Sideways In Crime Read online

  The lenses of my spectacles were streaked with rain. It wasn’t warm enough in the kitchen to fog them up. Even so, I took them off and polished them, while at the same time I thought about the bullet that would kill her one day. Maybe it would be news of my arrest.

  “Ah,” she said, “I algo tengo a desirte. Mira--I was so worried. Where have you been? Look at you--you’re soaked through.” Then she continued in the language of the old country, the Ladino language we had spoken in Cuba and Mexico when we were children. She got up to take my coat and cap. She hung them up over the mat, and lit the kettle for a cup of tea. Overcome with some kind of emotion, I allowed her to fuss over me, while at the same time I watched her face. What had I seen when I opened the door? . Maybe in that moment I understood my pity for the murdered

  woman in the governor’s box, a pity that had nagged at me all day, and not because she deserved it! She was nothing to me, a whore and worse, a Jewish whore, a “confidante” (as she had been described in the society papers) of the late King Edward, the biggest and the fattest whoremaster on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Rothschild hadn’t been too proud to pick through his leavings.

  “There’s no milk, but I’ll get you sugar,” Marta said. Shivering, I sat down at the table. I could hardly listen, because there was some other section of the puzzle. The pity I felt was part of it--the dead woman was also someone’s sister, maybe. And so I wondered if the assassin had known her, recognized her suddenly in the dark box. Maybe he’d seen something in her eyes, her beautiful dark eyes under her dark brows--I was looking at my sister as she fussed and tried to smile. But when I first opened the door, startled her out of sleep, I had seen a frightened flash of something in her face. The lamp, after all, was by her hand. She would not have been able to see me clearly as I stood beside the stove.

  Who else could I have been? Who else was she expecting? The situation was different. Madame Rothschild would have turned to see a man in evening clothes slip into the box. There was nothing unusual about that. There’d been no struggle at the door. Fooled by his self-confidence, the soldier in the vestibule hadn’t even challenged him.

  “Please tell me where you’ve been,” my sister asked me. “Es el uniko favor ke rekalmo de ti. I get so lonely in the nights. So worried, so frightened. Please.”

  I didn’t explain. I was too tired to invent some made-up story. Instead I reached to touch her hand. She pulled away from me. “Ke notche fria--you’re so cold,” she said.

  There was a connection between the assassin and his victim, I thought. Did he think he had no choice except to shoot her first, because she knew him? Or had he gulled us from the beginning, pretending to work with us, when all along he had a different plan? He was not one of us, that much was sure. It was because he was not one of us that he had managed to get so close.

  Could I have swaggered up the stairs of the Regent’s Theatre, a cigarette in my gloved hand? Not with my big nose and steel-rimmed spectacles, my foreign face and foreign voice. I was a stranger everywhere but here in this kitchen, these two rooms, and even here I could not be myself. Marta poured me out another cup of tea. I muttered a few things while my mind was somewhere else. I asked her how her shift was at the Triangle factory. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, and I thought that everything I did was for her sake, so she wouldn’t have to work so hard and joylessly, sewing shirt-waist dresses for pennies apiece. Maybe she’d get married to a man who’d treat her well, a simple man who would confide in her as I could not. I could not tell her anything. When the day came and the police asked her what she knew, ignorance would save her.

  She turned to look at me. What was the connection between Madame Rothschild and her killer? Maybe the police had already discovered it. Maybe they were already on the way to follow up some clue. What was obvious to me might just be obvious to them. But I still had an advantage.

  “Anton,” said my sister. (There, I’ve told you!) “Te rogo ke me eskutches. I went by the address you gave me, the Cafe Salonika. They said they never heard from you, it has been months. What should I think? Then I came home--look what I found.”

  She stood in her slippers on the cold floor. She reached down into one of the pockets of her flannel robe, and brought out the snub-nosed Colt. “My God, Marta,” I said. “It’s loaded.” She held it up like a snake or a spider. She couldn’t even look at it. It hung from her fingers and I thought she’d drop it. But she laid it on the table by my teacup and I put my hand on it. She was in tears.

  “Oh, Anton, ke es esto?” I couldn’t tell her. Relieved, I felt like hitting her. She had something else that she had stolen from my things. Now she drew it out of the same pocket, a gold chain with a round locket and a gold crucifix about an inch and a half long. Catholic women wear them. You’ve seen them.

  Marta had opened the locket to show the tiny portrait inside, an old woman in a hat. Again she let it dangle from her finger. But she dropped it into my palm when I held it out.

  “Anton, mi hermano, what’s become of you?” she said.

  “You are a stranger now,” she said, and she held out her hand. But what would be better, a stranger or a thief? I couldn’t tell her anything. I took the gun, the little chain.

  “Va te, va te. Ya me etcho in la kama,” she said, waving her fingers. So I got to my feet. I put on my wet coat again and went out into the cold, promising myself I’d find Katarina Rothschild’s killer and shoot him down.

  I was so angry, I thought it would be easy to kill a man. This was when I was still young to the movement, too impressionable, too green, my beard still soft, as my people say. I had not yet shot that gun or any gun. That winter I was nineteen years old. I did not know how to control myself. When I came out into the street, I was close to tears. The rain had turned to snow when I was inside. Clean flakes drifted down out of the dark as I walked past the abandoned lots. I was glad the rain had stopped. It seemed like some luck. I told myself that maybe I could be successful. Maybe I’d be able to track down Mr. Spotswood, Mr. Dandridge Spotswood, Esquire, of Petersburg, Virginia.

  This was my advantage over the police. I knew the man. I’d first met him at a hotel bar in Chelsea Gardens. (Never mind which one!) But it was a small, smoky room, made smokier by his incessant cigarettes.

  I don’t drink alcohol. He spoke about it like a connoisseur, about a brand of Scottish whiskey he couldn’t find since the start of the European war. These subjects made me angry, his bourgeois grumbling. He was reduced to drinking some other kind of whiskey from Kentucky, something named for the French monarchy. He complained about it after every shot. He said there was water in it, and he was probably right, because it had no effect on him that I could see. He was very tall, clean-shaven, with massive hands. He wore his hair in long black ringlets, an old-fashioned style. His dark wrists contrasted with his white cuffs.

  I found reasons to distrust him. I was suspicious from the beginning. He boasted he was the grandson of Colonel Robert Spotswood, hero of the second rebellion, which he called “the cause.” And I was sure he told the truth, because Spotswood also had been a gigantic man, almost seven feet tall. He had fought with Wellington in Texas after General Bonaparte surrendered at New Orleans. Later, he had fought for the Virginia militia against the redcoats. He’d won a name for cruelty, burning the loyalists out of the Shenandoah Valley. He’d been with Lee when he surrendered to Lord Cardigan at Appomattox courthouse. I had to listen to all that.

  You couldn’t have guessed the truth from anything Dandridge Spotswood said, that the second rebellion had ended with a terrible defeat just like the first.

  These southerners, I thought, could not be anything but partners of convenience, no matter how much we hated the same enemy. These Virginians had not fought their war for freedom but for slavery, after it had been outlawed by an act of Parliament. And for fifty years since Appomattox, the grievance of these people never went away. I could see it in Spotswood’s high-handed contempt, the way he treated the Ne
gro waiter at the bar. “The hypocrite,” I thought. “His own skin is just as dark.”

  Then I thought that was the point. In his arrogance there was some self-hatred. Robert Spotswood had been the grandson of an even greater hero, a man whose strength was famous in the Continental Army. He could carry a twelve-hundred pound cannon over his shoulder. By himself he had cut down a company of Tarleton’s Horse. General Washington had given him a sabre with a five-foot blade. And he had died at Yorktown with the others, when Lafayette and Rochambeau turned tail.

  At the bar I asked Spotswood about him. “Peter Francisco,” he said. It was like something from a children’s story, a child brought to Jamestown by a Spanish ship, dropped on the pier without a letter or a note or any kind of explanation. He was dressed in silk and leather, with silver buckles on his shoes--a five-year-old boy, and all he knew was his own name. “People said he was from Portugal.”

  My people also were from Portugal. “But didn’t he have African blood?” I almost said. What would have been the point? Peter Francisco had married into a rich family, after all. Dandridge Spotswood could boast of his black ancestor, but no one thought of him as black, because he was a gentleman. He disgusted me--there was a bar-maid who had caught his eye. She had soft yellow hair and a face covered in freckles. “What would you do with that?” he asked me, smiling. “Tell me what you’d like to do with that.”

  I couldn’t tell him anything. Later, we found a quiet table. He looked around the room, hardly listening as I spoke. The desperation of our plan did not impress him. He didn’t seem to understand or care he might be caught or killed. I thought this was bravado or stupidity. There were several things about him I misjudged.

  I met him twice before the night of the attack. Now, walking toward Seventh Avenue in the fresh snow, I tried to remember the details. I tried to think of some things I’d missed. I’d arrived the previous evening at eight o’clock. I had waited with the others in the cold. I had not seen Spotswood at our rendezvous that afternoon. Nor had he entered with the crowd, so for an hour I wondered if he’d come at all. I thought it was just like him to desert us. I thought I’d never trusted him. I remembered the blonde-haired waitress and thought it was disgusting how a black man could talk about her in that way. I walked back and forth knocking my fists together. Then I heard the shots, heard the screams, and went to take up my position at the doors. And when I saw him from the portico, bareheaded, pointing with his gun, towering above the men who tried to drag him down, kicking them aside like dogs, I saw in him the savage strength of Robert Spotswood or Peter Francisco--this was before I understood what he had done. I ran to the big doors as he came through, and he pushed me over as we’d planned. He pressed the snub-nosed Colt into my chest and I grabbed hold of it, hiding it under my coat as I floundered on the sidewalk. When I got to my feet, he was already gone, disappeared into the dark night, and I took to my heels soon afterward.

  This was the gun I still had in my pocket, the weapon that had killed Madame Rothschild. She had been murdered by a “Levantine assailant,” as an out-of-town newspaper had described him. Mistakes like that were all to the good. Maybe I had a head start, but I didn’t know where to go. I had always met Spotswood in public places. And he had already disappeared from his rooming house, where I’d tried to visit him the previous day.

  Now someone came up to me as I stood in the dark street by the dark theater. “Hey,” he muttered, “comrade.” I realized I was whistling the same tune as before, a Russian song called “Winter Sun.”

  Snow swirled around us. Fifty-seventh Street was deserted, though there was traffic on the avenue. “I saw you last night,” he said. “When the lady was shot. The Jewess, there.”

  I didn’t say anything. “Hey, come on,” said the man. “I saw you tonight, too. I thought you’d be back again, so I waited.”

  He was maybe sixty, with a nose like an electric bulb, gray hair, leather cap. He wore woolen gloves, and a woolen vest under his coat. He had a horse-whip in his hand. His hansom was across the street. “I saw the other fellow, too--I followed him. Six blocks from here. Tall fellow. Regular toff--gave him a ride. Looked like an Italian or a Greek.”

  He himself was Irish like most of his trade, most of the West Side. I turned to face him. “What do you mean?”

  “Last night. Almost he pulled Dido down. Stopped her. Hand on the traces--never saw the like. Then he was in before I could say anything.”

  “Where did you take him?”

  He squinted. “Oh, sir, I think you know.”

  I weighed this. He could be some kind of stool-pigeon, it was true. But they’re not usually so devious. So I told him the address of the rooming house. (But I won’t tell you!)

  I was going to walk there anyway, not for a good reason. It was the only address I had. Spotswood had been staying there when he approached us. And the previous afternoon, when I hadn’t found him at the bar, I’d gone to look for him.

  The woman was already cleaning the place out. She wanted to know where to find him, because he’d left without paying to the end of the week. I didn’t know anything about that, but I pretended I knew him so she’d let me into the room. He’d taken everything, so I guessed it wasn’t a trap.

  The place stank of cigarettes, and there were empty bottles on the carpet. But I didn’t think there’d been a struggle, even though one of the chairs had lost its leg. The pillows were on the floor. As I stood next to the bed, I felt something under my boot. The landlady was complaining about some filth in the basin, and when she turned away I bent down to pick up the little golden chain with the locket and the cross at the end of it. “He owes me money, too,” I said. There was nothing else under the bed, except for balls of dust.

  “Airs and graces,” she said. “Look at this pig-sty.”

  I couldn’t help her. I was concerned for our success. If I had only known!

  Now I mentioned the same address, and the cabbie squinted. “Close,” he said. “West of there.” Then he shrugged. “I’ll take you.”

  “I can’t afford it,” I said.

  He scuffed his feet in the snow, a quarter-inch deep. “Well, aren’t you just like all the others? The other fellow, now, he paid triple fare.”

  “Then you won’t mind taking me.”

  That made him angry. “Well, I reckon you’re a Jew as well. And here’s me wanting to help you. You know, fight the bloody bastards when you can. But it’s nothing to me.”

  Past one o’clock, the air was getting colder. There was traffic on the avenue. Sometimes people stumbled past us down the street, mufflers around their mouths. The cabbie touched his cap. “Take you home, sir?” he said to one of them.

  It was obvious, I thought. Spotswood had meant to trick us all along. That’s why I didn’t know where to find him now. Only... why had he approached us in the first place? What did he need from us? Surely there was someplace else to find a gun?

  But maybe you can’t tell yourself you’re going to shoot a woman in cold blood. Even a murderer needs a cause to fight for. “Comrade,” I said, “I don’t have any money. But you know something that could help us.”

  “Oh, so it’s ‘comrade’ now, is it? I reckon I know something, too. What about that pistol, do you think?”

  So the fellow had seen everything. “Don’t think I’m afraid of you,” he said. “Anarchist--bloody hell!”

  “You win,” I said. Then I followed him across the street to where his cab was by the post. I got into the compartment while he climbed up behind. “Your kind always has a few bits,” he said. He made a clicking noise with his tongue, touched up the horse--Dido, I supposed--and wheeled out onto Seventh Avenue. We headed down-town, then west toward the river. On the green banquette, I unfastened the chain from the locket and the cross. “Anarchist,” I thought. “Bloody hell.”

  He pulled up after ten minutes. “It’s Number 429,” he said as I stepped down. “I left him at the corner, like he asked. Then I watched where he went in. What
’s this?”

  He was angry. But I had a gun, and the chain was something he could pawn, at least. He threw it up in the air, caught it in his gloved palm, then turned his back on me without a word. The hansom wheeled away, and I found myself in a dirty neighborhood of brick-front houses, each divided into ten or twelve bed-sitting rooms, with a pump and a water-closet in the yard. We weren’t far from the rooming house or the hotel in Chelsea Gardens.

  I stood for a long while on the stoop of Number 429. There were names on the mail-boxes inside the door. The snow had dwindled down and stopped. The night was cold. The sky was clear, and there were stars.

  I was half-frozen by the time I saw the blonde-haired waitress. I had crossed the street to Number 442 during the night, and that’s where she came out. At first dawn she stood on the steps behind me, fixing her hat and scarf. Startled, I walked off down the street.

  But after a minute I turned back. I followed her a few blocks up the avenue and onto Twenty-third Street. She was walking east toward the hotel. We passed a line of new conscription posters for the war.

  Spotswood must have seen the cabbie waiting when he stepped down. He must have gone in the wrong door. “Miss,” I said, “miss,” and she turned around. She was tall for a woman, taller than me. Shivering, half-frozen, I pulled out the little locket and the cross, and I watched her face light up. “Oh, sir,” she said, “thank you. Did I drop them?”

  She didn’t even know. She shook my hand and gave her name, Helen Mullody. She didn’t ask how I had found her, found her things. She didn’t ask about the gold chain. I wondered if she knew she was part of a crime--probably not. Why would the fellow tell her what he’d done?

  I smiled and stammered, but inside I was cursing Spotswood and his black heart, which had come down through his ancestors. I looked into Helen Mullody’s face. I wondered if I should warn her. But then I thought Dandridge Spotswood had already put his mark on her, and I could see the lines around her eyes and mouth--I let her go. I watched her getting smaller down the block. Then I turned and retraced my steps, the revolver heavy in my pocket. I moved slowly, because I was so cold.