The Paragon Hotel Read online

  The solution to the first part of the problem, the empty rooms, did not cause a single head to be scratched: fill them with whores.

  About Catrin James, then. My mum was Welsh, from Glamorganshire. Probably still is, I suppose. In any case, she emigrated to New York in 1893 with nothing but a scalawag husband. After a week, she misplaced him, and she wasn’t too sore. Everything was jake. Realizing women always, while alive, have certain salable assets, she took to vending them along the East River, which amounts to finding an Ohio homestead plot and saying, “This’ll do.”

  Along came an Italian one day whose name she refused to tell me despite my insatiable curiosity. He was handsome and charming, even in his severely limited English, English my Welsh mum could barely understand. Relevant to this anecdote: my mum was still unreasonably beautiful. She still laughed a great deal. She always has. Her snout was a splendid snub button and her cheeks juicy fruit. A bluenose would have called her a trollop, and the faster sort of flapper would have hailed her as sister.

  And the Italian—he called her bella. Bella, bella, bella, all through the cold, starry night. Occasionally he wanted to expound beyond that word, and paid a Columbia student to translate his sentiments into the American vernacular.

  Come away with me, my bella!

  Or:

  I have found us a place already—it is very far uptown, but all I can afford if we are to live alone together, motherfuck these dripping basements with their twelve pairs of eyes. Only I will see them in our bedroom—yes, the way you are looking at me now, mia dolce.

  And for good measure:

  You will forget that this money-changing ever happened to you and forget your cock-gobbling husband, and one day when he is stabbed in the gullet, he will think of you as he dies and regret only that he did not spend every second devoted to your happiness.

  Catrin said yes. The hind leg of a donkey would have parted ways with its owner.

  They moved to Harlem, my mum and the amorous Italian, and lived as husband and wife, and introduced themselves to everyone as the same. They were happy.

  What a simply marvelous thing to say. I’ll say it twice: they were happy. And they had a year together. My father the Italian did not die for any romantic reason—rescuing Mum, or even holding his own in a fight. He was bitten on 134th Street by a vicious stray mutt, and the wound quickly became diseased. Fatally so. After the funeral, my mother decided that there were no new places she wanted to see terribly much without him.

  So Mum got back to work.

  Two weeks before the Raines law would go into effect, she was reekingly pregnant, and still more odoriferously poor. Two days before the Raines law would go into effect, my mum, as she was absolutely splendid at planning when not fried off her tits, marched into the newly renovated Step Right Inn on 107th Street and demanded a job. Seeing as she knew what the proprietor knew about the empty rooms’ future use.

  But no one else had yet been in the dire straits to say.

  I was born there with the assistance of two of my mum’s hooker friends. When I was still small enough to ask featherbrained questions, and demanded to know who my dad might be, I can still hear her replying, “He’s gone from us now, and there is nothing to be done about it anyway. Nobody . . . let it go.”

  Silly enough in retrospect, I’ll admit. But I thought she was saying my name.

  * * *

  —

  The first step on my journey to becoming a ruthless criminal happened on July 24, 1906, and wouldn’t have occurred at all if it hadn’t been so goddamned hot that day.

  Malevolent mists rose from 107th Street. Leek trimmings chucked from windows sizzled as they perished on the paving stones. Mustachioed men cursed, lifting the brims of bowlers to smear sweat from their swarthy brows. Skies positively leered with blue as birds swooned from fire escapes. Hard-faced women with fleshy elbows slapped their children for the fun of it, hissing, Bambino stupido! The very air was mean.

  And Mr. Mangiapane was meaner.

  At ten years old and living in a Raines law whorehouse—pardon, hotel—small acts of defiance were precious rubies in mine eyes, and nothing pleased me better than riling the proprietor of the Step Right Inn. He was a short, squat Sicilian who brought to mind a horse turd, and his name was Mr. Mangiapane.

  “Get her the hell out of here!” he spat at my mother, pointing a trembling sausage finger at me. “Get that nasty little rat of yours out of my saloon during business hours, or I will raise my cut!”

  Catrin sat at the oak bar, nursing her first beer of the day with decorous inattention. She adjusted the corset she wore under an open blouse that made her look like a creamy moth flitting about. Still funny, and still sanguine about her life despite the fact some would have found it positively heinous.

  I did. Which was the reason I enjoyed driving off her customers.

  “And what is it this time, Mr. Mangiapane, that has yer balls in such a tight knot?” she asked in her Welsh brogue.

  “Stupid bitch!” he squealed. “I send to you your first customer fifteen minutes ago, your disgusting creature offers to carry up his colazione, and five minutes later he is raging at me because the beautiful fried cutlet I sent had been replaced with a fried dishrag.”

  Mum giggled. “I’ve naught in the way of medals to award, but that were a bloody good one, my lovely.”

  My mother never minded my driving away loose-limbed, lantern-jawed suitors. Partly because hijinks amused her, and partly because she’d become one of the most popular ladybirds north of 90th Street. So there was jack to spend—we were always warm and always fed. I could attend desultory classes at the Catholic school up the street or play truant, just as I pleased. Meanwhile, the reason Mr. Mangiapane was so upset over a harmless prank was that he was awfully proud the Step Right Inn served actual food, food cooked by a Roman known only as Crispy Ezio. He could fry anything, and by God, did he take strange pleasure in the task. Ezio also happened to be fond of me, forever sneaking me fried whitefish and chucking me amiably on the jaw.

  And by the by, breaded and fried rags do indeed look identical to breaded and fried chicken. Bit tougher on the old nutcracker, however.

  “He was bad news anyway,” I scoffed. My only clothing that god-awful sweltering day was a cast-off shift so short that Mum had supplemented it with a pair of boys’ trousers, and I already felt as if I’d sweated out the entire Hudson. “It was counterfeit coin he tipped me with.”

  Their faces fell with the speed of meteors.

  “Get her out!” Mr. Mangiapane shrieked. “Out! Nobody is deadly luck!”

  Mr. Mangiapane called me Nobody because Mum sometimes did, and Mum did because I’d told her the story. It was a ridiculous nickname because I was so visible—laughing, hooting, racing, whistling. Still. The moniker began with love, as so many twisted things do. I think many a trouble begins with love, and it’s important to remember that when life feels like the shit scraped off Death’s boot sole.

  “Please calm yerself, Mr. Mangia—” Mum attempted, flying off her barstool.

  “Nobody even living under this roof is more than I care to bear! Ma vai a quel paese!”*

  He threw me out of the hotel as Mum stared in dismay. I sailed like a kite before gravity took me to task, my arm struck an empty tomato crate, and I nearly rolled into a bay-colored draft horse tethered outside.

  It hurt. My body and my pride. I lay there, wincing as blood bloomed. But by age ten, I’d decided the hell reserved for sissies was of the grimmest, so I lurched for the saloon’s door only to find that it had been locked.

  “Bastardo!” I raged.

  When I stumbled to the window, cupping my hands to peer in, Mr. Mangiapane and Catrin James were in a torrent of conversation, hands gesticulating like banners in a gale. All the blooms in Mum’s hothouse cheeks were pale with frost. Her boss resembled a dew-speckled red apple, i
f apples were capable of frothing rage.

  Disturbed, I stepped away, fingertips leaving tear tracks on the glass. I believed in omens—both good and bad. We all did in Little Italy. We lit our candles at Mass and wished on pennies in fountains. But there had been no portents of late. I’d spilled neither salt nor olive oil. Been careful to eat lentils at New Year’s.

  My guts quivered. Clearly, I’d miscalculated the import of bad currency.

  But how?

  Sun searing into my scalp, I surveyed my options. I could walk to the river to watch the giant vessels with their masts like spreading oaks, the squat steamers with their barnacle skins, the jolly tugs. Or I could steal cherries from Mr. Campo’s grocery, since he was foolish enough to situate their box on the street-corner side (I ask you). Maybe I could press my nose against the pawnshop windows over on Broadway, salivating over sparkles? A lonesome sniffle threatened when I struck upon richer ore.

  I’ll find my best friend, and we’ll visit the armies of the cats!

  So I set off in search of Nicolo Benenati with great gusto, after stopping to buy a cured-meat stick from the corner store.

  Next task was locating him. Nicolo wasn’t playing baseball with his cousins outside his apartment on 106th Street. Neither was he at his dad’s cigar shop beneath their home, though Mr. Benenati scraped my cheek with his wire-brush mustache and told me to inform his son that if he didn’t turn up to work his hours soon, he’d catch hell. He wasn’t tending his beloved tomato plants in the incinerated tenement death trap we loved so passionately.

  Sweat trickling down my sternum, I finally caught sight of Nicolo across the deafening river rush of Lexington Avenue. My closest friend stood at a pushcart buying pickles from one of the Yiddisher vendors. I slipped past drays drifting like so many lumbering barges, squeezed happily between a truck loaded with bricks and a wizened farmer delivering fresh-baked manure.

  “Alicia!” Nicolo exclaimed, giving my name four syllables as usual. His grin dimmed. “Jesus, topolina,* who the hell have you been boxing with this time?”

  Kicking the pavement, I shrugged, which was my form of bragging. Because I felt the usual indefinable surge of yes, you that I always did in Nicolo’s company.

  On the day everything changed, he was two years my elder, and therefore twelve. He wasn’t cleverer than all the other scamps bubbling out of the boiling vat called Harlem—but he was intensely focused. He wasn’t stronger either—but he was quick as a wasp. He wasn’t handsome—but he owned a striking hatchet face, a straight black hairline without a trace of peak, and a pair of weirdly slanting brows hitching a tent over his stake of a nose. And he was savagely dynamic. It didn’t matter a hatpin if Nicolo was rooting in his secret vegetable garden so he could bring Mrs. Benenati gifts she forever accused him of having stolen, or knocking a baseball through the window of a Broadway tenement, whooping with laughter as his gang took to their heels. Everything about him was honed to a sharper edge.

  As for me, I was simply different, and he liked that. No, I may not want to write this, but I owe it to my old friend: he loved it. Love in the fire-gutted sense of the word.

  Small wonder that I stood out from the other girls: I was a street brawler before I turned into Nobody. Like Nicolo, I was alone, as Mum had decided one pregnancy was quite enough, please pass the coffee. So there I was: half Welsh and half Italian, with chocolate eyes and wispy blond hair. Is it any wonder that I was often, shall we say, accosted? Everybody wanted the spare dough I cadged out of my generous and forgetful parent. Neither of we Jameses had ropes of pearls, but when we actually wanted something, it was ours for the purchasing. And we wanted so little to be happy—or Mum did, and I knew no better. Witness! Hot chestnuts, juicy oysters, sticky lemon drops, the amaro she had grown to love. When the local delinquents tried to take my coin, I fought like a wet cat, twisting, biting, clawing.

  And usually winning.

  “I boxed with Mr. Mangiapane,” I answered when Nicolo pressed me.

  “No kidding!” he exclaimed. “Taken to bearbaiting?”

  Considering whether to tell my friend about the counterfeit coin, I hesitated. “He thought the breakfast I delivered to a guest upstairs wasn’t funny.”

  Nicolo’s brows twitched. “And?”

  “Replacing a fried cutlet with a fried dishrag was plenty funny.”

  Nicolo roared with laughter, canine face tipped to the simmering skies. “Did he try to beat you?”

  “Nah, not him. He chucked me out and I made speed.”

  “But what will they do when you get back?”

  “Non mi interessa,” I answered—although in fact I did care, and was fretting over it dreadfully. “Where is everyone?”

  “What, Nazario, Renzo, Piero, those strapping young criminals? There’s supposed to be a new cockfighting ring on Lenox and they wanted to find it.” Nicolo shrugged. “I have to go to work anyhow, so—”

  “No! No, the cats!” I cried. “We must visit the armies! Viva i gatti, viva!”

  “But yesterday I didn’t set foot in the shop, and—”

  “You can make up the time. Today’s only Tuesday. Please?”

  Nicolo’s father was a gentle fellow and a generous employer. And getting what I wanted from Nicolo with please, in those days, was like wishing on a genie’s lamp.

  So he yowled like a tom. “Viva i gatti! Chi i gatti vivere per sempre!”

  Off we strode, munching pickles. The cat armies waged war in one of the many empty city blocks to the west, between 109th and 110th streets, just south of Morningside Park. We trudged up the hill, grasses tickling our knees, until we were at the scoop in the earth where the sheltering stones made fortresses for our troops.

  Here the boulders punched through the earth, and everywhere—in grass, under rock, and up oak—the feral cat community dozed. A one-eared tortoiseshell we called Umberto glowered happily at us from his stone perch. Sherbet, the orange tabby, rolled to soak up more sun. One ever-so-filthy specimen called Attila self-administered a futile bath. There were dozens of them, and the cat armies made joyful marching songs play in our hearts.

  “Damn it,” Nicolo lamented, “we didn’t stop to—”

  “Nessun problema. Come on, Nicolo, as if I’d forget the start signal.” I produced the dried sausage, broke it in two, and raised my half like a battle standard.

  It remains one of my happiest memories. Despite its overture, and its finale.

  “Ready the troops!” I cried.

  “Load the muskets!” Nicolo shouted.

  “Feed the horses!”

  “Clean the cannonballs!”

  “Polish the buttons!”

  “Dry the socks!”

  “Ready . . . aim . . . fire!”

  As the two chunks of meat soared, we settled in to watch the heady pageantry of some threescore cats fighting over salsiccia. A chorus of hissing, growling, and shrieking commenced.

  “Go, Napoleon, go!”

  “Lucrezia, puttana, get him, get him, get him!”

  We didn’t hear the footsteps behind us. Weren’t even listening for them. A shiver still goes down my spine when I remember the high giggle.

  We turned around.

  Dario Palma waved. Smiled in his brutal manner, showing crooked teeth. “Nicolo, glad to finally catch you. There’s business to discuss. Alice, you’re unnecessary. Goodbye.”

  Dario spat. Every passing day, he seemed more ape than man. Long arms trailing knuckles through the streets, scruff sprouting from his chin. With Dario were the other two neighborhood psychopaths, Doctor Vinnie and Cleto the Crow. Doctor Vinnie liked to catch mice and blind them with an ice pick before setting them loose in the pen where his dog, Caesar, was chained. Cleto the Crow gained his moniker from empty, staring black eyes. All three were fourteen. It was usually easy enough to avoid them—plunge into a crowd, slide into an
alleyway, slip through a bodega.

  We had no such options in upper Manhattan’s woodlands. A tingling in my fingers told me to curl them into weapons even as a tremor in my knees told me to run.

  Nicolo, always so suave, tensed. “Come on, Alicia, I have to be at the shop.”

  Vinnie and Cleto fanned out.

  Dario giggled again, an unnaturally sharp sound. It ought to have slit his throat. “You’re not going anywhere until you settle up. You owe us a dime, Benenati. Like I told you. We know that your old man pays you these days.”

  “He pays me chicken feed.”

  “Listen, we’ve had this conversation. The likes of us patrol your street, and the likes of you pays a small fee. You’re grateful for our protection, yeah?”

  “We protect you,” Vinnie emphasized.

  “We protect you plenty,” Cleto parroted idiotically.

  “Never asked for that, did I?”

  “It would hurt me to think you were ungrateful, Benenati. I have a tender heart,” Dario sneered.

  “You’ll have a tender face after I beat the shit out of it.”

  His lip spasmed into a fishhook. “Pay up, or we’re learning you a lesson, cazzo.”

  “Leave him alone,” I growled.

  “Alicia, you keep out of this,” Nicolo ordered.

  “Why? Come to think of it, she can pay up too,” Dario decided with dark glee. “Give me a kiss, Alice. Make it good enough, and I won’t charge you again for, say, a month?”

  “All right then, you stupid peasant,” Nicolo snapped, widening his feet. “Better make it count. You’ll only have the one chance.”

  Before I knew what was coming, Cleto the Crow had swooped down with his dead eyes and tossed me aside. I heard through the broken bells in my ears shouts in Italian and English, the crushed-cabbage thudding of fists. Scrambling up, I threw myself at the maelstrom. Again and again I launched my body and was repelled, and again and again Nicolo dodged, darted, head sunk like an ox as he landed clever hornet stings on the bigger boys.