The Astonishing Life of August March

by Aaron Jackson

  “Now you have to tell me,” she said, her eyes wide with delight. “I’m dying. Do you think I’m cheating you out of money?”

  Without meaning to, August chucked his glass across the room. “Goddammit, Penny, is it always about money? Can’t you see that I’m crazy about you? No. You just sit there twiddling your hair with all the insouciance of the ficklest calico. Well, I can’t take it anymore! You’re driving me to madness! Madness, I say! Soon I’ll be seeing specters, a neighborhood institution, muttering banalities on street corners. Or I’ll fling myself from a skyscraper, loudly singing the William Tell Overture as I plummet to my death.”

  “There are no words in the William Tell Overture.”

  “Whistling it then!”

  Penny shook her head. “Why haven’t you said anything before?”

  “As if you’d listen, you wicked quickhatch!” spat August, who was now deep into one of his rather exasperating loquacious monologues, the type that even Shaw might have found too prolix. “Doesn’t it strike you that our destinies seem intertwined? That ever since we were children, fate determines to bring us together time and time again? No. You care for me no more than the crocodile does the wildebeest. Than the jackal cares for the carrion carcass it teethes in the desert moonlight. If I were to lie down on the train tracks and be disemboweled by a runaway subway car, you’d shrug, take another bite of your croissant, and say, ‘Good while it lasted. Guess it’s back to fucking the marks.’”

  Penny stood up and slapped him. August slapped her back. Penny threw her whiskey in his face. August cursed and tried to wipe the stinging liquid out of his eyes with his shirtsleeve. Penny came too close, as if to slap him again, but instead she dragged her tongue across his face, licking the whiskey off him. Burning eyes forgotten, August kissed her and drew blood.

  * * *

  Both agreed that their business partnership couldn’t be jeopardized. Their affair would be a casual one, a comfortable sweater to slip into. In no way would it interfere with the work.

  “I don’t want to end up riddled full of bullet holes on some dusty road in Louisiana,” Penny said.

  “It must be bad luck to bring up the grisly demise of other criminal couplings, even so celebrated a pair as Bonnie and Clyde,” said August, splitting up the money he’d stolen earlier into two even piles.

  “Is it bad luck to mix business and pleasure?” she asked, slipping her share of the earnings down the front of her shirt.

  “Let’s find out,” he answered, removing the money and the garment that had held it in place.

  Though each found the other thoroughly distracting, they did manage to keep the enterprise thriving; apparently there was an inexhaustible supply of rich, stupid, single men in New York City. August’s phone hardly stopped ringing.

  “I have an idea.”

  It was a wonderful time for August, the summer of his life. Never had he thought this sort of thing could happen. Penny was different from other women he’d been with. August actually cared for her. Most mornings he would wake next to a girl and just wish she would leave. But when Penny was gone in the mornings, even if it was just to pop out and buy them both bagels, he felt a sharp pang of sadness, a regret, a death.

  What the hell was this?

  And now that he cared, he found the act of sex altered. There was still carnal lust, of course, and sometimes their lovemaking was silly or wild or carefree, the bedsheets tangled with laughter. But at other times, it could be serious. Their eyes would lock, and great secrets could be wordlessly exchanged. Promises. Oaths. It could be frightening, the depth of his feelings. August, generally unflappable, hadn’t known that sex could be so portentous, that he could taste fear, could hear it, could touch it, yet still be simultaneously overcome by the pleasures of his body.

  “I love you,” he dared to utter one night, buried in Penny’s perfection.

  “How do you know?” she whispered back.

  For some reason, this response was the most erotic thing August had ever heard, and he came instantly, forever and ever, until he was dead.

  Penny, calm and unruffled, allowed August a brief respite before arching her back, liquid and lithe.

  “Finish me,” she commanded.

  And August obeyed, still drowning in the dark fearsome waters of himself that had hitherto remained uncharted, undiscovered.

  What the hell was this?

  * * *

  “I have an idea,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Tell me everything,” August answered, unable to keep the smile out of his voice.

  “It’s a big one,” Penny said.

  Was it healthy for a somewhere-around-thirty-year-old man to get an erection while talking on the phone? August found he didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  “Go on.”

  “Have you heard of the Barreth Hotel? That big beastly thing in Times Square?”

  This August had not been expecting. Neither had his erection, which aggressively wilted. For the Barreth Hotel was the very same building that stood on the bones of August’s childhood home, the Scarsenguard Theater.

  “The name does ring a bell,” August said.

  “I met the owner.”

  Another shock, for the Barreth Hotel was owned by none other than Mr. Barreth, the mustachioed villain of August’s youth. August hadn’t thought about him in years, or he had, but in the way that one thinks of embarrassing mistakes made in adolescence; best to shuffle the mental deck of playing cards and quickly deal out a new hand.

  “Was he nice?” August asked, for he could think of nothing else to say.

  “What kind of question is that? No, he wasn’t nice. He was horrid. He’s who we’re going to hit next.”

  August then did something he’d never considered himself capable of: he hung up on Penny. Then, calm as a sainted martyr, he crossed to the liquor cabinet, poured a healthy dose of the first bottle he grabbed, and took a deep swallow.

  This was going to be interesting.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand,” Penny said, picking at the pickle that was served alongside her tuna melt. “You grew up in a theater?”

  Trying to relate his cryptic past was proving to be harder than August had imagined it would be, and he had imagined it to be impossible.

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  “And you were brought up by a costume lady?”

  “She was a laundress, but close enough. She raised me alongside celebrated English actor Sir Reginald Percyfoot.”

  “And they were married?”

  August nearly spit out his coffee. “Lord, no. She could’ve been his mother.”

  “But she was your mother.”

  “Precisely.”

  Penny chomped into her pickle and spoke with her mouth open, a habit August normally only tolerated in the mentally handicapped, but given that most of her acumen was currently devoted to sorting out his rather labyrinthine history, he let the matter slide. “And Barreth was what, your uncle?”

  August snorted, which was rather uncomfortable, as it forced scalding coffee up his nasal passage. He seemed to always be inhaling broiling liquids in Penny’s presence. He soldiered on. “He was most certainly not my uncle! The man was a scumlord whose twisted soul was bent solely on the acquisition of profit. Ebenezer Scrooge incarnated, he stalked the halls of the Scarsenguard, a vulture searching for orphans to displace or widows to rape.”

  “August, talk like a person.”

  “Sorry. He was an asshole.”

  “All the more reason to rob him, then!” Penny exclaimed, brandishing her pickle. Always brandishing, Penny. A brandisher if there ever was one. “I met him at the bar last night in the lobby of the hotel. He’s crazy about me. We could make a fortune!”

  Revenge would indeed be sweet, but throwing Penny into Barreth’s path didn’t sit well with August. The last thing that August had seen in the man’s path had been the Scarsenguard, and Barreth had pulled it to the gr
ound with a team of wrecking balls.

  “I have reservations,” was all he said.

  Penny threw her head back and laughed. “I knew you’d come around! We’ll go to the Barreth tonight. It’ll be fun.”

  Somehow, August doubted it.

  * * *

  “That statue’s imported,” Penny pointed out as they crossed the lobby of the Barreth, heading to the bar. She looked resplendent in a light blue dress, her heels clicking gaily against the tiles. “Genuine marble,” she said, when she noticed him studying the floor.

  But August hadn’t been pondering the merits of the marble. He’d been trying to imagine which part of the Scarsenguard they’d have been standing in. Probably the orchestra section of the theater, somewhere around row J. Below his feet, where staff currently bustled about the kitchens, had been the site of the world-famous Backstage Bistro. Royalty had danced in the very same spot that now housed a deep fryer. And over where the check-in desks stood would’ve been one of the cramped staircases that led up to the green room where Miss Butler had held court. There August had foraged for food and learned to read and had his childhood. Now a sunburned European was being handed the keys to her room while the terrier she cradled yapped incessantly.

  Was nothing sacred?

  They settled at the bar and ordered drinks, August a martini, Penny champagne. He crinkled his forehead at Penny’s choice of beverage; she was generally a proponent of hard liquor.

  “Have to play the part,” she said.

  They sat sipping their drinks, making stilted conversation, August sticky with guilt the whole time. This wasn’t right. They were in the Scarsenguard, dammit! He felt like he was having an affair or peddling tacky plastic key chains shaped like totem poles on an Iroquois burial ground.

  He was well into his third old-fashioned, Penny still taking dainty sips from her first glass of champagne, when Barreth finally appeared. Penny gripped August’s arm tight as a vise, a ghastly habit she had when excited.

  “That’s him,” she hissed.

  She didn’t need to say anything; August had already recognized him. He was older, heavier, and balder, but some things hadn’t changed. For one, he was still trailed by a horde of twitchy young scribes, who penned his words as hurriedly as the Israelites might have gathered manna on those early desert mornings. And he still had a preposterous mustache, a boneless badger hanging from his face.

  After her initial excitement abated, Penny went immediately to work.

  “My name’s Elizabeth,” she mumbled under her breath. “I just met you tonight. We hardly know each other. You’ll leave in a couple minutes.”

  “What?” August replied.

  But Penny was off to the races. “Yoo-hoo!” she cried, waving an arm emphatically to catch Barreth’s eye.

  August had never heard “yoo-hoo” used outside of the most saccharine movies, usually ones starring little girls who wore their hair in tight curls and spoke with a faint lisp. To hear the colloquialism uttered in actual life was off-putting, to say the least. Barreth, however, turned and smiled, which was a far more off-putting sight than Penny’s childish greeting had been. Truly disturbing stuff.

  “Miss Elizabeth,” Barreth said with what August supposed was intended to be a jovial tone. “How lovely to see you again.”

  “Oh, Mr. Barreth, I was hoping you’d be here tonight!”

  Though it gave him a distinct case of the willies, watching Penny work was astounding. Just moments ago she’d been surveying the Barreth with shrewd eyes and tossing off quick and biting quips. Within an instant of her spotting Barreth, however, her eyes were wide and dewy as a cartoon doe, her voice two distinct octaves higher, and though she’d done nothing to alter her wardrobe, her breasts were undeniably more prominent. And, dear Christ, was she dumb.

  “Mr. Barreth,” she started, “may I introduce to you my friend Mr. Andrew . . . oh dear, I seem to have forgotten your last name. This champagne is going right to my head.”

  August was so taken with Penny’s sudden transformation that it wasn’t until she bestowed a swift kick to his shin that he realized he was supposed to speak.

  “Mr. Andrew Burke,” August supplied quickly. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Absolutely splendid hotel you’ve got here, sir. A real wowzer.”

  Penny gave August the briefest of looks that translated to Why the hell did you just say wowzer? before plowing forward.

  “I met Mr. Burke tonight, you see, and I was just going on and on about your hotel.”

  “She sounded like a first-rate cuckoo bird, if you want to know the truth of it.”

  Another clandestine kick was granted to August’s shin, but he was undeterred. If Penny was going to pretend to be a moron, then by god, he would help her.

  “I was trying to tell him about some of the hotel’s more fabulous features, but I thought it would be better just to show him.”

  “Poor girl couldn’t remember the word for ‘elevator.’ Kept calling them ‘lifty-boxes.’ But that’s women.” August shrugged, throwing a wink at Barreth.

  “Quite,” said the old bastard. “You said you met tonight?”

  “Yes,” answered Penny, jumping in. “We were at a concert—”

  “And after the thing was finished, sweet Elizabeth here was trying to hail a taxicab by chucking nickels at it. She was getting mighty popular with a gin-soaked hobo, but she would’ve been carted away to the loony bin if yours truly hadn’t stepped in. That’s when she started clucking about your hotel, and I said, Well hell, let’s go take a gander. And she was right! This place is real fine. Big though. Sort of spooky.” August paused for less than a breath. “Feels haunted.”

  Barreth’s eyes bulged, and even his lips went pale. “This hotel is most assuredly not haunted. That I can guarantee.”

  “You sure? Not even one little spirit?”

  August was making Barreth (who had just slyly performed the sign of the cross) extremely uncomfortable and Penny extremely agitated, but he couldn’t have cared less. He hated everything about this scheme. Just talking to Barreth felt like blasphemy, like he’d dug up the bones of Miss Butler and was pissing on them.

  His feelings hardly mattered, however. Penny was an absolute pro and had already spun August’s bit of fun to work in her favor.

  “Mr. Barreth,” she whispered, all eyelashes, “might we go somewhere a little more private?”

  Barreth, visibly relieved at any change in subject, flexed his chivalry.

  “Of course,” he bellowed. “Would you care to join me for dinner at my private table?”

  Penny squealed and clapped like a wind-up monkey.

  “I’m afraid there won’t be room for you, Mr. Burke,” Barreth sneered.

  “No worries there, friend. I’ve got an appointment with a couple of ladies who’ll serve me more than dinner, if you know what I mean.”

  Barreth reddened and escorted Penny off at once.

  “What did he mean?” August heard Penny ask as they walked away, Barreth’s lackeys trailing them like flies on shit.

  “Nothing, dear, don’t give him another thought.”

  “What are those called?” Penny asked.

  “Chandeliers, my dear. Do you like them?”

  “They’re so twinkly.”

  “Aren’t they? It’s very clever how the lightbulbs are hidden from view, don’t you think?”

  “Lightbulbs? What’s those?”

  They rounded a corner and August heard no more. He paid the tab and left. He supposed he should’ve taken the opportunity to scope out the hotel, find the best place to make a score, but the truth of the matter was that the very thought depressed him, and the ghosts of his childhood were haunting the place with far too much vigor.

  As he walked, he grew angrier at Penny with each passing step. They had a good thing going—why did she have to drag Barreth into it? He couldn’t believe she was sitting down to dinner with him right this very minute, laughing at his jokes, pretending to be impres
sed. August knew it was all for show, that men like Barreth disgusted Penny, but that did nothing to salve his wounds. He tried to drink away his resentment at a few seedy bars before deciding he would take a page from Andrew Burke’s book and visit a strip club after all. His thoughts were too tangled, though, and he couldn’t surrender to the artifice, so after two drinks and some half-hearted flirting with a young woman named Cherry, he left.

  His sleep that night was fitful and full of tugging, restless dreams.

  * * *

  Though August tried to convince her to drop the whole plan, Penny was determined to make the most off Barreth. However, the old tycoon was proving harder to woo than the usual rube. After weeks of meticulously constructed serendipitous encounters that inevitably led to drinks and dinner, Barreth had offered Penny a chorus-girl contract in one of the bawdy reviews he still produced.

  “Can you imagine? Me covered in sequins and feathers, shaking my legs?”

  August found that he could imagine, very easily and with relish, but for the sake of harmony, he acted as offended as Penny seemed to feel.

  “All this time he thought I’d been chasing after him so I could be a chorus girl. I told him I’d rather die than be in some stupid music review.”

  August hoped that this misunderstanding would’ve put an end to the Barreth affair, but alas, hope proved to be as dead as Dickens.

  Still, August tried to persuade Penny it was a lost cause.

  “Look at this,” he told her on one of the rare evenings they shared together, as she now spent most of her nights with Barreth. “In New York he owns the Barreth, two restaurants, and countless apartment buildings. But there’s more. He owns a new hotel in Aspen and has shares of a casino in Las Vegas.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is he’s out of our league. Our last job was stealing diamond cufflinks off a man so old you could count all six of his teeth.”

  “We’re ready to move up in the world. Make a name for ourselves.”

  “No, Penny. We’re small-time crooks. We’re not mysterious international thieves that live on yachts in exotic locales where the women serving the drinks all speak broken English and smell vaguely of sweet roasting pork.”