“Children,” I said, too stunned for coherence. “No wonder you didn’t want anything to do with me when we met.”
Red Man—Walter—smiled again. “I was flattered, Pea. I don’t talk about my family, though, you understand; I’m telling you this now to answer your question. You ask me what Victor will do if you say no—I know what he’d do to me. So I say yes. But you? You lose this place. You lose your money and your power. You probably have to leave the city. But you don’t have a husband, you don’t have any kids that I know of. You don’t even have Dev, this time.” I flinched; Walter saw it, but was kind enough to pretend he didn’t. “You say no, that’s the end. Victor won’t ever take you back. But he might let you go.”
I thought of Gloria and the kids. Victor knew a lot about me, but I’d changed my last name and pretended for him as much as anyone that I had sprung, off-white and fully formed, from a smoky stage in a Times Square club.
Victor was a hard little knot of a man, and had been as long as I’d known him. He’d had all his own teeth back then, in the good old dry days of Prohibition. If he didn’t speak or smile or reveal himself with any other telling gesture, you might have even fooled yourself into thinking him handsome.
But Victor had been born ugly, with tastes for violence and vulgarity and opulence that distracted, but did not hide, that essential core. I won’t say I was fooled by him, but I was twenty when we met—fresh-faced, full of my own beauty, new enough to passing to be more thrilled than exhausted by it. And then Victor taught me to kill. It was easy, deadly easy, that first time.
It only got hard later, when the slip slip of knives into vital arteries started to wriggle like spiked minnows in my own veins. It had started to wear at me before Dev. Five years had meant a lot of kills in Russian Vic’s service. But Dev changed me, or he had at least changed how I saw myself.
At its easiest, love is a blanket; at its hardest, a black mirror—it isn’t just your flaws that show stark against that high-yellow skin, it’s your ghosts.
“Not even Dev,” I said, and pulled the lighter from my pocket.
“He still watches you, you know. Every night you’re there.”
“He watches Tamara.”
“Everyone watches Tamara.”
I flicked the lid on and off.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “what did she do, Victor’s job? Who is Maryann West?”
He opened the manila file to reveal the pictures inside. A dead white man slouched against a stack of crates on a concrete floor, his jeans stiff and dark, blending with the bottom half of an untucked flannel shirt. On the right of the image, dark columns of police officers’ legs threw stark, looming shadows across the floor and the body. A roll of police tape fluttered, unattached, in the corner. The photo was clean, well composed, its beauty easy to miss in the visceral horror of its subject matter. Walter had an artist’s eye, which some would say was wasted. I appreciated it today, because he had framed the shot to draw attention to one particular detail.
The man’s arms, crossed over his chest. The ragged stumps of his wrists, where the hands had been hacked away.
“I dreamed about them,” I said, faintly. “What does Aunt Sally’s dream book say about severed hands? Six, six, six? Maybe I should play.”
“You dreamed?” Genuine surprise in his voice, maybe even concern, but I was far away.
“Second dream, you know what they say.”
“Just rumors.”
“And that’s what some white folks say about the hands, too.”
He paused. “Not Victor.”
“No.” I pushed the folder toward him. “This isn’t one of the old photos? It looks just the same.”
I’d destroyed my life to avenge these murders. I still had nightmares of Trent Sullivan; the sound of his girl pounding her hands bloody on the bathroom door while I struggled with him on his bed, killing as a parody of love.
“It’s new,” Red Man said, just as soft. “Body turned up five days ago. And Victor says that Maryann West did it.”
So it was happening again. The rumors that even Sonny knew had spawned another believer. My second dream was true.
“Does it work, Walter? If they’re going to kill us for our hands, do they at least get something from them?”
He brushed a finger across my right wrist. “Whatever they get, Pea, it’s never enough.”
4
I wore my best dress and my best knives and careful makeup, so I thought I might pass for twenty-five in the dim, smoked light of the Pelican. I hadn’t said yes, and I hadn’t said no. I was still Victor’s knife, for as long as the hands held out, or for as long as I could bear to use them.
The Pelican was a different world on Friday and Saturday nights. Then, Victor was in it to make money, as much as possible. We had a line like any other club, and men in dark suits to take your measure and pronounce you worthy. It was always integrated—Victor made a point of that—but the strange weekday crowd, the anarchist syndicate meetings and the Yiddish one-act operas and Japanese-inspired poetic dance plays and French expressionist cabaret that Tamara had spent the last two years curating, like some kind of demented talent manager who never quite got it through her head that the Pelican was a verifiable, bona-fide, bodies-in-the-dumpster mob joint, and who through sheer conviction had made everyone else play along until her mad vision had become as real as my knives—that world dimmed to muted pastels when the Long Islanders and Upper East Siders descended upon the Village with their wide sedans and straining billfolds. Those nights, Tamara still put on her tasseled pasties and twirled them with a python named Georgie around her
