by David Fuller
“Think you can do better? Good luck, she’s gone missing the last few weeks.”
Longbaugh leaned in to flatter him. “You can find her.”
Hightower was more than willing to be flattered. “Well, of course, I usually can, but I haven’t bothered this time, not since Moretti lost interest.”
“How do we start?”
“Now, tourist, let’s not get overly excited . . .”
“Did you forget so soon? You’re a sentimental guy, and this one’s for love.”
“Playing on my weakness. And I do love a happy ending. All right, tourist. We’ll dig up Queenie. But lower your expectations, because she’s not going to be able to help you.”
11
Longbaugh continued to be conscious of his physical actions. He weighed his movements in advance, trying to leave nothing to chance, as he still did not trust that his muscles would respond the way they always had. He analyzed his walk and tried to affect the old stroll that would return him to fearlessness. He caught a glimpse of himself in a store window and his stride looked performed. He tried to walk without thinking, but when he did, his side ached and he started thinking again.
He forced himself to visit a department store on the Ladies’ Mile and bought a new bandanna. It was too new, too stiff, and a color they called forest green, although it was the closest color to the original he could find. The color would age, but it would never approach the old one. It did not feel natural, but it was the one thing of his own he wore the first night of the Hightower pilgrimage.
Hightower had outfitted him in working man’s clothes and said not to shave.
Longbaugh inspected the dirty shirt, the double-breasted reefer jacket and the shapeless slouch hat. “I wonder if Etta did this to escape Moretti.”
“What, dress like a working stiff? Could explain how I lost her trail.”
They met at the Hotel Algonquin, then started their search in the old Tenderloin area. He ordered nothing in the first bar. Hightower shook his head. “You order, you pay, you pretend to sip. Then put it down. Keep the bartender happy.”
They continued throughout the night, visiting a series of bars. In one place, Hightower mentioned that they used to have a blind tiger. That night there was no tiger and no Queenie. Longbaugh’s clothing, however, brought challenges from drunks in more than one bar. Hightower finally came clean, laughing while telling him that in the early nineties the righteous Reverend Parkhurst had hired a detective to take him on a sojourn to the seamier side of the city, and the detective had dressed the reverend in similar clothes. Parkhurst’s ensuing sermons had famously exposed the city’s underbelly. The following night, with Longbaugh back in his regular clothes, he and Hightower hit the dance halls, then visited bordellos in the days after that. He was relieved that the opportunistic Hightower did not take to calling him “reverend.” Still no Queenie.
Longbaugh wondered aloud why they weren’t looking at places on Fifth Avenue. Hightower laughed at him. “Fifth Avenue belongs to the rich,” he said. “No Queenies there.”
“How’d it get to be for the rich?”
“You mean, why aren’t the rich living in their waterfront properties?”
“I don’t remember any waterfront properties. Just docks.”
“Exactly. Docks and warehouses. On both sides of the island. You know what Fifth Avenue is? The farthest you can get from the water.”
They prowled streets and dark alleys, then ventured into deeply shadowed avenues under elevated train tracks. The shadows there bred fear and violence, a natural habitat for gangsters who lingered and attacked their prey without mercy. Hightower was on occasion recognized and sometimes welcomed, but usually merely tolerated. The one time Longbaugh was attacked, Hightower made quick work of the assailant. Hightower feigned nonchalance afterward, and Longbaugh wondered what it was Hightower needed from him, to have protected him that way.
Hightower did not mention Queenie by name as they questioned the locals. He played the part of an unlucky vendor attempting to rebuild his stable with “older” prostitutes. No one questioned his story, as there were plenty of bad ideas masquerading as wealth schemes, and there was no competition for the crone whore. The haunts of older prostitutes were uncovered, and Longbaugh and Hightower spent a series of nights in crawly rooms where half-naked women sprawled on dingy sheets, their backs and thighs dotted red with the bites of bedbugs.
The women, after donning exotic smiles, would grow churlish or tragic or both on discovering their visitors were not customers. After that, they did not mask the damage and desperation of their lives. Longbaugh wondered why these women did not merit the outrage of strikers who fought for better conditions. A naïve thought, perhaps, and while he knew the answer, the question lingered.
Queenie continued to be nowhere.
Longbaugh waited for Hightower to abandon the search out of weariness, but carried on as if he had weeks to burn. Longbaugh wondered if Moretti’s desire to find Etta was so fierce that Hightower would continue this odd journey in the hope that Longbaugh’s long shot was his best chance to find her. He studied the man, but Hightower’s good humor never wavered. That was troubling.
A coincidence can on occasion appear supernatural, but Longbaugh understood that luck involved maximizing opportunities. It had worked in bank and train robberies, and it worked here. When a net is cast over a vast area, the chance of catching your prey increases. They met an aging prostitute old enough to be past pathetic and on the road back to respectable. When she learned of their quest, she reached for her long pipe and a small brown cube wrapped in waxed paper. She loaded the cube and smoked in front of them. She smoked quickly, and he knew her opium tolerance was high and she would need to smoke a good amount to arrive at the sought-after euphoria. Longbaugh asked if many of the girls smoked and the old woman chuckled at being labeled a girl. Even in her altered state, she maintained the dignity of a dowager. But Longbaugh and Hightower now had a new destination. They were going to Chinatown.
• • •
THEY CONVINCED the myriad owners of opium dens that they were not police. Each owner in turn had immediately offered them a bribe, and while Hightower would have been happy to accept, Longbaugh had waved them off.
They found Queenie on their third stop. The interior of the den was kept in deliberate gloom, with individual pallets for the good spenders and bunks for the rest. Longbaugh breathed in opium smoke, which had a sweetish smell, flowery, pungent, and amiable, and was not like tobacco. Hightower stayed back, hat pulled low so that Queenie would not recognize him. She sat on the side of a wood-framed lower bunk, vein-marbled feet flat on the floor. A quiet Chinese girl prepared a pipe. Longbaugh wondered about Queenie’s tolerance and how long she could remain lucid. He made eye contact, but the quiet girl did not slow her preparations. An older woman snarled Mandarin at the girl, who then worked more quickly.
Longbaugh pushed in to press the situation, kneeling by the side of the bunk.
“Aw, honey,” said Queenie when he invaded her space, “you come on back later, I’ll take care of you then. But right now I got this other thing.” She patted his knee.
He put his hand on her hand to keep it there. “Been looking just for you.”
“Y’have? Now ain’t you the sweetest.” She slid her hand out from under his. She was conspiratorial. “This ain’t the place. We’ll go somewhere later and I’ll show you a good time. You want a pipe, honey? Make the time go faster.”
“Not right now. How long you been here?”
“Oh, few days.”
Longbaugh put his hand out to stop the quiet girl from giving Queenie the pipe. The girl’s eyes flashed.
“That’s mine!” said Queenie harshly.
The quiet girl looked triumphant.
“I just want a minute to talk.”
“You give it here, that’s mine!”
&nb
sp; Longbaugh backed off. The quiet girl held out the pipe to Queenie with two hands. Queenie laid her head on the pallet and curled her feet under. The quiet girl set the pipe between Queenie’s lips and danced a flame over the bowl and Queenie took a deep inhale. She leaned away, then came suddenly back to the stem and sucked in a second time to get every last essence, pressing the smoke down into her lungs. He waited until she exhaled.
“Talk to me.”
“I’m a little busy, honey.”
“Talk to me and I’ll buy you a second bowl.”
“What kind?”
“Just stay awake.”
Queenie was lucid when she spoke to the quiet girl. “No yen pock, I want the yen shee.”
“Yen shee is the box that holds the ashes,” said the quiet girl condescendingly.
“You know what I mean. No rooster blend, I want the other, the good stuff.”
“Li yuen,” said the quiet girl.
“That!” said Queenie. She turned a belligerent eye on Longbaugh to see if he would agree. He nodded to the quiet girl.
“Sucker,” said Hightower softly.
“Okay, honey.” Queenie’s manner changed so quickly that he knew her earlier act had been put on to be rid of him. “We talk now.”
The quiet girl held up one finger and Longbaugh put a dollar for the li yuen in her hand. The quiet girl looked at it and went away.
“Key to happiness is good health and a bad memory,” said Queenie. “This is how I get back my bad memory.”
Longbaugh wanted her memory intact. “Can’t you remember without feeling bad?”
“I used to try to forget so he wouldn’t know. I knew he could read my mind, see? He sees everything, of course, but I had this idea, if I could fool myself, then he’d be fooled when he went in my head.”
Hightower’s eyebrows rose and he made a mock sign of the cross over his crotch. At first Longbaugh had thought she was talking about Moretti, but realized she must have been talking about her god.
“Some days it got so intense that I thought he wanted me to forget so it’d be easier for him to forgive. But nowadays I can’t remember what I did. Strange, too, ’cause just when you think he wants you to be good, he gets imaginative.”
Longbaugh reacted to her peculiar theology.
“He had real different ideas about what to do, like he knew the bad things I’d done and wanted to try ’em.”
Longbaugh sat upright. This was not theology. If it was, then her notion of a higher being was unique. And deviant.
“I guess he got tired of me, although once I’d been his heart’s desire. I let Joe get in the way. I always let Joe get in the way.”
Nothing theological there. Longbaugh half smiled at his own misunderstanding.
“Tell me about him.”
“Which one? My Englishman?”
“Start there.”
“He was somethin’. Did you know he survived the Titanic? I coulda been in love with him, or at least I tried to be. I coulda been a countess or a duchess or somethin’ English. I coulda survived the Titanic!” The opium was softening the edges of her words. “But let me tell ya somethin’, honey, he wasn’t like Joe.”
“Giuseppe.”
“Yeah, Joe-zeppi. He hated when I called him that. Fidgy was nice, but . . . That’s my Englishman, Fidgy. Elegant. And too nice. Except when he was readin’ my mind. I forgot who I was when I was with Fidgy. He could make the past seem like it never happened. He said stuff like, ‘When you don’t live in the past, you travel beyond guilt and just live.’ He talked like that. But with an accent.”
Longbaugh wondered if her memories of Fidgy were an attempt to convince herself she had been important. He looked at her face, the harsh lines and hurt eyes, and remembered Lillian had told him she was not yet thirty years of age.
“Ah, here it comes.” Her body relaxed. “I love to forget. Only thing I remember is how pretty I was.”
Fishing for a compliment.
“You’re still beautiful.”
“Aw, honey, ain’t you a charmer. I was pretty. Ain’t no wonder Joe don’t want me now. Joe don’t want me, Fidgy don’t want me.”
“Where is Fidgy?”
“Back in England.”
“Did Etta know him?”
Queenie flashed anger. “Fidgy was mine. Even Joe didn’t know about him. He was my secret.”
“But you trusted Etta. Maybe you mentioned it to her, some late night when you needed to share your memories so they wouldn’t get lost.”
“No. Never once.” But inside of a breath, her adamance toppled. “Although I might have. He always had such beautiful guns, did I tell you about that? He was a collector. Kept them in wooden boxes, polished antiques, even the boxes were polished, beautiful guns.”
“Why did Etta help you?”
“She saw Joe hit me once. Why do I always gotta fall in love with someone’s not nice to me?”
“Etta, Queenie. Talk about Etta.”
“At least she thought I was worth saving. Although she had dreams too, mostly about helpin’ people. She got me that job, away from Joe.”
“Needle trade?”
“Yeah, but then there was a fire.”
“She saved your life.”
“I couldn’t be alone in my place after that, so she made sure I stayed hid from Joe.”
“Where did she hide you?”
“Oh, on Henry Street. Joe came lookin’, too. I was hidin’ and heard him yellin’ at her. Etta said she didn’t know where I was. She lied pretty good for a nice girl. But in the end I only had one place to go. She sent Joe away, then went to find me, but I was already gone. I felt kinda bad about that.” She yawned. “I think she got mad, since she went back to see Joe.” Queenie nestled in and closed her eyes.
Longbaugh pressed. “She went to see Joe.” He wanted her side of this story.
“To find me, yeah.” Her eyes fluttered open, closed.
“So you went back to him.”
“Had to, honey. Had to.”
“Had to? But you told her you wanted to get away from him, you promised you’d stay away for your own good. She came back to face Joe to find out if you’d betrayed her trust.”
“I couldn’t help that, honey. It was Joe.”
He watched her conveniently float away, as she didn’t care to face this. “Don’t you stop now, not if you want that second bowl.”
She opened her eyes reluctantly, forcing herself up on one elbow. “Hey, listen, it’s what she wanted to hear. But I loved Joe. How could I help myself, he came all the way to Henry Street to get me back. It was so sweet.”
He came all the way to Henry Street so he could dump you in the ash can, thought Longbaugh.
“But when Etta went to see him at the end, lookin’ for me, that proved to Joe she was the one, so he had to teach her.”
“You disappointed her.”
“Did the best I could. Didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“She saved you from the Triangle fire.”
“Yeah, but Joe said she also got me in it. I wouldn’ta been there at all if it wasn’t for her.”
Longbaugh backed off. “Okay.”
“Not like I didn’t give it a chance. I worked there for months. I was real good with that new sewing machine, three thousand stitches a minute—old pedal ones only do thirty-four.”
“Could have been your calling.”
“Nah. Not after what I did. A couple years before me’n some of the girls got hired to beat on strikers. So now I’m workin’ with this girl I’d smacked with an umbrella. She’s right on my aisle. I always turned my head, even though I don’t think she knew me.”
“You might’ve fit in over time.”
“First I hit her with an umbrella, then she dies in the fire.”
That brought him up.
“They just wasn’t my people. They called guys like Joe shtarkers—I had to ask what it means. Tough guys. Yeah. That’s Joe, all right. A shtarker. And I was his whore.”
He was losing her again, and maybe a little of himself in the opium smoke. She rolled away, but Longbaugh pushed one last time.
“You know where she is?”
“Don’t bother me, honey. I’m restin’.”
“Etta, where is she?”
“Well, if he ain’t killed her, she’s probably hidin’.”
“So he still wants to kill her?” Longbaugh looked at Hightower when he said it. Hightower apparently had an itch on his backside and was digging under his trousers to reach it.
“She cut his face. Never saw no woman do that, not to a Sicilian. They don’t forget that stuff.”
There was no reason to continue to torment her. He had emptied her of information, and her current condition made her useless.
“Okay, we’re done. You can sleep now, Q.”
Queenie came around from the wall and sat upright. “You call me Q?”
“Did I?”
“You know my sister.”
Longbaugh nodded, acknowledging the human connection. “I met her.”
“Whatta you doin’ to her, you bastard, you fuck my sister?” Longbaugh sat back. “You keep your filthy hands off her. I thought you was nice. You here to compare us? Well, stay away from her and go to Hell or, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”
Hightower pulled Longbaugh away.
“Come along, Romeo, you’ve done enough.”
At the door, Longbaugh stopped to face the quiet Chinese girl. “You give her that second bowl, that li yuen.”
Hightower made a face. “What the hell for? She’ll never know the difference.”
“She did what I asked.” He turned to the girl and said, “Make sure.”
“You think that helps, feeding her addiction?” said Hightower.
“Not like she’s one missed bowl from salvation.”
Longbaugh pushed by him and out to the street.
The sun was strong, the day hot. Hightower laughed with self-congratulatory glee. “Probably shouldn’t tell your wife what you were doing with Q’s sister. By the way, where is this adolescent lovely? She look anything like the young Queenie?”