Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (13 page)

At Police Headquarters, Simeon Lightner checked to see whether there were indeed, at Sing Sing, a criminal called Alick Kizer, and was pleased to learn that Alexander Keezer, with two fellow inmates, had broken out of the prison two days after Christmas. The reporter considered that any further investigation into the veracity of Lady Weale’s statement would be superfluous and possibly harmful, in that it provided Maggie Kizer with time to flee the city. After alerting the police to the name and address of the beautiful conspirator in the crime, Simeon Lightner returned to his desk in the Tribune Building and wrote the story out. It was finished by eight o’clock, and received immediate approval from the editor on duty, who decided it would appear on the front page of the morning edition.

Simeon Lightner had not only the satisfaction of solving the case of the death of Cyrus Butterfield, when the police had been able to accomplish nothing at all, but also of just having written the most exciting article in a series that was by its nature sensational—and all had been accomplished without the assistance or knowledge of Duncan Phair. Simeon declared to himself again and again that he would pay twenty-five dollars to see the expression on Duncan Phair’s face when he heard that the woman responsible for the death of Cyrus Butterfield had been found out.

Chapter
16

Shortly after she heard the outer door of the house slam and saw Mrs. Weale’s yellow kerchief headed off on some errand, Maggie Kizer went into her bedroom. She put on a dress of dark green silk with black trim, an old sealskin sacque and a green hat with a heavy black veil. She wore black gloves and but the single ruby ring that Duncan had given her on the New Year. When she emerged from the house she turned her steps southward on Bleecker.

It was Lady Weale and not Maggie who avidly read the articles that had appeared in the
Tribune
on the subject of Cyrus Butterfield’s murder. The octoroon did not trouble herself to be fearful of discovery. And once Maggie had explained carefully to Lady Weale that by her assistance in the disposal of the corpse on New Year’s Eve she had implicated herself in the crime, Maggie had rested assured of the landlady’s discretion in the matter. It had not occurred to her to offer Lady Weale money for her silence or to employ her sister-in-law, Lena Shanks, as a threat. For her help, Maggie had given Lady Weale several pieces of the jewelry that Cyrus Butterfield had presented her in the little time that she had known him.

Maggie Kizer was not a common prostitute and actually refused to receive cash for her favors. Rather, she let it be known—though in a perfectly ladylike manner—that she would be pleased to accept gifts of clothing, of furnishings, and especially of jewelry. These items she kept and displayed for as long as she remained on good terms with the donor, but when, for whatever reason, he no longer kept company with her, those gifts were taken to Lena Shanks and sold. It was this money that paid Mrs. Weale, the dressmaker, and the tavern that sent up her meals three times a day.

Maggie’s liaisons, which were invariably discreet, were carried through two and only occasionally three at the time. These multiple attachments assured that she would be well provided with gifts. She could not be expected to languish on Bleecker Street alone and unfunded if her sole protector were suddenly called away to his family on the shore of New Jersey in the summer or on business to England in the winter.

Until recently, her primary benefactor had been a philanthropist, quiet-living but enormously wealthy, whose principal contributions were to charities staffed by or run for the purpose of alleviating the sorrow and discomforts of young unmarried females, whether they be mill workers, or streetwalkers, or the daughters of impoverished Confederate gentry. He had courted Maggie for somewhat more than four years, but since October he had been in Scotland, attending at the bedside of his dying father. This gentleman, shortly before sailing, had introduced Maggie to Cyrus Butterfield, as a man of probity and charm, who would protect her in his perhaps protracted absence.

Duncan she had met at a select after-theater gathering at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue; Maggie was quite beautiful that night and had been so vain as not to wear her dark spectacles. In that carousing group of drunken overdressed women, giggling and accepting all sorts of amorous advances from the gentlemen present, Maggie had stood apart, not in a disapproving manner by any means, nor with the attitude that she had never witnessed such goings-on before, but simply with indifference. Duncan had offered her champagne, conversed with her, and accompanied her back to Bleecker Street.

Since that time, in the summer of
1880
, Duncan had visited Maggie two or three times a week and had rarely failed to bring her some trinket; and when he did not, Maggie knew to expect a gift-bearing messenger on the following day. In addition, Duncan had paid for the new parlor draperies and Maggie’s tavern bill for the second half of the year.

Duncan knew that Maggie had other attachments, though of their identities he was ignorant. That he was not her sole support was rather a boon to him—he forwent the febrile pleasure of jealousy but was untroubled by the tiresome burden of Maggie’s complete dependence on him. So far as Duncan was concerned, Maggie Kizer was the ideal of womanhood: quiet, intelligent, undemanding, beautiful, kind, pleasant, and desirable—not the less either for her bearing the telltale marks of the racially impure.

Maggie Kizer’s father had been a mulatto, a slave brought up as a superior servant in a fine house in Virginia. Some years before the Civil War, he had escaped to the North and, passing for white in society, had married the only woman who knew the secret of his birth—a girl from Maine who was heiress to the fortune of an Abolitionist family. The young couple lived in Kennebunkport and Maggie was raised with her two brothers in the city’s finest house. A tutor lived in the attic and a dancing master was around the corner; Maggie learned the pianoforte, recitation, and painting on velvet. But in her third year in a ladies’ seminary in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when she was sixteen, it was made public by her father’s chance meeting on the street with the brother-in-law of his old master, that Joseph Conway was half Negro. Immediately after, Maggie’s mother was disinherited by her family, and the grandchildren disavowed. Maggie was removed from the school in ignominy and went to live with her parents in a village in Vermont. Her two brothers went to sea at that time and she had never heard from them since. After a year of penury in Vermont, Maggie’s parents died in the explosion of a paddleboat on Lake Champlain, where they had been employed as maid and waiter, and a gentleman of the town took Maggie under his care. Soon, Maggie became pregnant, and was ejected from the village. She made her way to New York in the back of a cart carrying large blocks of marble for the students at the National Academy of Fine Arts, and shortly after her arrival made a visit to Daisy Shanks in her professional capacity as abortionist.

Maggie became addicted to opium during her period of wandering indigence in New York. It was not only that the drug-induced dreams mercifully occluded the misery of her destitution, but that opium killed the appetite—and it was cheaper than food. If one got a very little money somewhere, the piecemeal purchase of the sticky globes gave one the right to remain all the day upon the bunks in the joint; and on those soft pallets in the darkened rooms of a blind cellar, days collapsed into hours and whole weeks passed as if they had been no more than a few sulfurous days. Once, she had trekked to the joint through foot-deep snow, and when she came out again it was to find that spring was full-blown in Washington Square and Battery Park.

But one day, in that place that did not know time, a man on the neighboring mattress shared a sandwich and coffee with Maggie—food that had been ordered in from a nearby saloon—and asked if he might not take her back to his apartments. Maggie, grateful for his offer, accepted and accompanied the man to his flat on First Street. She remained with him for two months and they indulged their habit in the bedchamber rather than in the unhealthful cellar on Mott Street. But then he was arrested for the robbery of a clergyman who was doing charitable work in Five Points and sentenced to seven years at Sing Sing. Maggie once more was alone, and supported herself and her opium habit by selling off the gifts that the thief, who had been enchanted with her, had stolen for her sake. On one of her expeditions to Lena’s pawnshop, Maggie was introduced to Alick Kizer. She soon removed to his apartments in the house let by Lady Weale, and sometime later was married to him.

Her opium habit had abated over the years, for she was no longer a miserable woman. She had no wish any longer to be respectable, for she had learned at great expense that respectability was a bubble easily pricked. She wanted only a modicum of comfort, security, and ease—and those she had achieved. But the poppy dreams were delicious, and her system still craved the drug. She smoked at home now, but occasionally had to make trips to the drugstore or to her old joint for more opium, though she purchased the drug in such quantity that these errands were infrequent. But now she must also replace her
yen hock
, the sharp length of steel with which the gumlike opium is prepared for burning in the pipe. The flattened darning needle she had employed for the past few weeks was imperfect and she liked to have the proper article; her fine
yen hock
of gilded steel, which had served her for eight years, was the metal finger that had pressed the catch of Cyrus Butterfield’s life; and in her haste to be rid of the corpse, Maggie had not thought to extract it from his body. She rather wondered at the rapaciousness of the scavengers that had taken the murdered man’s clothes, that they had even discovered the golden nail hidden in the lawyer’s breast.

Maggie walked down Bleecker Street to Mott and then turned south. After only a couple of streets, the number of Chinamen to be seen was marked. They all wore long queues sticking out beneath round-crowned hats with cartwheel brims, wide shapeless breeches, and blue blouses beneath colorful quilted jackets. None appeared to take notice of Maggie as she approached, though she stood out easily enough on that poor street. However, when she stopped beside a group of four, lounging before a small wooden house and talking Chinese in low voices, one of them said sharply, “Who?”

“
En she quay
,” Maggie replied, words which meant “opium smoker.”

“Who
en she quay?
”

“Dark Glass,” she said, and lifted her black veil so that the Chinaman might see the spectacles beneath. The Chinaman nodded to a slatternly Irishwoman with moth-eaten eyebrows who blocked the doorway of the house, and the Chinaman’s wife moved aside to allow Maggie entrance.

At the end of a dark hallway whose walls were papered with letters that had been received from relations in China, Maggie knocked at a rickety door. A panel flew open, and a flat yellow face peered out at her. “
En she quay
,” she repeated, and the door opened. Maggie stepped through onto a little platform raised high above the cellar, which was filled with drowsy layers of acrid blue smoke, palpable and—at least to the devotees of opium—delicious. The Chinaman who had allowed her entrance stood obsequiously out of the way and Maggie looked over the room. It was about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, illuminated by a single lantern suspended from the ceiling; the glass in the lantern was of blue and green, and the place was but dimly lighted. On either side of an aisle running down the center of the room was a low platform, just wide enough for a man to lie at full length. It was roughly covered with a motley collection of bolsters, pillows, blankets, cushions, and mattresses. About six feet above this platform, and reached by short attached ladders, was another platform just like it, similarly cushioned. At the far end of the aisle was a doorway, boarded up on the bottom and barred at the top. The small room behind was better lighted and two Chinamen sat in there, playing a game with many ivory counters. In a large pottery jar between them were two dozen or so long narrow pipes and on shelves behind them were sets of the opium lay-outs—the apparatus required by addicts.

Only a few of the two dozen persons in the room were Chinamen. In the dimness, Maggie could see that some of the addicts lay sleeping with their pipes resting lightly upon an outstretched hand, some were propped on an elbow patiently working the opium over the little green-glass lamps, some smoked their pipes in contented stupefaction. A couple of men shared a plate of food and a single cup of coffee. A prosperous Chinaman, his handsome Irish wife, and their ten-year-old son lay in a reposeful triangle, passing a single pipe between them. A three hundred-pound woman from a Bowery freak show was propped in a corner with her legs spread wide, trying to make her sausage-fat arthritic fingers do their business properly with the delicate
yen hock
and the tiny black boluses of opium. And a young man—evidently a novice—staggered down the length of one platform, reeling and convulsive. Though he bumped over others’ lay-outs and kicked others in the legs or their stomachs, no one called out or appeared to take any notice of him. Besides the Bowery fat lady there were several women in the room—none of them so well-dressed as Maggie—who were indifferently placed among the men.

But despite these pockets of shifting light and movement, there prevailed in the smoky blue cellar an absolute and stupefying silence. It seemed as if in that place, the sense of smell had subsumed all of hearing and much of sight. One heard nothing, saw little, but the smell of burning opium pervaded one’s entire consciousness.

Although the scant, colored illumination, the fearful noiselessness, the pervasive sharp odor, the torpidity of all the inhabitants of that room could not fail to make a sinister impression on the casual observer, those who frequented the place knew it to be perfectly safe. No woman was ever molested, no man injured in a fight; harsh words rarely spoken were never attended. And though the place was the frequent resort of thieves, there was honor among them here if there was honor nowhere else. No one was ever robbed, though the jeweled hand of the actress dropped insensible across the breast of the pickpocket.

Maggie descended the short flight of steps into the room and walked slowly to the back. The head of a reclining female figure swayed languorously, and a featureless voice from an invisible mouth whispered, “Dark Glass . . .” Maggie paused and raised her gloved hand in salutation.

“What’s it like, Dark Glass?” cried the voice, a little louder, but with no more urgency than there was curiosity in the gleaming liquid eyes that were turned on Maggie. “What’s it like out there? Are they still burying the dead?”

Out there
meant all the world except this one room, and
out there
was an insignificant space by comparison.

“Yes, Dollie,” replied Maggie quietly, “wait a bit, wait a bit. . . .”

Dollie was an actress who, when not in work, had always retreated to the dens of Mott Street. Here she had made her acquaintance with Maggie and helped the octoroon when she was in greatest need of assistance. When however, in the first days of the year, it was found out at the National Theatre that Dollie had become pregnant by a member of the house orchestra and obtained an abortion of that child in the Black Triangle, the stage manager had refused to allow her to rehearse for the next production. Dollie had fled to Mott Street and had scarcely ventured out at all in over a month now.

At the barred window, Maggie purchased a tin of highest-grade opium, five ounces in a small oblong brass box that was painted with red Chinese characters, the best
yen hock
that was to be had, and a dollar’s worth of the second-best opium as a gift for Dollie. She paid a little more than ten dollars altogether.

When Maggie returned to Dollie, she was greeted vacantly—for Maggie’s presence had already faded from the hopeless addict’s mind. Dollie had got that name from her pink dimpled cheeks and her bright blue eyes that made her resemble a fine China doll. But now her cheek was faded and her eye grown cloudy; her face had fallen slack and her luxuriant black hair was hid beneath a greasy bonnet.

Maggie lay down beside her old friend and, taking out her newly purchased
yen hock
, began to heat a small pellet of the opium she had bought over Dollie’s green lamp.

Dollie leaned over and sniffed it. “Good dope,” she breathed. Despite scant illumination in the room, the pupils of Dollie’s eyes were contracted into points and Maggie knew that Dollie probably could see nothing but the flame of the candle in the lamp. Her only other light was the mixed flowing color of her dreaming. It was a wonder she had found out Maggie’s presence in the room.

The opium was placed in Dollie’s pipe and the two women smoked. Maggie fell quickly into a slow soft reverie, a reverie that was untroubled by remembrance of distresses past or present, reverie untouched by anxious dreaming, reverie that was nothing but solace for the care that burdens all. She stretched herself softly in her fine green dress upon the stained ticking of an old mattress and thought, when she thought at all, of this small but sufficient world of contentment and security that lay in the dark cellar of an old house at the lower end of Mott Street on the lower end of Manhattan Island. No statesman inspired by a gleaming Utopia, no cleric convinced of the possibility of heaven upon earth, no philanthropist with expansive heart and unlimited funds could have created, or even imagined, so fine an existence as this one. It was no wonder that
out there
was a sordid, deceptive, cold place.
Out there
was that other room, the rest of Mott Street, the rest of Manhattan Island, the rest of the planet—where the light glared and blinded, where the wicked and the weary beat upon the walls and cried out their misery.