by Lyndsay Faye
As did I. Shivering, I replaced the journal and turned to leave.
I hesitated, curious.
It occurred to me that I knew precious little about Mr. Salvatici. He was born in Italy but had a pounding great facility with English because he had gone to a Naples school with a tutor from Boston who admired to master oil painting, and his mother had made the best burrata on the planet, according to him. But everything else was shrouded in darkness.
In for a penny, I thought.
Gliding full sail for the bookshelf, I soon found a neat row of older journals. I opened one to a random entry.
March 17, 1893. The faro tables at the Rusted Anchor, 44th Street by the river, continue to turn a steadier profit than anyone hoped. I keep after all my associates from home to at least take a job as a dealer even if they refuse to dirty their hands, but many are uncomfortable anyplace outside Little Italy. Learn English, I say. Take some pride in yourself, I insist, to which they answer that our village was so lousy with the Family that simply our arriving in America was enough to count ourselves lucky. It might be enough for them, but when I write to Mamma, I want to tell her I’m king of something, any something. I think of her back home, unable to leave my grandparents as they wither, reading her youngest son’s letters. All that distance, all that effort, ought to mean something.
More than my most recent entanglement meant, anyhow. I hesitate to speak of that even here, but I ought to have forestalled all romantic considerations until after I was established. I never knew temptation could course so strongly through me. But that was no excuse, and I can only plead ignorance of prior experience with infatuation. From henceforth, I must be more calculated.
The first section sounded in character enough to bring a smile to my face. And supposing that my guardian’s hometown was riddled with cagnolazzi, it explained a great deal of his raison d’être. But as for romance, even infatuation—I’d grown so used to Mr. Salvatici’s quiet courtesy toward me that I’d foolishly forgotten he’d the same equipment as any other fellow. I wondered, reading eagerly ahead, who she was, but almost no mention of her was made except to say that the liaison was finished.
August 8, 1894. Saw the local boys over supper in Harlem for the first time in months. Some talk of leaving New York, finding a simpler life in light of the fact the Family begins to thrive here as grandly as they ever did back home. It’s demoralizing, watching them turn the other cheek continually. We fought bitterly over the question. Saddening as it is, if they want no part of the empire I mean to build, then I want no part of them.
Meanwhile, I seem to have made as clean an escape from Cupid as possible. I wish her well for all her unsuitability, but great ambitions require great sacrifices. I cannot allow anything or anyone to slow me down.
So this explained why Mr. Salvatici never spoke of her. I could find no further trace for the next two years, as if any ink devoted to her had faded into the white of the page.
An unsettled feeling combined with guilt over reading private diaries caused me to retreat and lock my side of the door, and I fell back against it, limp as an overcooked noodle. My boss’s scheme of using Sammy the Saint as a publicity stunt sounded to me like a dandy bet for the local undertakers; I’d as nasty a feeling about it as Harry Chipchase entertained regarding rainbows.
But I’d never openly disagreed with Mr. Salvatici before. And considering the fact I’d always fancifully thought myself in the same category as his beloved birds, that afternoon seemed a dreadfully inauspicious occasion for trying it out.
* * *
—
Following my snooping expedition, I attempted to nap but gave it up, throwing my sleep mask across the room like a tyrannical toddler. I was solidly in the grip of the proverbial willies. At five in the afternoon, the traditional time to begin making poor life decisions, I ordered room service to bring me a pair of bloody marys. Extra mary, light on the tomato stuff. The sunlight through my window bruised to indigo, and my liquid breakfast was nearly through when I realized that Zachariah Lane kicked off the second set leading a group soft-shoe number, right when the firearms were scheduled to start going off.
This alarmed me.
I considered my options. I could send word to Rye not to show up, which would render him, as Mr. Salvatici had put it, “dispensable,” but there had been too many graphic avian fatalities that morning to risk such a thing.
And our boss hadn’t commanded me to stay put, exactly. Had he?
Throwing myself at my closet, I pulled out a scarlet underskirt topped by a black bell-shaped tunic with a riot of poppies blooming on the draped sleeves. A thick red kimono-style waistband finished the effect, which I considered cute as the dickens. Mr. Salvatici was right about hiding in plain sight—wear something striking enough and style is all anyone can see. Meanwhile, this Nobody, I imagined, got snapped for all the fashion rags, had a torrid affair with a British captain who hunted lions, packed elaborate picnics but forgot the silverware. Rotten driver but still took flight lessons. That sort.
The sort Rye would find irresistible.
I cleverly decided I’d arrive just prior to the second set and let Rye escort me home in the aftermath, an idea that seemed fraught with positively long-stemmed romance. Supper involved pink champagne, and by the time I left the Arcadia, young Alice James was about as soused as she’d been the night before.
Never let it be said the old master lacks consistency.
The Tobacco Club was only four blocks away, so I walked. Its marquee blazed angel white, dazzling, and a velvet rope bordered a sumptuous red carpet. Photographers lugging the bulky boxes of their cameras milled about, spit-polished automobiles idled and honked, gents nursed cigars, and women fiddled with diamond bracelets, a hot night at a hot new joint in the hottest burg on the planet.
Somewhere, a car with its plates covered approached, grim as the Reaper. Somewhere, Nicolo Benenati lurked, his hatchet face alert but strangely dead, hunting the hunters.
“Miss James!” Harry Chipchase exclaimed from his post guarding the entrance. “For Pete’s sake, whaddaya think you’re doing here?”
“Oh, just lending moral support, don’t you know.”
“Are you nuts or what? Skidoo, kid, skidoo, twenty-three is the number for you.”
I tried to laugh as my heart seeped into my stockings. The shine was well off my clever scheme by this time. But I thought of Rye, made quick excuses, and Harry’s anxious spluttering faded as I slipped past the doorman.
The Tobacco Club proved packed to the wainscoting with rich loafers, slick producers, Broadway babies, and horn-rimmed critics. If Mr. Salvatici wanted bigger crowds, I didn’t understand where he was going to put them. Bouquets bloomed, matches hissed, smells of prime rib and almond-crusted fish mingled with cigarette smoke and French perfume, and one might suppose I’m yarning this backward, but it’s not the fact I got myself keyholed that mattered that night.
It was what happened after the bullets.
The scene roars in my ears, plays in flash-powder fits and starts. Pictures ripped from the headlines. The curtain sweeping aside for the second set and behold—Rye front and center in top hat and tails, flanked by a dozen dazzlingly bejeweled chorus girls. A cool champagne glass in my small hand. Mr. Salvatici’s face peering down from our second-tier table, the dash of his mouth quirked worriedly when he spied me.
Percussion that didn’t come from the stage.
Rat-a-tat-a-tata-tat-tat.
The crystal I held falling, shattering as people began to shriek.
Sammy the Saint’s smooth jowls quaked as he wielded the tommy gun from a half-curtained table. He must have paid someone off royally to have gotten all the way inside, and that someone would be dead by morning. Guests scattered like a firework, a hot metal reek flooding the air. Mr. Salvatici’s men returned fire, I glimpsed Nicolo’s tomahawk profile cut into view from the
wings, and there was Dario Palma, and men were spreading their arms around their lady friends, diving under tables, somersaulting over chairs as the chorus girls shrieked treble clef alarms.
Rat-a-tat-a-tata-tat-tat.
Then a searing stripe painted my upper left arm, and I was contemplating the ceiling.
“Easy there, darlin’. I got you. Jesus Christ, Nobody, this is no time for a siesta. Up now, up, up.”
It was just like the day I arrived at the Hotel Arcadia, Rye’s face blurring, only this time not smiling, not even for show, eyes fearful and every colored, and he lifted me like a rag doll. My body curved in on itself, and there was Mr. Salvatici, lipless mouth curled in a snarl, his revolver gleaming dark as his pomade as its muzzle spasmed, and then a different kind of darkness oozed down my own hair like oil, and Rye was saying something, almost singing it, something I’d have loved to listen to, but he was being a lullaby when I needed a fucking gun, and the last thing I thought of as the world slipped its axis was, You didn’t toast with the barkeep of Bruno’s Café when he wanted you to, no wonder everything is being shot quite spectacularly to hell.
* * *
—
When I woke up, I was in my bed, and Nicolo Benenati was sitting backward in a chair, smoking a cigarette. Watching me.
I gasped, and my arm sizzled like a lightning strike.
“Slowly, topolina.” Nicolo gripped my wrist. “Just settle into it. They drugged you pretty good after you fainted, but nothing’s going to make it easy. Not at first.”
Air trickled through my parched throat.
Mr. Salvatici should be here—why isn’t he here?
Or Harry or Rye or even Sadie.
“Mr. Salvatici brought in the house doc, knows better than to trust you with any old sawbones who might’ve been in league with Sammy the Saint. They locked you in, even. But it didn’t take much for me to get past the cop. What’s his handle? Harry?”
My lips moved. More in the way of trembling than of speech.
“He’s taking a nap in the linen cupboard. I wanted to see you, and he took exception. You didn’t think I could know you’d been hurt and not see for myself. Did you?”
The old girl wasn’t thinking anything except, Live through this.
Nicolo shifted to sit on the bed. There were specks of blood on his white collar. More on his cuffs. He frowned, running a single finger along my throat. His active form thrummed and he wore a jackal’s famished expression.
“Who was your friend?”
“Which?” I rasped.
“The handsome colored fellow. Leaped down from the stage when you fell.”
“Oh. He’s . . . he lives here. Used to be a doorman. I’m sorry, I’m all muddled. I should never have gone to the Tobacco Club tonight.”
“Why did you?”
“Well, I’m Mr. Salvatici’s lucky charm of sorts, and tonight was awfully important. Is he all right? Is everyone all right?”
“Do you mean your dancer friend?” Nicolo put out his cigarette, mechanical as a wind-up toy.
“The fur was well and truly flying, so I mean everybody.”
“Your dancer friend is fine,” Nicolo reported tonelessly.
I tried my blankest look.
My unwanted companion shrugged. “So are Mr. Salvatici and his men. We had the drop on the Clutch Hand’s boys. A society lady got clipped in the leg, a waiter didn’t make it, and those Corleonesi are on ice in the club’s basement. Coppers didn’t do much snooping. It’ll be the river for the trash, which is what your boss left to oversee. Sammy the Saint slipped out after he winged you. That was his bullet—the one as passed through your arm. But you’re safe, Alicia. I brought him here for you. Can you stand up yet?”
“I . . . think so, but Nicolo . . .”
He courteously offered his hand. Stomach roiling, I took it. My old playmate’s palm was dry and smooth and steady. I was wearing a nightgown, and I slid my feet into slippers. Nicolo kept one hand firmly in his and the opposite arm around my waist. I could have been wearing a straitjacket in a nuthouse and felt freer.
“I’d have tried to get to you at the Tobacco Club, but your friend was quicker. Hell, I’d just seen him dance—quick as blinking. That was probably why you looked at him like that, isn’t it? Anyone would look at him, just to catch what he did next.”
“Nicolo.”
“Alicia. My oldest friend. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”
“We always will be.”
My hallway stretched away from us, pulling itself into a tunnel like a rope of taffy. It must have been the middle of the night. I could have screamed, but Harry Chipchase was apparently down for the count. I could have fought, but I wasn’t strong enough.
So I turned into Nobody. Knowing full well that the possum act wasn’t very likely to work on a ruthless assassin who also happened to be in love with me.
“Where are we going?”
“To see Sammy.”
“No, please.” I went all but limp as he propelled me. “My arm hurts. For God’s sake, Nicolo—”
“Hush, topolina. You’re safe, remember? I’m here.”
We reached a door at the end of the corridor and he pushed it open.
Sammy the Saint reclined on an oilskin tarp on a hotel bed. Naked, open-eyed. His body was beginning to soften from the slim lines of youth into the rounder curves of excess. A pit had been carved in his breast with something like a hatchet or cleaver. The room reeked of meat not yet started to turn. His jaw had been forced open, and in it rested a lump of gore I supposed faintly was his heart.
The room swam. I know I was sick in the corner, great shaking heaves, and that Nicolo held my hair. Then I folded into a ball with my hands around my knees. I’d never wanted Mr. Salvatici so much in my life, and for some strange reason recalled his argument that I should bet all my chips on his roulette spins.
You find me dangerous, Miss James. Good. I am dangerous. But I am also, you will find, sane. Which compliment cannot be paid to the Clutch Hand.
It couldn’t be paid to Nicolo either. Not anymore. I’ll never forget his knuckles tilting my chin up gently—satisfied, as if he’d put down a rabid dog for me, and beneath the satisfaction a sick version of the enduring love that had always been there.
“That’s what happens to people who hurt you.”
“Nicolo. Not this. Clean and tidy, yes, but—”
“No, it had to be this way. I brought Sammy here to make a point to Mr. Salvatici as well as to you. The Clutch Hand was sent a powerful message, but you ended up bleeding. I prefer higher precision. A fagiolo.* This will show your boss what I think of mistakes.”
Nicolo stood up, nodded. He seemed nearly to have forgotten I was there. He adjusted his tie, a bizarre gesture when his collar was seasoned with blood, and regarded the desecrated corpse. I remembered him when he was eleven and I nine, wearing a look like that as he tied tomato stems to stripped branches, and my heart ached more than my arm ever could.
“I had a few words with your dancer friend,” he mused. “I thanked him for carrying you out of there so quick. Good night, topolina. If anyone else lays a hand on your pretty skin who shouldn’t, I’ll be there to punish him. Never worry about that. Not so long as I’m around.”
◆ Nineteen ◆
NOW
Isn’t it about time for the Federal government to speak or step out against the many brutal murders, whippings, intimidations and the branding of peaceful, law-abiding citizens by mobs, which are being done in many parts of the country?
—BEATRICE MORROW CANNADY, The Advocate, Portland, Oregon, July 19, 1924
Oh no, I can hear you perfectly now, Mrs. Snider. Muriel, I mean to say. Forgive me.”
“Not at all, dear. No one has a greater bond with our four-footed friends, but Buttons here is the plague of my life. There, that’
s quite enough yapping—you’ll let me speak with my friend Alice, won’t you, precious?”
The sound like a raven being repeatedly run over by a Daimler continues. Muriel has a point re: plagues. Medea is forever either chewing something expensive or plotting more complex malevolence. It doesn’t stop Blossom from slipping her scraps of Miss Christina’s roast chicken and cooing idiotically, but such are the foibles of human nature. I duck farther back into the comfortable cabinet in the Paragon’s lobby, nursing a cigarette. People are less likely to remark on a white woman using a colored phone booth supposing it’s full of smoke.
“Well, Fred and I had a heart-to-heart, and he thinks you’re the sweetest girl, but the KKK are about as sinister as the YMCA.” Her voice is thin and metallic through the telephone. “They just wrote a circular to be sent out to women like us who—though naturally ineligible—might encourage upstanding menfolk to apply. Would you like to hear it?”
“I’d be very grateful.”
Muriel Snider clears her throat officiously. “‘The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as a patriotic, fraternal, benevolent order, does not discriminate against a man on account of his religious or political creed so long as it does not antagonize the sacred right guaranteed by our civil government or conflict with Christian ideals and institutions. The Klan asks the support of churchmen everywhere in the great work of uniting into one organization, under one banner, all native-born Protestant Gentile Americans.’”
Those are awfully specific Americans.
“You see? What could be more appropriate, especially with anarchist organizations like this NAACP cropping up? Now. I asked about Davy Lee specifically—oh, think nothing of it, dear—and Fred said it would be the worst sort of paranoia to imagine the Klan had anything to do with the matter. He thinks in all likelihood the poor lad just wandered off and drowned.”