Lay Saints

by Adam Connell

  “Columbus and 63rd or something,” Briggs said.

  “Kink made someone go blind today,” Lundin said. “Watch out for that dog shit.”

  Briggs stepped around it, took a drag on the cigarette, passed it to Lundin. Briggs was in the middle, Kink on his right closest to the street.

  “Put his eyes out?” Briggs said.

  “You ever done that?” Kink said. “Put out a man’s eyes? Lundin tells me you’re badass but I have trouble visualizing that.”

  “I don’t need to impress you, and I don’t brag.”

  “Everybody brags, Briggs.”

  “Give him one,” Lundin said.

  “Something how you hurt somebody,” Kink said. “So I’ll be scared of you.”

  “The St. Marks job,” Lundin said. “That one.”

  “Let me have the rest of the cigarette,” Briggs said and took it. “Two brothers, they wanted their sister off drugs and hated her boyfriend for giving them to her. Was also pimping her out in the St. Marks Hotel. Lundin could barely get through to him, or her, cause of all the coke and H.”

  “I had to leave for another job had a time frame,” Lundin said as they crossed the street.

  “How do we know this club’s gonna be open and dancers gonna be there?” Kink said.

  “Haven’t you seen the posters all over?” Briggs said. “Friday night, talent night. Tryouts. Free drinks for spectators. Look psychedelic, the posters, the outline of an orange-pink woman touching her toes. Woodstockish lettering around the border. Not explicit.”

  “Never seen one,” Kink said.

  “Cause I been tearing them down,” Lundin said.

  They rounded the corner to the club. Its awning wasn’t up yet but a flurry of pasted posters surrounded the entrance. Devils’ Revels Cabaret. The same posters Briggs had described.

  “I’ll finish the story when we get out,” Briggs said.

  “You’ll finish now, I can’t wait,” Kink said.

  “S’okay, Lundin?”

  “Hurry up.”

  They stood in a circle away from the doors.

  “This couple, their diet was speedballing and video games and soda. I’ve got my own experience with drugs. I made her OD and killed the boyfriend in the tub, as bloody as I could. An angler’s fillet knife, I carried one then. Through the neck, his — under the bicep, what do you call that artery. Also his fmmeroral. He was spraying like a hose.”

  “Didn’t you get gore on you?” Kink said.

  “Nah, I was wearing those plastic raincoats they sell to tourists. Two of them.”

  “Like garbage bags,” Lundin said.

  “Ten bucks they cost me,” Briggs said. “Dragged her next to the tub, soaked her in his blood.”

  He finished the cigarette in one long drag. “She comes to, I’m standing there telling her I’m a neighbor. I heard screaming. She’d left the door open. Then she starts with the screaming for real and I’ve got my hand on her mouth. Begs me to help her get out of this. Her family, jail, his family. She was a skinny little creature all fulla fear. Pleading for me to help her out and get rid of everything. Which I did. She was thin as a ruler. She went clean, I followed up. And the boyfriend, as you can guess, he was no longer an influence.”

  “That’s how far Briggs will go,” Lundin said.

  “Creative,” Kink said. “I’m not sure about badass, but I’ll give you credit.”

  “I wasn’t looking for credit, and I wasn’t bragging.”

  “All that without making someone go blind,” Lundin said.

  The new club’s entrance was glassed double doors with stairs leading to a second floor. A beefy bouncer reading a newspaper with a gilled man on the cover was sitting inside. His chair looked about to collapse.

  He didn’t open the doors for them. “Up there,” he said and nodded at the stairs. “You get one hour.”

  There was no landing and no door at the top, the stairs opened onto the club.

  Ahead were six rectangular stages tiered below the large center stage. A complicated rigging of hanging lights, two shiny poles on the secondary stages for synchronized dancing, a barred corral beneath the performers so their fans could get close but not close enough.

  An open box for a DJ in the upper-right corner like a balcony, just above the two neon bars. White tablecloths on the tables that gave the space, I’ll admit, some class.

  Also:

  A Greco-Roman archway — tacky — leading to five Champaign Rooms. Hanging LED HDTVs with various sports showing. Sushi bar. Internet reservations. Illegal cigar section. And three ATMs.

  No area in back for public lap dances.

  No visible door to the dressing room.

  Two men stopped them before they’d taken two steps inside. One had a good but noticeable glass eye. The other had a big face, wider at the chin than his forehead. They were wearing sharp black suits.

  “Whoa, you boys got your own club,” Glass Eye said. “I’ll get you some vouchers, you come back when we’re open.”

  “He’s half-blind already,” Kink said to Lundin. “It’d be no hard task — ”

  “Owners here?” Lundin said.

  “The stairs are behind you,” Chinny said. He had a funny voice. Long vowels. “You know where they are cause you just used them.”

  Briggs said, “The posters advertised free — ”

  “For patrons,” Glass Eye said. “Not to competition, not for free. We’re outta free drinks, it so happens.”

  “Don’t wanna go down the stairs backwards,” Chinny said.

  Lundin searched the man, said, “She probably is stealing from you.”

  “What?”

  “Your wife, stealing from you,” Lundin said.

  Briggs stopped Chinny with a flat palm to his chest.

  A round table out of place near the sushi bar. The three men there playing cards were looking over.

  “How could you know his wife?” Glass Eye said. “You a troupe of vaudeville? What’s her name?”

  “Ex-wife,” Kink said. “Maven. Your daughter is, right now she is probably screwing that geek you hate.”

  Briggs was stepping into Glass Eye’s path when Lundin said, “Stop.” Harshly.

  Both Briggs and Glass Eye stopped. “The owners,” Lundin said, “they the ones playing poker?”

  “Two and a bodyguard,” Glass Eye said.

  “Go downstairs, the two of you,” Lundin said. “Wait with the doorman.”

  “I’ll read your future,” Kink said to Glass Eye as he passed.

  “Where they going?” shouted Owner One. His suit was the sharpest of all.

  “A meeting downstairs,” said Lundin on his way over, Briggs and Kink behind him.

  The bodyguard, as hard as a marble, was lunging out of his chair.

  “Sit, stay seated, do not say a word,” Kink said. Forbiddingly.

  “I could make you wet yourself,” Lundin said.

  “Woondyke,” Owner Two said, staring at his bodyguard with big eyes, his hands open.

  There were about a dozen desperate men among the hundred tables. Some glanced at the poker table, most had their attention fixed on the empty stages.

  “You’ll close before you open,” Lundin said.

  “Close what? Open what?” Owner One said.

  “Here, this,” Kink said.

  “You’re too close to Tattletail,” Lundin said. “And you shouldn’t have ever come after the owner like that.”

  “He wasn’t onstage, was he?” Owner Two said. His neck spilled from his collar like a coiled fat snake. “I got this phone” — he picked his cell off the table — “I could have twenty guys in here five minutes ago.”

  Briggs was too fast for him, snatched the cell and broke it.

  “Look,” Owner One said, “how he cut up Aldridge, we found him in the Park, we’re even.”

  “Not for last night,” Kink said.

  “What’s last night?” Owner Two said. The snake around his neck was turning red.
“Why is this one a priest?”

  “What’s this last night?” Owner One said.

  “The ambush, the alley,” Kink said.

  “What alley where?” Owner Two said.

  “He’s lying,” Kink said to Lundin.

  “No he isn’t,” Lundin said.

  Kink didn’t press.

  Lundin said, “You’re gonna close up shop. Sell the lease, turn it into a karaoke bar, I don’t give a shit. No dancers, and change that awful name. Devils’ Revels Cabaret? This Halloween?”

  “Woondyke,” Owner Two seethed.

  Woondyke the bodyguard was unresponsive.

  “I’d like to know what you did to him.”

  Lundin snapped his fingers at the owners. “Fire the dancers. Fire the staff, you want. Set fire to the place if you really want. But you will not open.” All of this said with intensity. “Instead, why don’t you go ahead and open a club like this down in Little Italy.”

  “What’s left of Little Italy,” Briggs said.

  “But that last part’s not an order,” Lundin said.

  The owners looked at him with idiocy and incredulity.

  “We’re gonna sit in on the auditions tonight,” Lundin said.

  “Auditions are over an hour ago,” Owner One said. “The girls you’ll see we’ve hired.”

  “Fired,” Briggs said.

  Kink said, “Put them up, one at a time, all of them. Separately, none of that two-pole silliness. Center stage, no music, no fancy lighting.”

  Owner Two said, “There’s only three — ”

  “Four,” Owner One said.

  “Four of them still here.”

  “Then we’ll see all four,” Briggs said.

  They chose the table nearest center stage.

  Kink said, “This part isn’t your forte, Lundin. You wanna go back now, it’s okay, no shame in it.”

  “I’ve got better taste than the two of you,” Lundin said.

  The first performer came out an Eskimo. The incorrect dangling fur hat, fur tube top, fur bloomers, wristbands. Her hair was long and dark, but fine like a vegan’s. Dark eyebrows and lips. She had a way of leading with her hips that was oppressive and obscene. She molested the pole like a naughty acrobat, at times her whole body in the air, upside down with limbs crossed. But naked, her “Eskimo” breasts were distressing in their absence, they were so small.

  “Hips but no tits,” Kink said. “Faraday would never.”

  “Nice brown nipples,” Briggs said. “Don’t often see them brown. A pretty mouth.”

  “Those double-A cups make her seem younger than Pearly,” Lundin said. “We can’t take her and feel right about it.”

  Her routine faded, as did her interest in it, and she left the stage.

  The next performer was pure Southern blonde dressed in a patriotic bikini. The scraps of Stars and Stripes did little to keep her contained. Big, suckling breasts and wide hips. There was a heaviness to her that beckoned. A motherly slut is what she looked like, like she could smother you. (Funny how smother is mother with an S.) There was something unrestrained in her way with the pole. Lundin thought she’d be welcome at the Tail.

  “They’re all gonna wanna take her home,” Briggs said.

  “Stripping too fast,” Lundin said. “Kitten could help her slow it down, make it burn. She’s big but tight.”

  “She is guilty,” Kink said.

  Lundin said, “Kink, you and I’ll find her backstage after the fourth.”

  The third performer had skin like black milk, so dark it shone. Her navy bikini could only be seen by contrast because of the white stitching. Her face was beautiful and happy but she had a square masculine carriage too reminiscent of Kitten. She was definitely a born female but Lundin thought having her and Kitten in the same room would give Tattletail’s audience too much sexual suspicion.

  The fourth dancer was the Nicotine Queen. Her great lively red hair was dyed jet-black. But it was still curly, and it was unmistakably her.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Friday, Matins: 1st Nocturne

  It was only nine-thirty and they were already upstairs at Tattletail. Tamm didn’t resist them.

  “I’m only gonna work there a few days during the week,” she said, “my days off here.”

  Lie.

  “How long can a dancer moonlight?” Faraday said. “How much savings does a body have to pay that toll, Tamm? All that abuse on your joints, your neck, your skin to wrinkle?”

  She was the only one standing. Kink was sitting beside Faraday on the sofa. Lundin was on the near armrest, Briggs on the far armrest. Tamm on the stool by the wet bar. The new dancer was sitting on the floor by the door, watching everyone.

  “It’s not permanent,” Tamm said.

  “So a choice is gonna be made,” Faraday said. “Against me, there’s that possibility.”

  Tamm thought that was a question that needed no answer. She’d never seen Faraday look worse; he was sitting stiff like his bones had been replaced with rebar. His nose was a caricature surrounded by swirling purples and blues. One ear was larger than the other, and both looked like they’d barely survived the trauma. His lower lip and the area below it was bishop’s violet. He tried to hide his missing tooth by speaking without his upper lip, a ventriloquist, but it was his front tooth and the gap was so wide that it was wasted effort.

  “Interesting hair,” Faraday said. “It’s awful on you.”

  Tamm said, “Where’ve you been, Pamplona?”

  “You’re not worried about me. You were worried, you wouldn’t have run off and betrayed me.”

  “Never would have known if these perverts hadn’t come to watch. And stolen this hillbilly girl.”

  They could have been speaking Icelandic for all the new girl could follow. The one thing she understood was hillbilly and that Tamm had meant her.

  “It isn’t normal to work one place your whole life,” Tamm said.

  “Finally,” Faraday said, his mouth more expressive, “we’ve come to the fork where you stop lying and I stop pretending you’re being honest.”

  “People move around, Faraday.”

  “It’s normal to stay when you make a good living, and you’re treated right.”

  “You treat me right?”

  “I don’t?” he said. “What should I do, let me ask you that. What am I not doing for you.”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You were cheating on me.”

  “That’s a little broad, don’t you think?”

  Oh. Let me mention, she was still in her bikini, and the hillbilly in hers.

  “Did you graduate college?” Faraday said.

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “Damn fucking right I know you didn’t.” He was slipping off the sofa and Kink pulled him up. “I ever ask why?”

  “Want me to tell you now?”

  “I’m not asking why, I’m asking did I ever inquire?”

  “No, you let me keep it to myself. Can I change, please?”

  “When we’re done. Came to me and you were, what, twenty-one?”

  “A few month’s shy.”

  “Broke?”

  She made a motion with her hands like Who remembers? but she remembered.

  “You were terrible at first,” he said, his voice rising but not to the point where the others thought he’d erupt. “Worst dancer here. I kept you on. You were dancing like it was Lincoln Center. No one wants to see that here. I kept you on.”

  “The other night,” she said. She crossed her arms. “Night the maniac leapt onstage.”

  “He never got that far,” Lundin said. “Why does everyone think he got that far?”

  “Tried and slice up your wife,” Tamm said. “The woman you love? After that me and Nadezhda we went out there to keep the room distracted. No striptease, naked from the get-go for spectacle. We weren’t asked to be that direct.”

  “I meant to thank you.”

  “And then we danced together on the en
d of the center stage, together like it was a porn show. To keep them distracted. We weren’t asked to go that far.”

  “Meant to thank you for that, too.”

  “But you didn’t. Because if it had gotten chaotic enough where it’d have been necessary to ask you’d have been in a rage for asking.”

  Lundin silently agreed.

  “And now you give me your intended thanks. Do me a favor.”

  “Anything for you, my love,” Faraday said.

  “Save your thanks for someone grateful, you give out so few.”

  “So few thanks,” Faraday said.

  Briggs wanted to put his hands over Tamm’s mouth.

  The hillbilly was absolutely in need of a translator but was enjoying the pacing, the tug of their sentences one against the other.

  “I cannot get over you as a brunette,” Kink said.

  “So we went out. Terrified. We danced. Terrified. The night that old lech died under my lap dance?”

  Faraday smiled, though it was painful. Lundin and Kink did laugh.

  “How many times, how many of these nights?” she yelled. “What’s the toll on that?”

  “You don’t get to yell at me.”

  “There’s more to this club than bare asses and waxed pubes,” Tamm said. “All the girls know it.”

  “Your new boyfriend, he knows it,” Faraday said.

  “He knows — What? No he doesn’t.”

  “I offered him a job,” Lundin said.

  “Bullshit. He, fine, joke with me, then everyone but your wife, but she doesn’t talk to us.” Her arms were folded tighter now, hands way up on the opposing shoulders.

  “She is how she is,” Faraday said.

  “Remote,” Lundin said.

  Faraday stared up at him, then back at Tamm. “Blessed and cursed with an artistic temperament. You have one yourself.” His teeth and jaw were a forest fire from so much talking. He was holding his left side because the tape was coming loose.

  “I don’t care about her temperament,” Tamm said. “Whatever’s more to this club, before the last week or so, it was harmless. It never so much as pricked anyone in that dressing room. Now we’ve got knives up on — Okay, near the stage.”

  “Unrelated,” Lundin said.

  “Did you get hurt?” Faraday said.