I would be officially working at Joe's that night. Emily was both my
roommate and my boss. She put me on the payroll, saying it was just funny
having me work there and not paying me. I didn't need the money, not that
Emily was exactly poor by this stage in her life. Joe's was a successful
business and since her father's death, she was the owner. I, on the hand,
still had much more cash to burn. I was a C-list semi-star.
Our apartment was small, smaller than the one I had in LA. There were four rooms. There was a kitchen with a partial partition which divided it from the living room area where there was a nice couch, a ratty armchair that used to be red but had turned a sickly pink color, and bureau with a blue- painted mirror above it. There was a kitchen table with four chairs, three of which matched and one she stole from the basement of Joe's, they were also in the living room as the kitchen was very small.
My bedroom was spare. I hadn't been living there very long. Besides my bed and some other furniture, there was only a picture of my college graduation with Ada Johnson on the wall, and a picture of Holden, George, Tobey and I at the hospital that sat on my night stand. The walls were painted peach, but fading.
Emily's room was roughly the same size and there were dozens of pictures all around. There many of her, George and Sonny. There was one of her and Mary working in a factory in the early months of the War. On a break, Mary had dangerously pulled loose her hair and it hung naturally off her head. Emily had her shoulder slung over Mary's and Mary was slouching down, making Emily appear taller. Their heads were together, wearily smiling. Mary was holding a tire with her left hand as others worked in the background.
There was another of her family. It was unusual for portrait photographs of it's time. They were all leaning in together–and smiling. Hannah and Peter were to the left with Jack crouching in front, and Maggie and Joe to the right with Emily. Jack looked to be about thirteen and Emily about seven.
I had been sitting around our apartment that morning for the better part of an hour. It was my usually routine of drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the newspaper when I decided to sneak into Emily's room while she was out and take a look at the picture again.
I had never seen an actual photograph of Jack before. It fascinated me. It ached me, to lose someone and have their innocence staring back at you. It ached, too, because I knew I had fallen out of love with the dead man and it scared me. For a time, it became all I knew.
I wondered if I would have left him if he had lived. Dead, I could love and idolize him and glorify him. But I wonder if I would have left if we docked together. I fell in love with the man, but I also fell in love with freedom. I would have tasted freedom and craved it in all its forms. Would I have stayed in his secure arms when I could have left him and run free? He may have been looking for love after years of wandering. I didn't know him long enough for a quiz. I knew what I wanted: no fences and wide open pastures. I would have left, maybe I would have always loved him and come back, but I knew myself too well. I would have left him at some point. It would have been a mistake. But I would have left him.
Now, I felt as if my love for Holden was fading too, and my burgeoning attraction to George only served to confuse me. I hated it. I was twenty- five years old and a woman of her own means. Looking back on my relatively short life, it played out like a story. I'd imagine the events of my life as a comedy, a tragedy, occasionally a sob story I'm sorry to say for someone who hates melodrama. I could consider the events of Titanic a great love story, not just because it was mine, but it seemed like one reflecting on it and pulling myself away from it a little. I had been one half in several love stories, and where I stood then–at about five o'clock in the evening sometime in early March, this the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty–I didn't feel as if I knew anything. I was lost. Where had the fire gone? I think I blew it out myself. I'd seen too much. It was the point where there was too much. Too much suffering and loss. I could still tell Emily Dawson her cousin was dead, I could still try to find Holden and see how he was or let whatever I felt for George blossom, or find my mother–who I barely admitted to myself that I missed. But she was my mother and she loved me. She wasn't the easiest person in the world, but if ever she loved someone she loved me. She *knew* me when no one else did, but I hated her for not doing anything about it. I couldn't deny my mother. But I couldn't deny anyone else. I was quart low on something I felt I couldn't get back.
Oh well, I thought, time to go to Joe's.
***
"Hey there, Em," I said walking into Joe's and casually dropping my purse on counter as I walked behind. She was slouched over the counter, elbows on the surface, chin cupped in her hand, rear sticking out behind her.
"Hello there," she said not looking up from her papers, most likely doing inventory. We weren't open yet.
"You look so serious," I commented. She looked up, as if to shake herself out of it.
"Yeah," she sighed, "I try to finish everything before we open tonight. Ugh, look at this," she held up her sheets. "Business is slow. Business was never slow."
"Welcome to prohibition."
"Jesus."
"Start trafficking alcohol," I teased.
"If only."
"Just a bad month."
Emily stared harder at her numbers. "I hate math and I hate Carrie Nation."
"You know I miss drinking, funny, things like this never mattered when I was a little girl. The only stimulant I needed was sun or rain, maybe a doll."
"Speak for yourself. I was cussing better than a whore since age six."
"Cursing and alcohol are two different things...what I was trying to say was we never needed any sort of corruption or...that's not a good word, adult, I suppose, forms of pleasure to keep going. Nothing's simple, even for people that aren't very complicated."
"Having trouble thinking of the right words?"
"Yes. Today my mind is a little clouded."
"And you went to college too. What a masterful grip on the English language."
"Yes, but I can still do this." I pulled a piece a blank paper from her pile and took her pencil. I began writing down my previous argument in Latin, albeit very poor Latin, but Latin all the same. Then I started writing in French, then Spanish, then our name's in Greek.
"That's disgusting," Emily said.
"Yeah, my Latin is terrible and only know my letters in Greek. I can't speak it."
"You're disgustingly over-educated."
"I learned Spanish between school, by default."
"Explain where the University of Maryland teaches its nurses the classics. I think if you know whether your patient is dead or alive is a little more first priority."
"Hey, it's good to be well-rounded. And I didn't learn it at university. Before they died, my parents had a lot of money and sent me to some pretty hoity-toity schools." I pressed the tip of the pen to my chin.
"Why don't you have any of that money now?"
"Debt." Emily knew the story of Rose Dawson, the Body. But she didn't say anything. So what if she'd already guessed I was the dead girl on Titanic? It was the only name, the only fact she had. As time went on it was easier and easier to put off telling her.
"By the way," she said, "you might wanna change your clothes."
"Why?"
"Remember what you said about business?"
"Huh?"
"I'm not doing it for *financial* profit but I got Irving to do me a favor. Dress sleazy, this place is gonna be crazy tonight."
"What are you getting at?"
"Never end a sentence with a preposition, college girl."
"Em!"
"Alright, fine. I'm trafficking alcohol on the side to get a hold of some these gang types."
"What?!"
"I don't give a damn about the legality of booze–though I'd prefer it–but I do give a damn about George and about my neighborhood that they've been killing. So what if the Gophers were falling when I moved here. Gangs are still killing my home. I heard stories about how the bigger gangs could rally five hundred people to a spot within an hour. So you know how much power they could have if they had all the alcohol? Booze, drugs–you know, not aspirin. I mean opium, cocaine, cloves."
"And would you buy from them if you wanted it for your own purposes?"
"Yes, I drink. And yes smoked a clove or two in my day and yeah, opium once, but no, not from those bastards." Her eyes were cold as steel.
"You're involvement in this is dangerous," I warned.
"Please," she said with an edge of bitterness, "no one's gonna kill me. You and George, sweet Jesus! You're so paranoid!"
"No, I meant revenge is unhealthy. How many people do you want to kill? How much better will it make anything."
"Revenge is for desperados and heroes. I'm just an ordinary girl."
"Don't you–"
"Don't *you* tell George and I mean it."
"He'll find out."
"He'll find out sooner rather than later if you tell him."
"Are you threatening me, Em?"
"No, I'd never do that. But I'd like to sometimes." She glided to the other end of the counter away from me. And I *do* mean *glided.*
"Are you wearing roller skates?"
"I might be!" she rolls into the kitchen flinging open the door. "You know," she said poking her head out again, "this is like this one time in Wisconsin–"
"Heard it," I dismissed yet another one of Emily's stories that she had been repeated for years. I didn't want to hear about Jack again.
***
She was right. Things were absolutely crazy that night. Just before happy hour I came back from the apartment in a nice black dress I wore out to dinner in California. Emily came out from the kitchen wearing a tight red, beaded thing that was not quite a dress and not quite a burlesque outfit. It fell to her knees and split up her left leg.
There must have been forty people in the bar. It was crowded and noisy with talking and shouting and a small quartet playing on the small stage in the back. There was Emily in the middle of the crowd, in her sparkling red dress, twirling around by herself. A long black braid followed her around like a whip as she spun. It was as if there was a glow around her, she was spinning and flowing as if she had somehow harnessed all the energy in the room. She was even dancing. It looked like she was flying on the inside. I wondered if all the people around her, dancing, enjoying themselves seemingly less then the proprietress, knew what a miserable life she had.
"Rose!" a voice came from behind, startling me. "Whoa, somebody's jumpy." George.
"Somebody else looks sore."
"My job is in trouble." He motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen for a more intimate discussion.
"Does it have anything to do with...substances that are not present?" I said as the doors swung closed behind me.
"No, I know about this place becoming a speak. Emily's working in cooperation with the police. So she's a spy as are the rest by default now. I found out, got, uh...unhappy." No, George Calvet, angry? Somehow I could hear the bitter sarcasm sounding through the eighteenth precinct. "And now I have to keep my mouth shut."
"Why?"
"If I make any more noise I'll be a communist, anarchist, socialist, Bolshevik homosexual Jew with a cherry on top."
"Jesus," I sighed.
"There's another liberal Jew they strung up for saying something."
"They crucified him."
"Mmm?"
"They didn't hang him. 'Strung up' implies hanging."
"They hung him from a cross."
"It's a different kind of execution."
"Well, they tend to lynch us non-Anglos nowadays."
"I think you can get away with getting 'Dirty Red' tattooed to your backside and losing your job. I don't think your pals at the NYPD would lynch you–or nail you to a cross."
"Won't lynch me? They lynched Leo Frank!" Leo Frank was a Jewish investigator in Georgia found guilty in his own murder case several years before. He was killed by a lynch mob at Georgia State Prison.
"So Emily's going to get shot by gangsters and you're going to be lynched because you're a Jewish cop?"
"Hey, Em and I, we've got a couple 'tarnishes' on who we are. Poor kid from the streets and a darker shade of white."
"Hey, I've got a criminal record in Chicago!" That was smart, I inwardly cringed. Stupid.
"You what?"
"I was arrested for disturbing the peace during suffrage rallies. Spent up to two weeks in jail once. You know, women–we don't have too many rights? I'm a capable adult voting for the first time this fall."
"If I can interrupt youse guys," Sonny butted in. We didn't even know he was there.
"Comments from the Italian on this argument?" I asked, inwardly groaning and thinking this had become a challenge of who's the bigger victim.
"No," he said, "look out there," he pointed at through the portal windows on the kitchen doors. The quartet on stage was directly in our field of vision. "That's Milton on the sax. He's really good, ain't he?"
"Yes, he is." I nodded, knowing I was about to feel incredibly guilty.
"You guys know 'em?"
"No," I said.
"Met him once," said George.
"I don't wanna say who has it worst where, but how do you think it feels to be Milton?" Milton kept on playing his sax in the next room, just as he had been. Milton was black.
"Shut up," said Sonny.
***
I was sitting in George's office the Sunday after. Em, Sonny, and developed a habit of hanging around there when we we're working ourselves. He was somewhere else in the station being neurotic. Emily was God knows where and Sonny had been in the bathroom for the better part of fifteen minutes. Somehow I had gotten into my head that Sonny was quite useless, probably owing to his unfaithfulness. I didn't know how to make it up to him after the night in the kitchen of Joe's.
"We are the only precinct in this whole city with a telephone in the bathroom!" George stormed in. I was at his desk reading the newspaper.
"That's where they first installed the lines..." I defended, half- heartedly.
"Cops are so stupid," he shook his head. Poor George. He was more bewildered than usual today.
Sonny came in looking for his coffee and looking to pinch my paper.
"What took you so long?" I asked him.
"I was making a telephone call."
George waved his fist. "I hate this place."
"Why? You can makes calls from the john, Calvert. That's luxury." Sonny laughed. George glanced at my paper.
"I know you're both eying my paper. There's not a chance until I'm finished....don't even think about my cigarettes."
"Why stuff the chimney when it's cold outside?" George teased.
"Sometimes I wonder if these are very good for me," I mused looking down my current cigarette between my fingers.
"Breathing smoke in and out of your lungs...concept could use some thought. But eh, won't kill you," said Sonny. George leaned into my paper, reading it over my shoulder.
"I think A. Mitchell Palmer is the devil."
"Well," I said, "you are the Commie." I winked at him. Sonny didn't see.
Emily scuttled in and shut the door behind her.
"Eleventh Avenue!" she whispered.
"What is it, Dawson?" George said low. The men gathered on either side of me as Emily leaned over the other side of the desk. We all huddled together as she rambled off information.
"A warehouse on Eleventh Avenue. Irving works for a guy named Hans Martin. Most of the bootleggers run everything to a warehouse on Eleventh Avenue." Sonny shifted himself uncomfortably. The man who shot Mary McBride, and subsequently as I later found out, Sonny's brother Carmine, worked for Hans Martin.
"That's amazing, kid. How big is Martin, do you know?"
"I dunno. Big I guess. The warehouse is a big deal–if it's all Irving's cracking it up to be. Not just booze, opium, marijuana, cocaine, and something that begins with an 'h.' Shit I ain't touchin' that's for sure. But they can make big money off of it. I'm gonna wait till I can see it myself."
"That's dangerous," George warned.
"Please," Emily huffed.
"I'm looking out for your safety. I'm a friend before I'm a cop. Watch yourself."
"Listen, I know I can do this. Just let me play around with Irving for a while. I know we can do this. We can get this guy. I can feel it. I have Irving," she gripped the air with her hand emphatically, "and I know we can–"
"Calvert!" Captain Barnes, George's boss, burst in ungracefully.
"Barnes!" George tried to straighten himself up as if he hadn't just been huddling secretively.
"Am I interrupting something?" Barnes folded his arms suspiciously.
"Aw, shucks!" Emily sighed, "you interrupted our Bolshevik party meeting!"
"Don't you even speak it, Miss Dawson! Calvert, I want a word with you no later than tomorrow!" He slammed the door and left.
Our apartment was small, smaller than the one I had in LA. There were four rooms. There was a kitchen with a partial partition which divided it from the living room area where there was a nice couch, a ratty armchair that used to be red but had turned a sickly pink color, and bureau with a blue- painted mirror above it. There was a kitchen table with four chairs, three of which matched and one she stole from the basement of Joe's, they were also in the living room as the kitchen was very small.
My bedroom was spare. I hadn't been living there very long. Besides my bed and some other furniture, there was only a picture of my college graduation with Ada Johnson on the wall, and a picture of Holden, George, Tobey and I at the hospital that sat on my night stand. The walls were painted peach, but fading.
Emily's room was roughly the same size and there were dozens of pictures all around. There many of her, George and Sonny. There was one of her and Mary working in a factory in the early months of the War. On a break, Mary had dangerously pulled loose her hair and it hung naturally off her head. Emily had her shoulder slung over Mary's and Mary was slouching down, making Emily appear taller. Their heads were together, wearily smiling. Mary was holding a tire with her left hand as others worked in the background.
There was another of her family. It was unusual for portrait photographs of it's time. They were all leaning in together–and smiling. Hannah and Peter were to the left with Jack crouching in front, and Maggie and Joe to the right with Emily. Jack looked to be about thirteen and Emily about seven.
I had been sitting around our apartment that morning for the better part of an hour. It was my usually routine of drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the newspaper when I decided to sneak into Emily's room while she was out and take a look at the picture again.
I had never seen an actual photograph of Jack before. It fascinated me. It ached me, to lose someone and have their innocence staring back at you. It ached, too, because I knew I had fallen out of love with the dead man and it scared me. For a time, it became all I knew.
I wondered if I would have left him if he had lived. Dead, I could love and idolize him and glorify him. But I wonder if I would have left if we docked together. I fell in love with the man, but I also fell in love with freedom. I would have tasted freedom and craved it in all its forms. Would I have stayed in his secure arms when I could have left him and run free? He may have been looking for love after years of wandering. I didn't know him long enough for a quiz. I knew what I wanted: no fences and wide open pastures. I would have left, maybe I would have always loved him and come back, but I knew myself too well. I would have left him at some point. It would have been a mistake. But I would have left him.
Now, I felt as if my love for Holden was fading too, and my burgeoning attraction to George only served to confuse me. I hated it. I was twenty- five years old and a woman of her own means. Looking back on my relatively short life, it played out like a story. I'd imagine the events of my life as a comedy, a tragedy, occasionally a sob story I'm sorry to say for someone who hates melodrama. I could consider the events of Titanic a great love story, not just because it was mine, but it seemed like one reflecting on it and pulling myself away from it a little. I had been one half in several love stories, and where I stood then–at about five o'clock in the evening sometime in early March, this the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty–I didn't feel as if I knew anything. I was lost. Where had the fire gone? I think I blew it out myself. I'd seen too much. It was the point where there was too much. Too much suffering and loss. I could still tell Emily Dawson her cousin was dead, I could still try to find Holden and see how he was or let whatever I felt for George blossom, or find my mother–who I barely admitted to myself that I missed. But she was my mother and she loved me. She wasn't the easiest person in the world, but if ever she loved someone she loved me. She *knew* me when no one else did, but I hated her for not doing anything about it. I couldn't deny my mother. But I couldn't deny anyone else. I was quart low on something I felt I couldn't get back.
Oh well, I thought, time to go to Joe's.
***
"Hey there, Em," I said walking into Joe's and casually dropping my purse on counter as I walked behind. She was slouched over the counter, elbows on the surface, chin cupped in her hand, rear sticking out behind her.
"Hello there," she said not looking up from her papers, most likely doing inventory. We weren't open yet.
"You look so serious," I commented. She looked up, as if to shake herself out of it.
"Yeah," she sighed, "I try to finish everything before we open tonight. Ugh, look at this," she held up her sheets. "Business is slow. Business was never slow."
"Welcome to prohibition."
"Jesus."
"Start trafficking alcohol," I teased.
"If only."
"Just a bad month."
Emily stared harder at her numbers. "I hate math and I hate Carrie Nation."
"You know I miss drinking, funny, things like this never mattered when I was a little girl. The only stimulant I needed was sun or rain, maybe a doll."
"Speak for yourself. I was cussing better than a whore since age six."
"Cursing and alcohol are two different things...what I was trying to say was we never needed any sort of corruption or...that's not a good word, adult, I suppose, forms of pleasure to keep going. Nothing's simple, even for people that aren't very complicated."
"Having trouble thinking of the right words?"
"Yes. Today my mind is a little clouded."
"And you went to college too. What a masterful grip on the English language."
"Yes, but I can still do this." I pulled a piece a blank paper from her pile and took her pencil. I began writing down my previous argument in Latin, albeit very poor Latin, but Latin all the same. Then I started writing in French, then Spanish, then our name's in Greek.
"That's disgusting," Emily said.
"Yeah, my Latin is terrible and only know my letters in Greek. I can't speak it."
"You're disgustingly over-educated."
"I learned Spanish between school, by default."
"Explain where the University of Maryland teaches its nurses the classics. I think if you know whether your patient is dead or alive is a little more first priority."
"Hey, it's good to be well-rounded. And I didn't learn it at university. Before they died, my parents had a lot of money and sent me to some pretty hoity-toity schools." I pressed the tip of the pen to my chin.
"Why don't you have any of that money now?"
"Debt." Emily knew the story of Rose Dawson, the Body. But she didn't say anything. So what if she'd already guessed I was the dead girl on Titanic? It was the only name, the only fact she had. As time went on it was easier and easier to put off telling her.
"By the way," she said, "you might wanna change your clothes."
"Why?"
"Remember what you said about business?"
"Huh?"
"I'm not doing it for *financial* profit but I got Irving to do me a favor. Dress sleazy, this place is gonna be crazy tonight."
"What are you getting at?"
"Never end a sentence with a preposition, college girl."
"Em!"
"Alright, fine. I'm trafficking alcohol on the side to get a hold of some these gang types."
"What?!"
"I don't give a damn about the legality of booze–though I'd prefer it–but I do give a damn about George and about my neighborhood that they've been killing. So what if the Gophers were falling when I moved here. Gangs are still killing my home. I heard stories about how the bigger gangs could rally five hundred people to a spot within an hour. So you know how much power they could have if they had all the alcohol? Booze, drugs–you know, not aspirin. I mean opium, cocaine, cloves."
"And would you buy from them if you wanted it for your own purposes?"
"Yes, I drink. And yes smoked a clove or two in my day and yeah, opium once, but no, not from those bastards." Her eyes were cold as steel.
"You're involvement in this is dangerous," I warned.
"Please," she said with an edge of bitterness, "no one's gonna kill me. You and George, sweet Jesus! You're so paranoid!"
"No, I meant revenge is unhealthy. How many people do you want to kill? How much better will it make anything."
"Revenge is for desperados and heroes. I'm just an ordinary girl."
"Don't you–"
"Don't *you* tell George and I mean it."
"He'll find out."
"He'll find out sooner rather than later if you tell him."
"Are you threatening me, Em?"
"No, I'd never do that. But I'd like to sometimes." She glided to the other end of the counter away from me. And I *do* mean *glided.*
"Are you wearing roller skates?"
"I might be!" she rolls into the kitchen flinging open the door. "You know," she said poking her head out again, "this is like this one time in Wisconsin–"
"Heard it," I dismissed yet another one of Emily's stories that she had been repeated for years. I didn't want to hear about Jack again.
***
She was right. Things were absolutely crazy that night. Just before happy hour I came back from the apartment in a nice black dress I wore out to dinner in California. Emily came out from the kitchen wearing a tight red, beaded thing that was not quite a dress and not quite a burlesque outfit. It fell to her knees and split up her left leg.
There must have been forty people in the bar. It was crowded and noisy with talking and shouting and a small quartet playing on the small stage in the back. There was Emily in the middle of the crowd, in her sparkling red dress, twirling around by herself. A long black braid followed her around like a whip as she spun. It was as if there was a glow around her, she was spinning and flowing as if she had somehow harnessed all the energy in the room. She was even dancing. It looked like she was flying on the inside. I wondered if all the people around her, dancing, enjoying themselves seemingly less then the proprietress, knew what a miserable life she had.
"Rose!" a voice came from behind, startling me. "Whoa, somebody's jumpy." George.
"Somebody else looks sore."
"My job is in trouble." He motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen for a more intimate discussion.
"Does it have anything to do with...substances that are not present?" I said as the doors swung closed behind me.
"No, I know about this place becoming a speak. Emily's working in cooperation with the police. So she's a spy as are the rest by default now. I found out, got, uh...unhappy." No, George Calvet, angry? Somehow I could hear the bitter sarcasm sounding through the eighteenth precinct. "And now I have to keep my mouth shut."
"Why?"
"If I make any more noise I'll be a communist, anarchist, socialist, Bolshevik homosexual Jew with a cherry on top."
"Jesus," I sighed.
"There's another liberal Jew they strung up for saying something."
"They crucified him."
"Mmm?"
"They didn't hang him. 'Strung up' implies hanging."
"They hung him from a cross."
"It's a different kind of execution."
"Well, they tend to lynch us non-Anglos nowadays."
"I think you can get away with getting 'Dirty Red' tattooed to your backside and losing your job. I don't think your pals at the NYPD would lynch you–or nail you to a cross."
"Won't lynch me? They lynched Leo Frank!" Leo Frank was a Jewish investigator in Georgia found guilty in his own murder case several years before. He was killed by a lynch mob at Georgia State Prison.
"So Emily's going to get shot by gangsters and you're going to be lynched because you're a Jewish cop?"
"Hey, Em and I, we've got a couple 'tarnishes' on who we are. Poor kid from the streets and a darker shade of white."
"Hey, I've got a criminal record in Chicago!" That was smart, I inwardly cringed. Stupid.
"You what?"
"I was arrested for disturbing the peace during suffrage rallies. Spent up to two weeks in jail once. You know, women–we don't have too many rights? I'm a capable adult voting for the first time this fall."
"If I can interrupt youse guys," Sonny butted in. We didn't even know he was there.
"Comments from the Italian on this argument?" I asked, inwardly groaning and thinking this had become a challenge of who's the bigger victim.
"No," he said, "look out there," he pointed at through the portal windows on the kitchen doors. The quartet on stage was directly in our field of vision. "That's Milton on the sax. He's really good, ain't he?"
"Yes, he is." I nodded, knowing I was about to feel incredibly guilty.
"You guys know 'em?"
"No," I said.
"Met him once," said George.
"I don't wanna say who has it worst where, but how do you think it feels to be Milton?" Milton kept on playing his sax in the next room, just as he had been. Milton was black.
"Shut up," said Sonny.
***
I was sitting in George's office the Sunday after. Em, Sonny, and developed a habit of hanging around there when we we're working ourselves. He was somewhere else in the station being neurotic. Emily was God knows where and Sonny had been in the bathroom for the better part of fifteen minutes. Somehow I had gotten into my head that Sonny was quite useless, probably owing to his unfaithfulness. I didn't know how to make it up to him after the night in the kitchen of Joe's.
"We are the only precinct in this whole city with a telephone in the bathroom!" George stormed in. I was at his desk reading the newspaper.
"That's where they first installed the lines..." I defended, half- heartedly.
"Cops are so stupid," he shook his head. Poor George. He was more bewildered than usual today.
Sonny came in looking for his coffee and looking to pinch my paper.
"What took you so long?" I asked him.
"I was making a telephone call."
George waved his fist. "I hate this place."
"Why? You can makes calls from the john, Calvert. That's luxury." Sonny laughed. George glanced at my paper.
"I know you're both eying my paper. There's not a chance until I'm finished....don't even think about my cigarettes."
"Why stuff the chimney when it's cold outside?" George teased.
"Sometimes I wonder if these are very good for me," I mused looking down my current cigarette between my fingers.
"Breathing smoke in and out of your lungs...concept could use some thought. But eh, won't kill you," said Sonny. George leaned into my paper, reading it over my shoulder.
"I think A. Mitchell Palmer is the devil."
"Well," I said, "you are the Commie." I winked at him. Sonny didn't see.
Emily scuttled in and shut the door behind her.
"Eleventh Avenue!" she whispered.
"What is it, Dawson?" George said low. The men gathered on either side of me as Emily leaned over the other side of the desk. We all huddled together as she rambled off information.
"A warehouse on Eleventh Avenue. Irving works for a guy named Hans Martin. Most of the bootleggers run everything to a warehouse on Eleventh Avenue." Sonny shifted himself uncomfortably. The man who shot Mary McBride, and subsequently as I later found out, Sonny's brother Carmine, worked for Hans Martin.
"That's amazing, kid. How big is Martin, do you know?"
"I dunno. Big I guess. The warehouse is a big deal–if it's all Irving's cracking it up to be. Not just booze, opium, marijuana, cocaine, and something that begins with an 'h.' Shit I ain't touchin' that's for sure. But they can make big money off of it. I'm gonna wait till I can see it myself."
"That's dangerous," George warned.
"Please," Emily huffed.
"I'm looking out for your safety. I'm a friend before I'm a cop. Watch yourself."
"Listen, I know I can do this. Just let me play around with Irving for a while. I know we can do this. We can get this guy. I can feel it. I have Irving," she gripped the air with her hand emphatically, "and I know we can–"
"Calvert!" Captain Barnes, George's boss, burst in ungracefully.
"Barnes!" George tried to straighten himself up as if he hadn't just been huddling secretively.
"Am I interrupting something?" Barnes folded his arms suspiciously.
"Aw, shucks!" Emily sighed, "you interrupted our Bolshevik party meeting!"
"Don't you even speak it, Miss Dawson! Calvert, I want a word with you no later than tomorrow!" He slammed the door and left.