The Wicked City: A stunning love story set in the roaring twenties

by Beatriz Williams

  “You really did shoot that bootlegger, from a racing speedboat?” he asks.

  “I surely did, sir. On the first try. Learned how to aim a gun from my brothers, out the western side of Maryland.”

  He shakes his head and hands the badge back to Anson. His fingers find the buttons of his thick woolen overcoat.

  “Shame on you, Marshall,” he says, taking off that rich garment and laying it over my shoulders, “letting a lady shiver like this without thinking to offer her your coat. What the hell kind of gentleman are you?”

  “I’ve often wondered that myself,” I say demurely.

  The officer steps back to the rope ladder and places his hands on the rungs. Moon comes out again, touching his cap as he turns his head over his shoulder, chin just edged against the cutter’s hull.

  “Carry on, then, Marshall. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

  11

  YOU NEVER told me you were an expert marksman,” Anson says as we shoot out over the water, away from the twinkling lights of Rum Row and the diminishing shadow of the Coast Guard.

  “I thought you already knew everything about me.”

  “Not everything. Not a thing like that.”

  “Well, now you know. Where are we headed, anyway? Back to New York?”

  “That depends on what you mean by New York.”

  “I mean the city, of course.”

  “Then no. We’re not going back to the city. City’s too hot for us right now. I’m taking you somewhere safe.”

  “Oh, brother,” I say. “Long Island again.”

  “Again?”

  “It’s a complicated story. I’ll tell you sometime. Say, that reminds me. What gives with that badge of yours? Taking Billy’s name like that.”

  He doesn’t reply. The motorboat’s skimming along at a fair clip, headed for the glimmering shore of Long Island, Rum Row parked to our right, and a wave smacks our bottom, sending us airborne for a second or two. We land with a hard bump, and Anson grunts.

  “You all right?” I ask.

  “Fine.”

  He grips the wheel and lifts the throttle a bit more, and I start to wonder just how much juice we have left in the can, racing along like this, gulping down gasoline in such a reckless fashion. The geography of Long Island is gray to me, but I guess we’re some distance to the east, hurtling toward shore at an acute sort of angle. Anson shows no hesitation in his navigation, no veering whatsoever from our course. He tilts forward as if that might somehow increase our speed, as if by narrowing his eyes and clenching his stomach, say, he might propel our slim, aggressive craft into safe harbor. Safe harbor, some cottage on Long Island, except this time, when I imagine a cottage like that, snug inside the walls of somebody’s grand estate, or else tucked into the lee of some fishing village, some farm, some anything, I don’t feel that ache in my chest as I felt in Glen Cove. I feel something else. Some kind of warmth. Some kind of lightening of the blood. I stuff my fingers into the pockets of my Coast Guard overcoat and listen to the thud of my heartbeat against the rip of the engine, and a rare somnolence settles over me. Like on that terrible day when I ran across the wet grass from the old fishing hole and boarded the next train out of River Junction, and no sooner did I fall into the clasp of that ungentle seat, and experience the surge and the thrust of a steam locomotive bearing me to safety, than I went to sleep. I slept right the way to Baltimore, and a conductor had to wake me up so I might not miss the connection to New York, and I remember how, for an instant upon waking, I did not know where I was. I could not have said my own name. Only that I was bound for Manhattan, I was fixing to plunge myself straight into the bosom of the wicked city and never come out again. That was all I knew. The horrors of the hour before, why, they had buried themselves, as I slept, under the kind of rich, foot-thick cushion of unconscious thought that would do any psychiatrist proud.

  And it’s the same thing now. That sharpness that overcomes your mind in moments of peril, the perfect acuity that guides your ideas and your actions when your life’s at stake, it just wears away as we race for safety on the Long Island shore. Slides from my skin like an old coat. The horror of the previous hour replaced by something that is nothing at all.

  12

  ANSON WAKES me when we reach land, or maybe the land wakes me all on its own. I open my eyes to the changing rhythm of the engine, the boat maneuvering into some kind of port. Sky still black and cold, moon somewhere behind us. Man beside me says Welcome back.

  I uncurl my stiff body from its strange position and try to summon back the shades of memory. A blanket slides from my chest. “Welcome back to what?”

  “You’ve been out cold.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since about three minutes after we parted company with the Coast Guard.”

  Coast Guard.

  Of course. Big boat, small Ginger. Fear like a bucket of ice emptying on your chest. And something else. Something so terrible you can’t even think about it just now. You need to think about present needs, just this one moment you’re living now, or else you’ll never make it. Black night, strapping warm fellow leaping from boat to dock, carrying a rope.

  Anson.

  I place my hand on the hull’s edge and push myself upright. He secures the rope to a piling and holds out his hand, gloved in leather. The strength of his grasp startles me. “Watch the edge,” he says, low and rumbly, and I suffer my legs to leap.

  “Where are we?” I ask. Marveling at the solid way about the boards beneath my feet.

  “Southampton, New York.”

  “And what’s in Southampton, New York?”

  “A place I know where we can lie low for a bit, until I’ve figured out our next move.” He’s working a knot into the rope, and there’s something a little wrong with his movement, something I can’t quite pin down. He finishes and turns to me. “Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here. I know the owners.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. And these owners, they won’t mind our tramping through the gardens at midnight?”

  Anson consults his watch. “It’s only ten o’clock, as a matter of fact. And no, she won’t mind.”

  “She?”

  “Me, I presume.”

  The woman’s voice shoots through the darkness from the edge of the dock, causing us both to jump. Anson’s left hand catches my elbow, and again I’m struck by the strange notion that something’s gone wrong in the regular operation of his knobs and spindles, something’s not quite right, but the notion’s overcome by the sight of the woman now striding up the dock toward us like a bizarre, moonlit ghost, dressed in a white bed gown trimmed by long, downy feathers.

  “Hello, Mother,” Anson says, calm and clear as you please, just before he topples straight forward onto the planks.

  13

  WELL, I won’t bore you with all the details. How, between the two of us, we manage to convey him—protesting at every step—to what Mrs. Anson calls the pool house; how she lifts the receiver of the telephone inside the foyer of said building and asks the operator for a Dr. Somebody, exhibiting all the urgency of a woman making an appointment with her decorator, while I unwrap the overcoat—which I now perceive to be badly torn under the left sleeve—from her son’s body. How I discover a neat charcoal-gray suit jacket wet with blood; how he mumbles at me not to make such a fuss. How I swear and yell that I’ll make all the damned fuss I want; how I run for the kitchen and fill a bowl with hot water and return to find the two of them, mother and son, locked in some kind of low, intense argument, from which Mrs. Anson extracts herself with the observation that her son appears to be in excellent hands, and she’ll just head for the drive and wait for the doctor, so the fellow doesn’t come barging right into the Big House and wake up all the staff.

  “Oh, of course,” I mutter, unsticking Anson’s bloody shirt from his bloody skin. “For God’s sake, don’t wake the staff. Would you stop flinching, please?”
r />   “She’s right about that, however. Can’t have anyone talking.”

  “Lord Almighty. Liketa bled to death, and your own mama can’t think but for the gossip?”

  “Not because of gossip. Because of our safety. And I’m not bleeding to death. Bullet just grazed my ribs, that’s all.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I already checked.”

  Sure enough, a thoroughly red handkerchief falls free as I unwrap the last of his clothing. I set the gory thing aside—Mrs. Anson can spare a dime or two for new upholstery, I do reckon—and fish the cloth from the bowl of warm water.

  “Poor Gin,” he says softly. “I expect you’ve seen enough blood for one evening.”

  “Think nothing of it. I was reared up with a mess of boys. I don’t ever faint at the sight of blood.”

  “No. But I’m sorry nonetheless.”

  “Are you actually apologizing to me for getting shot?”

  “For all of it, I guess.”

  “Well, in that case,” I say, busying myself with rag and water and skin so he can’t form a good look at my eyes, “I expect it’s a good thing we’ve got all night.”

  14

  WHILE THE doctor attends his patient, I wander outside. Some things ought to be kept private, I believe, and anyway I could use a mite of air after all that reek of copper blood filling the cavities of my head. To my surprise, I am not alone. The lean, ghostly figure of Mrs. Anson frets about the stonework, smoking a cigarette.

  For a moment, I imagine she doesn’t notice me. I stand fixed, fingers curling by my sides, while the moon touches her profile and the top of her bare, immaculate head. She exhales a bit of a smoke and says, without turning, “How is he?”

  “All right, I guess, for a fellow missing a chunk of his left side. Bullet went straight between the ribs.”

  “Well, that’s a mercy, I suppose,” she drawls. Another taste of her cigarette, and then: “You must be one of his colleagues at the Bureau.”

  I hesitate only an instant. “Yes.”

  “How lovely. Do you enjoy your work, Miss …?”

  “Kelly.”

  “Miss Kelly. Do you enjoy all of this? Running around New York with my son, capturing gangsters and getting shot and all that sort of thing?”

  “Not particularly. I’m more in the amusement line, myself.”

  She laughs harshly. “Are you? A girl after my own heart, then. I suppose I ought to ask you how you got into the enforcement business, in that case, but at this hour of the night I frankly don’t care. Adventure, no doubt. You young things are all terribly mad for adventure.”

  “Adventure. That’s it.”

  She turns at last, and I wish I could see her face properly, because I have some idea that she must be beautiful. She’s the kind of woman who carries an air of beauty around her, carefully cultivated, like a waft of rare oil. Delicate and chiseled. Skin as marble in the moonlight. The smoke trails from the end of her cigarette, and she shakes her precious head and says, “Just like Ollie. First football, and now this. Smoke?”

  I start to decline, but my lips tingle. “Why not?”

  She pulls a silver case from the pocket of her dressing gown and tosses it to me. “Never have sons, Miss Kelly. They’re nothing but trouble. You take the most tender care of those little limbs, and then they go off into the world and spend the rest of their lives trying to break them.”

  “Girls find other ways of getting into trouble.”

  “Yes, they do.” She watches me fumble with cigarette and match. There’s a bit of light glowing from what Anson called the Big House, a hundred or so yards away, and maybe it’s just enough to pick me out, there in the country midnight. Just enough to see me by. She goes on, more softly: “I have a daughter, too. Just two years old now. I expect she’ll prove a great deal of trouble when she’s older. But my oldest son went to war and died of the ’flu, and Ollie seems determined to get himself killed even more pointlessly. At first I thought he should break his neck on the football field. When he finished Princeton intact, more or less, I thanked God—”

  “I’m sorry. Did you say Princeton?”

  “Yes. He graduated, oh, I suppose it’s four years ago, and instead of taking a nice safe job in a bank or a place at law school, like any sensible boy, he tells me he’s going to work for the Prohibition agency. Can you imagine? My son, enforcing temperance. The irony.” She laughs again. “He was in Florida first, chasing all those fellows running rum from Nassau, and then they sent him back to New York, and there isn’t a day, Miss Kelly, not a day or a night I don’t worry about him turning up on my doorstep, dripping blood from some wound or another. Of course, I never expected him to bring a woman home with him.”

  I’ve been drifting in bemusement, smoking fiercely, ever since the word Princeton crossed those elegant lips, delivered in an accent that reminds me of the Bryn Mawr girls, mouths all stuffed with marbles. The sharpness of her last sentence yanks me back to the present. “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because he’s such a monk, you know. Tommy, he squired about every deb in town, he was in such demand. Darling, charming, golden boy. But Ollie. There never was such a serious child. Even worse since Tommy died. He worshipped Tommy, of course, but the two of them couldn’t have been more unlike. Ollie couldn’t stand parties. All those girls in white dresses. They threw themselves at him, of course—girls adore all that dark tragedy—but he never paid them the slightest attention. Never brought anyone home, that is. First football consumed him, and now this.” She drops the end of her cigarette into an urn of some kind. “Listen to me. I suppose you’re hungry and that sort of thing. I’ll make up sandwiches. Cook’s gone to bed, poor dear. Ham or chicken?”

  “Chicken,” I say.

  She turns toward the Big House and pauses. “You know, I believe I rather envy you.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “No, it’s true. I might have liked a little adventure, when I was your age. Instead I got this.” She gestures. “And you’ve got my Ollie.”

  “He’s your son. He loves you.”

  “Yes, he’s awfully loyal. The kind of boy who would die to protect you. Would take anything upon himself to lighten your own burden. But I never quite felt as if we understood each other properly. My fault, I suppose. It’s always the mother’s fault, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what the shrinks say.”

  “It’s a terrible burden. Poor Ollie. He arrived so soon after Tommy, whom I worshipped. And then there was Billy, who was my last, my baby, until Claire was born, and Billy was so much more … more … oh, he has a sweetness to him, my Billy, for all his mischief. But Ollie. So quiet and grave and orderly. Kept his room neat as a pin, even as a child. You could see he was thinking huge, fierce thoughts behind those eyes, but of course he wouldn’t tell you about them. Music, that was what he liked. That was how he told you things.”

  “Plays a fine clarinet.”

  “He plays everything. Piano, trumpet. Used to practice for hours, until he discovered football. And I never tried, you see, I never tried hard enough. Tommy and Billy, they were so much easier to love. Now it’s your turn to try. Imagine. A sharp-chinned redhead from—where are you from, Miss Kelly? You’re certainly not one of us.”

  She says the word us with such a note of strange disgust, I don’t take insult. Instead, I say simply, “Maryland.”

  “From Maryland. Well. I suppose Ollie wasn’t going to fall in love with a debutante. Take good care of him, please. He really is rather tender on the inside, I believe, though he hates to show it.”

  She starts to move away, toward the house, skirting the dark form of what I believe to be the swimming pool. Her fine, pale feathers shiver in the draft, like the hair of a Persian cat.

  I call out after her, “Thank you, Mrs. Anson!”

  She starts and stops. Turns her shapely head to the moon. “Anson?”

  And maybe I said that on purpose. Maybe I called out the name Anson as a test, b
ecause I already knew what she would say. Maybe I’m expecting what comes next, the way you expect a wave to crash upon the beach, after watching it build and build to a mighty crest offshore. My stomach is sick, my eyes a little blurred. My head still turning her words over and over, sorting them into some kind of order.

  “Yes,” I say firmly. Sort of desperately. “Anson.”

  And she answers me as if she’s been expecting something like this. As if she’s playing a part, as if she’s been guiding me homeward all along. Voice gentle and sure and terribly, terribly weary.

  “Anson is Oliver’s middle name, Miss Kelly. After the great naval captain. Didn’t he tell you? Our family name is Marshall.”

  15

  I STAND THERE, smoking my cigarette outside the pool house, for some time. Until the cigarette’s finished and the moon drops behind the roof. The door opens, the doctor appears. “Miss Kelly?” he says, squinting into the darkness.

  “Right here.”

  “Ah. I’ve bandaged him up. Nasty gash he’s got. I’ve given him brandy—”

  “I beg your pardon. Did you say you’ve given him brandy?”

  “For medicinal purposes, of course,” he says in a tone of slight offense. “It’s perfectly legal, you know.”

  “And he drank it?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Lord Almighty. How much?”

  “Four ounces. He wouldn’t take more.” Aggrieved sigh. “I hope it will help him sleep. A good night’s rest is essential. I’ve left another eight ounces on the nightstand. He should have another two ounces in the morning.”

  “I’ll see to it personally, doctor.”

  “And no exertion of any kind, Miss Kelly. We can’t have that bandage becoming dislodged. He lost a great deal of blood, a great deal. You may give him another two ounces if he becomes restless.”

  “With the greatest pleasure.”

  He seems to be peering at me, underneath the brim of his hat. I link my hands modestly behind my back.