“Is one of those for me?”
“Nah.” He tugs the blind pull to reveal Grub and Morsel, waiting on the fire escape just outside the open window. They grab the sandwiches with their eager, unwashed little hands. “Now, get,” he tells them. He doesn’t have to say it twice. He lowers the blind again and gives Swanny a wary glare. “Don’t tell Sharkey,” he says.
“?‘Don’t tell Sharkey.’ That seems to be the refrain in this place. I absolutely loathe secrecy. When I see him again, what are we to talk about?”
“Just don’t tell Sharkey.”
“Don’t tell me what?”
Swanny and Duluth both twist in the direction of the kitchen doorway, where Sharkey is leaning on the jamb, chewing, as if he’s been silently observing them for some time. He didn’t have his top hat on when Swanny met him, but he certainly does now. It’s an impresario’s chapeau—like his limo, glossy, black, and stretched. He wears a sharkskin suit today. He should look ridiculous in the daytime, but it’s as though he’s brought night into the room with him.
“He let me have a piece of ham,” Swanny says, fingering the pearls at her throat. She’s also chosen evening clothes.
“Once you eat my food, you’re not allowed to leave.”
“I’m still quite famished, actually. Have you had breakfast?”
“It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”
“That explains why I’m so hungry.”
“You worked up an appetite without getting out of bed?” There’s something kleptomaniac about his gaze.
“Doesn’t everyone wake up ravenous?”
“I’ll make you some sausage. Duluth, put that ham in the icebox. I need you to run a message over to the Dolls.”
Swanny has never seen a man cook before. But once Sharkey has taken off his hat and suit jacket, he sets about frying the sausages in a skillet with such distracted ease, it doesn’t seem unnatural in the least. He spits in a mug with I HATE MONDAYS printed on the side while the pan sizzles.
“I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed these clothes,” says Swanny to the back of his wifebeater undershirt.
“They look good on you,” Sharkey replies without turning around.
“Why do you have so many, and in my size?”
“Broads of your measure are rare in Torchtown. It’s extra inventory.”
“I wasn’t aware you were in the clothing business.”
“I’m a purveyor of all the luxuries.”
“You have an impressive collection.”
“I have good taste.” He slides a plate in front of her on the table. She looks down at black pudding, cut into thick purple disks, like coins. “Try it. You’ll like it.”
“I’m familiar with the dish.” Swanny spears a piece on her fork and samples it. “Mmm. Peppery.”
“Want some coffee?”
“Coffee—or ‘coffee’?”
“Coffee. You know, the drink?”
“Is it anything like…yesterday?”
“That was tea.” He rinses his mug out in the sink and gets a second from the cupboard, then fills them both from a coffeemaker on top of the fridge. Swanny warms her hands around the heavy thermal ceramic. Normally she’d want cream and sugar, but today she craves the bitterness.
“What was in it, exactly?”
“Little of this, little of that.” Sharkey takes a seat across from her. He picks up the butcher knife Duluth was using on the ham and cleans under his fingernails with the pointed tip. “You mean you never had it before?”
Swanny notices the letters tattooed on his knuckles: FUCK FIRE. She considers most body modifications unseemly, but this one charms her. Such bravado. It rather reminds her of the glittering battle cry of her mother’s brooch—which makes her wonder again, what has he done with her coat?
“Mr. Sharkey, I’m but a simple country girl, all alone in the big city. You seem to take me for someone with experience.”
He curls his lip. “Said the future murderess.”
“Revenge isn’t murder, I resent the insinuation. I’ll do what I plan to do with honor, or not at all. Now, do you also sell guns?”
“As it happens, I’m expecting a shipment.”
“I’ll barter my services as shopgirl for the proper armament.”
“It’s gonna cost you,” he says through the steam rising from his cup. “Couple weeks of work just for the piece. Couple more to put bullets in it.”
“And I take it you’re not willing to budge on those terms?”
“I don’t negotiate.”
She swallows a bite of blood sausage. “Then it seems you’ve left me no choice.”
“Finish your food. I wanna show you the shop.”
When Swanny steps into the Chaw Shop showroom for the first time, it feels like home. Like the estate in Wonland, it is decrepit and elegant, secondhand glamorous, from the tarnished brass spittoons in the corners to the dusty velvet curtains to the cobwebbed electrolier hanging from the ceiling, like a convolution of illuminated trombones. Library ladders reach the highest of the built-in shelves, though no books are here, only mason jars with sticky coils of drug piled within. A carved mermaid, sawn from the prow of a ship, looms in one corner of the room, as sensual and imposing as the marble caryatids on either side of the Dahlberg hearth. Swanny breathes in deeply. Perhaps the room brings back memories because of its scent, loam and toffee mixed together—which in fact smells nothing like Swanny’s home, but which is the scent of nostalgia itself: sweetness shot through with corrupting experience.
“As you can see, I run a classy establishment,” says Sharkey. “Which means there are certain guidelines dictating the daily operations of my business. So before we go any further I’ll need you to sign a standard Contract of Employ. Just a formality, nothing personal. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course. Business is never personal.”
“Good.” Sharkey goes behind the counter and retrieves a one-pager from a drawer. “Take your time reading it over.”
Swanny touches the paper. It’s actually typewritten; the words are punched deep into the vellum with the ancient violence of a brute machine.
The undersigned will have the right and privilege to call himself an agent of the Chaw Shop on any and all occasions when this is of benefit to him, and enjoy the associated protections.
The undersigned will be due payments in live currency or merchandise in the verbally agreed upon proportions at the first of each week.
In return, the undersigned acknowledges and agrees to the following restrictions as fair and just Conditions of Employ.
Killing Offenses:
1. The undersigned is forbidden to taste the retail.
2. The undersigned is forbidden to convey to outsiders any information that could compromise the secrecy of Sharkey or the Shop.
3. The undersigned is forbidden to remove any items from the premises of the Shop without express permission.
4. The undersigned is forbidden to go off and leave without reporting his intended whereabouts to Sharkey in advance.