GANGSTER
© 2012 M Jones
ISBN 978-1-926959-18-4
Smashwords Edition
Edited by A.M. Harte
Cover art design: MCM
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
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Dear Mr. Hitchcock and Mr. Price —
My mother introduced us.
What happens in these pages is most definitely her fault.
Flapper
“Forgive me, Father. It’s an imposition on you, I know, but I don’t know where else to turn. She’s completely out of control.”
“I’m no child,” the young woman in her twenties reminded her father. But he kept his grip tight on her arm, her silken pearls dangling near her waist as she struggled to break free.
The chapel was bathed in shades of dreary grey, and the three people were the sole occupants in the gloom. The priest shifted from foot to foot, unsure of how to proceed. This wasn’t the right course of action for a parent to be taking, especially when the wayward child in question was long past the age of discipline. The sudden arrival of domestic unrest had ruined his plans for the evening, and he hated having these unexpected surprises. It should be expected, but he hadn’t learned to give up trying to understand the motivations of these creatures. Though on the surface every detail seemed so important to them, their constant, ethical dilemmas forever proved to be nothing more than an annoying whine in his consciousness.
“You act like a spoiled brat, so that’s what you are. A tiny, childish little trollop. I should never have listened to your mother. A good whipping from a belt never hurt no one in their lives.”
“Not one from you,” she sneered. “Like you ever had the strength to lay a hand on anyone. You and your wheezing and your soft little bones.”
This parent, for instance, had long known the troubles his overgrown child caused, and yet here he was, asking the help of a near stranger to guide her in the proper way, as he saw it, that her existence should be conducted. Where the priest came from, there was no need to ask these questions. One followed a path that was clearly set out and any deviation from it would be swiftly dealt with.
Her father coughed shakily into his fist, his watery eyes fixed in a plea on the robed man before him. “I’m at my wit’s end, Father,” he admitted. “It’s true, I’m not a strong man. Never saw a healthy day since I was born. My lungs, they aren’t working properly, and my blood is thin. But I’ve done my best by my family, and I have a good job, not the best job, but one that keeps us comfortable.” He took a kerchief out of his pocket and, trembling, wiped his nose with it before shoving it back into its usual place, deep in the worn lining of his suit jacket. “I don’t understand how this happened.”
The priest nodded in what he hoped was an adequate approximation of sage understanding. “We cannot chose our burdens.”
“No, we can’t. And we’ve got plenty, my Martha and I. What with my bad lungs and watery blood and… and this.” He fixed a glare on the lazy posture of his ignorant daughter, who had finally broken free of his grip to sink into a nearby pew. “It doesn’t do us well to have her like this, not at all. Martha has a terrible heart, and this one has no qualms over breaking it day after day. She’s a wayward girl, obsessed with parties and the devil’s drink. We may not have much, but I assure you she comes from a good, God-fearing home. My Martha and I, we’ve given her the world, little that we could offer of it.” His voice shook as he looked at her. “ This is how she repays us, by tramping around like some common whore!”
“I wouldn’t say I was ‘common’,” she replied, arching the thin, drawn line of her brow.
Her father took his kerchief out again, wiping the sweat from his neck, his laboured breathing bobbing his Adam’s apple in a choked, uneven rhythm. “You’ve been a right disappointment, Clara.”
“I’ve been a disappointment?” she spat, incredulous. Her eyes, dark green and heavily ringed in kohl, studied him in ferocious apathy. He fought the urge to step back, a sure sign that he had already lost ground. He should be tough in her presence, if only for the benefit of her long suffering father. “Priest,” she said, her ruby red lips licking along the edge of the title. “You’re no priest. No white collar, no crosses, no bells, books, or candles to hold the devil at bay. Fancy people calling you father, Father.” Her dark rimmed eyes narrowed. “I know you never had one.”
“She’s full of the drink,” her father sputtered through his handkerchief.
“Please, I’m sober enough to know when there’s a lying dog standing in front of me.” She played with her pearls, her lips capturing a trio of them and staining them before she clenched them carefully between her teeth. Her voice was childishly muffled as she spoke. “He’s just some crazy imposter, Daddy. You musn’t believe a word he says.”
Her sickly father clasped his hands over his soiled kerchief, his voice weak and trembling as severely as his shoulders. “I am a man of faith. You’ll cast this evil out of her, in one way or another.” He pulled the priest to one side, his breath expelled in foul gasps as he whispered. “She was always a bit wild, a bit difficult, even as a young child. She…. There were things she did that were very, very wrong, but one doesn’t think nothing of them. An unkindness to a neighbour’s child who was younger than her. A cruel thing done to a dog. I can’t speak of it, you have to understand. I promised my poor wife. Her heart would give out that I even suggested….”
“Daddy, are you waiting here all night or are you going to go home and get your rest?” She rose from her seat and staggered over to them, her long arms reaching out to rest heavily on her father’s weak shoulders. “Go home, Daddy,” her moist, painted lips said, their sultry shape oddly demure as they delivered the promise of care. “I’ll be fine here, you know that.”
He continued to wipe at his sweating neck with the kerchief. “Yes, yes I do. This is a good choice, my dear. The good Lord will prevail, you know this.”
“Sure, Daddy,” she said, and left an imprint of her painted lips on his cheek. She patted his shoulder. “Go home to Mummy. Make sure she takes her medicine.”
“I will,” he said, smiling and nodding at her in feeble, weak hope. “You are a good girl, Clara, under all that painted rot.” He nodded at the priest. “You listen to what the Father has to say. He’ll steer you right.”
With that he left, his wheezing breaths following him into the alley, a thin layer of steam rising from the manhole near the entrance of the chapel. It obscured him in smoky mist. The priest blinked twice and the thin, shaky outline of the girl’s father was gone. Outside, the loud revelry of partygoers rose up from the underground depths of a nearby speakeasy, the one she had been turned out of. A brown bottle smashed against a wet brick wall. Laughter, cruel and contagious, echoed after it, followed by running footsteps, choked pursuit and fists meeting bone.
He turned on her, his black robes skirting his ankles. “You have put me at a great disadvantage by coming here.”
“What choice did I have? Daddy saw the light on in the chapel and dragged me in here. It’s your fault.” She placed a white pearl between her teeth and gently chewed it as he paced before her. She kept it hovering against her ivory grin, her long, painted nails edged around its circumference. “The party’s only just started, too. You should come by. The folks in there will get a hell of a shock seeing you being a man of the cloth.”
“I chose this guise for a reason,” he tersely reminded her. “It affords me anonymity.”
She scoffed. “Not by much. You were a murdered bastard not two weeks ago, and frankly, death looked better on you.” Her dark eyes focused on him, giving him the eerie feeling she was peeling his borrowed skin back, revealing the viscous jelly creature he was beneath the near atrophied sinews and flesh. “You don’t look right.” She let her pearls fall to her waist. “You look kind of sick. It’s not catching is it? Not some alien disease that’ll wipe out humanity or some rot like that? Disgusting. Ugh, it gives me the shivers.”
“Hardly.” He wiped his borrowed brow with the long sleeve of his religious garb. “I’m in need of sustenance. Minerals. A handful of sand could take care of me for an extended period of time.”
“Hungry,” she smiled, and it was a predatory sneer, one he had grown to dislike immensely. “But not for proper food. You’re a real squeaky wheel, needing a good oiling. Don’t worry, just hold on a little longer. You’ll get what you need, I promise.”
He bristled at this, his liquid, inner body shifting beneath his human disguise, the pain of the movement making him wince. “You tell me lies.”
“I never.”
“One right after the other. I’ve never known a creature to be so fast and loose with the truth. I can’t trust anything you say. When you say you have what I need, I know it means you’re dangling an empty promise.”
“Does this look like an empty promise?” she asked, and pulled a small, familiar can out of her purse.
He hated the way just the shape of the object made him feel. A creeping, longing pulse ricocheted throughout his being, making the dried husk of his borrowed skin chip and flake as it rubbed painfully against the black robe. He shouldn’t take it, for nothing was offered by Clara without a serious price to pay for it later. But he was tired, and it had been two weeks already. This body was drying out. He couldn’t bear to suffer more than he had to.
He snatched the square metal can from her grasp and quickly tucked it away beneath his robe. He would enjoy it later. In peace.
“You’re welcome,” she said, shrugging.
He ignored her, and instead turned his attention to the small street-level window that allowed a good view of the establishment next door. A plaintive wailing from a trumpet meted out a death march to the swooning crowd, glittering dresses and polished pearls swaying to its funereal rhythm. Langley, the trumpeter, was in a strange mood this evening. The priest rested his head against the cold glass of the window, taking in the slow, miserable notes. There was nothing like this where he came from. None of this spontaneous sadness that invaded places of joy.
He couldn’t quite articulate the feeling it gave him, his chin resting on the cold glass, Langley’s horn full of slain souls. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to be lost in its ethereal hypnosis, the long, harrowing notes dragging him back to his home. His life had been like that plaintive wailing. Time had meant nothing, no clocks ticking, no minutes counted in meagre seconds. Just an endless stream of sad, misty tones of ghosted moments.
“I didn’t even have that much to drink,” Clara said, ruining his reverie. She sprawled out onto the pew nearest him and rested her head on an open Bible, using it like a pillow. It was unlikely that any of the words her cheek lay pressed upon would seep through her skull to mingle with her soul. “Langley broke up with his latest catch. Caught him doing the local parish–not you, of course. Listen to those whining notes. Like no one ever had their heart broke but him. Like somehow the rest of us idiots are immune.” She pulled her pearls back to her teeth, the click of their white circumference echoing into the dark shadows of the chapel. “Still, poor Langley. He’ll have to blow his own horn for a while now.”
Another brown bottle flew out of an opened door and into the alley. It exploded against the brick wall opposite, the layered shrapnel of revelry piled high against the cracked concrete street. “They’ll be shutting it down,” he said. “It’s getting too obvious.”
“As if the coppers haven’t been paid off,” she sneered. “I have to wonder if the place isn’t full of them. Every truncheon on the block is in there having their fill of the devil’s transfusion. I ought to be in there myself, but sadly I find myself here, bored. With you.”
Her face was pale in the near darkness of the chapel, her dark but glistening eyes giving her the appearance of a ghost. She was a living spectre who smiled at his discomfort, pearls dancing against her midriff as she shifted where she sat. Her manner was one of unease, an overplayed act wrapped tight in a persona that was luminescent.
In his mind she wasn’t made of the usual terrestrial materials. There was little about her that appeared human. Surely she was constructed from cold, damp marble rather than frail skin and bones. There was nothing soft about her. He knew she could be a monster, pieced together in harrowing extremes.
When he’d first met her, he’d had the impression that if he’d passed his touch across her neck, the fingers he’d borrowed would suffer upon her icy skin, a frostbite burn searing him if he touched her shoulder of chilled stone.
“It’s still in full swing,” she said, nodding towards the partially opened window. Langley had given up his plaintive cry, the horn placed in its sacred place behind the bar, where none dare touch its polished brass sadness. A staccato drum rhythm now reigned over the party goers, who whooped and hollered in time to the hammering beat.
“I’ve heard rumours,” she promised, her voice creeping towards him in the damp confines of the cloister. She bit down on her finger, her eyes brimming with the excitement of bloodlust. “There’s a stranger in their midst.”
She’d caught his interest. He tried to keep the eager hope out of his voice, but it was to no avail. “What kind of stranger?”
“An odd one out. Like you.”
“Take me there.”
“Not so fast.” She draped herself over the pew, the silk feathers of her gown falling to the left, revealing the pale, polished gleam of her bare shoulder. “It’s just a rumour, that’s all. No hard, cold facts, those things you like best. But still,” she gave him a half hearted shrug, “you haven’t exactly been successful lately, have you? I’d say you need all the rumours you can get.”
Could it be true? He held his breath, deep in the soft well of his borrowed form’s belly. He’d been trapped here for what felt like a single moment that refused to yield and yet he knew this was an illusion. His former life of stretched minutes and infinite hours compressing and elongating at will was as far from him as the dawn of creation was to her linear moment.
She understood this, in her own ignorant way. He’d explained it once, the gleam of her knife glinting against her eye as it measured out the seconds of her acts of murder. Minutes meant hours and hours meant years. The soft waning of a heartbeat as the blood seeped out of a body was the closest she would ever come to understanding timelessness.
“Are you sure this time?” he couldn’t resist asking.
“I told you, I’m not sure of anything. Don’t you ever listen?” She curled her legs underneath her, now perched on the pew like a contented cat. “I could use a drink.”
“No,” he insisted. He wrung his alien hands, the fingers cramping from the movement, his feet pacing before the partially open window. The party began winding back up into a frenzy that would end in various acts of violence. “It’s not worth the risk.”
“I don’t know what you’re worried about. Sure, I joked about it, but you don’t look like him any more, you’ve gone and shifted his face around with your swimming in there. You’d have to squint sideways and upside down to see him, and everyone in there is blind drunk by now anyway. Just go in and have one.”
“I’ll go in, but I’m taking nothing.”
“You can’t go in there and not drink,” she told him. “It’s not just rude, they’ll look at you and think you’re there to convert them to sobriety. It’s past midnight. No one knows what that word means.”
“I don’t understand why you people imbibe what you aren’t permitted to,” he said.
“Oh?” she questioned him, her pencilled on brow highly raised. “And what about that tin box with its black goop, hrm? Are you so much a prohibitionist over that?”
“It’s not the same.”
“I’ve seen the way you act after a few gulps. It’s like you’re under the shade of a poppy.”
“I’m not under its influence.”
“Give it back, then. Have a fistful of dust instead, since that suits you.”
He hesitated, the square shape of the can against his side a comfort he didn’t want to release. Her hand was outstretched, a cruel smirk marring her otherwise attractive face. Angry, he took the can out from its hiding place and returned it to her. Victory was his.
Or so he thought. She only shook her head and placed the small can of motor oil back in her bag, that infuriating smirk all the more pronounced. She stood up and smoothed out her dress. “I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking I’ve had enough soul saving for one evening. I’m heading back in. I’ll meet you at the table near the back. You know the one.”
A sense of panic rose within him, for he knew what was going to happen the minute she left the dark chapel for the even darker tidings across the street. “You can’t,” he tried to warn her, but she was already on her feet, pearls dangling at her waist, a fresh application of lipstick being expertly painted on her pert, puckered lips.
“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she said, her tiny hand-held mirror held aloft as she painted on the thick line of burgundy crimson across her lips. She pressed them together, smearing the shade into an even deeper hue. “You’ve been in there before. They know you by now, you won’t be hassled.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t want to be known. I want only to do what I’m supposed to be doing: taking care of my target and leaving.” He was annoyed, and he stood to his full height, as best he could within the tight flesh, and painfully pushed his shoulders back. This was a posture of pride, he’d learned. It was uncomfortable and daunting to his own skin.
“I’m not going on a fool’s errand,” he said, resolute. “You have tricked me too many times, Clara, and I won’t allow it again.”
She snapped her lipstick compact shut and put it into her beaded purse. She kept her back to him, her neck gracefully bowed as she rummaged through the contents of her purse. She gave a relieved sigh when she found what she was looking for.
A chill coursed through him. He knew the cold instrument she’d laid her equally frozen hands upon. He closed his eyes. Though his people couldn’t dream, he wondered if it were possible after being here all this time, if he could somehow force her out of his present. How he longed to bury her in an unvisited past.
“The regular table,” she reminded him. “Right by the rear of the stage. I’ll give Langley’s trumpet a kiss for you.”
Speakeasy
Alcohol is not a substance he understands. His home has no such concoction, and the very idea of willingly taking a liquid that would make a person act moronically, impeding his or her memory, was ridiculous. It compromised his respect for human intelligence. Take this man at the bar, for example. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes dirty, his tie askew, his face haggard with several days’ worth of stubble. He was a shining example of human achievement in this brightly lit basement, the sparkle of his cuff links belying his social status. A wealthy man, by all accounts, except for the fact that he had to come here every night and lick the last remnants of alcohol from the bar as his cheek lay stuck to it. The drunkard was not alone in his quest, for several of his cronies had joined him, a drooling, half-lidded mass of unkempt bodies and time wasters.
For a race encapsulated in the linear lines of minutes and hours, this purposeful waste of limited life was sickening to witness.
He turned away, his inner liquid form uncomfortably pinched as he surveyed the bar. He caught the red glimmer of a familiar shade and inwardly cringed as he met her gaze and her dark smile across the room, where she was sitting behind the revelry on the dance floor. He pushed through the crowd, the dry skin of his host leaving thick flakes across wayward wisps of feathers, sweating bared shoulders and the backs of black silk suits. He was jostled and turned by the dancing crowd, most of whom could barely manage a slow waltz let alone an energetic fox-trot. They staggered like formless mannequins on the dance floor, jerky, unfamiliar movements forced upon limbs that refused to co-operate.
He could relate.
A shoulder met his and nearly sent him toppling. A rib jabbed into his jellied stomach, making him retch in pain.
“Watch it, jackass.”
“I’m sorry, but you bumped into me.”
“Then what are you saying sorry for?”
He knew what was happening. This burly, unpleasant creature was indigeneous to the area, a regular drunk who prowled the bar every other night. The man’s massive bulk blocked his view of Clara, who was concentrating hard on lighting her cigarette and ignoring the altercation about to occur.
Though this was a linear world, there were clear patterns that could be discerned, and it was often easy to determine the outcome of a set of variables. A man bumps into another. He is inebriated. He is of low moral character. He has a girlfriend draped and bored on his arm, her pink lips twisted in a tired grimace. He yells expletives, he clenches his fists. Someone in the crowd reminds him that he is starting a fight with a priest. The man doesn’t care. He only feels the dull ache of his shoulder and the disapproving glare of a drunk woman whom he doesn’t even like very much, but with whose company he is constantly stuck.
The fist comes first, before the kicks and the swearing monologue that accompanies violence.
He ducked as it shot out and with one fell swoop grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it behind his back. There was a satisfying crack, and a squeal of terror from the man’s now not-so-bored girlfriend.
The man collapsed to the floor. Just a few feet away, Clara continued to study the ashes at the end of her cigarette, uncaring of the drama unfolding before her. The crowd rushed to the fallen man’s aid, cowering from the holy judgement of a thirsty priest. He slid into the seat Clara had reserved for him, and she offered the can of motor oil as a tantalizing temptation.
“Go on,” she insisted. “No one here is going to care.”
But she was wrong, for all eyes were on him now, some of them friends of the man who had wanted so desperately to have just one night that didn’t end in bored sighs and rolled eyes. Their hands were clenched in fists they tightened and released, tiny dark eyes piercing into the dark corner where he and Clara were tucked away.
She tapped her ashes into the empty shot glass before her, and blew out a long plume of smoke. It snaked above her head in an uneven halo. “Have a drink. I know you want it.”
“I don’t,” he insisted, though his body craved the sustenance she was so blithely providing. He bent low, his brow creased as he spoke in a worried whisper. “I think I may have caused a scene.”
The man with the broken arm was encircled by four strong men who gathered him up, carrying him fireman-style up the narrow stairs. They bumped his busted arm, the bone snagging against the railing. His scream of pain stopped the band playing for an entire minute before they resumed their usual ragtime plonking.
“You worry too much,” she said, smacking her lips and taking a long sip of her gin and tonic. “Stuff likes this goes on here all the time, you know that.”
“They’re all staring at me.”
“You’re a tough-as-nails priest and you aren’t drinking. That’s all they’re worried about. They figure you’re bringing around the coppers.” She took another long sip before putting down her drink. It was hot and damp in the basement, and a thick layer of condensation lined her glass. She smoothed it over with the pad of her thumb before grabbing the can of motor oil and concealing it beneath the table.
“Just a shot,” she promised, and she looked up and around, shifty-eyed enough to send the signal that what she was giving him was more potent that mere vodka or whiskey. She poured it, thick and black, into a concealed shot glass and then placed it quickly onto the surface of the table. “Knock it back,” she said, pushing it towards him. “You can thank me later.”
All eyes in the dank basement were on him, even those of the soaked souls at the bar who were expert drinkers. He hesitated, his dry, rough fingers touching the rim of the shot glass. Unable to resist any longer, he snatched it up and downed it in one shot, the thick black tar sliding down his throat like the congealed blood of his borrowed body. He closed his eyes, sickened by the unpalatable bitterness. But the feeling was quickly replaced by a cooling, gentle sensation, one not unlike standing under a waterfall after wading in hot, sizzling lava.
The sages of the bar nodded and offered him a toast by tapping on their empty glasses for a refill. All eyes turned away from him, for he had now revealed himself as nothing more than yet another thirsty member of God’s chosen flock. There was no judgement. Jesus himself loved a bottle of wine or two. Word on the street was He also had a nasty temper.
“You’ve dragged me in here, and I see no evidence of my target,” he chided Clara, who fidgeted where she sat, her pearls meeting her teeth in their usual click-clack-click, keeping time with the jazz drum of the band.
“I know where, but I can’t tell you yet.” She let her pearls drop and finished her cigarette, tossing its smouldering ashes into the ashtray in the middle of the table. She sipped delicately at her drink. “If you want to finish your mission, you have to do something for me first.”
He didn’t like the sound of this. He’d been caught in this trap too many times before. Always, always, with the empty promises and half-truths. But she was the only connection he had, and he clung to it, hoping that somehow the pattern of her linear life would draw him to his target and he could complete his work and finally, without further delay, be allowed to go home.
“It’s nothing big. Just the usual.”
His liquid self cringed. Sensing his worry, she secretively poured him another shot of motor oil and handed it to him. He downed it, and then another with practised ease. “I told you before. No more favours.”
“I guess my information isn’t worth going home for.”
“You’re lying. I can feel it deep in the fourth marrow of my host’s rib. A stabbing pain that chafes against his skin.” The effect of the motor oil was making him dizzy, but his host’s dessicated flesh gradually faded into its usual grey-pink hue, his appearance less sickly, but still foreign. “There is no room for favours. Either you tell my what I need to know, or I am leaving you here.”
She clacked a white pearl against her top teeth. “It’s a damn shame you won’t help me. I know I’ve been a little, well, prone to exaggeration at times, but I’ve never steered you wrong. Your mission always has been top priority.”
He doubted this, but he listened nonetheless.
“What you need to understand is that sometimes, to get my information, certain obstacles need to be removed.” She gave him a blood red smile, lipstick staining her white teeth and the circular pearl she had tapped against them. She waved over a passing waiter, who rested a gin and tonic in front of her. The waiter tried to take away the oiled shot glass, but she held her hand over it. When they were alone she turned back to him. “Just one. That’s all, I promise.”
He didn’t want to acquiesce, but there was such surety in her manner, and his superiors were perversely silent. He had no other course but to follow her lead. “It’s risky,” he said, looking over his shoulder with nervous glances. The cronies of the bar nodded at him. “I’ve already made an impact here.”
“People only see what they want to,” she said. “You could slice him in half on that crowded dance floor, hell you could go onstage and do it right in front of the band. Some people might turn away, others might gawk. None would turn you in. This is a blind man’s home, in case you haven’t noticed. Lost souls clamouring their way to the bottom of every bottle.”
“That’s not how it is for you. You’re rarely drunk.”
“I find my pleasures in other ways,” she said, and downed her waiting gin and tonic in one single gulp.
He sighed, not wanting to be a party to this, but as she was his only connection, choice was seriously limited. He glanced at the dancing crowd, the low ceiling hugging them in tight in the near darkness. The glittering chandelier affixed to the ceiling was missing several of its glass tears, its asymmetry a reflection of the general sense of shadow and decay within the confined space. It was much like his chapel, he realized, only packed solid with souls that kept a firm grip on their sins.
He scratched at his collar, the motor oil doing little to ease the way the seams of the black robe chafed his host’s skin. A purgatory in cloth. He was doubtful of this alien religious sect, with its promises of a life that never ends, its belief that a non-linear existence was heaven. His own non-linear life was no paradise. What was strange was how this alien race could harbour a consciousness of such a state, and yet blanket it in ignorant, positive terms.
“I’m not talking about the usual method,” she assured him. “This guy’s a real sleazeball, a real crazy loony, if you know what I’m getting at. He’s not a good person, not like my Daddy. Not like me.” She sat back in her chair. “He owes me a connection that he didn’t deliver.”
“I can sympathize,” he said, tired of her excuses. “Why should I help you when you give me nothing but the same? Perhaps it’s you who should be worried, I might make you suffer the same fate as those who disappoint you.”
She stiffened. She cast an unforgiving glare on him that stopped his black, liquid heart cold. “You will never say such a thing to me again,” she ordered. Long fingernails scraped dangerously over the surface of the table between them, ending in curled claws. “We’re on similar missions, you and I, but you don’t want to admit it.” Her eyes sparkled with violent glee, murder intent in her iris. “Believe me or not, but never, ever, threaten me again. You know as well as I do that I have no qualms against getting rid of any obstacle in my path–and that includes alien freaks in priest robes.”
She relaxed, enjoying his discomfort. She poured him another shot, and he took it gratefully, the tremor in his host’s hand betraying his fear. “I didn’t mean to be unkind,” he said, only to inwardly frown.
That wasn’t the right sentiment, he thought.
Kindness. Such an unwelcome word.
“His name is Frankie. He’s one of Georgio’s fences,” she told him. “He told me he had connections in Hollywood, and he was going to get me a part in one of those moving pictures. Said there was a script made for me. He told me the director has it all set up, all I have to do is show up and I’m the lead. Don’t even need an audition.”
He nodded, taking in her words carefully.
She let out a tired sigh. “You don’t know what moving pictures are, do you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“No Clara Bow, no Louise Brooks where you come from, huh? Shame. The world hasn’t been the same since we all got addicted to sitting in the dark.” She gave him a bored shrug of her marble white shoulder. “Think of it like this: a play performed by actors, only they aren’t actors. They’re shadows, with bits of grey and white scenery in between.”
“You want to become a shadow of yourself?” he asked, confused.
“I’m going to be in pictures,” she said, ignoring him. Her mouth was a thin, tight line of burgundy. “Frankie thinks he got one over on me, but he’s going to pay for this.”
“It seems a simple enough lie, one you’ve fallen for before. Isn’t this how your other friend and I met?”
Her harsh features softened at the mention of her old flame’s name. “Mikey and I had a thing, and it was grand while it lasted. But that’s the trouble, see. People always disappoint.” She drank the rest of her drink and motioned to the bartender to bring her another. “Me and Mikey weren’t exactly on the best of terms when you met up with us.”
He thought back on that night, on the spilling of blood, on the pleas for mercy and the cold, glinting stab of steel digging through pliant flesh and into resisting muscle.
“No, you weren’t,” he said.
“It’s like this,” she explained. “I always expect more from people than they are willing to give. Sometimes, I get a little over the top angry about it. Like with Mikey that night. He was supposed to get me a diamond ring and all he brought me was this dull old ruby. Hell, any whore can have a ruby. I wanted a diamond. That’s just not the way you treat the one you call your girl. That’s casting her aside, telling her she’s worth nothing more than second best.” She shook her head. “That’s over with. Ancient history. Frankie’s the one on my mind now, and he’s the one I’m concentrating on. He’ll be at the end of the bar at one o’clock, and I want you to tell him he has to come outside, that I’m waiting for him to take me for a ride in his new motor car. He’ll think we’re going somewhere romantic, like the Clifford Motel. He’ll fall for it. He’s a dumb jerk like the rest of them were.”
“I don’t know,” he said, still uncertain. Shifty eyes at the bar kept passing over him, hidden in glances given to attractive girls dancing past. He could feel the old soaks keeping him in their sight’s periphery. “I broke a stranger’s arm. This Frankie is going to be on his guard.”
“Do what I told you,” she ordered him, and got up from their table. “I got everything waiting. All you have to do is play look-out. Easiest damn job in the world.”
She walked unevenly towards the front of the bar, her steps forced as she made her way through the dancing crowd to find the set of stairs that led to the alley outside.
* * *
The pavement shone with the thin glimmer of moisture that had collected in pools beneath the black walls lining the alley. He was well sated, but he didn’t care. He needed his sustenance. With a shake of his wrist, the bottle of motor oil slid into his hand and he took a long, refreshing drink from it, far more than the tiny shot glass amounts with which Clara had taunted him. The crude black substance crept into every crevice of his mind, muddying it, his surroundings shuffled into uneven pieces. Along the slick back of fossil fuel he rode into familiar territory, where images of time filtered into his consciousness, some crystal clear, others murky.
There was a ghostly hand chiseled from cold marble. A glint of a knife. Wounded eyes pleaded with him, begging him to make her stop. Her victim, shocked as they always were at her betrayal.
Her victim stared wide-eyed at him, a familiar name sliding from blood-soaked lips. With a final sigh the last syllable of it died with him.
“Frankie.”
The name pulled him out of his motorized dreams, echoing across the vast horizon of his timeless consciousness. Frankie. He had pulled that man, that one Clara had pointed out, into the alley with nothing more than a promise of a shot of whiskey. Frankie. Why had the man stared at him like that, and called him by his own name?
Within the darkness, the glittering pools of water captured the flickering gaslight that hovered over them, sending out ripples of broken light. He tried to focus properly as a new, but familiar, shimmer walked towards him. He shook his wrist, the motor oil leaking out of a hole in his palm and staining his sleeve. A curse spilled from him, the language alien on his numbed tongue.
She grabbed his wrist, her ghost’s flesh injecting frostbite.
“I told you to wait.”
She snatched his motor oil, and he could feel his soul clamouring towards it, his host’s tongue dry with fear as she held it aloft.
“No more of this,” she said. She took off the cap. He shook his head. She nodded hers.
He turned away as Clara poured it out, black and thick upon the puddles of the alley, the ripples eddying outward and staining the soles of his shoes.
“I warned you about this stuff,” she said, shaking her head as she kicked the now empty can across the alley. It landed with a dull thud against something soft and wet. “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it? I hope you can find the wagon, my friend. You aren’t tagging along with me unless you’re riding that hay ride.”
He didn’t want her condemnation, he wanted answers.
“He called me Frankie.”
“Of course he would,” she answered, and snapped her dripping switchblade shut.
Lies
He gripped the edges of the chipped porcelain sink with shaking hands. He didn’t often take stock of his feelings, especially since he couldn’t be sure if they were really his own, or some leftover infection from the flesh he had been forced to inhabit. But it was perhaps not so different a house, not with the way the blood sat stagnant, congealing in his host, his own liquid heart beating just above his forehead as he settled his bulk in behind the human ribs. The longer he stayed within this skin, the more he melted into it, and there was nothing worse, no punishment so severe, as to remain in this uncomfortable position. He was cramped and corporeal, enduring a life measured out in haphazard sequences of minutes, hours and seconds. The only relief was how this physical discomfort didn’t remain in the memory long. His home existence had no such amnesia; its residents retained every moment within their minds. Entire universes lived within their memories, birthed and destroyed. Memories tripped along forever, coursing through them like this blood coursed through this creature’s veins.
Memories were not permanent in this world. They became muted. Fictional. He’d been here too long and had allowed himself to fall victim to its linear influence. It seemed so long ago that he’d arrived, but perhaps it wasn’t.
He couldn’t remember his name.
He had an understanding that he hadn’t always been anonymous, that at some point in his life there was a point of referral. A series of syllables that were alien on the human tongue. With his stained, bloodied hands on either side of the sink, he stared at the image in the cloudy cracked mirror and gained no clue as to his identity.
Frankie. Maybe that’s who this was, and now himself.
No, he had a different purpose, a far more complex mission than the proper utterance of his name.
It was the oil doing this. He had to stop.
He washed away the blood on his hands with cold, rust-tainted water. The blood stained deep beneath his fingernails and he couldn’t remove it no matter how much he scrubbed with the filthy rag he used for this exact purpose. The evidence of Clara’s past betrayals was still embedded in the grey fibres. He reached for the bar of lye and it slipped out from between his fingers, flakes of dark burgundy staining the cracked sink like bits of dried paint. He turned on the tap full force, washing the evidence down the drain. He worked hard on his fingernails, digging beneath each one with care. He snapped one off of his index finger and cursed over the way it gushed black ooze. All that effort for nothing.
He stared at the horrible bend of his nail and the oily mess that dripped out over the pad of his finger. Brackish slime dropped into the grey sink, a tiny piece of his essence mingling with his host’s former bloodstream. He ran the injury under the dirty, cold water and wrapped it tightly with the cloth he’d been using to wash up. He dripped soapy remnants of dark grey as he left the sink and headed for what served as his dining room.
It wasn’t an uncomfortable place, this tiny room above the chapel, even if all signs pointed to it being an abandoned post. A single room comprised of one table, a chair, a sink in the corner and a cot beneath a barren light bulb. A cross was the sole decoration above the lumpy bed, and it absorbed the light from the bulb, the shadows playing on it and making it far more ornate than its simplicity suggested. He wasn’t sure what had happened to the original rector. In truth, he hadn’t thought on it. He’d been told, “Put these on. You can live upstairs,” and that was how things had come to be as they were. The voice he heard in his memory was Clara’s, not his superiors. They wouldn’t know, even in their all-encompassing knowledge, how to navigate this world.
He felt nauseous as memory picked at the slimy grey matter that was his host’s brain. He could hear her voice, telling him with all her cheerful intonations: “It’s no problem. I know he won’t be back. You’ve got nothing to worry about, you can hide out here easy.”
Lies, lies, and yet he always felt compelled to believe her.
Unlike him, she had a name. Clara. Similar to clarity. How strange it was that her label was the opposite of what she was, for every word and nuance was masked in her deceitful web, a taunting melody that he couldn’t help but listen to. She’d lied. Her Frankie was not a friend who needed to be taught a lesson. What had that unfortunate soul called her before she had ended his teasing with the glint of steel smeared with moonlight? A moll. A whoring, silly moll.
He’d broken her heart, she told him later, that man she called Frankie who wasn’t Frankie. He’d broken her heart and she had to make sure she broke his in return. She’d shrugged her pale, white shoulder as she skipped off into the darkness of the alley, promising to visit him tomorrow. “It’s just how things are around here,” she assured him. “It’s tit for tat. That’s how it all works.”
She’d sauntered off into the late hour, purse swinging, pearls dangling. She’d nothing to fear from the blackness that surrounded her. She was a part of it, a spectre that revelled in shadows, lighting up with pleasure the darker everything around her became.
He shook his head, uncomfortable. Surely he had been imagining things, a direct result of throwing back a near half gallon of oil. Memories remained frustratingly vague.
He should work harder to temper himself, to ease off the oil and minimize its negative effects. Saying no to it was becoming increasingly difficult. Soon he would be like the cronies at the basement speakeasy next door, his head bobbing up and down over a glass of black liquid, his mouth drooling over the beautiful, smooth escape it provided from the minutes and hours.
He collapsed into the creaky wooden seat at the small table and felt a sharp pain ride up his side as a broken rib pierced him. His host was an uncomfortable place of residence, and it wouldn’t be long before he would require a new one. He could have borrowed Clara’s latest conquest, but she had been too busy placing her marks on him, her usual x’s and o’s carefully carved above the lids of his eyes, blinding his corpse.
It was a curious habit, and she herself had no proper explanation for it. Like many things since his arrival, he had learned to accept what didn’t make sense. He shifted inside of his present body, careful to avoid the splintered rib and the piece of spine that jutted inward towards the kidney. He bumped into the spleen and a sudden gurgle rose from it, rising up his chest and into his throat. A long, thin trickle of black seeped out from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand with irritated impatience.
He was definitely drinking too much.
He cast a glance back at the filthy sink and felt an inward groan rise within him. He would have to clean it up properly, give it an ample scrubbing to hide all traces of himself. Clara had been wise to teach him this. First, however, he had an itch to scratch, and though he was loathe to admit it, he needed this sustenance, because without it he couldn’t bear to face her and the vile world she lived in again. How else could he confront her, without its thick taste welling in pools around his host’s tongue?
He pulled his priest’s robe over his head, revealing the pair of well cut trousers and tank top he wore beneath. The fresh can of motor oil he’d purchased was tucked against his suspenders and he released it onto the table, the tin brightly coloured in vibrant red and orange, full of the promise of being the best for one’s capital investment–the motor car. He hesitated for a moment, only to decide that it would be better to finish it off here and now, to finally end it and say this was the very last one he would ever imbibe. There was a pink teacup on the far corner of the table, its contents long since dried up, a brown sludge staining the bottom. He grabbed it, and with an eagerness that filled him with shame, he unscrewed the can of motor oil and poured it into the teacup until it was near to overflowing.
He brought it in front of him and stared into it as though divining the future. That’s what humans did, he knew, because Clara occasionally visited the elderly woman who lived in the apartment two stories up from the speakeasy, seeking out answers to questions that couldn’t be asked.
“She’s wise,” Clara insisted. “She’s got the sight, if you know what I mean.”
He didn’t. In his world, the future was part of the present, and there was no need for googly eyed old women with pinched expressions and a foul, mothball aroma that pervaded every wrinkled crevice of her body.
Besides, there was no wisdom for him, only watery tea and old Sousa’s sad shake of her head that could mean any number of emotions. Annoyance at his being there. Anger at being roused at a late hour to take a few pennies from a sparkling flapper. A creaking, ancient body torn from her bed only to divine that his future was boring and not worth telling.
From his experience, the latter was usually the case. Every visit, Sousa would swallow a wet cough and pull out a cup of tea, patiently filling it for Clara. She’d drink from it greedily, burning the roof of her mouth. With quiet determination, Sousa would then feign reading the signs on the bottom of the cup while Clara listened in rapt concentration. ‘A new man,’ the old crone would slyly hint. “One to replace the old one.”
He could envision Clara, pale in the red tinted light of the old woman’s kitchen, a colour deftly fashioned from the red kerchief draped over her lamp.
“Did you hear that?” Clara would say to him, her voice edged in whispered wonder. “Isn’t she amazing?”
“She can tell you what you already know.”
“She’s amazing. Don’t listen to him, Sousa. He’s a drip. No fun at all. Just like the tap–drip, drip, drip. How boring!”
Through the thin walls of his room, he could hear the plaintive cries of Langley’s trumpet, the practice notes full of his usual melancholy. He hadn’t yet touched his teacup full of motor oil, and he was still in the throes of indecision over whether or not he should drink it and be done with it, or if he should wait a while, maybe until mid-afternoon or even later into the evening. A peculiar sense of timing had brewed between himself and Clara. He had grown to understand that it was during these times of day that he would most need the medicinal comfort of slick black oil pouring over his insides.
Langley’s trumpet wept in the background as he caught a glimpse of his face reflected on the inky black surface of the cup. He looked ill, by human standards. As well he should. She had tortured him yet again with her empty promises and he had fallen for them, a ruse he should have known to recognize by now. How she managed to convince him of her lies, he wasn’t entirely sure. He wondered if there was scientific merit to the idea that a woman could cast a spell upon a man’s reason. Langley’s trumpet seemed to think so, though perhaps the trumpeter’s situation was more complex than most.
Still, Langley’s trumpet didn’t have to wash up the blood. It didn’t taunt him with promises so it could glean terrible favours. When Langley cried, his trumpet lamented along with him. Not so Clara, who would laugh at pain, and giggle at disgusted wincing.
A new man, who had broken her heart, so she’d cut out his. There was always a new one. The glint of metal and x’s and o’s and bucket upon bucket of blood.
The more he thought about the night before, the more the motor oil tempted him.
He’d wasted enough time trying to understand her reasoning. They’d been companions in blood for what felt like a millennia. She called it two weeks, a fourteen day stretch, a fraction of time to her understanding, but so much more to his own. He’d never experienced what it was like to live minute by minute, counting out each second that crawled past, unused, wasted. Such an alien concept, this measuring of time; it was difficult for him to navigate. He searched his damaged memory, and he knew he had been there, in the alley, the night before. An imperfect mixture of recollection assailed him. He had snippets instead of whole pieces of what had transpired. The motor oil did this: it dulled his perceptions and put him back into that non-linear plane of reasoning he properly understood.
Someone, perhaps Clara’s person of interest–her beau if that’s what he was–had called him Frankie and looked on him as though he’d seen a ghost.
Langley’s trumpet sang deep and slow in profound agreement. He rubbed his chin in thought, the fingertips of his host as dry as scales. There was no need for a mothball scented diviner to figure out his past; the trumpet knew it well enough. What had happened was something awful, and vile, and it was so much better to drink a sip of oil and forget most of it beneath its muddying haze.
He was about to take a sip, a big one, when the telephone rang.
It rang and rang and rang.
He placed his teacup back down carefully, slopping some of the motor oil onto the matching saucer. The telephone always made him nervous. He wiped dry, flaking palms onto the tops of his thighs and forced his breath to resume its more natural, human pattern. How did one answer this thing again? Receiver, ear, depress lever, dial a number.
What number?
He rose from his seat and walked into the kitchen, where the telephone was bolted to the wall. He picked up the receiver and, with a hesitant greeting that refused to hold any conviction, said, “H-Hello?”
“Did you have to let it ring a million times? Honestly, it’s not going to bite you.” She sighed on the other end, and in the distance he could hear Clara’s father, roaring and coughing in tandem as he tried desperately to bring his wayward daughter back into his iron control. “I have good news for you, if you’re willing to listen.”
“Your father sounds angry,” he said.
“He should be, since he’s kicking me out of the house and all.”
“That will be a problem for you.”
“Says who? I’ve got plenty of digs to sleep in, and I don’t need to do much of that as it is. Besides,” she became sultry as she spoke to him, “ I got an iron clad plan and you’re a part of it.”
“I don’t think I want to be.”
“Too late. You’re in.”
There was crackling static on the line, and he could hear her sigh in between another conversation invading their own. “We have to talk private. Sousa has to hear what I have to say, I’m going to need her special insight before we leave.”
He was taken aback by this. “Leave? I don’t understand. There is nowhere to go.”
“You think I’m not helping you, but I am, in every little thing I do. One day you’ll get it, you’ll see. You’ll say, ‘My, but that Clara was something special, the way she understood how this was going to happen, and it did, just like she said. I’m so glad I listened to her, even if she did steer me wrong once in a while–No fault of her own, no, none at all.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said, but he already doubted himself.
“I got my bags all packed and I’m ready to blow this joint. Daddy is being a real pain. He was so upset when I showed up at five this morning, furious that I’d let the sun come up. I told him, if that were in my power, that ball of fire would be hurtling towards Earth instead of just sitting there, being a bore and taking up all the attention from all the other planets. Apparently, a girl like me shouldn’t be alone at such an ungodly hour. I didn’t know there were different levels of morality according to the hours of the day. Did you?”
He thought how her acts of misconduct coincided with certain parts of the day when he imbibed more motor oil than was safe to any body, alien or human.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, now you know.”
“I am educated.”
There was a slam of a door, and a protracted, furious bout of cursing levelled off by a final lung-crushing gasp that wheezed and tortured itself in and out of damaged lungs. “Whore,” her father struggled to squeeze from the last breath he drew in.
She ignored him. Behind her, her father slowly suffocated in his own despair, staggering against furniture and knocking over vases. He guessed this is what was happening in the background, the struggle crashing through the earpiece of his telephone. The scuffle abruptly stopped, leaving an eerie silence in place of chaotic fury. Clara took a deep breath before continuing, her voice forced into cheerfulness.
“I will meet you at Sousa’s in about an hour. I have some unfinished business to attend to here. But you better believe me, this is a big one, a real juicy tidbit you can’t leave behind. You’re coming with me, because there’s no choice, and Sousa will agree with me, you’ll see.”
“Going with you?”
“One hour. Toodles.”
She hung up, leaving him to contemplate dead air. On the table, in its pretty pink teacup, was his black pool of motor oil promising a sweet escape. It didn’t matter how early the hour was this time. He pounced upon it like a hawk on an injured rabbit and drank every last drop in one satisfying, anxiety-free gulp.
Travel
The mothballs made him gag; he coughed up a black murky chunk of partially-digested motor oil onto the carpeted hallway outside of Sousa’s apartment. Clara cast him an evil glare, but Sousa, who immediately opened her door, didn’t seem to mind being roused from her bed. A thick line of red lipstick covered her wrinkled lips, and her yawn was large enough to consume them. A heavily manicured hand met her mouth as she lazily hid her exhaustion, and with a gesture that suggested tired inevitability, she waved them into the cramped confines of her upper floor apartment.