The Paragon Hotel Read online

  “Aye?”

  “Girls, maybe.” I forced myself to shrug in fine Catrin style. “Maybe he wants to bed me, and that’s all.”

  “He’ll never bed you,” Mum reported, drinking and then scraping the back of her hand against her mouth. “Never even try.”

  This was confounding. Plenty of Mum’s swains expressed courtly admiration for my developing person.

  Catrin James stood, brushing river soot off her skirts. “He’ll be good to you. Protect you, even. But he’s ambitious. Not the sort of ambition that eats you from the middle and leaves naught save a great hole—that’s the Clutch Hand, and you’re right as an almanac when you say Mauro Salvatici hates him. I mean the more dangerous kind, the kind what grows instead of erases, the sort o’ fellow as sees himself as the king in a storybook. Making a world all his own.”

  “And you don’t mind the danger?” I shielded my eyes to see my mother’s face better.

  “There’s danger everywhere, my lovely. Before he died, yer father talked fer a week of staking a claim out West. Or at least, I think that’s what he was on about. I was afeared o’ sickness and Indians and begged till I was hoarse to stay. The dog bit his leg two days later. I’ll not dissuade you.”

  Eyes watering, I absorbed this. That Catrin James, rather than uncaring, was maybe only desperately unlucky, and thus resigned to float along like fireplace ash tossed in the gutter. Was that bravery or laziness? Either way, I felt disgusted by it.

  “You could try to talk me out of this,” I attempted.

  “I’d fail. Things happen. We wait for them, and one day they arrive. And Mr. Salvatici has already happened to you.”

  She left me. I sat there alone, breathing the salty river. I’d been keen on some hearty lamentation and had received a shrug. So I wanted Nicolo. To wipe his tears, run my hands over his tightly corded arms. To hear that he’d rather I stay with him and his mother. I’d say no, of course. Even then I knew how cruel I could be, but I wanted the option, I was positively drunk on options.

  Mum was right. If you wait long enough, things happen. And there is no reversing such events. No more than all the love in the world can change the weather.

  * * *

  —

  When I arrived at the Arcadia to change back into my finery and thereby prove to Nicolo my change of circumstances, Rye was holding the door open for a white man who kept making brief bows, as if expressing admiration without actually touching him. He looked like a fat woodpecker—if woodpeckers felt dreadfully awkward around Negroes, which so far as I know is an exclusively human characteristic.

  “If it hadn’t been my father’s, I’d not have minded, but the agony of sentiment—I’ll never repay you. Never!”

  “Likely not,” Rye agreed cheerfully.

  It was stated so offhand that the man laughed. “Here’s—oh, what the hell, my wife would’ve noticed and I’d never have heard the end of it. Two bits for your efforts!”

  “You’re not the first fellow as lost his coat on a night hopping from hotel to hotel like a leapfrog. And I never forget a coat, sir! Watch the corner there, those puddles best be called lakes every year starting September first.”

  When the chap toddled off, I materialized into view on the bottom steps. Rye’s mouth produced an ear-crowding smile, and I felt an unfamiliar sensation tickling at the base of my spine.

  “And how are you today, darlin’?”

  “Better, I think.”

  “You sure look it, Miss James.”

  I almost answered with my rote, It’s Nobody. Instead my tongue tumbled over itself saying, “It’s Alice. I’m going to live here, working for Mr. Salvatici, so.”

  He was about to reply when I heard from another direction entirely, “Alice!”

  Unfortunately, this voice was revoltingly familiar—Dario Palma, with a hair thicket sprouting from his open shirt, swinging loose fists the size of melons. Flanked as ever by Doctor Vinnie, the animal-torment specialist, and Cleto the blank-eyed Crow. Doctor Vinnie had his snarling canine, Caesar, at the end of a leather leash thick as a strap; Cleto stood there, collecting flies in his teeth.

  “How did you know where I was?” I marveled.

  They can’t have followed me. No one ever follows me.

  “That mouse turd clinging to Nicolo’s shoe. Name of Nazario.” Dario spat something ripe on the pavement.

  Doctor Vinnie’s dog licked its floppy chops as its master sneered, “He spilled.”

  Cleto, who I suspect was raised in a locked root cellar, emphasized expressionlessly, “He spilled all right. Spilled good.”

  Rye made a curt dip with fingers on his uniform cap. “Afternoon, gents. These friends of yours?”

  “No,” I stated through my teeth.

  “Listen to me, puttana,” Dario sang. “We need a little favor only you can provide us.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “About? This is about our whole neighborhood and its future. We’re not going to hurt you—you’re Nobody. Remember?” He giggled, the single childlike trait that hadn’t yet been bludgeoned out of him. “But if you don’t come with us, young Benenati is going up in flames.”

  The trio walked to the corner. Waited for me with slitted prison-gate eyes. But my friend’s name was enough of a bell chime, I didn’t need another summons, I was already walking when Rye said in my ear, “You better promise me I don’t need to escort you.”

  “When’s your shift over?” I asked.

  “Two hours. But—”

  “If I’m not back by then, tell Mr. Salvatici.”

  Shaking his head, he answered, “I don’t much like the sound of that.”

  “It’s what the boss wants,” I realized.

  After joining Dario and his grim circus clowns, we steered toward an alley. Workmen clad in torn coveralls and cloth caps were tearing out the walls of the nearest building and tossing them streetward like so many sacrifices onto a capitalist pyre, making way for the wretched hive the place would become. Once out of sight, Dario ducked his bullish head low.

  “You have to talk sense to Nicolo.”

  “Why would you help him?” I demanded. “You’d as soon kick him in the balls as shake his hand.”

  “Because he’s going to set all Harlem on fire.”

  “But—”

  “Right, a stupid little slut wouldn’t understand. I’ll lay it out for you. Nicolo Benenati murdered my uncle and the Corleonesi he worked with. Slit their throats like they were lake trout. My uncle Tommaso was pure poison—he used to put his cigarettes out on me if I didn’t roll ’em right. He’d killed more than twenty men, here and in the Old Country. Made no difference in the end, though, did it? Fuck Nicolo, that cold-blooded animal. But there had to be consequences, so the Clutch Hand ordered Papa Benenati snuffed.”

  “Who carried out that order?”

  “Fuck me—everyone’s saying it was somebody else. Even if I knew, I’d never tell. It should end there, Alice. But it isn’t going to, not if Nicolo has his way. It’ll be a madhouse. Blood feuds, stilettos in the dark, riots.”

  “Those are your specialty, not his.”

  “He’s gone crazy, I tell you, the wiry piece of shit. Chi troppo vuole nulla stringe.”*

  My new employment, not to mention grief for my friend, made me bold. “Why should I listen to a pack of scurmi fituzzi?”*

  Dario yanked me into his hot, sour breath. My toes left the stones and my head scraped up the masonry. As a child, I’d have kicked him in the cock. But as Nobody, I went limp as a fish.

  “He’s fucked you by now, hasn’t he?” Dario murmured against my neck. “I heard Mr. Mangiapane was trying to get virgin coin for you, but that’s a joke. Isn’t it? Well, I don’t care who’s been gutting your sweet little sardine. I could have you right now, and then who are you going to call a scurmi fituzzi?
”

  “Please,” I choked.

  “Oh. Now you’re begging for it?”

  “She wants it,” Vinnie agreed in his nasal whine.

  “Wants it bad,” Cleto parroted.

  “Stop this!” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything you say.”

  “That’s better.” More chuckles spilled forth from Dario. “Anything I say? I say you’re going to stop him before it’s too late, topolina.”

  “Stop what? How—”

  “I called a meeting and he agreed.” Dario Palma bit my earlobe, and it was all I could do to remain a rag doll. “And you’ll tell him that his pathetic revolution is over. Then you’ll tell him that if he refuses, I’m going to shove my cock in your figa so far you won’t have room in your throat to scream. Now. We’re off to the Murder Stable.”

  “No,” I croaked. “God, no, please not—”

  He dropped me. When I landed on the mud and brick dust, he chortled, and then I was upright again, being marched as if to my hanging.

  We hadn’t far to go. The Murder Stable was on East 108th Street. It was a vast livery warren, used to house the draft horses the Clutch Hand employed in his counterfeiting business and produce rackets. It housed over a dozen torture chambers. Its shackles had spikes facing inward. It had drains in the floors like an abattoir. At least sixty men had died there, in so many pieces that their ghosts rose from the stinking floor to spook the mad-eyed mares.

  That’s not true, though, I thought. It’s a livery where livestock are kept. And men have been held there, yes. Been beaten, yes. Been killed.

  But not today, by Christ.

  We turned a corner. A poplar rustled a warning, a stray cat yowled an alarm, but we strode toward the Murder Stable as if the devil were behind us as well as ahead. Then the air stilled, and my frame went rigid.

  “Merda,” Dario cursed. “It took too long to find you. We’re too late.”

  “Where are the others you invited, Dario?” Vinnie whimpered, dragging his reluctant dog.

  “There ought to be others,” Cleto confirmed.

  “Vai a dar via il culo!”* Dario snapped.

  I reached the entrance. The Murder Stable was as big as a fortress, a hulking island of corrugated metal. Two enormous sheet metal doors gaped open. A broken padlock hung from one of them, and it produced a dry-bones rattle in the gathering dusk. I waited. Hardly breathing.

  Then a figure pushed through the darkness like a knife through black cloth, and the men behind me yelled in various tongues, English and Italian and the universal language of terror, and lit out for tamer streets.

  Nicolo stood before me, dropping a horse’s sawed-off head wearily to the packed earth. His dirty face was lined with tear tracks, and his proud nose looked to have been knocked half off his hatchet-like face.

  “Where did those sons of bitches run to? I have something of Morello’s to show them!” he snarled. Then his expression changed. “Alicia. It’s you.”

  He walked up to me slowly, and now I could see better. Too much. See the lake of red he’d been wading through as he made tracks as clear as footprints in the sand.

  “Did they threaten you?” he asked. It was almost tender.

  It wasn’t tender—it was mad.

  He took my face in his trembling hands, and they were sticky, already crusting. “They’ll never threaten you again, topolina. They won’t threaten any of us.”

  I remember wondering, as his lips met mine for the first time, whether I was more terrified of a man who would cut a horse’s head off because he wanted to, or who would cut a horse’s head off despite the fact that the action went against every particle of who he was.

  ◆ Thirteen ◆

  NOW

  Foreigners and niggers will lower the standard of our community morals, as has been done in those mongrelized communities where the color line is not drawn.

  —WILLIAM H. GREEN, “Let’s Keep Grant’s Pass a White Man’s Town,” Southern Oregon Spokesman, Grant’s Pass, Oregon, May 24, 1924

  Returning to my room to make ready for the night’s reconnaissance, thinking No lipstick, rouge though, and dancing shoes, I remember another individual worrying a hole in her head: Miss Christina. Her room is between mine and Blossom’s, I know, because once I saw her stoop for a paper scrap edged under her door. Maybe a bill or a request to serve corned beef hash or a torrid love poem.

  Can you so much as watch a body pick up litter without wild imaginings?

  When I knock, I hardly expect an answer. But the door swings, imperfectly closed, and reveals the tiny chef hunched over on the sofa with another message. She slides it in the pocket of her plain brown dress.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry, that wasn’t a bit intentional!” I exclaim. “I only meant to—”

  “It’s all right.” Miss Christina’s voice is clotted with sorrow. “Come on in, I got a few minutes. The waiters been serving leftover meat loaf sandwiches all afternoon, anyhow. I just needed to—to feel near him.”

  That’s when I remember Blossom saying Davy Lee lived here.

  Lives here. Drawing a severe red line through the past tense, I tap a cross on my thigh.

  Now I’ve stepped inside, I witness the fortress of Max’s devising where Davy sleeps and feel a terribly warm ache. The bottom half, which boasts an arched entrance, is composed of slender logs standing maybe three feet high. But the top half is crenellated planks, a toy castle, with a neatly swaddled mattress tucked against the back wall and a hole the perfect size for a boy to hoist himself through connecting the levels.

  I shake my head. “That right there is the real jazz. I’d have given up hard cider to lay me down in a wooden palace when I was a squirt. And where I grew up, hard cider was required for a cheerful outlook.”

  “Davy loves it, sure enough.” Miss Christina sits, crushing her hands together. “Seeing that fortress empty—it’s a terrible hard blow, Miss James.”

  I seat myself on a chintz armchair. “Any news?”

  She shakes her head. “We’re none of us trackers—we never grew up in the woods. It’s all one to sharecropping and city folk whether we’re following branches busted off by a boy or a buck. I been praying to the good Lord some of them volunteers from the South who Max roped in can help us.”

  “It’s awful,” I commiserate.

  Her eyes are stitched with scarlet needlework that matches the red kerchief she’s tied over her hair again. “I keep picturing him. Just a cub, when he first spied that there castle and grinned fit to bust himself open. I done cried all night while I was searching, Miss James. Only way I can look at that bed with a dry cheek is there’s nothing left to water it. Now, what’s your business?”

  “I went to see the Chief of Police.”

  “Tom Vaughan?” Miss Christina contemplates her interlocking fingers as if they hold some swell miracles. “You consult Blossom over that play?”

  “Naturally.”

  “How’s she see it?”

  “Long odds. Anyway, it was Jenny’s notion. He’s pledged to assist.”

  “Hmm.” Miss Christina sighs heavily. “Jenny sure looks up to his missus.”

  “I’d the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Vaughan at her home—last time I lamped passion like that was in an opera house.”

  “Davy Lee thinks she painted the sky blue. I like her plenty enough myself—there’s no harm in her, mind. Just too much spirit to keep a lid on sometimes.”

  “That describes her to the veriest T. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  She bites her lip. “Maybe she ended up funny coming from the raw land and then the Starr family turning timber wealthy sudden like, but then again maybe she was born feisty. Saw her leaving her church once after the Negro congregation let out. Skies opened up. White and black alike wearing church hats, and did she laugh. After that, a wetting from the Almighty didn’t s
eem like such a fuss to me.”

  “Then you were born here too?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am.” Miss Christina folds her mouth like she’s sealing an envelope. “No, I got to know Miss Starr on account of her volunteering for every soup kitchen in Portland. Woman’s lobster bisque is a dream.”

  “It couldn’t possibly hold a candle to your red fish stew. Supposing she was raised au naturel, though, I’m curious—how does she come to be educated enough to teach Weekly Betterment?”

  Miss Christina must be relieved at my readiness to switch topics, because the flattery goes over like a lead balloon. “Word is she went away to a girls’ school years back after her family struck it rich, a real genuine college. People sure talked. But it worked out just fine. I was one of the chefs when Evelina Starr married Tom Vaughan, and that there was a wedding to beat the band. She’s nicely settled now, I hope.”

  “Can a tempest ever really settle?”

  “I’m not the one to say.” Standing, the chef twists her back. “Hungry, Miss James? Clam fritters or baked veal in tomato sauce tonight.”

  “Miss Christina, I don’t know that it’ll produce any cheer, but Blossom said she was sure that Davy was alive. That she could . . . sense it somehow.”

  The tiny woman regards me with fathomless wells of loss in her eyes.

  “Do you pay mind to that sort of thing?” she asks numbly.

  “Oh, as the sun rises,” I assure her with hand over heart.

  “Well, I wish I did, Miss James. And I’ll do my best to try. ’Cause the dearest boy in the world is out there, and if it helps him come on home to us? Hell, I’ll believe that Blossom Fontaine can fly.”

  Disheartened, I exit. A maid passes me in the hall, slender and neat, whose lashes flicker in my direction before she sails away to dust pillowcases and tuck in soaps. Shutting myself in my room, I regard the old girl in the mirror. The corpus appears currently fraught with worry, not to mention battered by sentiment and injury and change.