Fifty-to-One

“Mr. Borden, then. I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. But we’ve all got troubles. And I’m happy to hear about your dreams, but we’ve all got those, too. I didn’t set out to make an investment in your company, and it’s not like you handed me a stock certificate back there on the sidewalk. What you did was lie to me and take my money. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to get a job next door, I might’ve starved. You should be ashamed—”

“Of what? It’s quite a good job you’ve gotten—yes, Erin told me. You’re going to be dancing at Manhattan’s premier nightspot. And would you ever have gotten that job if I hadn’t given you the card for this building? Think about that. We both know you came to this city for a reason; I heard what you said to your sister. Well, I’d say you’re well on your way to realizing your dream. And tell me, would you really be there this soon, this fast, if it hadn’t been for me?” And he smiled, a big guileless smile with a little desperate twinkle in his eye.

Tricia wanted to tell him he was wrong. She wanted to slug him again, knock him off the straight-back chair he was sitting in and show him you didn’t take advantage of a South Dakota girl, no sir. But there was just enough truth to what he said, and she was tired, and the cot across the hall was no feather bed but right now it was calling to her as if it were.

“All right, Mr. Borden. Here’s my offer to you, you can take it or you can leave it. I didn’t plan to invest thirty- five dollars in your company and I don’t mean to do so now. So we’ll call it a loan. You’re going to pay it back to me, with interest, at the rate of five dollars a week. Let’s say eight weeks instead of seven—that should cover it. If, at the end of eight weeks you haven’t paid me in full, I’ll go to the police and tell them what you did.”

“They’ll arrest you for usury,” Borden said. “That’s something like one hundred percent interest.”

“Well, your other choice is that I can go to the police right now,” Tricia said. “Take it or leave it, Mr. Borden.”

He turned to Erin. “How old would you say she is? Our little usurer? Nineteen going on forty-five?”

Erin grinned. “I think you’d better agree to her terms, Charley, before she tightens the screws some more.”

“All right,” Borden said. “All right. I’ll pay. But there’s something you’re going to do for me in return.”

“What’s that?” Tricia said.

“You’re going to be working at the Sun, right? That’s Sal Nicolazzo’s joint.” He fished around on his desk, found another book and tossed it to her. Tricia caught it. This one wasn’t a Hard Case Crime title; it said Gold Medal Book in the upper left corner and I, Mobster across the top. The author was identified as “Anonymous.”

“You’re going to work for your money,” Borden said. “You’re going to keep your eyes and ears open, and you’re going to bring back a story that’ll sell a million copies.”

4.

Little Girl Lost

The lights went down everywhere but on the little podium where Roberto Monge stood, baton in hand, and the men of his orchestra waited, poised for the downstroke, trombones and clarinets raised, lips puckered. Then the stroke, and music began to flow, like an undulating river, the percussionist in the corner adding a jungle beat by smacking the skins of a bongo. A spotlight splashed the center of the dance floor, so recently filled with swing- dancing couples, illuminating first the ankles, then the legs, then the spangled torso and cleavage and shoulders and beautifully made-up face of Miss Kitty Dufresne, looking so different now from the terrified girl on the bench in Madame Helga’s office. She waited four beats and then launched into her song: When they begin the beguine...it brings back the sound of music so tender...

It was when Kitty stepped back and returned the microphone to its stand that Tricia and Cecilia came out from the wings on either side, each dressed in a flowing, feather-trimmed skirt and halter top, each swaying to the music. And Tricia looked different, too. Whatever had been left of the innocent eighteen-year-old girl from South Dakota was definitely gone now. Tricia was not only blonde but coiffed like a starlet out of a Hollywood musical. Her lips were pomegranate red, her eyebrows tweezed and shaped and accented with pencil, her eyelids powdered a sultry charcoal blue. Cecilia was the older of the two—by seven years, as she’d confided to Tricia in the dressing room they shared backstage—but when they were out on the floor, you couldn’t tell. They might both have been twenty; they might both have been forty, or no age at all.

As the orchestra’s playing swelled, they danced in tightening circles around one another, not touching, and then briefly with one another in a brisk imitation of a tango, first Cecilia leading, then Tricia. They ended with some side-by-side bump and grind moves as the orchestra changed tempos yet again, giving Cole Porter’s music a jazzy sizzle. Nothing too naughty (Billy Hoffman had warned them, unnecessarily, that their clothes had to stay on), but they gave it all they had and the crowd applauded noisily.

The first night, Tricia had to concentrate on remembering the choreography, and didn’t manage even so; there were some unseemly stumbles. But by the third night she had it down and by the end of the week, even while dancing the more strenuous parts of the routine she found herself paying more attention to the rapt faces in the audience than to her dancing, wondering what secrets each might hide, her mind returning to the meeting in Charley Borden’s office.

She’d caught the book he’d thrown at her, I, Mobster. “What’s this supposed to be?” she’d asked. The tag-line on the front cover said The Confession of a Crime Czar. And on the back it said,

When we received the manuscript of this book in the office, we knew immediately we had something far out of the ordinary. We asked a prominent New York attorney to read the manuscript and arrange for the endorsement of a prominent judge, district attorney, or other high public official. Our friend, the lawyer, sent the manuscript back. “Too hot,” he advised...

“It’s supposed to be the true story of a mobster’s life, from pinching candy as a kid up to running a criminal organization as an adult,” Borden said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. What it is, though, is pure, unadulterated malarkey, from the first page to the last. Probably written by some hack whose knowledge of crime is limited to the nights he’s spent in a drunk tank for disorderly conduct. Not a word of it’s true—not one. But how many copies did it sell? Go ahead, ask me.”

“How many?” Tricia said.

“A lot,” Borden said. “It sold a lot of copies. And now they’ve made a movie out of it, too, which is bound to sell some more.” He leaned forward over his book-strewn desk. “But imagine how many they’d have sold if they’d had a true story that was actually true. A story from someone deep inside Sal Nicolazzo’s outfit.”

“This Nicolazzo is a mobster?” Tricia said.

“He’s from Calabria, right next door to Sicily. What do you think?”

“I don’t think every Italian’s a mobster,” Tricia said.

“Well, this one is. He runs illegal gambling joints up and down the east coast, two or three here in New York alone. People say there’s cards and dice at the Sun, if you find the right room. And what better way to find it than from the inside?”

“So what you’re saying is you want me to write you a book like this one,” Tricia said.

“Who said anything about writing? More like taking dictation. You find the right person in the outfit and get him talking, all you’ll need to do is copy down what he says.”

“And you want me to do this for five dollars,” Tricia said. “Not even. For the portion of my five dollars of interest that you feel is usury.”

“Nah, forget that. You bring me a story, I’ll pay a penny a word,” Borden said. “The same as I pay the rest of our authors. Up to five hundred dollars, max, for a book. How you split it with the guy whose story you tell is up to you.”

Tricia had smiled, thinking about the portable she’d been lugging around the city, the compact little Olympia SM3 DeLuxe with its two-tone ribbon, and about the half-ream of paper wedged inside the typewriter case, filled with all the short sketches she’d written during the endless train ride. Dancing wasn’t her only ambition. She meant to visit the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and those other writers had congregated; she meant to write some Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, perhaps about a country girl’s impressions of the big city. She hadn’t considered writing a story about mobsters, but...why not? For a penny a word, she’d give him all the story he could handle.

They’d shaken on it. “You’re on,” she’d told him.

But now here she was, deep inside, or as deep as a girl could get in one week, and so far there was no sign