“I am. So what?”
“Then what’s this Montrose Avenue? There ain’t no Montrose Avenue in Baltimore.”
No, there sure wasn’t. I’d been telling a story about messing around in a cemetery with my friends as a teen—Entemann and his pals wasted a lot of hours swapping tales of how much fun they’d had as boys, how much better their lives were then, the usual tavern drivel. Say no more than you must is an ironclad rule of cover work, but to fit in I’d transplanted a true story from my youth to my fictional hometown, Baltimore, a city I didn’t know well. I’d gotten the name of the cemetery right, Old Saint Pauls, but Montrose Avenue was in Chicago. I should have said Pratt or Lombard—hell, I shouldn’t have said anything at all about the streets we walked down. Telling a tall tale to stay in the good graces of Entemann and Company didn’t require fine-grained detail. And now Geider wouldn’t let my slip go. How can a joe not know the names’a the streets where’s he from, huh?, his pals nodding vigorously as they dog-eyed me. They peppered me with questions about where I’d gone to school, who the principal was, how many were in my class, on and on. I feigned anger and stormed out, protesting that I wasn’t going to take the third degree from the likes of them. What else could I do? The real Herbert Paulreich would have stormed out, too. Of course, the real Herbert Paulreich wouldn’t have mixed up the streets of Baltimore and Chicago. I’d blown it—there was no way I could go back. I typed up my final report and slinked into Paslett’s office to take my drubbing, the commander’s parting line branded in my memory. Thought you were better than this, Voigt.
On the way out, I’d run into Skerrill. Word had already gotten out about my blunder, I was taking a lot of razzing, but it usually ended with a clap on the shoulder and a Better luck next time. Skerrill had smiled maliciously, slowly shaking his head and making clucking noises. Maps, Voigt, maps. Oughta try reading one next time. I’d brushed past, but he knew I’d heard the taunt.
Now I was getting my second and probably my last chance to do cover work—Paslett didn’t keep screwups around. I wasn’t going to dwell on the irony that Skerrill’s murder made that possible. If I wasn’t careful from the moment I became Barston, I might make a mistake—and some sort of mistake had cost Skerrill his life.
CHAPTER 8
I STARTED WITH CLOTHES. I WAS NO DANDY, BUT THEODORE BARSTON wouldn’t wear a stitch of anything I owned. The boxer shorts from Hecht’s and socks from Woodies, my Guild Edge snap brim and Hylo worsted shirts—all of it had to stay in my closet with my uniform. My Harvel wristwatch, a present to myself when I got into the O.N.I., came off reluctantly. I put away my Gillette and the Murray and Lanman’s Florida Water an old girlfriend had given me. From now on, I’d shave with disposable safety razors and splash myself with two-bits-a-bottle aftershave.
Secondhand shops and dime stores supplied a wardrobe. I was determined to think, act, talk, and spend as the real Barston would, which meant I had a budget of ten dollars. Prisoners leave the brig with only the clothes on their back and some scrip to spend at the cut-rate shops that grow like weeds outside army posts and naval bases. So from a Ben Franklin, socks and shorts; from “Sally,” the thrift store of the Salvation Army, a pair of lightly worn dungarees, a flannel shirt, and a faded Van Heusen. From an old Jew’s shop on D Street, I picked up worsted trousers, a scuffed leather belt, and a windbreaker. The owner expertly eyed the clothes I was wearing as he totted up my purchases, but he didn’t ask why I was buying used clothes which, even new, had cost half as much as what I was wearing. A good reminder of why I needed to get every detail right. With the last two bucks, I bought a Timex watch at Woolworth’s.
I went back to my flat and changed. Before finding a room, I wanted to study Barston’s profile. As I read, I rolled a chunk of cobblestone from the alley around in my hands, to roughen them up. Franklin D. jumped up on the table and walked across the folder, mewling. I checked the urge to put him outside—soon he’d be spending even more time alone. Hoisted him to my shoulder, rubbed his belly, opened a can of Spam for him.
Like an actor practicing lines, I memorized every detail about Barston. The addresses of the flats he’d grown up in. His mother’s maiden name, the city in Germany she’d emigrated from. What her father had done (bricklayer) and what had happened to her siblings (elder brother, killed at Verdun; younger sister, dead at thirty-four, leukemia). The elder Barston’s scrapes with the law and his brawls with hired goons—union organizing on New Jersey’s docks in the ’30s was not for the meek or weak. Learned all about the activities of the Jersey communists, the rallies they staged for striking dockworkers, the fundraising for families whose husbands, brothers, and fathers had been jailed when the strikes got violent.
The file said nothing about William Barston being mixed up in communist espionage. What the hell would dock workers spy on? But if I’d learned one thing during the last eight years, it was: don’t underestimate the Reds. Anyway, Big Bill, as he was known—and the lone photograph did show a bruiser of a man, shoulders as wide as a yoke, fists like hams—wouldn’t have breathed a word about espionage to his son. So what the hell am I gonna say about my pop to get into H & H? A question I couldn’t ignore. Paslett seemed to think I could just sashay into the clipping service and bask in huzzahs and hugs after I proclaimed myself to be the only son of Big Bill Barston, martyr of the ’38 Hoboken strike. Paslett had a keen eye for what the Reds were up to, but what he saw, he saw from the bridge—he didn’t know how workaday communists walked, talked, or blew their noses. And if I didn’t hit the perfect note when I stepped into H & H, I wouldn’t even get the time of day from those folks.
Memorizing Ted Barston’s life story brought forth unwanted thoughts of my own family, of my boyhood. Unwanted only because I couldn’t afford the distraction, couldn’t afford mixing up my experiences with those of Barston. Yet I couldn’t shake the realization that I hadn’t thought about my folks and brother in a while, couldn’t remember the date of Mom’s last letter. I didn’t keep her letters. Read them twice, then tore them up. Wasn’t sure why, maybe I didn’t want a stack of letters around reminding me of how long it’d been since I’d seen my family.
I wondered how Pop was doing at the print shop, if Mom still loved her job at the jeweler’s. My brother, Eddie, my only sibling, was working as a house dick at the Sheridan Plaza Hotel in our Chicago neighborhood of Uptown. Eddie had been 4-F’d—he was partially deaf in one ear from a fall when we were kids. My fault, that accident. When I was fifteen and Eddie was twelve, we’d scaled the light tower on the breakwater at Montrose Harbor, in Lake Michigan. The rungs were slick with rain that had just ended, I should’ve warned Eddie to be careful. I was almost to the crow’s nest when I heard a thunderous clang. His right hand had slipped, he was dangling. Ellis, help. I scrambled down, too late. Eddie dropped at least twenty feet to the concrete deck. A fisherman ran over, we broke every rule of first aid. Turned Eddie onto his back, lifted his head by the neck, wiped blood from a cut with a dirty rag. The fall broke his left arm, sprained his wrist, burst his left eardrum. Much of his hearing came back, but not enough to put him in uniform. Climbing that tower was my idea, and recalling that Eddie had needed no coaxing, that he was eager to follow his older brother up those treacherous rungs, didn’t let me off the hook. But maybe I saved his life, I thought. Drafted, Eddie could’ve been one of the first to splash ashore at Omaha Beach, could’ve been at Guadalcanal.
“Barston, Barston,” I muttered to myself. Had to remind myself that for the foreseeable future, Ellis Voigt had no childhood, no family, no past. Had to become Ted Barston, had to carry his history, his stories, his secrets. What was it like to be someone who kept part of his life hidden? I wondered if Barston had confided in any of his shipmates, if he’d found like-minded Reds in the Navy. If he’d been smart, he’d kept his mouth shut. Like me, like everyone in uniform, he’d taken an oath to defend and protect the Constitution, and the Communist Party wanted to overthrow our government—being caught as a
member was an awful good way to earn a dishonorable discharge or worse. Was that why Barston had turned to dope, to deal with the pressure of his secret?
I closed the folder, scratched the now-dozing Franklin D. behind his ears, and set out to find a flop. Wore the dungarees and flannel shirt, carried the rest of Barston’s clothes in a battered rucksack I dug out of the closet. D.C. didn’t have a Bowery, not officially, but you wouldn’t know that if you strolled Ninth Street south of Mt. Vernon Square. Got a taste for celluloid cheesecake? That afternoon, the Leader Theater featured a double bill: Julie Jericho (for real!) in Jungle Drums, Leslie Dey in Hard and Fast. Prefer the real thing? The Gayety Theater offered hourly burleycue. If you wanted to skip the tease and get straight down to ten-bucks-a-pop business, the pimps, touts, and girls would find you pronto. Pawnshops, gutbuckets, and taverns masquerading as “lounges” were wedged between fifteen-cent lunchrooms, “souvenir” shacks selling sanitary rubber goods, and two-bit flops.
The Jefferson Club Hotel for Men looked no worse than any other option, so I went in. Threadbare carpet and Positively No Loitering! signs greeted me in the lobby. The clerk, a squat, swarthy man with a frizzle of steel-gray curls wreathing a weathered pate, listed from his stool, an elbow propped on the counter. Studying the Star crossword, a pencil stub jutting from his fingers. Smoke drifted from a soggy cigar in a tray stuccoed with gray-black ash. I stood for a moment; he didn’t look up.
“How ’bout ‘Seeks Room,’ five letters,” I said.
“How ’bout ‘Annoys Clerk,’ seven letters?” Still not looking up.
“S’long as you got a bed, I can be a wiseguy or a guest, take yer pick.”
He picked up the cigar and puffed fiercely, sending up more exhaust than a broken-down truck. “This being a classy joint, wiseguy, you pay the week ahead, no refunds for an early departure. One-seventy-five, plus a buck deposit if you don’t got your own bedroll.”
“I don’t got.”
“Two-seventy-five, then. Plus whatever you wanna give to guarantee prompt service in the future.”
“I got nuttin’ ta be prompt for,” I answered, trying out my Hoboken accent.
He rolled off the stool and padded off to collect my sheet, pillow, and blanket. “You’re in Four-D,” he said as I tucked the bedding under my arm. “You wanna rent a lock, it’s a dime-a-week.”
“I’ll get my own.”
He shrugged and turned back to the puzzle. I left to buy a lock. “Classy joints” like the Jefferson didn’t have rooms like real hotels. Instead, you got a 4' by 8' stall with a metal cot frame, a lumpy mattress, and a fly-specked bulb that worked if you were lucky. The walls were warped plywood boards that went up six feet—instead of a ceiling, chicken wire drooped from stall to stall, like a tarpaulin. It was supposed to keep tenants—inmates?—from stealing from one another. So was the lock you put on the door hasp when you went out.
I bought a cheap lock at a variety store, then trudged up the creaky staircase to the fourth floor. Plaster walls, dingy and cracked. Moldings thick with ancient brown paint, smell of unwashed feet and dirty laundry in the air. I had to stoop to clear the chicken wire over my stall. Pulled the light chain; at least the bulb worked. A roach scrabbled away. Dried bloodspots dotted the gray mattress, which meant the Jefferson also had bedbugs—lots of them. So many that when a man rolled over in his sleep, his weight crushed the pests who had just helped themselves to his blood. We’d had bedbugs when I was a kid. Hell to get rid of. They lay eggs in mattresses, burrow into cracks in the floorboards and walls—takes months for the powder to kill all of them. Pop finally succeeded, but Eddie didn’t believe him, kept insisting he could feel them biting him while he was sleeping. He had nightmares every night and got hysterical when Pop angrily told him he was imagining it. One night I promised Eddie I’d stay awake till morning, keeping guard, making sure no bugs crawled on him. But I fell asleep in the chair in our shared room—has any child ever stayed awake through an entire night, no matter how strong his willpower? Fortunately, I awoke before Eddie. Did you see them? he’d asked as soon as his eyes opened. He’d smiled when I shook my head.
I sighed, shook off the memory—Barston, be Barston!—and made up the bed. Tucked the rucksack under the cot, reminding myself that I’d have to throw it away when my undercover stint was done—if the roaches didn’t move in, the bedbugs would. At the lunchroom next door I counted out fifteen cents in nickels and pennies for a bologna and cheese sandwich, a mealy apple, and a cup of coffee that was somehow both weak and bitter. I wedged onto a stool between a fat man who huffed as he slurped soup and a white-haired bum who appeared to be wearing all the clothing he owned, including his winter coat. I gulped down the tasteless sandwich and lit up, tapping out an Old Gold—Barston’s brand—for the bum before he even asked.
“Kind of you, friend, kind of you,” he muttered, drawing eagerly.
What else did I need to do before I walked into H & H? Picturing myself reaching for the door handle and entering the office made my heart race, my mouth dry. Was this how actors felt right before the curtain went up? For all the memorization and rehearsal, did they dread the moment when they actually had to speak, did they fear that their first line wouldn’t pass their lips, that they’d freeze under the light, paralyzed and terrified, exposed as frauds?
I forced myself to focus on my tasks. Visit the Red Cross and persuade the nurse to take blood from both arms and to put the needle in hard, to mark up my forearm. Go over Barston’s file one more time, make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. Meet with Terrance for an inspection and a shakedown cruise, to make sure I could pass for Barston. Put out two cans of Spam for Franklin D. And, though I knew I shouldn’t, leave a message for Liv to tell her I was free to see her that night. I knew I should sleep at the Jefferson Club, but one more night as Ellis Voigt, one more night with Liv—didn’t I deserve at least that before I gave myself over to the bedbugs, roaches, and Reds?
I CALLED TERRANCE AND ARRANGED TO MEET HIM FOR LUNCH THE NEXT day at a place we both knew, Margie’s. With Barston’s last nickel, I called Liv’s rooming house and left a message. I’m free, will meet you at 6:30, El. Then I walked down to Pennsylvania Avenue, to the Red Cross station, to give blood and get some needle marks.
Of course I couldn’t tell the nurse, a round-cheeked cherub of a gal, why I needed marks, so I played nasty, goosing her hard and plastering on a leer. Dressed as I was, wafting Eau de Jefferson, that did the trick—she jammed the needle in but good. Since I was out of money, I had to walk home, and I was pretty light-headed by the time I got there. I stripped down to skivvies and fell on my bed. Supposed to be a short nap, but I didn’t awake for two hours. My sleep was fitful, unsettled by another dream about Delphine. We were walking endlessly down badly lit, desolate streets. We’re almost there, she kept saying, but it seemed like we were on the same block, no matter how far we walked.
I got up, washed my face, changed clothes, left for my date with Liv. Or as she’d called it, our “surprise.” What kind of surprise? I’d asked the morning after our visit to the Tidal Basin. She’d just woken up, was stretching her arms out, fingers clasped, smiling sleepily.
“You gotta say yes or no first.”
“What if I’m on duty?” I’d asked.
“Then you’ll miss it.”
“No rain check?”
“For a surprise?”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
So at 6:30, I was standing at Fourteenth and P, as agreed. No sign of Liv. I smoked, bought and drank a Coke, tried hard not to look like a joe waiting on a girl. Whoever said surprises arrived on time?
At ten to seven, Liv walked up. White knee-length dress with vermilion stripes, a plum-colored hat, small clutch in her hand. Smiled when she saw me. I tossed my cigarette to the curb.
“How will you be?” she asked.
I leaned to kiss her, parting with the taste of her lipstick. “Good to see you, Liv.”
“So, El.”
“Yes.”
“What do you know about classical music?”
“Other than that Mozart was deaf and Beethoven died young, not much.”
Her mouth opened in surprise, she began a correction—then saw my smile. “Wise guy.” She punched me playfully on the shoulder. “What do you know about Arnold Schoenberg?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Good.”
“Am I about to get a lesson?”
“Might say that—we’re going to a recital of some of his compositions. The pianist is very promising.”
“Promising to be good in ten years?”
She pulled a face. “Don’t be cynical—I mean he’s very talented.”
The recital was in a Methodist church with an airy sanctuary. A gleaming black grand piano had been wheeled in front of the altar. Mixed crowd, scattered throughout the pews. A few pensioners, some students, a middle-aged woman knitting a scarf, two men quietly arguing about the merits of Social Realism in American art. Not my kind of crowd, but better than my new neighbors at the Jefferson Club Hotel.
Schoenberg’s work was unlike any music I’d ever heard. The pianist, a chubby young man in an ill-fitting suit, sat on the bench and leaned precipitously to the left, like a man caught in a nor’easter. First, a few soft, random notes, his left ear cocked to the keys. Then, suddenly, a dissonant cascade, a jumble of notes; if a musical composition could be spilled, I thought, it must sound like this. The erratic volume, soft, barely audible passages followed by loud bursts, continued, as did the unpredictable tempo.
The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel Page 7