Everybody Goes to Jimmy's (5 page)

Before we found a cab, she gave me a strange look that I couldn't read. My pulling the pistol may have surprised her, but I don't think it impressed her, not like the drunken debutante.

Later, in front of her building, she pulled me into the shadow of the front steps, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me harder than she ever had. Her body molded itself against mine. I got hard and she knew it.

“Yeah,” she said as she plucked the bill from my hand, “you're going to be trouble all right.”

Then came the evening when everything changed. We had been to a place called the Bat. It looked to me like something out of a Theda Bara vamp movie. It had all these thick drapes covering the walls and pillows on the floor and incense and no light. Anna said it was Bohemian. I thought it was scary, and I didn't care for the food, either. But she liked it, or maybe she liked the third beer. Something made her looser and more reckless than she usually was.

It was still light when we left, and she said we should walk through the park, so we did.

I strolled. The Bohemian dinner was still kind of heavy, and I was not in the mood to move quickly. I'd made it through half a glass of beer and still felt bloated. She was just the opposite. To this day, I can close my eyes and still see her that evening, the way the low sun flattered her and cast a long shadow and how she skipped and twirled on the path, running ahead and coming back to grab my arm in both of hers. She tried to pull me along faster, teasing me.

Finally, she said, “I bet you didn't know that I was the fastest runner at North Central Illinois High School. I could even beat the boys. I could even beat the boys on the track team. Nobody could catch me. Ever!”

I burped softly and nodded my head.

“And I'm still the fastest. I can beat you, Jimmy Quinn.” She danced right up in front of me and touched the tip of my nose.

I should have agreed with her, or kept my mouth shut. Instead, I said, “No, you can't.”

She stopped and put her fists on her hips and said, “You don't believe me.”

“Look, you don't understand. I—”

“You think just because I'm a girl, you're better than me.”

And that started a long argument as we walked. At first, she wanted to race me right there in the park, until I pointed out that she was wearing heels and a dress. Did she really want to race in that outfit? She didn't. I thought she'd lost interest in the subject, but a few steps later, she said, “We can't do it tomorrow because I've got a long shift and I've got to be at the laundry after that. So it will have to be Thursday, OK?”

“What Thursday?”

“We'll race. On Thursday. I challenge you.” She tapped me on the nose again. It was starting to piss me off a little. “Got that? I, Anna Gunderwald, challenge you, Jimmy Quinn, to a race.”

I remember her expression, the cocky smile, the sun on her face, and I fell for her all over again, even harder, so hard I could barely breathe.

I said, “OK, then, I accept. You name the time, the place, the distance. I don't care. Now, what are the stakes?”

That brought her up short.

“Let's talk about this,” said I as we continued our walk. “You don't have a lot of money to put up, but I do. So why don't we say that if you win, on the course of your choosing, I'll give you one hundred dollars.”

Her eyes lit up, and she tightened her grip on my arm. “And if you win? Not that you will.”

“If I win … you'll do whatever I want you to do on Saturday night. You cannot say no to anything I ask.”

All sorts of thoughts and feelings crossed her face then—greed, worry, fear, confidence, uncertainty, and finally, I think, some kind of triumph. She thought she had me. She turned to face me and stuck out her hand and said, “Done.”

She didn't know that I don't gamble.

When I walked up to her building on Thursday afternoon, she and her three roommates were waiting for me on the steps. They were giddy and giggling and trying to act like they were football players or something, and I was the opposing team. About all I could see of what Anna was wearing were her shoes, canvas sneakers. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She was trying to give me a hard look, like the other girls were, and it seemed less forced on her. She really wanted to beat me.

I was wearing work clothes. Pants that gave me a lot of room and didn't slow me down, and my jacket with the extra large inside pocket for securing payoffs and bribes. It was empty. I'd made my last delivery to an aide in the mayor's office in the middle of the afternoon. And, of course, I had my Keds.

Looking at the situation from her point of view, I guess it made sense. She had raced against other guys before and she beat 'em. I was just a guy who was kind of stuck on her, not very tall, not particularly strong. If I'd ever done any kind of racing, I hadn't mentioned it to her, and since guys tend to brag to girls about things they're good at, I probably hadn't raced.

That was true, I guess. I hadn't raced, but I did run. When Rothstein needed a message hand delivered, he expected me to get there and get back as fast as I could. When I was delivering stacks of cash to cops and aldermen, I knew there were guys who'd try to intercept me. In other words, when it came to running in New York, I was a professional and she was an amateur. If I'd been a gentleman, I'd have told her that. I wasn't and I didn't.

The three girls kept giggling to one another, and I knew they were saying things about me, and that embarrassed me, so I tried not to look at them and focused on Anna. She popped up to her feet and tossed off the blanket. She was wearing a light blue sleeveless V-neck jersey with the letters
PHS
printed on the front, and loose dark-blue silk bloomers that came to her knees.

I had suspected that she would want to race in the park, and that worried me. I was always a little spooked in the park. Too many trees and it smelled of dirt and horses and sheep. I guessed that it would be more like the rolling hills of Illinois, where she'd grown up. Actually, I didn't know if there were rolling hills in Illinois. I'd never really been out of the city and sort of assumed that there were rolling hills on the other side of the Hudson River going all the way to the Pacific, except for the places where there were rolling deserts that I saw in Western movies.

But no, she said we were going to do it right there. We'd start from her building heading west across Broadway and West End to Riverside Drive, where we'd turn south for one block, then back the way we'd come to Amsterdam Avenue, where we'd turn north for a block and be back at her steps. I guessed it a shade under a mile.

If the people passing by thought that the little group of four girls and a guy was odd, they didn't show it. I took my jacket off, hung it on the metal railing, and rolled up my shirtsleeves.

Anna's face was flushed and bright with sweat. Maybe she'd already run the course, or she was just excited. She had that same triumphant look I'd seen the other night.

I heard one of the other girls whisper, “There weren't so many people when we worked it out yesterday.” And another girl answered, “No, that's good. She's lighter on her feet.” I didn't say anything. The third girl told us to take our places and put our feet on a chalk line they'd drawn on the sidewalk.

She looked both ways down the street, raised her hand, and said, “Ready, set, go!”

And we ran.

It was a narrow street with shops on the first floor of most of the buildings, delis, grocers, laundries, lunchrooms, barbershops. There were small trees and newsstands close to the curb. Sidewalk pavement was in fair shape, a bit uneven, and it was about as crowded as you'd expect a neighborhood to be on a Thursday evening.

Anna zipped out ahead and hadn't taken ten steps before she had to work her way between two women carrying grocery bags. I stayed a few steps behind for most of the first block until we approached Broadway. That's where I angled left and cut into the street with the cars and trucks and horses. I was ahead of her before we crossed the intersection and stayed on the other side of the street. There were fewer people around us toward West End where the apartment houses were bigger and fewer still on Riverside Drive with all the big houses.

Part of me wanted to look back, to see where she was, but I knew that didn't matter. I tried to think of her as a thug who was trying to hijack a big precinct payment and kept moving, looking ahead. I watched out for groups of kids and big families. Both were slow, and kids were unpredictable. You never knew what they were going to do. Even three adults who were strolling and talking to one another could jam things up completely. You had to be ready to take an angle across a street, so you needed to know what was coming up behind you.

I was so intent on weaving through the crowd that I almost overran the turn at Amsterdam. But I didn't.

The three roommaters' shoulders slumped when I showed up in front of them. I was still breathing hard when Anna came up Amsterdam less than a minute later. Unlike the other girls, she was surprised to see me.

“What did you do? You cheated, you must've cheated. I didn't see—”

“I passed you in the traffic across Broadway. Stayed on the other side of the street after that.”

She was breathing hard through her nose and glaring at me, fists on hips, as she walked back and forth on the sidewalk. The silk bloomers were plastered to her thighs, and the shirt stuck to her breasts as sweat darkened it. Right then, she was the sexiest female I'd ever seen in the flesh. I tried not to stare at her.

A guy walking past gave her a wolf whistle. Anna paid no attention. After a long moment, she got her breath back and wiped her hands across her eyes, wiping away either tears or sweat.

“All right,” she said. “You won. I don't know how …”

“I didn't cheat.”

“I didn't say you did. It's just … It's just … nothing. You won.” Her expression changed, and she actually looked happy. And sexy. “All right. Saturday night.” She looked up at the girls on the steps. They were worried for her and gave me more nasty looks. “What's it going to be?”

I had no idea. I had forty-eight hours to figure something out.

Saturday night at eight o'clock a taxi parked in front of her building. The driver rang her apartment. When she came down and asked where they were going, he said that he wasn't supposed to tell her anything. I'd like to think that she was tingling with excitement and anticipation, but I doubt that was the case.

The cab took her to the side door of the Chatham Hotel on Vanderbilt Avenue. That's where she was met by Mr. Stebbins, the bell captain who happened to be a mutual friend of Mr. Rothstein and me. When A. R. happened to entertain one of his showgirls, he often used the Chatham, and I had delivered special tips to most of the guys on the staff.

Mr. Stebbins handed Anna a rose. (That was his idea.) He assured her that many of the hotel's finest guests preferred not to parade themselves through the lobby on the way to their rooms, and the staff was always happy to accommodate them.

He told the elevator boy to take her to the ninth floor, the Taft Suite. When she knocked on the door, I let her in. She wore a light blue dress and a cloche hat. She held her purse in front of her stomach like a shield. I can't say that she looked happy.

Let me tell you about the Taft Suite. Imagine three really large high-ceilinged rooms separated by wide sliding doors. Now, fill those rooms with furniture that was big and heavy and not particularly comfortable, as it turned out. Put marble statues of half-naked people on the marble-topped tables and sideboards. Then hang pictures of racehorses and such in ornate gilt frames on the walls. Yeah, it was pretty god-awful and not cheap, let me tell you. But for one night, it was mine. The truth is that I still didn't know exactly what I wanted to do that night, but I knew that this was the kind of place you did it in, whatever it was.

“Listen,” I said to her, “I gotta tell you that I still feel kind of bad about the race and everything. You didn't know that I do this stuff all the time.”

“You didn't talk me into anything. I did it all by myself.”

“And so now you're here to do whatever I tell you to do, right?”

She stood a little straighter. “Yes, that was the bet.”

“OK, I've got things figured out,” I lied. “I know, because you've told me about it, that you have to share a bathroom with six other girls. Isn't that right?”

She nodded, looking confused.

“So I want you,” I said as I walked across the room and opened a door, “to spend at least the next hour doing whatever it is that girls do in the bathroom.”

She snorted a surprised laugh and put a gloved hand over her mouth to smother it.

Now, to picture this bathroom, imagine one of those Turkish baths made of sparkling white tile and with nozzles and fixtures and such that I had no idea what they did, and a bathtub big enough for the twenty-seventh president of these United States when he stayed at the Chatham. Taft weighed in at more than three hundred pounds, and Mr. Stebbins claimed that their tub was deeper and wider than the one Taft had installed in the White House.

So, what was I doing? Looking back on it, I think I just wanted to get Anna naked when I was under the same roof, and then I'd see what happened.

All right, you could say, “Jimmy, why didn't you just get the room, take off your clothes, and hop into the big Taft-sized bed and be there waiting for her to arrive?” I admit that the idea occurred to me, and at first, that was the plan, but when the time came, I chickened out. I was too frightened, too inexperienced, too immature, too whatever you want to call me to carry it off.

And so away she went into that vast bathroom, and I could hear water running for the longest time. Then I turned on the radio, and I don't remember what I listened to, but I didn't really hear it anyway. I was imagining what was going on behind that door. I could see her stripping off her clothes and sliding into that ocean of a tub and pouring in all the lotions and bath salts and potions that the head maid had told me women like. And there was a champagne cooler in there beside the tub, but it was full of bottles of beer.