The Americans Read online

  She laid her palm against his perspiring cheek. He felt sublime, sinful, drained, grown up. Her smile had a touch of sadness. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it was very nice indeed. Madam Melba doesn’t require me to say that, you know. Here”—she drew his head down on her bony shoulder—“we still have a few minutes. Rest.”

  Even though his eyes were closed, Will quickly came back to a sense of where he was. Madam Melba’s was located on a sparsely settled dirt street between the river and the university. Only a couple of nearby cottages were visible in the fog. Weed-infested vacant lots adjoined the bordello on either side, and water filled deep ruts at the foot of the ramshackle steps out in front. The house itself was clapboard, with heavy curtains at every window to hide the business conducted inside.

  Once through the front door, the depressing effect of the fog and the dark was banished, replaced by sounds and sights that soothed and pleased the senses. Polite laughter blended with dazzling piano arpeggios. All the gas fixtures made a soft glow through their glass bowls. The mingled scents of powder, perfume, and cigarette smoke gave the air a languorous quality.

  Madam Melba was a proper, spinsterish woman in a high-necked gown. She had greeted the arriving students gravely and even pecked Joe Marchant’s cheek as if she were his maiden aunt.

  From the foyer they’d moved to the parlor, where the smoke and the perfume were much heavier. Girls lounged in their undergarments, nonchalant and overpoweringly sensual.

  Will vividly remembered the first look that had passed between him and Aggie. He also remembered something that marred the otherwise pleasant picture. A huge, flatfaced man was posted beside a table just this side of the hallway leading to the rooms. The man took Will’s money and gave him a surly look. In the hack, Marchant had issued a warning about the man.

  “She has a big Hungarian working for her. Don’t say anything smart to him. He hates the college crowd, and they say he’s killed three or four men right here in Boston.”

  Tonight the flat-faced man had a great many targets for his hostility. Harvard students made up most of Madam Melba’s trade. Whether or not the fellow was indeed Hungarian didn’t much matter. By looks and by occupation, he qualified for the name, which was widely if inaccurately used, especially by newspapers. Criminals whose origins couldn’t be identified easily were always Hungarians. If not that, Slavs.

  Watching Aggie walk ahead of him down the hall, Will realized he’d picked the only woman in the place with hair the color of Dolores Wertman’s—

  Dolores. Her face floated in his mind as he drowsed on Aggie’s shoulder. He could almost imagine it was Dolores who had responded so ardently to his lovemaking.

  The thought of Dolores triggered an explosion of shame. Aggie felt the sudden tension in his body. She shifted her head far enough to get a view of his face. She touched his cheek again.

  “What a guilty look you have! Didn’t you enjoy—?”

  “Very much,” he broke in. He didn’t want her feeling bad.

  “But you’re red as an apple. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  The lie was obvious. Trying to put him at ease, she snuggled closer. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  He managed to gather his nerve and say with a shy smile, “It was just—so easy to love you.”

  “Did you think it would be hard, or complicated?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Love should be easy. Pleasant. With no remorse afterward.”

  His color deepened. “That isn’t what I was brought up to believe.”

  “Ah. That’s it. Half the boys who come here have the same problem. Well”—another reassuring pat—“you don’t have to rush to the altar just because we made love. It may work like that elsewhere, but not in here.”

  He was embarrassed that she’d guessed his secret thoughts. He had indeed been thinking that a respectable girl, compromised this way, would have sobbed and demanded that he marry her in return for what she had given him in a moment of weakness. And his own conscience would have insisted that he do what the girl, and society, said was only ri—

  A crash brought his eyes open. From down the hall, he heard an angry shout. Aggie sat up and pressed her palm against his chest.

  “Lie still. I’ll see what’s wrong.”

  Naked, her thinness pitifully evident, she ran to the door and peered out. Both of them heard loud voices—a man’s and a woman’s, the latter shrill and vindictive. Instantly, he had a sense of danger.

  Aggie shut the door, leaned against it and scratched herself. “Nothing serious. Just a small dispute down the hall.”

  But it didn’t sound small to him. The woman screamed an obscenity. The floor vibrated as someone or something fell. Boots pounded. Someone was in trouble. Maybe a fellow student. He remembered the Hungarian. If one student got in trouble, all of them might—

  He pushed up from the bed. “Let me take a look.”

  Aggie protested but he ignored her. He pulled on his drawers, then his pants. With a nervous glance at his face, she moved away from the door.

  Heart hammering, Will lifted the latch and stepped into the dim hall.

  ii

  Two doors down, a wiry, curly-haired young man with a towel around his middle was confronting a naked blonde with shoulders and thighs as big as an ironworker’s. She towered over her customer, but he wasn’t intimidated.

  “I saw you reach for my wallet.”

  “Damn liar!” the blonde retorted. Marchant poked his head out of another door. Noticing Will, the blonde said to him, “You should have heard what he asked me to do for him. Or with him. I’m not sure which. I said no, so now he’s accusing me—”

  “Of being a thief!” the curly-haired young man broke in.

  Madam Melba hove into view at the end of the hall, followed by the lumbering thug with the flattened face. He unbuttoned his shabby jacket to show a billy club in his belt.

  Madam Melba stepped between the quarreling pair, shoving each of them roughly. “I’ll have no disorderly behavior in this establishment, Mr. Pennel. My unofficial truce with the college is a very delicate one. Now explain yourself.”

  “I don’t deny I was asking for—something special,” the student said. “I’d have paid. What I wanted doesn’t change’ what she did. She tried to steal my money.”

  Will leaned against the wall, watching the flat-faced man, who was glowering at the angry customer. Pennel, Will thought. A familiar name. But he couldn’t place it.

  Madam Melba dismissed the accusation with one word. “Nonsense.” She put her arm around the blonde’s pudgy waist. “Alice is the newest of our girls, but I screen every applicant most carefully. I run an honest house, and you and all the other young gentlemen from Harvard know I do, Mr. Pennel.”

  “Maybe I know it, but she doesn’t,” Pennel shot back.

  The flat-faced man was fingering the billy club. The corridor was growing crowded as whores and their customers popped out of the cubicles. The situation might have eased if Pennel hadn’t made one last statement.

  “I’m going to have the authorities look into this place.”

  Madam Melba’s gaze grew chill. “Be careful about uttering threats like that, young man. We can’t afford to treat them lightly.”

  “You damn well better not! I’m getting out of here and going to the police.”

  He spun and started back into his cubicle. Madam Melba pondered only a moment. She waved to summon her helper.

  “You’d better do a little something to dissuade him, Rudy.”

  A smile spread over the thug’s face. He yanked the billy from his belt and sauntered toward the door of the cubicle, pleased to be the center of attention.

  Will was alarmed to see that none of the students moved to help Pennel. In a place like this, trouble for one of them meant trouble for all. Maybe a few conciliatory words could avert it. Impulsively, he stepped forward.

  The thu
g stopped and glared. Will slid past him, blocking the doorway. Inside the cubicle, Pennel was scrambling into his clothes.

  It took all the courage Will possessed to look past the flat-faced man and say to Madam Melba, “Give him a chance to calm down. Maybe we can get him out of here and avoid a muss.”

  Madam Melba was clearly anxious for a peaceful settlement. She rushed to Will’s side. “You mean no reports to the police?”

  “I don’t know Mr. Pennel personally, so I can’t promise. But I’ll certainly talk to him. If there’s fighting, someone else in the neighborhood will call the police, and then we’re all in dutch. I don’t think anyone here wants to be involved in a scandal—”

  Other students in the hall murmured anxious agreement. Headlines flashed into Will’s mind. LAW INVADES SPORTING HOUSE. PUBLISHER’S SON ARRESTED. What did they do to you at the medical school for such an offense? Dismiss you, most likely.

  “Please, Madam Melba, give me a chance to talk to him.”

  The flat-faced man didn’t like the interference. He grabbed Will’s shoulder. “I’ll do the talking that needs to be done here.”

  Will put a palm against the man’s left arm, to hold him back. “Let her answer me before you—”

  “Don’t shove me, you college fucker,” the man shouted. Before Madam Melba could step in, he slammed the billy against the side of Will’s head.

  CHAPTER VI

  MARCUS

  i

  WILL CRASHED BACKWARD INTO the wall. Flimsy paneling broke. He reached high over his head, snatching at a gas fixture to keep from falling. The blowsy blonde lunged at him, hands forming claws. “Little bastard! Who asked you to interfere?” she shrieked.

  The flat-faced man flung her aside and rammed the end of the billy into Will’s left hip. A little higher and it might have done serious damage. But it glanced off bone and gave him time to grab the thug’s wrist.

  An unexpected twist of the wrist loosened the big man’s grip. The stick fell. Will caught it. The thug fisted his hand and launched a punch that could have broken Will’s neck if it had landed. Will ducked. The man’s hand smashed a hole in the wall and disappeared up to the elbow.

  Will hit the back of the man’s neck with the billy. The thug yelled, his arm tearing strips of wood from the wall as he staggered away. Will helped him along by ramming the billy into his groin. The man crashed against the opposite wall, screaming like a gored animal.

  Madam Melba had abandoned all pretense of gentility. “Carrie, fetch my horse pistol! I’ll show these rich brats they can’t tear up my house.”

  The naked blonde kicked Will’s shin and clawed his face. One nail nicked his left eye, momentarily blinding him. She tore the stick out of his hand turned, and sought another target. Joe Marchant was hurrying to help Will at last. The blonde hit Marchant’s head three times. The last blow broke the billy. The young medical student went down in a slow corkscrew, blood pouring from a gash in his scalp.

  The blonde turned back to Will, charging like a jiggling white elephant. He didn’t want to hurt a woman. On the other hand, he had no intention of letting her maim him. He put up both hands and shoved, managing to hurl her off balance. Cursing, she fell against Madam Melba, knocked her down and landed, buttocks first, on the madam’s scrawny bosom.

  Madam Melba flailed and shrieked. She might have been a longshoreman, so obscenely did she curse the students and so loudly did she scream for the horse pistol one of her girls was attempting to pass to her.

  Alice was still floundering on top of her employer. “Get your fat hams out of my face!” Madam Melba howled, pinching the blonde’s backside. The blonde shot up like a cannonball. Will, meantime, took the only escape route left open to him—the door through which Pennel had retreated.

  Pennel had his shoes and trousers on. The moment Will burst in, Pennel yelled and pointed: “Watch out behind you!”

  Will spun. The flat-faced man was lurching across the hall with one hand outstretched and the other still rubbing his groin. Desperate, Will hunted for a weapon. There was none.

  A small, cheap armoire stood beside the door. He leaped to the end of the armoire, put his shoulder against it and pushed. The armoire moved easily; evidently there wasn’t much inside.

  He shoved the armoire diagonally into the doorway an instant before the thug appeared. The man’s outstretched arm was pinned between the doorframe and the piece of furniture Will was pushing with all his strength. Bone in the man’s arm cracked. He screamed.

  Wild-eyed, he struggled to extricate his arm and kick the armoire aside. In the corridor, Harvard men were running to and fro while whores in various stages of undress punched and kicked and threw chamber pots at them. Panting, Will searched the cubicle. He and Pennel were trapped—

  No! Next to the headboard hung a velvet drapery, old, shabby—and rippling slowly.

  Will leaped past Pennel, tore the drapery down and whooped. Unlike Aggie’s cubicle, this one had a window. It was raised a couple of inches. Outside there was nothing but mist and the dark.

  “Out that way!” Will ordered. Pennel snatched up his shirt and coat, then tried to raise the window.

  “Stuck!”

  “Put your coat over you and go headfirst.”

  In the corridor there was more punching and screaming and crashing, the pandemonium heightened by Madam Melba’s torrent of oaths, and then by the boom of her pistol. Pennel swallowed, covered his head and dove at the glass, shattering it, and tearing his trousers as he plunged through. Will heard him as he hit the muddy ground.

  Will scrambled through the sawtoothed opening and leaped, landing in watery ooze and sinking ankle deep. The footing was treacherous. He lost his balance and sprawled face first. But his only injury was a scratch on his left forearm.

  Covered with mud and spitting, he scrambled to his feet. A spectral hand, equally filthy, shot toward him out of the fog. The other student was barely visible as he shook Will’s hand and whispered, “Marcus Pennel.”

  “Will Kent.”

  “Thanks for what you did.”

  “Never mind that now. Got your wallet?”

  “In my pocket. You at the college?”

  “Medical school. Let’s get going!”

  Madam Melba appeared at the broken window. “I’ll teach you to disrupt and vandalize a decent, orderly business establishment!” Beyond the other student’s shoulder, Will saw her pistol glinting.

  He dove against Pennel and knocked him into another puddle. There was a roar, a streak of fire in the dark. Before Madam Melba could fire again, they leaped up and ran. Neither paid any attention to the direction the other one took.

  Will ran a block in the thick fog, too shaken to be amused by some of the brawl’s comical aspects. All at once he slowed down. He looked to the left, to the right, and behind.

  He was running alone.

  He stopped, listened. In the murk, shouts reverberated, and loud crashings. At that precise moment a door in his memory sprang open.

  “God above. Marcus Pennel.”

  He’d come to the aid of a member of one of the very richest families in America—a family even wealthier than Will’s, and so long entrenched in New York Society that, by comparison, the Kents were upstart immigrants.

  He started walking, moving rapidly but without a sense of fear. The thick fog would protect him from further danger. Rain began to fall again, dampening the mud that was drying on his arms and bare back. He was uncomfortable but he didn’t mind.

  “Pennel,” he said again. As he recalled, the first Pennel had been a rag dealer prowling the streets of Manhattan with a pushcart, sometime during the early years of the eighteenth century. Today the family had real estate holdings nearly as vast as those of the Vanderbilts. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Pennels had begun to accumulate a second fortune by constructing and leasing factory buildings on land they owned all along the East Coast. Their money was old money, polished into respectability by the passage of many generat
ions.

  For a moment Will fervently wished he hadn’t become confused and lost Pennel in the fog. He’d have liked to get to know the young man he’d helped. It could have been a useful contact for the future.

  But of course no member of the Pennel family would deign to speak to a Kent unless it became necessary during some commercial transaction. He’d never see Marcus Pennel again.

  As it turned out, he saw him the following Wednesday night.

  ii

  Marcus Pennel called at the house on Beacon Street. He wore a suit of expensive English tweed, complemented by a walking stick and pale gray gloves. He strolled around the Kent parlor with an air of authority quite at odds with the panic he’d displayed at the brothel.

  “Didn’t have a proper chance to thank you, Kent. Took a wrong turn and lost you somewhere. Trust you got back here in one piece?”

  Pennel was at least two years older than Will. He had an amiable, boyish smile and gave the impression that he didn’t take anything seriously, though Will knew better. He took the contents of his wallet very seriously. A family trait, no doubt.

  In response to the question, Will smiled and nodded. “I was damn near frozen. Luckily my parents had gone to bed by the time I got here. I didn’t have to explain why I was half naked and covered with mud.”

  “How’s that other fellow? The one who got coshed?”

  Embarrassed, Will said, “I don’t know what you mean by coshed.”

  “Oh, of course. Little term I picked up in Britain last summer. Coshed means hit on the noggin.”

  “Then you’re talking about Marchant.”

  “I s’pose. I don’t know the chap’s name. I was looking out the door just as he fell.”

  “He’s all right. Some of the others from the medical school sewed up the gash in his scalp after they all got away. I’m told Madam Melba handed out some bribe money to the proper authorities and is doing business as usual.”

  Marcus sniffed. “Last time I patronize the old slut. That Hungarian would have nailed my balls to the ceiling if I’d been forced to deal with him all by myself. I wasn’t carrying enough cash to buy him off, and that’s the only way I know to handle such scum. You came to my rescue—”