The Lonely Hearts Hotel(100)

“Drown that thing in the bathtub,” said a gangster. “Jesus.”

Pierrot ignored him and stroked the cat’s head. The cat was all black, except for the lower half of its face, which was white, as if it were covered in shaving cream. “Hello, my darling. Well, we’re here no doubt to discuss pleasure in the most unpleasurable of manners. You’d best do something wicked in this life so that you don’t get reincarnated as a man. There’s nothing to walking on two legs. Highly overrated.”

The gangsters looked at Pierrot, who they were sure would have been murdered if he’d been a New Yorker. Why had this good-looking moll chosen this effeminate buffoon, they all wanted to know. But Jimmy understood why immediately. Because he allowed her to be free.

Rose and Jimmy just sat there looking into each other’s eyes. Then it clicked why McMahon hated her. And he suddenly knew something about McMahon that he hadn’t known before. He knew that McMahon was a certain type of man. McMahon was the type of man who had hated Jimmy’s mother. McMahon was the type of man who had looked down on Jimmy’s mother. He was the type of man whose lousy opinions had pushed Jimmy’s mother out the window.

Jimmy’s mother was all these amazing things. She was able to make him stop crying. She had drawn a tiny black cat on a piece of paper and she held it up to her face and made a meowing noise and it was just as if the drawing had come to life. She had put both of his socks on her hands and they told him about how much they enjoyed going for walks.

“Once a whore, always a whore,” she had said to Jimmy the day before she leaped out a window.

Jimmy surprised everybody in the room by saying: “When that clown walked off the tightrope, what was that supposed to mean? Like, that he might be a bum but he had highfalutin thoughts?”

“Exactly,” Rose answered. “He thinks that he’s confined by a social order, but he’s not confined.”

“How come you guys have so many clowns in your show?”

Rose turned to Pierrot, offering him the opportunity to answer. He was just sitting there, looking rather uncomfortable and upset by the men around him, as though he were still on the side of the cat. He found it difficult to even look at Jimmy Bonaventura. He couldn’t get the image of all the things that the mob boss had done out of his head. He knew that a lot of people saw Jimmy Bonaventura as a romantic figure. Look at all he had. He had started off with nothing at all, and now he ran the greatest city on earth. Was this the American dream, then? At what expense did it come? Could a person only become wealthy if they had no regard for anyone but themselves?

“Je vais t’attendre dehors,” he said to Rose in French, because he wanted to speak to her and no one else in the room.

“Why do we have so many clowns? You weren’t careful in the 1920s,” Rose went on, letting Pierrot leave. “You never thought that everything would get terrible again, and so you had no need to invest in sad clowns. In Montreal we understand that everything in life is seasonal. Winter is always going to come, and then summer is always going to come. You have to prepare yourself for the eventuality of every emotion. We’ve always had clowns.”

“They make a living off that?”

“Have you seen the reviews? This troupe is successful. We’ll be able to go back and forth across the border any number of times in the next year. It’s the perfect cover. The police are on to McMahon. It isn’t just this. They are always looking to catch him. They’ll never look at me. They’ll never think that a woman would be in charge. I’m a woman, so I’m invisible. I’ll never be a suspect.”

“Are you saying that you’ll never get caught?”

“No, we’ll all get caught eventually. And it’s only by accepting this that we can make any sort of bold decisions. Do you believe that?”

“I do. I never thought about it like that, though. You put things in a very intelligent way.”

“Once he’s dead, they’ll leave this all alone. Everything exists only within a temporal framework. Every clown knows that.”

Jimmy paused for a second, staring at the girl, needing a moment to take in what she had just proposed to him. Then he said, “Are there other people who speak like you in Montreal? In Montreal are you considered unique?”

“For a woman, yes.”

She gently leaned across his desk and took a piece of paper off a stack and a pencil from the jar. She felt confident. There was something magical about a piece of paper and a pencil. It was with them that all the new things of the world happened. She began to map out on the paper a diagram of downtown Montreal and its crime organization and holdings. She began to draw all the different nightclubs; all the little theaters; all the narrow backstreets; all the boulangeries, with their tiny pastries in the window; and the hospital, with all the newborns in the cribs. She made everything into a little grid, as seen from up above. The whole city was like a seamstress’s box, with everything divided up into its proper compartments.

It was as though she were laying out her entire city and childhood for Jimmy. When she drew the hotels, he could see her standing in her stockings over a little blue sink, brushing her teeth. When she drew the café, he saw her eating chocolate pudding and reading an Honoré de Balzac novel in it. When she drew the church, he heard all the different confessions she had whispered into the ears of priests over the years. She was not at all afraid of this Montreal that she could fold up and fit into her pocket.