The Count of the Sahara (30 page)

Chapter 22

Chicago, Illinois

March 5, 1926

The Count crumpled the telegram into a ball and threw it at the wall of Mrs. Cudahy’s boarding house. To say he threw like a girl would be an insult to the girls I knew, who could at least get it home from the infield if they had to. “Omaha and Grand Platte. Garden spots of the plains, I’m sure.”

I tried to put a good face on it. “It’s work at least.” And it was better news than the wire that awaited us upon arrival yesterday. That one had been from the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C:

No room on schedule spring or summer stop

Chance something in 27

JH Finley, President, NGS

Whenever the Count cussed, it didn’t sound like real swearing, just genteel annoyance. This time though, he let out a string of words that would have gotten him a mouthful of Life Buoy if Mama heard him. The gist of it was, John H Finley had his head firmly up his own arse. I’d have laughed, but the look on his face told me it wouldn’t be a good idea.

We shared a room in a boarding house on South Dearborn. Lee Keedick, the omnipotent agent, used it for his other show business clients—mostly opera singers and long hair types—when they were in Chicago. It helped keep down expenses.

That was going to be the way of things now, especially that money was going to be tight. When someone else was footing the bill it was the Pfister, or the Allerton or the Palmer House. When it was on the Count’s dime, it would be boarding houses and shared rooms. That was fine by me, but it bothered him deeply. He must have apologized three times since we arrived the day before.

“It’s only temporary,” he explained at least twice. “Only until we get the money straightened out again.” It didn’t bother me much, but I could see embarrassment, or maybe even shame, written on his face.

Then I asked him for the third time. “We’re still going to St. Louis, though, right?”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Yes, we’re going to bloody St. Louis. Don’t have a lot of choice in the matter do we?” At least I still had a job.

As boarding houses went, this one wasn’t bad if you didn’t count the Irish biddy running the joint. Colleen Cudahy had a beak like an eagle and a brogue so thick you could smell peat smoke. Her nose wasn’t nearly as sharp or deadly as her tongue, which could take an eye out from across the room. I learned that the first day, when I tracked mud into her parlor.

She wasn’t shy about sharing information either. Apparently the last two young men Mr. Keedick arranged to share this room did not keep to their separate beds, and she let it be known in no uncertain terms that wouldn’t be tolerated. Not in her house. She knew how those European types were. Degenerates, the lot of them.

“You look like a good lad,” she confided to me that first afternoon, “but I don’t trust that fancy one. Too pretty by half, and prob’ly English, from the sounds of him. They’re all queer, that lot.” It took a very involved conversation with my employer to understand what it meant and what had her so riled up. I guess I wasn’t pretty enough to be a suspect, and for once I was glad.

The widow Cudahy’s inability to keep a thought in her head for more than five minutes without sharing had one big advantage. I knew Havlicek was watching the house. Well, not him, since there were twenty-four hours in a day, but another guy, younger and even shorter by the sounds of it. He’d come around asking about the Count, then tried to take a room, but the widow Cudahy had that uncanny Irish ability to smell an informer, and enthusiastically sent him on his merry way. Poor guy was probably still picking broom straw out of his hair.

The ride down from Beloit had been two and a half hours of silent hell. De Prorok sat and moped, occasionally sipping from a bottle he got from God knows where. Somewhere around Elgin, he began to perk up and by the time we got to Union Station he found his second wind. Since then he managed to keep me hopping.

The first order of business was to go through all the slides and pictures, and pull every photograph we added before the Beloit speech. Anything with the school’s name on it should be replaced with something more dramatic, or at least Beloit-free. To be absolutely precise, he told me to burn them, I assumed it was just the anger and the brandy talking, and placed them in a separate box.

I was also responsible for procuring the train tickets, which could wait for tomorrow. What couldn’t wait was finding a cleaner to do something about the Tuareg robes and turban. Apparently my stage fright literally oozed from every pore, and the costumes were getting awfully fragrant. I didn’t know any place in Chicago one would find a laundry with twenty-four hour
burnoose
and
tagelmust
service, but he assured me I was smart enough to figure it out.

His duties consisted primarily of making phone calls, sending telegrams to Maurice Reygasse in Paris that were doomed upon transmission, waiting for word from Alice and having dinner—and drinks—with his friend at the Oriental Institute. Some muckamuck from Michigan State University was in town, and he might get them interested in the work the ungrateful bastards at Beloit didn’t want to pay for. Not for the first time, I wondered how having someone else pay for dinner and getting drunk could be remotely considered work, but that’s why he was the boss.

His being occupied freed me up for the evening. Sharing a room meant I had little time to spend on my tinkering, and I had some things I should probably work on, but “The Black Pirate” with Douglas Fairbanks was opening. To see a Fairbanks movie opening night seemed like the kind of luxury only a free man with cash in his pocket could enjoy. A guy could get used to that feeling.

I wandered north on Dearborn, whistling happily while walking underneath the thundering train tracks into the Loop, and was surprised how fast you could feel at home in a place after only one visit. A guy could get used to Chicago, I supposed, but there were so many other places. St. Louis next, and New York, maybe Boston. Lost in my daydreams, I stepped off the curb into a slushy puddle right up to my ankle. I wondered if he had anything planned in Florida.

My evening consisted of a great pirate movie and a plate of egg foo young, which I was proud to order all by myself but was disappointed to find out was just an omelet covered in brown gravy, but at least it was cheap. My soaked wool sock refused to dry, and rather than risk pneumonia I headed back to old lady Cudahy’s.

I hadn’t even finished banging my shoes clean on the wooden stoop when the door flew open. “’Bout time you got back, boyo. You need to do something about him.” I had a pretty good idea who “him” was.

“He’s carrying on something awful up there. You’d best see to him. And calm him down. Honest people need to get their sleep, y’know.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll see what I can do.” I took the stairs two at a time and banged on the door.

“Mr. De Prorok….”

A loud, thick voice shouted at me through the thin white panel door. “Piss off, Brown.”

It wasn’t really an option, with an old Irish woman standing right behind me, cutting off retreat. I opened up anyway and closed the door behind me, nearly nipping her beak as she peered in to see what was going on.

He sat on the bed with his elbows on his knees, a half-empty pint bottle on the bedside table, and a pipe smoked in the ashtray sitting atop a mountain of dead ash. His eyes glistened with tears, bloodshot and burning like someone had circled them neatly in red ink.

“Are you alright?” I asked, for lack of anything intelligent to say.

He sniffed, which was more answer than the question deserved and handed me a yellow piece of paper. It was from Western Union. I unfolded it to see:

To: B de Prorok

Not coming to New York

Send money as agreed

A

“It’s true, Brown. She’s not coming back. She’s choosing him over me.” He looked up for a response, any response. Getting none, he dropped his face into his hands and wept. Deep gasping sobs wracked his body.

I held the paper out to him, but he was too busy crying to notice, so I put it on the bed, carefully pressing it flat. I couldn’t stand to see him like that, and seeing grown men cry wasn’t something that happened in my neighborhood, so I was completely useless to him. I looked around the room. On the rickety round table near the window the lockbox lay wide open. The letters and official papers were scattered all over, wrinkled where they’d been balled up, then pressed flat again, probably more than once. There were pictures of the little girls. The picture of Alice de Prorok, all soft curls and adoring puppy dog eyes, lay beside the overflowing ashtray. A water ring, although probably not water, marred one corner of the photograph.

Because I didn’t know what else to say, I managed to pour gasoline on the fire. “It’ll be okay.”

He looked up at me, the red coals in his eyes blazing. “How? Exactly how is it going to be okay?” It was a fair question, and one I didn’t have the answer to. My oafish shrug only infuriated him. “Yes, well I don’t know either. I’m ruined. All of it… my family, my career the digging rights, they’re all gone. And why? What have I done to deserve this, eh? What have I done that’s so God-damned awful?”

“Well,” I began, trying to sound like I had a clue what I was talking about, “you’ll see the girls all the time.”

“No, I bloody won’t. He’ll get them…” I knew he meant Kenny, there was only one “Him” in de Prorok’s world at that moment. “He’ll take them and hide them in Brooklyn, and won’t let me see them, just to be spiteful. I know that miserable son of a bitch will…”

His foghorn voice blew at full volume and a small Irish fist banged on the door. “Ye knock it off in there, or I’ll call the police. We got honest people tryin’ to sleep that don’t need this nonsense.” I felt like asking her to name one, but opted for lowering my voice to a stage whisper, as did de Prorok.

“What am I supposed to do?
Je suis fauché
. I’m broke. Completely and utterly busted.”

I knew there was broke, and there was
broke.
“How can you be broke? You make two hundred a day?”

His lip curled up like I’d crapped in his hat. “Two hundred a day is nothing. And everything gets sent back to Alice as soon as it comes in. Why do you think we share such glamorous accommodations?”

“It’s more than most people make.”

“I’m not most people, am I?”

A completely unreasonable and unreasoning rage was building inside me. “No, you’re not. Most people work a hell of a lot harder for a whole lot less.” The words flew out of my yap before I could stop them, and I knew there were more where they came from.

His lips pulled back in a teeth baring snarl. “Vass de matter, Villy. Vorried about you chob? Worried you might have ta go back ta Muhwaukee and live with Mutti und Papa?” The German “v”s were meant to sting, but not as much as throwing my Wisconsin accent at me. His ear and his aim were both deadly.

“That’s not what I s-s-said.” Damn.

“But it’s what you meant. You need me. Everyone needs me… until they don’t. Then they’re happy to leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Hmmmph. Because you need me. But you will, eventually. You’ll suck the life from me, fifteen dollars at a time and I’ll have to start all over again. I’ve worked too hard to be treated like this. I don’t deserve it.”

There he was, playing that song again. How hard he worked. Poor him. He doesn’t deserve this. Well who does? Sometimes you got what was coming to you. Sometimes you got more, some people did, anyway. Usually it evens out and you still feel gypped. I felt the words bubbling inside me, churning and boiling and I knew I shouldn’t let them out because that’s how stupid things get said and unretractable words spit in people’s faces. They flew out anyway.

“Why don’t you deserve it? What makes you so special?” His body sagged, his fingers ran through his hair over and over. “What do you even do? You get on stage for an hour or two every c-c-c-couple of days and talk about shit nobody really c-c-cares about. And they pay you good, and they treat you like a big shot…”

He looked up and gave a long sniff, followed by a longer pause. “Because I have a talent, Brown.”

“Okay, you can talk real fancy, b-b-big deal. That’s not work.”

He couldn’t have been more shocked if I punched him in the nose, which was close to happening. We were both getting hot, but while my voice got louder and more spit-producing, he got quieter, his voice dropping to a hiss. It was scary. Like a rattlesnake is scarier than a barking poodle.

“It is a big deal you blithering idiot. It’s the biggest deal there is.” He stood, meeting me eyeball to eyeball. “Most people can’t do what I do. Look at you. You can’t take what’s in that big block head and say something without stammering and sounding like a cretin. People write you off, they think you’re stupid. And you’re not… not by a long shot… You’re smart, but it’s wasted. The world will never know what you really are… and neither will you, because you can’t tell your own story.”

He began to pace, his lecture voice emerging, focused on an audience of one. “Most people can’t tell their own stories. They piss themselves at the idea of speaking in public, or they can’t find the words… so they walk around frustrated and angry at the world. But that’s what I do. You see? I tell other people’s stories for them. I take history and all those dates and facts and all that boring bullshit science and translate it for the brainless masses in a way they can actually comprehend. Do you think anyone really cares about science or history unless it comes with a good story?”