House of Thieves (8 page)

The girl nodded.

“You know what happens to little girls who lie, don't you?”

“They go to hell. But I'm telling the truth, sir,” she said, voice trembling.

“And why are you here?”

“I forgot to bring Mrs. Cook's cat with us,” she said, lowering her head in shame. “Jamie came back with me to get him, and we decided to spend the night. Please don't tell her I forgot him. She'll be so cross with me.”

“It's all right. I promise I won't tell anyone.” Kent reached out to stroke her hair, smiled at Brady, and walked away.

“The house wins again.”

George stared at the green-felt faro table and the blue-ivory check that represented his twenty-five-dollar losing bet. The dealer, who sat behind the table with an assistant who tracked the house's card count, met his eyes, looking for a sign that he would continue to bet. But George turned and walked away from the table, Kitty on his arm.

He was down four thousand. Two hours ago, he had been ahead seven.

Less than a week after his debt was forgiven, George had caved in and resumed gambling. He couldn't help himself; the gambling dens reeled him in like a helpless fish. He fought with all his might, but it was useless. With college finished, George devoted more days to teaching. Doing so put him in constant proximity to the scores of gambling joints on the Lower East Side. Walking by them every day was torture. He was like a starving man walking by rows and rows of restaurants, smells of delicious food wafting out to tantalize him.

His brief hiatus had been hell. Like a drunk on the wagon, his body seemed to go through withdrawal. Smoking, pacing back and forth in his apartment, and going for long walks in Central Park were no help in shaking off the malaise. Even while making love to Kitty, he thought about the tables. But there would be no income until the fall, when he started teaching at Saint David's. The only money George had on hand was his weekly trust fund allowance, which he needed for living expenses. If he blew that, he'd have to live off Kitty—or worse, go to his parents. Inevitably, they would start asking questions.

One morning, he leaped out of bed and, without really thinking, took the graduation watch Aunt Caroline had given him to a pawnbroker on East Forty-Fourth Street, along with a few other valuable trinkets, such as a gold cigarette case. With a one-thousand-dollar stake burning a hole in his pocket, George's willpower vanished into thin air. Kitty begged him to stop with all her might, but it was like trying to halt a runaway locomotive. George could not be swayed.

Because Kitty insisted on going with him, George went to a respectable house instead of the lowlife joints, which had the lower stakes he preferred. Chamberlain's, a first-class gambling house that catered to society men, looked no different from the other brownstone mansions off the side streets of Broadway. The interior was magnificently furnished with expensive furniture, marble fireplaces, frescoed ceilings, and plush velvet carpets. Its front parlor was given over to the entertainment of guests, while the rear parlor was reserved for gambling. A large dining room beyond the rear parlor provided free meals, cigars, and liquor to the well-dressed patrons. Faro, the most popular game in the city, was played fairly in these first-class houses. George knew he wouldn't be cheated.

They sat down on a recamier in the front parlor, and Kitty laid her head on his shoulder.

“I can lend you some money to keep playing.”

“No. You've given me too much already,” George said. He kissed her cheek.

“Bad night, George?” asked a rotund, Havana-puffing man as he walked past.

“Just wasn't my night, Senator.”

Chamberlain's boasted the most exclusive clientele in the city. Like Senator Philip Merrill of New Jersey. Two Congressmen, a city councilman, and an ex-governor were in attendance. The house's most frequent customers, though, were Wall Street speculators. They were in the enviable position of being able to lose five thousand in a night and then make eight thousand from deals the following day.

Merrill was standing next to Ned Chamberlain, the middle-aged proprietor. As the senator walked away, Chamberlain leaned in and spoke confidentially to George. “I'm sorry about tonight, Mr. Cross,” he said apologetically. “I hope we can come to an understanding about tonight's setback. You're the last person I'd like to see something happen to.” He bowed slightly and walked off.

Kitty shot a glance at George, who remained silent. “You have to ask your aunt for some money, Georgie.”

George looked at her in astonishment. “For Christ's sake, Kitty, I could never do that. The shame it would bring on my family! They'd be ruined.”

“Ruined? That's all you goddamned society people care about—your good name.”

“You don't understand. You think society people live in a world of luxury and pleasure? Well, it comes at a price. There's an incredibly rigid code of behavior we have to obey, and if we break one single rule, we're subject to something worse than physical torture or death: expulsion from society. Forever. No forgiveness.”

Kitty shook her head slowly from side to side. “You people just don't know how good you have it.”

“And you just don't understand,” George said, giving her a playful kiss on the cheek.

“It's four a.m. Come back to my place,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

“No. I have to go home and get cleaned up for class. I promised the students we'd go to Battery Park, and I can't let them down. Not after everyone else already has.”

“I have to work this evening,” said Kitty, “but I could come over to your place at two.”

“I'll be at the Windsor Palace.”

Kitty sat up and clutched George's arm. “For God's sake, Georgie, you can't go back there.”

“They have a chuck-a-luck game going on, and I can win. I know I can,” George said, determined. He had just been introduced to the dice game, which had become very popular on the Bowery. “I'll put down a fiver and let it ride.”

“No, my love. Don't. Stay home and wait for me. I can cook you your favorite breakfast in the morning. Beefsteak and kidneys.” She stroked his hair, gazing at him.

Kitty knew she could have any man in New York. She could be showered with wealth and diamonds, feted and adored. But she chose George. He didn't think of her as a mere sex object; he actually enjoyed her company. To Kitty, their conversations were the best part of their romance—long, engaging rambles about everything under the sun. Sometimes they'd talk into the night so enthusiastically that they'd forget about making love. They had gone to the Museum of Natural History and the theater at Niblo's Garden and strolled the boardwalk at Far Rockaway, arm in arm. Never was George embarrassed to be seen with her.
Not
like
my
clients
, Kitty sometimes thought bitterly, who would avert their eyes if they happened to pass one another on the street. To them, she was still a whore, no matter how beautiful and poised she appeared. It delighted her that George was so nonjudgmental.

And never once did he ask her to give up her work. There was the practical side, of course—he couldn't support her yet, so she had to earn a living, making in one night what he would be making in a month as a teacher. And there was something very erotic to George that other men coveted his girl. George was never ashamed of what she did for a living, nor was she; in fact, she enjoyed it. Kitty was refreshingly open and comfortable about sex, and she knew how to give pleasure to a man. To the society girls George knew, sex was an unpleasant obligation in a well-arranged marriage. When it came to immorality, his world was unforgiving. He told her once about a classmate of his sister Julia's who had been hounded out of society because she sat beside a gentleman in a carriage instead of opposite. Her family was ruined. Even the slightest mention of sex in polite company was deeply inappropriate; a woman who exposed her ankle was dubbed a harlot.

But all this ostensible propriety, Kitty knew full well, was an elaborate facade. Men of George's class engaged in the most deviant sexual practices, sometimes with girls as young as ten. George had seen his father's friend, Stanford White, entertaining one no more than thirteen at Miss Jennie's. Half the buildings between Fifth and Seventh Avenues and Twenty-Fourth and Fortieth Streets were used for immoral goings-on, a veritable sexual playground for the rich and powerful. Sometimes it seemed that every society gentleman was a part of this secret world of indecency and vice. Kitty remembered a client telling her that a gentleman wouldn't be a real gentleman if he didn't have a dark secret, be it women, gambling, or little boys.

With the ample income she earned at Miss Jennie's, Kitty had acquired a nice apartment on East Nineteenth Street. It was there that George had noticed her sketches on the walls. He urged her to keep drawing, telling her she had real talent, and he told her about the Art Students League at Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. Kitty took classes in her spare time, and her drawing did improve. Her newfound talent thrilled her, filled her with pride. George loved and
cared
for her as a real person, she'd think sometimes as she filled a blank sheet of paper with images, black lines moving across the expanse of white. It was this quality that had won her heart. One day, she hoped, they would travel to California, to a place where she had no past, and they'd start a new life together. Kitty loved George so much. Watching him destroy himself with his sickness was killing her.

“Please don't go out tonight, Georgie. Remember, you promised to wait up and pose for me.”

George leaned over, kissed her cheek, and nodded. He saw Kitty to the door of her apartment. In the carriage, he called out to the driver, “Fifty-Ninth and Seventh.”

But after a few minutes, he thumped the roof of the carriage and shouted, “Do you know the Windsor Palace on the Bowery?”

Julia liked to think of it as a raging river of well-dressed society women, flowing endlessly from Twenty-Third to Fourteenth Streets. Every day, enormous numbers of ladies in a rainbow array of velvets, silks, brocades, and satins, all wearing large hats topped with flowers and feathers, traveled along Ladies' Mile, the city's prime shopping district. Huge department stores lined block after block, their plate glass windows full of wonderful things to buy—from pet monkeys to French silk stockings to Peruvian hat feathers. Broadway, the spine of the district, was packed with carriages of all varieties, horse-drawn trolleys, and hordes of pedestrians crossing back and forth between them.

With her mother by her side, Julia was swept along in the current of shoppers. At Broadway and Nineteenth Street, they extracted themselves and entered the arched entrance of Lord & Taylor. The building, with its diagonal tower at the corner and a mansard roof (since childhood, her father had taught her architectural terms), had been built with cast iron. Julia's father loved cast iron and used it on his own buildings, but he said some critics thought it a phony material that only pretended to be stone. Still, whenever Julia walked past a cast-iron building, she rapped her knuckles on a column to hear the metallic sound.

Inside, they went into the double-height shopping space on the main floor. Although Julia's coming-out gowns had already been ordered from Worth's, there was still a whole new adult wardrobe to be selected. Dresses for mornings, afternoons, and evenings needed to be bought, each with dozens of accessories. The choices were daunting, and Julia felt a wave of envy for men, whose clothes were not meant to attract attention. A man who would dare wear a purple waistcoat, say, would be branded an outcast. But for society women, uniformity was a grave sin. Their wardrobes had to stand out and dazzle. The more extravagant, the better.

Julia was glad that her mother was there to guide her. She knew Helen was considered a great beauty, and her choice of clothes was admired by all. Julia was also happy that Granny had not accompanied them. Since beginning preparations for her coming-out, Julia had been bombarded by advice from Granny. Last night, she proclaimed, “Unless very, very well acquainted, a man who grins at a lady when he tips his hat is not a gentleman of good breeding.”

Julia and Helen liked to tackle one store a day instead of racing up and down Broadway. Yesterday, they had shopped at Arnold Constable. Tomorrow, a day at B. Altman was planned. After making some selections on the main floor of Lord & Taylor, they took the steam elevator to the upper levels. Each floor was a riot of femininity, with salesgirls waiting on well-dressed women at counters and wrapping desks and running back and forth with parcels and change. Little Lord & Taylor boys in white shirts followed behind the female shoppers, carrying their purchases. There was hardly a man to be seen.

Mother and daughter patiently examined the wares, moving steadily up to the fifth floor with their bag boy. Finally, they descended to the luxurious reception room on the main floor where they ran into many friends and had tea while a woman played Brahms on the piano.

On the way out, Helen realized she had left her gloves in the reception room and left Julia to wait outside the main entrance. Amid the flow of humanity up and down Broadway, Julia noticed a boy on a safety bicycle, the new kind with identically sized wheels. He slowly rode south—then accelerated and intentionally ran into an elderly woman crossing the street, knocking her over. His bike tipped. The boy got up, yelling and cursing at the woman for her carelessness. In a second, a crowd of people gathered, blocking Julia's view. Straining to see, she made out a young man in his twenties, wearing a gray three-piece suit. He walked to the edge of the crowd, where a man was craning his neck, trying to see the commotion. In a fraction of a second, he stole the man's wallet from his pants pocket. The young man walked slowly along the perimeter of the crowd and stole a wallet from another distracted man; an instant later, he stuck his hand in a woman's blue velvet handbag and removed a leather change purse. He worked with lightning speed. Then he walked south on Broadway, as casually if he were taking an afternoon stroll. Julia was mesmerized, unable to believe what she'd just seen.

Helen came up behind her. Julia kept her eyes glued on the man.

“Mother, I just ran into Lavinia Stewart, and she asked me to go to Macy's with her and her mother to look at a dress. I'll take a hansom back home. Will that be all right?”

“I suppose. I wanted to pop into W & J Sloane to look at a rug for Charlie's bedroom. Don't be late for supper, dear.”

Julia kissed her mother and disappeared into the crowd. Breathless, she walked quickly down Broadway; soon, she was just twenty feet behind the man. A sense of giddy excitement swept over her. A great admirer of Dickens, she had read
Oliver
Twist
three times, fascinated by the story of Fagin and his gang. But while she'd read about pickpockets, she'd never seen one.

Near Broadway and Fifteenth Street, the boy on the bicycle reappeared and ran into an elderly man. A crowd formed, and the young man went to work. Julia stood in the doorway of a store and watched, grinning from ear to ear. When he finished, she kept following. The sidewalks were packed with shoppers. She knew she blended in with the crowd and wouldn't be noticed, even if he turned around.

The young man made his way to the Fourteenth Street station of the Sixth Avenue Elevated. The station, built of iron and covered with steep roofs capped by iron cresting and finials, straddled Fourteenth Street like a huge crab. As Julia followed, she passed through dappled patterns of sunlight and shadow thrown onto the street by the lattice-like train tracks above.

Although her family's main means of transportation was carriages, her father had taken her and her brothers for rides on the Third Avenue Elevated. The whole experience was thus quite familiar. Staying a healthy distance behind the pickpocket, she paid the off-peak fare of ten cents and went into the waiting room, an elegantly appointed space done in black walnut and stained glass. Soon the rumble of an approaching train began to vibrate the station like an earthquake tremor, and dozens of waiting passengers went out onto the platform. The pickpocket was taking an uptown train. Julia hid behind one of the slender cast-iron columns that held up the platform roof, but she could still see the man.

The train's steam engine screeched and hissed as it pulled into the station. Julia took a seat at the opposite end of the pickpocket's car. The train lurched forward and picked up speed. Keeping one eye on the man, Julia looked out the window. The thing she liked most about riding the elevated was that you passed within a few feet of the apartment windows on the buildings lining the avenue, so close that she felt she could reach out and tap the inhabitants on the shoulders. It was better at night, of course. Then the apartments were lit up and you could secretly observe the intimacy of people living their lives: eating, reading, arguing. She'd see a mother feeding a baby, two lovers holding hands on a sofa. It was like going to the theater, but with dozens of miniature stages stacked together. Julia was so caught up that she almost missed the pickpocket's stop at Thirty-Second Street.

After disembarking, the pickpocket walked down Sixth Avenue and stopped just south of Thirtieth Street, in front of a three-story brick building painted bright yellow. He went in, greeting the two men who were coming out. Julia cautiously approached the building, worried that he'd suddenly reappear. From the curb, she saw that the building was called the Haymarket Dance Hall. A sign by the door stated that women were admitted free, while men paid a twenty-five-cent admission. She went to the entrance to look inside, half expecting to see Fagin and his boys gathered around a table. Music emerged from within, and she stepped aside to let by a fat, middle-aged man holding the arm of a garishly dressed woman with rouge on her cheeks.

A man in a black frock coat and gray trousers walked up to her and smiled. “What do ya say…two dollars…for an hour? That's more than fair for a classy looker like you.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Julia said.

“All right, three, then.”

When Julia didn't reply, the man shrugged his shoulders and walked on. Confused, Julia stepped up into the doorway to get a better look.

“I wouldn't go in if I were you,” said a voice directly behind her.

Startled, Julia spun around to face the pickpocket. Up close, she saw that he was in his early twenties and surprisingly handsome, with penetrating blue eyes. Regaining her composure, Julia put on a look of indignation. “Why ever not? The sign says women can enter for free.”

Her reply made the pickpocket laugh out loud. “You're not that type of woman.”

Baffled by his answer and angered by his laughter, Julia stiffened her spine and added ice to her voice. “Sir, I never talk to complete strangers on the street.”

“But I'm not a stranger, am I? You've been following me since Fifteenth Street.”

“That's absurd.”

“You sat in the same car on the elevated.”

“You're terribly mistaken.”

“You'd be a rotten undercover detective—you're too beautiful. I spotted you a mile away.”

Taken aback by the backhanded compliment, Julia paused, then went on the attack.

“You're a thief,” she said in a shrill, accusatory tone. “I saw you.”

“So you caught me. Why not turn me over to the police? Look, here's your chance.” The pickpocket pointed to a barrel-chested policeman strolling down Sixth Avenue, twirling his billy club. “Go ahead.”

Tongue-tied, Julia looked down at the slate sidewalk as the cop passed by.

“Dandy John Nolan's my name,” said the pickpocket, tipping his bowler hat and grinning. Granny's admonition from last night came immediately to mind, and Julia looked away.

“Sir, we've not been formally introduced by our mothers.”

“Who's been feeding you that malarkey? Listen, you've come all the way up here. Let me buy you a beer. You seem real interested in what's going on inside. I'll show you. Come on.”

Julia looked at the handsome young man and then at the double doors of the Haymarket Dance Hall, perplexed. If Fagin was in there, she was determined to see him. She wasn't going to be afraid. Besides, didn't writers need to experience all aspects of life?

“I have never tasted beer,” she said softly.

“Then you're in for a treat. It's the nectar of the gods.” Nolan flashed her a smile, which Julia shyly returned. He held out his arm, and she hesitated for a moment, then took it.

Together, they went inside.