"Then they throw them in the river."
Joe's scalp and the backs of his ears itched. "Quite the occupation."
"Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn't it?"
For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.
"Say something clever," Emma Gould said. "Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever."
Joe said nothing.
"And while you're thinking of things," Emma Gould said, "think of this - they're watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won't make the stairs."
He looked at the earlobe she'd indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chickpea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.
Joe glanced down at the bar. "And if I pull this trigger?"
She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he'd placed between them.
"You won't reach your earlobe," he said.
Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the center of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.
"I get off at midnight," she said.
Chapter Two
The Lack in Her
Joe lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse in the West End, just a short walk from the riot of Scollay Square. The boardinghouse was owned and operated by the Tim Hickey Mob, which had long had a presence in the city but had flourished in the six years since the Eighteenth Amendment took effect.
The first floor was usually occupied by Paddys right off the boat with woolen brogues and bodies of gristle. One of Joe's jobs was to meet them at the docks and lead them to Hickey-owned soup kitchens, give them brown bread and white chowder and gray potatoes. He brought them back to the boardinghouse where they were packed three to a room on firm, clean mattresses while their clothes were laundered in the basement by the older whores. After a week or so, once they'd gotten some strength back and freed their hair of nits and their mouths of poisoned teeth, they'd sign voter registration cards and pledge bottomless support to Hickey candidates in next year's elections. Then they were set loose with the names and addresses of other immigrants from the same villages or counties back home who might be counted on to find them jobs straightaway.
On the second floor of the boardinghouse, accessible only by a separate entrance, was the casino. The third was the whore floor. Joe lived on the fourth, in a room at the end of the hall. There was a nice bathroom on the floor that he shared with whichever high rollers were in town at the moment and Penny Palumbo, the star whore of Tim Hickey's stable. Penny was twenty-five but looked seventeen and her hair was the color bottled honey got when the sun moved through it. A man had jumped off a roof over Penny Palumbo; another had stepped off a boat; a third, instead of killing himself, killed another guy. Joe liked her well enough; she was nice and wonderful to look at. But if her face looked seventeen, he'd bet her brain looked ten. It was solely occupied, as far as Joe could tell, by three songs and some vague wishes about becoming a dressmaker.
Some mornings, depending on who got down to the casino first, one brought the other coffee. This morning, she brought it to him and they sat by the window in his room looking out at Scollay Square with its striped awnings and tall billboards as the first milk trucks puttered along Tremont Row. Penny told him that last night a fortune-teller had assured her she was destined to either die young or become a Trinitarian Pentecostal in Kansas. When Joe asked her if she was worried about dying, she said sure, but not half as much as moving to Kansas.
When she left, he heard her talking to someone in the hall, and then Tim Hickey was standing in his doorway. Tim wore a dark pinstripe vest, unbuttoned, matching trousers, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and no tie. Tim was a trim man with a fine head of white hair and the sad, helpless eyes of a death row chaplain.
"Mr. Hickey, sir."
"Morning, Joe." He drank coffee from an old-fashioned glass that caught the morning light