by John Jakes
Shadow noticed the exchange of looks, though missing its meaning. “These are my two assistants, Mr. Lewis Kress and Mr. James Daws. Lew and Jimmy.”
Lew Kress shook hands first. He had a hangdog air, and a thick Southern accent. “Pleased to meet you-all.” Jimmy Daws stepped forward, his brown eyes thoughtful. He shook with Wex, then Paul.
“Hullo, pal. Been a long time.”
“You know each other?” Shadow said.
“We have met,” Paul said, leaving it there.
Jimmy Daws slapped his shoulder. “Yes we have. ’Deed we have. Glad to see you again.”
“All right, enough damn sociability,” Shadow said with a gruff laugh. “You’re not here for sport, you two. Get rid of those handbills.”
Lew and Jimmy filled every available pocket with wads of them. Paul noted the word “Luxoscope” in circus type, along with many exclamation points. The assistants started out the gate at the same time. Jimmy biffed Kress on the shoulder. “Jesus, watch it.” Though he was smiling, his eyes were anything but friendly.
Kress stepped back. “Sorry.”
Jimmy tipped his derby to the group and left, reserving his last attention—a swift, speculative look—for Paul. Despite the hot sun beating into the grandstand, Paul felt a chill.
The Bath’s horse, First Ward, placed in the third race. Wex won twenty dollars. Then he lost it all on Saratoga Boy in the fourth. Saratoga Boy stumbled and had to be dragged off the track in a canvas sling.
Wex dug down and found a few more dollars. He left the box with a harried expression. Paul was asking himself whether it would be dishonorable to speak further to Shadow. He very much wanted to.
Lew Kress and Jimmy came back for more handbills. Jimmy chatted and joked with the tarts. Kress tried to interject a remark. Jimmy shushed him, with all the deference he’d give a bothersome fly. Kenna leaned over to whisper in Coughlin’s ear; he was chewing his cigar and scowling like a gargoyle. Coughlin slapped his back. “Ah, don’t worry yourself, Hink, I’ll take care of that bozo. He’ll vote the way he oughta vote, or he’ll need crutches.”
Colonel Shadow acted bored with the nieces. Paul thought that if he didn’t seize the opportunity, it might never come again. He slid over to the chair beside the colonel.
“Sir? I would very much like to work with flicker pictures. I would like to learn how to photograph them. Do you by any chance have a position?”
“I thought you worked for Rooney.”
“I stay with him, but my job is delivering laundry. Mr. Rooney knows my interest.”
Shadow relaxed. “I don’t have anything now, but keep in touch, you never know. I like young hustlers with ambition. My boy Jimmy, he has a ton. Kress, though—he’s a disappointment. Jimmy chews him up like a soggy biscuit. Must be that damn Dixie upbringing.”
A minute later Paul’s neck prickled again. The two helpers had come back. Jimmy Daws was leaning against the rear rail of the box, arms folded.
Watching him.
Wex’s luck was bad the rest of the afternoon. At the end of the seventh and final race he threw his remaining tickets away. “Dutch, let’s go home.” He shook hands all around. “Ladies. Mr. Kenna. Colonel—I truly want to hear more about your enterprise.”
“Anytime. You have my card.” Shadow shot a look at Paul.
“Alderman Coughlin, thank you, it’s been a grand afternoon.” Wex’s face said otherwise.
“So long, Dutch,” Jimmy said to Paul as he and Wex moved to the hinged gate. “Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Very possibly,” Paul said.
“Till then.” Jimmy tipped his derby.
Jimmy’s presence at Shadow’s would make it a less desirable place, but Paul couldn’t let that stop him.
On the El, Paul confessed he’d asked Colonel Shadow about employment. “But I would hate for you to think I was disloyal to you.”
“Ah, forget it,” Wex said, waving. “You’re honest and I appreciate it.”
The car rattled over the tracks. Soot blew in, speckling Wex’s hair.
“Listen, Dutch, I’m proud you were my pupil, even for a while. I’ve known all along that you’d move on. It’s the living pictures you fell in love with first—wasn’t I the one who showed them to you? I saw the light in your eyes when the elephant danced. If you can sign on with a man like Shadow, do it. Don’t feel guilty, or look back.”
“That is very generous of you.”
“Sure,” Wex said with a shrug and a wan smile. “A man who loses can afford to be generous, can’t he? He isn’t risking anything.”
Paul tried to continue the conversation but Wex wasn’t interested. He sat with his chin in his palm, gazing at the buildings passing by, the streets and weedy lots below.
Communing with his demon? Paul wondered sadly.
Wex’s unselfishness lifted a burden from Paul. The future shone with a special new brightness. He couldn’t wait to tell Julie of all he’d learned from Wex, and of the even more exciting possibility of learning the moving picture trade. When would she finish that damned trip and come home to him?
On his rounds next morning, he asked Madame Camille, owner of the Pleasures of Paris, whether he might use her telephone. Because she liked him she said yes. He’d already delayed this call too long. He tapped his foot nervously while waiting for the line to connect.
“Crown residence. Manfred speaking.”
Paul roughened his voice and muffled it with his sleeve. “Mrs. Volzenheim, please.”
Manfred grumbled. There was a lengthy silence.
“Here is Louise. Who is that?”
“Louise, don’t say anything, it’s Paul.”
“Master P—”
“No! Not my name. I implore you, just listen. Tell Aunt Ilsa I telephoned. Only my aunt, not my uncle. Tell her I’m safe and well, she mustn’t worry.”
“Are you here in Chicago? Please, everyone will want to know—”
He interrupted. “Is there any news of Cousin Joe?”
“Nothing. Not a whisper. It’s so sad, both of you gone, everyone so unhappy—”
“Uncle Joe must be happy.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that’s true.”
“We hold different opinions there, Louise.”
A girl in a pale pink wrapper came sauntering down the hall, smoking a little cigar. Teasingly, she pulled her robe open to show herself, then leaned against him, licking his cheek and his ear. Paul made shushing sounds.
“Yes, hello? What is going on there?”
“Nothing, I’m in—a place of business, it’s busy.”
“Never too busy for you, lovey,” the girl whispered, rubbing his pants. Laughing at his discomfort, his scarlet face, she sauntered away.
“Remember, only tell my aunt.”
“Not Fritzi, or Carl?”
“Aunt Ilsa can decide.”
“Will you telephone again?”
“Not for a while. Thank you, Louise. I miss you. Good-bye.”
When Paul dragged in from work that night, Wex’s mood was, if anything, deeper and darker. He spoke with a slur as he served bowls of bean soup at the table.
From his coat pocket he took a brown pint bottle, one-quarter full. He uncorked it, tilted his head back, drank, and put the bottle on the table. He looked at Paul like a guilty child.
“I lost altogether too much money at the track. I’ll need another extension on the rent. I don’t know if the landlord will allow it again—” A long sigh. “I told you mine is a poisonous disease.”
Gently, Paul said, “Then why don’t you stop?”
Wex wiped his mouth. Stubble showed; he hadn’t used his razor today.
“That’s a thought, isn’t it? Absolutely right, too. I must stop. If I don’t, then you and I will be looking for a roost in some tree in Lincoln Park.”
So it was that bad, that desperate. He’d had no idea.
Wex gestured with the bottle. “Eat your soup. There’s more.”
“Demons,” Wex mumbled, gazing at his son’s photograph. “Everywhere.”
“Yes,” Paul said. He envisioned the eyes of Jimmy Daws.
62
Jimmy
ON THE FIRST DAY of April 1895—before he met Paul at the racetrack—Jimmy observed his twentieth birthday. He was gainfully and, he hoped, safely employed with Colonel R. Sidney Shadow. Jimmy had started with the colonel about five weeks after the murder of the little blond tart, and his terrified abandonment of the whorehouse trade.
Jimmy worked at the colonel’s peep show joint on the corner of Twenty-second Street and State, west of Freiberg’s Dance Hall and opposite Buxbaum’s Marlborough Hotel. Freiberg’s was one of the busiest dives on the Levee. Men paid twenty-five cents to get in, forty cents for every highball for themselves or for the girls (highballs the girls drank were seltzer water lightly tinted with ginger ale). If a girl made an arrangement, she took her customer across the street to the Marlborough. Ike Bloom, who owned Freiberg’s in partnership with his brother-in-law, also had a financial interest in the hotel, where the price of a hot mattress was two dollars per half hour. Bloom received a cut of every dollar. It was a sweet arrangement. Everything on the Levee was an arrangement, as Jimmy knew very well.
Jimmy had met the colonel by chance, at Freiberg’s. Shadow came in for a romp because his ladyfriend had her monthly complaint. At the long bar they fell into casual conversation. Shadow must have liked something about Jimmy’s looks and cocksure attitude, because he started to question him. Did he need work? Was he single? There were no questions about his past. Finally Shadow asked him to drop around next morning to talk about a job.
That was in the late fall of last year. By then Shadow’s establishment had been open for several months. Jimmy had passed it several times. All the window glass was opaqued with paint. Above, on the building, two big signs in bright primary colors shouted to both streets:
Colonel R. S. Shadow’s
LUXOSCOPE PARLOR
The MIRACLE of the Era!—Pictures That MOVE!
—Suitable for All Ages—
No Charge for Admission
By a dusty cash register at the front of the peep show parlor, Sid Shadow interviewed his prospective employee. He was straightforward.
“I currently have another helper, Mr. Lewis Kress. Lew was a student at some jerkwater divinity school down South. Unfortunately he was dumb enough to fool with the daughter of the Episcopal rector and put a little bun in her oven. He left his studies rather precipitously.” Jimmy came to understand later that Shadow’s vocabulary could be more formal and elegant when he wished it to be.
The colonel paused to draw on a long cheroot. The flavorsome aroma was one of those little symbols of the success Jimmy craved and intended to have someday.
“I’m telling you about Lew Kress for a reason, Jim. If I hire you, I want you to consider Lew your enemy. It’s good for the business.”
“I—Colonel—gee—I don’t get that.”
“It’s simple,” Shadow said. “Let’s suppose I own two bulldogs. Let’s suppose I pit them against each other. It isn’t as reckless as it sounds. I might lose a dog in a scrap, but I might gain a champion money-winning throat-tearing fighter. Now do you get it?”
Jimmy grinned. “Yes, sir. I sure do.”
The ground-floor Luxoscope Parlor had ten bulky peep show machines, five on each side of a wide aisle. The machines operated on the flip-card principle they shared with a competing machine called the Mutoscope. Edison’s Kinetoscope used a continuous strip of film instead of cards, but the effect in all the machines was similar: the illusion of motion from a sequence of rapidly flashed stills.
Shadow’s machines featured subjects such as the Lake Michigan surf rolling in, or a horse-drawn fire engine careening through an empty street (that cost thirty dollars to arrange, Shadow said). There were novelties: a man sneezing uncontrollably and shattering vases and china; a comical black mammy baking a pie with many attendant mishaps of spilled sugar and scattered flour.
The colonel complained that most of the card sequences were too tame. He intended to introduce racier subjects. Mild as the current ones were, he said, a lot of people, including most ministers, considered the flicker pictures an invention of the devil. Lucky they never got into the back room.
Above the parlor on the second floor, Shadow occupied rooms with his common-law wife, a pale, busty blonde named Mary Beezer. The two assistants shared the remaining space. Almost the first thing Jimmy did after Shadow hired him was inspect their rooms. Lew Kress had the larger one, with windows overlooking State Street. Jimmy would be forced into a dark cubicle with no windows. That evening, he announced to Mr. Lew Kress that they would exchange.
“See here, I been with the colonel since he opened,” Lew said. “You-all can’t do this.”
The instant Lew protested, Jimmy kicked his shins, flung him against the wall, then showed him the blade of a knife.
“Let’s get straight, Lewie,” he said to the trembling Southerner. “You move out and stay out of my way, or you’ll make me mad. You don’t want to do that.” Smiling sweetly, he patted Kress’s cheek with the flat of the knife.
Lew Kress cleared out of the large room in a half hour.
Jimmy’s work for Shadow consisted of tending the peep show cash register, watching to make sure patrons didn’t damage the machines, guarding the special back room, and sometimes passing out handbills in other parts of town. Lew Kress passed them out on the Levee because Jimmy didn’t want to be humiliated by bumping into acquaintances while doing such menial work. In addition to all this, he found he could earn extra money when Bathhouse John or Hinky Dink issued a call for troops at election time. He considered himself a loyal Democrat, so why not?
Jimmy didn’t plan to stay with Colonel Shadow forever. You couldn’t get rich working for somebody else, and Jimmy was ambitious for wealth and for the kind of power wielded by the Levee kingpins. Until he was sure the death of the little blond tart was forgotten, however, and until he decided where to move for the biggest opportunity, he’d stay.
Actually he was fairly happy, first of all because Shadow’s Luxoscope Parlor was in the heart of the Levee. When a gent came to the Levee and went on a tear, the term for it was “going down the line.” Jimmy went down the line so often and enjoyed it so much, he had no desire to work anywhere else.
Second, he liked the business of flicker pictures. It had glamour and a zesty air of lawlessness, especially in the curtained back room. Yet it had a highbrow, scientific air about it. Jimmy had attended parochial school for only four years. He hated his studies, and the nuns showed him the gate after he beat a weaker pupil to a bloody ruin in the schoolyard. Mother Superior said he was an incorrigible, whatever that meant. She said he had a violent temper. Jimmy could read, of course, but he did it with difficulty, confining himself to spicy stories in the Police Gazette, or Mixed Drinks: The Saloon Keeper’s Journal. So it pleased him to be involved with something brainy like flicker pictures. Mr. Thomas A. Edison himself was involved with them. Everybody had heard of Edison.
Finally, he liked his living quarters; the nicest he’d ever had. He enjoyed the constantly changing view of State Street, the musical rumble of the South Side El running by, and the other, more provocative noises he could hear by resting his forehead against his side of the colonel’s bedroom wall. Listening to Shadow and Mary excited Jimmy. He loved sex. With his fear about the dead tart abating, he loved life.
Which was a wonder, considering how bad a lot of his had been up until now.
In the cellar Shadow maintained a workshop. There he tinkered relentlessly, building and rebuilding his big, boxy flicker projector. So far it had failed to work right. Shadow showed Jimmy the workshop the day after he started. The large room had concrete walls covered with yellowing white paint and patches of mold. There were spiderwebs in the ceiling corners, pieces
of unfinished lumber lying about. There were toothed gears of various sizes, hand tools and rubber belts, perforated strips of film, and a whole lot of drawings with measurements and arrows all over them. Many discarded drawings were stuffed in a box in a corner. An electric bulb with a crudely cut tin shade hung above the main workbench. There were oil lamps for extra illumination, and a damp, unpleasant smell. Like a grave must smell, Jimmy thought.
Shadow tried to explain the workings of his planned projector but Jimmy didn’t get it. He told Shadow he’d been stuck with terrible teachers who shortchanged him when it came to understanding machines and “science stuff.”
He silently congratulated himself on a good, weepy speech. Shadow seemed a little disappointed.
As the weeks passed and he proved himself by roughing up and ejecting a couple of unruly customers, he was additionally charged with maintaining good relations with the beat patrolmen and fly cops who dropped in occasionally. Through them, and through regular visits to the precinct house to deliver the sealed brown envelope Shadow sent every week, Jimmy regained his nerve and lost all fear of being prosecuted for killing the little tramp and floating her in the river.
Colonel Shadow paid off the local precinct house for a very specific reason. The back room. There, an eleventh machine showed a card sequence called “A Chinese Dream.”
Jimmy watched it a dozen times in his first couple of weeks on the job. Every time, it stiffened him so bad, he had to relieve himself on his own. In the forty-five-second sequence, a dreamy-eyed little Chink girl danced wearing nothing but some veils. Through them, you could clearly see her tits, the ends round and dark as summer buckeyes. If you were especially sharp-eyed, you might even catch a glimpse of something dark and tantalizing between her legs. That was why Jimmy, or sometimes Lew Kress, guarded the back room so diligently. To see “A Chinese Dream” cost three dollars, and required a special notched slug for the slot.
Jimmy once asked Shadow whether he’d personally photographed all the still shots of the dancer. He knew the colonel made most of the pictures for the machines in front.