Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  They walked back through the basement to the alley, where the two agents were smoking cigarettes and Taylor was still sitting on the ground, handcuffed and cantankerous.

  ‘He said he’d cooperate,’ Eriksson said. ‘But he needs to make some phone calls. We’ll take him back to HQ, hold him there till the brother shows. What do you want to do about the meet?’

  ‘Let the brother arrange the details,’ she said. ‘I want him comfortable when he talks. Call me at the office when you know more.’

  Eriksson tipped his hat at her, turned and signaled to Dressner, who hauled Taylor up to his feet. They all walked around to the front of the building, and the agents put Taylor in a car and drove off with him, leaving Ida and Jacob on the street alone.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ Ida asked.

  ‘Heading home, I guess. You?’

  ‘Back to the office. I need to have a talk with Michael. You want a lift?’ she asked as they reached a green Chevrolet touring car, parked up on the sidewalk.

  ‘You own a car?’ Jacob asked, surprised.

  ‘No, I couldn’t afford a car. I signed it out of the Pinkerton car pool.’

  They drove through midday traffic all the way back to Jacob’s. At first he felt a little embarrassed to be sitting in the passenger seat while a girl did all the work of driving, but after a while he got used to it, mostly.

  ‘You handled Taylor well,’ Jacob said. ‘And the two agents.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ she replied.

  ‘How long have you been a Pink?’

  ‘Oh, coming up to ten years now,’ she said.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘Less and less.’

  They talked a bit more about the case, and then about the hot weather, and then about other slight things that are classed as small talk. As they chatted she seemed to relax a little, the formality he’d noticed in her earlier dissolving, and he wondered if at the root of it there wasn’t some trauma in her past, and he thought about his own traumas and wondered if she, like him, had learned to put distance between her inner self and the outside world.

  Sooner than Jacob expected they were on his street. Ida pulled up outside a speak-easy a couple of doors down from Jacob’s building, and let the car idle, the engine turning over uncertainly with a rattle like a chain-smoker’s cough.

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I’ll let you know what happens with Taylor.’

  ‘Sure. I’d appreciate that.’

  They smiled at each other and then there was a commotion in front of them – two men burst out of the door of the speak and ran across the street to a waiting car. Jacob saw the determined looks on the men’s faces, saw the car screech off as soon as they’d jumped into it. Ida and Jacob both realized what was going on a second too late.

  When the bomb went off they were parked right in the path of the blast, outside the windows of the speak. The shockwave sent glass and burning metal and shrapnel out onto the street, cutting through the air, the roar of it making their ears ring and bleed.

  PART SIX

  THIRD CHORUS

  ‘Bombing, combined with window smashing, slugging and shooting, has become a profession practiced by specialized crews or gangs. The apprehension of bombers is made difficult by the quick getaway provided by the automobile. Their conviction is very difficult because of terrorization of witnesses; the disappearance of witnesses after indictment; and the fact that gangsters are able to raise defense funds, often enormous, as the sinews of war against constituted authority.’

  THE ILLINOIS ASSOCIATION FOR

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE, 1928

  35

  The next morning Dante still hadn’t heard from Red about whether or not the missing waiter wanted to meet. The waiting around made him anxious, as did the feeling that he was slowly being encircled, that in the murky depths, a net was being slowly drawn around him.

  He needed something to take his mind off it all, and he also needed to pay his condolences to Loretta, so he hopped into the Blackhawk and drove over to her sister’s house in Little Italy. The dog stuck its head out of the window for the journey, letting the world lash itself against its tongue. The sun was up, gilding the streets, and Dante took in the speed and pulse of a city on a summer’s morning sailing confidently into the future.

  In the heart of the Loop, the sidewalks and shops were whirring with people and wealth and opulent commerce. The country was on a decade-long spending spree, tumbling in and out of love with whatever new and exciting thing it could grasp ahold of, but beneath the rush of it all there was anxiety, and Dante could feel it even here, a sense that for all its glamour and speed, modern living was crushing spirits and increasing loneliness with ever quickening and frenzied power.

  After twenty minutes, he arrived in Little Italy, parked up and rang the bell of the run-down house where he had dropped off Loretta. When they were kids, it was Mary – Loretta’s sister – that was the pretty one, and Loretta the gangly, bookish sister, and as Dante peered at the house on the nondescript Little Italy street, he wondered how comes it was the sister with all the options that had played it so close to home.

  He heard a racket of children from inside, then a harried-looking woman opened the door. There were only a couple of years separating the two sisters, but Mary looked so much older – face lined, shoulders slumped, hair thin and pulled back under a gingham bandanna. She looked Dante up and down and grinned.

  ‘Well, I’ll be,’ she said, leaning her hip against the door jamb. ‘How’s tricks, Dante?’

  ‘Tricks are good, Mary. How’s things with you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. Just waiting for the rain, and boiling like a lobster while I do. Come in . . .’

  She pushed her hip off the door jamb and opened the door wide and Dante stepped into a living room crammed with furniture and strewn with children’s toys. All of the windows were open and an electric fan was trying its best to keep the place cool.

  ‘Lorrie! Il cavaliere’s here!’ she shouted up the stairs, before turning to give Dante a knowing grin. Dante smiled back at her awkwardly, then turned to look about the place. Three children were lying on the floorboards by the fireplace, in front of a Serenader radio on a table broadcasting a Western serial, the noise of gunshots and horses’ hooves on dusty plains filling the air.

  ‘Nice place you got.’

  ‘You should have seen it before the sprouts destroyed it,’ she said, nodding at the children. There was a noise of feet trotting down the stairs, and they both looked up to see Loretta, wearing head-to-foot black.

  ‘My condolences,’ said Dante, figuring from the get-up she’d heard Abbate’s death had been confirmed.

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ Mary said, and Loretta shot her a look. Then Mary shrugged and turned to walk into the kitchen.

  ‘Nice seeing you, Dante,’ she said, looking at him over her shoulder.

  ‘You okay?’ Dante asked Loretta.

  She nodded listlessly.

  ‘How you finding it here?’

  ‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Nice to be around the kids but a little cramped, you know?’

  Dante nodded. On the radio gunshots rang out, and the children squealed.

  ‘You wanna go somewhere?’ he asked and she nodded again.

  ‘Wait a sec. I’ll just get my purse.’

  She turned and went back upstairs, and Dante leaned against the post of the staircase and looked over the living room, at the scuffed furniture strewn with doilies, the three children lying on their bellies, their feet wheeling through the air as they listened to the serial. Then Loretta came down again. She’d put on a pair of pumps, and had pushed her hair back under a cap, and in her hand she had a purse.

  ‘Remember when I met you in the Ritz,’ she said, smiling awkwardly. ‘I was dressed in mourning, too.’

  ‘Sure I remember.’

  She turned to the kids.

  ‘Tell your ma I went out,’ she said, and
one of them turned around and nodded.

  Dante opened the door and they stepped out into the muggy day.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s just drive.’

  ‘Out of the city?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They got in the Blackhawk, and the dog bounded into Loretta’s lap and she stroked its neck. Dante started up the car and thought a moment about whether or not anyone would be following them, or if it was just his anxiety, or if it mattered either way.

  Then he put the car into gear and with the windows wound down, they sailed west out of the city on the land breeze, looking for the consolation of wide open spaces and unhindered skies.

  36

  In her years at the Pinkertons Ida had been shot at, strangled, and attacked with a knife, an iron bar, a hammer, a paint tin full of acid; but she had never been caught up in an explosion before. As the blast wave passed she found herself in a mist of smoke and brick dust, sitting in the car covered in glass shards, with a piercing ringing in her ears that was making her skull shake.

  She looked up to where the blast had come from: the ragged front of the speak-easy. The windows had been blown out, and choking black smoke was pouring from the frames, and in between the billows she caught glimpses of the charred hell inside.

  As she tried to gather a wire of thoughts to cut through the chaos, she saw Jacob was next to her, his hands cradling her face. He was saying something she couldn’t hear over the ringing in her ears, and then he turned away from her and got out of the car. She watched him walk into the plumes of smoke to look for survivors, and it was only then that she saw there was blood on his hands and she checked her face, and realized there was a cut on her temple.

  She got out of the car and tried to stand and the world swerved away beneath her and she caught hold of the car’s door handle to steady herself. She breathed slowly and tried to tense the muscles in her legs, and it was then she noticed the dents in the side of the Chevrolet from the blast and the shrapnel. She looked away from the car and saw there was a line of people running into the bar, some running out, carrying the wounded. Then Jacob was next to her again.

  You okay? he was mouthing. She looked down to check herself. Two arms, two legs, no blood pouring from anywhere except that cut on her temple. She nodded and Jacob said something else she couldn’t hear, and he passed her a handkerchief and she put it to her head and he put his arm around her and led her away.

  Then they were going up some stairs and she realized they were going to his apartment. Was that what she’d agreed to? They were in a hallway, then at a door, then in a living room. He led her to the sofa and she sat and then he was sitting on the coffee table in front of her with a medical kit, tending to the cut on her head. She could hear the scraping of the cotton wool on her skin, and then she could hear his voice.

  ‘How are you feeling? Can you hear yet?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s coming back,’ she said, and her voice sounded distant, muffled, not her own. She felt the sting of iodine on the wound, and then he tied some padding into place with a bandage.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. If you want, we can go back down? Talk to the police?’

  She shook her head and the padding felt strange as she moved, unbalancing her skull.

  ‘Maybe some whiskey?’ he said. ‘For the shock.’

  She nodded again and he came back with two glasses filled with clear liquid – moonshine whiskey. They drank, she on the sofa, he on the coffee table. She was surprised to find she was sitting with her legs tucked under her knees. He stood and crossed to the windows and opened them up, and it was only then she heard the shouts and commotion outside.

  ‘I’m just going out to see what’s happening,’ he said.

  She didn’t reply and he climbed out onto the fire escape and stood there with his drink, looking down on the chaos. It was then she remembered he’d been in the war. Maybe he’d seen dozens of such scenes and become used to them and that was why he was so calm. And then she realized that she too was acting calmly and she wondered why that was. Maybe she was so shaken by the bombing that it would take some time for the emotions to come, for the aftershocks of terror to pump through her body.

  She stared at the Persian rug below her, at its pattern fading out of the weave where it had been left threadbare and thin as a beggar. She found its geometry hard and rigid and unsettling, and a harrowing sense of loneliness gripped her and she looked up at the windows once more and saw Jacob drain his drink, and step back inside.

  ‘Police are there now. Medics too. You wanna go and let a professional help you out?’

  She shook her head, worried she might start crying.

  ‘What do you want to do? You can use the phone to call someone?’

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to go with you?’ he asked, and before she’d even thought about it, she nodded. She wanted to be somewhere she felt safe, but she didn’t want to be there alone, not when the shock wore off.

  They left the apartment a few minutes later and hurried past the scene on the street. Medics were tending to the injured and the police were holding back a crowd. In the middle of the debris was Ida’s green Chevrolet, pockmarked and dented, looking like a tin can someone had squeezed in their fist. They made it to an intersection and Jacob hailed down a cab and they rode back to hers. They stayed silent for the most part, trying to process what had happened in their own ways.

  When they got to Ida’s they sat on the sofa, drinking bourbon, chain-smoking Luckies tip to tip, burning the smell of death out of their nostrils. When the drink started working, they started talking.

  She asked him how he’d ended up a photographer, and he told her he wanted to be a policeman but he wasn’t allowed on account of his leg; and she told him she wanted to be a policewoman but she wasn’t allowed on account of her skin; and she laughed for the first time since the bombing, and after a moment he laughed too.

  Then she asked him what had happened to his leg, and he told her the whole sorry tale, and about going off to fight in the war in France, about coming back and struggling to adjust, about all the hours he put into exercising his damaged ankle, trying to regain as much strength and control as possible, and how that still wasn’t enough to get him into the police. Then they talked about the case, and why they were so invested in it. He told her about the violence and brutality he saw in his work every day and all the other traumas that he’d been through in his life.

  ‘How do you deal with it?’ she asked. ‘Seeing all that horror? All the crime scenes and battlefields?’

  He paused and thought a moment, his face flushed from the bourbon.

  ‘You have to look at it. The hell. If you close your eyes, you’ll always be scared. But if you stare it down, at least you can draw strength from the fact that you had the courage not to look away. The only danger is, maybe it’ll warp you, you know? Maybe looking at it leaves you empty inside.’

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’

  He shook his head, then went quiet a moment as he mulled it over.

  ‘Maybe. At first,’ he said. ‘But the emptiness is the starting point. Maybe it’s meaningless so you’ve got the space to build your own meaning. At least, that’s what I tell myself.’

  He turned to her and smiled awkwardly, and she sensed he was embarrassed by what he’d said, but she wasn’t sure why. The fact that he was willing to be so open with her, so honest, made her feel comfortable about doing the same, and she told him about New Orleans, about the hatred and the poverty, and all the other things that had led her to swap brutal hurricanes for brutal winters.

  Time crawled by, and the sun made its scorching way across the sky, skipping in and out of the gaps between the buildings, until eventually it dipped into the dusk of the prairie to the west and night came on. She switched on the light and the radio and it was still tuned to CBS and she
kept it there, and at some point when they were silent and listening to the music, they looked at each other and they kissed. And when they got up the world spun around them, and they realized how drunk they were.

  They managed to make it into the bedroom, stumbling and grabbing at each other’s clothes, and they made love in a needy sort of way, clawing at each other, reaffirming their own existence and their hold on life.

  And afterward they lay on the cotton sheets and listened to the Duke Ellington Orchestra on the radio. Around midnight Jacob rose and went back into the living room to get the bourbon and cigarettes, and Ida wondered why she had let it happen, and she guessed it was because they were still so close to the death that had stalked them that afternoon.

  He came back in and she watched his body through the moonlight, athletic and lithe. He lay down next to her, poured two glasses of bourbon, passed one to her and lit them a couple of cigarettes, and they smoked and drank in silence for a while, peering through the gloom.

  The Duke played a blues, mournful and wordless, so plaintive it seemed to Ida to be a blues about death. It set her mind drifting back through her life, past the burned bodies she had seen that afternoon, to all the killings that had surrounded her.

  ‘I murdered a man once in New Orleans,’ she said. She didn’t look at Jacob, but from the corner of her eye she could see that he had taken the revelation calmly.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘He was trying to kill me.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t murder.’

  ‘Suppose not . . . But it sure feels like it.’

  Then they put their cigarettes in the ashtray and wrapped their arms around each other and listened to the Duke play ‘Creole Love Call’ and ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ and all the while the cigarettes burned in the ashtray, releasing lines of smoke that curled upwards and around each other in a ghostly double helix, and they held onto each other, floating on an undercurrent of loneliness.