The Wicked City. Beatriz Williams

if I stand on the toilet, the pig might just fly. I’ve got the figure for it, thanks to poverty and cigarettes. On the other hand, who wants to die in a ventilation shaft?

      You may be surprised to hear this, but when I first arrived on Manhattan Island two years ago, wearing my heart on my sleeve and ten additional pounds around my hips, I had never once sipped the nectar of juniper nor breathed the leaf of tobacco. It’s true! My dear mother had scraped and saved to send me to a nice Catholic school fifty miles away, and I’ll be damned if those nuns didn’t have their wicked way with me. A year of college didn’t improve matters, what with the Wagnerian dorm mother and the scarcity of men. So there I stood in the middle of Pennsylvania Station, in a hat and a sweet pink coat, clutching the tiny valise that contained my all, just like every starlet who’s ever set foot in her land of dreams, and I thought I had made a terrible mistake, that I would never belong in this sea of stink and vice, this hive of determined bees lining their cells with honey. And then I tasted the honey, honey, and I started to understand what New York City was all about. Hallelujah. I started to glimpse my place in the hive, how each tiny insect contributed her mite of pollen, how grand it was to live in a hive like this at all, even if your cell measured one inch square and lacked proper ventilation, even if you had to pawn your favorite shoes each month to pay the milkman for a quart of milk, even if—well, you get the idea. The point of Manhattan is that you occupy a cell in the hive at all. That you belong. That you have your seat at the Christopher Club bar, and that seat, if you’re clever, can propel you from a typing pool downtown to a swank party uptown to the front of a camera in a tatty Village studio, so any man with a nickel in his pocket can admire the tilt of your tits.

      And I’ll be damned if I’m ready to give up my seat just yet.

      I set one foot on the lid of the toilet. Brace my hand on the wall. Hoist my bones upward and upward to the hole in the ceiling, fill my lungs with the reek of sewage, and then, of course, comes the exact second the boots clamor down the hallway and the door flies open, and the powder room fills with gentlemen of blue suits and billy clubs, unamused by my predicament.

       5

      ABOUT THOSE nuns.

      Maybe I was a little unfair, a moment ago. There’s nothing like a good convent education, as I often tell my gentleman friends, and even my lady ones. Your knuckles may suffer and your knees may burn, but the poetry and the multiplication tables are yours for eternity. Along with the guilt, but who doesn’t need a little shame from time to time, to keep her on the straight and narrow? Anyway, there was this one sister, Sister Esme, who loved me best, and to prove it she rapped my knuckles the hardest and sent me to penance the longest. When I turned seventeen, she called me into her office—about as inviting as an Assyrian tomb—and gave me a beautiful Bible, in which she had painstakingly marked all the passages she thought relevant to my character, such as it was. You can imagine. She told me that of all the girls who had filtered through her classroom, I was the most unruly, the smartest-mouthed, the least tractable, the most irreligious and argumentative, and she fully expected to hear great things from me. She also said (assuming a terribly serious mien) that she had one single piece of advice for me, which was this: I owed confession only to God. Not to my fellow man, not to my instructors, not even to my parents (this accompanied by a significant slant to the eyebrows). And most especially (her voice grew passionate) not to any person, howsoever persuasive, howsoever threatening, belonging to the judiciary branch of the government, whether local, state, or federal. My conscience belonged to my Maker, and to Him alone. Did I understand?

      Well, naturally I didn’t. Lord Almighty, I was only seventeen! I had so little experience of the world outside the walls of that school. But—in the usual way of childhood advice—Sister Esme’s words return to me with new meaning as I slouch upon a metal bench in my cell at the Sixth Precinct, cheek by miserable jowl with the other female patrons of the Christopher Club that January midnight.

      Now, I don’t mean to startle you, but I’ve never landed in the pokey until tonight, though you might say the visit’s overdue. I guess the place is about what I expected. We’re a tawdry lot, sunk into nervy, silent boredom. Dotty’s chewing her nails; Muriel’s worrying a loop of sequins on her sleeve, such as it is. One girl, gaunt and ravishing, leans cross-armed against the damp concrete wall, staring right through the bars to the tomato-faced policeman on the chair outside. She’s too beautiful for him, and he knows it. Looks everywhere but her. I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her around. She’s wearing a shimmering silver dress, ending in a fringe, and her arms are white and bare and cold. Someone once told me she was Christopher’s girl, and I guess it might be true. Nobody ever bothers her for a smoke and a dance, for example. She sits by herself most nights at the end of the bar, staying up past bedtime, sipping cocktail after cocktail, trailing a never-ending cigarette from her never-ending fingers, disguising the color of her eyes behind ribbons of smoldering kohl. The kohl’s now smudged, but the smolder remains. Liable to ignite the poor cop’s tomato head any second. She gave her name as Millicent Merriwether—I pay close attention to these details, see—but then none of us told the booking rookie our genuine monikers. Where’s the fun in that? And I’ll be damned if this vamp is a Millie.

      There’s a clock on the wall, above Tomato-Head’s cap. A damned slow clock, if you ask me. For the past half an hour, I’ve amused myself in priming my nerves for every twitch of the minute hand, moving us sixty seconds farther into the morning, and each time I’m early. Each time I teeter on the brink, unable to breathe, thinking, Now! and Now! and Now! until finally the stinking hand moves. As amusements go, it’s a real gas. Millie the Vamp turns her head and regards me from the corner of one pitying eye. I shrug and resume my study. By the time three o’clock jumps on my spinal cord without any kind of notice from our hosts, without any sign at all that anyone’s left alive in the rest of the Sixth Precinct station house, I’ve had it. I call out to Tomato-Head.

      “I don’t guess a girl could bum a cigarette, if she asks nicely?”

      He makes this startling movement. Clutches his cap. Turns from tomato to raspberry.

      “No? I guess rules are rules.” I lift my hands and stretch, an act that creates an interesting effect on my décolletage, don’t you know. “I don’t mean to be a nuisance, officer, but I do have a breakfast appointment I’d rather not miss. And this fellow happens to prefer me scrubbed up and smiling, if you know what I mean.”

      Tomato-Head looks to the ceiling for relief.

      “Now, don’t be embarrassed. We’re just a mess of girls, here, the nicest girls in the world. It’s a shame, the way they turn honest girls into criminals these days, don’t you think?”

      “Oh, shut your flapper, Gin,” Dotty says crossly. “It ain’t his fault.”

      “No, of course not. Poor little dear. He’s just doing his job. Why, I’ll bet he’s seen the inside of a juice joint or two himself, when he’s not on duty. He doesn’t look like teetotal to me, no sir. He looks like the kind of fellow who enjoys a nice time on the town, likes to make a little whoopee—”

      “Says you.”

      “Don’t you think? A friendly-faced cop like that? I’ll bet he’s on our side.”

      “Him?”

      “Sure. Because why? Because it’s the first time the joint’s been raided, isn’t it? And Christopher’s been around since the start of the Dark Ages. So—”

      “Oh, give it up.”

      “So I say there’s a rat. A rat in the house. Somebody squealed, didn’t they? Hmm, officer?”

      Tomato-Head chews his lips and looks ashamed.

      “You see? Someone ratted Christopher out. I’ll bet it’s someone on the inside, too. I’ll bet—”

      Millie turns so fast, her fringed hem takes a minute to catch up. “Be