Immortal (4 page)

But yes, I do see women. Men too, at one time. I spent about a century and a half as a homosexual. It ended up being far too much work, so I didn’t keep it up. (You never really appreciate women until you’ve tried pleasing another man. Just trust me.)

My relationships don’t last very long, mainly because it’s hard to grow old with someone when you don’t grow old. Consequently, I’m often the Courtier, Secret Lover, or more recently, the Transitional Boyfriend. Most of the women tend to be fairly young from a societal standpoint (“young” meaning something different depending on which century we’re discussing) and in the exploratory phase of their sexual lives.

Okay, and I like younger girls. Sue me.

It was a Saturday night, and we were in a speakeasy called Looie’s. You wouldn’t know it was a club by looking at it because Looie’s was in the basement of a former fish market in a run-down neighborhood on the edge of Lake Michigan. It was an ugly, dark place that always smelled of cod and human sweat. The cement floor was covered in sawdust and on Saturdays, there was a live jazz band that was nearly impossible to hear because so many people came to dance there that the sound of scuffling shoes over the sawdust and cement made a rasping sound that drowned out almost everything else, and because the amplifier hadn’t been invented yet. The bar—a crude, wooden table hastily erected by Looie himself—only served bathtub gin and sacramental wine, neither of which tasted particularly good.

I loved the place.

I began that memorable evening standing at the end of the bar, watching the Saturday night masses bump each other on the dance floor, and watching Irma. She was standing in front of me bouncing up and down with the kind of effortless grace I always admired and never had. (Immortal and utterly without rhythm, that’s me.)

“Come on, Rocky, I wanna dance!” she pleaded. I was calling myself Rocky at the time.

“You are dancing,” I pointed out.

“With
you
, stupid!” She undulated her way over to me and rubbed up against my side, which made me think of doing something with her other than dance.

I looked into her eyes and smiled. She really was beautiful. Maybe today she’d be something less than special, what with almost no chest to speak of and a figure that could be described as boyish. But her legs were long, her eyes were a fascinating green, and she had a nose that was nearly as perfect as Cleopatra’s. (Or so I’ve heard. Never met Cleopatra.) Her brown hair was cut in what might be called, fifty years later, a Dorothy Hamill style. I gave her a decent kiss, which she deserved.

“You go dance,” I said. “I just want to watch you.”

She put on a pouty face, pecked me on the cheek and sashayed away, all beads and feathers and silk.

I really miss her.

“Hit me, Looie,”
I requested of the bartender and owner in his own language. Looie was a first generation Italian. He spoke with a heavy Northern accent and, despite having lived most of his life on the south side of Chicago, was far more comfortable in his family’s native tongue.

I’m fluent in about a hundred different languages, most of which are no longer of any use to anybody. Aramaic, for instance, isn’t doing me any good anymore. Someone once suggested I had the “gift of tongues” but that’s not true. I’ve just been around long enough to gain fluency everywhere I’ve been. Since language changes far more quickly than I do, I try to practice as much as possible, to pick up on any modern nuances that might have come about since I’d last visited a particular region.

“More the same, Rocky?”
he asked, in Italian.

“Do I have a choice?”

He winked at me.
“Just a moment.”
He ducked under the counter and resurfaced a moment later with a new glass for me. I took a sip.

“Scotch!” I exclaimed. Twelve-year-old scotch, at least. Made the bathtub gin taste like piss water by comparison.

“Not for most,”
he said.
“Just for friends.”

“I thank you,”
I said sincerely.

“It is no problem.”

This is another good reason to be fluent. I’d known Looie for only about six months, but the minute I first greeted him in Italian I was his favorite customer.

Plus, I did do him a favor once. Looie’s sacramental wine came via the usual channels (i.e., a faux Rabbi with an imaginary constituency. The Rabbi’s name was Frank and he was about as Jewish as I am) but the bathtub gin was a homemade affair. When Looie first opened his little nightspot, a nephew named Santino was his mad scientist, and Santino mixed a pretty fine concoction. So fine, he was stolen by a local family for their own string of illicit bars, and Looie was forced to shut down temporarily because he knew nothing about making his own alcohol. So, I gave him a few tips. Actually, I built a still for him, a slightly modern version of what an alchemist named Aloysius showed me back before the Enlightenment. Except where Aloysius used sheep intestines, I used rubber tubing.

“Where did you get the scotch?”
I asked him.

“I made some new friends,”
he said mischievously, giving me a sly wink.

That could have meant anything. In Chicago, in the Twenties, it almost never meant anything good.

On the dance floor, all race and class distinctions had broken down completely. I saw that Irma was swinging with two very limber black men and a white woman wearing a fur stole that looked, to my somewhat trained eye, to be genuine sable. Nobody cared anymore who they were dancing with, which undoubtedly would have had the idiot Puritans who authored the alcohol ban in the first place pitching fits, had any of them been there.

“What kind of friends?”
I pressed Looie.
“You’re not selling out, are you?”
Looie had been under pressure to join one of the Chicago families, and I was one of the few people who knew about it.

“I may be, my friend,”
he said.
“I am tired. This business is for the young.”

“Business is great and this is the best place in town. Everybody knows it. Why mess that up?”

He smiled.
“It will be no less good with another man behind the bar.”

I shook my head.
“It’s not the man at the bar, it’s the man at the door, and you hire the man at the door.”
I was speaking metaphorically. The doorman was another one of Looie’s nephews. He was somewhat slow—not apparently fluent in either Italian or English—but he did comprehend each night’s password. My point was, Looie’s nephew let everybody who knew the password through. Under new ownership, that could change. Most of the other speakeasies in town were stratified according to race, class, and musical preference. Franchised, in today’s lingo.

“We will see,”
he said simply. Then, hailed at the other end of the bar, he toddled off.

I checked on Irma again, but with the surging crowd it was difficult to spot much more than her raised hands. Fairly soon I was going to have to join her, but I wasn’t nearly drunk enough yet to try dancing. I downed my scotch. Still not drunk enough.

That was when I saw her.

The surprising red hair is always the first thing I notice. Even in the poor lighting of Looie’s place it stood out quite clearly, almost glowing. I squinted. She turned. I met those magnificent eyes. It was definitely her.

“Hey!” I called out uselessly. Nobody could hear me, and if they did,
hey
was pretty non-descriptive anyway.

I ran to the dance floor and started to push my way through, positioning myself between the red-haired woman (she was at the far end of the floor, near the band) and the exit. In the past, every single time I spotted her, she was either too far away to reach or somehow managed to slip away before I could get to her. I wasn’t going to let that happen this time.

Then fate intervened, as it always seemed to. Just as I started forcing my way through the dance floor crowd, the front door—which was made of solid iron—blew open with a loud
BANG
that startled everybody and knocked Looie’s corpulent nephew backward several feet. The band came to a discordant stop, and as one, we turned to see what had just happened.

From where I stood, I could see right up the short flight of wooden stairs and outside. A car blocked the entrance. It had been fitted with a wooden beam, a rudimentary battering ram. Someone had crashed their car specifically to take out the door.

Keep in mind this was prefire code and an illegal establishment to boot. The front door was the only public exit.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

The room remained silent, all except for Looie’s nephew, who had been knocked down the stairs and was groaning unpleasantly. I think we all knew what was coming next.

The first Molotov cocktail spun into the room, shattered on the wooden railing, and started spreading fire down the stairs. The second made it all the way to the edge of the cement floor and caught on the sawdust. The third reached the wall near the bar about two feet from where I’d been standing a minute earlier. It caught as well, as it should have. Except for the cement floor, the entire building was made of wood.

I had landed in the middle of a Chicago-style hostile takeover and asset liquidation.

As you can imagine, I’ve been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was if there’s going to be a mob panic, don’t be standing between that mob and wherever it is they all want to go. The second thing I learned was, don’t try to run through fire.

Other than me quickly stepping away toward the bar—where I was less likely to be trampled—the first person to make a move was one of the black guys Irma had been dancing with. He ran up the flaming steps, and it was like a spell being broken because a second later everyone else was behind him. I wanted to scream out that that was an incredibly stupid thing to do, but the decision had been made and nobody would be interested in listening to what I had to say. Get out, they all agreed, before the steps are gone and the fire has reached the rest of the room. Get out because we don’t know about any other exits. Just get out.

I saw Irma fly past me and managed to grab her by the elbow, yanking her in the other direction despite her hysterical protestations.

“We have to get out!” she shrieked.

“Not that way!”

“There’s no other way!”

“Of course there is,” I said confidently.

But was there? We were below street level and all the windows were half-sized, covered on the outside by iron bars, and nine feet from the floor. Great security if you don’t want people breaking in and stealing your supplies. Bad idea if you desperately need to get out and the door is barred.

The sound of gunfire filled the air, causing me to duck instinctively. Whoever it was that had started the fire decided to discourage any attempts to get the hell out of the place by shooting a tommy gun through the doorway. Interestingly, this only managed to affect the people who were actually hit by bullets. Everyone behind them kept trying to plow through.

“You see?” I said to Irma, who I was still holding back. “We can’t go that way!”

I scanned the back of the room. There had to be another door, and there was. It was on the far side of the bar. I’d never even noticed it before. Better, it was open.

I threw my fur coat (it was the style at the time) over Irma and dragged her to the door. It led to a small back room that smelled even fishier, and a narrow wooden staircase which led upstairs. At the top, sitting in front of the door and crying, was Looie.

“It’s locked!”
he cried, in Italian.

“Unlock it!”
I commanded.

“No, no, no. It’s barred. It’s . . .”
And then he continued his weeping.

I stormed to the top of the stairs, pushed Looie aside, and threw my weight into the door. It wouldn’t budge. He was right. Whoever took care of the front door also knew there was another exit and had taken care of it. Great.

In another minute we would all be unconscious from smoke fumes, and another minute after that we’d all be dead.

“Looie,”
I barked. He couldn’t even acknowledge me, so I slapped him hard across the face.
“You know this place better than anyone. There
HAS
to be another way out!”

“No, no, no other way . . .”
He was inconsolable. At the bottom of the stairs, Irma was curled up and bawling on my coat. I could hear the rising panic in the other room. People were burning. This was getting to be as bad as Rome, albeit on a much smaller scale.

I ran through what I knew about the building. It was on Lake Michigan. They used to sell fish upstairs and gut and store them on ice downstairs. That was why the floor was cement, because melted ice can just wreck a wood floor.

Fish. I knew a lot about fish. Worked on a fishing trawler once, in Galilee. We never used a place like this. No, we had to clean the fish on the boat, salt it, and get it to market right away, because nobody had invented the ice machine yet. It was messy work. We’d slice the fish up the middle, pull out the bones, and toss the bones and the guts overboard.

It was stupid when I gave it a little thought. Who cleans fish in a basement? What do you do with the guts?

What
did
they do with the guts?

I grabbed Looie and pulled him to his feet, dragged him to the bottom of the stairs, and sat him next to Irma.
“Watch her!”
I commanded.

I took two steps back into the main room and immediately discovered there was almost no breathable air left. The smoke had gotten thicker and the ceiling was nearly engulfed, and the heat from the flames was palpable. At the front of the room, the wooden staircase had collapsed, and I could see several bodies already piled up near the door, either victims of the fire or victims of the sons of bitches on the other side of the doorway. Those that were still alive were in pretty much the same state of paralysis as Irma and Looie.

Me? I had an idea.

Back when I first saw the old fish market, my first thought had been that the building was surely about to tumble into the lake. It jutted out over the water a good five feet. My new thought was, you don’t build a building hanging over the side of a lake unless you’ve got a good reason for it.