Winter at Death's Hotel (30 page)

***

In the evening, Arthur Newcome went through the unpretentious front door of a Sixth Avenue saloon and found himself facing a large man in a boiled shirt who asked if he had a connection. Newcome was prepared; he mentioned a name, offered a card. The boiled shirt opened another door, and Newcome entered Paresis Hall.

That wasn't its real name; it had had several names, but Paresis Hall was what everybody who went there called it, or simply “The Hall.” It was a large room with a bar along the far end, the walls matchboarded up to the height of a chairback, above that a powdery blue-green, with framed paintings and photographs at eye level, most of them of men with not too many clothes on.

A piano and a violin and a viola, or maybe two violins, were playing off to one side. People were waltzing in an open area. Some of them were men dancing with other men, some men dancing with girls who were also other men, but the newcomer had to guess about that. Some of the guessing was difficult.

Elsewhere in the room, men sat at round tables, some alone, some in twos or threes or fours. A couple of the girls trotted from table to table, where they were mostly tolerated, smiled at, sometimes laughed at, once goosed.

“Best beer,” Newcome said at the bar.

The barman could have fit into any saloon in the city; he had a mustache, a white apron, a toupee, a white collar and shirt, a narrow necktie and sleeve garters. He pushed a respectably large glass of beer across, took Newcome's money and said, “New here?”

“Very.”

“Looking for somebody?”

“Ah, let's say ‘getting the lay of the land.'”

“Rooms upstairs if you decide. Bit quiet just now.”

“That suits me.”

He sat at a table by himself, feeling eyes on him, a necessary examination: was he a cop? was he a pigeon? was he a find? One of the girls trotted over and sat down and said his name was Anna May and wouldn't he like a companion?

“I wouldn't, really, but I don't object to buying you a drink.”

“Oh, I don't come here to
drink
!” Anna May laughed. He had a pleasant, soft voice, a manner more deliberately feminine than was quite convincing. His dress was surprisingly tasteful, a reserved dark blue with a wine-colored bustle. He referred to the other girls as “she” and said that they were a darling lot, and wouldn't he like to dance?

“The only dance I know is the gavotte.”

Anna May giggled. “Do you really want to be alone?”

“I do.”

Anna May gave a theatrical sigh and a flounce and trotted away to gather with two of the other girls and look at Newcome. He turned away from them to watch the dancing. It was not particularly graceful; two middle-aged men in tweed suits were dancing together and looked to him rather like two bears pushing each other slowly around the room. An older man in a black frock coat was dancing with a younger man, almost a boy, who was wearing a working-man's unpressed trousers and mismatched jacket, no necktie. The man was talking into the young one's ear; he didn't dance well and seemed to be concentrating on keeping up.

Newcome looked around some more, thought it wasn't quite the Café Royal, but one didn't come to it for style or elegance. The Hall was famous. It was said to be the only place of its kind in New York; perhaps it was. It was said to be owned by a policeman, but it might have been only that it was protected by the police and paid accordingly. It was raided now and then, pro forma, but nobody important was ever arrested. It had been closed by the Lexow Commission, but here it was again. Still, once the fact of being there had registered and the glow of the new had worn off, Newcome thought that he wouldn't become a habitué. And the beer was too fizzy.

He glanced across the room and saw a tall man standing at the bar. He was about Newcome's age, well cared for, good-looking in an American way, whatever that meant. What did it mean? Newcome thought it had to do with the air of being well fed, on the edge of overfed; also a sense of self-confidence, even brashness.

The man looked at Newcome. He smiled. Newcome smiled back. The man raised his glass a couple of inches, inclined his head an inch to one side. He raised an eyebrow, raised his glass again. Newcome shook his head. The man detached himself from the bar and ambled over.

“Happy to buy you one,” he said as he got close.

“One's enough, I think. I'm used to English ale.”

“May I sit? Yes, one doesn't come here for the beer, does one.” The man looked around the saloon. “My name's Frederick.” He looked at two of the girls who were now dancing together. “I really hate fairies.”

“‘Hate' is a strong word.”

“‘Detest,' then. They give us such a bad name.”

“I'm Alfred.”

“You're English.” Frederick—Newcome doubted that it was his real name—sipped his beer. “How's the Wilde thing going in London?”

“Badly. It's one reason I'm here. Suddenly it's dangerous to be ‘so.'”

“It's always dangerous. Damn Oscar anyway. He's as bad as those girls for what he does to the rest of us.”

Newcome didn't much care for the talk about “us,” not because he didn't feel some solidarity but because he was above all himself and he didn't attach himself to groups or causes. They watched the other people dance for some seconds and Frederick said, “What're your other reasons?” He looked at Newcome. “For being here. You said Oscar was one.”

“Oh.” Newcome laughed. “I've an aunt who's going to make me wealthy one day, and I like to keep an eye on her. Not that I mean her any ill; she's a good old trout, but she likes a certain amount of attention.”

“Is that what you do? For a living, I mean. We Americans always want to know what people do for a living.”

Newcome laughed again. “I
live
for a living. I suppose I'm like a character by Mr. Henry James: the American who lives abroad, has no visible means of support, and has discreet but illicit liaisons. We're supposedly spoiled by European immorality, but in fact we thrive on it. Perhaps we even cause it.”

“How did you find The Hall?”

“Drawn by its magnetic properties.”

“Not very magnetic right now.”

“Quite dull, in fact.”

Frederick finished his beer. “I belong to a club that meets once a week in a Turkish baths after they close to the public. It's quite amusing, really. There are several members who always bring some new lads from downtown. Would you like to go?”

“Tonight's the night?”

“As it happens.”

“My lucky day.”

“Luckier than The Hall, I suspect.”

“Now?”

Frederick looked at his watch. “If we leave now, we'll be early but not outrageous.”

Newcome looked at him, gauging how likely it was that the man really belonged to such a club. Newcome had had a good deal of experience, some of it bad, in sizing up offers. He said, “I don't mind.”

Next day, Saturday, Alexander Newcome sent up the message that he had the carriage at the hotel door, and Louisa hurried down, at least insofar as she could hurry. She wasn't accustomed yet to navigating her way out of the annex; there had been a moment when she had turned the wrong way—the old way—to take the lift. She was still taking the lift, even though it was only one floor now; she wasn't about to risk going down the stone steps from the mezzanine, which was what her own floor in the annex communicated with. In fact, if she'd been well, she could have done it in a moment; the short passage into the hotel was only a few feet from her own door. But she had to go the other way, halfway across the annex and then to the rear where the lone lift was, and so down. And then all the way back, to enter the hotel almost directly below her own window.

“I'm so sorry I was so long,” she said when Newcome rose from one of the lobby chairs.

“Not at all.” He was, as always, beautifully dressed, but he looked weary, in fact older. A bad night?

She let him help her to the carriage step by holding her hand and lifting a good deal of her weight; she was able from there to lift her right foot and then pivot and pull herself to the seat. The carriage was open but had a tonneau that could be pulled up against rain. She had expected that Newcome would drive, but there was a top-hatted driver.

“This is so very kind of you, Mr. Newcome.”

He began a kind of travelogue of the city as they rode. He pointed out several Fifth Avenue houses and hotels that she had already seen on the motorcar ride, although she didn't mention that. She was really thinking of the telegram she had had from Arthur that morning, cruel in its curtness:

FORTY POUNDS OUT OF QUESTION STOP YOU HAVE SHOWN SELF INCAPABLE FRUGALITY STOP TEN POUNDS FOLLOWS STOP ARTHUR

It had seemed wantonly unkind. In her anger, she had torn up her budget, which was useless, anyway, as she had based it on the certainty of having forty pounds. How did he think she was to live?

A second telegram had come just before noon:

WILL SEND TEN POUND INCREMENTS AS NEEDED STOP IF RAILWAY TICKETS REQUIRED I WILL BUY STOP ARTHUR

She had started to send him a telegram saying that she could not live like a beggar, but she saw the futility of a husband–wife spat at long distance. But she was hurt and disappointed in him.

Newcome showed her Union Square, which would have been pleasanter had the leaves been out; as it was, it seemed to her commercial and rather stark, although Newcome seemed delighted with the permanent reviewing platform for parades.

When there was a lull, she said, “I have moved to the hotel annex, you know.” She waited for some sign of what a come-down this would be to him; surprisingly, he said only, “Oh? It was quite a nice private house when I was a boy. I used to visit my aunt's family—where the hotel is now, you know—and I played with the children where the annex now is. They were nobodies, but the house was quite fine.” He seemed little interested. “And here we are.”

At the walking-stick shop, he meant. It proved exactly what he had said, rather fusty and dark, the mullioned window dirty. The sticks, however, were works of art, or at least of artisanship. She passed over an Irish blackthorn, although she liked its heft and the impression it gave of the country, but Newcome whispered in her ear that they had better ones in London, and this wouldn't do, simply wouldn't do for a lady. In the end, she selected a polished ebony with an ivory handle like a hunting crop's.

“It must bear all my weight,” she said to the stooped old man who was tending to them.

“That stick would hold up this gentleman and more.” But he insisted on measuring the height of her hand from the floor; he pronounced it all right, then went into the back somewhere and came out after several minutes with a new horn tip on the stick.

“If ever there's anything not right, you bring it back. No matter how long.”

She had barely enough money for it. Arthur's ten pounds—
ten
miserly
pounds!
—wouldn't arrive until Monday. Could she afford to take Minnie to supper?

Newcome put her crutch cross-wise of the carriage. She rode with one hand on her new stick, admiring it. Even on that cold, damp day she felt better with it in her hand, riding in a carriage up Fifth Avenue and looking, she thought, rather nice in her gray and her velvet hat. It was not, however, compensation for Arthur's telegrams and a growing distaste for the hotel, which she blamed on her move to the annex.

She wanted not to be staying there, if she was honest about it. If she had had the money, she'd have moved to another hotel until she had to join Arthur. Not merely because she was in the annex, but—Carver and the noises, and the stories, and…

She reminded herself that that evening she would be with Minnie, and they would see the Wild West.

Newcome gave her a choice of Clark's for luncheon or Dorlon's Oyster Saloon, the first on the same block of West Twenty-Third Street as the hotel, the other on Madison Square. “Clark's is generally preferred by ladies.”

“In that case the other one, by all means.” She didn't know what she meant by that, the more so as she disliked oysters. But his tone had been so knowing, as if he could predict what she would say, that she chose the other.

The truth was, Alexander Newcome irritated her, now that she had spent a little time with him. He was too clever, too negative, too bored, too
civilized
; she compared him with Detective-Sergeant Dunne—but why was she doing that?—and surprised herself by thinking that Dunne had been a pleasanter guide.

Nonetheless, the afternoon was not painful, particularly as the evening was there to be looked forward to. They cut across Twenty-Third Street to Dorlon's, then resumed the tour up Fifth Avenue. Newcome mostly sneered at what he saw but seemed to love the older brownstones because they were unpretentious but “honest,” the houses of his childhood. Of the grand ones built more recently, he was contemptuous—the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first, for example, was “infested with the bad taste of the Vanderbilts,” who had built four houses there. “Some people should never be allowed to have money,” he droned. “Or they should put it in trust for the second, perhaps even the third, generation, when taste seems to develop.”

Louisa mostly stopped listening. She enjoyed the smoothness of the rubber-wheeled carriage on Fifth Avenue's well-paved length, a contrast to the streets she had ridden with Dunne; in fact, between bad paving, tramcar rails, and holes, most New York streets were dreadful—certainly worse than London's.

Newcome pointed out the beginnings of Central Park but told the driver to continue up Fifth so that she could see “vulgarity immortalized in stone.” There were more millionaires' houses, most not yet completed: chateaux, castles, palaces. It was true that the total effect was rather flashy; the competition among them both clear and crass. She didn't tell him, however, that she agreed with him. His perpetual denigration of everything American was wearying.

They turned into the park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at which Newcome waved a hand. “You don't want to go in. You've seen
the
real
thing
in London and the Continent, without doubt.” They went on across the park and he showed her the huge and elegant block of flats called the Dakota, situated so far uptown that most of the streets around it had been laid out but not paved, most of them without townhouses or other proper buildings. Instead, there were wooden shacks and shanties, hardly houses at all, some seeming to decline into the mud around them. Newcome gave one of his smiles and said, “The Irish. Hibernian
nostalgie
de
la
boue.
”

She heard the names of landmarks in Central Park—the Ramble, the Mall, the Lake—and looked at those things and found herself not thrilled but not bored, either, a kind of bearable lack of pain. Still, she was pleased, in a muted sort of way, to see people of all sorts in the park, as if they really did enjoy it and really had made it their own.

They passed a statue that he said was Garibaldi, the liberator of Italy, “insisted on by the resident Dagos; they've put one of Columbus somewhere, too.” Then they started down Sixth Avenue. He offered afternoon tea at the New Netherland but she refused. Back at the New Britannic, she tried to manufacture enthusiasm for the afternoon. He seemed satisfied, perhaps took her muted tone to be an imitation of his own. They parted, both having done their duty.

She went in and started for her old rooms. When she remembered her new room in the annex, she felt her soul sag.
Cheer
up
, Louisa!
She tried to stand very straight and walk gracefully, but it wasn't yet possible with the cane. She realized as she reached the corridor to the annex that she'd left her crutch on the floor of the carriage.
Oh, dammit!
Her ankle hurt from the weight she had to put on it with the cane. Before she passed into the annex, she waved one of the boys over to her and asked him to have Reception ring for Ethel and tell her to bring ice. She gave him five cents. He looked severe.

The ice helped. So did having Ethel there.

But she wanted—what? She wanted to be somewhere else; she wanted to be taken care of, protected,
understood
; she wanted to be well away from murders and noises and money worries. She wanted life to be a quiet, pleasant journey that stretched into a quite distant future without bumps or horrors.

She slept.

***

The Wild West was enchantment. It pulled her out of herself and out of her doldrums, and she applauded with gloved hands and grabbed Minnie's hand right at the opening, when Cody and the entire cast of Indians and cowboys and pistoleros came riding into the arena at the gallop and pulled up within inches of the barricade that separated them from the audience. She gasped, too, when the Indians threatened the settler's cabin, and she laughed and shrieked when the Deadwood Stage was held up.

“I loved it!” she said to Minnie afterward.

“It's bunkum, but I liked it, too.”

Thrilling. Yes, decidedly thrilling.

“But taffy,” Minnie said as they walked across Madison Square, Minnie holding Louisa's hand to help her.

“Don't spoil it for me, Minnie.”

“I don't mean to spoil it; I just mean that the West wasn't like that, and the men didn't dress up like grand opera.”

“It's the way it should have been, then.”

“Well—you're English.”

“Allow me a little romance, Minnie.”

They walked to Clark's—“preferred by ladies”—and had supper. Clark's didn't bother Louisa now; to the contrary, without Newcome's snide comments, the company of women was pleasant, even soothing.

Minnie said, “I've got an announcement.”

“Oh, Minnie—you're not marrying!”

“No, Louisa! This is serious!” She lowered her voice. “I'm getting the front page on Monday, and I'm going to tear the Murder Squad to pieces!”

“Oh.” Louisa had pretty much forgotten that part of the last week. “Did what Leonard and I found help?”

“Help! It's the foundation, the core, the, the…
pedestal
.” Minnie held up a fork loaded with veal. “I've got the dead wood on Cleary. I've got that flannel-mouth at your hotel, too—Carver?”

“You talked to him? At the hotel?” She felt neglected.

“Sure, that's what reporters do. I asked him how much he'd had to give Cleary and Grady to shut them up. I thought he was going to pass out. He's a pill, that one. But I got him.”

“He admitted paying them?”

“He threatened me with the police. That'll go great in the story.”

“And the women?”

“The women. You mean the murders? Yeah, that's in there, too—I tied it all together in a neat little bundle. Murder Squad, murders they aren't investigating, dirty money, Cleary's tenements—it's all there.
And
the identity of the first victim!” Minnie gave Louisa's hand a little slap. “You really struck gold on that, hon! I'm really,
really
grateful.” Minnie lowered her voice, actually looked around for eavesdroppers. “Roscoe G. Harding! Whaddayou think of them apples?”

“I don't know him.”

“No, hon, o' course you don't. Harding's a big noise in coal. Millionaire. He just happens to be the husband of the first victim.”

“The woman I saw in the hotel?” Louisa was dumbfounded, and obscurely disappointed, too. But why? She said, “How do you know that?”

Minnie made the universal sign for baksheesh, fingers and thumb rubbed together. “A sawbuck to the night guard at the morgue to tell me which mortician had picked up the body; another sawbuck to the mortician's driver to say where the body went next; two sawbucks to a so-called reporter in Mount Kisco to find out who was buried in a private plot up there—Mrs. Roscoe G. Harding!”

“But Minnie—at the hotel, she was—”

“That's where it all started. It's beautiful! My article goes from there to Cleary to Carver and Harding, and then I ask the questions: why didn't the police investigate this foul crime? Why has Roscoe G. Harding buried his beautiful wife without a public funeral? What are they hiding at the New Britannic Hotel?”

“Are they hiding something?”

“Louisa! You're the one that told me about it. Carver paid off Grady!”

“Only to keep them from mentioning the hotel in the newspapers.”

“Yeah, well, now they're gonna be
featured
in the newspapers. Or in one newspaper, and
I
scooped
the
World!”

“But what about the second murder?”

“All in good time. That veal was great.” Minnie pushed her plate a half-inch away. “Vegetables, no. I ate enough vegetables when I was a kid to last me. You ever eat ramps? Ramps and potatoes, ramps and potatoes… I want dessert.”