For the Love of Mike (28 page)

“Even if he wants to hurt you?” I demanded.

She shook her head. “I’m sure he doesn’t mean me harm. He’s just frightened at the moment. He doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t know whether he can trust me or not.” She grabbed at my arm suddenly. “You won’t tell the police about him, promise me that. Not until I’ve decided what I must do next.”

“All right,” I said. “We will say nothing until you’ve made up your own mind. But he killed somebody, Katherine. He killed a good woman. You can’t expect us to sit by and do nothing. You know in your heart that you have to tell them.”

Katherine sighed. “I know. I’m so confused and so frightened—I don’t know what I feel anymore. But I did love him once.”

“But you are afraid for your life. You can’t go on living this way,” Jacob said angrily. “The man must be brought to justice.”

“The man is a brute. You were quite right to leave him,” Sid said.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here. He’ll never be able to find you. Our lips are sealed,” Gus added.

“Thank heavens for that. Now we can all relax,” Jacob said.

It turned out he wasn’t one hundred percent right.

An hour or so later we were bathed, changed, and restored. Sid and Gus insisted on feeding us. After a large filling meal of roast beef, cabbage, and potatoes (the Moroccan phase having begun to wane), Jacob took his leave reluctantly.

“You’re sure you will be all right now?”

“You’ve said that a dozen times. How could I possibly not be all right? I am among friends and my own home is across the street, complete with large male bodyguard. Nobody would think of looking for Katherine here. We will sleep soundly tonight, believe me.”

He went then. I crossed the street to my own house and returned with pen and paper.

“I am writing to your father, Katherine,” I said. “I will limit my news to telling him that I have found you safe and sound if you will complete the letter yourself.”

She chewed on her lip. “But he’ll come after me as soon as he gets the letter.”

“Then tell him not to.”

“You don’t know my father. He was used to ordering men around in the army for most of his life. He expects everyone else to salute and obey—wife and daughter included.”

“Tell him that you have left Michael Kelly and it appears that your marriage might not be legal—that will make him happy. Then tell him that you are not ready to come home yet, but will keep in touch from now on. He can’t ask for more.”

Still she hesitated.

“Katherine, if it were your child and you were desperately worried about her, wouldn’t you want to get a message from her, saying that she was safe?”

She nodded and sat at the table. She blotted and folded the letter before I could read it and thrust it into an envelope.

“That’s done then,” she said.

She put her hand instinctively to her throat.

“You used to wear a locket,” I said.

She nodded. “My grandmother’s.”

“What happened to it? How did Mr. Mostel get his hands on it?”

“We needed money. Michael told me to pawn it. I asked Mr. Mostel if I could pawn it to him. He gave me twenty dollars for it. Not nearly enough but it kept us going. Michael drank most of the money away, of course. I wonder if it was still in Mostel’s office and it burned in the fire.”

“No, it’s safe,” I said, “and I may be able to get it back for you.”

Her face lit up. “Really?”

“I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”

She jumped up and hugged me. “Molly, you are a miracle worker.”

“I must go home now,” I said. “Keep out of sight and let my two trusty friends take care of you. You’ll be quite safe with them.”

“I’m sure I shall.” Katherine looked around her. “In fact I shall be so comfortable here that I may never want to leave.”

I smiled as I walked to the front door. I had the same warm feelings about Nine Patchin Place. I hadn’t wanted to leave either. My little home across the street still felt like a bleak substitute, but at least I didn’t have to worry that Shamey and Bridie were living in an unbearable slum.

I stepped out into the night and pulled my wrap around me as I crossed the street. As I went to open my front door a figure stepped out of the shadows and an arm grabbed me.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

“It’s only me,” Daniel’s voice said.

“Holy Mother of God! My heart nearly jumped right out of my chest,” I said.

Daniel stepped out of the shadows into the light of the street lamp. “I had to see you. I’ve just called at your house but they said you weren’t home.”

“I was across the street with Sid and Gus,” I said. “What do you mean by scaring me half to death?”

“I heard about the fire. I got there just in time to see you in the arms of that Singer fellow. Before I could reach you, you went off in a cab with him.”

“I was naturally upset, having just escaped from being burned to death. Jacob comforted me.”

“Ah, so that’s all it was. That’s fine then.” The lines of concern had melted from his face. Anger welled up inside me.

“No, that’s not all it was. I think you should know that he’s asked me to marry him.”

He looked at me for a second, then laughed. “Of course you’re not going to marry him.”

“Oh, and why not, pray? Does the New York police force have jurisdiction over marriages these days?”

“You’re not going to marry him because you don’t love him.”

“How do you know that I don’t love him?”

“Because you love me and you can’t love two people at once.”

“I
loved
you,” I corrected. “But I grew tired of waiting. Almost a year has gone by, Daniel, and still you haven’t told Miss Norton of my existence.”

The flickering light of the gas lamp lit his face. He was wearing his greatcoat with the collar turned up and the wind tugged at his unruly curls. As usual the physical attraction of the man was overwhelming. I fought it.

“The time has never been right, Molly. I work so darned hard that I barely have time to sleep. I have hardly seen Miss Norton for months and when I do see her, the time just goes before I can pluck up courage. I told you it has to be done properly. If I make her feel betrayed, she will stop at nothing until she has ruined me completely and utterly. She might appear sweet but she has a ruthless streak in her nature.”

“If you chose such a person to marry—your advancement must indeed mean a lot to you.”

“I was a young man when I first proposed to her. She seemed sweet and delicate and all that a man could want in a wife.”

“Rich too, of course. And influential.”

“That was taken into consideration. But I didn’t have a chance to see any of her faults until later.”

“And now it seems you would rather live with her faults than risk her wrath. That doesn’t say much for your character.”

“I agree. I have been a hopeless coward where this is concerned. I just beg you, do not do anything rash to spite me.”

“If I marry Jacob, it will not be to spite you. It will be because he is kind and caring and honorable and will take good care of me.”

“When did you ever need anyone to take care of you?” That roguish smile crossed his lips.

“Maybe I have had enough of trying to fend for myself. And I can help him with his work too. He is making a difference, Daniel.”

“And I am not?”

“Of course you are, but Jacob does his work for love, and you do yours for ambition. He could make a lot of money from his photographs but chooses to take pictures to arouse the public conscience. He is actively seeking to better the lot of those poor people who have no voice of their own. It’s a noble cause.”

“But not your cause. I don’t see you as a rabid socialist by nature,” Daniel said. “When your enthusiasm wanes, what will you have left then?”

“Mutual respect and affection.”

“Is that enough, Molly?”

“It may have to be, Daniel. If you came to me tomorrow and told me that you were free of your engagement and asked me to marry you, I might well consider it, but I do not intend to become an elderly spinster while I sit at home waiting.”

“You could always have written to Miss Norton yourself. That would have brought matters to a head.”

I shook my head. “Oh no, Daniel. Either you come to me willingly, freely, and with your whole heart, or not at all. It has to be your choice and yours alone. You should go now. The night is cold to be standing outside.”

“You could ask me in.”

“That wouldn’t be proper, would it? Word might get back to my fiancé.”

As I went to walk past him he grabbed my arm and swung me around to face him. “Don’t do this to me, Molly. Don’t taunt me this way.”

“I assure you, sir, that I take matters of the heart very earnestly. If you think my decision to marry Jacob is merely to taunt you, then you are wrong. If I commit to him, I commit whole-heartedly, and with full knowledge of what I am giving up.”

He grasped at my shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Don’t give up on me, Molly, please.”

“Let go of me.” I shook myself free. “You’re not going to soften me up with your sweet-talking blarney anymore. I’m getting on with my own life without you and I’m doing just fine.”

“Apart from almost getting yourself burned to death in a fire, shot at, captured by gangster, and arrested for prostitution?”

“Apart from those, yes.”

I looked at him and he started to laugh. I had to smile too.

“I love you, Molly Murphy,” he said softly, then he reached out to stroke my cheek.

“Good night, Daniel,” I said somewhat shakily, then I fled inside the door before I could weaken. Once inside I stood in the doorway with my hand to that cheek where his hand had been.

Twenty-seven

I
t was an unaccustomed luxury to rise with the sun the next morning, to dress and breakfast in leisure, and to get a kiss from the children as they went off to school.

“I’m glad you’re not going to that horrid place anymore, Molly,” Bridie said, wrapping her little arms around my neck. “It was no fun when you weren’t here. All we had to eat was dripping toast and Shamey bullied me.”

“Well, I’m going to bully you now,” I said, stroking her hair fondly. “And my first command is to bring me your hairbrush. You have a knot the size of Galway Bay in the back of your hair. And you, Shamey, haven’t washed your neck in a week. Go and do it now.”

“Tough guys don’t need to wash their necks,” he muttered as he made for the scullery.

I waved as they ran off to school.

“They’re turning out just grand, aren’t they?” I asked Seamus, who had come into the room.

“Thanks to your help. Who knows where they’d have been if we had stayed with Nuala in the tenement? I wish there was some way to repay you, Molly. I’m doing my best to find a job, really I am. I’m seeing a man today at the department store called Macy’s. Do you know of it? They say it’s very grand. They take on extra help for the Christmas season—carrying packages for ladies and the like.”

“You’ll be back on your feet soon enough.”

He nodded as if he didn’t really believe this. “I’ve only ever been a laborer, you see, and now I don’t think I’ve the strength to swing a pick and shovel.”

“You’ll find something, Seamus. Don’t worry about it. I’ve just concluded two cases, so I’ll have money coming in.”

As I said that, a smile spread across my face. Two cases solved. I had become a real detective. I would go and collect my fee today. I thought it only fair to confront Sarah first and verify the truth about those papers I had seen. I had been wrong about things before—just occasionally.

I had no idea where Sarah lived, or Mr. Mostel either. I headed for the garment factory because I couldn’t think of any other sensible starting point. As I approached along Canal Street I saw that a small crowd was still gathered around the burned-out shell of the building. Men were dragging out sorry-looking pieces of furniture from the cabinetmaker on the ground floor. On the sidewalk were stacked bolts of waterlogged, singed cloth. It was a sorry sight. I noticed that several of my fellow workers were standing among the crowd, staring at the building as if they couldn’t believe what they saw. Then Seedy Sam emerged from the ruined doorway, shaking his head. He spotted me and pointed his finger accusingly.

“It was you, wasn’t it? You and that Sadie girl—you started the fire deliberately because I locked you in. I knew you were trouble from the first day.”

I marched right up to him. “We started the fire?” I demanded “Is that what your addled brain has been thinking? We were almost burned alive in that firetrap. It was only sheer luck that we got out.”

“You probably didn’t mean it to burn up the whole building—just drawing attention to yourselves.”

“The fire started because one of the little girls panicked at the thought of being locked in and she knocked over one of those unsafe oil stoves. You’ll be lucky that you’re not arrested after we’ve told the police how you locked us in.”

“Me—arrested?” He stepped away, his eyes darting around the crowd. “I didn’t do anything against the law.”

“I’d say holding people prisoner against their will might be grounds for arrest,” I said, looking at the other girls in the crowd. “What do you think?”

The crowd made angry murmurs.

“I was just doing my duty, doing right by Mr. Mostel.”

“I hope that’s how he sees it, because I’m on my way to visit him now, and you can be sure I’ll let him know how you locked us in—just as we’ll be letting the newspapers know all the details too.”

He seemed to deflate like a balloon. “I’m just the foreman,” he said. “They can’t pin anything on me.” And he hurried off. The girls looked at me and laughed.

“Are you really going to tell the police and the newspapers?” one of them asked.

“I might. In fact I probably should, shouldn’t I? It would make people aware of how badly we’ve been treated. Maybe some good will come of it.” I decided to visit Jacob as soon as I’d settled the matter with Sarah.

“Do any of you know where Sarah lives? The frail-looking girl from Russia—quiet as a mouse?”

“Oh that one.” One of the girls nodded. “She lives on Hester. Two buildings from us.”

I noted the address in my little book. “And what about Mr. Mostel?” I asked.

“You’re going to see him too?”

“I might—just to tell him what I think of him and his fire-trap,” I said. “Does anyone know where he lives?”

“Oh sure. We go to supper there every Shabbat,” one of the girls said with a laugh.

“He lives on the Upper East Side,” someone else said. “Right by the park. Fancy schmancy. I saw him when I went uptown to the zoo once. He came out of a side street, right across from the zoo. He was riding in his carriage with his family. Very grand.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Are you really going to see him? You sure have
chutzpah,
Molly. I bet he throws you out.” I heard them calling after me as I made my way toward Hester Street. Of all the Lower East Side, Hester Street was the most bustling street of commerce. Pushcarts made through traffic impossible. It was hard enough for a pedestrian to squeeze between them. Everything from fish to old clothes, from the lyrics to popular Yiddish songs to roasting sweet corn, all crammed in along the sidewalk. I picked up my skirts and stepped daintily through the debris. Sarah’s building was above a kosher butcher shop and the dead animal smell accompanied me up the stairs. I knocked on the front door. It was Sarah’s narrow little face that peeped through the crack in the opened door.

“Molly! What are you doing here?”

“Just come to pay you a visit, Sarah.”

She opened the door wide. “Come in, please. This is so nice of you.” She led me into a small room, that clearly comprised their living space. On one wall was a shelf of pots and dishes. There was a crude bench and table. Possessions were stacked in orange crates and blankets and quilts were folded in a corner. A pale woman sat in the one good chair, a rug over her knees. In the poor light her skin looked almost gray and was so shrunk around her bones that she looked like a marble statue sitting there. Sarah’s sister Fanny sat on an upturned crate at her feet. The place was damp and cold, the wallpaper peeling to show black holes in the walls. It was about the most sorry sight I had seen since coming to America.

“Mama, this is Molly who works with me,” Sarah said, then repeated it in Yiddish in case her mother hadn’t understood. “She was wonderful. She jumped across the roof, like in a circus.”

Sarah’s mother said something. Sarah nodded. “Mama says you must have some tea with us. She is sorry we have no cake or sugar.”

“Oh no, don’t make tea specially for me . . .”

“Of course you must have tea.” Sarah filled a pan from a jug, then put in onto a little spirit stove.

I sat on the bench and looked around again. On the shelf and the walls were some fine little charcoal sketches—street scenes and street urchins.

“You must be the artist, Sarah,” I said.

“My sister Fanny also draws well,” Sarah said. “We had a tutor in Russia who had studied in Paris. He taught us well. He said we both had a gift.”

“That must have made copying Mostel’s designs easy for you then.”

The girls both jumped as if they had been burned.

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

“I saw those pages that floated away yesterday. They were Mr. Mostel’s new designs. You were going to hand them to your sister to take to Lowenstein’s, weren’t you?”

Sarah glanced swiftly around the room. “Please. Not here. Mama doesn’t know. She doesn’t understand much English, but—step outside, please.”

I followed her out of the front door. “So I copied his designs,” she said, lifting her little chin defiantly. “Serve him right, mean old man.”

“But Sarah, he was employing you.”

“I was slaving for him,” she said venomously. Quite a transformation from the meek little mouse who had worked beside me. “He deserves what he gets. He wouldn’t let my sister work with me. He said no families, bad for business, so she had to find work with Lowenstein. Then Mr. Lowenstein found out I was working for Mostel and he tell us he pay good money if we find out what Mostel’s new designs look like.”

“You must have known that was wrong?”

“Wrong? Ha! I tell you something—I wasn’t going to do it. I say to Fanny we are from good family. We do not resort to stealing like common peasants. And that very next day my mother is taken bad. We have to send for the doctor. The doctor wants paying right away. I come in to work an hour late and the foreman says to me, ‘If you’re gonna come in late again, don’t bother showing up.’ He wouldn’t even listen. So I thought—why not? We did it last season and Lowenstein give us fifty dollars. Fifty dollars—can you imagine? We could buy Mama good food, we could pay the rent and the doctor bills.”

“But you were cheating your employer.”

“Oh, and he never cheated us? Ten cents for sneezing. Ten cents for going to the washroom, for coming back one minute late from lunch. And don’t think we didn’t know about turning back the clock hands to get extra minutes out of us. We were cheated every single day, so don’t preach to me about cheating.” She looked at me, suddenly suspicious. “Why do you want to know this? Are you some kind of church lady preacher?”

I shook my head. “No, I was hired by Mr. Mostel to find out who was stealing his designs.”

“So you’re going to go and tell him you’ve found out?”

“I have to.”

“And then what? We get arrested and go to jail and our mother will die. That’s good American justice. They killed my father and brothers in Russia, you know. We came here with nothing—we left everything in Russia: clothes, jewelry, books, all left behind. Our mother has been sick ever since.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’ll do what I can for you. I’ll make Mostel agree not to press charges, if you promise me you won’t do it again.”

“Won’t do it again?” She laughed bitterly. “I won’t be stealing Mostel’s designs again because there is no Mostel’s. We’ll be trying to live on Fanny’s six dollars a week and we’re going to starve and Mama’s going to die.”

“I really am sorry. If I could do something, I would. Perhaps another shop will take you on.”

“Me and fifty other girls. Oh sure.”

“I should go,” I said. “Give my respects to your mother. I hope her health improves.”

Without saying a word she turned and went back into the room. I heard her telling them in Yiddish that I didn’t want any tea.

I felt really sick as I descended the stairs to busy Hester Street. Here, down below that one room, life was going on merrily—housewives bargaining over herrings and chickens, little boys throwing mud balls at each other, a monkey dancing on an organ grinder’s shoulder. Should I just forget the whole thing and let Mostel think that I hadn’t found his spy? If I made personal judgements about each case that I undertook, I wouldn’t be making much money in my chosen profession. I had to learn to keep myself remote. I had been hired to do a job. I had done that job and now my duty was to report my findings to my employer.

I couldn’t help feeling like a heel as I rode the Third Avenue El north to the Upper East Side where I had been told Mr. Mostel lived. It was always a shock going from the Lower East Side to another part of the city. The sensation was like Alice falling down a rabbit hole and finding herself in another world. There were mansions facing the park with the occasional horse and carriage waiting patiently outside a front door. A maid was scrubbing front steps. A nanny walked past pushing a high English perambulator. On a street across from the zoo I found a mailman delivering letters. Luckily he was an observant mailman and directed me to East Sixty-third.

I found the house easily enough—an elegant brownstone, four floors high. This was what the sweat of his laborers had bought for Mr. Mostel and his family. It was hard to feel too sorry for his current disaster.