Of the facts I do know, here are some: I know the liquor at the speakeasies ranged from the very high to the very low, running the gamut from French champagne to grain alcohol. All in all, I realize now in retrospect a pretty decent-size operation must’ve been in place, and there was surely a certain amount of importation going on. During different intervals at the speakeasies there were numerous bottles of English gin, Irish whiskey, and Russian vodka all floating about. I had also gathered from the amount of bathtub gin and moonshine in circulation that a reasonable amount of production was likewise going on. I’d overheard Odalie on the telephone several times, and from her half of the conversation I made out that these homemade varieties of alcohol were being sold over the counter at several general stores and drugstores in a variety of locations from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and that the cryptic messages Charlie Whiting sat by the ’phone and took down had something to do with this business. Once I even answered the ring of the telephone in our apartment only to have a man with a rather uncouth Chicago accent rattle off a string of store names whose illicit supplies I can only assume needed restocking. The gentleman at the other end of the line was several minutes into his itemized list before I was able to stop him by blurting out, I beg your pardon, but I’m afraid Miss Lazare is not at home presently. Evidently the caller was greatly taken aback by this piece of news, for he rang off immediately.
In general, though, I remained rather ignorant on the subject of Odalie’s business, and I must admit, my ignorance was of a rather self-imposed, willful variety. I am no dullard, so I suppose I should have seen the repercussions that would eventually come from my adopting this position. I did not know then—or rather, I did not want to know then—that there would come a day when I’d wish I’d taken more care to distance myself even further from Odalie’s business matters.
• • •
BY THAT TIME, 1925 was already half over. As the sultry days of September stretched into an Indian summer, Odalie and Gib began to quarrel more regularly. While I realize it is very unbecoming of me to say so, I suppose I was inwardly delighted with this development. I never understood the draw Gib held for Odalie in the first place, and it seemed inevitable that Odalie should want to part ways with him. Whenever we spoke about it in private, I heartily encouraged her to take the steps necessary to effect this separation. While I never said so aloud, I even fancied that their increased proclivity to fight had something to do with my presence in Odalie’s life, that I was perhaps unseating Gib in some significant way. Many of their quarrels during that time had to do with Odalie’s whereabouts. When I first moved in, Odalie was very careful to keep Gib apprised of her actions at all times. But as my tenure wore on, she grew increasingly neglectful of this duty. Silly though it may sound now, I speculated that my presence in the apartment had emboldened Odalie in some way. She was breaking free of Gib, and I was helping her! Of course, this turned out to be true in the end—but not in the manner I imagined.
The result of Odalie’s quarrels with Gib was that she needed someone to occasionally take up his role in business matters. She began to ask me for little favors. These were small tasks; typically they involved dropping off an envelope at this-or-that drugstore, or picking one up. I told myself I needed to go to the drugstore anyway, and the delivery of these envelopes was merely an innocuous little side-errand. But of course I knew better.
For her part, Odalie was extremely clever in the delivery of her requests. The first time she asked, we were on the terrace, lazing about in the late summer heat and sliding ice cubes along the backs of each other’s necks in an attempt to cool down.
“Would you mind terribly?” she asked just after making her request. I hesitated, and she sensed it. “Why, Rose,” she exclaimed, “the shape of your neck is just lovely. Has anyone ever told you that?” Indeed, they had not. “You really could carry off a bob in style, you know. Just think!” I felt myself blush up to the roots of my unbobbed hair.
Before I knew it, I had completed this same errand on her behalf no fewer than four times. I was unprepared, however, for her requests to escalate into something more than the occasional passing along of an envelope to a drugstore clerk. Odalie was careful to stack the odds in her favor at first, naturally. One night, we found ourselves curled up in Odalie’s room on top of the bedcovers. She had been fighting with Gib, and ever the sympathetic listener, I had been playing the part of her attentive audience. We had been holding hands, as we often did, and just as Odalie dozed off, she pulled my hand to her lips and brushed it with a kiss. “A true sister,” she murmured as she drifted off into a deep state of slumber.
The very next day she asked me a new kind of favor—one to which I found myself powerless to say no. It started off as a normal Tuesday, but eventually she compelled me to leave my post an hour prior to quitting time in order to run a “business errand.”
“I would do it, but I’m behind. See this huge stack of reports that need transcribing here? All that’s for the Sergeant, and I think he is growing quite intolerant of me these days. But you . . . you’re always so on top of your reports, Rose! You can afford to step out for an hour. Oh, and it won’t even be that! Much less, I’d say. Just slip out the door quietly, and I’ll make sure no one notices you’ve gone,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not sure—”
“It’s really easy,” she promised. “It’s a little bit out of the way, but all you have to do is pick up a message.”
As I began to demur, she stiffened and gave me a look.
“Oh, Rose, I can see you’re put out. Please, never mind then. Don’t bother yourself over it. I’ll just telephone and ask Gib. . . .”
Of course I stopped her, and with a contradictory mixture of eagerness and reluctance I wrote down the address she gave. On my way out the door, she hurried after me and grabbed my wrist and said, “Oh! I almost forgot—for cab fare,” while giving me an open-mouthed wink. As I hailed a taxi and climbed in, I glanced at the denomination of the bills clutched in my fist and realized she had just handed me enough money to pay a city taxi to chauffeur me all the way to St. Paul and back.
It had been muggy and overcast all day long, and though it was only September and not yet five o’clock, the sky had already turned a dark sickly green color. The driver, probably hoping for some semblance of a fresh breeze, had all the windows rolled down in the taxi, but it didn’t seem to help much. When I handed him the slip of paper containing the address, he nodded and seemed to understand where we were going, so for most of the ride I simply sank into the back seat, leaning my head back and sweating rather indelicately on the leather upholstery. Eventually we pulled up in front of a brick building somewhere along the East River. The driver waited expectantly, but I was slow to make my move—the building didn’t even look inhabited. Whatever the edifice was, it certainly wasn’t a residential building; it appeared to be more of a disused factory of some sort. I noticed a few of the large glass windows on the upper floors had been smashed out, giving the building the air of a toothy jack-o’-lantern.
“Well?” the driver prodded, peering back over the seat and pushing the brim of his newsboy cap up so as to get a better look at me. I peeled a few bills from the wad Odalie had handed me just minutes earlier and paid him.
“You can keep the extra seeds.” It was a slang expression I’d heard Odalie use at least a dozen times. Along with her clothes, I was evidently trying on Odalie’s vocabulary and mannerisms.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. It sounded like skepticism, but I assumed he likely meant it in earnest, as I’d just handed him a rather large tip. I did not, at that time, consider the possibility his cynical tone had anything to do with the fact he’d picked me up in front of the police precinct and was now dropping me off along a rather dubious stretch of the East River.
Once out of the car, I approached the only door I could discern along the building’s entire facade. I heard the cab pull away be
hind me. Somewhere out on the East River a garbage scow gave a great blast of its horn and the far-off shrieks of bickering seagulls echoed over the water. The door before me was heavy, wooden, and padlocked. By then I was certain I had written down the address incorrectly, but since the taxi was already long gone and there didn’t appear to be a convenient way to telephone Odalie, I figured I might as well knock on the door. I reached up with a cautious hand and rapped on the wooden door timidly. It gave a mighty shake, and the padlock jingled on its chain. I looked around with an air of embarrassment, as I suddenly felt very foolish. I suppose I expected very little in the way of a response. But almost as soon as my feeble knocking died down, a rectangular peephole I had not initially detected slid open with violent force.
“What d’ya want?” a low voice boomed. I squinted into the dark of the peephole and, with a gasp, discerned a rather beady eye looking out at me. I stood there, blinking stupidly. “I said, now, what d’ya want?” the voice repeated.
“I’m here . . . on behalf of Odalie Lazare,” I said. The peephole slid shut, its closure proving to be as violent as its opening. A heavy bolt sounded and keys jingled as a series of locks were undone. The door swung open, and I found myself staring at a thickly muscled, red-haired man wearing a fisherman’s sweater and knit cap. He was quite large. The level of my eyes, I noticed, came to about the middle stripes upon the man’s chest.
“Hurry up!” he barked, and without thinking I stepped over the threshold and plunged into the darkness inside. It was some kind of antechamber. The door was swiftly shut and bolted behind me. The padlock and chain were just for show apparently; the more I looked around, the more I realized everything that truly locked was bolted from within. Which meant, of course, the structure was regularly occupied by people—the last thing I’d expected.
“Odalie sent you?” the redhead asked. I nodded. He looked me over from head to toe, as though deciding whether the curious phenomenon in question was actually possible. He let out a huff that made me think the matter ultimately went undecided. “This way,” he said, evidently no longer interested in the specifics of my person. He began walking rapidly down a hallway, and as he moved I realized his lantern was the only source of light around.
“Wait!” I said as I hurried after him. He ignored me. I stumbled forward in a scurry and caught up to him. When we got to the end of a seemingly endless labyrinth of hallways, he drew up short in front of a door.
“Dr. Spitzer’ll be in there. That’s him you’ll wanna talk to.”
With that, the redhead turned on his heel and the light from his lantern dimmed as he moved away. Confused and desperate not to be left alone in the dark in such a frighteningly unfamiliar place, I clawed for the doorknob. As soon as my hand found it, the door pushed open easily, and I was immediately blinded by a series of bright overhead lamps hanging from the ceiling in the room within. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to this new development, my brain on the verge of abandoning all expectations of normalcy.
“What in the world—?”
“Can I help you?” a man in a crisp white lab-coat asked as he approached.
“Oh! Why . . . no. No—I mean yes! Yes, please. I suppose I should explain; you see I’m . . .” I suddenly felt reluctant to give my name. “Odalie sent me,” I finished. I looked around. The room, as I have mentioned, was very brightly lit. There was a pair of very high, long tables running down the middle of the room, upon which a great number of beakers and flasks dripped and bubbled away. The air smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol and something else . . . something I couldn’t quite place but that smelled a little like formaldehyde. “What is this place?”
The man in the lab-coat frowned. “Odalie sent you?” he repeated, just as the redhead had done. “Hmm.” He looked me over. He had very dark, almost black hair, parted precisely down the middle, all of which was complemented by an equally dark, sharply trimmed mustache. As his predecessor had also been, the man in the lab-coat seemed skeptical of my connection to Odalie. Finally he shrugged. “Hmm, yes, well. Fine. I suppose that must be true enough. After all, who else would you be? We’re expecting another chemist in soon, and surely you’re not him. Hah! Unless . . . I don’t suppose your name happens to be Madame Curie?” He rolled his eyes at me, gave me another assessing head-to-toe look, and before I could give an answer supplied one of his own in a snippy voice. “No . . . I don’t suppose it is.”
I remained silent, still staring goggle-eyed at the multiplicity of gurgling, steaming contraptions behind him. He followed my gaze over his shoulder. He turned back to me and grunted.
“You probably don’t even know who she is,” he said with a sneer, and I realized he meant Madame Curie. I felt my dander go up. A sudden rush of heat went to my cheeks, and the queer mechanical feeling I sometimes experienced came over me.
“Madame Curie is the winner of two Nobel Prizes,” I said haughtily. It wasn’t as if I’d never read the headlines growing up! “Not to mention living proof that men often jump to the wrong conclusions, in more ways than one,” I added for good measure. The man in the lab-coat raised his eyebrows at me and cocked his head. Almost imperceptibly, his posture straightened. “Listen,” I said, hoping to take advantage of the footing I’d just gained in order to accomplish my task. “I’m sure you run a regular Nobel-quality operation around here. But I’ve only come to pick up a message.” He gazed at me and remained speechless for several seconds. “Odalie said there would be a message,” I prompted him.
At the renewed mention of Odalie’s name, the trance was broken and he snapped out of his stasis. “Yes, of course. Well, there’s no good news, I’m afraid.” He turned away from me to attend the beakers with a brisk, businesslike air. He began making a series of minor adjustments to the contraptions located there. “You know how the gov’ment regulators are cracking down. They’ve really laid it on thick with the methanol lately. I can’t promise any of this batch will be drinkable. Not if we don’t want another chap dying, like last time.”
“Oh! Why, you don’t mean . . . You can’t mean someone actually . . . !” I was utterly confounded.
Instantly, I could see my state of uninformed bewilderment had cost me my temporary superior footing with the man in the lab-coat. He rolled his eyes disdainfully at me, then sighed and cleared his throat. “Look Miss . . . Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is, just tell Miss Lazare this: The batch is a bust, but I’ll try it again. My friend is a chemist in a hair tonic factory; I can try starting from some of what they use.” He thrust a bottle in my direction. “And here,” he barked. “You can give ’er this.”
I was slow to retrieve the bottle, and he shook it back and forth as if to nag me. “What is this?” I asked, and looked at the crude, unlabeled, green glass bottle.
“Proof,” Dr. Spitzer replied, “that I’m not selling a good batch out from under her.”
My fingers closed hesitantly around the bottle’s neck. I peered into the glass and squinted at its contents. As far as I could tell, they were crystal clear. I swirled the liquid around, causing Dr. Spitzer to frown.
“Don’t go drinking that now,” Dr. Spitzer warned. “You have enough common sense to know that much, doncha?”
“Why . . . yes . . .”
“Figures. Course, you look more like the pampered type; probably more used to all that fancy imported stuff.”
I blinked dumbly at him. I had never before in my life been taken for “the pampered type.” The dim realization occurred to me that Dr. Spitzer’s manners were turning increasingly rough by the second. As he looked me up and down rather uncouthly, any semblance of the imaginary university that had conferred upon him his title of “doctor” dropped away. The expression that took over his face was both wolfish and cruel at the same time.
“Yeah, I know all aboutcha: Leave it to all’a the blue-collar boys to drink the homemade stuff and let ’em try their odds, while you leave it alone.” He gave a
n embittered sigh and shrugged dismissively. “Well anyway, just remember to relay my message.”
I stood there, still absorbing the message to be relayed. Dr. Spitzer was irritable now, this much was plain. I felt as though I’d botched things; I’d managed to both offend him and prove myself a ninny. He pushed a button and somewhere an electric buzzer rang. Seconds later the redhead was standing in the doorway.
“Stan can show you the way out,” Dr. Spitzer said in a flat, dismissive tone. He resumed his work as though my presence in the room was already a distant memory. I followed Stan with the same automatic step that had led me into the building, and before I knew it I was standing outside again, the heavy wooden door shuddering to a close behind me. A clammy breeze was blowing off the river, and looming above me at some distance I could make out the peaked trestles of the Queensboro Bridge. Self-consciously, I tucked the bottle clutched in my hand under my coat. It wouldn’t do to be seen on a public street holding an unmarked bottle of alcohol.
But then I looked around and realized there was no one to see me. I had no mode of transportation; no bell-boy or doorman had telephoned for a cab to pick me up as I had nowadays all too quickly become accustomed. I began walking away from the graveled edge of the river in the direction of greater civilization. Though I had been ushered in and out of the building with great speed, the overall errand had taken longer than I’d expected. As I picked my way from the rubble-strewn industrial blocks and back into the major avenues, I gave a dismal glance at my watch and realized the ride back to the precinct would only get me there in time to turn around and go home for the day. I deliberated as I neared First Avenue, then hailed a taxi and gave the driver the apartment address instead. At least I could be fairly confident in Odalie’s ability to conceal my absence.
The Other Typist Page 26