Beautiful Days (22 page)

When he turned to leave, Letty shifted out of the doorway. She seemed to know she might otherwise be trampled. Cordelia reached for her hand and grasped it as she moved after Charlie through the door, squeezing once before she let go and began to chase her brother.

On the main floor the noise had reached a riotous pitch. Everyone reached out to grab her attention. She batted them away and tried to keep up with Charlie. Halfway down the bar, Roger, her press agent, was the first to succeed in blocking her path.

“Where's Mona?” he demanded, unsmiling. “She was supposed to be on an hour ago and everyone is asking about it. All the writers want to be able to say the legendary Mona took the stage at midnight, and she's nowhere to be found!”

“Then find her,” Cordelia answered, in a quiet but forceful tone, and pushed past him after Charlie.

When she stepped onto the sidewalk, she saw that the streets had become damp and were reflecting the orange light of the streetlamps. The photographers waiting by their cars stood, and the flashes began going off, so she held up her hand to hide her face and went to Charlie. He was standing at the center of a cluster of his Dogwood gang, men who had been on hand that night in case there was trouble.

“This is payback for what happened this morning,” she said, coming to stand beside him.

“Yes.” Charlie shook his head angrily, but he seemed not as crazed as he had before.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Go back inside.”

“No, Charlie, I'm coming with you. Astrid is my best friend and she's in danger and I'm coming with you.”

“No.” Charlie had her by both shoulders and he was steering her back toward the door of The Vault. “No, you're not.”

“But it's my fault. I should never have told you about the submarine. I should never have . . .” She felt helpless and angry with herself, and she wanted badly to do something that would make Astrid safe. “And Thom—I saw Thom, and he told me, he told me to be careful, but I thought that was just idle talk. I should have told you. I should have told
someone
.”

“It's not your fault.” Charlie had pushed her against the door, his brown eyes wide beneath a tensed brow. “Just go inside for now and take care of our business.”

The memory of what violence could do to a body was fresh with her, how it could tear up and make fragile a person who had walked around for years with a swaggering air of impenetrability. She nodded until Charlie let her go, but she did not immediately do as he'd instructed. She stood there in the murky street, watching bystanders and photographers and debutantes who were ignorant of the hardships of life and wanted nothing so much as they wanted to get inside her club. She was struck by how summery everything seemed—the bare shoulders of girls, the bright colors of their gowns, the flowers they wore in their hair—because inside of her it had turned cold and wintry.

Poor Astrid, who seemed never to consider the fact that the world might do her harm, and was so careless about everything, except when it came to friendships, where she had always proved herself fiercely loyal. Cordelia was furious with herself for being so selfish and thinking that Thom's comment was directed at her alone. So she lingered awhile longer outside, made immobile by the thought that tomorrow morning she'd wake up with the blood of two loved ones on her hands.

Chapter 21

IN THE MAHOGANY HALLWAY IN THE BACK OFFICES OF The Vault, a petite chorus girl stood shivering in a dress that hardly fit her. She could not go back out into the club, where birthdays and first kisses and youth itself were being loudly toasted, and where a millionaire who lived on pennies was escorting a girl from his own tribe to their table. But she had no reason to stay where she was, and her current location held no appeal, for it was the place where Cordelia had abandoned her yet again. Nothing could have been so predictable.

Just as Letty was about to slide down the wall and crumple into a ball, a diminutively sized man with a loud bark came in from the main floor and demanded to know where Cordelia was.

“Don't know,” was all Letty could get out.

His nose twitched like a rabbit's. “Who are you?”

“Letty Larkspur.”

“That's a good name, kid, but I don't know who you are yet, so get out of my way.”

He straightened his suit jacket and brushed past her and knocked on the door. “Mona?” he called out. “Mona, honey baby?”

For some reason—Was she suspicious of this stranger in Cordelia's empty office? Was she curious? Did she simply have no place else to go?—Letty followed the man as he pushed through the door and into another wood-paneled room, where a leather fainting couch had been installed, as well as a vanity table and mirror. She smelled the acrid bile before she fully comprehended the scene within, and it was not until the rabbit-faced man knelt to the ground and repeated the name
Mona
that she realized what was happening.

The pretty woman she'd witnessed strutting through the club yesterday was lying half on and half off the fainting couch, her hair bedraggled and her dress askew. She had been sick all over herself, and all over the floor.

“Mona,” the man said again, lightly slapping her face.

She groaned and managed to get one of her eyes partially open. “Roger?” she gasped.

“Mona, I told you not to drink tonight!” he shouted, and then let her limp body fall back where it lay.

“Oh, God,” she said, and Letty had to turn away, because she realized that the woman was going to be sick again.

In the hall she saw Paulette, rushing toward her from the main room. “Oh, Letty, there you are! The band is asking for Miss Alexander, have you seen her?”

Letty made a face and inclined her head toward the sorry scene in the makeshift greenroom.

“Christ,” said Paulette, once she'd seen for herself. “Mr. Tinsley, what are we going to do?”

“Get me some coffee . . .” he said, standing. “No, get me an ice bucket . . .” But this must have seemed likewise inadequate, because he covered his face with his hands and began laughing hysterically.

“Are you all right?” Letty whispered to him.

“All right? Of course I'm not all right, my reputation is about to be ruined! I'm in hell,” he snapped. Then he rested his hand against his hip and stopped laughing. “Letty Larkspur—you make that up yourself?”

Letty shrugged.

“Then you must be—what? A singer, a dancer, a chorus girl extraordinaire?”

“I just had my first night at the Paris Revue.”

The man let out a sigh of despair and turned away.

Letty gulped and stepped into the room so that the press agent couldn't look away from her. She had listened to enough radio to know that all a girl needed was one little twist of fate. Suddenly it didn't matter to her that it was Cordelia's club, or that Mona Alexander had just drunk herself out of the spotlight that Letty herself had once coveted. It didn't matter if Grady was still out there and only had eyes for Peachy Whitburn. There was an audience, and she was the girl to entertain them. That was all.

“Let me do it.” She fixed her big blues eyes on Roger so that he couldn't look away. “I'm your girl.”

“Mr. Tinsley, she really does have a beautiful voice,” Paulette said.

His eyes went from Paulette back to Letty, and his nose twitched. “Take that terrible dress off,” he said, pulling a slinky black column from the place where it hung by the wall.

“Oh, I . . .” Letty mumbled.

But Roger only rolled his eyes. “Believe me, honey, I'm not interested.”

So she pulled the pink dress over her head and let Paulette and the press agent dress her in the black. They powdered her face and put lipstick on her mouth, and then Roger came back from the dressing table with a gold headdress that covered her hair like a cap and dangled along her ears and neck, as though she had on a bobbed wig of glittering metallic threads.

“So what's your angle, kiddo?” Roger asked.

“I told you, I'm a chorus girl at the Paris Revue.”

“There have been a thousand of those.” He bent to press fake eyelashes onto her upper lids. “Can't you give me something better?”

“Cordelia and I were best friends in Ohio. Union, Ohio. That's where I was born.”

“Forget it.” He let out an exasperated sigh as he applied white powder to her nose with a soft poof. “I'll just make something up to tell the boys from the press.”

“You look gorgeous,” Paulette said. Letty batted back her big, new lashes and glanced at herself in the mirror. Earlier in the evening she had played the tiny backing role, but now she looked almost as much the diva as Lulu.

“Don't get weepy,” Roger quipped. “You haven't done anything to write the boys back in Ohio about yet.”

Flanked by Paulette and Roger, she went through a door and into a hall that ran along behind a row of teller windows. On this side of the room, the windows had been covered from the inside with parchment paper, but she could still see forms moving out in the room and hear the general din. At the end of the hall there were a few steps that led to the stage, where she could see the profiles of the musicians as they came to the end of a song. She took a deep breath and didn't consider looking back. Her destiny was right there, and she was ready to grab it with both hands.

At first, Astrid thought it was the scratchy fibers of the rope around her feet that would do her in, but now she knew it was the slow drip-drip-dripping of some leak high above her. The chair she was sitting on was pretty bad, too, as was the sack over her head. Wherever she was, it had an unpleasant fishy odor. But the incessant dripping was the real torture.

“Hello?” she yelled. She hadn't heard anybody for what felt like a long time, although she knew that the men who had taken her from the tavern were still close by. She'd only seen the face of one of them in the bathroom mirror. Then he'd grabbed her, one hand over her mouth and the other gripping her around the front, so that he could drag her backward and another man could lift her by the feet. She had kicked furiously, but they were stronger than she was, and after a minute the second man had managed to tie her ankles together with rope. She had struggled against them, but then they put her in the backseat of a car and the motor started up.

At first the men had talked a lot in low, threatening tones. That had been to get her to stop screaming, she guessed. After that they talked less, though when they went over the bridge, one of them began making some bland remarks about baseball. She didn't know how long they had driven, only that there were more men wherever they had taken her, and that more rope was used to tie her to a chair. By then she knew that it wasn't Charlie's men who had nabbed her, because Charlie's men would have been warned not to be so rough. After that she became terrified they would gag her, the way she'd seen a girl gagged in a movie once, and so she kept quiet. But now she hadn't heard anyone's voice in a long time, and she was afraid that the drips from the ceiling might make her lose her mind.

“Hello?”

The next thing she heard were footsteps that echoed across the room, and splashing as someone walked quickly toward her. She shrank as he got closer, and then she felt the sack ripped off her head.

“What is it?” sneered the man, whose onion-and-pickles mouth was close to her ear.

Astrid's eyes blinked and she saw that she was in a big dark warehouse, only partially lit with bare bulbs. Its walls were lined with large crates and there were puddles across the floor, which were possibly the source of the putrid smell. Her dress had been dragged through the dirty water; it was badly stained around the hem.

“Well, what?” the man repeated, drawing back and showing her his teeth. He had a face like the butcher's least choice cut of beef.

“I wonder if you might do something about that damned dripping?” she demanded, trying to seem as imperious as possible.

The man put his big greasy hand on her cheek and then drew it back over her hair, which was already damp with fearful sweat. He smiled in a way that conveyed the opposite of an ordinary smile. “This ain't the Ritz, dolly.”

“Hey, go gentle on her!” a voice from the opposite end of the warehouse called.

Both she and her antagonist bent their bodies to see who it might be. To her surprise, she recognized the second man, who was standing in the doorway from another adjoining room.

“Thom Hale, get me out of here!” Astrid yelled, but she saw immediately that this tack would do her no good, for Thom stiffened at the implication that they'd known each other socially. He was wearing a pewter suit and a starched white shirt, and she wondered if he had begun his evening thinking he'd get a glimpse of Cordelia's new endeavor.

“Aw, Tommy boy wants us to be nice to his swank friends,” the man with breath like onions and pickles said.

“Don't be a moron,” Thom returned. This time his voice was hard, and he refused to meet Astrid's eyes. “We don't need to hurt her, we just need them to think we might.”

“But what does it matter anymore if Charlie says he's not negotiating?” the man yelled back.

“What?” Astrid gasped.

“I told Duluth this was the wrong idea. You don't bring girls into revenge.” Thom sighed in a way that briefly filled Astrid with hope, but then he went on in a defeated tone: “Do what you want. I'm leaving.”

The man put his big hand over her mouth and leaned in close to her ear again. “Guess you're going to shut up now, huh?”

For several terrifying seconds the skin of his hand continued to press against her face, but when he walked away, she found that her fear of being left alone, and what came after that, was worse. “Wait!” she cried. “Call my stepfather, Harrison Marsh. He'll pay your ransom.”

“We don't want your money,” the man said. The door had slammed behind him, but the word
money
was still echoing off the walls as Astrid closed her eyes and began to choke quietly on her own tears. Earlier that day she had thought herself very brave for going to an old shack on the waterfront, but now she knew that she was not brave. She had disregarded Charlie, and now he was going to let her die, and the only thing she could do was shed salty tears all over her ruined evening gown.

When Cordelia did finally gather herself enough to return to the club, she was surprised to find that the general clamor of the place had died down. The music was not so jittery, either. It had become sweet and lilting, and it was now accompanied by a female voice that she knew well. She couldn't see the singer onstage, but she knew immediately that it wasn't Mona Alexander. People who had already retrieved hats and coats were lingering by the door, as though entranced by a lullaby, and she had to go around them, making her way along the bar to get a look.

In a black dress, with her face framed by a gold headdress, Letty was a vision of a much more experienced performer. Her eyes danced across the audience and she raised her arms, slow and sure, as her voice swelled. Cordelia thought of her when they first became friends, when they were still girls and Letty blushed when anyone said even the most casual thing to her. It was incredible that this was the same girl. If Cordelia had told any of the men along the bar watching Letty, rapt, that she was just seventeen and had only arrived from Ohio in May, she knew they would have fallen off their stools in surprise.

For a brief moment Cordelia saw a panorama of everything she had come to New York to find. There was good company, a whole menagerie of types, all joined together under one roof by a determination that a day should not end with a balanced meal and an early bedtime, that life should be very glorious and gay and full. Outside was a world of fear and violence and disappointment, and no one knew what bad news awaited them when they left this spot—least of all her. But for the time they remained here, they got to witness a petite girl emerging, as if from a chrysalis, to become everything she'd ever dreamed for herself.

When the song ended, Letty bowed her head. The applause was deafening. Cordelia watched as she turned to the band and whispered something, and smiled to think that Letty's practicing had not been for nothing. The next song was a fast number, and Cordelia had reached the other side of the room, but she had to duck into the back area behind the bar, where even the dishwashers had ceased their labor to listen, because by then tears were streaming from the corners of her eyes.