AHMM, October 2008 Read online

  * * * *

  4. Trajan to Pliny

  You should restore the goddess in her original form, to which the Bithynians are accustomed. It would certainly be out of keeping with the spirit of our age to demand such a change in immemorial religious usage.

  Very likely, your wise Arpocras is correct. Certainly the gods and goddesses work through human agencies in mysterious ways. No one can deny that.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Darrell Schweitzer

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  Fiction: SKIN AND BONES by David Edgerley Gates

  Edward Kinsella III

  * * * *

  New York's a city that's forever reinventing itself. In lower Manhattan, excavations for a water main or a subway line will uncover graves from a forgotten potter's field, or a shellfish midden predating the Dutch. The public library between Fifth and Sixth is built on the site of the old Croton reservoir, itself once a formidable monument to nineteenth-century ambition and ingenuity. Times change, and the landscape of the city changes with them. Where once there was a boundary between the wild and sown, for example, in Peter Stuyvesant's day, is now Wall Street. The footprints are all about, if only you take notice.

  And of course New York's a place that invites reinvention. Irish and Italians, Germans and Swedes, Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe, Armenians, Levantines, and Greeks, the tidal migration north of Negroes between the wars, apple-cheeked kids from Iowa, and streetwise toughs from Jersey, all of them hungry for adventure or advancement, Anglicizing their names, rewriting their histories, imagining their own creation myth.

  Dede van Rensellaer had been born Deirdre O'Donnell. The orphaned child of a whore, she grew up in the workhouses and was turned out onto the streets when she was fourteen. She fell into the natural grasp of a pimp and was jobbed out to the trade. If you'd asked her why she didn't seek to enter service as a domestic, she would have guffawed. Where was the practical difference? In either case, you were property. She was, as it happened, rescued by one of her clients. Not so rare an event as you might think. She married above herself and never looked back. I was startled by her invitation to lunch.

  We met at the Waldorf. I knew it only from the salad. But she cared little for appearances, that was plain.

  "Mickey, it's been twenty years,” she said, offering me her hand.

  I took it. “Ma'am.” She was probably the one on thin ice, not me.

  "Would you care for a cocktail?” she asked.

  "Better, perhaps, that I keep my wits about me,” I said, as I took my seat.

  Her laughter was like a chime, nothing artificial or forced about it at all. She'd certainly kept her gamine charm.

  "I'd share a bottle of wine,” I said, leaning against it.

  She ordered a Bordeaux. The wine steward and the maitre d’ apparently knew her well.

  She rubbed the cork between her fingers and passed it beneath her nostrils. She approved. I let her order the meal for both of us as well. We raised our glasses.

  "The future,” she said.

  It was the shared past we were drinking to, I imagined, but we clicked rims.

  Scallops, en croute, a green salad, beef Wellington. More pastry, in fine, than I would have chosen, given the pounds I've put on in my age. But it was her treat, and her schedule.

  We came to it over coffee.

  A girl, she told me. Not much above fourteen, but already slightly soiled and shopworn from the life. Undernourished, just skin and bones. Wary, a little feral, perhaps, mistrustful of solicitude.

  "Why?” I asked her. I meant, what was her interest.

  "Oh, Mickey,” she said. “Isn't it obvious? She reminds me of me, at that age."

  "Nothing further?"

  She smiled and shook her head, sadly. “I see where you're going. No. She's not my illegitimate daughter, or the like. If it were blackmail, I'd face it out, or hire a private dick to break some heads."

  Something she knew full well I had a name for.

  "Not that, either,” she said, reading my expression.

  I nodded. Rented muscle is easily found. The rich have lawyers and dogsbodies to insulate them from responsibility or consequence. “Why call in an old marker, then?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with level regard, and then her focus shifted past me, into some indeterminate middle distance. “I'd say I owed you, Mickey, not the other way around.” She spoke without addressing me directly, or as if she weren't talking about herself. “You never took advantage of me back then. I even wondered if you were queer. For all that you're no doubt a hard man, and a wicked one, you've got a sentimental streak."

  "I've a weakness for the downtrodden,” I said, meaning some irony.

  "You wear it lightly,” she said, letting her eyes meet mine again. They were blue and transparent, like Arctic ice.

  I shifted my weight, uncomfortably.

  "You have boys on the street,” she said. “Girls, too, for all I know.” She meant the young numbers runners I used. “What I do know is that you don't whore them out."

  I could see where this was going. “You think my kids would already have noticed her, yes?” I asked.

  "Beekman Place,” she said.

  I knew she lived in the East Fifties. “Not our turf,” I said.

  But she had a whim of iron. “You could cozy up to her."

  "I'd be a john, no more."

  "You might win her trust, Mickey."

  "A thankless errand,” I said.

  "You'd have my thanks."

  "No good deed goes unpunished, Deirdre,” I said.

  "And don't I know it,” she said, sadly.

  Which, on the face of it, was sufficient. In retrospect, I should have been less credulous.

  * * * *

  They say there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway. I couldn't tell you, but it feels anecdotally accurate. All those children who come here, wild with ambition. How many of them fall through the cracks? How many of them suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? I was a product of the West Side streets myself, Hell's Kitchen. If the mob hadn't found me and taken me under its wing, I'd have been bait for predators.

  This is not merely philosophy.

  It was 1949. Along the East River, ground had been broken for the United Nations. Sutton Place and Beekman were old and established, respectable addresses, and the foreign legations were eager to snap them up. Real estate values were going right through the roof. But at curbside, prices were stagnant.

  "Bareback blow job, two bucks,” one of my kids told me.

  "Is that how she makes the rent?” I asked.

  "She can always sleep on top of a heating grate, or under a cardboard box."

  "You speaking specifically, or generically?"

  She shook her head. “I don't know her,” she said.

  "Can you get to know her, Judy?” I asked. She looked at me suspiciously.

  How much do you give away? They were sly, they were hungry, they were survivors, they'd shovel their competition under a subway train for the odd dime. I had to be frank. “It's a favor for a friend,” I said. “I want her looked after."

  "Would you do it for me, Mickey?” she asked.

  She was thirteen, just shy of puberty. I could have turned her out and gotten a return. “Yes,” I told her. It was true.

  "Okay,” she said. Wise beyond her years.

  I protected my kids, unlike some, but it wasn't sentiment. I was investing in the future. People might tell you that there's an infinite pool of throwaway talent, the abandoned and forlorn, and in brute fact they're thrown away daily, like candy wrappers, but if we eat our own young, hope dies.

  Not that the children weren't themselves carnivorous. Judy would interpret my writ however she chose, and not necessarily to my liking. All the same, I wanted her and the other canny lads to see the job through. They were my only decent chance to get at Dede's lost girl. It was a small ambition.

  I worked a different angle. Two dollars,
Judy had told me. What was the girl's market? Sutton Place and Beekman.

  I started with the doormen.

  They were a mixed lot. Insular, territorial, proprietary. Some of them were protective, some of them were condescending, some of them were hostile. All of them were for sale. It was a matter of meeting their price.

  Dede's own doorman, on Beekman, had an inflated idea of his own importance. I didn't use her name, of course, which would have gained me nothing in any case, but crossing his palm with silver gained me nothing either. He was either obtuse or willfully ignorant. His knowledge of the neighborhood was sadly deficient, and none of what he shared was useful.

  I had better luck with a colored man at an apartment house on Sutton. He'd been at his trade since before the war, and I put his age at above sixty. He carried himself with brittle dignity, treading that careful line between deference and pride. The nameplate on his uniform read Judah Benjamin, which I thought curiously Hebrew, but it was only coincidence, his last name the residue of some long-dead white slaveholder, his first the legacy of a Bible-thumping mother who'd spent too much time reading the Old Testament. He had a sense of humor about it. I was careful not to press a slight and ambiguous advantage.

  "A white girl, maybe fourteen?"

  I nodded.

  "You looking to turn her out?"

  I'd laid a twenty on the counter, and he'd ignored it. This was a delicate negotiation. I didn't want him to imagine insult. I put a second cautious twenty down beside the first one. “I could,” I said, “if that were my object. But why then would I be so circumspect?"

  He shrugged.

  "I might tell you a story neither one of us would believe,” I said. “Why bother?"

  "But you mean her no injury."

  "I'm offering what I'd imagine was a benefit."

  "A mixed blessing."

  "What has she got now?"

  He smiled, shifting his gaze away from mine. His eyes were very old. “She has her freedom,” he said.

  "No,” I said. “She has choices."

  He looked at me again. “I know you,” he said.

  "Or somebody very like me,” I admitted.

  He was on the edge of trust, but his experience told him better. “Russians, Arabs, Jews,” he said, shaking his head. “I came to Harlem a lifetime ago."

  I had a notion what he was driving at. “I grew up in New York,” I told him. “I was a mick from the West Side. I worked the docks and joined a union, or I signed up with the cops."

  "You signed up with the mob,” he said.

  I nodded. “I stepped on the third rail,” I said.

  "I grew up in the South,” he said. “My father was a jailbird. A lifer at Angola prison. You know what that means?"

  I could guess, but I really couldn't imagine.

  "I came North. I left my mother; I left my brothers and sisters behind. I came for the promised land. I was too old to go in the service when the war came. But let me tell you, the ‘30s, the ‘40s, the pussy was unbelievable. It was lying around like bottle caps."

  "A lifetime ago,” I suggested.

  "Yeah,” he said. “Well."

  "Let me ask you something, Judah,” I said. “Back in the day, the Cotton Club, the Apollo, when you were a player. Would you have used this girl and cast her aside?"

  He nodded. “A stiff Johnson's got no conscience."

  "Let me ask you a different question,” I said. “Russians, Arabs, Jews. What'd you mean by that? I'd think the kid's natural clientele would be your own tenants, guys coming home after a hard day at the office, don't get it from the secretary, don't get it from the wife, buy a quickie on the sidewalk."

  "I don't much appreciate your vocabulary,” he said.

  "It gives me some sleepless nights,” I told him.

  The two twenties vanished. His hand passed across the counter in front of him and the bills disappeared, like a magic trick. I thought I'd lost him. I didn't know how to recover my limited advantage.

  "I can tell you where to find her,” Judah said.

  "That's a start,” I suggested.

  "Diplomats,” he said. There was contempt in his voice.

  "You talking about the UN?"

  "Yeah, the You an',” he said sarcastically.

  Nobody back then used the locution UN much. Most people thought the entire enterprise a joke. It was located out in Flushing Meadows, an ash dump before the 1939 World's Fair. Now it was slated to be developed on prime east waterfront.

  "Money attracts money,” I said.

  "You ain't just whistling ‘Dixie,'” he said.

  I smiled. “You don't strike me as the sort of man who'd be likely to whistle ‘Dixie,'” I said.

  He ducked his head, concealing a laugh in his collar.

  "The girl, then,” I said. “She services these newcomers."

  "They take it when the tray is passed,” he said.

  "You know her name?” I asked.

  "Maggie,” he said. “May not be the one she was born with."

  "That's all?"

  "We pass the time of day. I give her a dollar."

  "Not two?"

  "I don't need no blow job from a fourteen-year-old white girl,” he said. “Some kid with no ass in her pants and one step away from the needle."

  Skin and bones, Deirdre had said. “You know that?” I asked him. Heroin and coke weren't as common on the street as they are now. Jazz musicians, some Bohemians who smoked dope, but it was a Negro thing, or so many of us were willing to think.

  "Way things are,” he said. “It's how their pimps keep them under their thumb."

  "So she's a hophead?"

  "Not today, maybe, but tomorrow or the next. She might not be courting salvation,” he said.

  I agreed. “Depends what she's running away from,” I said.

  "Frying pan into the fire."

  I agreed with that too.

  "You can't fix all the sadness in this world, Irish,” Judah said to me. “Some of it's beyond repair."

  He seemed like somebody who'd know.

  * * * *

  I would have tried the beat cops next, but the police found me first. I'd wandered down First Avenue as far as the corner of Forty-eighth, where the UN construction site began. It was one hell of a big hole, between First Avenue and the river, and extending six blocks south, the whole of it barricaded with cyclone fencing and plywood. But there were peepholes cut in the plywood every ten or twelve feet, both at adult eye level and for kids, to accommodate sidewalk supervisors. I was looking through one of them, not able to envision much, since the footings hadn't yet been poured, let alone the concrete forms for foundation work. In fact, the crews had either hit groundwater or the East River was leaking in because the entire excavation was a muddy, sucking wound, swallowing bulldozers and backloaders, time and money. I wondered how far behind schedule they were by now, and who'd been fool enough to post completion bonds.

  I turned when I heard the car pull up at the curb behind me. It was a big prewar Lincoln, the V-12, but I knew its owner had never been inconvenienced by gasoline rationing.

  A rumpled, overweight guy in a cheap off-the-rack suit got out of the passenger side. He looked irritated.

  "Sergeant,” I said, pleasantly enough. I kept my hands in my pockets, representing no threat. O'Toole would have been all too happy to grind my face into the pavement.

  "Pat would like a word,” he said, inclining his head.

  O'Toole was an errand boy and a precinct bagman, all the more dangerous for being both stupid and aggrieved. He wasn't, in fine, the sort you'd want to meet if he were off his master's leash. I had no call to aggravate him further.

  I got into the passenger seat of the Packard. O'Toole left the door open and drifted a few yards off.

  "Mickey,” the man behind the wheel said, smiling.

  "Pat."

  Patrick Francis Gallagher was a lieutenant of detectives. He'd started out as a harness bull, like so many others, and by virtue of
luck and opportunity, and an easy way with the necessities of criminal enterprise, he made ready advancement. He was bent. I wouldn't complain if he'd been compromised by the Hannahs, my own mob, but he was in the pocket of Frank Costello and a creature of the Italians.

  "What's your interest in underage whores, Mickey?” he asked me.

  "Word gets around,” I said, ducking the question. I'd only been canvassing the neighborhood that very morning.

  "Enough of the road apples,” he said. “What's your stake in it? Are the Hannahs looking to expand their territory to the East Side?"

  It was a curve ball, but it gave me an alibi. I swung on it. “I thought this was open turf, Pat,” I said. “Would you be telling me different?"

  He was too slippery to give me a straight answer. We were like two card players, feeling out our respective strength early in the game, trying to read each other's betting pattern before we committed our chips. Gallagher, in this case, checked. “You still answer to Tim Hannah?” he asked.

  "As always,” I told him.

  "Then tell Young Tim to back away,” he said.

  This, of course, had nothing to do with the Hannahs, but a thing takes on its own momentum, and it was about to run over me like a truck with bad brakes.

  * * * *

  I had nothing to report to Dede as yet, but it was early days, or so I thought. I'd put some feelers out myself, my kids were keeping an eye peeled, so all in all, best foot forward. Pat Gallagher might prove to be a riddle, I knew, but for the moment I figured he was just blowing smoke up my ass.

  It was coming on dusk, and the kids began to trickle in. There were half a dozen countinghouses and money drops located across Midtown, but this was a storefront on Tenth Avenue, where my runners congregated at the end of the day, swapping war stories and ragging on each other. The building was owned by the Hannahs, and I'd outfitted the upper three stories: bunk beds, a community kitchen, and some semblance of privacy. They were outlaws, thrown away, and I offered them safety. Not that it didn't come at a price. They understood what we traded for, and our currency was loyalty, both up and down.