Kaleidoscope Page 5

  It was time to show or fold.

  The Hotel Milner was on Seventh, just off Vine. What could he do to improve the odds between now and five o’clock? First thing, was to clean up. Jack’s feet were still damp inside his socks, his woolen trousers clung to his calves, and his shirt was rank. He couldn’t go to the Milner like this.

  Jack thumbed through the bills in his jacket. He’d filched a hundred bucks from the advance money that Mamere stashed under her cot and so for the first time in a long time, was cash rich. He’d be able to get some nice duds. Maybe take a car to the Empress after and get something in his stomach. No point in meeting this date on an empty stomach.

  Or empty hands, either. He’d need a knife, at minimum, and maybe a pair of knuckles. Could get those from Spuds. Might as well pay off his marker while he was at it, make the Polack happy.

  Jack dropped stiffly from the streetcar at West Fifth, found a café not far from the Carew Building. Mostly tradesman and merchants downtown. Manufacturers and railroaders didn’t get a lunch. Jack scanned the paper over eggs and hash browns and about a gallon of coffee. You couldn’t look at a newspaper without smelling money. Story on the front page said by September the Carew Building would be a pile of scrap. A skyscraper in its place. Forty nine stories tall. Forty nine! What kind of gelt did it take to build a place like that?

  He checked the sports and the horses and was lighting his third Chesterfield when a clock reminded him of the hour. He stubbed out his cigarette, downed his coffee to the grounds. He could not afford to be late.

  It took a couple of hours for Jack to get himself clean, clothed and armed. He crossed Vine around four on his way to the Milner. It was a nice hotel. You entered the lobby on ankle-deep rugs spread across an oak floor buffed to a pleasant sheen. Paintings all over, large oils, mostly. Landscapes of the Ohio or Mississippi. The obligatory portrait of the governor and General Grant. All displayed beneath electric lighting that was incandescent and expensive and mostly unnecessary.

  Fair number of folks milling in the lobby, which suited Jack’s purpose. A banner over the entry to the bar greeted attendees to a convention of railroad executives. Pretty easy to spot that crowd, gents in their fifties and sixties with drinks and cigars and floozies flashing leg alongside. The usual complement of couples, married, courting or adulterating, drifting about.

  Jack pulled a newly-bought Hamilton from his vest, checked it against a cabinet clock in the lobby. He returned the timepiece to his vest pocket, handling the fob like worry beads. Pausing to examine his reflection in one of the hotel’s many gilded mirrors.

  He told himself that he fit right in. The man staring back from the glass did not look like some jerk scrapping for cash or booze. It was a clean-shaven man in the mirror, a well-boned comer in a brand new single-breasted frock. A silk four-in-hand. Studs for the lightly-striped shirt and a new pair of Cole Haan shoes

  He cinched the knot of his tie. Act like you owned the place, that was the thing. Like you belonged.

  He crossed toward the desk inhaling a mixed atmosphere of French perfume and Cuban cigars and looking smart. Jack paused along his measured course to buy a paper from a selection near the concierge, leaving the girl a tip; sufficient but not ostentatious. Trying to remain unimpressed with the gents in tails and cummerbunds tapping ashes into potted ferns. The women flat as boys in the little black dresses that were all the rage. Their cigarettes coiling smoke from the tips of ivory holders. Boas and beads.

  He’d give anything for a drink and there was a bar to oblige, flouting inspection just beyond the lobby. You couldn’t buy booze, not even at the Milner, but you could bring your own. Jack would give much to join the murmur of conversation rising along that long brass rail, guys and gals consorting in mixed company. But he stopped himself, folding his paper as casually as he could manage before strolling past the bar to reconnoiter the front desk.

  There were three clerks attending. Older man with the mien of a gatekeeper. Fella next to him looked fag. The third clerk keeping his eyes caged on the ledgers. No prospects there. Would have to be a bellhop, then. Jack took his time selecting the likeliest mark.

  There he was, a kid kissing ass for tips. Chinstrap frayed at the edges. A tangle of unruly hair spilling below a cylinder of wool and tassel.

  Jack strolled over.

  “Sir?”

  “Looking for a room.”

  “Check-in’s at the desk, sir.”

  “Said I was looking,” Jack displayed his wallet. “Didn’t say anything about checking in.”

  The kid pushed Jack’s wallet away.

  “Not here.”

  “Where, then?”

  “By the lift.”

  “After you.”

  The bellboy hefted a couple of bags on the way over.

  “I don’t have much time,” the kid said.

  “Room is already reserved,” Jack pressed a buck into his hand. “Price is the name. Sally Price.”

  “You wanna number?”

  “Yeah. And whether she’s checked in.”

  “Wait in the lobby.” The kid lifting the bags again in response to the elevator’s descent. “Soon’s I drop these off, I’ll be back.”

  Jack found a chair in the lobby below a framed oil of a river-boat. Hiding behind his Enquirer and trying to ignore the sweat that threatened to stain his expensively starched collar. Didn’t take more than a month for the bellboy to get back.

  “Got something for me?”

  “Gonna cost you another buck.”

  Jack was already slipping him the bill.

  “There’s a room, all right. Paid in advance. The lady ain’t checked in yet, though.”

  “Anybody else checked in?”

  “You, ah…you got a relationship with this lady, sir? This Miz Price?”

  Jack produced a brand new five-dollar bill.

  “Let’s say I’m her husband.”

  The kid grinned.

  “Husband? Really? Well, that’s queer as turtles ’cause there’s a gent already up there says he’s her husband, too.”

  Upstart little fuck.

  “Tell me something—his trousers. Were they nice and dry? Or did they look like they mighta been soaked?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Try.” Jack keeping the fiver in his hand.

  The bellhop glanced back to the desk, to the concierge.

  “Gent looked spic and span to me. Not a suit, though, not like you. Just trousers and a linen jacket.”

  “But dry?”

  “As a bone.”

  Of course, dry clothes didn’t prove anything. Arno Becker could as easily have changed into dry duds as had Jack.

  “What about the number?”

  The bellboy scanned the lounge nervously.

  “I dunno, mister, I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Come on. We’re almost there.”

  “…Room four-four-nine.”

  Jack took the lift to the fourth floor. He tipped the operator two bits and waited for the carriage to descend before turning down a hallway that still had fixtures for gas lighting. On the way to Room 449 an aging valet passed by, and a maid. Jack shoved his hands into his pockets on reaching the room, pausing at the door to make sure the hallway was empty. His left hand came out ringed in brass. A long, folding knife filled his right hand.

  Seven inches of blade in the knife. He snapped it open, slipped it beneath the door’s knocker and let the boar’s head drop onto its brass plate.

  No response.

  Jack tried the knocker again.

  “Who is it?” an androgynous falsetto queried from behind the door.

  Was that Becker waiting inside? Or was it Alex Goodman? Jack had to throw the dice.

  “Sally, it’s me. Alex.”

  If Alex Goodman was waiting on the other side of the door Jack would have to break in. But if the fellow on the other side of the door was Arno Becker—

  Jack waited.

  Then it came, the
snick of a deadbolt, hinges, the scrape of a bright chain. A sliver of light peeled from pillar to post and Jack kicked the door straight into Arno Becker’s face.

  “SUCKER!!” Jack slashed with his knife—

  And got nothing but air.

  Becker recovering from a somersault with a broken nose and a knife of his own. Left hand. A southpaw.

  “Do come in.”

  He lunged and Jack took a piece of Becker’s blade on his knuckles.

  Arno smiled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Fuck you,” Jack snarled, but he knew he had lost any benefit of surprise and already his heart was hammering anvils.

  Pretty tight quarters for a knife fight. Footing was tricky, too, the floor polished and waxed slick as mercury, rugs loose on top. Arno circling like a shark.

  Sizing him up.

  “You’re not Goodman,” the blond butcher declared.

  “The fuck would you know?”

  “I saw you chasing a streetcar earlier today. Was grand entertainment.”

  “Get your jollies easy.”

  Becker snapped his knife from his left hand to the right and took a swipe—

  But you couldn’t survive the Great War and bayonets without learning something. Jack stepped inside the arc of Arno’s blade and snapped a half-pound of brass solidly into the bone above the bastard’s elbow.

  Becker grunted in surprise, his knife spinning useless onto the polished floor. Jack waited for Becker to turn, the blond man scrambling to retrieve his weapon, and when he did Jack pounded two short, savage blows to the bastard’s kidneys.

  Arno cried out this time. Real pain. And then Jack measured a haymaker right to the gap between the blond-haired skull and the ox-sized neck.

  Becker dropped like wet cowshit to the floor, knees bent, legs bicycling weakly. It had taken all of twenty seconds, but it felt to Jack like he’d been on the ass-end of a heavyweight fight.

  He collapsed to the nearest chair and jerked his tie loose, heaving for air. When he was able to breathe, he rose on trembling legs to retrieve Arno’s pigsticker from the floor.

  That’s when a steel-toed shoe caught him square on his shin.

  It was Jack’s turn to kiss the floor, rolling as Arno Becker smashed a chair to splinters only inches from his skull. But Jack had Becker’s knife, added to his own. He scrambled to his feet with blades in both hands, backpedaling.

  Arno croaked a kind of laugh.

  “Now you have to kill me.”

  The second round raged even more furiously than the first. Becker ripped a club of oak from the leg of a Chippendale, chairs, lamps and vases shattering in the melee that followed. Jack would have traded both knives in his hands for a bayonet. Or an entrenching tool. More than one Kraut had lost his head on the edge of a doughboy’s shovel.

  But knives and knucks would have to do.

  Arno wanted his frog sticker back, you could see it. You could see him timing Jack’s lunge, just see the son of a bitch waiting for him to weary, for the snap to go out of that left jab so that he could smash Jack’s wrist and take back his knife.

  Jack obliged with a feint to Becker’s left hand, always the left—the hand now holding Becker’s club. Jab left, jab left. Little slower. Slower still—

  Arno’s hand snaked out faster than Jack could have imagined to trap his left hand. You could see the club following.

  That’s when Jack dropped to a knee and came from the floor with his knife in an uppercut to Becker’s groin.

  Becker’s balls should have been sprouting from his trousers, but something hard and smooth deflected the thrust of Jack’s blade like a stone skipped over water.

  It was a cup. Goddammit, the bastard had armored his balls with a cup!

  But Becker was still nicked, a seam bleeding bright and red above his navel.

  “Not so deep as a well,” Becker pressed a hand to his wound. “Nor so wide as a door, by any means.”

  But it was enough.

  The butcher lurched back. A pair of French doors led to the balcony outside, a dead end apparently for Sally’s killer. But Becker still had his improvised club. And Jack was spent. His arms heavy as lead. Stars swimming in and out of view before his eyes. Not to mention the knee and shin. One slip, Jack knew, and he could still wind up like Sally Price.

  He couldn’t take that chance.

  He could wait. He had the bastard cornered and hurt, after all. Nowhere to go. But Becker was laughing! A mocking caw bubbling from a wide, sensual mouth, and it wasn’t until then that Jack registered the fire escape.

  The progressive city of Cincinnati had only recently required boarding homes and hotels to install those ingenious, cascading ladders of egress. Becker backed through the windowed doors and out onto the balcony.

  “She begged at the end, you know.”

  Staunching his wound as he released a safety-latch.

  “And you’ll beg, too, whoever you are, before I’m through.”

  He rode the ladder down like a fireman’s pole, a bright rasp of metal on metal to the alley below, and by the time Jack reached the balcony Becker was gone.

  The bellboy regarded Jack Romaine. Suit and shirt ripped to shit. Face cut and bleeding.

  “Sally must be hell on wheels.”

  “I’ll pay for the damage,” Jack pulled the kid inside.

  “No skin off my nose.”

  “But I need to keep the room. I’m expecting another visitor.”

  “Another? Jesus, where’s her husband? First husband, I mean?”

  “He checked out.”

  “I dunno,” the kid was having second thoughts.

  Jack displayed a tenner.

  “That’s more than you make in a month.”

  “…What you want me to do?”

  “Sometime right after five there’s gonna be another gent asking for Sally Price. Make sure you’re the boy brings him up.”

  You could see the one cog in the kid’s brain turning over.

  “There gonna be another brawl?”

  “Don’t expect so.”

  “Didn’t expect this one, though, didja?”

  “It’s a different situation, all right? You ain’t burnin’ anybody.”

  The bellhop took the money. “But I was never here, got it? I never saw you. I never said a word about no room. Nothing.”

  “’Course not,” Jack agreed amiably. “This is our transaction, shortstop. You and me.”

  The kid shoved a lock of hair back inside his hat.

  “All right.”

  “That’s the stuff,” Jack approved cheerily. “Now, the name you want is Goodman. Alex Goodman. Or for that matter anybody asking after Sally Price.”

  “Goodman,” the bellboy nodded sullenly. “Got it.”

  “You see ’im, you hear ’im, you just steer ’im in here to me.”

  “I want another Jackson when I bring him up.”

  “Done.”

  Jack watched the bellhop retreat down the hall. He hoped he’d bought the drip’s loyalty, at least for the night. There was nothing else for it, really, nothing else to do. Jack closed the door.

  Nothing but to watch and wait.

  Couldn’t have been fifteen minutes later Jack caught himself nodding off in the Chippendale lounger.

  “Dammit.”

  He’d had trouble staying awake ever since the war. You never got enough sleep in the trenches, what with the misery, the disease, the enervating cold. More than once Jack had gone unconscious standing sentry, but that wasn’t sleep.

  The only thing kept him up was poker or whiskey and here he was in a fine hotel with no game, no booze, and the crushing urge to slumber. How long would he have to wait for Alex Goodman, anyway? Jack fished out his watch. Check in by five, the man’s letter directed, but that didn’t mean Goodman would arrive at five o’clock. He could be along later. Maybe a lot later.

  Jack didn’t need a mirror to know he was a mess. He was injured, exhausted. He had to get som
e rest. Just a nap, he told himself. If Goodman showed, the bellhop would wake him. Jack propped up the broken chair with a coffee table and then pulled up a generous ottoman. That would do. He shed his jacket, loosed his still-stiff collar and lay down.

  He’d had worse beds, for sure; there were no sofas in the trenches. One of his worst fears as a corpsman had been to be buried alive in one of those filthy ditches, to be entombed in a barrage of artillery, sucking mud and muck into his lungs. A death by suffocation spurred with a single concussion of high explosive. Roused from sleep only to find death on a litter fashioned from a rag of blanket and ammunition cans.

  Or to be flooded. Two days of thaw were enough to collapse any manner of tunnel or trench. Come spring, a single shower could trigger a flash flood and there you were, drowning like rats. Drowning, each man clawing over corpses to survive. Soldiers, comrades, scrambling over one another to get over the top. Clawing at the bones or putrefaction of corpses lodged alongside, an arm or leg now an improvised rung on a grisly ladder.

  You were lucky enough to get out, there’d be snipers waiting. The machine guns.

  Jack could see it now, a wall of water coursing down the trench. And there’s an arm, mummified, a hat rack reaching from the trench’s unsteady wall. He leaps to grab that offered hand.

  He reaches out. He grabs the arm.

  And pulls Sally Price from the dissolving wall. She comes out naked and hairless. She’s laughing, a pitiless laughter. A harpie’s revenge and then—

  A brass knocker jarred him awake.

  “…Miz Price?”

  Jack lurched up, disoriented.

  “Sally Price?”

  Jack scrambled from his makeshift bed, snatched the chain from its lock and yanked a bellman into the room.

  A bellman in pillbox and stripes—but not the boy Jack expected. This was a guy old enough to be his grandfather.

  “The hell are you?”

  “Sir! Sir, please!”

  The old fart raising a hand as if to ward off an angry fist.

  Jack didn’t blame him. God knows he must look like somebody just got finished fighting a dog.