‘You should of buried him deeper then,’ Frankie suggested without troubling to feign surprise. ‘Why you tellin’ me?’
Kvorka bridled a bit. ‘He didn’t freeze to death, Dealer.’
Frankie waited.
‘I ain’t tryin’ to make no pinch, Frankie,’ Cousin assured him earnestly. ‘I ain’t even tryin’ to give you advice. But it would do you some good to know what the score is on Louie now.’
‘Sounds like the game’s over for Louie,’ was all Frankie had to say.
‘He’s at the morgue ’n there’ll be a coroner’s inquest. I can tell you the verdict now ’cause I tossed him in the wagon myself.’
It was Kvorka’s turn to wait. Either the dealer needed to know or he didn’t.
‘What’s the story, Cousin?’
‘“Death due to assault, assailant unknown.” His neck was broke, Frankie.’
‘If you ask me that’s a damned good thing ’n I’m happy to hear it,’ Frankie told him steadily.
The crap game was getting well started. ‘Only tryin’ to square a favor,’ Kvorka told him.
‘What do I need favors for?’ Frankie turned on his heel. What did the guy take him for? Some high school stub who’d break down ’n say, ‘Please don’t arrest me, Mister, I won’t do it again’? It would be a cold day in hell before Bednar would pin a rap like that on Frankie Machine. He stood watching the crapshooters until he saw Kvorka get his hat and overcoat out of the wardrobe and leave. ‘He could save his favors,’ Frankie repeated. Machine didn’t scare as easy as some aces might think, he told himself.
But when somebody offered him the dice he shook his head, No, and wandered off looking for Sparrow. He went around the hall twice and couldn’t spot him.
Wandered without noticing that everything everyone was doing around him was the funniest sort of thing anyone had ever yet done. The hall was jumping with comical fellows wearing their girls’ best hats and every man of them doing it like he was born for the stage.
Best of all, no one seemed to mind being outdone in anything. Though each tried to outsing, outdrink and outdance the next fellow, yet between the singing and the dancing and the drinking each conceded readily he didn’t do nearly as well as anyone else in the place might have. Each exhibited his humility and trust by offering his whisky, his counsel and his girl to whoever stood nearest.
‘Just everybody is feelin’ good tonight,’ Sophie laughed, and felt just as good as anybody. Following Frankie’s circuit of the floor, she wondered who he was looking for. If it was for whom she suspected, she determined, someone would learn that it was as easy to slap a face from a wheelchair as from a standing position. Her suspicion trailed along behind Frankie as she watched him, hatless, leave the hall.
For he knew where dark-haired Molly sat by herself, in the nest on the first floor front, and it wasn’t Sparrow he had to see most of all. Remembered where she sat counting the Els that passed in the night.
It was New Year’s Eve on the El, it was New Year’s Eve down Division Street, it was Happy New Year’s Eve for the boys from the Tug & Maul and the girls hustling drinks at the Safari. It was Happy New Year in Junkie Row at Twenty-sixth and California and Happy New Year for the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles.
It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny’s heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat.
It’s like that for all hustlers’ hearts: to pay the most and get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has that doesn’t get stopped up is her purse. And that’s as full of holes as a married man’s promises.
Yet, when the El passed overhead, it drew the curtain up in that same passionate fluttering that had touched her heart so strangely the first night he’d come by – then died, as she felt her heart had died; and dwindled like any dying heart away. He would not be by again.
She tried to rouse herself, saying it would never do, letting herself feel so useless again. She had never understood why she had lived with a man like Drunkie John, for whom she had cared nothing at all, and found the answer now: when a woman feels useless she doesn’t think anything of throwing herself away. One way of doing it, with one man or another, was as good a way as any other then. She ought to be hustling drinks across the street this minute instead of letting herself feel that, unless one certain clown knocked soon, she would be useless all her life.
It seemed to her now that all she had ever wanted, with one man or another, one street or another or under any old moon at all, was simply this: a man to care for, and a child of her own. To nurse in the silver evening light and tend in the gilded morning. That was all she had ever wanted.
Or ever could want again.
As the party down the street grew gayer and the revelry in all the bars increased, she sank into a pleasant sleep and dreamed she held somebody else’s baby to her naked breast while someone knocked and knocked at some far door and she could not answer without letting the baby go.
‘John is drunk and back at the door,’ she counseled herself in sleep, ‘come to take my baby away.’ She wakened in a dead-cold fright, the fire had gone out and yet the knocker rapped on through her dream.
‘It’s me, Molly-O,’ Frankie’s unemphatic voice. ‘I know you’re there. I asked at the club and they said you hadn’t showed up. You sick, Molly? You mad at me?’
She watched the knob turning, he was trying to see whether it had been locked against him. Then rose at last and let him in.
‘He’s scared,’ she thought the second she saw his face. ‘I’m the girl he comes to when he’s scared.’
He stood with his back against the door and he was sweating across the hair line, there were flakes of snow on the hair.
‘Who’s chasin’ you, Frankie?’
‘The aces. They’re goin’ to pin the sluggin’ on me.’
‘Are you clean?’ she asked and before he had time to fashion the lie, ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t in on sluggin’ Louie. It’d spoil just everythin’ if you did. We been straight with each other so far – let’s keep it straight. The way it is with you ’n me, when it ain’t straight no more it’s over. There ain’t six barflies between Antek’s and the Safari who can’t take one good guess about who got Louie that night. It ain’t that hard to guess with your buddy spendin’ like crazy.’
‘The punk ain’t had two bucks all his own to spend in a month,’ Frankie reproved her. ‘What you tryin’ to hand me?’
‘Just what the people are sayin’. Buyin’ drinks by Antek like he owns the joint all yesterday afternoon.’
Frankie laughed uneasily. ‘You didn’t see no cash go over the bar, did you?’
‘I wasn’t there, Frankie, I just heard. They don’t like it at the Safari if I hang around Antek’s too much. Where I make my livin’ is where I should spend, they think.’
‘Then I’ll tell you this: either the punk is spendin’ Stash’s Christmas bonus money or he’s runnin’ up a tab on Antek. Stop worryin’.’
‘I ain’t worryin’ about the punk,’ Molly told him gravely, ‘it’s you I’m worryin’ about.’
He went to the window. Between the girders of the El the snow was freezing fast. ‘No, I ain’t clean,’ he answered with an ice-cold bitterness. ‘I ain’t got enough blood on my hands, I got to pull somethin’ like that.’
It wasn’t till he’d told her that she came to him, to link one arm into his own. ‘Don’t torture yourself. It’s a good thing he’s gone. I seen the way he hooked a couple of them Safari kids onto the needle.’