The Girl Is Trouble (9 page)

As we gathered our things and marched toward the hall, my frustration reached its breaking point. I couldn’t spend an hour sitting still in an auditorium, not when there were so many questions swimming about my head. Who cared about the stupid war when Mama had been murdered and nobody cared?

Pop may have given up on her, and Pearl might be too afraid to help me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do this on my own. And if I was going to do it, I better do it now, before I lost my nerve.

As we passed the girls’ restroom, I took the opportunity to duck inside the door. I waited for someone to call out my name, demanding to know where I was going, but the rest of the class passed without noticing me. I half hoped I’d find Suze inside there, killing time with a cigarette, but the room was empty. I waited until the hall was silent, then left the restroom and rushed toward the main doors of the school—

Where a hall monitor was standing.

“Um,” I said, as soon as he eyeballed me. “I’m turned around. Where’s the auditorium?”

He was sitting beside a small table with a stack of tardy notices to hand out to anyone who arrived once first period started. He barely looked up from the
Archie
comic he was reading as he pointed me in the right direction. I thanked him, followed his finger, and turned the corner out of his sight.

There was another entrance to the building, at the rear of the school, where a series of crash doors let students leave but kept them from returning the same way. The only problem was that it required going past either the auditorium or the front office. I started toward the lesser of two evils, only to find that Mr. Pinsky was stationed just inside the auditorium doors, smoking a cigarette. I tiptoed toward the doors. The auditorium lights were down and a projector whined as a film filled the screen at the front of the room.

“GERMans are the Enemy,” read the screen as bacteria goose-stepped in formation.

Mr. Pinsky coughed and turned my way. I moved back to my starting place just in the nick of time.

There would be no getting past the auditorium. He’d spot me for sure.

I doubled back and started toward the front office. A sour-faced woman in a tiny hat stood with her hand wrapped around a lanky boy’s collar. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but the boy blushed a deep purple as the woman railed at the secretary about something that required effusive gesturing with her free hand. I couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. Whatever the woman was talking about, the secretary couldn’t take her eyes off her.

I ducked down so that if they did look my way, they wouldn’t see me. I was almost past them when—

“Shouldn’t you be in class, young lady?” a deep voice in front of me asked.

Nuts—the jig was up. I began to straighten and tried to think of a story that could get me out of this predicament.

But it was no teacher calling out to me. It was Benny Rossi.

*   *   *

“NO, STAY DOWN,”
he whispered. He waved me his way and I continued my strange half crawl, half walk until I was past the office. We turned the corner toward the upperclassman lockers and I was finally able to stand up. “You should’ve seen your face,” he said.

“That would’ve required a mirror.” I tried to continue on my way, but he stopped me.

“Relax. I’m not going to sing. I’m skipping classes, too, dig?”

“I know. It’s just I’ve got places to be.”

“You sore at me?”

Were we really having a conversation about this now? “Actually, if memory serves, you’re the one who’s mad at me. I’m the detective’s lying daughter, remember?”

“If Suze can forgive and forget, so can I.”

“Thanks.” Any other day I would’ve been thrilled to hear this. Any other day standing alone with him, leaning in close so we could hear each other’s whispered words, would’ve thrilled me. But this was the day I needed to find out what happened to Mama.

“So what’s your story?” asked Benny.

“I have to use the restroom.”

“Tell me another one while that one’s still warm.”

“I’ve got to be somewhere.”

He seemed to understand that this wasn’t something he should continue to bug me about and dropped the eager beaver act. “Well, you can’t go that way.” He nodded at the exit I was headed toward.

“Why not?”

“There are poindexters at every entrance. Principal DeLuca’s got it bad for tardies and truants.”

“I thought that door only opened from the inside.”

“Somebody figured out how to make it open from the outside.” He winked at me. If he wasn’t the someone in question, I’d eat my hat. “But don’t worry, there’s another way. Come on.” He took me by the hand and, before I could register where we were going, pulled me into the boys’ restroom. As the door closed behind us, he put his finger to his lips and gestured for me to stay where I was. Then he checked the stalls and the long trough against the wall that I thought was a sink until I saw that there were actual sinks in another part of the room. “The coast is clear.”

“Great, but your plan isn’t. Am I escaping through the sewer?”

He pointed toward a small window above the radiator. “It’s a tight fit for me, but you should have no problem getting through. It’s a rough drop on the other side, so I’d better go first to catch you.”

Before I could respond, he climbed onto the radiator and pulled himself through the tiny opening. He was right about it being a tight fit. As the window reached his waist, he turned and wiggled with the ease of someone who had done this many times before. His legs slithered through the opening and I heard a thump as he landed outside.

“Okay,” he said. “The coast is clear.”

I didn’t think about what I was doing, or how I’d reverse the process when I wanted to return to school later that day. I just climbed up on the radiator and pulled myself through the window, hoping someone wouldn’t choose to come into the restroom as my skirt-clad rear headed north.

Benny waited on the other side, reassuring me that he’d catch me and help me to the ground. It wasn’t a long drop, but it was an awkward one. A door opened behind me, and I slid through the window and into Benny’s arms just as someone entered the restroom.

“What the—?” said a voice. With me still in his arms, Benny flattened against the side of the building so anyone looking out the window wouldn’t see us. It worked. Whoever it was retreated back into the bathroom and Benny gently set me on the ground. He took two steps to the right, then stopped himself. I saw the problem at the same time he did: there was a police car curbside. The officer inside would spot us for sure. Rather than risk it, Benny backed up, took me by the hand, and pulled me in the opposite direction, across the waterlogged baseball field. The rain had stopped, but its damage was done. Thick mud threatened to swallow my saddle shoes with every step.

Finally, we reached the edge of the school property where only a chain-link fence separated us from freedom. In the shade provided by the baseball bleachers, I turned to thank him. “That was swell of you. Thanks.”

“Thanks aren’t necessary, but payback might be.”

“I guess that’s fair. What’s your price?”

“You can start by getting your friend Pearl Harbor to find a way to excuse my absence for the morning.”

I cringed at his use of Pearl’s nickname, but I didn’t correct him. “All right.”

He removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped one out. He offered me the package and I declined with a shake of my head. “So where you got to be?”

Why not tell him? It’s not like Benny would squeal. “Yorkville.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a German neighborhood on the Upper East Side.”

He lit the cigarette one-handed like he’d been doing it all his life. “I know where Yorkville is, Nancy Drew. I’m just wondering why you want to go to someplace like that.”

“Don’t call me Nancy Drew,” I said.

“Relax. It’s just a joke.” He exhaled a circle of smoke. “So what’s with the destination?”

“It’s where my mother died.”

“Where she killed herself?” Had Suze told him that, or did everyone at school know my strange, sad story?

“Maybe.”

His eyebrow lifted.
Did you lie about that, too?
he seemed to ask.

I shrugged. Who cared if anyone trusted me anymore? I certainly didn’t.

“You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on you,” he said.

I took the cigarette pack from him and pulled one out for myself. They were Lucky Strikes, the ones in the green package that signs on the subway declared had gone to war. I’d never smoked before, but at that moment I desperately wanted to, as though the warmth it provided could take away the chill that settled in my bones the night before. Benny lit it for me and I held it at an awkward angle close to my face so I could feel its heat without inhaling its smoke.

“My pop has a safe,” I said. “He left it open a couple of days ago and I found some photographs. Of my mother.” The whole story spilled out. Benny listened in silence, all traces of skepticism wiped from his face. He didn’t move as I told my tale, not even taking time to ash the cigarette that dangled from his lips and threatened to drop to the ground. When I finished, he was silent for a beat, though you could see the gears in his head jumping into action.

“You have to go to that hotel and talk to that maid.”

I wished Pearl was there to hear his conviction. This was the kind of help I needed. “I know. That’s my plan.”

“You can’t go alone,” he said.

“Are you volunteering for the job?”

“I might be. For a couple of hall passes.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.” I finally took a pull from my own cigarette and immediately regretted it. The acrid smoke filled my lungs and made me want to vomit.

Benny took the butt from me and tossed it onto the damp grass. “Maybe stick to one violation a day,” he said. “Today, you skip school. Tomorrow, you can add cigs to the mix.”

CHAPTER

8

“IS THIS WHERE YOU LIVED?”
asked Benny. We were on the Upper East Side, my old stomping grounds. Up until the spring this had been my neighborhood,
my
home one of the large apartment buildings with a doorman who greeted you by name,
my
school the one where all the girls wore plaid skirts and crisp white blouses.

“Near here,” I told Benny.

He let out a low whistle that I could guess at the meaning of. To someone who had nothing, it had to seem much better to have once been rich and lost everything than to have never had anything to begin with.

I hadn’t expected for us to lose all of that when we lost Mama. I had imagined my life would continue pretty much the same as it always had, only with Pop in the role that Mama had played. But the transition proved to be more difficult than that. Somehow the money we’d relied on to maintain our lifestyle had disappeared when Mama died, a reversal of fortune that had never been explained to me. And rather than trying to continue carving out a life he knew we couldn’t afford, or relying on his brother, Adam, to provide it for us, Pop had abandoned the Upper East Side entirely, banking on a fresh start being preferable to remaining where we would constantly be reminded of everything we’d lost.

He’d been right, I guess. Staying on the Upper East Side would’ve meant confronting Mama’s absence every single day. In our new place it was possible to pretend she’d never existed rather than being faced with the memory that this was a space she used to occupy. She’d never been in Mrs. Mrozenski’s home, never sat on her sofa.

Or at least I used to think that. Now Mrs. M.’s house would always be the place where I’d learned that Mama had been murdered.

“So where’s the hotel?” asked Benny. I hadn’t bothered to check for the address. This whole scheme had come upon me so quickly that I hadn’t had time to plan.

“East Eighty-sixth Street.”

“That’s a long street. You got a number?”

I shook my head. “There wasn’t one in the article. All I know is that it’s called the White Swan.”

Benny held up a finger, telling me to wait, and ducked into a phone booth. I half expected him to emerge in costume, like Superman, but when he came out he looked exactly the same, save the directory page he clutched in his hand. “Got it,” he announced as an old man walking past us sent a frown our way.

“Public phone directories should not be vandalized,” he barked.

“Tell someone who cares, geezer,” said Benny as he pulled my arm and quickened my pace.

“Hooligans!” the man said into the wind. I blushed. Was that who I was now?

We continued on, eventually reaching East Eighty-sixth Street and weaving our way into the neighborhood called Yorkville.

It was one of Manhattan’s many ethnic neighborhoods, only instead of being home to Eastern European immigrants and Italians like the Lower East Side, it was the Germans who had settled here. There was a time, Mama told me, when the streets were alive with German music and the scent of sauerbraten and other national delicacies wafted through the air. The German flag flew beside the Stars and Stripes, and the majority of the words that crammed the shopkeepers’ windows or were shouted from the newsstands were in the residents’ native tongue. English was infrequently spoken; this was a haven for those who had moved here from abroad, where they didn’t have to force themselves to assimilate but could recede into their own culture for a while and rest.

“It’s creepy, huh?” said Benny.

“What do you mean?”

“This place. Look at it. It’s like they’re trying to hide who they are.” He was right. The war had changed Yorkville. How couldn’t it? Anything German began to be viewed with suspicion; even the food underwent a sort of patriotic makeover by being assigned American names (no more sauerkraut—instead, enjoy liberty cabbage). The German-language newspapers could still be purchased at the kiosks, but more and more people opted to buy the ones in English, as though to reassure us that they weren’t reading anything subversive. The flags were gone—at least the German ones—as were any other proud signs of German nationalism.