Kaleidoscope (6 page)

“Tell me something—his trousers. Were they nice and dry? Or did they look like they mighta been soaked?”

“Hard to say.”

“Try.” Jack keeping the fiver in his hand.

The bellhop glanced back to the desk, to the concierge.

“Gent looked spic and span to me. Not a suit, though, not like you. Just trousers and a linen jacket.”

“But dry?”

“As a bone.”

Of course, dry clothes didn’t prove anything. Arno Becker could as easily have changed into dry duds as had Jack.

“What about the number?”

The bellboy scanned the lounge nervously.

“I dunno, mister, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Come on. We’re almost there.”

“…Room four-four-nine.”

Jack took the lift to the fourth floor. He tipped the operator two bits and waited for the carriage to descend before turning down a hallway that still had fixtures for gas lighting. On the way to Room 449 an aging valet passed by, and a maid. Jack shoved his hands into his pockets on reaching the room, pausing at the door to make sure the hallway was empty. His left hand came out ringed in brass. A long, folding knife filled his right hand.

Seven inches of blade in the knife. He snapped it open, slipped it beneath the door’s knocker and let the boar’s head drop onto its brass plate.

No response.

Jack tried the knocker again.

“Who is it?” an androgynous falsetto queried from behind the door.

Was that Becker waiting inside? Or was it Alex Goodman? Jack had to throw the dice.

“Sally, it’s me. Alex.”

If Alex Goodman was waiting on the other side of the door Jack would have to break in. But if the fellow on the other side of the door was Arno Becker—

Jack waited.

Then it came, the snick of a deadbolt, hinges, the scrape of a bright chain. A sliver of light peeled from pillar to post and Jack kicked the door straight into Arno Becker’s face.

“SUCKER!!” Jack slashed with his knife—

And got nothing but air.

Becker recovering from a somersault with a broken nose and a knife of his own. Left hand. A southpaw.

“Do come in.”

He lunged and Jack took a piece of Becker’s blade on his knuckles.

Arno smiled. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Fuck you,” Jack snarled, but he knew he had lost any benefit of surprise and already his heart was hammering anvils.

Pretty tight quarters for a knife fight. Footing was tricky, too, the floor polished and waxed slick as mercury, rugs loose on top. Arno circling like a shark.

Sizing him up.

“You’re not Goodman,” the blond butcher declared.

“The fuck would you know?”

“I saw you chasing a streetcar earlier today. Was grand entertainment.”

“Get your jollies easy.”

Becker snapped his knife from his left hand to the right and took a swipe—

But you couldn’t survive the Great War and bayonets without learning something. Jack stepped inside the arc of Arno’s blade and snapped a half-pound of brass solidly into the bone above the bastard’s elbow.

Becker grunted in surprise, his knife spinning useless onto the polished floor. Jack waited for Becker to turn, the blond man scrambling to retrieve his weapon, and when he did Jack pounded two short, savage blows to the bastard’s kidneys.

Arno cried out this time. Real pain. And then Jack measured a haymaker right to the gap between the blond-haired skull and the ox-sized neck.

Becker dropped like wet cowshit to the floor, knees bent, legs bicycling weakly. It had taken all of twenty seconds, but it felt to Jack like he’d been on the ass-end of a heavyweight fight.

He collapsed to the nearest chair and jerked his tie loose, heaving for air. When he was able to breathe, he rose on trembling legs to retrieve Arno’s pigsticker from the floor.

That’s when a steel-toed shoe caught him square on his shin.

It was Jack’s turn to kiss the floor, rolling as Arno Becker smashed a chair to splinters only inches from his skull. But Jack had Becker’s knife, added to his own. He scrambled to his feet with blades in both hands, backpedaling.

Arno croaked a kind of laugh.

“Now you have to kill me.”

The second round raged even more furiously than the first. Becker ripped a club of oak from the leg of a Chippendale, chairs, lamps and vases shattering in the melee that followed. Jack would have traded both knives in his hands for a bayonet. Or an entrenching tool. More than one Kraut had lost his head on the edge of a doughboy’s shovel.

But knives and knucks would have to do.

Arno wanted his frog sticker back, you could see it. You could see him timing Jack’s lunge, just see the son of a bitch waiting for him to weary, for the snap to go out of that left jab so that he could smash Jack’s wrist and take back his knife.

Jack obliged with a feint to Becker’s left hand, always the left—the hand now holding Becker’s club. Jab left, jab left. Little slower. Slower still—

Arno’s hand snaked out faster than Jack could have imagined to trap his left hand. You could see the club following.

That’s when Jack dropped to a knee and came from the floor with his knife in an uppercut to Becker’s groin.

Becker’s balls should have been sprouting from his trousers, but something hard and smooth deflected the thrust of Jack’s blade like a stone skipped over water.

It was a cup. Goddammit, the bastard had armored his balls with a cup!

But Becker was still nicked, a seam bleeding bright and red above his navel.

“Not so deep as a well,” Becker pressed a hand to his wound. “Nor so wide as a door, by any means.”

But it was enough.

The butcher lurched back. A pair of French doors led to the balcony outside, a dead end apparently for Sally’s killer. But Becker still had his improvised club. And Jack was spent. His arms heavy as lead. Stars swimming in and out of view before his eyes. Not to mention the knee and shin. One slip, Jack knew, and he could still wind up like Sally Price.

He couldn’t take that chance.

He could wait. He had the bastard cornered and hurt, after all. Nowhere to go. But Becker was laughing! A mocking caw bubbling from a wide, sensual mouth, and it wasn’t until then that Jack registered the fire escape.

The progressive city of Cincinnati had only recently required boarding homes and hotels to install those ingenious, cascading ladders of egress. Becker backed through the windowed doors and out onto the balcony.

“She begged at the end, you know.”

Staunching his wound as he released a safety-latch.

“And you’ll beg, too, whoever you are, before I’m through.”

He rode the ladder down like a fireman’s pole, a bright rasp of metal on metal to the alley below, and by the time Jack reached the balcony Becker was gone.

The bellboy regarded Jack Romaine. Suit and shirt ripped to shit. Face cut and bleeding.

“Sally must be hell on wheels.”

“I’ll pay for the damage,” Jack pulled the kid inside.

“No skin off my nose.”

“But I need to keep the room. I’m expecting another visitor.”

“Another? Jesus, where’s her husband? First husband, I mean?”

“He checked out.”

“I dunno,” the kid was having second thoughts.

Jack displayed a tenner.

“That’s more than you make in a month.”

“…What you want me to do?”

“Sometime right after five there’s gonna be another gent asking for Sally Price. Make sure you’re the boy brings him up.”

You could see the one cog in the kid’s brain turning over.

“There gonna be another brawl?”

“Don’t expect so.”

“Didn’t expect this one, though, didja?”

“It’s a different situation, all right? You ain’t burnin’ anybody.”

The bellhop took the money. “But I was never here, got it? I never saw you. I never said a word about no room. Nothing.”

“’Course not,” Jack agreed amiably. “This is our transaction, shortstop. You and me.”

The kid shoved a lock of hair back inside his hat.

“All right.”

“That’s the stuff,” Jack approved cheerily. “Now, the name you want is Goodman. Alex Goodman. Or for that matter anybody asking after Sally Price.”

“Goodman,” the bellboy nodded sullenly. “Got it.”

“You see ’im, you hear ’im, you just steer ’im in here to me.”

“I want another Jackson when I bring him up.”

“Done.”

Jack watched the bellhop retreat down the hall. He hoped he’d bought the drip’s loyalty, at least for the night. There was nothing else for it, really, nothing else to do. Jack closed the door.

Nothing but to watch and wait.

Couldn’t have been fifteen minutes later Jack caught himself nodding off in the Chippendale lounger.

“Dammit.”

He’d had trouble staying awake ever since the war. You never got enough sleep in the trenches, what with the misery, the disease, the enervating cold. More than once Jack had gone unconscious standing sentry, but that wasn’t sleep.

The only thing kept him up was poker or whiskey and here he was in a fine hotel with no game, no booze, and the crushing urge to slumber. How long would he have to wait for Alex Goodman, anyway? Jack fished out his watch. Check in by five, the man’s letter directed, but that didn’t mean Goodman would arrive at five o’clock. He could be along later. Maybe a lot later.

Jack didn’t need a mirror to know he was a mess. He was injured, exhausted. He had to get some rest. Just a nap, he told himself. If Goodman showed, the bellhop would wake him. Jack propped up the broken chair with a coffee table and then pulled up a generous ottoman. That would do. He shed his jacket, loosed his still-stiff collar and lay down.

He’d had worse beds, for sure; there were no sofas in the trenches. One of his worst fears as a corpsman had been to be buried alive in one of those filthy ditches, to be entombed in a barrage of artillery, sucking mud and muck into his lungs. A death by suffocation spurred with a single concussion of high explosive. Roused from sleep only to find death on a litter fashioned from a rag of blanket and ammunition cans.

Or to be flooded. Two days of thaw were enough to collapse any manner of tunnel or trench. Come spring, a single shower could trigger a flash flood and there you were, drowning like rats. Drowning, each man clawing over corpses to survive. Soldiers, comrades, scrambling over one another to get over the top. Clawing at the bones or putrefaction of corpses lodged alongside, an arm or leg now an improvised rung on a grisly ladder.

You were lucky enough to get out, there’d be snipers waiting. The machine guns.

Jack could see it now, a wall of water coursing down the trench. And there’s an arm, mummified, a hat rack reaching from the trench’s unsteady wall. He leaps to grab that offered hand.

He reaches out. He grabs the arm.

And pulls Sally Price from the dissolving wall. She comes out naked and hairless. She’s laughing, a pitiless laughter. A harpie’s revenge and then—

A brass knocker jarred him awake.

“…Miz Price?”

Jack lurched up, disoriented.

“Sally Price?”

Jack scrambled from his makeshift bed, snatched the chain from its lock and yanked a bellman into the room.

A bellman in pillbox and stripes—but not the boy Jack expected. This was a guy old enough to be his grandfather.

“The hell are you?”

“Sir! Sir, please!”

The old fart raising a hand as if to ward off an angry fist.

Jack didn’t blame him. God knows he must look like somebody just got finished fighting a dog.

“It’s all right,” Romaine tried to calm the geezer. “Take it easy. I was just expecting somebody else is all.”

“Sure, mister.”

Scanning the room, now. Taking in the shattered furniture. Blood on the floor, on the couch.

“Look, you wanna be a problem?” Jack let him see his brass knucks.

“NO! No, sir.”

“Then just forget about this mess. Forget it.”

He peeled off the ten-spot slated for the kid and pressed it into the old-timer’s trembling fist.

“Relax. You don’t know nuthin’. You came up here asking for Sally Price and her husband meets you at the door. That’s me. I’m the husband. You didn’t even go inside, see? Now whatever you got, pass it on.”

“Just this.”

The bellhop stretched like a first baseman to drop a sealed envelope into Jack’s hand.

“And where’d you get it?”

“Some character. Didn’t give a name.”

“Gotta do better than that, pops.”

“He was just some guy, I don’t know! Had this loud jacket and baggy slacks an’ one of them straw hats like you see with a flower big as yer fist stuck in the band. He caught me on the street.”

“The street? OUTSIDE?”

Jack burst from a gaggle of coats and tails milling on the street outside the Milner Hotel. It was already dark, gas lamps mixing with electrics along the street. The sidewalk swelling with ladies and gents, streetcars and automobiles. Jack scanned the avenue up and down. Not a loud shirt or baggy slacks anywhere.

Not a straw hat in sight.

Jack sagged against a lamp pole, pulled the envelope from the torn pocket of his suit jacket and tore it open with his teeth.