“My mother will kill me,” Mabel wailed as he dragged her away from the chaos unfolding behind her.
Theta and Memphis ran. Behind them, the police stormed the place, breaking open walls, knocking chairs over. Two flappers and their beaus screamed and stumbled drunkenly into the wall of cops. A clearly intoxicated man whose face was covered in lipstick pulled out a gun and fired off shots indiscriminately. One of his bullets passed through the book of poetry in Memphis’s hand. Memphis stuck his finger through the hole. “That was a library book,” he said, gasping.
“Poet, we’ve gotta scram!”
Memphis ran with Theta around a corner, where he pulled her into a telephone booth. She looked up through heavy lashes into Memphis’s handsome face. She’d seen plenty of handsome fellas before, but none who wrote poetry and shared the same strange nightmare. Deep down, Theta felt stirrings she’d guarded against since Roy and Kansas and what had happened there.
“You pull me in here to hide or to neck, Poet?” Theta joked, trying to catch her breath.
“Trust me,” Memphis said. He turned the crank on the telephone three times and gave a hard push on the back wall, which opened onto a secret passageway.
Upstairs in the club, it was chaos as the police stormed the doors. The bartenders moved quickly. They flipped the bar over, sending about two dozen bottles of good hooch down a chute to their untimely end, then pulled a lever on the bar itself, emptying the bottles and glasses there down another chute and wiping the evidence away with rags. Patrons screamed and climbed over tables, knocking one another over in their panic to get out. Some of the flappers continued dancing, thrilled to be arrested and make the papers. “You sure you gents don’t need a drink?” the club manager quipped as the cops walked him toward the door. In the midst of the hysteria, Henry walked calmly to the piano, took a seat, and began to play.
“Don’t look at me, officer. I’m just the piano player,” he said, but the man in blue cuffed him anyway.
In the melee, Sam and Evie were separated. Evie dodged and wove her way toward an exit just as a fresh wave of cops barged in. She doubled back, passing the dim blond from earlier, who was pouring her heart out to the cop arresting her: “These chumps are all the same—one minute they’re trying to get you into the struggle buggy, the next, they’re giving you their typhoid.”
Trapped, Evie dove under a table and hid beneath its white cloth, watching. She reached up just high enough to grab an open bottle of champagne and pull it down with her. It seemed a shame to let good hooch go to waste, and if she was going down, she was going in style. After a few minutes, she peeked out and saw Sam gliding easily out the door, untouched. Or rather, she thought she saw him. He moved so quickly she couldn’t be sure. She only knew she was angry again. She bolted after him, calling his name, but a second wave of policemen rounded the corner. Evie ran back into the club room, keeping low. She spied a dumbwaiter hidden behind the bar and made a break for it, wriggling herself in. Her long necklace caught on the hook, scattering pearls all over the floor, which tripped an officer heading her way. There was no time to mourn the jewels, so she slammed the door shut and hoisted herself toward freedom.
“Didn’t I tell you to trust me?” Memphis said. He and Theta stood in the dank wine cellar beneath the club. A lone worker’s bulb over the door cast dim light across the dirt floor and the barrels stored in the deep room.
“What is this place?”
“It’s where they store the hooch when it comes in from Canada,” Memphis explained. “Come on. Be careful—the steps are tricky.”
“Where to now?”
Memphis stood for a moment, trying to get his bearings. He didn’t spend a lot of time down here, and he wasn’t certain of the room. He only knew there had to be a door somewhere. Up the steps, the doorknob jangled. There were shouts.
“Cops,” Theta whispered.
“Hold on, hold on,” Memphis whispered back. “Let’s see if they go away.”
It was quiet for a spell; all they heard was their own breathing. Then a loud thwack broke the silence, and Theta yelped as a policeman’s ax splintered a slit in the cellar’s big wooden door.
“Tell me you know a way out of here!” Theta said.
“This way!” Memphis said, and hoped he was right. They threaded through barrels of liquor. Behind them, the door gave way, and someone shot into the air, shouting, “Stop right there!”
“Should we…?” Theta panted.
“Not on your life, Princess,” Memphis said, pulling her on.