Speak Easy

silver flask. Zelda’s in the middle of saying:

“…up in my room. Just come look. I can pay. I can! I fixed Mrs. Acosta’s stove last week. I’m flush. Well, golly! My Daddy taught me how to make things work when they quit on you. He wouldn’t have anyone saying he raised a Helpless Hattie. That’s what he called girls who only knew how to be pretty. Now, being pretty’s plenty hard, but nobody’s Daddy since the dawn of time ever cottoned on to that—there I go again, blowing away! Just come, Mr. K. Come look and if you can’t do it no harm’s done.”

Harold the spy lives for a hard lock. Georgie hands over her love wrapped in brown paper. Blood seeps through the bottom. They don’t see it drip, but they feel it.

1090

Frankie Key spiffs himself up real good for the evening. He takes a change of clothes up to the tenth floor. He gets off early tonight. Free and clear by midnight and he feels just as fine as candy about it. Al gave him a new suit, and boy, a suit from Al is prettier than a girl’s ballgown. No boy of mine should have to slum a party in a paper bag like yours, he said. Where’d you get it, you uncle’s funeral when you were fourteen? Come ’ere, kid. You look like a fifty-pound nun in a ten-pound habit.

Frankie touches it while he sets out the tools of this particular job. She’ll be impressed. Anybody would be. The suit’s this kind of grey that’s barely grey at all, but lavender and blue and a little green, too. It shines a little when you move in it, and he does plan to move. It’s got a tie the hot, heady color of the bougainvillea in his mother’s garden way back. Ruby chip cufflinks and fennel flowers in the buttonhole. And if those shoes aren’t actual goatskin, Frankie here will eat his book.

Oh yeah, Frankie’s writing a book. Everybody’s writing a book in this joint. It’s the thing to do. Furrow your brow over pages and pull your best Keats-face, your best long-tooth Joyce-mug and the girlies just fall all over you. The lads, too. It’s a 100% kind of magic, works on everyone. Make me a character, won’t you? I was just born for the page. Make me art. Make me alive. Make me real ’cause you’re only real if somebody’s talking about you, and fiction’s the best kind of gossip there is. Every time some sad sack in the Artemisia thinks say, I oughta write a book, an angel falls flat on its face on 42nd Street and gets a ticket for jaywalking.

But Frankie’s not bad. Mostly he’s been writing detective stories up till now. It does nice things to his mind, like working a puzzle backwards, pulling out pieces one at a time until he’s the only one who knows the picture. Besides, stories that start with a dead girl sell. He doesn’t like that. His mother wouldn’t like it. But it’s true. He’ll try something else, someday. Something smart and cold and hard in all the right places. He just hasn’t found his big thing yet. He will. He knows it. Boys always know their big damn deal is right around the corner, sucking cigarettes and panting their name. But right now the murder racket snags him bylines and smart’s not doing the trick. So up with blood and down with melancholy! Yes sir, hack those throats, fire those guns, furrow those Holmesy brows! It’s easy to be lazy when lazy keeps you in gin. Frankie’s not monogamous when it comes to detectives. No Poirot or Spade for him. He likes to be a new man every time he punches a typewriter. And honestly, his night-gig will keep him in stories till he’s out of teeth and time.

And what’s his gig? Frankie’s a tube-man.

When Mr. Slake rustled himself up a hotel, he kitted her out with the best and newest of everything. Why not? The best is better, isn’t it? New beats old in everything but wine and compound interest. Frankie’d never seen anything like the tubes when he slid into home in that fine front lobby. Pneumatic tubes, all through the place like veins through an elephant, opening up into every room with little brass cubby-doors and long glass pipes. If you could see through walls, you’d see this fantastic glass spider hugging onto the whole damn castle. And in the pipes? Air rushing, rushing all the time, air so beefy it’ll carry a capsule from one floor to another, a capsule like a crystal ball, stuffed with whatever you want. Messages, trinkets, lipstick handkerchiefs, tickets, keys, candies, paints, pens—but mostly messages. He has no idea how it works. It could be a great big green-assed genie puffing into a hookah in the basement for all he knows. Frankie doesn’t use it himself—but he knows the score.

See, Al showed up on the roof one morning. Just leaning against the chicken coop in his cotton candy suit like it was the finest throne in England. He tossed an egg up in the air and caught it and said: heya, Frances, how’d you like to make some real scratch? And any Buffalo boy knows when the big man says he wants a favor you just better hop.

So, this is what Frankie does for Al: he sits in Room 1090, not even a suite, just a single halfway between the roof and the basement. And whenever a crystal ball comes flying up the chute, he grabs it, jots down what’s inside in a big green book, then sends it back on its way. If it’s a letter, he copies it out. If it’s a trinket, he describes it down to the gold chain and the porcelain handle and records the to and the from. Everything passes through Room 1090. Everything goes in the book. Frankie has nice handwriting. Frankie has a tidy little heart. Frankie assumes he’s not the only one. Some cat like him on every floor, most likely.

These are some of the things that pass through Frankie like a like that lady on the fortune telling card, passing water from one jug to another.

Send up the Matchstick Girl and Iron Hans tonight, won’t you, Mme. Georgiette? After supper, if you please. —E. F. Rm 1216

You owe me twenty bucks on account I chewed off Bobby Smile’s ear for you last week and if you don’t pay up I could do yours for free. —J.W. Rm 401

Mr. Bessler, a fella got me in some awful trouble and he ain’t never gonna marry me ’cause his name goes up in lights every night and mine goes down in the dirt. I got six dollars saved and I know you can do it quick. —S.A. Rm 244

I’ll need a case of rum tonight, Raspy, four bottles champ. & two vermouth. Just a quiet night in with friends. —Q. T. L. Rm 1967

Don’t you love me anymore? —O. C. Rm 1550

If you send me another letter I shall have you evicted. This one I shall burn. I advise you to do the same. —B. R. Rm 1388

Of course, baby. Of course I love you. Come down tonight. I’m sorry. —E.B. Rm 212

Miss Lily, I cannot abide another night without you. My wife is away. Come up. Wear your boy’s clothes. I shall kiss your feet. I shall kiss your everything. —C.A.S. Rm 2064

1709

The big party’s on seventeen tonight—a double birthday for King Lear and the Mad Mauler, a silver screen slickie and the heavyweight champion of the world. Though how the Big M crunched that poor bastard’s face in Toledo nobody can figure. Unless somebody loaded down his gloves something special. Unless 1919 was a mighty fine year for crossing palms in the Artemisia lobby while the seals barked like three stupid fates with one beach ball between ’em. Never you mind, I guess.

By the time Frankie shows, it’s gimlets and Gomorrah up there. The Slovenian tenor who made such a thumping glory of Carmen last month plays Apollo, zinging arrows from a serious mister of a bow, whacking his shots into the moose-head hanging over the elevator, popping the lights in the hall, telling filthy jokes about bear-fucking to girls on roller skates. His laugh blows through three octaves. Doors are flung open, people pouring in and out, the whole floor shaking, hopping, dancing, hollering. Through one door Frankie K can see a naked girl standing in a washtub pouring champagne over her head and reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner while everybody throws dimes over their shoulders like she’s the goddamned Trevi Fountain. King Lear, wearing his prop crown, has Cordelia bent over a chest of drawers in the back bedroom, huffing Now, gods, stand up for bastards! while he does his big scene on her back.

On the floor in 1790, the Mad Mauler’s own pad, there’s six or seven cats playing dice on the rug. Frankie looks closer. It’s no game he knows. Bone dice. Burned-in pips. One girl looks up at some player who’s got fifty years over her and hisses: double fiv

e and the antelope burns, old man. Her face looks like she swallowed a limelight when she says it. Frankie shivers.

He taps antelope-girl’s shoulder. She looks up at him, all milk of innocence.

“Have you seen Zelda?” he asks.

“Who?”

“Zelda. Zelda Fair. About this high, short black hair, smile like a punch in the gut?”