The Girl Is Trouble (10 page)

And yet, for all the attempts they’d made to tone down the foreign flavor that had once distinguished this neighborhood from all the others, Benny was right: there was something about Yorkville that felt … well … creepy. I knew that was why Pearl didn’t want to come here. Hitler may never have walked these streets, but it still felt like we were marching into his lair.

“What would you rather they do?” I asked. “Wear armbands that declare that they support Hitler?”

“At least we’d know then. By hiding who they are, it makes you wonder if everyone here is a Nazi,” said Benny.

“Because they’re German?”

“Sure. Why else?”

“My mother was German. I’m German. All it takes is one drop of blood.”

“Yeah, but you’re not like them.”

“But going by your logic, how do you know for sure?”

He didn’t respond. As we walked East Eighty-sixth Street, searching for the White Swan Hotel, Benny and I eased closer and closer, until we moved as one. We seemed to be watched as we walked, “outsider” stamped on our foreheads even though, to my eyes, we looked like everyone else (perhaps they were wondering if we should be in school, I reassured myself, but no—those stares seemed to imply something else).

Maybe it was just that we knew what had happened here. A woman had been murdered, and for some reason no one had done anything about it.

Benny pulled the directory page from his pocket and handed it to me. I focused on checking the building numbers. This was it—the address for the White Swan Hotel, only the building that stood there was vacant. The door was chained, the windows boarded up. A sign hanging in front of it had had its letters removed, though the sun had left behind a shadow of what had once been the eponymous bird beckoning travelers to stop here for the night.

Pearl was right. This was a wild-goose chase.

“It’s closed,” I said. “I’m sorry I dragged you all the way up here.”

“What else was I going to do today?”

The familiar burn of tears threatened to overtake me.
Not now,
I pleaded with myself.
Not in front of Benny.

He approached the building and tried the doors. “Iris,” he stage-whispered. He waved me toward him. One of the windows was open. Did we dare? The street seemed oddly vacant, the way the city always got just before a storm hit. Benny waved again. Then, losing his patience with me, he climbed over the windowsill and disappeared inside. He landed noiselessly and let out a low whistle. “You’ve got to take a look at this place,” he said. “Come on now—don’t be chicken.”

Boy, howdy—I had no choice now. With a quick glance to make sure we weren’t being watched, I followed him inside. On the other side of the window was a dusty couch that had softened his entry. I coughed as months of disuse floated into the air, and attempted to clean the residue off my backside before moving on.

It was dim inside, but not too dark to see that we were standing in the lobby. The furniture was threadbare but alluded to a time when it had been grand. Not last year when Mama was here, but some years before, perhaps when the White Swan first opened its doors and being located in Yorkville wasn’t viewed as a disadvantage to a business.

We gravitated to the lobby desk, where a guest ledger stood open as though someone still expected people to check in to the place. Almost everything was covered in the same dust that coated the furniture, except for the corner of the desk where the phone and a stack of papers sat. I picked up the receiver and confirmed that the line was still live.

“Someone’s still working here. Or living here or something,” I told Benny.

“Interesting.” Benny opened drawers, setting off a rattle of dried-out fountain pens and broken pencils.

I rifled through the papers. There were newspapers and typewritten pages piled into a hasty stack. All were in German. From the formatting of the typing, the pages appeared to be a flyer announcing something. “Amerikadeutscher Volksbund,” it read, followed by what looked to be a date.

“Anything?” asked Benny.

“Just a bunch of stuff written in German. You?”

“Rusting paper clips. Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

I hesitated. “If the phone is still being used, whoever’s using it might be up there.”

“If we run into someone, we’ll tell them we came in to get out of the storm.”

I looked toward the window we’d climbed through. “It’s not raining.”

“No, but it was. Relax. We haven’t done anything wrong except a little breaking and entering. If there’s someone up there, I’ll handle it.”

That didn’t reassure me. “Oh, a little breaking and entering. Is that all? What if the someone up there is armed and dangerous?”

“Don’t bust a button. You may not get another chance to get in here. You want to see where she died, right?”

“I guess.”

“Then come on.”

There was an elevator that clearly wasn’t operating, and a stairwell whose door had been left ajar. We weren’t the first uninvited people in here. Someone else had been through the building, no doubt looking for anything of value they could take. There was no lighting in the stairwell beyond the little bit of sunlight that leaked through the boarded-up windows. We both held on to the banister for dear life and followed the stairs up two flights.

We exited the stairwell and entered a sparse lobby. Dents in the carpet told of furniture that used to be there to offer a momentary respite for guests waiting for the elevator or for a friend, and darker strips of wallpaper hinted that there used to be paintings, mirrors, and sconces on the wall, all of which had been taken down in the days since the White Swan had closed.

Rooms fanned off in all directions. Some of the doors were removed from their hinges, others closed. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which rooms were accessible and which weren’t. Through the open doors we spied bare, stained mattresses, broken furniture, and more signs that things that used to be there weren’t anymore.

“This one,” I said. I stopped before a closed door marked 3C, the room number that had appeared in the newspaper article. Benny took hold of the doorknob and turned. It didn’t budge. I scanned the hallway and found two nails still in the wall, though the pictures they’d once held were gone. I pried them free with a thumbnail, then inserted them with shaking hands into the lock for room 3C. It took some effort, but eventually my improvised picklocks landed in the right spot and the lock clicked open.

“You’re too much, Nancy D.,” he said.

“I asked you not to call me that,” I replied.

Like the other rooms, 3C had been ransacked. Benny touched my shoulder and pointed at the mattress. A rust-colored stain that someone had attempted to scrub away told the tale of a pool of scarlet liquid that had once sat there. It was on the walls, too, though the sun had done a better job fading it from the peeling wallpaper. Either Mama died here, or the hotel had a history of very bad things happening inside it.

“Oh, God—I’m going to be sick,” I whispered.

Benny took me to the window and pushed the pane up until the fresh air rippled through my hair. That was better. The acid that rose in my throat began its descent. I stuck my head out the window and took a deep breath.

“That’s it,” said Benny. “Breathe slowly.”

“This was a terrible idea. We shouldn’t have come up here.”

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. That was Mama on the bed, on the walls, on the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut. “I can’t look at it again.”

“You don’t have to. Keep your eyes closed. Take my hand and I’ll guide you out of the room. Okay?”

I did as he instructed. I only made it two steps before a metallic click stopped me.

“Und es sieht aus wie ich habe unbefugten Zugriffen.”
My eyes popped open. There was a man with a gun standing at the door to room 3C.

*   *   *

HE GESTURED US AWAY
from the windows. I couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t want to shoot the glass, or if the light was bothering his eyes, but I hoped it was the latter.

“Gibt es nicht mehr von ihnen?”
he said.

“What?” asked Benny.

“Are there any more of you?” the man said with a thick German accent—Mama’s accent—coloring his words.

“There’s no one else, just us,” said Benny. He was remarkably calm, as though he encountered men with guns all the time. He still held my hand. As he spoke, he put his other arm around my waist and pulled me close to him.

“Today is not your lucky day. My friend across the street sees you break in and he calls me. I’m tired of you people coming into my building and thinking you can walk away with whatever you want. Empty your pockets,” said the man. I produced a subway token and my house key. Benny uncovered an identical token and the wallet he connected to his waist with a chain. “What have you stolen?”

“Nothing,” said Benny.

“So I stopped you in time?”

“We’re not here to steal,” said Benny.

“A likely story. Then why have you come?”

Standing in the room my mother died in, with a gun pointed at us by the man who could’ve been her killer, I felt no urge to come clean about our true purpose for being there. I tried to think of a reasonable lie, but the combined forces of his gun and Mama’s blood (it was hers, wasn’t it?) rendered me completely mute.

Fortunately, Benny hadn’t lost the gift of gab. “Promise me you won’t tell her old man,” he said.

Pop? Was he really going to bring Pop into this?

“I don’t believe you’re in the position to make demands of me,” said the man.

Benny squeezed my hand reassuringly, silently asking me to trust him. “I know. It’s just … look, if he finds out we were together, that’s it. I’ll never see her again.”

The man lowered the gun, but he didn’t speak.

“We shouldn’t have broken in. That was dumb. But we needed someplace to be alone.”

The man’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Some place with a lot of beds, eh?”

Benny looked down, doing a bang-up job of being bashful.

“And what do you have to say for yourself, Juliet?” the man said to me.

Nuts, I thought this was Benny’s scene. I didn’t realize I was going to have to act in it, too. “Please don’t tell,” I whispered. “Pop will send me away. He’s already said as much.”

He slid the gun into his jacket and I finally felt like I could breathe again. He was going to let us go. The danger was past. “This is no place for young lovers. It’s dangerous here, eh? Your girlfriend deserves better than rats in the walls and stained mattresses.”

At the mention of the mattress I went woozy.

“Your girlfriend doesn’t look so good.”

Benny attempted to steady me. “It’s that bed. She thinks it looks like blood on it. We heard a rumor that someone was murdered here.”

He smiled, showing us a mouth missing half of its teeth. “Murdered? No. Killed themselves. My girl is the one who found her.”

Anna Mueller. He was talking about Anna. “Your wife?” I asked.

“Not anymore. When business gets bad, she gets out, says she’d rather wait tables at the Biergarten than clean rooms for me. Her loss, eh? Now get out and don’t come back. Next time maybe I’m not so nice about it.”

Benny led me from the room and back down the stairs. “You okay?” he asked as we reached the window through which we’d entered the building.

“I think so.”

He flashed that brilliant smile of his. “Good, then we’re off to the Biergarten, whatever that is.”

CHAPTER

9

IT TURNED OUT THAT THE BIERGARTEN
was a combined social hall and restaurant in the heart of Yorkville. I vaguely remembered Mama telling me about it, or places just like it. It was the kind of joint Pop and she used to go to in the early days of their courtship, sharing each other’s life story over mugs of warm beer and plates of fried potatoes and pickles.

As we entered the building, I thought of the two of them huddled together at one of the picnic-style tables while a band played music from the stage, forcing them to yell above the music to be heard. “The music was so loud,” Mama once told me, “your papa doesn’t hear my name right. That whole first night he thought I was called Enid. It was only when he asked if he could see me again that I corrected him.”

We took in the room where a smattering of people ate their lunch. Waitresses toted large platters of food and beer on trays they hefted high above their heads. None of them wore name tags—this was the kind of place where the clientele most likely knew their names and when to use them.

One passed by us with an empty tray she slammed onto a counter.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. This was my invitation to go on.

“Is Anna Mueller working today?”

“Who wants to know?” Her accent was as heavy as the tray she’d just dropped.

“My mother is a friend of hers and she asked me to stop by and say hello.”

The eyebrow stayed raised. “What is your mother’s name?”

“Ingrid Anderson. They knew each other at the White Swan.”

She made a noise like a snort. “The White Swan? There’s a memory to dredge up. I’ll see if she’s busy.” She walked away. Instead of going into the main hall where the other waitresses were, she disappeared behind a door marked “Private.”

“What was that all about?” asked Benny.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Barely a minute passed before the waitress returned. “She’ll see you. Through the door and up the stairs.”

I went cautiously through the door, half expecting to find another man with a gun waiting for us. There was no one there. At the top of a dark staircase was another door, this one open. A blond woman was seated at a desk, typing figures into an adding machine.

As we entered, she stopped her work and stared at us. “So she was right: you really are a couple of kids. What business is Ingrid Anderson of yours?”

“She was my mother,” I said.

Though her accent was lighter than the other woman’s, there was no denying her heritage. “So this wasn’t a lie?”