From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.
For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”
“After that gyp you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”
Ellen sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabó’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.
“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabó both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”
“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”
“No, I’m going to shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H., and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabó from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”
“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but that’s jake, ’cause so would anyone else.
“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch . . . But, wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.
As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28—right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel—I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say accidentally because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the sixteenth century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.
Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier, I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to die in Paris. I was holed up in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’ve always had a nose for the macabre, and had dabbled—on and off—in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex . . . But I’m digressing.
A friend of a friend heard I was busted, down and out and peddling a bunch of old books, schlepping them about Manhattan in search of a buyer. This same friend, he knew one of Harpootlian’s clients. One of her human clients, which was a pretty exclusive set (not that I knew that at the time). This friend of mine, he was the client’s lover, and said client brokered the sale for Harpootlian—for a fat ten percent finder’s fee, of course. I promptly sold the Dee and Kelley manuscript to this supposedly notorious madam who, near as I could tell, no one much had ever heard of. She paid me what I asked, no questions, no haggling—never mind it was a fairly exorbitant sum. And on top of that, Harpootlian was so impressed I’d gotten ahold of the damned thing, she staked me to the bookshop on Bowery, there in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, just a little ways south of Delancey Street. Only one catch: she had first dibs on everything I ferreted out, and sometimes I’d be asked to make deliveries. I should like to note that way back then, during that long, lost November of 1928, I had no idea whatsoever that her sobriquet, “the Demon Madam of the Lower East Side,” was anything more than colorful hyperbole.
Anyway, jump ahead to a rainy May afternoon, more than six years later, and that’s when I first laid eyes on Ellen Andrews. Well, that’s what she called herself, though later on I’d find out she’d borrowed the name from Claudette Colbert’s character in It Happened One Night. I was just back from an estate sale in Connecticut, and was busy unpacking a large crate when I heard the bell mounted above the shop door jingle. I looked up, and there she was, carelessly shaking rainwater from her orange umbrella before folding it closed. Droplets sprayed across the welcome mat and the floor and onto the spines of several nearby books.
“Hey, be careful,” I said, “unless you intend to pay for those.” I jabbed a thumb at the books she’d spattered. She promptly stopped shaking the umbrella and dropped it into the stand beside the door. That umbrella stand has always been one of my favorite things about the Yellow Dragon. It’s made from the taxidermied foot of a hippopotamus, and accommodates at least a dozen umbrellas, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen even half that many people in the shop at one time.
“Are you Natalie Beaumont?” she asked, looking down at her wet shoes. Her overcoat was dripping, and a small puddle was forming about her feet.
“Usually.”
“Usually,” she repeated. “How about right now?”
“Depends whether or not I owe you money,” I replied, and removed a battered copy of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled from the crate. “Also, depends whether you happen to be employed by someone I owe money.”
“I see,” she said, as if that settled the matter, then proceeded to examine the complete twelve-volume set of The Golden Bough occupying a top shelf not far from the door. “Awful funny sort of neighborhood for a bookstore, if you ask me.”
“You don’t think bums and winos read?”
“You ask me, people down here,” she said, “they panhandle a few cents, I don’t imagine they spend it on books.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” I told her.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t. Still, queer sort of a shop to come across in this part of town.”
“If you must know,” I said, “the rent’s cheap,” then reached for my spectacles, which were dangling from their silver chain about my neck. I set them on the bridge of my nose, and watched while she feigned interest in Frazerian anthropology. It would be an understatement to say Ellen Andrews was a pretty girl. She was, in fact, a certified knockout, and I didn’t get too many beautiful women in the Yellow Dragon, even when the weather was good. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in Flo Ziegfeld’s follies; on the Bowery, she stuck out like a sore thumb.