The Night Mayor (13 page)

Outside an elevated railroad station men in raincoats with collars turned up and hats with brims snapped down bustled busily, coming from and going to nowhere in particular. Robert Walker, a soldier in uniform, was fighting his way through the crowd, a bunch of flowers and a marriage licence in his hand, wading against the human tide to the shining spot under the clock where Judy Garland stood, dressed in angelic white that stood out against the drab extras, waiting anxiously. Susan checked the clock. It was two thirty. Down the road a little, a streetlamp spotlit a grubby newsstand.

Cook idled the cab.

‘Extree! Extree!’ cried the freckle-faced Mickey Rooney. ‘Private eye wanted for murder! Extree! Extree!’

‘Hold on here a minute.’

‘Sure, sister. I got all night.’

Susan reached for the doorhandle and found only smooth upholstery. She flipped her mind and the handle came back, a size or two too large. She opened the door, slipped the hood of her see-through up over her hat and stepped into the rain.

The newsboy, cap turned backwards, waved his paper in the air, still shouting.

‘Can I have an
Inquirer
?’

‘For def, doll.’ He pulled a paper off his stand and accepted some small change. ‘By the way, I get off in half an hour.’

‘Fresh.’

‘As eggs,’ Rooney grinned and nervously ran a wet hand under his cap, smoothing his tousled hair.

Susan stood under an awning and read the extra.

Banner headline: PRIVATE EYE WANTED FOR MURDER! Smaller-type captions: ‘Philanthropist Truro Daine Still Dead. Enquiry Agent Richie Quick Wanted by Police. “No Statement at This Time,” Says Commissioner Neil Hamilton. “We’ll Fry the Rat Yet!” Vows Chief of Detectives Barton MacLane.’

There was a picture of Daine doing the samba at a nightclub, and a grainy passpic of Tom Tunney passed off as Richie Quick. They both looked dead.

The text, after the first one-sentence paragraph, was a jumble of meaningless words. The only other story was a flyer about the war. After the front page, the rest of the paper was blank.

‘Extree! Extree!’ shouted the newsboy, ‘Spine-Snapper Strikes Again. Scotland Yard Baffled! Extree! Extree!’

That paper was for someone else. Susan recognised Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, somehow not quite anachronistic in deerstalker and bowler hat, as they consulted over their extra. Bruce was flustered, but Rathbone seized on a minute clue and rattled off a string of deductions.

‘Ah-ha, Bruce, the clouds part. I do believe this bloody business betrays the involvement of our old friend Professor Lionel Atwill. Evidently the reports of his death in the sewers of Montevideo were exaggerated. The gorilla footprints, the Ecuadorian pygmy poison and the six-fingered alabaster hand are most suggestive. Quick, the game is afoot!’

They hurried off, Rathbone with an excited spring in his step, Bruce huffing and puffing to keep up with him, and passed out of the rain into a street wedged thick with fog. Susan could see a gaslamp vaguely in the murk, and hear the clip of hooves on cobblestones. That was another part of the City.

This was a weird Dream. She ducked back into the cab.

In the mirror, Cook’s eyes were white marbles. The windshield was a white spiderweb of cracks centring on a neat black circle. There was a matching neat black circle in Cook’s forehead too.

Cliché.

R
uger and Rains were our most up-front suspects, so I decided to start with the mystery man of the Cicero Club, George Macready. I knew a little about him. He had come from out of town with a fortune, was known to have been a vociferous
Bund
supporter before the war and had set up a chain of more or less above-board casinos in the districts where gambling was more or less legal. He had a high-rolling joint on the
SS Nocturne
, a ship anchored outside the limits, and some nasty rumours had floated back on the tides along with a well-dressed corpse or two. But by far the worst of his establishments was the Noir et Blanc, a palatial clipjoint on the waterfront. Some people said that gambling should be illegal throughout the City. Other people muttered that, the way Macready had it set up, what went on in his places wasn’t really gambling. There were plenty of conflicting stories about the way he got the scar that ran from temple to chin down the right side of his face. None of them were pretty. On the side, he ran an art gallery with Vincent Price, which didn’t sound exactly legitimate either.

Carradine and I decided he was most likely to be in the Noir et Blanc. Besides, neither of us liked the idea of the swim out to the
Nocturne.
There were sharks out in the bay, and they didn’t get fed often enough. The waterfront was a vile district, further gone even than Chinatown. The worst elements of the Latin Quarter, little Araby, New Haiti and the Occupied Sector flowed together in an open sewer of vice, crime and callousness. Brownstones cosied up to slums, police cars were armoured, and everything was for sale. A row of dubious cafes with misspelled French names huddled together, while the streets were aswarm with vendors hawking bogus curios, limping sailors down on their luck, scuttling coolies with slit eyes and concealed daggers, and pop-eyed black zombies lurching on mysterious missions. I wondered if Anna May Wong had passed this way. Through the squalor threaded a well-guarded street. Limousines slid across the asphalt, decadent thrill-seekers cringing behind their curtained windows. Macready had men posted on the sidewalks to protect his customers’ money on their way to the casino. After they left, they were on their own. We were too hot to take a cab, so we just sauntered along with the crowds.

I was hoping the cops down here would be too busy lining their pockets to pay much attention to the all-points bulletin out on me. We hadn’t seen the National Guard yet. Carradine caught a half-naked Moroccan boy with his hand deep in my pocket, and threw him over a low wall. Dogs barked and snapped, and we heard the sneak thief running barefoot into a maze of alleyways, bomb sites and derelict hotels. I still had my gun and what was left of Sterling Hayden’s money. Perhaps I should try to pick up a little extra at Macready’s tables. Then again, perhaps not. In one of my newspaper clippings, he was quoted as having said, ‘I make my own luck.’ The suicide rate in this quarter was unnaturally high, and the insurance companies had established a definite connection between owing large sums of money to George Macready and accidental death. There was enough blood on the streets down here already. A crowd had gathered around one of the piers, where Marlon Brando and Lee J. Cobb were tearing chunks out of each other with docker’s hooks. We were offered a variety of tempting odds by a rat-faced freak with a clutch of money in one hand and promissory notes in the other. I passed.

‘There,’ said Carradine. The Noir et Blanc was a palace all right, lit up like a carnival float. Flags of all nations hung like gibbeted criminals from a row of poles just under the roof. It was probably an optical illusion, but the place seemed to be flying more eagles and swastikas than stars and stripes. Gargoyles spewed rainwater. Crowds of men and women were swarming up the front steps to the three revolving doors. They looked like sacrifices crushing themselves into the mouths of Moloch. A gigantic neon roulette wheel revolved under the Noir et Blanc sign.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’

We pressed into the throng and allowed ourselves to be sucked forwards, up the steps. I wasn’t sure that our clothing would pass muster at the doors, but others in the crowd were even more outlandish and uncivilised. I saw the major-domo turn away a couple weighed down with medal ribbons and jewels, while admitting a fat young man in a greasy fez and ragged robe. We were let through with barely a curled lip, and found ourselves in a foyer hardly smaller than a pyramid. It would have been a good place to hold a torchlight rally. Macready must have enlisted the services of Cecil B. DeMille as an architect. The place was done up in his trademarked colossal style, with a huge pair of well-muscled stone legs standing astride the doorway to the main casino. The ceiling, inconceivably far above our heads and leprous with chandeliers, cut off the legs at mid-thigh. I had the impression the statue extended through the upper floors. The gigantically helmeted head of some biblical hero would stick out through the roof and stand like an Easter Island monolith among the chimneys and machine-gun emplacements, jewelled eyes blazing with golem life.

We held on to our coats for fear of never seeing them again, and mingled with the doomed souls. Doors five times the height of the average giraffe opened between the statue’s ankles, and the latest intake of victims were swept inside. We went along with them.

The central cavern of the Noir et Blanc was the gambling hell Dante might have designed. The roulette wheels were sunk in circular pits. The most irredeemably damned, in their white dinner jackets and turbans or strapless black sheaths and dripping jewellery, clogged up the lower circles, dropping chips onto the grid as if casting swill to the pigs. At the very lowest level, a wheel fully twelve feet across was spun by a pair of mountainous Turkish wrestlers in tiny loincloths, while a bent and crippled croupier, Mischa Auer, shrieked numbers at the losers. People had been trampled to the floor around the wheel. Auer was suspended in a hanging basket, his dead legs dangling beneath him, reaching out with a surreally long scoop to dredge the chips into a central sinkhole. A girl lunged over the grid, screaming that she had made a mistake, fingers just missing the disappearing chips. One of the wrestlers tipped her up by her ankles, and she too vanished into the hole, high-heeled pumps kicking as she was swallowed by whatever machine or animal lurked below. The wheel kept spinning, the damned kept pouring away their money.

The higher tiers housed lesser wheels, chemin de fer, blackjack, slot machines,
vingt-et-un
, baccarat, five-card stud. Stricken friends and dangerous parasites, penniless would-be gamblers seeking a vicarious thrill and subtle pickpockets in the pay of the house mingled with the addicts. Silent orientals passed among the clientele, serving drinks and notes of credit. Two czarist officers, bulky in their comic-opera uniforms, solemnly played Russian roulette, each downing a drink every time the firing pin of their revolver came down on an empty chamber. The din was intolerable: overlapping dialogue in several languages, dowagers with laughter like painted nails down a blackboard, the endless rattle of the wheels, occasional gunshots, screams of unknown origin, the gravel-under-waves chink of piles of money turning over again and again, the shouts of losers. And somewhere, behind it all, a bland jazz band. One of the White Russians lost and the other drained a blood-spattered glass, his hand shaking as he collected his winnings.

‘That’s the Count Charles Boyer,’ said Carradine, pointing at an impassive, middle-aged man who was throwing a fistful of ribbon-bound documents onto a table. ‘He’s trying to gamble away his estate before it falls to the Nazis, but his lifelong losing streak has changed. He keeps winning.’

‘A sad story.’

‘All stories here are sad.’

We worked our way around the central tier, hands in pockets, and came out in an ornamental garden open to the stars. A glass roof, hundreds of feet above us, kept out the rain. There was a mercury pool for losers to reflect in while they blew their brains out. The staff were just removing the latest crop of bodies. Curt Bois was filling a bucket with rings, watches and empty wallets.

‘Macready will be upstairs,’ I said. ‘Let’s go quietly.’

We found ourselves in a hall where a masked ball was in progress. Streamers flew through the air, revellers contorted to the music. There was a vaguely medieval theme: knights and ladies, fools and brigands. One party had come as a dragon and were doing a conga through the dancing couples, tail disintegrating even as the giant head bobbed up and down.

There was a grand marble staircase, spiralling up to the eaves and the upper areas of the casino. It was guarded by more muscular wrestlers, dressed as barbarian warriors.

‘There’s your man, Richie.’

Carradine pointed. George Macready, immaculately suited, deadly stick in one hand, was halfway up his stairs, talking with a party of high-ranking Nazis. ‘Martin Kosleck, he’s their minister of propaganda,’ Carradine told me. ‘Paul Lukas, the butcher of Bratislava. And the woman is Katina Paxinou. She performs unnatural experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps. They say she’s been able to transplant a gorilla’s brain into a human body, or maybe a human brain into a gorilla’s body.’

‘Quite a sweetheart. Nice company our boy is keeping, eh? Even if he’s not the new Night Mayor, he’s certainly up there on my list of notable detriments to the community.’

Macready and his group turned away from us and drifted up towards the darkened area near the roof before disappearing through a doorway.

‘So, all we have to do is get past Gog and Magog, and we can have a little talk.’

Carradine and I sauntered across the dance floor. Zorro leaped through an enormous fountain, but tripped and fell face first into the water. Everyone within six feet was soaked. A scythe-toting Death turned round and screamed furiously at the bandit chief. A monkey in a fringed vest, a plumed sombrero tied to its head, shot into my legs, pulled at my trench coat and showed off his teeth. Carradine kicked it out of the way.

The crowds parted. An oriental girl dressed as a matador wrenched off her domino and threw herself at me. Our teeth gritted as we kissed.

‘Hiya, American sojer johnny,’ she cooed. ‘You got my missing knife?’

‘Hi, Anna, could you…’

But she was gone before I could finish asking her for help, borne away by three identically dressed musketeers, waving her whip in the air, and lost in the crowds again. I saw Zeppo Marx sitting glumly, out of the action as usual, looking at his watch, ignoring the festivities.

The wrestlers were even more enormous up close.

‘We need a diversion,’ I shouted over the cacophony. Carradine nodded, but we didn’t have an idea for one.