Siren Queen(14)

My parents taught me not to come calling empty-handed, and I hadn’t. Silently, I laid out a pack of cigarettes, a stack of novels, and twenty dollars, which I had held back from Jacko’s final payoff.

Mrs. Wiley hummed in satisfaction. She stowed the cigarettes and the cash somewhere in her voluminous purple caftan, piled the books on a table to the side, and nodded at me.

“I suppose someone taught you manners after all. All right, push me to the balcony and we’ll talk.”

I realized that she sat in a wicker wheelchair, which had been all but hidden before she gathered her caftan around her body. I cautiously pushed her to the open balcony, and turned to her there.

“All right. For what you gave me, I’ll tell you how things are. If you want me to tell you what you can do, that will be more. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said. I wondered grimly if I was being scammed, but I had few other options. I wasn’t going to wait for All Saints’ Day, not when Jacko was playing a game I could barely understand.

I told Mrs. Wiley what had happened, and somehow it turned into the story of everything that had come before. I told her about the laundry, and Jacko’s films on Baker Street, and about Maya Vos Santé and Irene Leonard and all the rest. Through it all, she watched me with those bright, bright eyes, and I didn’t think I had ever been watched like that before. Jacko was interested in what I could pretend to be. My mother watched me and silently worried about what I wasn’t. Mrs. Wiley looked at me searching for what I really was, and what she saw made her nod and smile grimly.

“Well, first, let’s talk about your man Jacko,” she said, tapping one hard finger thoughtfully on the cement balustrade. “He’s easy. If he had said to the studio that he had found a likely looking girl that could be the next Su Tong Lin…”

“I don’t want to be Su Tong Lin,” I interrupted petulantly, and she smiled.

“Shut up, sweetie. It doesn’t matter what you want, but I do agree. She was as soft and beautiful as sunlight, and that’s not you.

“If he had given any hint to the studio that you existed, you would have been snatched up and a paper-child contract with a few hundred dollars tied around her neck left in your place.”

I thought of the silk doll that my mother had made to replace me for my father. I think it was then that I decided for certain that I never wanted to have children, not if they were so disposable, so very easy to replace.

(“They’re not,” Jane said to me gently. “They’re really not.”

“If you say so.”

“You weren’t, either,” she said, and we had to stop talking for a while.)

“Jacko would have gotten something nice for you, I think,” Mrs. Wiley said, inspecting me carefully. “A choice picture, his pick of the stable, even a few good years, yes, but I think he saw something else he wanted more.”

Her eyes went distant and hard, and her free hand closed tight into a fist.

“He wants a queen all his own. He’s smart enough to know that he’ll never be a king, not in his own right. He’s no Oberlin Wolfe, no. However, queen’s consort? That’s a good road. That’s easy.”

“Consort to a queen…” I said hesitantly, wondering at the words. There was something ugly about the idea, and Mrs. Wiley nodded with a goblin smile.

“Oh, I think you have the right of it. He would hitch his star to yours, and my dear, I do mean hitch. You’re the girl he made, the one he fed on small parts and food service sandwiches. He’s dazzled you and brought you into this world, because he didn’t have to shoot all of those pictures on Baker Street, and I daresay that there are a dozen girls prettier than you walking around on Ord Street.”

It hurt less than you might think. “Pretty” was a word that could come before “chink bitch” just as easily as anything else. There probably were girls far prettier than me on Ord Street, but their parents kept them at Chinese school and temple, refusing to let them roam.

“He has plans to dangle you in front of the studios as the fresh new face—they get you if they keep him. He probably has a few on the line, and you’re the most likely. If you found out about me and came here to get information, I can even see why. In a year or so, he’ll probably marry you. Would you like that, I wonder?”

I certainly would not, and the disgust must have shown on my face. It made Mrs. Wiley laugh out loud.

“Smart girl. If he’s not dragging you up, he’s dragging you down.”

That wasn’t why I was so put off by the idea, but that didn’t matter.

“So I can be a studio changeling or Jacko Dewalt’s wife. Is that all?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Wiley said. “I sneaked into the midnight dances without a patron at all, and I had Wolfe, Everest, and Aegis all bidding for my hand by the end of the night.”

“I don’t dance,” I said disconsolately, and she laughed at me again.

“We’re not talking about you right now, dear. I danced so well that I could be dancing still if I hadn’t grown sick of it, but of course by then Elgin Aegis owned me from the chalet in Le Havre to the beautiful little bungalow in Brentwood. He owned my teeth too. Unfortunate legacy of a childhood spent eating gravel in my bread, I’m afraid, and they were rotting out of my head by the time I was twenty-four.”