Westside Lights, page 2
It had been twenty years since the lights went out on the Westside. I was just a child, and I remember the terror of light bulbs bursting in their sockets, of gas jets spitting uncontrollable fire. For most of my life, the nights had been lit by moonlight, candle, or nothing at all. Occasionally, scientists, hucksters, true believers, and outright lunatics had tried to bring electricity or something like it to our deadly streets. Their efforts had earned them nothing but humiliation, bankruptcy, and disfiguring burns.
But Professor Bourget had turned on the light.
The crowd screamed—a cry of the purest relief. They screamed because they had waited so long for light, they’d forgotten how badly they missed it. They screamed not because they were happy but from the sudden absence of pain. It is possible that I was screaming too.
The light grew brighter. The abandoned structures that ringed Spring Square—a sailor’s hotel, a spice warehouse, a parochial school, a factory whose facade advertised “It Is Great! Pride of the Farm! Tomato Catsup!”—were so fiercely lit that I saw every missing brick, every nick in the iron. Look closely, and you could tell the light was flickering, but let your eyes rest, and it was the purest glow you’d ever seen. Bourget threw up her hands and, after quite some time, the crowd quieted enough for her to speak. She yelled now, loud enough that even over the wind, I could make out every word.
“How do you like it?” she cried. “How about more?”
A roar from the crowd. She clapped her hands and, up and down West Street, Peacekeepers tore away the wrapping on the other Devices. They jammed in the crystals and spun the cranks and stepped back sweating as the lights whirred to life and the crowd grew louder still. This time it took much longer for the roar to die.
“This is just the start, folks. I made this light at my factory, just a few blocks south of here, and I plan to make a whole lot more. Lights big enough to tear a hole in the night sky, but small enough to put on your dinner table. You’re never gonna eat in the dark again.”
At that, her audience screamed so loud, nothing could have shut them up. People surged toward the Device, wanting to get a hand on it, forcing the Peacekeepers to fight them off with fist and boot and club. Eventually, the crowd dispersed to toast to the brilliance of Professor Bourget. Only a few stayed behind, entranced by the spinning machine, the light that had not been there before. I was among them. The tall woman who’d given me the champagne was as well.
“You got your column?” I asked her.
“And a whole lot more. This neighborhood has seized my interest. Anything left in that bottle?”
“A bit.”
She snatched it back, drained it, and smashed it on the ground with a magnificent belch. She walked away and, to my surprise, I followed. As I would soon understand, she was even harder to ignore than Bourget’s lights.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Gilda Carr.”
“Marka Watson. You know my work?”
“No.”
“Good. When it comes to serious drinking, there’s no one worse than a fan. Let’s find some oysters and more champagne. Light has come to the Westside, and we shall not sleep tonight.”
I thought she was joking. I quickly learned Marka meant everything she said. I don’t know where she got the oysters, but they were electric. I don’t know how she found champagne, but it was as cold as the light outside. I ran out of conversation before the bottle was dry, but Marka had enough for both of us. She was a theater critic, a journalist, a poet, an essayist, a wit. Among the overeducated, she informed me, she was quite famous. I let her know I didn’t care, and she was smitten. That night, at least, when her opinions seemed daring and her jokes were fresh, I didn’t mind acting as her audience. She should have irritated me, but the light and champagne had me dizzy, and her charm was irresistible—like an artillery barrage.
We drank until dawn, stopping only because Marka’s wallet was empty and the bartenders did not yet know her well enough to extend credit and I certainly wasn’t buying. When we emerged onto Spring Square, Bourget’s lights had been turned off. Marka tripped over a loose paving stone and fell into the dirt, which was littered with broken glass burned orange by the rising sun. She hadn’t seemed drunk until now.
“Lord, this place is ugly in the morning,” she said. “How do you stand it?”
“This time of day, I tend to be asleep.”
“We’ll break that habit. Do you mind if I use that line of yours, about the testicle, in this week’s column?”
“So long as you promise not to use my name.”
“Modesty! Amazing. I thought it was dead. My editor’s a puritan, anyway, he won’t print it, but it will be a pleasure to make him blush.”
I helped her up. She slumped against my shoulder. We cut an uncertain path across Spring Square. When our weaving brought us to the base of the great lamp, we brushed our hands across its iron. It was too cold to touch.
“Gilda, darling,” she said, “how on earth am I getting home?”
“I happen to know a man with a stolen boat.”
And that is how the Misery Queen found her first passenger. There would be dozens more, but she was the one who mattered. Van Alen and Roebling had established the tenderloin, but Marka was the one who dubbed it the White Lights District, and she was the one who put it on the map, churning out column after column to tempt Eastsiders with holes in their souls and money to waste to walk overland from the fence or sail around the Battery for a taste of glorious squalor. Marka spent weeks at a time in the Huntington, a ramshackle old hotel not far from Spring Square, attended to by a clan of artists, critics, and hangers-on. On the nights they missed the comfort of their penthouses, Cherub and I sailed them home. The rest of the time, we drank at their side.
They were beautiful. They dressed well, spoke brilliantly, and spent money like they were allergic to it. To them, we were curiosities: real-life Westsiders kept around because we knew every bartender and because our presence kept them from feeling phony. They paid us in flattery and truly embarrassing amounts of cash, which was enough for Cherub but hardly satisfied me.
I don’t know why I stuck around. At first they were amusing, but I can spend only so much time laughing at other people’s jokes before my face gets sore. They were unapologetically happy, and I studied them to try to understand how I could be, too. When that failed, I found comfort being around people who didn’t care if I was silent and whose gay squawking drowned out my private worry that happiness didn’t fit me at all.
And so we vaulted from 1922 to ’23. The roots of the District sank deeper. Bourget Devices proliferated along the waterfront, spinning out crystalline light that made all of us look paler, thinner, and more perfect than we could ever be in the day. A portable unit found a home on the deck of the Misery Queen, presented by Marka to light our way across the river in the predawn. Somewhere in there I turned twenty-nine, and realized I was probably as close to maturity as I would ever get. On our boat, Cherub and I were as perfect as a rhyming couplet. Onshore, everything was rotten, but not quite bad enough to flee. Everywhere I turned, I saw my grinning friends.
They seemed immortal.
Death was nearer than we knew.
Two
Soon after the disappearance of Grover Hartley, Cherub and I were out with Marka and her clique, slurping warm ale in a furrier’s warehouse that had been converted to a pool hall. Towering windows gave a view of the Hudson, which looked as clean and cold as the day it had been sliced into the earth, but the air in the bar was thick with sawdust and every surface gleamed with sweat. It was lunchtime. My head felt like I’d slept on a nail.
Cherub was playing pool with Lisbeth Frasier, a screeching heiress whose increasingly popular poetry was, Marka assured me, “strictly steerage.” She’d given Cherub ten dollars to bet on their game and had spent all night winning it back. It wasn’t hard to do. He played with the same frenzied enthusiasm with which he made love and had not yet realized that what works in the bedroom is death in the pool hall. Between shots, he wound his way through a story that had become legend among Marka and her friends: the tale of the night he stole the Misery Queen.
“It was well past midnight, that sweet spot in the evening when the drunks are dozing but the fish market hasn’t woken up. There was no moon—I made sure of that—and it was so dark I could barely see my hands as I swam up to the pier. I slipped out of the water, quiet as you like, onto the deck of the ship that had stolen my heart. My breath caught as I heard movement in the cabin. I was not alone.”
He went on through the epic fistfight that won him the boat, a battle with an East River giant who got more Bunyanesque with every telling. I happened to know the truth of the story—that he’d bribed a guard at a marina while the ship’s owners were at Newport and simply sailed the trim little sloop away—but there was no sense ruining his fun. I was deep into a fantasy of my own. I had an audience of one: the playwright Stuyvesant Wells, one of Marka’s nearest and dearest, whose high hairline, soft cheeks, and dead eyes made him look like a potato that had been left out in the rain. He was gin-sleepy and barely listening. I did not mind.
“It would be a hell of a case,” I said, “finding a missing bird.”
“Shame you can’t fly.”
“Flying’s overrated. I could run the whole thing from the ground. I’ve been studying the birds on Spring Square, getting to know their habits. I haven’t seen her. I need to go deeper.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll start by crashing an ornithology lecture at City College. Corner the professor and force him to tell me everything he knows about gulls. Once I have a handle on their diet and migratory patterns, I’ll divide the District into zones, ten feet square, and chart out their nesting grounds, feeding grounds, spawning grounds—”
“Dying grounds?”
“Those too. And then I’ll build a trap. Something clever, something that a two-legged bird can wriggle out of, but that would hold a one-legged gull fast.”
“Sounds like a job for the esteemed Professor Bourget.”
“I don’t employ subcontractors. I’ll find that bird myself.”
“It’ll be an awful lot of work.”
“Yes. Yes indeed.”
My fantasy dissolved like river foam. I rubbed my jaw, which had been hurting more and more lately. I looked down at the bar and found I’d been tracing a figure in the sawdust—a crude drawing of a lovely bird. The weight that had rested on my stomach since Grover’s disappearance grew a little heavier. I swept the sawdust onto the floor and choked down another mouthful of warm beer. Across the room, Lisbeth and Marka roared with laughter as Cherub missed another shot.
“Why not take it to the authorities?” said Stuy, with his eyes fully shut.
“The police wouldn’t care.”
“Nor should they. But there must be someone in this strange place with power over the birds.”
He smiled as his head rolled back. Perhaps, like Cherub, he dreamed of soaring through the sky. He was right, of course. There was one person in this city whose power over earth, surf, dirt, and sky was unmatched. His name was Glen-Richard Van Alen, and he was far away, secluded in his fortress at the far end of the Upper Westside. But here in the District, his power was held by Ida Greene. If my accounting was correct—and I will be honest, it very rarely was—she was in my debt. I had fought at her side; I had saved the Lower West on her behalf. It was the least she could do, I thought, to task a few lackeys with the recovery of my bird.
I plucked Stuy’s drink from his hands before it spilled and sipped it as I swept toward the door. Marka glanced at me but did not get up. Cherub waved his cue, concern on his face. I raised my glass and smiled, as big as I could manage, and he returned to losing the game.
After the stale air of the pool hall, I was revived by the breeze blowing along the Boardwalk—an almost sturdy structure, built atop the remains of West Street, that ran the length of the District, from Morton Creek to Canal. I walked fast, putting warmth in my legs and purpose in my stride. The District’s northern end was a little strip of hell. The buildings were hastily converted factories, like the pool room, or outright shanties built from whatever garbage the Hudson coughed up. In them you could purchase oily liquor at a nickel a shot, a fixed price that attracted thirsty Eastsiders by the hundreds. Behind the saloons were brothels, gambling halls, and drug dens that operated with the same brutal efficiency. For those who had nowhere else to go, it was a last shot at living. For Marka and her followers, it was the greatest show in town.
Closer to Houston, the District put on airs. Piers 34 through 38 had been rebuilt to receive yachts and improvised Eastside ferries, like the Queen, which brought wealthy slummers, bourgeois climbers, and anyone else with a few dollars to lose. To better part them from their money, the Roebling Company was experimenting with something unprecedented: quality. Here the liquor was aged—or at least dyed brown—and the bars had been sanded and stained. The hypodermic needles were clean and, if you believed the advertising, the women were too. Look closely and it was still hell, but much better dressed.
None of it interested me. Liquor is liquor, and I’d take mine however it made its way into my glass. But I wasn’t bitter enough to refuse the breeze off the river, the creak of the Boardwalk, the stink of fried fish, the music that roared out of every window. Lose the people, I thought, and the District wouldn’t be half bad.
The Boardwalk led me to Spring Square, the District’s bloody heart, where men in wrinkled tuxedos slept off last night’s drunk in the shade cast by Professor Bourget’s unlit lamp. I passed the Casino, the Huntington, and a few boardinghouses whose fresh paint and luxe names couldn’t conceal that eighteen months prior, they had been empty industrial shells.
On the far side of the square, I arrived at St. Abban’s, Van Alen’s local headquarters, an abandoned schoolhouse where the smack of rulers still echoed through the air. During the early days of the District, this jumble of Gothic arches and medieval turrets had been proposed as a site for the Casino, but Van Alen felt it inappropriate to profane what had once been a respectable Catholic school and instructed his people to make offices of it instead. Swilling booze in a parochial building was blasphemy, but using it to organize an empire of sin was simply good business. The rainbow guardsmen had their barracks here, and there were outposts of the various charitable enterprises that Ida Greene used to put a pretty face on Van Alen’s empire, but my business was on the second floor, where the ledgers were kept and policy was made.
I climbed the sweeping stone steps and was reaching for the door when it swung open, nearly bashing me in the skull. Out bounded Oliver Lee, looking immaculate, like he’d never been tired in his entire life. If it weren’t for a gray smudge on his left cuff, I might have mistaken him for a god.
“It must be nice,” I said, “charging through life like there’s never anyone on the other side of the door.”
“A terrible habit. Are you okay?”
“Tolerable.”
“Will you be out tonight with Marka and her crowd?”
“Probably.”
“Where are they starting? I’d love to tag along.”
Every time I saw Lee, which was more often than I cared to, he invited himself out for drinks. I had no idea why. I usually managed to dodge the request, but once I’d slipped up and told him where he’d find us that evening. Marka spent the entire night making cracks about my wardrobe—“You’re so clever, Gilda, always wearing black. It very nearly hides the stains.” Lee would not be welcome again. She loved it when criminals dropped by her table, but only when it was her idea.
“You’re too good for them,” I said. As the words came out of my mouth, I was surprised to find I actually thought they were true.
“Nonsense. I don’t write, I don’t dance, I don’t—”
“But you work. It must be an immense effort, coordinating the Roeblings and Van Alen, keeping everyone happy, keeping the drugs flowing and the lights spinning and the party going on and on. You do it all, hours and hours a day, and your collar never loses its starch. Why waste time on Marka and her friends?”
He used a well-trimmed thumbnail to scratch his brow.
“They’re like no one I’ve ever known,” he said. “Life is so easy for them. I guess . . . I just want to understand.”
I wanted to tell him to go home to his family, to forget the lights of the District and take solace in sleep, the greatest narcotic of all. But I could hardly give advice that I wouldn’t follow myself.
“I don’t know what Marka’s plan is tonight,” I said. “But if I see you, I suppose I could permit you to buy us a round.”
Marka would crucify me for that. Perhaps I’d take the opportunity to tell her to go to hell. Perhaps, more likely, I would endure the humiliation in silence. After all, I was supposed to be retired.
Lee smiled. If I weren’t so thoroughly hungover, I might have been charmed.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. “What brings you to St. Abban’s?”
“I’m wanted in the principal’s office.”
“That’s what you get for cutting class.” A look of brotherly concern crossed his face. “Quite seriously though, Miss Carr, if you ever have any trouble with the Van Alen crowd, remember the Roebling Company is your friend.”
Friends with the Roebling Company. It was not a comforting thought. And I wasn’t quite sure I believed it.
He held the door open. I stepped into a musty hallway whose only light came from a pane of stained glass that showed a bearded man hip deep in a river, blessing the waters with his hands. I set my glass on the runner—no sense staining the wood—and proceeded up the creaking stairs.
My step slowed as it occurred to me that I had never handed a case over to the authorities before. Murder, arson, burglary, kidnapping—those I would toss aside at the first opportunity, but I had always kept the truly tiny mysteries to myself. The best of them, the ones intricate enough to hold my attention for weeks, so unimportant that no one would steal them—they were rare, and well worth hoarding. The disappearance of Grover Hartley had the makings of a classic, and I was about to throw it away.
