Drifting, drifting to the sound of the muted horn.
There was a gentle tap on my shoulder.
I turned.
Mr. Noland was standing slightly behind me and slightly to my right, his hand resting on my shoulder.
“I’m cutting in,” he said.
And his hand tightened on my shoulder, and he moved me away from Dominique, my left hand still holding her right hand, and then stepped into the open circle his intrusion had created, looping his right arm around Dominique’s waist and shouldering me out completely.
I moved clumsily off the dance floor and stood in the middle of the arch separating the two rooms, feeling somehow embarrassed and inadequate, watching helplessly as Mr. Noland pulled Dominique in close to him. At the table he’d just vacated, the two women were laughing it up with Bruno. I went through the arch and back into the lounge with its black leather booths and its black leather barstools. My grandmother raised her Manhattan to me in a toast. I nodded acknowledgment, and smiled, and walked toward where Mickey Tataglia was sitting at the bar, chatting up a redhead, who was wearing a windblown bob and a liquid green dress the color of her eyes. He had his hand on her silk-stockinged knee. She had in her hand, I swear to God, a long cigarette holder that made her look exactly like any of the Held flappers on the covers of Life. This was a night for firsts. I had never seen two women with purple wigs, and I had never seen a woman with a cigarette holder like this one. I had never danced with Dominique either; easy come, easy go.
As I took the stool on his left, Mickey was telling the redhead all about his war experiences. His brother Angelo was behind the bar, filling coffee cups with booze. I told him I wanted a Bosom Caresser.
“What’s a Bosom Caresser?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Our waiter asked me if I wanted one, and I said yes, and he brought it to me.”
“What’s in it?”
“Mickey,” I said, “what’s in a Bosom Caresser?”
“Talk about fresh!” the redhead said, and rolled her eyes.
“Are you asking what I would put in a Bosom Caresser?” Mickey said. “If I were making such a drink?”
“Who is this person you’re talking to?” the redhead said.
“A friend of mine,” Mickey said. “This is Maxie,” he said, and squeezed her knee.
“How do you do?” I said.
“This is Richie,” he said.
“Familiar for Richard,” I said.
“I’m familiar for Maxine,” Maxie said.
In the other room, the band started playing “Mexicali Rose.”
“If you want a Bosom Treasure, you got to tell me what’s in it,” Angelo said.
“Bosom Caresser,” I said.
“Whatever,” Angelo said. “I have to know the ingredients.”
“Mother’s milk, to begin with,” Mickey said.
“You’re as fresh as he is,” Maxie scolded, rolling her eyes at me and playfully slapping Mickey’s hand, which was working higher on her knee.
“Laced with gin and egg white,” I said.
“Ick,” Maxie said.
“And topped with a cherry,” Mickey said.
“Double-ick,” Maxie said.
“We don’t have any mother’s milk,” Angelo said.
“Then I’ll have a Rock ’n’ Rye,” I said.
“I’ll have another one of these, whatever it is,” Mickey said.
“Ditto,” Maxie said.
“Hold the fort,” Mickey said, getting off his stool. “I have to visit the gents.”
I watched him as he headed toward the men’s room. He stopped at my grandmother’s table, planted a noisy kiss on her cheek, and then moved on.
“Was he really a war hero?” Maxie asked me.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “He was in the battle of—”
“Just keep your damn hands off me!” Dominique shouted from the dance floor.
I was off that stool as if I’d heard an incoming artillery shell whistling toward my head. Off that stool and running toward the silvered arch beyond which were the tables with their white tablecloths and the polished parquet dance floor, and Dominique in her short black dress, trying to free her right hand from—
“Let go of me!” she shouted.
“No.”
A smile on Mr. Noland’s face. His hand clutched around her narrow waist.
Maybe he didn’t see her eyes. Maybe he was too busy getting a big charge out of this slender, gorgeous woman trying to extricate herself from his powerful grip.
“Damn you!” she said. “Let go or I’ll...”
“Yes, baby, what is it you’ll do?”
She didn’t tell him what she’d do. She simply did it. She twisted her body to the left, her arm swinging all the way back and then forward again with all the power of her shoulder behind it. Her bunched left fist collided with Mr. Noland’s right cheek, just below his eye, and he touched his eye, and looked at his fingertips as if expecting blood, and then very softly and menacingly said, “Now you get hurt, baby.”
Some people never learn.
He had called her “baby” once, and that had been a bad mistake, so what he’d just done was call her “baby” again, which was an even bigger mistake. Dominique nodded curtly, the nod saying “Okay, fine,” and then she went for his face with both hands, her nails raking bloody tracks from just under his eyes — which I think she’d been going for — all the way down to his jawline.
Mr. Noland punched her.
Hard.
I yelled the way I’d yelled going across the Marne.
I was on him in ten seconds flat, the time it took to race through that arch and charge across the dance floor, the time it took to clench my fists and hit him first with the left one and then with the right one, bam-bam, a one-two punch to the gut and the jaw that sent him staggering back from me. He rubbed his jaw in surprise. His hands came away with the blood from Dominique’s fingernail-raking. He looked at the blood in surprise too. And then he looked at me in surprise, as if trying to figure out how some madman had got inside this civilized speakeasy. He didn’t say a word. He merely looked surprised and sad and bloody, shaking his head as if wondering how the world had turned so rotten all at once. And then, abruptly, he stopped shaking his head and took a gun out of a holster under his dinner jacket.
Just like that.
Zip.
One minute, no gun. The next minute, a gun.
Dominique took off one of her high-heeled shoes.
As she raised her leg, Mr. Noland looked under her skirt at her underwear — black silk panties in my grandmother’s “sirocco” line, $4.98 over the counter in any of her shops. Mr. Noland then realized what Dominique was going to do with the shoe. What she was going to do was hit him on the other side of the head with it. Which was possibly why he aimed the gun right at her heart.
I did the only thing I could do.
In reaction, Mr. Noland bellowed in rage and doubled over in pain, his hands clutching for his groin, his knees coming together as if he had to pee very badly, and then he fell to the floor and lay there writhing and moaning while everywhere about him were dancers all aghast. Bruno rushed to him at once and knelt beside him, his hands fluttering. “Oh, God, Mr. Noland,” he said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Noland,” and Mr. Noland tried to say something but his face was very red and his eyes were bulging and all that came out was a sort of strangled sputter at which point one of the women with the purple hair came running over and said, “Legs? Shall I call a doctor?”
Which is when I grabbed Dominique’s hand and began running.
“A bootlegger, a narcotics smuggler, a hijacker, and a trusted friend of an even bigger gangster named Little Augie Orgen, that’s who Legs Diamond is.”