Siren Queen(59)

“Two Mary Carlisles,” I said, and she raised a perfectly etched eyebrow at me.

“This ain’t the Knick, kiki,” she said, and Aguila frowned.

“She’s not a kiki, Lita. Lay off. Let’s say two Chicago fizzes, and maybe go easy on the water for once in your life.”

“Whatever you say.” Lita shrugged. “Though you know Alice don’t like you stepping out.”

“Huh, Alice,” Aguila snorted. “I don’t care what she thinks.”

“If you get me punched, I will leave you here,” I said. “I can’t even kick in these shoes.”

She led me back to a cracked leatherette booth at the rear of the roadhouse. Though I could feel people regarding me over the tops of their drinks, it was a relief to put my back to the wall and to sip at what turned out to be a fairly good Chicago fizz. It was cold and lemony, and the gin wasn’t even so bad. I carefully didn’t think of the stuff that Harry kept locked in a walnut cabinet, pure juniper and shivery ice.

“Oh just ignore Lita,” Aguila said with a wave of her hand. “She’s always nervous about folks unless they’ve been coming for a while.”

“What’s a kiki, anyway?”

“You know,” Aguila said, tilting her hand back and forth like a seesaw.

“I don’t.”

“I thought … you and Emmaline Sauvignon and Caroline Carlsson…”

“No. And Caroline Carlsson’s gone back to Sweden.”

Greta wrote to me haphazardly from their homestead north of the Ume River. She and her pale-haired daughter sounded as if they were thriving; Lawrence was still adjusting to the long nights and thin days. She wondered to me, brooding, if he had left something vital in Los Angeles, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if they could come back and get it. A heart of Norrland ash wood would have to suffice for a crown of stars, and only time would tell how well he could bear it.

Caroline Carlsson missed the snow too much to ever work again, was what the studio put out, and that was true enough.

“Well, a kiki’s a girl who’s not all…” She pointed at herself in shocking red. “Or all…”

She pointed towards a tall, lean woman in a slightly dated brown suit, fedora pushed back on her dark head. She didn’t have the close-cropped hair some of the other women sported, but instead slicked it to one side in an Eton crop, already a little out of date. She saw Aguila’s nod and lifted her drink to us with a slight smile.

“Neither fish nor fowl,” I said. It was a position I knew well enough.

“Well, more like a narc,” she said. “She’ll get over it. Especially if you come often. Thursdays are the only time it’s all women, but the men ain’t so bad. Little safer, too, if a raid comes up and you can switch partners fast.”

“Would you like it if I came often?” I asked, trying a smile.

Aguila started to say something, but then her eyes lit up and she flew out of the booth to a powerfully built Black woman in a pinstripe suit. I stared, and when their kiss got past conciliatory, I tilted my head back against the cushioned booth and shut my eyes. My mind, when I tried to focus on anything that wasn’t right in front of me, was the buzz of a dead channel over the radio.

“This seat taken?”

I opened my eyes without moving my head. It was the woman with the Eton crop, and now I could see the broad set of her shoulders and the serious set of her face. She didn’t look like someone who laughed easily, and that suited me just fine at the moment.

“Not at all. If you want to take her drink, too, go ahead. It doesn’t look like she’s got much need for it.”

The woman smiled slightly and took Aguila’s fizz. I watched as she rolled the glass between her long fingers before bringing it to her lips. When she joined me in the booth, she sat on my side rather than across from me.

“You’ve never come here before,” she said, a statement and not a question.

“No. I didn’t know places like this existed.”

She tilted her head, watching me like I was an interesting bird or insect that had rolled into her backyard.

“Most people who make it here are a little happier than that.”

“I’m not sure I’m a happy person,” I said, and when that sounded a little too much like a line Scottie Mannheim would write, I added, “Aguila brought me here. I needed to be away for a little while.”

“Well, dear, this is away all right. I’ll say thank you for Aguila’s drink and move on if you want to be away and alone…”

I surprised myself by reaching for her hand, pressing it down to the table under mine. She was cool to the touch, but then I realized that that was because I was warm. It was as if the Santa Anas had blown a curl of fire into me, and now it was eating me carefully from the inside. She glanced at the white bandages that I had wrapped around my palms at the studio, covering the wounds the wires had given me, but she said nothing.

“No, stay. I’m not going to talk much right now, but stay.”

I sounded imperious, and she snorted a little, but nodded and leaned back against the seat. One arm came out to drape over the booth behind my head, not around my shoulders, but corralling me close nonetheless.

She sent one of the rare waitresses for a vodka on the rocks, and she sipped it with one foot slung up on the seat across from us. She seemed as inclined to quiet as I was, and as I watched her, she watched the room, the groups of women gathered at the shadowed edges, the couples that didn’t so much dance as rock slowly in each other’s arms. There was a record on, and Joey Fletcher’s sweet, soulful voice floated over us, telling us she’d never lie to us, make us cry, or deny us.