His voice was shaking. He was outside in the hallway because she didn’t ask him to come in. He explained that he didn’t work for Tom Dennison anymore and had just come to visit.
Evie knew Jake was living in Lincoln, something that surprised him, since nobody wrote him there, he said. “There was a lot of talk after you left,” she said. “Rumors you’d been run off, or killed for being unfaithful to Dennison, that you’d gone back where you came from, that I gave you syphilis and the both of us were committed to a sanitarium to lose our minds. Folks said you killed a man and ran to Kansas City until the heat wore off. But I got to the bottom of it,” Evie said. “Maria Eigler told me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Tom ran you out, didn’t he? For you not being who he thought you were.”
He laughed at that. “I hoped nobody would know. I lost that thousand-dollar bill and it was all over. Nobody is so dumb they’d forgive that, yeah. Tom let me leave. That’s something.”
Jake doesn’t know, Evie realized. Nobody ever told him that she’d given the thousand back to Dennison, even as they ran him off, and that was what saved his hide.
“Tom’s a forgiving man, isn’t he?” Evie said.
“A thousand dollars. More than that.” Jake’s eyes wet thinking of all that money. “Did I ever have so much as all that? Seems impossible now.”
At her suggestion they went for a walk. Neither knew how long they’d go or where. He led down to the Flatiron. Reinhold had sent him a letter—There’s one letter, Evie thought—telling how the big project under the city was nearly done. “The tunnels aren’t being used yet,” Jake said, “but they’re close.” They walked without looking at each other. Strolling in half strides, staring at the pavement. He detailed things she didn’t really care to know about the tunnels. How permanent lighting was wired in and gravel spread over the bottom of the corridors. A spiral staircase replaced a dumbwaiter from the hotel kitchen. “It’s all just piddling now. They don’t even dig. Not since last week.”
Jake stopped to have a look around. He paced the pavement, led Evie across the street to stare down at the bricks in one spot, then back across to another. Somewhere around here, he explained, was where he struck down Ugo with the backside of a spade.
“Is this the spot?” Evie asked. “Below us? Where we’re standing now?”
Jake said he’d know if he were under the surface. He’d remember the bend, the dip in the tunnel floor. But he hadn’t been down there since, and it was impossible to tell otherwise.
“Then why say anything? Is this why you came back? To dig up the business with Ugo?”
She saw that Jake was shaking again. “There’s no reason,” he said. “I wanted to see you. You understand that.”
“Come on,” Evie said, leading back into downtown. “Where else does the tunnel go?”
They followed along the surface. Around city blocks and buildings, as diagonal as he could navigate the squared city grid, north on Eighteenth Street to Douglas, near bustling Hotel Fontenelle, then down Dodge to Eleventh. They were moving liquor in the tunnels, into hotel kitchens, all the way to the terminus north of Capitol Avenue, where a new red light called the arcade was open for business. The arcade was in an alleyway between two brick buildings where Tom Dennison’s infamous Sporting District used to be, years ago, before that was shut down by a previous generation of reformers. Iron gates were posted at each end now, painted red and decorated with lights. There were dozens of cribs, small chambers that held women. Each crib had two areas, an entryway, a cot beyond the divider. A door and window formed the projecting front, the whole thing about six feet high, shorter than Jake. Girls waited in windows to have their shapes appraised by whoever moved along the line. Businessmen over lunch hour, high schoolers skipping class. This was what passed for discreet, even in this reform era, at least in the context of what had gone on so publicly for years down on the river flats.
There was nothing on the river where the flats used to be. Evie knew this. Mud and garbage. All the tents gone. There were the pig iron mills, the river and its spit foam, its blackened tree trunks floating along, gray mud slick across its banks. The tents with girls inside had been replaced by this glittering fantasy. The girls in the arcade had on silk robes and their hair was pinned up. They joked loud like they’d spent the morning drinking. One of them looked familiar to Jake and he said so to Evie. He thought the girl was named Doreen. “The girl in the red dress.” He pointed her out. “Raped in Riverview Park two years ago. Had her fiancé run out on her. I know her.”
This girl wore what was supposed to look like a cocktail dress but was really a slip that enabled her to fuck quick. Evie had made it for the girl and knew she wasn’t Doreen. This girl, tall and slender, Mary, walked right by the both of them. She had a rigid jaw, a small mouth, narrow eyes. Jake followed her to the gates. “I’m sure it’s her,” he said.
“It isn’t Doreen,” Evie said. “It can’t be. Doreen killed herself.”
A chippie taking her life wasn’t news, but Evie remembered how it ended for Doreen. She’d wandered the streets until someone grabbed her and said they’d take care of her. They fed her, bought her some clothes, some liquor, led her down the basement stairs of an opium den. Doreen lasted a year on the flats. That was long enough. She grabbed the exposed circuit wire that ran through her tent and took it in her mouth. A john had just walked in. Lights flickered all along the river before going out, the length of the flats and on Capitol Avenue. Doreen bit into the wire and broke the circuit. She had to be cut loose because her teeth fused to the metal.
“You knew her?” Jake asked.
“We weren’t friends. I just heard, that’s all. The lights went out one night. If you lived on this block, you heard how that girl was the reason why. Doreen Jungjohann. How’s a girl walk around carrying a name like that anyhow?”
Evie asked if Jake had a place to stay. He could head to the Eigler house for the night, he said. Maria would take him. But he didn’t angle that way. Evie and him walked the gloaming instead, to the edge of the tenements, to the top of a Little Sicily bluff to see the river at sunset. They circled back north of Dodge, north of Capitol, to the brownstone where Evie lived, close enough to the arcade to hear an electric piano pound out ragtime, keys falling one on top of another in whimsical rhythm. She’d left the lights on in her rooms. The curtains were closed and glowed yellow from the bulbs. Her ears throbbed trying to hear something from the other rooms, some grunt or sigh, if the girls were busy with clients. What she heard was traffic. Pops of motorcars, rhythmic mill pounding, a train whistle in the distance. The building was quiet.