The Dilemma
The Dilemma
The door slammed in my face.
A cold breeze flapped the
corners of my overcoat, and I quickly reached up to keep my hat
atop my head.
My lady’s maid Amelia Dewey
sighed. “I’m sorry, mum.”
Carriages and horses, women and
men passed by, never giving me a glance. The wooden banister
snagged my glove as I descended the cracked steps. The midmorning
light was weak, thin, pale.
Amelia glanced around. “Do we
go on?”
Did I have any choice? “We go
on.”
But it was much the same on
24th Street as on all the rest. The response varied from fearful
curtsies to angry curses. The answer still was no.
No, they didn’t need an
investigator.
No, they knew no one who
might.
No, I couldn’t come in.
“Fucking Pot rag” was the most
blunt way it’d been expressed, but their eyes all said it.
The worst was on West 4th, when
an old widow woman offered me charity. Even in the Pot I wasn’t a
beggar, nor — as some put it — a new way for the Spadros Family to
gouge their quadrant.
I wasn’t so far gone as to take
their pity.
We returned home for luncheon.
My butler, Blitz Spadros, opened the door for us. “Any luck?”
I sighed, shook my head, went
past him into our home.
It was a good place, those few
apartments. Now that I think of it, the place was built to be a
boarding house. An entry, a small parlor through a door to the
right. My two rooms lay to the left: the front one my bedroom, the
next my office, each with their own bath and toilet. Another
unoccupied room lay beyond that.
Straight ahead, stairs rose to
a large room which had picture windows overlooking the street.
Behind the parlor, a door led to our kitchen. The hall beside the
stairs passed first the kitchen (accessible through a door to the
right). Then the hall passed our empty room and turned behind the
kitchen to the rooms Blitz and his wife Mary shared. A closet
nestled under the stair.
The building was a duplex: our
half faced onto 33 1/3 Street. It had a side door from the kitchen,
which opened onto an alley barely wide enough to walk down.
This was all I owned in the
world, and if something didn’t happen soon, I’d lose it too.
I went through the parlor into
the kitchen. My housekeeper Mary stirred a pot of soup. We often
had soup these days.
Mary Spadros was a pretty woman
of one and twenty, with pale skin and straight light brown hair.
She smiled when she saw me. “Almost ready.”
I slumped into a chair. “It
smells wonderful.”
Amelia came in. She now wore
her maid’s uniform, black with white hat and apron. “Mum, you need
out of these clothes.”
I let out a snort of amusement.
“Always wanting to change me.”
“You’ll feel better once you’re
into something comfortable.”
I did feel better, especially
once my corset came off. I hated the thing. Even as a child, I
hated anything which tried to constrain me.
We sat around the small kitchen
table, Amelia bustling about to serve our soup and bread. A bit of
graying black hair had fallen from its bundle under her hat to lie
damp along her pale doughy cheek. While she placed my food
precisely, she was more careless with Blitz and Mary’s items. A bit
of soup slopped over the side of Mary’s bowl onto the white lace
tablecloth.
Mary rolled her eyes, but not
so Amelia might see.
I said, “Won’t you have a cup,
Amelia?”
“I may.” She ladled the
steaming liquid into a wide mug. “I’ll sit on the back stair.”
Amelia would seldom join us —
sitting at the table with your “betters” was apparently forbidden
to servants in Bridges. But this didn’t bother me today. Amelia had
made it quite clear that her first loyalty was to my husband,
Anthony Spadros.
And Tony didn’t need to know
about this.
Once she’d closed the door, I
asked, “What’s our situation?”
Blitz put his elbows on the
table. “We have this month’s Family fees. We have enough to pay for
your medication. And for food, if we’re careful. The main problem
is the property tax.”
When Dame Anastasia Louis left
me the deed to the building after her murder, it was about to be
sold for back taxes. So his words disturbed me.
“Fortunately, it isn’t due for
a few months yet.” He glanced aside. “Sawbuck should be here today
with your allotment.”
Tony sent money each month by
way of his first cousin Ten Hogan (who everyone called Sawbuck),
supposedly for “all I needed” — the minimum required by law for a
woman “of my station.” But it was much less than the Court had
provided during my trial.
We’d had to replace the parlor
windows several times after rocks and bricks were thrown in. A fine
metal mesh placed outside the lower windows, held up two feet away
by rods of iron thrust deep into the earth, stopped that. But we
were still making payments for the work.
And I owed Mr. Doyle Pike — the
lawyer who’d saved my life — a great deal. Aside from a few cases
which were little more than messenger service, I’d earned nothing.
I had no idea how to pay the thousands of dollars I still owed him.
It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life.
After the trial, Mr. Pike
immediately filed a lawsuit against the city for everything he
could think of: false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, libel,
failure to protect me whilst in custody. That last one almost got
me killed.
We did everything the judge
asked, yet one day Mr. Pike brought bad news. “The Four Families
want no more scandal. The court has been instructed to delay until
we give up.” Mr. Pike had patted my hand, yet I could see his
disappointment. “My dear, I can pursue this further if you wish.
But it’ll be less costly, both to your pocketbook and reputation,
if we stop now.”
I had no money to pay what I
already owed him, much less continue on. But he’d shown no
inclination to forgive the debt. Each time Mr. Pike had come
calling since then, I’d told Blitz to inform him I was not at home.
And I hadn’t answered any of his letters. But I knew how this
worked: eventually, he’d tire of being polite and hire
enforcers.
Anyone Mr. Pike hired would
hesitate to attack me, if only out of fear of the Spadros
syndicate. But there were many ways to make my life miserable which
didn’t involve physical violence.
Blitz and Mary looked glum.
They were living on the little they’d been able to save before they
married and left Spadros Manor. I’d forbidden them to spend any of
that on me, or if they did, to keep an accounting. But I knew
they’d spent their money anyway — we still had meat in our soup,
after all.
Blitz — also Tony’s cousin —
had been his night footman. Mary — the daughter of Tony’s butler —
had been Tony’s maid. But since Blitz and Mary left Spadros Manor
to become my staff, Tony seemed not to care if they starved.
As one of Spadros Manor’s
servants, Amelia had plenty. And I wondered if this was deliberate,
a way for Tony to show what I could have — if I would only return
to him.
Was he truly that petty?
Mary rested her hand upon mine.
“You’ll find someone who needs your help, mum. I know you
will.”
People were always telling me
to “go back to the Pot.” It was times like this that made me wonder
if they weren’t right to say that after all.
I couldn’t spare a penny up and back several
times a day for taxi-carriages, so my feet hurt most of the time.
After our brief luncheon, I sat in my bedroom, put my feet up, and
counted my business cards. One hundred twenty-seven left of the 500
I’d bought before the trial, with no way to purchase more.
I’d sent a card to my former
dressmaker Madame Marie Biltcliffe (who used to arrange cases for
me, until we’d fallen out) and received no answer. My best friend
Jonathan Diamond had pinned my cards in places where families of
the accused gathered and given one to every attorney in the
city.
I wiggled my toes inside my
boots. Twenty-three years old, and not much to show for it.
My birthday had come and gone,
with my few retainers and the smallest Yule log for company. And
every day, from the time I woke to the time I fell asleep, I wanted
a drink. I wasn’t sure that would ever leave me.
But I was free. I had a roof
over my head, and my stomach was full. The steam pipes worked and
the lighting too. I hadn’t frozen over the winter.
All I needed was a job.
I lit a cigarette and read a
day-old copy of the
Bridges Daily
Amelia had brought from
Spadros Manor.
The new Mayor, Mr. Chase
Freezout, seemed to be recovering from the terrible beating my
father-in-law Roy Spadros gave him on the courthouse steps in early
November.
At the Grand Ball on New Year’s
Eve, Mayor Freezout had given a brief speech from a rolling chair
at the top of the balcony. But he hadn’t been seen in public until
now. According to the paper, he made a proclamation — “firmly
grasping the lectern” — to denounce the “ruffians plaguing this
city.”
I imagined Mayor Freezout
referred to someone other than the Four Families. The sight of the
police standing idly by as he was beaten bloody by the Spadros
Family Patriarch on the Courthouse steps couldn’t have failed to
make an impression.
Inventor Etienne Hart and his
mother Judith had moved from their ancestral home at the racetrack
to a mansion on 190th Street, Hart quadrant, right next door to
Mayor Freezout’s former home. The paper said the new Hart property
was being heavily guarded.
I could only imagine. At the
time, I felt certain Mrs. Hart was being questioned most
thoroughly. She’d almost caused a war between the Spadros and Hart
quadrants. But what would her husband Charles Hart do? As Patriarch
of the Hart Family, he couldn’t let a scandal of this magnitude go
unpunished.
Inexplicably, Roy Spadros
hadn’t pursued the matter. Which was odd, because Roy hated Charles
Hart more than anything else.
And why had Judith Hart turned
against me in the first place?
From all my observations, she
believed I was her husband’s lover. The idea repulsed me — the man
was old enough to be my grandfather! And while perhaps Mr. Hart had
some feeling towards me, we had firmly resolved the matter. I
regarded him as a rather dangerous but highly useful
acquaintance.
But clearly Mrs. Hart was in
league with the notorious Red Dog Gang, who’d tormented me and the
Spadros Family for over a year now. District Attorney Freezout —
now Mayor — indicated after the trial that Mrs. Judith Hart had
been part of his framing me for the zeppelin bombing.
Could the motivation for all
the crimes the Red Dog Gang had committed — kidnapping, blackmail,
theft, murder — possibly be as simple as Mrs. Hart’s jealousy?
I laughed aloud at the idea.
You didn’t bomb a zeppelin, killing hundreds of people, because
your husband was in love with another woman. It was absurd.
So there had to be much more at
stake. But what?
I sat up, squared my business
cards, and put them in their case. If we were to survive, I had
work to do.
I’d made it down 24th Street.
With any luck, Amelia and I might visit the east half of 25th
before darkness fell.
The bell rang.
I reached my door just as Blitz
knocked. “Sawbuck’s here.”
I opened the door; Blitz
stepped back, startled. Sawbuck loomed behind Blitz in the open
doorway.
While the money was welcome,
Sawbuck, not so much. I leaned on the door-frame. “Master Ten
Hogan. What a pleasant surprise.”
Sawbuck flicked out a dollar
bill. “Here’s your cash.”
I almost laughed. A dollar.
“Why doesn’t he come himself?”
Sawbuck hadn’t moved, the
dollar still standing upright between his fingers. At my words, his
face darkened. “Why do you think?”
He flicked the dollar into the
air, and it fluttered down. “I’ve done my duty,” he snapped, and
stalked out.
Blitz picked up the dollar. “It
seems Mr. Anthony has had a bad day.”
That made sense. Sawbuck was
utterly devoted to Tony, and had not forgiven me for leaving Tony
the way I had.
The horror on Tony’s face when
he saw me and Joseph Kerr together that night in my study swam in
front of my eyes. “I imagine so.”
But I had to focus on today.
“Amelia.”
She emerged. “Yes, mum?”
My feet hurt terribly, but I
could think of no other options. “Let’s see how far we get on
25th.”