Kaleidoscope (7 page)

“Hello.”

A train ticket was neatly folded over a crisp set of bills and a handwritten letter. Jack counted the cash first. One hundred…
Two
hundred and fifty bucks! Romaine folded the cash away as he scanned the ticket. Looked like Mr. Goodman wanted Sally to head south. Tampa.

Then he read the letter. It was penned in the same precise hand as the correspondence he’d fished from the garbage bin at the zoo. Jack raised the script to catch the streetlamp’s limn.

Jack double-checked the ticket. Tampa.

“I guess that’s south enough.”

But where the hell and what was The Kaleidoscope?

He stuffed ticket and letter back into the envelope and for a good long moment considered running south with Martin and Mamere. Just take what was left of the money Bladehorn had given him and blow town.

But that hadn’t worked in Chicago, had it? Wouldn’t work in Cincinnati, either, or Tampa, not even with a five hundred dollar head start. Guys like Bladehorn didn’t let the small fish go; they couldn’t afford to, not with all the big fish watching for any sign of weakness.

Jack was going to have to face the music; he had fucked up with Sally, no way around that one. But if he didn’t want his legs broken he had to convince Bladehorn that the trail to his property led to Tampa and Alex Goodman.

All said and done, Jack had done his job, hadn’t he? He’d gotten the goods from Sally, even if second hand. He’d faced Arno Becker in a knife-fight, for Chrissake. Cut that competitor out of the chase. Surely, Bladehorn could manage the rest on his own. He could send Fist to Tampa, couldn’t he? Why not?

Bastard could use a good sweat.

Jack limped into Spuds’ place early the next morning. Now that he was paid up he was welcome to use the phone. He rang straight through to Bladehorn’s residence. No party lines on The Hill. Fist Carlton took the call.

“I got some news for Mr. Bladehorn.”

“Where you at?”

Took an hour for Fist to pull up outside Spuds’ place, those massive hands spanning the Duesenberg’s steering wheel like a player on a piano.

It was a long and silent drive to Bladehorn’s mansion. No one on the grounds this morning. No croquet. No accoutrements of polite society. Fist kept his hands in his pockets as he escorted Jack to the hothouse out back.

Bladehorn was busy pinning insects onto a board. A jar of butterflies took their place on a raised table littered with piles of peat and moss. A brilliantly veined Monarch was being crucified on a cross of cork mounted above the potting table. Bladehorn was oblivious to the creature’s last flutters. He listened to Jack’s stammered excuses absently as he studied the train ticket, the letters. Leafing through the bills with gloved hands as Jack amplified his encounter with Arno Becker.

“I give you a simple job and I read about it in the papers. Though I grant that not many men have survived an encounter with Arno Becker,” the gangster allowed, dabbing a kerchief to the spittle gathering at his mouth. And then, “Too bad you couldn’t kill him.”

Fist Carlton seemed disappointed at his boss’s measured response. Probably because he had looked forward to beating Jack to death himself.

“Now tell me everything again. From the beginning.”

So Jack ran it once more, a nearly accurate account of the previous day’s events, concluding—

“That’s about it. Last time I saw Arno he was riding a fire escape. But he doesn’t know about this Kaleidoscope place, or Tampa, Mr. Bladehorn, you can bet on that.”

“You are the gambler, Mr. Romaine, not I.”

“Look at it this way, Mr. Bladehorn; if Sally knew where to find the money, Becker’s already got it. If you saw what he did to her, well—you’d know.”

“Mmmm. So what did Arno get from the poor woman?”

“He got a name, Alex Goodman,” Jack answered. “And before Becker was done he knew Goodman was ’sposed to meet Sally at the Milner. That’s why Arno went to the hotel, to wait for the sap. Lucky I got there ahead of him or we’d have Goodman’s scalp to go with Sally’s.”

“Even so, you should have been at the prison when Miss Price was released.”

“If I
had
, Becker’d have killed us both.”

“Perhaps. Probably, even.” Bladehorn selected an orchid from a tray heavy with mist. “Nevertheless, you were tardy.”

“The thing is—Sally’s not your horse, Mr. Bladehorn. Never was. You want your property you need to find Alex Goodman.”

“So you say.”

“Look how he strung Sally along: First, he tells her he’ll meet her at the hotel, but he doesn’t show. Instead, he sends in a letter off the street with a wad of cash and a ticket to Florida.”

“To what purpose?” Bladehorn kneading a trowel’s worth of peat into a pot. “If Sally did not know where to find my property, as you surmise, then why would Mr. Goodman involve himself with her at all?

“Maybe to kill her,” Jack shrugged. “Or maybe to split the pie; for all we know Sally and Driggers were partnered with Goodman from the beginning. But the point is, Sally’s only link to your cash and certificates is through Alex Goodman and Goodman’s going out of his way to stay out of sight. Read the note; he’s not even going to show his face at the Tampa station. Tells Sally there’ll be ‘a man’ to meet her. What man? Who? I’m tellin’ ya, this is a guy wants to stay out of sight. Got to be a reason.”

Bladehorn transferred the orchid to the pot and laid his trowel aside and Jack decided to press his case.

“Another thing, Mr. Bladehorn, about the letters. You look, you’ll see there’s no return address on any of ’em. No address inside to write back, no phone number. And then the very last letter Sally gets travel money and a train ticket, so you know what I’m thinking?

“I’m thinking this guy Goodman has got your property, all right, and he’s on the lam. He’s hiding in some swamp near Tampa. Someplace out of the way. But it won’t be long before he cashes in those railroad certificates, you can bet on that, and when he does you can kiss off ever seeing a dime of what your wife took from you. A man can’t run far on five hundred dollars, but a quarter of a million—? Son of a bitch will be out of the country.”

Bladehorn regarded his jar of specimens. Wings black and gold and tapping, tapping against their transparent prison.

“An interesting theory, Mr. Romaine.”

“It’s your best shot, anyway,” Jack tried to disguise a sigh of relief. “Now, sir, I’ve been jake by you, haven’t I? But now that we’re square I’m thinking I should leave the city. Start over.”

“Very sensible,” Bladehorn agreed. “But first you’ll need this.”

Holding back the cash as he handed Jack the train ticket intended for Sally Price.

“What are you tellin’ me, Mr. Bladehorn?”

“That you will be traveling to Tampa, of course.”

“Really? ’Cause, I was thinking more like the west coast. San Francisco, maybe? Or Los Angeles, somebody said something about the movies.”

Bladehorn shed his gloves to open the lid on his jar of captured monarchs.

“You’re going to Tampa on my behalf, Mr. Romaine. You will go, you will find Alex Goodman, whoever he is, and you will bring back my stocks and cash, or what’s left of it.”

“That…wasn’t our deal,” Jack edged back.

“Do I need to remind you of your considerable debts, young man?”

“I owe Mr. Capone. Not you.”

“Not so.”

Bladehorn collected a butterfly deftly and when he resealed the jar took care to display the telegram beneath.

“All your notes,” Bladehorn invited Jack’s confirmation. “Over six thousand dollars of debts paid. By me.”

Jack snatched the telegram and the gangster smiled as the weight of his unexpected largesse sank in.

“You no longer owe Mr. Capone a dime, Mr. Romaine. You now owe…me.” Bladehorn’s smile was malignant. “You will recover what my unfaithful wife tried to conceal from me, my boy, and I shall forgive your debts plus pay the balance of the thousand originally bargained. Now, I would say that’s a handsome proposition, wouldn’t you? Eminently.”

“What if I can’t find anything?” Jack could feel Fist at this back.

“Then I shall find something of yours, won’t I? Some
one
of yours, I should say. And balance the ledger on those terms.”

Jack lunged. Fist Carlton jerked him back like a dog on a leash.

“Touch my son I’ll kill you, you sick fuck! By God I will!”

“An impotent threat.”

Bladehorn rummaged a pin off his table of flowers as Fist dragged Jack toward the flimsy door.

“Goodbye, Mr. Romaine.”

The gangster raised his captive butterfly to the board.

“Good hunting.”

Moolah—
cash or loot, usually stolen.

H
ow long will you be gone?” Mamere was looking especially severe this morning in her perennially funereal attire.

“Couple weeks. Month at the outside.”

Jack hesitated before reaching over his duffel bag to take a photograph off the apartment’s wide windowsill. His son Martin, framed in tones of sepia. The dark hair, like his mother’s. Handsome kid. Like a movie star.

Mamere lit a cigarette off the stove’s sputtering burner.

Jack returned the photo carefully to the sill.

“You’ve got four hundred in the kitty,” he nodded to the tobacco tin that she imagined secured their assets as securely as a vault. “I took the rest.”

“Will you have enough?” she exhaled.

“I got the ticket, plus some of the cash I held back.”

“You mean that you stole.”

“Stealing from a thief ain’t stealing. ’Specially from a bastard like Bladehorn.”

“Stealing is stealing.”

Jack finished his inventory without retort. Three suits, the last of which, having gone through a fight, was patched worse than the other two. Shirts and skivvies. Toiletries. Rummaging through the bag he spotted the knuckles, bright and heavy. The knife he verified by feel, the gnarling of its scales long familiar.

“I want you and Martin out of the city. Just ’till I get back.”

“Why?” she stiffened further. “Why should I do such a thing?”

Jack reverted to vulgar French. “(So that no one may harm him.)”

She replied in kind. “(So. You have put your own son in harm’s way?”)

“
Oui, Mamere
.”

The use of the familiar lowered her guard a fraction.

“(Are
you
in danger?)”

“Just take care of Martin,” he replied in English.

She considered the matter a moment.

“Francois’s family,” she said finally. “In Cleveland. You remember the place? His address?”

“Yes.”

Francois was his wife’s elder brother. He had not spoken to his brother-in-law for years.

Mamere exhaled a cloud of cheap tobacco. “They are family.”

A sudden constriction in his throat. Jack swallowed.

“I’ll wire if I have any news. Don’t try to reach me. Don’t write anything down.”

Jack shifted his duffel onto his shoulder. Established his fedora on his head.

“When Martin gets back from school tell him…tell him…”

“I tell him,” the old woman said, and turned away.

Rube—
a mark, a chump, a loser.

S
eventy-three dollars got you a sleeper from Cincinnati to Tampa. A first-class ride. Jack boarded the seven o’clock
L&N
which gave him more time than he wanted on the haul to Atlanta. Too much to think about. Too much time on hands used to handling cards or whiskey. Jack tried to keep awake, tried to keep that photograph before him, of Martin, of Gilette.

The terrain rolling by outside his Pullman coach became more and more unfamiliar. He felt himself drifting on iron wheels further and further from steady bearings, the gentle vistas above the Ohio River giving way to blue mountains which had by sunset transformed into a flat and ochre pan of clay.

There was no discernible industry on the approach to the city of Atlanta. The urban landscape of the Midwest had long given way to wheat fields, small towns, and, now, to pockets of agriculture hemmed in at intervals with small, dirty towns peopled at their fringes with Negroes. Negroes everywhere. At the stations. By water-filled ditches. Jack’s odyssey south seemed to him lined with colored men and cane poles, their catches of fish got with a snatch of line and a can of worms.

He had thought no region could be more humid than Cincinnati, but the further he locomoted into the Deep South, the wetter and warmer it got. The laced curtains in his compartment hung like rags on a clothesline. Moss sagged on the live oaks outside like the beard of a drowned man.

Jack took off his collar. He wanted a drink. He wanted to gamble. He began to wish for any variety of companionship, some intercourse with his fellow-travelers, some conversation to pass the time. But those imperatives warred with a sterner dictum, which was to remain sober, alert, and inconspicuous, which compelled a distance from his fellow passengers.

There was plenty of temptation. Someone had brought a gramophone into the dining car. It didn’t work well, a worn spinner of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” jumping grooves with the train over iron tracks. But a swell of young people kept on without regard, the women shedding their Berlutis and stockings to dance the Charleston and sipping from their sheiks’ silver-tipped walking sticks. Ignoring entirely the admonitions of stone-faced conductors. Those determined to revel ignored the porters and searched for more recruits to their own inebriated cause.

“Come on, fella,” a redhead with an Eaton crop plopped into his lap. “Don’t be a flat tire.”

Parties didn’t stop, after all, just because you were in sweaty transit. The lost generation were determined to have a good time, even if they made themselves miserable doing it. But Jack declined their invitation. He could not afford the seduction of some flapper out for a good time. The last thing in the world he could afford was to cross some jealous boyfriend or husband. Harder to ignore were the card games played as casually as checkers all over the car. That, and the booze. An atmosphere of temptation, cigar smoke redolent in the heavy air, the seductive movement of makeshift chips among snifters of brandy or collins of bourbon.

There was another reason to say alert, of course, and his name was Becker. Jack found himself looking over his shoulder for Sally’s killer. He would not have been surprised waking in his sleeper to find that blond, evil face sharing his pillow. The man was preternatural, immune to normal attacks.

Death’s happy whore.

Every blond-haired passenger gave Jack the sheebies, which he kept telling himself was not rational. How, after all, could Becker know Jack was on this train? And even if Becker had tracked Jack onto the Pullman, surely by now Jack would have spotted the bastard. Wouldn’t he?

Why, then, did Jack keep looking over his shoulder?

The cars switched locomotives at Atlanta, continuing on the Central of Georgia to arrive after midnight at Albany where the Atlantic Coastline Railroad took over, it’s ’467 engine pulling Jack deep into the Sunshine State at seventy or sometimes eighty miles an hour past small towns with place names completely unfamiliar: Monticello and Perry. Live Oak and Hampton and Ocala. Wildwood and Coleman. Jack opened his wallet. There were two photographs lodged inside. One of his son Martin. And then Gilette. She posed stiffly with a pair of other nurses in their whites and hats. He had other photographs but this was the first and his favorite.

Sitting there in the diner, looking over his shoulder, Jack wondered how things might have been if his wife had not been taken from him so soon. Would he have remained a family man? Would he have stayed in New York working a foundry or on the docks or perhaps a shoe salesman downtown?

The photograph had been taken in France, in Tannerie, at a field hospital. Jack had mustered from Camp Upton in New York with forty thousand other patriots or draftees or those wanting to prove something to themselves. The 77t? Division deployed from ships and rail-lines and even horseback to fill the trenches criss-crossing countryside once travelled by Napoleon. The division had engaged heavily fortified Boche for nearly a month in the Oise-Aisne region. Tens of thousands of men were shredded in that encounter. Gilette had been assigned to a French first-aid post behind the lines in Tannerie. A church had been converted for the purpose. The walls were peppered with German artillery, part of the roof was blown away, but the Virgin inside, serene in marble tranquility, was untouched. You heard stories like that all over France, that the statues of saints and virgins were impervious to German guns. It had been beneath Mary’s open hands that Jack entered the infirmary.

You smelled the wounded long before you saw them. The ripe stench of pus mingling with the astringency of alcohol. Woefully few doctors in attendance, fluttering by intermittently in their long white coats. It was the nurses who were ubiquitous, working virtually as surgeons themselves in the daily, sometimes hourly, dressing of wounds. Nurses, mostly women, prying shards of metal or bullet from suppurating injuries. Nurses treating tetanus and gangrene and peritonitis. Everything from cracked kneecaps to trepanned skulls. Jack was not himself wounded. He had been commandeered with a half-dozen other men to secure a truck of supplies being sent to the hospital. The trucks were always clearly marked with the universal cross but supplies were short on both sides of the line and were subject to ambush, even by French civilians.

The efficiency of trench warfare could be measured in the tons of material needed to treat casualties. Gauze was delivered over sea and land in lots of a thousand yards, along with cuvettes and gloves and platinum needles. And morphine, of course. Lots of morphine. Enough alcohol to float a city of gangsters. Supply lines were subject to any number of ruptures, however; even hospital ships were subject to attack and so Jack found the nurses at Tannerie attempting to sterilize bandages corrupt with pus or excrement in vats of boiling water. Constant streams of wounded were unloaded as so many cords of wood from trucks and cots, doctors making instant judgments as to the likelihood of survival—this man too far along to help, this man rushed for immediate amputation. The rest waiting in pain, sometimes agony, comforted only by memory or religion or most reliably the human contact of the mostly-female and mostly French nurses who lived on soup and bread and sixteen hour shifts.

Rows and rows of American and French and sometimes even German soldiers languished in cots littered row upon row beneath a cathedral ceiling festooned with the limp standards of the Allies. The place was eerily quiet. No complaints from those martial beds. The muffled coughs of those able to clear their throats and chests, the sputum of those sequestered with tuberculosis. Murmurs in varying tongues of men dictating letters, or dying. Those soon to be discharged reading letters or playing cards. Sometimes you’d see a man sipping a malted milk or peeling a rare orange. Mulling over a copy of some hoarded magazine or newspaper or, of course, letters from home.

“Over here.”

Jack actually heard his wife-to-be before he saw her. She was petite, even for a French woman. Built like a pear. Hair tangled as a ball of yarn trapped beneath the peaked, starched hat. But the eyes were the thing. Green, like the kind of green reflected in a still stream banked by some brilliant forest. An emerald green.

Her patient was muttering some gibberish in a language Jack could not identify. He was a soldier, that was clear enough, shrouded in sheets and bandages with tubes like tapeworms draining a lung. A leg had been amputated and was seeping. He clutched a medal like a rosary. A scrap of ribbon embossed with a star over a scrap of brass.

“You can help me.” She spoke to Jack in passable English. It was not a request.

“Is he a prisoner?” Jack had asked.

“No. Arab. They left him here to die, but I’ve brought him back I think.”

She made Jack wash his hands. “Hand me the instruments when I tell you,” and before you knew it she was in the guy’s guts, pulling out scraps of cloth and integument.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack tried to hold his gorge.

“It was worse before. Wasn’t it, my Muslim friend?”

The man growled something.

“Cheerful, isn’t he?”

“He wouldn’t speak to me at all in the beginning,” she replied. “They don’t trust the French.”

“And yet they fight for them?”

“They fight for any reason at all.”

“You need anything else before I go?”

“We need everything. All the time.”

The Arab died not long after that first encounter. Gilette was not sure what to do with his things. Usually there was a forwarding address, some next of kin. But for the Arab, nothing but a box in a hole in the ground.

“He was awfully attached to that decoration,” Jack remarked. “Maybe you should bury the medal with him.”

“No,” she shook her head sadly. “He thought it would keep him alive. Toward the end, when he knew better, he made me take it.”

“What’s it for?”

“Men who are wounded, they get one.”

He saw Gilette perhaps half a dozen times in her hospital ward, always with supplies. She was a native of the area, turned out. Lived only a bicycle’s ride from the hospital. “‘Who would you choose for a husband’,” he read the question from a worn edition of
The Spiker
, “‘a Frenchman or an American?’”

“A Frenchman,” she replied without hesitation. “He eats less.”

Just before the 77t? moved on he managed one last trip to the hospital for the allowed excuse of visiting a wounded buddy. He brought chocolate instead of linens or morphine. Then he made Gilette promise that he might see her when, as he put it, the job was done. She seemed surprised, even a little amused, when a month after Versailles he arrived at her shepherd home. A cottage of wood and shingle. A small vineyard. Goats and sheep. She was much changed in her new setting, reduced from a position of competence and command to a peasant. He offered her New York and after only a moment’s hesitation she said he should speak to her parents.

They married in the same sanctuary where she had labored during the war and honeymooned on the boat to America. They were pregnant less than a year later and then had come the terrible epidemic. Gilette directing her own care until the very end.

“You are a terrible nurse,
mon cher
.”

“And why is that?”

“You care too much.”

She reached over to a bed stand and produced the Arab’s ribboned medal.

“The ‘
Insigne du Blesse Militaire
’,” she pressed it into his hand. “To remind us of our wounds.”

The photograph slipped from his fingers to the dining car’s hardwood table. Jack’s hand wandered to the brass pinned, still, on his lapel. He glanced about. Car was nearly empty; Jesus, was it that late? Jack checked his watch before he slipped Gilette’s photo beneath his son’s. Then he dropped a buck from his wallet for the steward and left the diner.

Jack Romaine collapsed fully clothed into his sleeper’s narrow berth. The gay voices of floozies and their gents smothered in the deep rumble of iron wheels on iron rails. The sway of the car. Rock along, rock along. All he needed was a little rest, he told himself. Just a little…

An emerald green outfield frames an immaculately groomed baseball diamond. Jack sees his son heft a bat over homeplate. A boy of summer in a uniform trimmed in scarlet. Soft hair spills from beneath a woolen cap; Martin waves to his dad. Jack smiles back proudly. The catcher dons his mask; Jack cannot see the barred face. But he recognizes the hands that give the pitcher his signal. They are huge hands. Misshapen. And as Jack stands paralyzed in the stands at left field he sees the pitcher begin his windup. An athlete, for sure. Big man. Hair and skin pale as bleached bone.

Arno Becker hurls a fastball straight at the batter’s head.

“Martin! MARTIN!”

Jack tries to warn his son. But there is no sound, no rush of air, nothing to strum his vocal cords to life as the ball sails in slow motion toward the unblemished boy at home plate—

“TAMPA in one hour. Passengers for TAMPA.”

A porter rousting travelers from their dreams.

Jack stumbled from his rack, splashed water on his face from the valet’s basin. A change of shirt and then he was back to the dining car. The windows set at intervals along the car’s length divided the passing scenery into separate frames like splices from an ongoing film, a series of pictures flashing inside motionless panes depending entirely on the train’s six driving wheels to impute activity and life. In the course of Jack’s restless slumber oak trees and Spanish moss had been replaced by palmetto and pine. A land still owned by Seminoles flashed by now—

Clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

He reached for a cigarette then decided against it. He already felt like he was breathing syrup. The heat was stifling inside the car. He wanted to get
out
. To climb atop his Pullman, rip open his coat and collar and bring a gale of stream-driven air bursting into his lungs. To see something beyond a virid blur of vegetation.

They had to be near the coast, but it was impossible to tell. A wasteland sentineled with conifers crowded right up to the rail-bed leaving only a ribbon of sky turning amethystine overhead. Not a living thing moved, not even a buzzard, the climate torrid under plum-colored ribs of cloud.