When she refused his hand, I thought, Ah, there’s pride. That Chinese slip of a queen.
I moved toward the door, expecting Tan to come for me. He glared through the glass. “Wait,” he spat.
Was it ten minutes or thirty I stayed there? Well, it felt like a long time. At last I busted out of that perfume-soaked buggy and hurried like hell down the plank sidewalk, the women’s stony gazes following me. When I reached the door of The Rose, I pushed into a world of darkness.
All these years of imagining, I had seen it lit bright. Candles, chandeliers, that kind of thing. In my mind, music played at The Rose all hours, with ladies in fine dresses spreading their professional merriment while the men, dressed as if headed to the theater or the opera, sat at white-clothed tables and smoked and drank.
The front room was low-lit and creepy. A first-floor tavern, stinking of beer and sweat and fetid flowers. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a vase of wilted roses, scattered wood tables and chairs, a dance floor, a long, waxy mahogany bar.
There was a certain coolness too. I mean temperature, sure, I mean time; I mean a deep, undeniable cool that you could push against, if you wanted to, but why would you?
There was a stage in back marked by a tired gold velvet curtain and matching gold swags. The chairs onstage were positioned at odd angles, the band’s brass instruments, dented with knocks, haphazardly abandoned where the players had dropped them, as if it didn’t matter one performance or the next; the real show at The Rose was always in motion.
In a week it would all be ashes.
Hank, Rose’s man, was talking to a man behind the bar. The next thing I knew Hank was beside me, gripping my elbow too hard. “You all right, miss?”
“Fine, Hank,” I said, “I’m fine.” I never wanted anyone to think otherwise.
“Then stop all your shakin’, Miss Vera,” he said, moving me along. “You’re with old Hank. Here we go, this way.”
He didn’t question my being there; he didn’t question where we needed to go. My arrival had coincided with the brothel’s off-hours, when most of the staff was asleep upstairs. Two women perched on bar stools were talking to the thick-necked bartender, who was hacking a bowl of limes. When they turned to look at us, Hank glared and shook his head. In unison they turned away.
At a table by a corner, a black woman was putting on a private show. Her skin was so uniformly, gorgeously dark, it looked blue in the light of The Rose. She was straddling the lap of a fat-bellied man, breasts to his tremendous paunch, feeding him shrimp from an icy silver bowl. She made a show of selecting each shrimp, plucking it from one bowl and dipping it into a second bowl of sauce. The man lifted his chin, honked like a seal, and she dropped the shrimp into his trap, giggling, then cleaned his mouth with her lips. I had never seen anything so disgusting, except perhaps when Rogue nibbled shit in the park; I couldn’t look and I couldn’t not look.
When she saw me, she cried out, “Oh my sweet Jesus,” and crossed her hands over her heart. “What’s the news, darlin’?”
Her name was Capability Jones and I didn’t think I knew her from when I was small, except I knew her in my belly. I knew that broad smile.
“Damn it, Cap,” barked Hank. “You don’t see this.” He pointed to the top of my head. “Hear me?”
Capability’s grin folded in reverse, collapsing like a cardboard box. She cocked her head and looked appraisingly, unpleasingly, at the man on whose lap she sat, and said, “You full up, honey?”
Hank kept us moving, now crossing the room and heading for the far wall, our journey measured by his wide, booted strides. Next to a gold-framed painting of bare-breasted lady sailors, Hank pushed on a wall that was actually a door. The door led to a passage papered in pink damask, which led to yet another door and one after that, a maze. I had no idea where I was being led but I trusted that eventually we’d get to Rose.
I tried my best to keep quiet, to stanch the questions I longed to ask. And anyway, Hank was carrying on for the two of us. “Boss don’t like surprises,” he muttered, “you know it, still you’ve been barking up this path, I’ve seen it coming, and had you only asked, don’t you know old Hank would have taken care? But her mood,” he fussed, “oh, her mood. I cannot say.”
“I’m sorry, Hank.” In my heart, I almost meant it.
“Sorry is as good as yesterday,” he replied. “Chip off the block is what you are. You and her don’t know sorry.” He didn’t mean it unkindly. I even think he meant it as a form of praise.
The whole time we were walking briskly down narrow halls, passing row after row of doors. Some were open partway, and I caught glimpses of beds covered in shades of satin, no pillows or covers, just the sheet. In one room, a heavyset woman was lying on the bed wearing only a corset and bloomers. She was reading a newspaper, her enormous feet crossed at the ankles.
She called out to Hank, her voice a low bass. “Whatcha know, Hank?”
“Not now, Valentine,” Hank grumbled.
I wanted to ask who Valentine was. I wanted to ask so many things. But Hank was shushing me as
