“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 of illegal gambling, nothing to suggest anything untoward was going on at all. Sure, there were some men who loomed when they stood and whose tailored tuxedo jackets bulged suspiciously at the armpit. But those might be off-duty cops, hired to protect a rich man and his date for the evening—or even on-duty cops, for all she knew, casing the place for the same reason she was. There were some sideways glances she’d noticed from men as she left the floor at the end of her act, and once or twice a napkin pressed into her palm with a telephone or hotel room number written on it, but what girl didn’t have that sort of thing happen, even if she wasn’t dancing under a follow-spot in a halter top? It hardly made the Sun one of your worse dens of iniquity.
Nicolazzo himself (a brooding, heavy-browed man with what looked like a jagged scar along one cheek, judging by the newspaper photos she’d dug up at the library) so far hadn’t shown his face in the club.
Taking off her makeup after the second show one night, Tricia asked Cecilia if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary.
“Like what?” Cecilia said. She was peeling off a set of fake eyelashes as she spoke.
“I don’t know,” Tricia said. “You hear stories about clubs like this. What goes on in the back rooms.”
“Sure,” Cecilia said. “The last place I worked, the boss lined all the girls up at the start of every week and he pointed—you, you, and you. And if you were one of the ones he pointed at you had to go back to his office with him, where he had this big fold-out couch, a Castro, you know? And if you didn’t go, you were fired. And everyone knew it.”
“Is that why you left?”
She nodded. “I haven’t seen anything like that here. I mean, once in a while Robbie will give you a pat on the rear, but my god, if that’s as far as it goes, I’ll be on cloud nine.”
“What about gambling?” Tricia said. “Or drugs? Anything like that?”
“Why? Have you seen anything, Trixie?”
“No,” Tricia said. “You just hear stories.”
Cecilia shrugged. “There’s probably some of that. You get that sort of thing everywhere. My advice to you? Don’t go looking for it. Keep your head down, do your job, collect your pay, and go home happy. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tricia said. “I was just wondering.”
But Tricia had a second job to do. She had a book to write. And not having found any true crime to write about wasn’t going to stand in her way. So she began to pound out a few pages a day, setting her Olympia up on the chateau’s sole writing desk around two each afternoon, while most of the other girls were out on jobs, shooting covers for magazines or private stills for “collectors.” The ones who didn’t have any work watched her type with a mixture of idle curiosity and indifference, peering over her shoulder now and again but never long enough to read more than a few words. Which was just as well. If it got back to Borden that she was at work on something, he wouldn’t be surprised—but he might be if he knew how often the story she was cooking up changed paths or a scene reached a dead end and needed to be scrapped and restarted, something that presumably would not have been the case if she’d just been, as he’d put it, taking dictation.
She read I, Mobster and some of the Hard Case Crime books and stole liberally from them, inventing a narrator who’d grown up in the slums and found opportunity in crime. She never gave him a name, just had other characters refer to him as “kid” or “buddy” or “hey, you.” She figured she’d have them shift to calling him “mac” and then “mister” and then “sir” as he rose through the ranks. He came from Chicago to New York after the war, joined up with an old pro on a heist of grade-A beefsteaks (or was it a bank robbery? she went back and forth on this point), and ultimately became one of the senior soldiers working for a Sicilian crime family down on Mulberry Street...before finally getting lured away to work at the Sun by their chief rival, Sal Nicolazzo. And that’s where the fun began in earnest, with her nameless hero getting his hands dirty in the world of illegal gambling and all the associated pleasures. She found it exciting to write about this fellow, imagining her way into his sinister, violent life, full of gunplay and brawls and round-heeled women who welcomed him into their arms. (These she based, one by one, on her roommates, not even bothering to change their names. None of them were big readers, and she felt confident they wouldn’t sneak peeks at the growing manuscript she kept in the cardboard box beneath her cot.)
Whenever she found herself starved for an idea, she paid a quick afternoon visit to the public library and pored through old copies of the New York Times and the Daily News, hunting for stories about mobsters and their misdeeds. Eventually the steady diet of newspaper articles, all filled with juicy betrayals, gave her the idea to have her narrator grow sick of Nicolazzo’s controlling hand and plan a robbery—a mammoth heist of his own operation that would involve opening the safe at the Sun and fleeing with a month’s proceeds from the big man’s casinos, tracks, and fight clubs. It was the sort of thing that, if it had ever really happened, Nicolazzo would of course hush up—a Mob boss clumsy enough to let himself get robbed by one of his subordinates?—and that, in turn, would account for the fact that the reading public had never heard about it. The only difficult part was coming up with a good plan for the heist—and for that she got help from a couple of experts, two young fellows she spotted bringing manuscripts to office 315 repeatedly and trailed one day to the Red Baron, a dark little bar down the block with propellers and pictures of biplanes hanging on the walls.
“Gentlemen,” she said, putting a little hip action into her stride as she approached, “may I buy you a drink?”