By The Sea, Book Two: Amanda (5 page)

Amanda took a deep drag on her cigarette and
flicked it overboard. "I know my way around. But any decent cop
will steer you to a decent speak, if you ask him nicely."

He rubbed the underside of his chin.
"Somehow I don't see myself doing that. In Great Britain we like to
assume the police are on the right side of the law."

"Oh, don't be a prig. The Amendment was made
to be violated. It's illogical, unenforceable, a leftover bit of
jingoism from the war. The only reasonable thing about it is that
it wasn't ratified in Connecticut."

"Sorry. Just trying to make conversation,"
Geoff said, casting his eyes skyward in the deepening twilight. It
was such a hopeless task.

"Well—I just don't think you're entitled to
an opinion unless you've been there," she said sullenly.

I might say the same for your war
sculpture, you arrogant little wretch,
he thought. Still, all
he really wanted was to have an amiable, pleasant evening. He was
finding that he didn't care, after all, what made Amanda Fain tick.
Besides, she made him feel old. He stole a sideways glance at her;
she was groping in her purse on her own, searching for another
cigarette.
The hell with her. Let her get her own bloody
smoke.
He wondered how old she was. The first bloom of youth
had passed, certainly. Old enough to know better, he decided. Late
twenties?

Another silence ensued; he was getting used
to them. Amanda pulled up on West Fifty-Second Street, not far from
an enormous brownstone monstrosity which turned out to belong to
Cornelius Vanderbilt III. Amanda had answered his query about its
ownership briefly, and with contempt. The Vanderbilts were less
nouveau
than the Fains; maybe she was envious.

She turned off the ignition and they sat
there in the dark for a moment. There was an adolescent dare in her
voice as she said, "How do you feel about cheap thrills?"

"They sound like something I can afford," he
quipped, determined not to back down. He had the feeling that she'd
challenged him to a pissing contest, and he knew that he was better
equipped than she. He got out of the car. She opened her own door
and started down the block. He fell in beside her and they walked
along a row of elegant brownstones, many of them private
residences, until they reached the middle of the block.

Amanda turned abruptly and led him down some
steps to a heavily reinforced basement door. She rang the bell. A
light went on above them, and a small shutter behind an iron grille
slid open. Amanda murmured, "Tango." The door opened and they were
let into a dim hall and up to another door, where the same process
was repeated. All Geoff really wanted was a cutlet; he could have
done without the theatricals.

Once inside Amanda took him directly to the
bar and elbowed a niche out of the crush for them both. It was
noisy and perishingly hot, and even though the clientele was of the
sort that bathed before donning their tuxedoes, sweat was still
sweat. On the whole, he thought he might prefer Newport.

He was half expecting her to say, "What's
yer poison?" but in fact, she didn't bother to consult him. Two gin
and tonics were delivered—although if he were required to flaunt
the law, he'd rather have done it with vermouth—and Amanda plunked
down two dollar bills, which stunned him.

"Oh, say, I can't allow—"

"I
said
it was my treat, didn't I?
How is it? Not bad, I think. This place waters it less than most."
She tapped her glass against his. "To the Volstead Act."

"You Yanks have been a lawless bunch ever
since the Boston Tea Party," he said dryly, and watched her down
her drink in two swallows.

She motioned to the bartender for refills.
"There's a half-hour wait for the food, but it'll be worth it. It's
French."

"What's the place called?"

"Gary's."

The drink was getting to him and the heat
was killing him; he thought he might be getting claustrophobic. The
din, the smell, his altered perceptions—it was reminiscent of the
battlefield.
Oh God. Not now. Don't make an ass of yourself,
he thought. In desperation he began to babble on about his country
home, drawing on his memories of cool, damp morning walks through
what was left of their meadowland.

She was staring at him and he knew that she
wasn't missing a thing, not a bead of sweat on his brow, but he
didn't care. He was babbling on to save his sanity, to win the
pissing contest. The round ended when a young, very sleek buck in a
dinner jacket squeezed through the elegant mob, slid an arm around
Amanda's waist, and dropped a comically passionate kiss on her
well-formed neck.

"You!" she cried, surprised. "It's here?
Tonight? I don't believe it! Marvelous!" Amanda turned to Geoff.
"Meet my brother David."

This was David? That David? The one with the
broken wrist? Where was the cast? Bewildered, Geoff pushed his
drink away from him. Bootleg gin must not be like normal gin. He
held out his hand, but David declined to take it.

"Sprained," he said, which cleared up some
of the mystery.

Flushed with excitement and looking suddenly
far more delectable, Amanda explained: "David's got a pal who's a
Prohibition agent. He gets all kinds of tips, including which
places are going to be raided on a night. We've evolved a kind of
game: the last one to leave before the raid wins."

Geoff cleared his throat. "I see. Are we
playing the game now, by any chance?"

Amanda looked at her brother. He nodded.
"Sammy Tucker walked in with me, took one look at the new
bartender, and walked out again."

"He thinks the bartender's the agent?" said
Geoff, incredulous.

"Hey, those guys are good. The plant could
be posing as anyone—musician, waiter, opera patron. For myself, I'm
keeping an eye on the gent in the brown suit who keeps tapping his
foot to the piano," David said, nodding toward one end of the
bar.

Geoff let go with a laugh, a loud, bright,
spontaneous laugh. He'd traveled three thousand miles for the
pleasure of being rounded up in a dragnet with two infantile
boozers because he got suckered into drinking gin he'd certainly
pour down a sink at Seton Place, if he thought the plumbing could
take it.

"What's wrong with you?" demanded Amanda. "A
little nervous, maybe?"

Ah, the pissing contest; he'd almost
forgotten. "Not at all. I just don't think Mr. Brownsuit is our
man."

She arched her brows at him, intrigued. "Got
any better suggestions?"

He glanced around at the company: most of
them were in evening clothes, bound, obviously, for the theater
district. Sir Tom was right: society women dressed, or undressed,
like Amanda. All around him soft breasts and hips were enveloped in
not too many yards of crepe and silk, trimmed in beads and sequins.
Fringes seemed to swing from every protuberance. It was all very
natural, very alluring. If there was a whalebone in the room, he'd
stir his drink with it. Funny how he'd never noticed the change in
dress back in England. All he remembered seeing there were visions
of Anna in France.

Anna.

"Look, you don't have to play the game if
you think it's boring," said Amanda. "We can go. I'll take you back
to your hotel."

He shook himself free of the vision. "God,
no. I'd drop dead of hunger," he said with a weak laugh. "All
right, then: I'd say it was—that bloke there, the waiter with the
salver." An arbitrary and unimaginative choice, but he had to stay
in this round, and he'd been landed a punch to the gut. Anna.

"Wrong, absolutely wrong. I'm sure he's not
here yet," Amanda announced flatly.

"And I'm sure it's the fella at the end of
the bar," interrupted David. "Christ, look at him fidget. He's
getting ready, and I'm getting out. If Louie comes looking for me,
tell him I'm at Ma Maison. It's important."

"Stay out of that joint, David. That's a
rotten bunch."

"Yeah, yeah." He gave Geoff a nudge. "Older
sister. She should be having kids of her own, but no: dumps all her
maternal instincts on little Davey." And he left them.

Embarrassed, Geoff said, "Your brother seems
also to be a Freudian of sorts."

"My brother doesn't actually read books
without pictures," she said, turning back to the bar and calling
for two more.

One thing about Amanda: she could hold her
liquor. Geoff was relying more and more on habit to keep him
vertical, but Amanda stood straight as a lamppost, even with one
slender foot on the bar. He watched in a woozy haze as Mr.
Brownsuit, in a burst of twitchiness, approached an attractive but
probably too expensive woman on their left.

"Federal agent, my foot," he murmured to
Amanda. "He's on the make, pure and simple." He smiled a rather
silly smile—unquestionably, he was on his way to being drunk—and
added, "Is he here yet?" Amanda did seem to know her business after
all.

"Not yet. How's your waiter looking?"

"Rather sweet, actually. He has kind eyes."
Geoff brought his glass more or less up to his nose. "This isn't
half bad stuff, you know. I may be getting a little squiffy."

"You need food." She sighed. "Well, at least
you're not a mean drunk. I'm curious: what exactly are you doing
over here? Sir Tom says you came to see the Cup Races, but I don't
buy that. Are you in finance? Are you like our Wall Street
playboys? You don't look bound for the ministry or the diplomatic
corps or anything. Sir Tom says you were hurt in the war. Is that
true?"

Sobering, he said dryly, "No. Sir Tom
lied."

"Well, I mean I know it's true, I suppose,
but ... well, you don't look like a veteran. You look too ...
disengaged."

He held up his hand to the bartender for a
refill. "Amanda, your sense of timing pales before your sense of
tact. Are there any other subjects I can refuse to discourse on
before I leave you in search of a meal? Because somewhere in this
city of four-odd million, there must be cooked food for sale." His
face was flushed, either with liquor or heat, and that annoyed him.
He was going to have to concede another round of the pissing
contest to her.

"Touchy,"
she remarked coolly. She
began to look around again, the way she had in the hotel room,
while he began to think he might be regaining the advantage.
Instead, she threw five dollars on the bar and whispered, "Time to
go now." Without waiting for him to argue she dragged him by a
coat-sleeve away from the entry door.

They ended up in the kitchen. Amanda threw a
ten-dollar bill into a salad being tossed by the chef, gasped,
"Thanks, Henri," and yanked Geoff out of the service door into the
alley outside. "Let's go watch the fun," she said, still
breathless.

They went around to the front and stood side
by side in the sweltering evening as the clientele, some angry,
some laughing, were rounded up outside on the pavement. Nothing
very serious was going to happen to them, obviously. The speakeasy
itself would be shut down, only to open again in another
brownstone, or in the same one under another name. It was all a
game, a socially acceptable form of anarchy. Something about it
struck at the heart of the civilized values Geoff held dear. "A
nation is not governed," he quoted softly, "which is perpetually to
be conquered."

Amanda looked at him thoughtfully a moment,
then said, "I'm starved. Let's go."

Back in the Daniels, Geoff found himself
with a spinning head and wishing desperately that she'd tire of him
soon. They passed one restaurant after another, his stomach
growling resentfully all the while, on their way to the Lower East
Side, where she insisted the best goulash in town could be found.
He didn't want goulash. He didn't want gin. He didn't want to
listen to her rage over the antics of Attorney General Palmer, who
had detained over six thousand Americans since the beginning of the
year on suspicion of being Communists. He didn't want to hear about
a federal government run amok. If anything, he thought it was the
citizens who were running amok. All he really wanted was a cutlet.
And maybe some tea.

He got his tea—watery, tepid—along with a
bowl of goulash, a dish he considered unpalatable by definition.
The Café Budapest, squeezed between a dry goods shop and a
shoemaker, had an ambience light years away from Gary's elegant
speakeasy. If it were ever raided it would be for violation of the
health code, not for the serving of alcohol. There was no alcohol,
and as a result there was no raucous laughter, no scandalized
squealing. Mostly there was just low, urgent, distressingly sincere
talk. Many of the men were bearded; the women, dressed in loosely
layered garments which favored black, would have been labeled
Bohemians half a century earlier. Two smartly dressed couples,
undoubtedly taking a tour of the underside of Manhattan, stood out
nearly as much as Geoff and Amanda. The red checkered tablecloths
were dirty, but in the dim light no one noticed or seemed to
care.

"You don't like it," Amanda challenged.

"My dear young lady, why wouldn't I? Paprika
is the salt of the earth."

"I don't mean the goulash; I mean the type
of crowd."

"What type is that?" he asked innocently,
shoveling reluctantly into his stew.

"Socialists. Reformers. People with a sense
of fairness; people who want to make sure that everyone gets half a
loaf, instead of sitting idly by while some gorge themselves and
others starve. There is more genuine nobility in this room than in
all the speakeasies on Fifty-Second Street combined," she said with
heat.

He looked into her gypsy eyes, and then
around the room. "I think I see a fraud or two," he couldn't help
observing.

Her dark eyes flashed triumphantly. "There!
I knew it! I knew you had a simple-minded attitude about us. You
think a revolutionary should
look
like a revolutionary, and
be unkempt and smelly. It would be stretching vour imagination to
breaking point to think that a well-dressed person could care,
really care."