Westside, page 24
Virgil slipped his hand into mine, and squeezed. I did not pull away.
Fifteen
I found Juliette in Turtle Bay, waiting across from the apartment that was not really hers. She stared as I approached, not waving and not smiling, like I was long overdue.
“I said I was going home for the night,” she said. “It isn’t my home.”
“No, it’s not. I suppose I should introduce—”
“Virgil Carr. We’ve met before—on Christmas, a long time ago.”
“You’re Galen Copeland’s girl.”
“Not quite.”
“How did you work it out?” I asked.
“I took my time walking home. By the time I got here, it was dawn, and Papa—my dead papa—was leaving for work, walking alongside a woman who looked rather a lot like me.”
“Are you all right?”
“My nerves are singing. To see him like that, so full of life. It was simply . . .”
“I know.”
“Have you any idea how to get us home?”
“I’ve almost got that figured out,” I lied. In that moment, I didn’t care about escaping this terribly pleasant city. I just wanted to stop the bleeding. “Until then, you can’t spend the whole day sitting on this stoop.”
“Truly, I am fine.”
“You deserve a few hours’ sleep. Virgil, what would Mary say if Juliette appeared at the house and said you had sent her?”
“She wouldn’t say a thing,” said Virgil. “She would fix you breakfast, draw you a bath, and have you tucked into a warm bed before you had a chance to thank her.”
“That sounds,” said Juliette, “like heaven.”
We gave her directions, and Virgil handed her his spare key. She would enjoy a taste of heaven, while we rode north to hell.
We were far enough uptown that the city was quiet, and the sky seemed bigger than was sane. The tenement on 172nd Street was in better shape than when I had seen it last. The stoop was stained, but not filthy. The windows were grimy, but unbroken. A brick propped open the front door. I followed Virgil up the stairs.
The apartment on the top floor was locked. I didn’t bother knocking. I opened my burglar’s kit and went to work. Virgil stopped me with a rough, heavy hand.
“My daughter is no housebreaker,” he said.
“I’m not your daughter.”
He reached for his skeleton key. Before he could get it, I opened the door. Virgil tried not to look impressed.
“How are you sure it’s this apartment?”
“I see one rather persuasive clue.”
In the corner of the immaculate room, a bundle of bones sat wrapped in a rocking chair, staring out the window at the early morning sky.
“Mr. Van Alen,” said Virgil, sweeping his hat off his head. “I haven’t seen him since I was a boy.”
“He was bigger then?”
“Like an oak. A drunk, savage oak.”
Virgil knelt in front of Van Alen’s father and failed to catch his eye. I leaned by the window, pistol at my side, and waited for the lady of the house to come home.
“For god’s sake, Gilda, put that gun away.”
“You don’t think we’ll need it?”
“I’ve known these people since I was a child.”
“And now you’ve come to arrest their son.”
“Put it away, or I’ll have you wait in the street.”
“You can’t tell me where to go.” I tried to say it like I was an adult, not a brat pitching a tantrum. It didn’t quite work. Virgil stared me down, and the gun went back in the bag.
When the door opened, Mrs. Van Alen withheld her surprise. She set a bag of groceries on the table and hung her hat by the door. Without turning, she said, “Clubber Carr, you beast, what are you doing in my home?”
“We’re looking for your son,” I said.
“He hasn’t lived here for years.”
“He doesn’t visit?”
“Why should he? A grown man cannot be expected to pay such respect to his parents. Especially a great businessman like my son.”
“Please, Mrs. Van Alen,” said Virgil. “We don’t want to hurt him. We just want to talk.”
“Every few weeks, the police come to our door. They barge in. They scuff the floors and upset the furniture. They always come asking the same question—where is Firecracker? And they never believe me when I tell them that I don’t know. If I knew, he wouldn’t be safe. If I knew, I wouldn’t be safe. Now get out, before I call the Sentinel and let them know that the police are so incompetent, they’ve resorted to housebreaking.”
The click of the pistol echoed through the room like distant thunder. It attracted their attention. I nuzzled the barrel through the carefully combed remains of Mr. Van Alen’s hair. Mrs. Van Alen leaned on the stove. Her hand crept toward a knife.
“No, Mrs. Van Alen,” I said. “Don’t bother. This is the end of the conversation.” She let the knife go. “Perhaps you don’t know where your son lays his evil head. Perhaps he does not call as often as you’d like. But you must have some way of contacting him, in case of catastrophe—such as two detectives breaking into your home and threatening your husband’s life.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I pushed the muzzle into the old man’s head.
“Fine—there’s a grocer on the corner. The owner is one of my son’s . . . he calls them lieutenants. He can get him a message.”
“Go now.”
“It will take him an hour to get here.”
“I can hold this gun all day.”
“You are a devil.”
I nodded. She left. I watched out the window and saw her walk to the grocery, looking not quite as proud as she had a few minutes before. I looked back, and Virgil stared with sad eyes.
“You can put that gun down.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You handle it pretty easily for a girl who hates pistols.”
“I’ve grown accustomed to it.”
“When we bring Glen-Richard in, your case is finished?”
“Nearly.”
“I don’t think you should go back to the other side.”
“Virgil.”
“It’s no joke, Gilda. It sounds like . . . the way you’ve described that place, it sounds like hell on earth. It’s made you hard, harder than you need to be. A girl your age shouldn’t do work like this. She shouldn’t be so easy with a lockpick, with a gun.”
“You should see me with a broken bottle.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not. And it doesn’t change the fact that the Westside is my home.”
“People leave home. You told me . . . you said your house is gone. Your Hellida is gone. Your Mary. Why go back there?”
“Because I don’t belong here.”
“You could. Your mother—Mary and I. We’d like nothing more than to have you stay. It would . . . to let you go back, if we can even find a way to get you back, it would be like turning our backs on a miracle. If—”
The door opened. Mrs. Van Alen was home. I picked the gun up and pressed it against her husband’s head.
“You sent the message?” I said.
“I told him there were rats in the apartment, that he should come stomp ’em out. He’ll understand.”
My palm sweated, and my arm grew tired. She fidgeted at her table, trying to read the newspaper, interrupting herself every few seconds to glare at the demon who had invaded her home. Finally, the silence defeated her. She stomped to the stove, grabbed the kettle, and filled it with water.
“I trust you can drink tea and hold a gun at the same time?” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I hope it burns straight through your throat. You raise this girl, Clubber? You raise her to behave like this?”
“I didn’t.”
“You should both be ashamed.”
The tea was the same noxious green that Firecracker had served me, just two nights before, in the top of his lighthouse. It didn’t smell any more appealing in this city than it had in mine. I set it on the bookshelf and watched the clock crawl around.
We felt Van Alen coming up the stairs before we heard him. The entire tenement shook, and Mrs. Van Alen closed her eyes in gratitude.
“My son well tear you limb from limb,” she said. “You will not live to see another day.”
The shaking stopped. From the hallway came heavy breathing, like a bull about to charge. The knob turned slowly, and the door crawled open. Glen-Richard Van Alen filled the doorway, a few hundred pounds of rage poured into a straining suit. When he saw Virgil at the table, his face broke into something that might be considered a smile.
“You ugly old son of a bitch,” he said. “The hell are you doing uptown?”
“Step inside,” I said. “Shut the door.”
Van Alen pulled a flask from his coat, emptied Virgil’s teacup, and poured him a drink. From across the room, which felt quite a bit smaller with Van Alen inside, I recognized the gasoline punch of Barbarossa’s special reserve.
“Drink, pixie?” he said, waving the flask at me. “I suppose not.”
“We’ve questions for you, Dick,” said Virgil.
“And who’s the insect? A cousin or something? Gods above, Clubber, she looks just like your Mary, or that girl of yours went under the truck a few years back.”
“Don’t bother trying to intimidate us, Mr. Van Alen,” I said. “I have seen the stills that brewed this horrible stuff. I have been fitted for a corset in Barbarossa’s secret storehouse. I know that Galen Copeland has been bringing you liquor from our city. I watched him die. But before he was blown to pieces on a Westside dock, Copeland made you rich, he made Barbarossa rich, and he kept a little bit for himself. So if I tell you that I know all of this, you will not lie when I ask you if you know where your liquor comes from.”
“A little town I hear they call New York City.”
“Yes, but a very different New York. A broken city, split down the middle and haunted by shadows that creep a little farther every time a shipment crosses the divide.”
“I should have known you were from the other side. That city breeds ’em crazy.”
“You did not cross over to kill Galen Copeland?”
“I’m no killer. I never crossed over at all.”
He laid his hands face up on the table, as if to show me that they were not stained by blood. They were large, but soft, their manicured fingernails unmarked by the Westside Van Alen’s ceaseless toil.
“Those are not a killer’s hands,” I said, “but they have counted money made from the blood of lesser men.”
“She may or may not be your daughter,” he said to Virgil, “but if that little bitch keeps mouthing off, I’ll snap every bone in her hand.”
“Please, Mr. Van Alen. I’m the one with the pistol.”
“It’ll take more than one bullet to bring me down.”
“But it would ruin your mother’s rug.” He laughed. His mother didn’t. “You’re buying liquor with guns?”
“I am.”
“I thought guns didn’t work on your Westside,” said Virgil.
“Those crafted where I come from rust to pieces,” I said. “But these are otherworldly and work just fine, apparently. Where do you get the weapons?”
“Bribe a guard at Governor’s Island,” said Van Alen. “Artillery isn’t quite so scarce in my city as it is in yours. But liquor is harder to get. Or it was. Now, I got crate after crate of bootleg hooch coming in, and the police can’t trace it, because the world it came from doesn’t even exist. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been a happy partnership for all concerned.”
“But yesterday, you failed to make your delivery.”
“You saw that, did you?” He stretched his arms out, and the joints in his elbows cracked like snapping branches.
“Your supply run short?”
“Only a hiccough. Guns are on their way. I don’t welch, you got that?”
“Who’s your buyer?”
“That sniveling detective you got over there. Thorne. A real laugh, seeing a cop so desperate to touch a gun.”
“Who else?”
“It’d been Copeland. I liked dealing with him. We’d been doing it, lord, a long time.”
“How long?”
“Close on twenty years.”
“1903?”
“Could be. First time he came over, I didn’t believe a word he was saying. Thought it was just old Galen, on a bender. But then he took me downtown, made me stand across the street and watch the real Copeland on his way into his offices, and that was when I knew we had something.”
“What did he bring you?”
“At first? Whatever he could steal. But every trip he made, things in your city and things in mine, they got a little more different, until what was easy to get in one place was scarce as hell in the others.”
“Like liquor.”
“That, eventually. But other things too. Like 1914—we had a blight knock out the whole apple crop upstate, and Galen made a fortune bringing over boat after boat, stacked to the waterline with Acey Macs, Cameos, and Ginger Golds.”
“That was the year my Westside went to hell. Three thousand one hundred and thirteen disappeared. For apples.”
“For money. Galen knew what he was about. I was sorry to hear he got finished off.”
“And who are you dealing with now?”
“You may as well put down that pistol, girl. Your arm is shaking.”
I parted his father’s hair with my gun. The barrel traced a bumpy course along the moles and liver spots above his ear. I tried my best to grin like a sadist.
“Goddamn it,” said Mrs. Van Alen and slapped her hand on the table.
“Why don’t you take a walk,” said Van Alen. The old woman didn’t move. She was nearly as big as her son, and twice as angry.
“I’m taking you down to Centre Street,” said Virgil.
“On what charges, precisely?”
“Smuggling. Bootlegging. Bashing a man’s head in with a car door—I’m sure there’s a charge in there somewhere.”
“And this scrawny, crazy-eyed mouse is your only witness. Tell me, kid, what do you say when the court asks your address? ‘Well, I come from New York, but not this New York. I’m kind of a traveler, come from another world. I’m a goddamned magician!’”
He seemed to think that was very funny. I was not convinced.
“Gilda’s got a message for you,” said Virgil. “You’re gonna listen, quiet and respectful, or I will make you regret it.”
“I’ve been bigger than you since we were six years old.”
“But you haven’t been fast enough to land a punch since we were ten.”
Van Alen stood, or tried. Before he was halfway up, Virgil reached over the table and slapped him across the cheek. The big man sat back, stunned, one cheek red from the blow, the other from embarrassment. I explained our position.
“Those guns are not going back to my city,” I said. “The town I come from is an ugly place, but I love it and I care for its people, and I am sick of watching them die.”
“I’m not afraid of any woman.”
“Then fear the cops.”
“When half of Centre Street is on my payroll?”
“Not the city cops,” said Virgil. “The Volstead boys. They’ve been hungry for you for a year now. It wouldn’t take more than a phone call for them to come down hard.”
“But you’ve got no proof!”
“When has that ever mattered? I could get an eviction notice on this door this afternoon,” said Virgil. “I could put your parents on the street. I could have them deported.”
That last word he said with great relish, stretching out the three syllables like he was savoring the last bites of a meal. By the time the sentence ended, Van Alen was broken.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I got other ways of making money. This whiskey tastes rancid, anyway. I’ll give back the liquor and keep my guns.”
“And you’re coming downtown.”
“Fine. If that’s what you need to feel like you’re still a real cop, do it. I’ll answer whatever questions you’ve got.”
I lowered the gun. My muscles burned. Across the room, Van Alen’s mother twitched with rage. Van Alen stood, his head brushing the decrepit chandelier that dangled unevenly above the table. He leaned over and gave his mother a hug.
“Turn around,” said Virgil, “and I’ll cuff you.”
As he turned, his mother smiled at me, a bitter little smile. The knife on the counter was gone.
Van Alen spun on his heels, and Virgil screamed my name. The sun splashed across the knife, blinding me just as the gun went off.
I hadn’t felt myself aim the gun. I hadn’t felt my finger pull the trigger. It was like it exploded in my hand.
Mrs. Van Alen howled like a gutted pig. Her husband didn’t move. Firecracker grew smaller with every breath, a punctured balloon deflating on its way back to earth.
A cockroach crawled down the wall. Van Alen’s eyes focused on it. Something came out of his mouth that was not quite a sound. He swayed slightly, then fell onto his mother’s table, shattering it into splinters.
He’d said one bullet couldn’t stop him. He’d been wrong.
The knife was buried in the floor. The man who looked so much like my father kicked it. The tip snapped off, and it skidded across the rug.
I dropped the gun. I looked away from the body, but I could not escape the odor of death in the air. I do not remember how I felt, my first victim at my feet. It would be some time before I felt anything at all.
“Goddamn, Gilda,” said Virgil.
I was looking for the words to apologize when Mrs. Van Alen reached for the broken knife. She charged at me like water from a burst dam. If the knife still had its tip, she would have buried it in my heart. Instead, she contented herself with cutting a long, deep groove down the side of my face.
More than anything, the sensation was surprising. It lanced through me with electric speed, so intense that I had to step away from it, to admire the heat of the blood pouring into my mouth and the blinding force of the pain.
She set the knife against my other cheek, intending to cut a matching scar. The blade was close enough to my nose that I could smell the onions she had cut the night before. My foot slipped, and she fell on top of me, the weight of her enough to push me across her husband’s lap, and halfway out the open window.
