Hell's Gate (15 page)

Mike went down on one knee, thrusting his face close to Suds. He pushed the muzzle of the Colt into his gasping mouth. “How you like that? You want more? How you like I blow your fucking head off? You think you'd like that?”

Suds sobbed around the barrel of the Colt, his body shaking as if he was still being stomped.

“Where is she? You know? You got three seconds.”

Suds shook his head, but couldn't manage anything more than sobbing moans. Mike thumbed back the hammer.

“No! No!” Suds managed, his eyes going wide. “No!”

It was all Mike could do not to pull the trigger. The thought of what the groveling piece of shit before him had done to Ginny had him as close to losing control as he'd ever been. The Colt shook in his hand. To stop it, he jammed it even farther down Suds's throat. Suds choked and drooled around the barrel.

“Who's there?” a voice called from down the hall. “I'm calling the police, damn it. I'm callin' the goddamn cops, see. See how ya like that.” A door slammed.

Mike eased up on the pistol, the voice like ice water dashed in his face. “Where is she?” he hissed at Suds. “Tell me now or the cops'll be picking up your fuckin' corpse.”

“Don' know. Don' know. Gertie's,” Suds gurgled around the pistol. “Swear I dunno.”

Mike waited a few moments before he took the pistol from his mouth and wiped off the spit on Suds's pant's leg. Without another word, Mike stepped to the door, the pistol staying on Suds like a compass needle.

“I need a doctor,” Suds managed through swollen lips. Mike stopped. He almost pulled the trigger then, could feel his finger tightening of its own accord. There was no thought of consequences, no sense of right or wrong, just the blur again and the buzzing. He stood for a long time, almost a minute, not giving a shit if cops were called or not, holding the automatic on Suds's head, his nerves crackling, ragged and sparking beneath his skin in little jumps and starts.

Slowly he regained control. With great effort, the pistol lowered. Mike tucked the automatic into his shoulder holster and disappeared.

15

GINNY SLEPT LONGER than she could ever recall. She slept all through the next day, remembering it only because she had used the toilet down the hall. She had a foggy vision of shuffling bare feet on the cold hallway floor, and sometime later settling back into her creaking bed like an autumn leaf. She'd discovered the secret of plumping her single, thin pillow into something passably comfortable. It smelled faintly of old drool, but felt like heaven.

When she finally woke, she was hungry. The window above her door was the color of fireplace ash. She figured it was sometime around six. It was strange, yet somehow marvelous, to have lost a day like that. At Miss Gertie's she'd often worked until the iceman came knocking at the kitchen door in the morning. It had been a scrambled existence with sex the only real timepiece.

Ginny's stomach growled as she dropped her feet to the floor. She realized that she hadn't had a proper meal in nearly two days, not counting the apple she'd bought from a girl on the street while searching for a room. She splashed some water on her face and sprayed a little cologne behind her ears, hoping it would hide her unwashed condition. She smoothed the wrinkles from her clothes as best she could, realizing that she'd have to add an iron to the growing list of things she needed to buy. Her reflection in the small mirror screwed to the back of her door was indistinct and gray. She blinked and rubbed at the glass. She looked like a ghost, her skin pale and strands of hair straying off in a frazzled aura around her head. “You look a sight, girl,” she said to her reflection. It was one of her mother's standards. She'd come back from playing with her brothers, or working with the cows or chickens and hear those words, colored with equal parts of disapproval, exasperation, and love.

She was changing, her old self dropping away. She was becoming something new, something entirely more ordinary, more regular, and respectable. Ginny brushed the errant hairs back and secured them in a neat bun. She smiled at her reflection. A factory girl smiled back, or a shop girl or maybe even an office girl, definitely not a whore.

She would set about making that transformation the next morning. She'd get herself a respectable job, new clothes with a bit less flash and with them a new way of thinking about herself. She'd put the old Ginny away. It would be the new Ginny who would find Mike. She wondered if he knew what had happened, if he was already looking for her. She hoped he was, but didn't want to be found, not just yet.

Ginny stepped into the street a few minutes later, her stomach growling, but her spirits high. She found a sandwich shop on Forsythe where she joined a small crowd of showgirls, whores, rubes, panhandlers, gamblers, and hawkers, sitting so close it looked as though they shared arms. The soup was hot and not as watery as she expected. She wolfed down a plate of boiled ham, slathered with mustard, and with burnt biscuits on the side. She just about cleaned the crumbs off the table, but still felt she could eat more. She thought about going back in line for more, but her purse wouldn't allow it. She had to watch her money until she got a job.

The whores at the next table were loud and Ginny couldn't help but listen as she nursed her coffee. She imagined for a moment that she was back in Miss Gertie's kitchen with Eunice and Rachel and the other girls. She missed them in that moment though she hadn't really thought about them these last couple of days. She'd had companionship with them, if not much more, girls like her who knew how she felt and when to lend a sympathetic ear when things got bad. Ginny ached for that. She felt alone in that moment, so much that no amount of noise or laughter or elbows in her side could bridge the seas that surrounded her. She finished her coffee and fled.

Ginny left feeling better in body, though her spirit still lagged. The night had turned a little damp and there was a chill to the air. Ginny turned up her collar, feeling almost refreshed by the cold. The long rest and hot meal had taken the edge off her last night at Miss Gertie's, the blood and that animal Johnny Suds. Ginny smiled grimly and walked toward the Bowery.

*   *   *

She was wide-awake and couldn't think of going back to her room, so soon she found herself walking toward the Bowery a few blocks away. The lights from thousands of bulbs lit the night sky in that direction, sending up a glow that silhouetted the tops of the tenements for blocks. She could hear music too, faintly at first, a mix of instruments and styles that she mistook for the jangling of harness buckles and the bump and clop of wheels and hooves. As she got closer it was as if a dozen bands were parading in the distance, each playing a different tune. A constant hum came from everywhere and nowhere. She could see an organ-grinder working the block, hear a German band banging out a drinking song from somewhere around the corner and from a place Ginny couldn't identify there were strains of “My Pearl is a Bowery Girl,” sung in a passable tenor. “She sets them all crazy, a spieler a daisy, my pearl is a Bowery girl.”

Ginny had heard about the Bowery, of course, but had never actually been there. At Miss Gertie's none of the girls were allowed out much. The Bowery was never on the itinerary.

The crowds thickened as she drew closer to the cacophonous, glowing mecca of all things sinful. She noticed too that the vast majority around her were men, every one sporting a gray derby it seemed, with flashy clothes in bright colors. Plaids and stripes, the louder the better, were worn with flair and swagger as if every man carried a chip on his shoulder. What women she saw were of the low variety with gaudy makeup and trashy, close-fitting rags. They chewed gum, almost every one, making a show of the lips and mouth. They kissed their lovers openly, when and where they pleased.

The whores were little different, distinguished mainly by their clustering in little groups, trolling for customers, leading men into darkened doorways, fighting with their pimps. None of the girls at the house had ever walked the streets. That was where whores ended their careers. Ginny had always heard that such women were the most degraded, the most vile, their looks coarsened by alcohol or made lifeless by hop. She'd been told too that they bore the scars of angry pimps and rough customers and that the worst of them were walking disease factories. It went without saying that any man who'd lie with one was only slightly better.

Ginny watched them, taking a certain comfort in knowing that she had worked in the best of houses. Only the best and most beautiful girls would ever see the inside of a place like Miss Gertie's and she had been one of those. She felt superior to these tramps and with a small start thought that she had never felt superior to anyone before. But then the realization struck her that if she'd stayed at Miss Gertie's it would have been only a matter of time before another Johnny Suds scarred her, her beauty faded, and that she'd end her career here, whistling to Bowery boys.

Ginny came upon a small covey of whores just off the Bowery. They were clustered around a sandwich man. He had a wooden sign draped over his front and back, held up by straps over his shoulders.
THE GRAND MUSEUM
, it said on the back,
HAS
WONDERS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE,
SEE
MULITA THE SNAKE CHARMER, JO-JO THE DOG-FACED BOY, A PIECE OF THE TRUE HOLY CROSS,
AND
TORTURE IMPLEMENTS OF THE SPANISH!
The girls were laughing and throwing their skirts up at the gaunt, hollow-eyed bummer. He grinned vacantly as he shuffled by them, but was stopped by one of the girls, who stepped in front of him, bent over, and threw her skirts over her back. She wasn't wearing panties and her pale ass stopped the sandwich man in midshuffle. He swayed before the sight as though he might fall over. The girls screamed with laughter. The sandwich man recovered from his shock though and lunged forward, both hands out like a child after a Christmas toy. The girl was too quick for him. She jumped out of his grasp with a laugh, turned, and slapped him hard across the face. He staggered to one side, where his ankle turned on the curb. He was pitched into the street, his sandwich boards clattering. Ginny stood still, fascinated and appalled as the man struggled to rise while men stepped around him and a wagon swerved. The signs were too much for him and at first he tried to roll like a turtle on its back. The whores shrieked and clapped their thighs as a loose circle of onlookers mocked the man's feeble attempts. No one helped. It was well known that sandwich men were the lowest of the low, so ruined by alcohol, syphilis, opium, or God knew what else, as to be barely human. Even ragpickers and night-soilers had higher status.

At last the man stopped struggling and lay there beneath his sign, the words
THE ARMLESS WONDER, ONLY AT THE GRAND MUSEUM
emblazoned in red letters across his front. The crowd didn't dissipate for some minutes though, seemingly unsatisfied with the show. There were taunts and someone threw a beer on him but he didn't move. At length a group of sailors picked him up and set him unsteadily on his feet. He stumbled forward like an automaton and soon melted into the crowd.

“Hey, sista, you workin'?” a man said to her a few steps further on. He wore a gray derby, tilted to one side, a bright white shirt with a Celluloid collar, a red plaid vest, and gray striped pants with shiny shoes peeking beneath the hems. The clothes were expensive, but the face had heavy, beaten brows, and a nose like a ripe strawberry. “Yer a beaut! What a bundle! C'mon, let's us have some fun, huh? I'll take ya spielin'.”

Ginny didn't hear the rest. She walked faster, turned the corner heading south, and quickly lost herself in the crowd. The lights were almost blinding after the relative darkness of Forsythe Street. Dime museums, dance halls, pawnshops, bars, and cheap hotels lined the street. Hawkers shouted above the dance hall bands and street musicians. There were others whose sole job seemed to be to push as many people off the sidewalk and into doorways as possible. A man vomited at the curb just a few steps down the street and a woman was shoved into the back of a Black Maria, shouting curses at the cops who'd arrested her. A dance hall's open doorway gave a brief glimpse of a chorus line doing the cancan, legs kicking high, the audience cheering over the crashing of the band.

Ginny felt as if she'd been transported to another world where every base instinct was celebrated, raised on high and crowned with electricity. There was a free-for-all jump-and-crackle to the place, animating everything. The men had it in their faces, the women, too. It might have been from Edison's bulbs, but Ginny didn't think so. The crowds possessed the true fire. The bulbs were only the reflection.

The cops she saw seemed jaded and bored. They had the look of men who'd seen everything and strolled with what appeared to be relaxed indifference. Up close their eyes were hard and penetrating as they scanned the crowds, their helmets bobbing among the derbies, bowlers, boaters, and occasional top hats.

The cops eyed Ginny with interest and even curiosity. Most of the men she passed did. Though she knew she didn't look her best, she was still a very attractive woman. But that was not the only reason. She was unescorted. Unescorted women on the Bowery were either whores, showgirls, or out of their minds.

Further on, past a nickel shooting gallery, a wax museum, and a place that advertised
TABLEAUX VIVANTS
in lurid red letters, Ginny came upon a kinetoscope parlor. A crowd was just bursting from its doors, so she found her progress blocked just in front of the ticket booth. She had heard of kinetoscopes, of course, but had never actually seen one. Her parents had forbidden it, hinting that there was something unsavory or sordid about the places that showed them. The front of the building was all in lights and stills from the pictures were plastered like billboards on the walls, glued one on top of the other. A man shoved Ginny toward the ticket booth. “Just a dime! Just a dime fer a gran' ol' time!” he shouted, herding others after her. “Da wondas o' da woild faw yaw eyes unfoiled.”