Westside Lights, page 4
“Then what should I give them?”
“Plain spaghetti. Bits of fish. The things a bird should have.”
And then, as quickly as she had crashed down on me, Lady Birdlady left, striding down the Boardwalk, swinging her umbrella with all the ease of the cop on the beat.
I spent a few minutes breathing. When I tired of that, I slunk back to the vendor who’d sold me the sandwich. While she tended to her vat of spluttering clams, I snatched a bucket of fish guts from the back of the stand. I stashed them belowdecks on the Misery Queen. They stank like a plague victim. It had been months since I smelled anything so fine.
Three
As the sun set on that long, strange afternoon, I found myself pressed against the bow of the Misery Queen, fending off a portrait painter. Aside from Cherub, Eva Distler was the sole Black person allowed access to Marka’s inner circle. She wore a sleek yellow dress adorned with impractically long fringe and a ribbed white cap over tightly wrapped braids. Her hands were avian, every finger weighed down with gold, but they were stronger than they looked, and they had me in their grip.
“It’s an absolute sin that you’ve never had your portrait painted,” she said. “A girl with your coloring. I’ve seen white people and I’ve seen white people, but I’ve never met anyone quite as pale as you.”
She scraped a calloused thumb across my cheek.
“Like an old sheet, bleached and bleached and left for a year in the sun. Please let me paint you, Gilda dear. The world deserves to see what a real Westsider really looks like.”
“The world must do without. I’ve seen your portraits. Everyone you paint comes out looking like a corpse.”
“Everyone is a corpse. Some of us just don’t know it yet.”
I chuckled, because Marka’s people expected you to laugh at their epigrams. She did not let go. My cheeks grew sore.
Behind her on the flat stretch of boat we called the party deck, Marka and five immaculate Eastside wits huddled around a cabinet that held life vests, tin cups, dwindling bottles of liquor, and the portable Bourget Device. Although night was just upon us, the Device had been spinning for an hour or more, so that Marka could pour champagne precisely as she prepared her assault on the District. She drained her cup and sliced across the deck. When her flickering shadow fell across us, Eva backed away.
“Stop pestering the girl,” Marka told Eva. “Hers is a beauty that cannot be imprisoned on a canvas. And she’s right. You make everyone look like shit.”
“If you’re going to be nasty,” said Eva, “at least pour me another drink.”
“The good bottles are empty. It’s time to go ashore.”
Marka slid her arm into the crook of my elbow. Her skin was smooth and cold, like marble. Every time she touched me, I felt perfectly steady, as though the boat had stopped rocking and the world was still.
“And where shall we begin this evening’s debauch?” said Eva.
“I feel like dancing,” said Marka.
“The Casino?” suggested another of the gang, a hard-edged choreographer named Bess Barron whose only outfit, as far as I could tell, was a tuxedo she’d dyed crimson and recut to suit her long, slim frame.
“I want a band with a pulse,” Marka said. “What about that barge, the red one? Their band plays so loud I can hear it in my nightmares.”
“Screaming Minnie’s,” I said. “The one with the birds.”
“I can’t have them making a mess on my dress,” said Eva, but her eyes were downcast. Marka had made up her mind, and no power on earth could change it.
Marka clapped her hands. The group shifted. I hung back, watching my last sip of champagne tilt with the rocking of the boat. Marka snapped her fingers in front of my face.
“Asleep on your feet?”
“Just tired. Staying in tonight.”
“Speak English. ‘Tired’ is not a word I understand.”
“It’s a condition that occasionally afflicts mortal women. If it passes, I’ll meet you at Minnie’s. I want to make sure I have some fight left for the long weekend.”
She bent down to kiss my forehead. Her lips, as always, were cold. In a voice lower and softer than the one she used for marching orders, she said, “Get some rest. Tomorrow waits.”
Cherub popped his head up from below. His feet were bare and his chest was too, but he’d pulled out his old top hat and tried to hammer out the dents. No one at Minnie’s would look more elegant.
“Don’t tell me you’re hanging back, too,” said Marka.
“I don’t know,” said Cherub, looking at me. “Am I?”
“You got all dressed up,” I said. “Shame to waste it. Go on. I’ll catch up later.”
Placated, Marka glided down the gangway, moving steadily in heels so high they made me dizzy.
Cherub pulled on his boots, kissed me on the cheek, and whispered in my ear: “Any idea why our cabin smells all corpsey?”
“We gave up bathing over a year ago.”
“And? As far as I can tell, we smell better with every added layer of grime.”
I kissed him. I put everything I had into it, but I must have left something out, because when I was finished he asked me, “Something wrong?”
There was quite a bit I could tell him. Too much, in fact, and I was impatient to start my investigation. So I just said, “Go out. Have fun. I’ll see you soon.”
He squeezed my thigh and scurried to join the waiting crowd. As they chortled down the dock, I tried to settle into the silence. It was so strange being alone, even though it had been for so long my natural state. I flipped off the light and slipped below. I opened a cabinet, tossed aside a wad of uncommonly filthy sheets, and withdrew the bucket of fish scraps and my long, shapeless bag. For the first time in quite a while, I tasted adrenaline in my mouth. What I was doing wasn’t dangerous, but it was just a little bit wrong, and I found the fear of getting caught quite preferable to feeling nothing at all.
I brought the bucket up top, hitched it to a cleat, and let it dangle off the Queen’s prow. I slunk back to our airless cabin, stripped down to roughly nothing, and pressed up against the porthole, listening to the current’s wet slap. I rooted through my bag for something to eat and found nothing but a stale brown roll that was as brittle as slate. Even I wasn’t that desperate. I chucked it back in the bag and watched the bucket hang.
Gulls came, dozens of them. When one got close, I’d count its legs. Invariably, there were two. After swallowing my disappointment, I’d slam the porthole and yell, “That’s not your dinner!” until the offending bird went away. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if Grover Hartley appeared—grab her by the scruff and drag her into the boat?—but I needn’t have worried. Of all the gulls drawn by my stinking bucket of fish, she was not among them.
This was no tragedy. Finding her would have ended the case before it started. Approached with the correct level of carelessness, the search for Grover Hartley could carry me through the onset of autumn, when the yachts vanished and all but the most desperate gamblers and drunks deserted the District, when our breath steamed the glass of the Misery Queen and Cherub finally agreed to come home for the winter. I wanted my bird, but there was no reason to hurry.
I was into my second pleasantly boring hour when I spotted a woman peering through tortoiseshell glasses at the boats, a notebook in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other. Cornelia Prime had said that Ida Greene was away from St. Abban’s. I did not expect to find her here. She spent a long minute inspecting each ship, then clamped her holder between her teeth, scribbled something in her little book, and moved on. She wrote, naturally, with a Bishop’s Blue Streak. Unless she’d done something to offend Van Alen, I doubted she’d been demoted to the post of harbormaster, but what she was doing there, I could not say. It was a tiny mystery, yes, but not one I cared about. She did not seem interested in the birds.
After she returned to shore, I continued my vigil. Staring at a bucket of maggoty fish bits was drowsy work, and my eyes were beginning to get heavy when I heard the cockpit hatch slide open. I pulled the blanket over my chest.
“Cherub?”
“Not quite,” said Marka, chuckling as she ducked into the cabin. “Not used to seeing quite so much of Miss Gilda Carr.”
Her laughter put me on edge. There had been something noble, I thought, about the search for my missing pet, but under Marka’s cold gaze, my work felt pathetically small. I braced for some cutting remark. She sat on the edge of my bed, took my hand, and squeezed it tightly. The sudden intimacy was dizzying.
“Don’t tell me you’ve decided to call it a night,” I said, scrambling to remember how it was we spoke to each other. I must have gotten it right, because she took her hand away and put on her old bulletproof smile.
“Of course not. Screaming Minnie’s is amazing. The band plays loud enough to drown out the screeching of the birds, and they have warm towels at every table to wipe off the droppings.”
She brushed her shoulder, where her dress was marred by the faintest damp stain.
“So what could have possibly tempted you back here?” I said.
“Something had me tense.”
“What?”
“The thought of Gilda Carr with a dry throat.”
She nestled a nearly full bottle into the crook of my arm. It was faint pink, adorned with an image of a woman, straight-backed and naked, pulling the string of a golden bow.
“What is it?” I said.
“The good stuff. Something new. The boys are calling it Diana’s Fire.”
I cracked the seal and took a drink, scorching my throat and making my stomach lurch in a most pleasant way. It was like gin but, somehow, more so. I offered the bottle to Marka. She shook her head.
“I left a highball back at the bar. I can hear the ice melting—a sickening sound.”
But she did not go. She just stared down at me, a big sister noticing her sibling for the first time. I don’t think she’d ever been quiet that long.
“Are you well, girl?” she said.
“Well enough.”
“You look like an overexposed picture. I shouldn’t have interrupted you. You need the sleep. We all need the sleep. Let me fix your bed.”
She shoved her hands under my thin mattress and tugged the sheet tight. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do something for another person besides light a cigarette or pour a drink, and it occurred to me that our friendship might mean more to her than she let on.
Her fingers drummed on the bunk. For a moment, it looked like she might say something meaningful, but she spared us both.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “We sail an hour before dawn.”
“I thought you’d be at the Huntington for the holiday weekend.”
“I shall be—though I don’t intend to sleep much while I’m here—but Bess and Stuy want to watch sunrise on the river, and Cherub, the darling, is sailing us out. Would you like me to wake you for it?”
“I’ve seen sunrise before.”
“That’s what I told them—it’s just like sunset, only backward. Even so . . .”
She checked her face in her mirror. Once her smirk was firmly in place, she slouched out. I lay until the click of her heels faded. Then I kicked off the blanket and tried to fan the sweat off my chest before I resumed my watch. I took a deep drink, the first of many. Long before midnight, the bottle was mostly empty and I was fully asleep.
I dreamed of the subway. I was at Fourteenth Street, trying to go uptown, but every train I found was running the wrong way. The station corridors wound and dipped past platforms that had been walled off when the fence was built. I ran weightlessly. I was very late.
At last, a metal staircase led me to an unlit platform and a tunnel that carried me deep into the dark, at the end of which I found a woman’s rotting corpse, her hands clawed down to the bone.
The dream meant nothing—I had endured it many times before—but that night it came with a coda: the ivory hands of Marka Watson, plunging from the dark like vengeful spirits. They squeezed the sheets around my chest, pulling them tighter and tighter until—
Thunk.
The sound woke me slowly. My eyes were weighed down by liquor, and it took a long time to wrench them open.
Thunk.
I squeezed my temples. The stink of fish was worse than ever. My stomach lurched with the ship.
I got onto my elbows. Out the porthole I saw the inky silhouette of the deep Westside. There was no wind. There was no rain. There were no human sounds.
But if I was alone, why the hell was the ship so far from shore?
“Baby?” I shouted. “Cherub?”
Thunk.
I lay for a minute or two, trying to find an excuse to close my eyes and go back to sleep. Whatever was happening, surely it could wait an hour or ten. But no matter how tightly I closed my eyes, sleep could not be recaptured. Curiosity would not let me rest.
I stepped out of the bunk and fell hard as the ship thunked viciously to port. I’d never felt the Queen so unsteady. It was as if no one were sailing her at all.
It was possible that I was alone on the boat. Cherub was an enthusiastic sailor, but he’d never been trained. His knots were improvised affairs, and it was easy to imagine that one had slipped loose and let the Hudson carry the Queen away.
I braced my hand against the cabin’s cool, smooth wood. Any other night when I’d woken, drunk or hungover or caught between the two, the touch of that wood had put me back in my bedroom at Washington Square. Tonight, it was nothing but a dead tree, and I was a woman who was very far from home.
I pulled my dress off the floor and, as I struggled into it, I discovered my hands were shaking. Perhaps it was a side effect of Marka’s new liquor. Perhaps it was simple fear.
I unlatched the galley door. It swung open and thudded against the wall. The galley was pitch dark, but that was not unusual. It should not have bothered me, but I had the feeling of being deep underwater, and every step felt like I was sinking a little more.
The floor was heaped with mess, just as it always was. I kept my feet flat on the wood, easing them forward, strangely afraid of the embarrassment that would come if I tripped and fell.
Again, I called Cherub’s name. Again, no answer but—
Thunk.
The hatch to the cockpit was open. Through it I looked up to the black, blank sky. There had been a moon when I’d fallen asleep, but it had been swallowed by the clouds.
I tried to call out again, but Cherub’s name stuck in my throat. Above my head, something skidded across the deck. It could have been footsteps. It could have been, well, I simply couldn’t say.
I took hold of the rails and was about to climb when the ship pitched forward. An object clattered down the steps. Something so small that it took me a moment to find it among the debris, and even longer to work out what it was.
It was yellow, pointed, and slick with blood.
A tooth.
Thunk.
“Who’s up there?” I called, fighting to contain the tremor in my voice. “There must be someone up there. Teeth don’t just fall out on their own. There must be someone, and this is my goddamned boat, and . . .”
I trailed off, feeling foolish. Not even the wind replied.
I squeezed the tooth. It dug into my palm, hurting just enough to keep me from losing my head.
I was alone on the ship, I told myself, alone on the Hudson, and something had happened, something quite bad, but I was alone. Whatever it was, it was over now, and I was alone.
Thunk.
Or was I?
I dropped the tooth. It landed on the wood, the smallest possible sound.
There was nothing to do but go up the stairs.
I gripped the railings and hurled myself into the cockpit. I nearly slipped. In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t. There was quite a lot of blood.
I must have said something. I’m sure it was quite clever—“Dear god,” perhaps, or that old standby “No no no.” Or maybe my mouth just hung open as my eyes took in the scene. It didn’t really matter. There were certain sights for which no reaction was appropriate, for which there was nothing we could do but fight to keep our eyes from closing.
Gore streaked every inch of the cockpit. There was blood on the tiller, on the canopy, the seats, the wood, on every length of rope, on the sails that flapped uselessly in the wind. I tried to focus on the rare patches that had been spared, which showed so white they were almost blinding, but there were not enough to distract me from what had to be seen.
The bench beside the wheel. The little bench where Cherub used to stretch out, where I occasionally dozed, where Grover Hartley liked to defecate. There was something on the bench.
Two somethings, in fact.
Bodies.
They were wrapped so tightly around each other, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The things that used to be their faces were obscured by the things that used to be their arms. Most of their skin had been peeled away, leaving dripping muscle and spilled organs and cracked bones. Their clothes were gone, too, save for some shredded fabric that clung to their hips and legs. By the red trousers with the thin satin stripe, I recognized Bess Barron. By the fringe on the yellow dress, I knew I had found Eva Distler.
Their bodies. My friends.
Trying to steady myself, I took a deep breath. It was a mistake. The smell jolted through me, twisting my stomach into a knot. A bucket of rotten fish I could abide, but this was simply too much.
The ship lurched again. My stomach did, too. I fell to my knees and emptied it across the cockpit. The sweet stench of liquor and hot bile cut through the funk of death but did not really improve matters. My hands splayed open against the wood and were instantly dyed red.
Such things are not possible, I thought. Such horror cannot be real.
But these things do happen. Moments of true, blistering horror that the polite newspapers bury on page twelve and the Police Gazette splashes across the cover. Families burn, babies fall, old men slip on the elevated platform and are thrashed to death. Sometimes there is a survivor—the boy sent out for milk before the start of the tragic fire, the mother of the dead child—and you cluck your tongue and think, That poor creature. Wouldn’t they be better off dead?
