She circled the building, trying to divine the best way in. Front door, back door? Neither seemed great. A half-height window into the cellar held more promise. Using a stick she found on the ground for leverage, Tricia forced the shutters open, then squatted and peered inside. There were curtains here, too, but enough space separated them that she could see a sliver of the room. By angling herself this way and that she could make out that there was no one inside. She tried to open the window, straining the way Charley had at the Sun (only without spitting on her hands first—she didn’t see how that would help). When it didn’t budge, she took out the gun and, holding it by the barrel, swung it against the glass.
The pane cracked and pieces tinkled to the floor inside. Tricia ducked out of sight. A few moments later she cautiously crept back, looked in. There was still no one there. She wormed her arm in through the hole, avoiding the jagged edges, and felt around the frame. Sure enough, the window was locked. She unlocked it. It went up smoothly after that and she dropped through it to the cellar floor.
Glass crunching slightly underfoot, she made her way to the door of the room where she and Coral had been held. “Cory,” she whispered. She tried the knob. The door swung open.
“Cory?”
The room was dark. She groped for the cord to the hanging light and switched it on. Coral wasn’t there; no one was. The bunk in the back was empty.
Was she upstairs? Tricia wondered. Were they all upstairs, putting Coral through some horrible ordeal, trying to get out of her some secret she didn’t possess or information she didn’t know? Tricia listened for some sign that this might be going on. She heard nothing, but it gave her little comfort. They might have gagged her. She might be unconscious. She might, as Barrone had said, already be dead.
Tricia knew she had to find out, had to go upstairs, had to face whatever was waiting for her there. But she was glad for any excuse to put it off, even just for a minute. So she went to the far side of the room, to the bunk where Coral had been sitting when Mitch had shoved Tricia in, the bunk where they’d sat together while Coral told her story. She hunted around the foot of the bunk, felt underneath it, looking for she didn’t know what. A message, she supposed. Some sign that Coral had been here. She knew she’d have tried to leave one for Coral if their positions had been reversed.
Conscious of the time slipping away—someone could come downstairs at any moment, and of course Barrone could also show up at any moment, with or without Charley in tow; they must have figured out by now where she’d gone—Tricia pulled the bunk away from the wall. And there, scratched into the brick with a nail or a stone or in any event something with a sharp edge, were a dozen words made up of ragged, angular, hastily formed letters:
GARAGE 15 ST AVE C
19H GLOVE COMPMT
MORE AT MOON, LCKR22
Tricia pushed the bunk back. More at Moon, Locker 22. ‘Moon’ had to mean Nicolazzo’s club, of course, the dimea-dance place Coral had worked at before she took up boxing. But more what? More photographs? Of whom?
Tricia backed out of the room, held the gun firmly before her, took off the safety, and climbed the stairs. At each landing she spun left and right, gun before her, solitary bullet at the ready, but no one appeared. The building really was completely silent, and dark, and by the time she made it to the top she knew there was a good reason for it.
The place was empty—abandoned. Nicolazzo had hared off to another location, one she couldn’t even begin to guess at. And he’d taken Erin and Coral with him, in whatever condition his interrogations had left them.
At least that was the hopeful possibility. The alternative was that he’d buried them here. That was the big question, really: Were they among the wounded or the slain?
Don’t you touch them, you bastard, Tricia thought as she headed down to the street. Don’t you dare touch them.
It felt more like a prayer than a threat and she kept repeating it to herself as she raced back toward the subway station, putting out of her mind the possibility that maybe he already had.
A block away from Queens Plaza she saw a limo heading toward her, pulling off the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge. Startled, she found herself frozen in place, unable even to turn away, but it passed without slowing, without the man on the other side of the open driver’s-side window even giving her a glance.
She glanced at him, though. Eddie. Sporting what looked, as he sped past, like a black eye.
Charley’s handiwork? she wondered. Or Renata’s?
Tricia heard her train pulling in then and ran for it.
Let Eddie and his passenger discover what she already had, that Nicolazzo was nowhere to be found—that he’d flown the coop, probably as soon as Charley had walked out the door without anything to prevent him from seeing where he was. Let them exercise themselves trying to find him. She had a lead to follow, however tenuous.
Like Gleason used to say, she thought. To the moon, Alice. Straight to the Moon.
32.
Blackmailer
Unlike the Sun, which famously crowned a midtown office building, or the Stars, which filled a two-story bunker of its own near the waterfront, the Moon almost invisibly occupied the second story of a squat Garment District tenement, sandwiched between a buttons-and-trimmings wholesaler on the ground floor and a battery of one- and two-man tailoring shops on the third. There was no nightclub banner flapping from a flagpole here, no doorman in livery to usher you inside (or to keep you out, for that matter). There was a front door and a staircase and, in one of the second floor windows, a neon image winking from full moon to crescent and back again, twenty-four hours a day.
On the sidewalk, wiry men heaved wheeled metal racks loaded down with dresses on hangers, one rack in each hand, while others scurried alongside, lettering tags on the run with swipes of a grease pencil. Even on a Sunday morning, the neighborhood was buzzing, in part to make up for the day many houses lost on Saturday (when the Millinery Center Synagogue on 38th was perhaps the busiest building in the neighborhood) and in part to prepare for the onslaught of orders that would roar in Monday morning.
Tricia picked her way through the chaos, stepping up into doorways or down into the gutter as necessary to allow men in an even greater hurry than she was to pass. She knew where the club was—it was no secret. The Times and the News had both written about it. But she’d never had reason to go herself. It was widely known to be a place only men frequented, and mostly a certain type of man: an older man, perhaps, or one burdened with some minor deformity; the halt, the lame; the shy, the scared, the slow of tongue, the foreign accented; those men whose appetite for female company, in short, exceeded their ability to procure any for themselves absent a fistful of tickets and a roster of women whose job it was to not notice the defects in their dancing partners.
It wasn’t prostitution, though of course you heard stories; and many a feel was copped in the name of close dancing. That Coral had passed her first years in New York working here saddened Tricia. She’d pictured her sister headlining in a rooftop revue, or at least enlivening the chorus, not letting herself be tooled around a dance floor by a succession of sweaty-handed romeos with a buck to spare.