When she reached Joe, her eyes flicked on his near-empty bucket. “You want another?”
“Sure.”
She glanced at his face and didn’t seem fond of the result. “Who told you about the place?”
“Dinny Cooper.”
“Don’t know him,” she said.
That makes two of us, Joe thought, wondering where the fuck he’d come up with such a stupid name. Dinny? Why didn’t he call the guy “Lunch”?
“He’s from Everett.”
She wiped the bar in front of him, still not moving to get his drink. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. We worked the Chelsea side of the Mystic last week. Dredge work?”
She shook her head.
“Anyway, Dinny pointed across the river, told me about this place. Said you served good beer.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
“Because someone said you serve good beer?”
She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.
“The beer’s not that bad,” he said and raised his bucket. “I had some once in this place this one time? I swear to you it—”
“Butter doesn’t melt on your tongue, does it?” she said.
“Miss?”
“Does it?”
He decided to try resigned indignation. “I’m not lying, miss. But I can go. I can certainly go.” He stood. “What do I owe you for the first one?”
“Two dimes.”
She held out her hand and he placed the coins in them and she placed them in the pocket of her man’s trousers. “You won’t do it.”
“What?” he said.
“Leave. You want me to be so impressed that you said you’d leave that I’ll decide you’re a Clear-Talk Charlie and ask you to stay.”
“Nope.” He shrugged into his coat. “I’m really going.”
She leaned into the bar. “Come here.”
He cocked his head.
She crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”
He moved a couple of stools out of the way and leaned into the bar.
“You see those fellas in the corner, sitting by the table made out of the apple barrel?”
He didn’t need to turn his head. He’d seen them the moment he walked in—three of them. Dockworkers by the look of them, ship masts for shoulders, rocks for hands, eyes you didn’t want to catch.
“I see ’em.”
“They’re my cousins. You see a family resemblance, don’t you?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “You know what they do for work?”
Their lips were close enough that if they’d opened their mouths and unfurled their tongues, the tips would have met.
“I have no idea.”
“They find guys like you who lie about guys named Dinny and they beat them to death.” She inched her elbows forward and their faces grew even closer. “Then they throw them in the river.”
Joe’s scalp and the backs of his ears itched. “Quite the occupation.”
“Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn’t it?”
For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.
“Say something clever,” Emma Gould said. “Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever.”
Joe said nothing.
“And while you’re thinking of things,” Emma Gould said, “think of this—they’re watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won’t make the stairs.”
He looked at the earlobe she’d indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chickpea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.
Joe glanced down at the bar. “And if I pull this trigger?”
She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he’d placed between them.
“You won’t reach your earlobe,” he said.
Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the center of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.
“I get off at midnight,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
The Lack in Her
Joe lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse in the West End, just a short walk from the riot of Scollay Square. The boardinghouse was owned and operated by the Tim Hickey Mob, which had long had a presence in the city but had flourished in the six years since the Eighteenth Amendment took effect.
The first floor was usually occupied by Paddys right off the boat with woolen brogues and bodies of gristle. One of Joe’s jobs was to meet them at the docks and lead them to Hickey-owned soup kitchens, give them brown bread and white chowder and gray potatoes. He brought them back to the boardinghouse where they were packed three to a room on firm, clean mattresses while their clothes were laundered in the basement by the older whores. After a week or so, once they’d gotten some strength back and freed their hair of nits and their mouths of poisoned teeth, they’d sign voter registration cards and pledge bottomless support to Hickey candidates in next year’s elections. Then they were set loose with the names and addresses of other immigrants from the same villages or counties back home who might be counted on to find them jobs straightaway.
On the second floor of the boardinghouse, accessible only by a separate entrance, was the casino. The third was the whore floor. Joe lived on the fourth, in a room at the end of the hall. There was a nice bathroom on the floor that he shared with whichever high rollers were in town at the moment and Penny Palumbo, the star whore of Tim Hickey’s stable. Penny was twenty-five but looked seventeen and her hair was the color bottled honey got when the sun moved through it. A man had jumped off a roof over Penny Palumbo; another had stepped off a boat; a third, instead of killing himself, killed another guy. Joe liked her well enough; she was nice and wonderful to look at. But if her face looked seventeen, he’d bet her brain looked ten. It was solely occupied, as far as Joe could tell, by three songs and some vague wishes about becoming a dressmaker.
Some mornings, depending on who got down to the casino first, one brought the other coffee. This morning, she brought it to him and they sat by the window in his room looking out at Scollay Square with its striped awnings and tall billboards as the first milk trucks puttered along Tremont Row. Penny told him that last night a fortune-teller had assured her she was destined to either die young or become a Trinitarian Pentecostal in Kansas. When Joe asked her if she was worried about dying, she said sure, but not half as much as moving to Kansas.