agents don’t accept bribes, Miss Kelly.”
“You don’t say? Because a little birdie tells me they’d be the first.”
“They’re good men with families. Wives and children.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have a wife and children, Mr. Anson?”
A slow blink, like a reptile. “That’s a personal question, Miss Kelly.”
“Oh, I see! I’m the one who’s supposed to spill all the beans in this room, isn’t that right, while you get to keep your beans to yourself. Seems you’ve got a nice little racket of your own, Anson. A nice little racket.”
He breathes in slow, regular drafts from a pair of gargantuan lungs. Fresh coffee on his breath and nothing else, not tobacco nor liquor nor money, just good clean virtue.
“You see? It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? There was this painter I used to sleep with, when I first came to New York. A real wisenheimer. He taught me about a lot of things. He taught me all about perspective. How you can change the essence of an object, the soul of it, you can change this thing entirely just by looking on it some different way. But you know what? I’ll bet you already knew that. Something tells me you know a lot about art, don’t you, Mr. Anson? Expensive art, the kind they hang in museums and fancy Fifth Avenue apartments. You know from perspective, I’ll bet.”
“I understand the concept.”
“You think you’re the good guy, don’t you, Mr. Anson? You think you’re some kind of honest-to-goodness knight, riding into River Junction on your fine white charger to do away with that dastardly villain with the twirling mustache. Cover yourself with medals. Laurels on your head, damsels on your arm. I wonder what you’d say if you knew how it looks from where I’m sitting.”
“So tell me.”
I turn a little on my hip on that chair, so we’re face-to-face, terribly intimate, the way you turn to your lover in bed. Prop my elbow on the back of the chair. Drape one leg over the other. His knee’s no more than an inch from my own.
“Why, you look exactly the same, you and my stepfather. You take me by surprise. Haul me to your lair. Corner me where I can’t strike back. Hold someone dear over my head, just to make sure I play along. You and Duke, you just want to get a little something out of me, whether I like it or not, and you don’t ever mean to pay me back for my trouble.”
Well, if I was hoping to get a little flicker out of him, some sign of impact, forget it. You might as well chip emotion from a glacier. Just those wintry eyes, staring at me. Those fingers hanging downward from his thigh, thick and knobbled. Scar on his chin. On his forehead. Lashes black and plentiful. The room throbs around us, the city throbs around the room. A block or two away, the boats skate silently across the Hudson River, hauling in booze, hauling in contraband everything in an unstoppable swarm, like the skeeters back home, too small and quick and clever for you to swat.
Without warning, the fingers flex. A few quick strikes, like the twitches of a dying man.
“I have neither wife nor children, Miss Kelly,” he says. “Your turn.”
“All right. Here’s my turn: Duke Kelly’s a cold-blooded bastard, and I’ll turn myself in at the nearest precinct before I trundle back to River Junction like some poor sucker and help you catch him.”
“I see. And what if you’re not the poor sucker heading for jail?”
“Then I don’t give a damn either way.”
“Are you sure about that? Isn’t there someone in this town you care about?” He leans forward an inch or two and says, low and slow, “Someone even now enjoying the hospitality of the New York City Police Department.”
“You mean Billy.”
He doesn’t answer that. Why should he? Just returns my stare. Exchanges my breath for his. I’ll say one thing: he’s got a handsome set of eyelashes, the only soft thing about him. So light at the tips, I want to dust them with my pinky finger, ever so gently. For some reason, this idea soothes the pulse at the base of my neck, the one that has a nervous tendency to gallop off like a runaway horse at the mention of my stepfather’s name. The ringing clears from my eardrums. Thoughts fall back into place. Bright, crisp, useful little thoughts.
“Now, Mr. Anson. We both know you can’t make a thing stick to my Billy-boy. Don’t you know what family he belongs to? The Marshalls?”
There is a slight pause. “I have an idea.”
“Pillars of society. Patrons of every charity between here and Albany. Pals with every pol at every poker table in town. All Billy has to do is make a telephone call to dear old Pater and he’s a free man. Why, I’ll bet you a bottle of genuine Dewar’s he’s a free man already. Trundling on back to Princeton, New Jersey, this minute, in the backseat of Pater’s Packard limousine. What do you say to that?”
Anson shoots straight to the ceiling. Plants his hands on his hips. Ignites the nerves behind his eyeballs. Parts his lips like he’s got a lot to say to that, sister, and none of it good.
But the seconds tick on, one after another, and nothing comes out from between those two poised lips. Just the furious whir of second thoughts in the tumblers of his brain. Then the slow unstiffening of the muscles of his face, not what you’d call movement, not even a change of expression—he hasn’t got any of those, remember?—but a kind of deflation, a loosening of the skin. Maybe his shoulders sink a little, I don’t know. But the eyes stay bright.
“I guess I’d say you’re probably right about that.”
“So you got nothing.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“In fact, I do believe this entire hullaballoo constitutes nothing more than a bluff on your part, doesn’t it, Mr. Anson? Be honest, now. Just a noisy show to try and scare a poor working girl who’s done nothing worse tonight than order herself a glass of honest sweet milk from the wrong establishment.”
Long, lazy pause. Like the ocean holding its breath before the turn of the tide. And then. So quiet, it’s almost a whisper:
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
I rise slowly, untangling my legs as I go, allowing my skirt to fall back into place and my limbs to lengthen. I cross my hands behind my back and keep on rising, right up to my tiptoes, so my nose nearly brushes the brute end of Mr. Anson’s chin.
“Why, if I wanted to raise a big stink, I could take this whole affair straight to the top, couldn’t I? I could show off all my bruises. Weep and wring my little old hands. If Billy were to hear of this, for example …” I shrug my shoulders, such that Mr. Anson’s silk-lined jacked slides across my skin.
He stares down his nose and mutters, “Good old Billy.”
“Yes. So what do you say we come to a little arrangement, Mr. Anson? A little proposal of my own.”
“What kind of arrangement, Miss Kelly?”
“So simple, even an honest fellow like you can understand it. It’s like this. You take me
