When the taxi pulled into the drive, the butler alerted the Brinkleys, consequently causing them to come down to see if anything was the matter. I still remember the look of reproach Max Brinkley shot me through his monocle, confused and thoroughly disapproving. Odalie conveyed a series of hasty and halfhearted regrets to our hosts, who shook our hands politely enough but who each arched an eyebrow and frowned over our shoulders the whole time at the driver as he loaded our luggage into the trunk. The final farewells were said, during which I felt Odalie’s hand on my arm, the skin of her hand as soft as velvet, her grip as unyielding as iron. And then in record speed I found myself in the back of the taxi. The tires spun over the gravel, and the thin, frowning faces of Mr. and Mrs. Brinkley receded until they were no more than two expressionless blurs.
Of course, I assumed we were going to the train station, so when Odalie asked the driver how much he would charge to take us all the way into the city I was a bit surprised. I was even more surprised when he named an exorbitant sum and she agreed to it straightaway, not bothering to barter in spite of the fact we both knew she could very well have gotten him down to half the price he named. It took us three hours at top-notch speed, interrupted only by a solitary stop at a filling station, in order to arrive at our destination. Throughout our entire journey Odalie periodically twisted about to peer through the cramped, oval-shaped back window of the taxi. I looked back a few times myself and half expected to see Teddy running maniacally behind us, trying to catch hold of the automobile’s bumper.
We arrived in front of our hotel without further incident sometime in the afternoon. During our ride back into the city, I had realized summer was lazily fading away. Already the days were beginning to grow shorter. For the remainder of that afternoon and on into the evening, Odalie appeared jittery. The lunch hour had come and gone while we were still in the back of the taxi, but Odalie did not appear to notice its absence, let alone the fact it was now time for dinner. There was a good amount of fresh food in the apartment ice-box, but she only took one bite of this or that simply to lay the dish down and walk away, forgetting all about it. She was the same with books and magazines. She picked one or the other up and turned a few pages merely to set it back down again, and all the while the blind, distracted stare never left her eyes. Several times she got up to open the curtains and peer out the window into the night and then, with a small, almost imperceptible shudder, drew them again as though recoiling from some unseen specter.
By the time the shrill ring of the telephone sounded, she nearly jumped out of her skin. It was Gib, of course. I could tell from her responses he was demanding to know why we’d disappeared and where we’d been. Or rather, where Odalie had been, as I suspect Gib was not in all honesty greatly concerned about my own whereabouts. From across the room, I could just about make out the tinny, canned sound of squawking that emanated from the telephone. Somewhere in the city, Gib was at the other end of the line, angry as spit. I listened to Odalie as she tried to soothe him with that mellifluous voice of hers.
“Oh, don’t fuss so much. . . . Sometimes a girl just needs a little vacation. . . . Well, of course I’m always here if there’s a problem. . . . What do you mean? What’s happened?”
He’d sent little Charlie Whiting out on a delivery, and the dumb kid had gotten himself picked up by the police. Oddly, this piece of bad news seemed to wash over Odalie as something of a relief. Her rigid body melted back into its catlike slouch. She hung up the receiver and began plotting straightaway, happy to be presented with a new distraction. But before I tell all about how Odalie maneuvered to get Charlie off the hook the next day at the precinct, I’d like to take a moment here and explain a little bit about my state of mind at the time.
By now, the outside observer has probably intuited our interaction with Teddy had not yet fully run its course, and something serious was about to happen. It is important to me that I tell why I did not listen to my better judgment and distance myself from the impending catastrophe.
During my time with Odalie, I’d heard so many stories aimed at explaining her origin, each new fable wonderfully fantastic and implausible in its own right. I suppose I’d gotten used to the idea Odalie’s past was ultimately unknowable—and in some ways it made her rather mythical in my mind. But the story Teddy had told me out on the swimmers’ raft somehow changed everything, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I suspected his story was the true one. Moreover, I sensed there was an element to Teddy’s version Odalie wished to keep concealed from public view. It was the only way to explain her otherwise bizarrely potent aversion to the otherwise innocuous-seeming undergrad. And besides, the bracelets—those incontrovertible bits of mineral and metal—had somehow set Teddy’s story apart from all the others. Unlike the Hungarian aristocrat, whose dapper suits and top hat turned to ash immediately upon contradiction and blew back into whimsical vapor from whence they came, the bracelets were very tangible objects I had witnessed on more than one occasion with my own eyes. Odalie’s own explanation to me about the origin of their existence—a deliberately vague and shoddily wrought riches-to-rags story about a doting father and a tragically deceased sister named Violet—was never terribly convincing (when I brought up her sister’s name less than a week after she’d told the tale she had absently responded, “Who?”—and uncomfortably, I had been forced to remind her). Not to mention the fact I’d overheard her the night she’d told the Lieutenant Detective the bracelets were an engagement present. Now it was looking like this latter bit of information may have very well been the truth. Or, at least, a half-truth.
I say all this because while one might judge me a fool, they would be mistaken to think me a total babe in the woods. I knew by then who and what Odalie was (although I readily admit I did not yet know in full—that would come later). Teddy’s effect on her nerves did not bode well for her innocence. From my days spent sitting in front of the stenotype taking dictation in the interrogation room, I knew how to tell the difference between the agitated nerves of an innocent man and the agitated nerves of a guilty man, which with their raw, paranoid edges always jangled about more loudly in the end and gave him away. The long and short of it is I knew there was a good chance Odalie was in fact Ginevra. And I knew if that was indeed the truth of it, there was certainly a reason she had made the switch.
Why then, one might wonder, did I remain at Odalie’s side, concealing her secret and following her around as she conducted further illicit business—the very brand of business, as I have already mentioned, of which I did not approve in the first place? I have said here I am no babe in the woods, and this much is true; I am no innocent. But only now, with the added advantage of hindsight, do I see how I may have appeared (to some) shrouded by the pall of malice from the very first moment I met Odalie. The word obsession has been bandied about rather recklessly by the newspapers. When I was not her condemner, I was her collaborator and, all too quickly following suit, her coolie. One might question why I was so drawn to Odalie, why I was so eager to ingratiate myself to her, if not for unnatural reasons. Yet I must insist again that there was nothing improper in my devotion to Odalie.
This is not to say I didn’t want anything from Odalie. In the months we spent together, I watched countless others—men and women alike—as they swarmed around her, fawning over her, practically pawing at her, all of them wanting something from her. They had disgusted me. But I realize now how I, too, craved something from Odalie, and while in comparison to the desires of her other admirers my desire was much nobler in spirit, it was nonetheless like any other hunger in that it was driven by appetite and need.
It is difficult to put into words what I wanted from Odalie; language too easily corrupts, you see, and falls short. Once, while at the Bedford Academy, we were made to learn all about the carnivorous plants of the Americas. Most of the other schoolchildren were fascinated by the violent Venus flytrap, with its hinged leaves like a series of tiny bear traps. But I w
as more intrigued with the pitcher plant, with its much more alluring tubes shaped like upside-down bells, and the simple premise of its sweet nectar bait. Odalie was like that for me, and I suspect for other people, too. The promise of potentially being the recipient of her love and adoration was a sweet nectar one couldn’t resist; like the insect drawn to his peril, you stepped toward it willingly.
Before you think me dreadfully Sapphic, perhaps it would do to remind you there’s a great history of friendship between women—bonds that are pure and true and do not take on the more unfortunate shades of impropriety. Our mothers’ generation certainly understood it. Why, isn’t the cornerstone of Victorian girlhood founded on such wonderful intimacies? I believe, with all my heart, the generations before us knew a type of loyalty in love that our modern society does not understand at all. An acute cruel streak, the doctor here wrote next to my name. I suspect he thinks me an outright monster, but I am no monster. He misunderstands my motivations. I only wanted the giggles, the held hands, the whispered confidences, all the cool kisses upon my cheek that had evaded me throughout my own childhood. And in answering for the rest of my actions . . . well, it is natural for us to feel some measure of possessive zeal for the things we love. We cannot help the fact we humans are territorial creatures, after all.
I am rambling, perhaps, but there is a point to all of this. My point is motive. From the moment I heard Teddy’s story, I became abstractly aware that an invisible clock had been set to ticking. I also understood this clock was ticking down to something, but why and to what event of course I could not know just then.
• • •
THE MONDAY AFTER we returned from the Brinkleys, we awoke to find a brilliant red dawn sky overhead. As the sun slogged upward and red gave way to blood orange, the colors vibrated with diminishing intensity. It was as if summer itself were burning off the last of its halcyon days. It was still warm out, but already the air was thinner and laced with the suggestion of cleaner, crisper days ahead.
Though we had arranged for a longer holiday, Odalie had determined we should return to work that day, in part, I assumed, to take care of the minor predicament into which Charlie had gotten himself. We rose, dressed, and made our way down to the precinct. Once through the entrance door, the Sergeant did not seem particularly surprised to see us. I think he had come to accept the fact Odalie would come and go as she pleased, and his choices were to either twist his mustache and grumble about it or not twist his mustache and not grumble about it. But Iris was flustered by our return. She was a woman who took comfort in routine. She had parceled out the work very precisely in our absence and now found herself obliged to spontaneously redistribute it. She huffed and huffed and hardly said hello, while Marie flew over to us and shook us with a friendly, brute force, her fingers now thickly swollen from her increasingly obvious state of pregnancy.
“Why on Earth would anyone cut short a holiday?! Oh, you little fools!” she exclaimed in an accusing voice, but her shining face betrayed her true delight.
“Just as I feared,” the Lieutenant Detective chimed in. He sauntered in our direction, pushing a hand through his hair. “You cannot go more than two days without me.” It might’ve been directed at Odalie, but for some reason he winked at me. I stiffened. I felt the back of my neck grow hot.
“Well, you could take a nice long holiday, Lieutenant Detective, and we could retest that theory,” I replied on instinct. At this, Marie shook her hand at the wrist and whistled, as if to say touché! I watched as the Lieutenant Detective’s grin slid into a frown, and felt that familiar sensation of satisfaction tinged with regret.
“No one’s going anywhere,” the Sergeant asserted. “We’ve got work to do.” We stared at him, unmoving. “Marie”—he snapped his fingers—“coffee!” Whatever odd enchantment had temporarily rooted us in place suddenly lifted, and the office hummed again as we all went about our business.
“Let me help you with that, my dear,” I overheard Odalie say to Iris, who had lumped all the case files back into one pile and was preparing to divvy them into a revised distribution. Odalie’s voice was sugary and pleasant enough, but I saw the tendons above Iris’s necktie flex defensively. Order and control were Iris’s two best friends, and I knew by the end of the hour Odalie was bound to worm her way in between them, much to Iris’s silent distress. If there was one thing I could consistently predict, it was that Odalie would always get her way.
Odalie had also not forgotten her promise to Gib. After a handful of casual, perfectly innocent-sounding inquiries, Odalie was told a representative was on his way over from the Lower East Side Boys’ Home to collect a young juvenile named Charles Whiting, who was being temporarily held in our precinct’s holding cell. To any outside observer, Odalie did not appear dreadfully interested in the case. But nonetheless, the corresponding file somehow made its way from Iris’s pile and into her own. It seemed a haphazard transaction, but I knew better. Before the lunch hour rolled around, a telephone call had been made to inform the representative he needn’t bother making the trip, and a middle-aged couple had rung the bell at our front desk to sign the boy out. They were Charlie’s parents, they claimed, despite the fact they twice referred to him as Carl (It’s a pet name, the woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Whiting explained the mistake away).
Of course I was privy to the fact these weren’t really Charlie’s parents. Everyone at the speakeasy who regularly interacted with Charlie knew his father had died in the war and his mother had drunk herself to death the year after the armistice. But it wasn’t until they had already departed, each holding one of Charlie’s hands parentally tucked into one of their own, that I was finally able to place his “mother’s” face as that of the woman who had once removed her shoes and drunkenly played “Chopsticks” on the piano with her toes.
19
I have as good as admitted the journal I kept about Odalie reads like one long love-letter; it details my initial intrigue with her and quickly evolves into an outpouring of the sisterly affection I spent so many hours cultivating for her. I understand only too well how it will appear to the eyes of an outsider, and I have endeavored to keep it among my private things for as long as that arrangement holds (the doctors here are not keen on privacy). We have access to very few books here—Too much fiction may overstimulate the mind, and as you know, your imagination is already altogether too excitable, they tell me. With little else to do and little ability to concentrate on the ridiculous “recreational” activities they offer here, I have now reread my journal several times over. It is striking how little is mentioned about Odalie’s business affairs. At present, I can see only one entry that makes reference to the high level of Odalie’s illicit entanglements. Of course, at the time, I failed to accurately interpret the meaning of this exchange, but I made note of it thus:
Today when I came home O and G were in the back bedroom and I heard them arguing about something. I would never eavesdrop, but they must not have heard me come in and they kept at it, and then of course it got so it was too late for me to interrupt or cough or make my presence known in some other way, and so I just held my breath and stood there, quiet as can be. Curiously, they weren’t arguing over O having other suitors as they normally might have, but instead it was something about business, and O sounded a great deal more agitated than usual. At one point G shouted, Well, now that you’ve gotten your card from that almighty crook of a police commissioner, I suppose you think you don’t even need me anymore. It was a curious thing to say—to my knowledge, O has never met the Commissioner. Finally, G came storming out and made for the front door, and when he caught sight of me he gave a rude snort and shouted back something horribly slanderous to O about my being a toadie and a spy. Then he left without saying so much as hello to me and slammed the door. Thought G and I had achieved a peaceful treaty, but I see now I was a fool to think so. It is truly less of a treaty and more of a stalemate, I believe.
• �
�� •
I KNOW MY PERSECUTORS would delight in much of my journal, but I believe this particular entry would disappoint them. Their explanation for entries like this one would be of a simple nature: They would say, of course, I am a madwoman, an unreliable raconteur. But I know the truth, and I’d be willing to bet if the Commissioner himself were to ever catch wind of this entry, the entire journal might even disappear altogether.
The fact of the matter is, my journal is rather devoid of further entries on the subject because I never knew that much about Odalie’s business. I realize, of course, nobody here believes me when I say so, but I’m afraid it is simply the truth. The doctor I am seeing—Dr. Miles H. Benson; you may as well know his name, as it is no great secret—nods his head as though he believes me, but I know he is merely humoring me. He thinks if he nods his head in that sympathetic way of his I’ll come to see him as an ally and confide in him. But in truth, I have not honestly been privy to the kind of secrets I’m sure he is salivating to hear. It’s likely he has imagined a whole world for me, a world of racketeering and tommy guns and shoot-outs in curtained restaurants. Of course these imaginings are so false as to be laughable; the existence I led with Odalie was one of fine furnishings and delicate pastries and frequent trips to fancy department stores. At best, I possess a fragmented knowledge of the role Odalie played in the importation and production of alcohol, assembled mostly from bits and pieces of information acquired by indirect means (here Gib might snarkily point out that what I call “indirect means” he calls spying).
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