The Paragon Hotel Read online

  Say my name again. And while you’re granting favors, please don’t go.

  “Oh, I’m a regular textbook of health.” Trying for a jazzy twirl in languid fingertips first, I slide the glasses back on. “See you on the morrow?”

  “S’pose so.”

  “Topping. Max?”

  He stops and his body is angled just so, that little bit closer, knee cocked and his cream-and-sugar-coffee face tipped down—I’m not inventing it.

  And then it hurts so I can hardly breathe.

  “I’ll do the best I can to help while you’re gone,” I vow. “If not for you, I’d have played proverbial taps.”

  When he leaves, he doesn’t say goodbye, but he does brush thumb and forefinger against my chin in an affable fashion and I gaze after him, feeling the prints. Thinking the money in my room could easily pay for eleven-thousand-mile stints with Max if not for the fact that I got my wish.

  I’m trapped here, Overton would retaliate somehow if I went missing, and Max would hate me for it.

  * * *

  —

  When I catch my first face full of Portland in blazing daylight, I gape up at it like a salmon, fish mouthed and reeling.

  We’re standing outside the Paragon Hotel the next morning, Blossom and Davy and Miss Christina and myself, and my eyes swell at the carnival of color. Everything I’ve ever seen, from Tobacco Club chorus girls to Central Park in July, was in black and white. And now I’ve fallen headfirst into a box of oil paints.

  “The mountains are out!” Blossom rejoices.

  “When the clouds break and you can see the peaks,” the cook explains. “Too many buildings on this street, but Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Saint Helens . . .”

  Blossom waves her fingers like a magician, the bell sleeves of her mustard coat sliding down a switch-thin arm. “Welcome to Portland, Alice James. Now let us make the most of it before the dying of the light. Oh, easy now—you’re not long out of bed and this is a marathon, not a sprint.”

  When Blossom informed me last night after pan-fried trout stuffed with wild mushrooms that if the next day was fine, they were taking Davy to the Elms, I lost no time hitching myself to the wagon. For several reasons. By now I itch to get my bearings; my constitution requires, as it is said, bolstering; I like Blossom in the child-bright way of being surprised someone you admire is letting you share their orange.

  And if I quit the Paragon Hotel, I am less likely to make an uninvited guest of myself in Maximilian’s bedroom.

  We stand at the corner of Northwest Everett and Northwest Broadway. The skies are enormous, flung open and sprawling. A bucket of spilled cerulean. Stately brick and stone buildings tower above us—the Paragon seems small with its fifth-story gable points and its carefully hosed pavement—and pretty iron streetlamps with triple lights blooming from their sturdy metal stems dot our path. A horse-drawn cart sagging under its load of flour sacks passes us, but so do sleek automobiles, Fords and Daimlers with wheel spokes blurring and cloth tops flapping in the crisp wind. Broadway is wide and teeming with locals. Men wearing double-breasted suits in fawn checks and sober pinstripes, carrying copies of The Oregonian. Brisk women with bobbed hair, stenographers hunting down coffee and egg salad sandwiches, one meltingly boneless flapper whose lips have likely kissed things of far greater interest than the cigarette she sips from an ivory holder.

  Aside from the guests milling at the entrance of the Paragon, and the Japanese boy carrying a lunch delivery, everyone is white. It scrapes against part of my brain I seem to have left on 107th Street.

  Miss Christina sets off with Davy by the hand. Blossom follows beside me, her teeth set as if she’s keen to crack them.

  “Don’t think me too forward,” I begin. “I’d never be so gauche as to ask what’s ailing you, but can I assist?”

  “Aren’t you a dear,” she returns absently. “I’ve been ill, that’s all. Dr. Pendleton and I have it well in hand.”

  “Awfully unpleasant old coot, that.”

  “Award-winning prize ass, Alice, but he did save your life, mind.”

  “I hadn’t any choice and duly tip my cap. But why in hell would you put up with him?”

  “Because you can’t chase down a more thoroughgoing black doctor—he’s actually revoltingly talented. Graduated top of his class at Chicago Medical School. Nor is there another with his experience, having served in the War and practiced with sterling results at Cook County Hospital before that. He’s the tops. That’s despite the fact he knocks himself off his own loop starting midday precisely. And as you gathered, not being deaf, he doesn’t like me any more than he does you, but he yet admires to see my engine restored to tuneful conditions. That’s ever so sweet, don’t you agree? Romantic.”

  My eyebrows defy gravity.

  Laughing, Blossom slaps my arm. “He’s not my sort either, honey. The very idea. He’s also my uncle.”

  “Your uncle?” I exclaim.

  “Oh, indeed yes. My late mother’s half brother.”

  “Awfully thick blood you must have, putting up with his . . .”

  “Personal quirks? I’ve hardly any kin left, honey, I can’t afford to be particular. He knows me of old, he owns a simply stunning hotel, and when I left San Francisco in nineteen fifteen, he picked up the lost penny and brought me to dwell where he dwelt.”

  “He must have been so different before serving.”

  Blossom hoots, clapping. “Lord, no, he’s been like that ever since the day he graduated from med school! His white professor told him he was the most promising surgeon with the deftest touch he’d ever seen, amazing privilege to have taught him, wasn’t his skin simply a tragic miscalculation of nature, and then asked Uncle Doddridge to remove a tumor. From the professor’s golden retriever.”

  For several seconds, neither Blossom nor I can breathe.

  “I know,” she gasps. “It’s crushing. But isn’t it rich?”

  “It’s giving me gout. Say, I never mentioned last night—your friend Mrs. Vaughan seems a fine specimen.”

  The expression that twists Blossom’s mouth is neither frown nor smile but something soul deep and private. “Evy is the true spirit of Portland. She’s its generosity and eccentricity and isolation and passion and rebellion and melancholy and kindness. Of course, it’s simply frightful trying to pack all that into one person, so she’s also hideously uncomfortable.”

  “Being married to a police chief must be steadying?”

  “Yes, it must, mustn’t it,” says Blossom, and not a word does she say more for fully ten minutes.

  What happens later in the day is so deeply stamped on my memory that what led up to it is stilted, like picture flip-books. The gorgeous blue ribbon of the Willamette River, crawling with the stripped corpses of pine forests lashed together on barges. The looming iron hulk of the Broadway Bridge, riverbanks glowing electric green as we cross it in the cool sunshine. The trolley car with its jolly red paint and voltaic hum and us at the back, peering out as we glide along near-silent tracks.

  The Elms Amusement Park is bordered by meadowlands, river, and a lake on its eastern side, ferocious brambles disputing every boundary, its white entrance flanked by giant statues of tin soldiers. After days fighting to stay in my warm little cave, I’m ever so giddy to be out of it. Blossom, meanwhile, surreptitiously wipes water from her eyes—whether suffering or wind produces it, I can’t say. When she notes my concern, she forces a smile. The gate agent, a sour, fat fellow with ruddy side-whiskers, glowers as he spits a chew into a coffee tin. But he grudgingly passes out tickets after Miss Christina brandishes an extra dollar.

  Davy yanks at Blossom’s hand, grinning. “First the Barrel of Fun!”

  “Why, just what I’d have proposed,” she agrees.

  “Lord, that place gives me the creeps,” Miss Christina comments.

  The journey is a sh
ort one—minutes later, we approach a fun house a little way into the park, looming above the emerald grass and penny candy wrappers. Tattered red flags shudder along the rooftop. The flat facade is black, with grinning skeletons jerking in a graveyard dance. An owl crowned with devil horns presides over the entrance, morbid kohl circling its empty eye sockets, above a plank walkway painted with constellations. It makes the world feel upside down.

  “Stay close now, honey,” says Blossom, and we plunge into a lightless maw.

  Davy laughs.

  I can’t see, and that shouldn’t frighten me. But apparently the old girl is shy of nerve since incurring the wrath of Nicolo Benenati. Trailing fingertips along the corridor, I turn left, right, right again.

  Nothing whatsoever save a wall.

  “Any point to this place other than elbow bruises, Davy?” I call, aiming for jocular.

  No one replies.

  Heart skittering like a roach, I try another direction, stumbling into a room draped with fake cobwebs and Spanish moss. In the dim, the plaster headstones look like real marble. The skeletons are arranged in a tableau. One sitting at the edge of his grave with a tin coffee cup, one sleeping with a hat pulled over his eyes. One plunging a knife redundantly into his comrade.

  Bit late seeing as the worms are already finished, but good show for technique.

  Thinking I see Miss Christina’s pleated coat exiting, I follow. A dead end results. Then another. I hate this place with shocking vim.

  Davy, you owe me ever so many cookies. Heaps and heaps.

  I catch a glimmer of light and quicken my pace.

  Mirrors. Everywhere. The kind that fracture me into dozens of Nobodies, every Nobody I’ve ever tried on, each uglier than the last, each guilty of more shocking crimes, my neutral face transformed into a mob of pale monsters.

  Every single one a murderess by proxy, and for what, in the end? For whom?

  Bitter, thick liquid pools in my throat. My legs falter, and I slide to the floor with my eyes screwed shut. I don’t know how long I stay there, quaking, before I decide that any room is better than this one and flee, smearing my malformed features with damp fingers as I slide along the glass.

  Stumbling into broad daylight again, I realize I’m not breathing and gasp. I’m at the back of the fun house. Miss Christina and Blossom stand together, faces pinched, coat hems flapping. They look expectant.

  “Oh gracious, honey, did you run into an actual ghost?” Blossom questions. “Where’s Davy?”

  “He’s with you,” I answer stupidly.

  But he isn’t. Davy Lee is nowhere to be found.

  ◆ Nine ◆

  THEN

  Corleone means Lion-Heart. Korliun it was named by the Saracens, who founded it and made it a military stronghold in the picturesque thirteenth century. Something of the savage, marauding spirit of the Saracen, always a menace to civilization, hovers about the place—a savagery that has nursed into being a dangerous and powerful arm of the “Black-Hand” Society of Italy.

  —WILLIAM J. FLYNN, Chief of the US Secret Service, The Barrel Mystery, 1919

  The night that the arsonists bled out behind Nicolo’s home, I met him in our usual café as he’d ordered. My stomach full of tadpoles and the bruschetta untouched. Harvest festival candles glowed from every alcove, hemorrhaging crimson wax into graphic pools.

  “What happened?” I whispered when he appeared.

  Nicolo landed opposite, glistening with sweat despite the cold.

  “Nothing, topolina. All is well.”

  “Neither of those things are true!”

  Releasing a breath like a steam valve opening, he masked his mouth with tented hands.

  “They were already dead. Blood everywhere, blood enough to drown in. I dragged them into the alleyway. Then I scrubbed down the yard. Christ, it was such a mess—pray I didn’t miss anything in the dark. I’ll find my parents, tell them . . . what should I tell them? Nothing, maybe. Wait for morning and word to spread naturally.”

  “Yes. Don’t say anything.”

  “But, shit, Alicia. How can I do that? Don’t you want to find out who was responsible?”

  I burned to deliver the dope to my closest friend. But Mr. Salvatici’s proposal glued my tongue to my teeth. He hadn’t asked for secrecy, not directly. But he expected it.

  That was simply how our world worked.

  “No.” Nicolo lightly slapped his brow. “You’re right. If I’ve someone to thank and can’t repay them, that’s one kind of trouble. If it had nothing to do with us, that’s another. Grazie a Dio, and let dead dogs lie in the road. Everything will be all right, Alicia. I promise you.”

  Nicolo knew how to step around horse shit. But his optimistic nature betrayed him on that occasion. Because the bodies were indeed found the next morning, and the police did in fact uncover bloodstains pooled under a cracked flagstone obscured by weeds. Thus, as his parents were genuinely dumbfounded and had been dining at the ever-crowded Enrico’s, Nicolo was arrested for the cold-blooded murder of a pair of Corleonesi who’d trespassed into his rear yard.

  I heard the news while fetching eggs. From a knot of men gossiping outside the market, men who never knew I was there until I dropped the basket. Yolks spilling everywhere. Heedless, I stumbled into the nearest piss-reeking alleyway and raised my forgettable face to empty grey skies.

  “If Mr. Salvatici saves Nicolo from hanging, I will join with him.” Closing my eyes, I crossed myself for good measure. “For Nicolo. My life is forfeit. I will do everything Mr. Salvatici asks.”

  Luck and prayer are only two different ways of making bargains. I will give this act if I get this in return. This penny in a fountain. This Hail Mary. I don’t know which category that particular plea fell into, since—though heartfelt—it was awfully informal. Not to mention appropriately melodramatic for a fifteen-year-old girl.

  But three days and a thousand dread-sodden heartbeats later, Nicolo was released on All Hallows’ Eve.

  Secretly, I packed my things, hot tears of relief spattering onto chemises and stockings. Tears of apprehension followed. I was about to enter the services of Mr. Salvatici, a man who apparently gave orders to the NYPD. The police in those days were very much as they are now. Canny. Burly. Some kind. Some cruel. But not a single jackal swaggering about in his brass-buttoned coat spoke Italian. So I didn’t know how Mr. Salvatici procured Nicolo’s freedom, but I did know the bluecoats probably thought themselves well rid of a pest. Court cases often collapsed under the sheer strain of Italian relations swearing on ancestral graves that their kinfolk had never so much as fibbed about taxes.

  As for Mr. Salvatici, the idea of life at his hotel was so blank, my mind kept slipping clean off it. And how would I break it to my never-very-alert mother?

  Mum, I’m striking out to defeat all of Corleone. Wish me luck?

  I was at the Step Right, pondering this very question, when Nicolo burst through the doors. It was the first afternoon that felt like winter, a barbed wire taste in the air presaging hunched shoulders and doubled-up stockings. My friend spent his time in the clink as a punching bag, I noted with a pang of rage. His bright eyes shone from within purpling shadows, and half his knuckles were burst.

  “There’s the young devil!” a soused Mr. Mangiapane growled from behind the bar. “Sweep the trash out the door, says I.”

  “Oh, Nicolo,” Mum gasped. “Sweet child, what have they done with yer face?”

  “Nothing. Just a bit of an adventure, Miz James.”

  I was off my stool, gripping his wiry forearms. “What son of a bitch hurt you?”

  “Easy, easy there, Alicia.” He smiled. “This was only their idea of a little fun.”

  “Conosco i miei polli,”* I snapped. “Have you seen your parents?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Benenati had spent a vociferous forty-eight hours telling anyone who
would listen that they had been the subject of a Mafioso threat, yes, but that Nicolo would never hurt anyone, not even the smallest flea, and yes, he cleaned the blood, naturalemente lo ha fatto,* but who could blame anyone for doing the same?

  “Yeah, they met me at the station house.” He searched my face. “Mom sent out for meat, fish, cheese, eggplant. Enough to feed ancient Rome. I’m sore, not starving to death, but she’s out of control. I came to ask you to dinner.”

  “Little Alice isn’t going anyplace.”

  The words were so close to my ear, they tickled. Mr. Mangiapane had emerged from behind the counter. He rubbed a bloated hand over the skeins of hair draped across his scalp.

  “Here now, less of that,” Mum crooned from her barstool.

  “Shut it, woman! I’m putting my foot down.” Mangiapane sent a yellow wad of spittle toward my mother. “Nobody at all would be one thing, but this Nobody eats my food, sleeps under my roof!”

  “Come and have a nice—”

  “She’s going to work!” Mangiapane roared.

  My elbow flared with pain as he dragged me into him, away from Nicolo.

  “You thought you could spend your life at this hotel, skulking, and pay for nothing?” he spat. “Mi rompi i coglioni.* I got a top-notch price from a regular, not a bad sort. Healthy fellow. Never fear, mia dolce, I’m not a monster—you’ll get half.”

  Crispy Ezio emerged, drying hoary hands with a rag. “What in cockshit is all this bellowing?”

  “Let her go,” Nicolo ordered. He said it almost calmly. “I’ll tell you one time. Not again.”

  “Get off me, you fat bastardo!” I cried. “I’m leaving anyhow.”

  “The hell you are!”

  I’ve often puzzled over what would have happened if Mr. Mangiapane hadn’t been staggeringly drunk. Stupid and loutish as the man was, he liked his own flabby hide as much as the next stupid lout. And throwing me around in front of Nicolo Benenati was as good as waving a red flag in front of a bull.