Winter at Death's Hotel (14 page)

“
Three!
” He flung open the gate with its usual crash. “Step back inna car, will yous, lady?” A man and a boy were waiting to enter. Louisa hadn't practiced going backward and almost fell.

“
Gongup!
”

She lurched against the back wall and let her weight rest there until they reached seven and the car stopped, the gate crashed, and the boy shouted, “Seven! You wanted seven, dintchoos, lady? Seven! You getting out or aintchoos?”

The man and boy parted without looking at her. She hobbled forward, head down so she wouldn't put a crutch in the gap between the elevator car and the seventh floor. Once she was on firm ground, she turned. The gate was already closing. She said, “You needn't be rude, young man.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” She heard this like a fading angelic voice as the doors closed and the car ascended.

She looked around. She was in a long corridor that must have run the width of the building; others ran at right angles at its ends. Directly across the corridor from her was a grate like a theater's ticket window, and a sign that said “Inquiries and Deliveries.” She hoisted her weight on the crutches and made her slow way over. A very young man, hardly out of adolescence, was inside the window. He was reading something, turning brilliantined hair to her.

“Excuse me?”

He held up a finger without looking up.

“Excuse—”

He whirled away from her and scribbled something on a slip of paper, jammed it into a tube the size of a cucumber, and rammed the tube upward into a brass pipe that ran up the wall—one of seven that Louisa could see. There was a whir and a sucking sound, and the tube disappeared.

“Yes, lady?”

“I am looking for a Mr. A. M. Fitch. He writes for the
New
York
Express
.”

“Newsroom.” He pointed with a pencil down the corridor. “Third door onna left.” He didn't pause but looked away from her and said over her shoulder to somebody behind her, “Yeah?”

An urchin was standing behind her. He was so small that he had to pull himself up to talk over the window's ledge. “Gotta packet fer da compositor.”

The pencil pointed the other way. “Second onna left.”

“Ya t'ink I doan know? Ya tink I was bawn yestiday?” The urchin looked at Louisa. “Some nerve.”

Louisa hobbled along the corridor, adding the young man and the urchin to her store of New Yorkers.
Very
poor
manners. But a kind of essential humor. Or resilience, at any rate.
She opened a door that said Newsroom and hobbled into chaos.

The room was enormous—at least the size of the New Britannic's lobby. A waist-high fence of once-varnished wood ran its length, dividing a narrow lane where Louisa stood from a vast area full of desks. Four pillars rose to the ceiling. Smoke hung in visible layers, swirled as men and boys moved among the desks. At the far end from her, three men sat on a kind of dais with a wall around it; people, most of them boys, were handing up sheets of paper. Intermittently, a bell rang, and a different boy would run to the far corner of the room. At the other end, five telephones hung on the wall; every one had a man slouched into it as if he had been hung up there, and every man was shouting.

The place stank. It stank of men. She knew the smell—tobacco, perspiration, their maleness (not unlike the after-sex smell), old clothes—and it reminded her of Arthur, from whom this smell was a pleasant emanation of the man himself, not disgusting as it was here.

She chewed her lip and looked around for someone to help her. If anybody thought it unusual to have a woman on crutches visit the place, he kept it to himself. Finally, she approached a wooden gate set into the long, battered fence.

“Excuse me?”

A man wearing a green eyeshade was leaning over something he was reading by the light of an electric lamp.

“Excuse me?”

He never moved. He had a pencil and he was making marks on the pages in front of him. Louisa knew what he was doing; Arthur did the same thing when a book was going to the press. But Arthur was at least polite if she interrupted him. Or more or less polite.

She sighed and moved along the fence and spoke to an older man who was sitting with his feet on his desk and a glass in his hand. He swiveled his eyes to look at her but didn't move his head. The strong odor of whiskey reached her as he swirled his glass. “What's up?”

She thought he meant that she could interrupt him. Taking the folded newspaper article from her pocket, she said, “I should like to see your sketch artist.”

“Wouldn't we all. I think if you look in the nearest dive, which is to say saloon, or, as they say on your native shores, ‘pub,' you'll find him. Keep your eyes cast down, as he's likely to be on the floor.”

“His name is McClurg.”

“So it is. That won't keep him from being on the floor, though.”

She quailed at the idea of going into a saloon. Even with Ethel—even with
Arthur
—she wouldn't have dared go into a saloon. Her New York guidebook was very harsh about saloons. She smoothed the newspaper article with a gloved hand, supporting it with the other, and said, “Would it be possible for me to see A. M. Fitch?”

“Would it be possible?” He held up his glass and spoke to it. “Would it? It would. But I wouldn't advise it.”

His alcoholic calm, if that was what it was, irritated her. “I should like to see A. M. Fitch!”

“Be it on your head.” He actually smiled. “Little lady.” He stood, looked into a far corner of the room, and bellowed in a voice that could have been heard on Staten Island, “Hey, Fitch! You got a visitor!”

Louisa looked where he was shouting. It was like looking through the trees in a wood, trying to see something beyond them: between her and whatever was in the far corner were male bodies, standing, leaning, hurrying, chatting. A few of them looked up at the man's bellow; somebody laughed. Then two of them parted and she was able to see what she supposed was A. M. Fitch—a woman in leg o' mutton sleeves and a black straw hat the size and shape of a boater. Miss or Mrs. Fitch (Louisa, shocked to find any woman there, supposed it had to be Mrs.) craned her neck and saw Louisa, studied her, looked disgusted, and waved her in.

Louisa thanked the man with the glass and went to the gate, wrestled with a bolt on the inside and finally got it open and hobbled through. Nobody offered to help, but everybody watched. She had suddenly become the most interesting thing that had happened in the newsroom that day. As she lurched forward on the crutches, she was afraid that one of them would trip her, so strong was her sense of their dislike, yet their faces were merely interested, perhaps speculative. None of them moved. Blushing furiously, wondering how one was supposed to hold one's head up while moving on crutches for which one hadn't the strength, she moved through the desks, tacking around them like a clumsy ship, pulling up at last at the dock of Miss or Mrs. Fitch's desk.

Close to, the newswoman looked to be a very young and freckled woman dressed in mannish clothes. The white leg o' mutton shirtwaist was cut mannishly; she wore a mannish necktie with it and a man's paper cuff protectors next to her hands. Louisa supposed there was a skirt hidden under the desk, would have been horrified to find there were bloomers or even trousers. The woman had watched Louisa come toward her; now, she said in an apparently angry voice, “What have you got for me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You got a story? A tip? What?”

“Might I sit down?”

“You might, if I had a chair. Anyway, you aren't staying, are you?”

“Why are you all so
rude
?” Her opinion of New Yorkers was changing.

“It comes with the territory, honey. Anyway, you're English and kind of hoity-toity, so I 'speck we'd seem rude no matter what. What's a woman like you doing here?”

Angry now, Louisa said, “I
thought
I would be able to gather some information!”

“You kidding me? Sweetie, we're the ones who gather information. Sorry.”

“I might even have something to contribute to your story about the woman who was murdered in the Bowery, but I suppose that wouldn't interest you! Thank you so much for your time.”

Louisa put her right crutch behind her and prepared to turn around.

“Contribute what? D'you know something or you just shooting the squit? Hey, sweetheart, I'm talking to you!” The woman had come around her desk and caught Louisa by the arm; at least she'd revealed that she was wearing a dark skirt. She looked as if she were deciding whether to strike Louisa or shake her. “Yes or no?”

“Do take your hands off me.”

“Oh, la-di-da!”

“You are being deliberately rude. No one could be so rude by mere chance!”

The woman put her face close to Louisa's. “In-for-ma-tion—yes or no? You spikka da English? You
capisce
‘information'?”

The woman frightened her; the audience of men terrified her; but what had Arthur said?
Remember
that
we
are
emissaries
of
Britain.
She said very quietly, with not a tremor in her voice, “Good day,
Mr.
Fitch.”

Somebody laughed.

Fitch turned on him and said something about where he could put his laughter. She turned back to Louisa, folding her arms over the white shirtwaist. “If you know something about the murder in the Bowery that's new and dazzling, tell me. That's my story! It's dead as a doornail right now, but if you got something good, I could goose it back into life. Look, lady—Miz…?”

“Doyle. I am Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Miz Doyle, everything's on deadline here; we're all in a rush. I know it doesn't look it; this bunch of vagrants are mostly asleep or telling dirty jokes or getting noodled, but that's because the early-aft edition's mostly in bed. Still and nevertheless, I can't stand jawing with you all day while you make up your mind whether you got something or not. Get me?”

Louisa looked at her with a blank face. “I will tell you what I know if you will tell me what
you
know. And introduce me to your sketch artist.
Get
me?
”

“But is it
good
?”

“I saw the murdered woman the day before the murder.”

“Where?”

Louisa smiled like the Sphinx, which she had seen on a trip with Arthur.

Fitch grabbed a chair from another desk, dragged it over and slammed it down close to her own, then signaled Louisa into it. She had placed it so that Louisa's back would be to the vast room; now, when she spoke, she whispered. “These pissants would steal me blind if they got the chance, so keep your voice down, get me? They
hate
me. Because I'm a woman.” With Louisa seated, Fitch took her crutches and leaned them against a wall. “You any relation to the writer Conan Doyle?”

“I am his wife.”

“That's a good angle. I can see it in a subhead. ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.' Get it?”

“If there is a chance of any such thing, I shall tell you nothing.”

“‘Nothing comes from nothing,' sweetheart; it works both ways. But if you don't like it, I'll see they don't use it. Promise!” She smiled a smile that said that her promises weren't worth tuppence.

“Nor is my name or any hint of my identity to be used—no ‘wife of a famous author known for a certain English detective,' or whatever circumlocution you would invent.”

“‘Circumlocution'! We oughta put you on the copydesk. Okay, you're Mrs. Anonymous. But it's a nice angle. Tell me.” But even as she said it, Fitch put up a hand and said over Louisa's shoulder, “If your ears were any bigger, you'd fly, Musgrove! Beat it! Go on—can't you see I got a sob story here?” She shook her head, whispered to Louisa, “This is no good.” She pushed herself halfway out of her chair and screamed “COPY!”

She stayed in that position until a boy appeared, to whom she snarled, “You took your time, you little varmint!” She grabbed a blank sheet of paper, folded it in half, and gave it to the boy, who was not unlike the urchin Louisa had seen downstairs, except that he had on a mangled necktie. Fitch handed him the folded paper and whispered to him, “Go find McClurg. He'll be in the Aces and Eights. Tell him to meet me at Holtzer's in five minutes or he'll never get another loan from me as long as he lives.” She caught the boy's shirt. “Now run with that paper like it's something I gave you to take upstairs pronto, and if McClurg isn't at Holtzer's in five minutes I'll take it outta
your
hide. Get me?”

The boy, unfazed, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and ambled away.

Fitch sat down and sneered, “‘Lo, how I fly.'”

“Shakespeare!”

“Yeah, we have him over here, too.”

“There was another woman who was murdered whom they called—”

“Can it, sweetie; the walls have ears.” Fitch was on her feet again. She grabbed a cloth coat from a hook above her desk and an umbrella from its place in the corner and then helped Louisa to her feet. “You new to the outriggers?”

“I've used them only last evening and today.”

“Well, do your best. We gotta haul ash here or McClurg'll turn right around and go back to his saloon.”

“Where are we going?”

“Holtzer's.” She tried to hurry Louisa through the newsroom, but Louisa might as well have been told to swim. Again, everybody watched her. A few men made remarks to Fitch, most of them unintelligible to Louisa, although she did hear one of them call Fitch “Lady Jam-rag.” Fitch seemed to understand them better, because she said to one, “Try it, and I'll have your you-know-whats for oysters, Flynn,” and to another she said only, “You'll never be that lucky, Jenks.” She didn't slow until she reached the elevator.