We left the coffee shop and headed back out into the cold. I turned to head back to the L station, but Moira grabbed my arm and headed up the street.
“This way, Saul. There are some friends of mine I want you to meet.”
“What? Now?” I asked dumbly. I was wasting a lot of time that would be better spent sleeping, especially if I was taking Moira out tonight.
“Sure. It won’t take long.”
I shrugged and let her lead the way. I was dead tired, but I couldn’t really resist.
“I don’t have anything to wear to the Lexington,” I mused to Moira. “I’ve not had a suit since my bar mitzvah, and I don’t think I can get into that one anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll let you borrow my tie.” She shook the green tie she was wearing in my face with an impish smile.
“Ha. Ha,” I said. “I’m serious. That place is ritzy, full of rich snobs. Even if I had a suit I wouldn’t fit in.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Moira repeated. A black Cadillac passed us heading up the street. Moira turned her back to the road and gave a small shiver.
“Are you sure you’re not cold? You can have my coat.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, her voice a bit distant. She pulled out a cigarette and I pulled out my Ronson to light it. She took a long pull on the Chesterfield, blowing the smoke into the frigid air. “Like I said, I know some people at the Lex. They’ll make sure we get in and it won’t matter what you wear.” She leaned over and gave me a slow kiss. My mind swam; it wasn’t our first kiss —that had been at the speakeasy—but the other kiss hadn’t been like this. I could feel her tongue playfully reaching out and tickling my own tongue.
She broke the kiss and looked past me up the street. I turned but she grabbed my arm and we continued, her right arm entwined in my left. I heard the sound of a car backfiring a couple of times. I glanced up from gazing at Moira and saw the same black Cadillac idling in front of a garage with a sign that read, SMC Cartage Co. Two cops were leading two other men dressed in suits toward the car.
BANG!
I nearly jumped out of my shoes at the sound. One of the men being led by the cops stumbled, a gout of blood shooting from his shoulder. The cops pulled their revolvers and pointed them toward Moira and me. I protectively stepped in front of her as I raised my hands, yelling “Nooo!”
More gunshots exploded around me. The cops fired toward us, and more shots rang out from behind us. Moira’s red hair flashed before me and I felt a sharp pain in my chest, falling to the ground. Moira fell on top of me. I cowered, hands over my head as several more shots were fired. I looked up and could see the cops pushing the two men into the car. The men fell in, then one of the cops got behind the wheel, and the other jumped onto the running board and fired two more shots as the car pulled away. I glanced behind me and could see two men running down the street, their overcoats flapping behind them as they ran.
Everything was suddenly quiet except for the frantic barking of a dog coming from someplace nearby. I crawled out from under Moira and gave her a shake. “What the hell was that?” My ears were still ringing from the gunfire. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I shook Moira again. She didn’t move. A deep fear settled in my stomach as I turned Moira over. She lay in a pool of blood. A ragged hole was in her left chest, right about where the heart would be. Her blouse was stained red, and her green tie had a sickly, mottled color. “No, no, no,” I mumbled. I felt her neck, but I couldn’t feel a pulse. “No, no. This didn’t happen.”
Blood covered my hands and was soaking into the knees of my pants. I could hear the wail of a police siren in the distance. I stood up, muttering “This isn’t happening.”
The sirens were getting closer. It wasn’t safe for me to be here; you never knew what the cops might do, and I didn’t want to be there to find out. Panic gripped my heart and I ran across the street and down an alley, fear and dread propelling me away from Moira’s dead body.
Chapter 2
I ran for several blocks, my legs carrying me away from the nightmarish scene. I’m sure that I was quite the sight, running through the streets with bloodied clothes, but I didn’t care. I saw the diner where Moira had eaten her last meal and I skidded to a stop. Gladys the waitress stood outside the entrance, a cigarette perched on her lips. I started to say something, but the look she gave me, followed by her scream, compelled me to run on. I ran and ran until I couldn’t breathe. I finally stopped in an alley, hiding behind a trash bin and away from the people on the street. Bending at the waist, my hands resting on my blood-stained knees, I tried to catch my breath. Images of the gunfight and Moira’s blood spreading on the cement played in my head like some demented movie. I gagged on bile, and then vomited behind the bin. I spat out the sick remnants of my breakfast, and then sat down on the cold pavement.
I was dazed and winded, and had a pain in my chest. Suddenly thinking that I might also have been shot, I grabbed at my shirt feeling for a hole or blood. I couldn’t help but remember Uncle Jakob telling me about fighting during the Great War and how soldiers would check themselves for wounds after a battle. I pulled up my shirt to look, the cold air biting at my skin, but all I saw was the beginning of a bruise. Moira must have fallen into me when the bullet struck her. I didn’t know how she’d gotten in front of me, and I couldn’t make sense of why she would have done that.
I don’t know how long that I sat there, but eventually I crawled back onto my feet. My first thought was to return to where Moira had been shot. A part of me knew that I should go back and tell the police what had happened, and what I had seen. But if I went back looking like this, the cops would arrest me on sight. Hell, Gladys would probably tell the cops that Moira deserved it after the misery that she put her through this morning, And I’d never get a chance to tell them what really happened. Straightening my clothes, I walked out of the alley as casually as I could and continued home. I didn’t remember the rest of the walk, making the necessary turns or crossing any streets to get back to my apartment at 1313 North Racine, but I apparently made it without incident since the next thing I knew I was climbing the stairs to my third floor apartment.
The floor creaked as I reached the second floor landing and I froze. I knew that meant that Mrs. Rabinowitz would know somebody was here and poke her head out. As if on cue, her door cracked open. Mrs. R was a nice old lady who lost her husband last summer, and I think she had been trying to fill the void left by his passing by focusing on my life. She was worse than my mom in that way. When I had moved in, she and Mom had met and Mrs. R had promised Mom that she’d look out for me and keep her informed of everything that I did. She was thin and shorter than my sister, with a pronounced stoop to her posture. She had grey hair that was always meticulously pinned up on her head. Normally I would have greeted her warmly and chatted with her about my day, but right now I wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat or to listen to one of her lectures. She started to call out to me, but before she could say anything I waved her off, saying, “Not right now, Mrs. R. I’ll catch up with you later.” I don’t know if I stunned her by my abrupt greeting, or if she caught a glimpse of my bloody clothes as I turned to head up the stairs, but she didn’t say anything and quickly closed her door.
I unlocked my door, closing it behind me. My apartment was one of two on the top floor of the tenement. It was on the right side of the building, the door from the hall opening onto the small kitchen—sink, small hotplate, an old icebox that actually needed ice to keep anything cold and a few functioning cabinets, which were painted the same odd canary yellow color as the walls.
I had only been in the apartment for about two weeks and hadn’t really bothered to decorate. The apartment had come furnished, such as it was, with a table and a couple of chairs in the kitchen, a ratty couch and a floor lamp in the front room of the apartment overlooking the street, and a bed and wardrobe in the bed
room in the back. There were rugs in both the bedroom and the living room, but bare wood floors in the rest of the place. I had brought with me my only possessions: two quilts, one from Nana and the other from Grandma Imbierowicz, my clothes, an alarm clock, and a family portrait of mom and dad standing with me and my younger sister at my bar mitzvah. Mom had reluctantly lent me some dishes, a single coffee cup, one glass, some cutlery, and an old frying pan. She’d have preferred that I ate all of my meals at home, but I had insisted on making my own way.
I pulled the cord for the kitchen light, which cast a feeble glow and gave the yellow walls a sickly hue. I walked over to the sink and picked up the dirty glass that I’d used at breakfast and filled it with water. I raised it unsteadily to my lips and took a quick drink, rinsing the bile from my mouth. I threw my coat over the table and headed for the bathroom. The bath was filled to capacity with a cast iron tub, toilet, and sink. I looked at my face in the cracked mirror; there were small splatters of blood on my cheek. As I turned on the water, I noticed that my hands were caked with dried blood—Moira’s blood. I started franticly scrubbing my hands and face, but the blood came off too slowly. I felt dirty all over, covered with blood and drenched in a cold sweat. I tore off my clothes as I ran water in the tub.
The water was cold, but I didn’t care. I scrubbed my hands and legs until I had removed all of the blood. The entire time I was re-living the events of the morning. Moira meeting me at the L. The dull slap of a ham steak hitting the diner’s tile floor. Moira’s glare at the waitress. The cold air and how great it felt when she kissed me. Then the confusion of the gunfight, and the gut-twisting fear when I saw Moira lying in a pool of her own blood.
I almost vomited again, but I had nothing left and just dry heaved a couple of times. I sat in the cold water, catching my breath. “Why did I run away?” I asked the tub.
I didn’t expect an answer, but I couldn’t help but hear Mom’s voice in my head telling me, “Don’t be a shvuntz. You need to go tell the police what happened. You need to go tell them about this poor girl’s death and that you had nothing to do with it.”
“But the cops were there already,” I whined back silently. “They’re the ones that shot Moira.”
Mom didn’t answer. Neither did the tub.
Between the temperature of the water and my slow realization that I would never see Moira again, I was beginning to feel cold. Shivering, I pulled the plug, letting the pinkish water drain out and dried off with a threadbare towel. I left the blood-stained clothes on the bathroom floor and dressed for bed. It was after noon, and I needed to sleep. I wouldn’t even have time to mourn Moira’s death; I would lose my job if I missed work. I set the alarm clock and crawled under the quilts.
As I drifted off to sleep, a cruel thought came to me. At least I didn’t have to go to the Lexington.
Chapter 3
My alarm clock woke me up at 8 p.m. Despite nearly eight hours of sleep I was completely exhausted. I had the strangest dreams, filled with grinning wolves chasing me down endless alleys. As I hurried around a corner I nearly ran into Moira, standing with her hands on her hips and looking at me in the same way that she had looked at the pie that she’d devoured this morning. Needless to say, I hadn’t slept well.
I dragged myself out of bed and did my ‘morning’ routine. I was still getting used to working the graveyard shift. 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. was not a shift that any sane person would like, but it was a job and postal work paid pretty well. At least well enough that I could get out from under Mom and Dad’s roof, and it was a far cry better than working at the Armour meat packers like Dad.
I picked up my clothes from the bathroom floor and tossed them into the bottom of the wardrobe. Mom would give me hell about the blood, but I could tell her a lie about how it got on my clothes, and with Dad working forever and a day at the packing house, she knew how to get blood stains out of any piece of clothing. I took a proper bath—one advantage of my shift was that I always had hot water at night—then dressed in clean clothes. I made myself coffee in a rusty, third-hand coffee pot that I’d picked up at a junk shop and pulled a day-old bagel—well—more like three days old—from the cupboard. I was out the door and heading for another day at the Post Office by 9:30 p.m. I didn’t have to worry about Mrs. R stopping me to chat as she was always in bed by 8 o’clock.
I got on the L at the Racine Street station, and took it around the Loop to the Post Office. My mind was still preoccupied with the events of this morning. There was a couple sitting at the back of the train, holding hands. They were dressed for the town, and she held a small bouquet of roses. I suddenly remembered that it was still Valentine’s Day and, had events been different this morning, I’d be at the Lexington with Moira right now. The couple caught me staring at them and I awkwardly turned away.
I got off the train and entered the massive Post Office building, taking the stairs up to the third floor where the sorting room was located. The sorting room was a large space filled with dozens of stations where the mail was sorted in order for it to get to its destination. Bags of mail were dumped into wheeled bins that were brought into the sorting room so that the sorters could examine each piece and place it in its proper slot. Once we sorted the mail at night, the mail carriers would pick up the mail in the morning for delivery. I clocked in and headed to my station without talking to anybody. I picked up a stack of letters from the bin and started sorting them into the slots.
“Hey, Saul. Did ya hear the news?”
I looked over to Joe Klein, who stood at the sorting station next to mine. Joe was my co-worker and had become a good friend in the past couple of weeks. He sounded excited.
“What news? You finally get that dame to go out with you?” I laughed. Joe had been trying to get Francine, the waitress from the coffee shop downstairs, to go out with him for forever, or at least for the entire time that I had been here.
“What?” Joe sneered, which was odd since he always liked talking about his soon-to-be girlfriend. “No, the news about the killin’.”
My stomach jumped, and I fought back bile in my throat. “What killing,” I replied as evenly as I could.
“What killin’?” Joe practically yelled. “How can you not know? What killin’?” Joe sighed and shoved a couple of letters into a slot. “The killin’ that’s in all the papers. What they’re callin’ a massacre.”
I breathed a bit easier. If Joe was saying it was a massacre, then it couldn’t be about Moira’s death. “Look, Joe. I had a wonderful date with my beautiful gal after work yesterday, then crashed in bed for the rest of the day until I got up to come here and enjoy your smiling mug. I haven’t heard about any massacre, so spill the beans.”
Joe leaned over conspiratorially, even though half the sorting room had heard him earlier. “The papers say that seven of Bugs Moran’s gang got killed.”
I whistled. “Was it another gang?”
“The papers are saying it might be Capone’s gang, but there’s no proof.” Joe grabbed some more letters from the bin. “Hell, I heard that Al has been down in Florida for weeks.”
I laughed. Joe always liked to talk like he knew Al Capone personally. “So where’d this massacre take place?” I picked up a new stack of letters.
“Up on North Clark Street in some garage. The Daily News has got.…You okay, Saul?”
I had just dropped the entire stack of letters onto the floor and I felt the blood drain from my face. I quickly knelt down to pick up the letters. It’s just a coincidence, I told myself. There’s lots of places on North Clark Street where this could have happened. I stood back up. “I’m fine. I think it’s just something I ate.”
“That’s cuz you Jews don’t eat proper food,” Joe said, going back to his sorting. “You need to eat some good pork chops or bacon sometime. Maybe a nice slab of ham.”
I winced at the memory of Moira flinging the ham to the diner’s floor. I w
ent back to sorting and let Joe go on with his rant against my faith. Not that I was especially religious, mind you, since I usually went to Temple just to make Mom happy. I knew that once Joe got started on a new topic he wouldn’t come back to talking about the massacre at the garage unless I brought it up.
But now it was hard to concentrate on my work. Did the papers know about Moira too? I kept telling myself that this massacre had to have happened someplace else. I don’t know how I managed to get through until our break; my mind was filled with all sorts of dread and fear. I kept glancing toward the sorting room doors, expecting the cops to come busting through to haul me away for questioning.
Joe and I headed down to the coffee shop at lunch. The place was busy as usual. Somebody was getting up from the counter just as we came in and left behind a copy of last night’s Daily News. I grabbed the seat before Joe could and looked at the paper. The headline seemed to scream “MASSACRE 7 OF MORAN GANG” and there was a picture of several dead bodies, the wall behind them riddled with bullet holes.
I ordered the special and a cup of Joe. While I waited for my food to come I read through the article. “Killing scene too gruesome for onlookers. View of carnage proves a strain on their nerves. Victims are lined against wall; one volley kills all. Assassins pose as policemen; flee in ‘squad car’ after fusillade; Capone revenge for murders of Lombardo, officers believe.”
Unremarkable Page 2