Pete Hamill - Forever

The countess was one of his best sources. She knew stockbrokers and real estate speculators, police spies and politicians. She knew who was planning the newest financial scheme that would reward those who knew before others did. She sometimes invested her own money and made even more than the men in the know. She knew too which marriages were disasters, which rich young men were bound for personal calamities. She discreetly fed private information to Cormac, who put some of it in the newspaper and held some of it for himself. She knew, above all, how New York worked.

“Nothing is as it seems,” she said. “Not here and not in France. Not anywhere. And everything is driven by money. The thing you must do is find out what is truly happening, not what seems to be happening. Understand the lie, and you’ll see the truth. Start off by believing that everything is a lie.”

She paused. “The God story is a lie, told by archbishops to enrich themselves. Democracy is a lie. The police are a lie.”

“And us?”

“We’re a lie too,” she said with a smile. “A good lie.”

Cormac didn’t hear them come in. It was after midnight on a frigid January night, and he was putting final touches on a somber portrait of a woman named Millicent. She was from Poughkeepsie and the other women called her Millie the Weeper. She cried the way other people laughed. That was her specialty. She cried when she heard a sad song. She cried reading a sad tale in the newspaper. She cried when the weather was beautiful and cried when the weather was ugly. If a customer performed with unusual vigor, she wept torrents. If a customer failed to perform at all, she wept as if the apocalypse were due in an hour.

On this night, she was off in her own room, and Cormac was alone, adding highlights to her painted raw sienna hair, humming Scarlatti. Then he heard a door slam down below. Then voices raised. Then something shattering. He went to the landing and looked down.

Three men wearing rough cloth caps were confronting the countess. One growling voice came up the stairwell.

“We’ll close ye down, ye bloody whore, if you don’t do what we say.”

“Get out of here now,” she shouted back. “Go now, and I’ll do nothing. Stay, and keep this up, and there’ll be hell to pay.”

The heaviest man, his face still hidden to Cormac’s view, shoved her hard against a banister.

Cormac went into his room and took the sword off its hook on the wall. Then he moved silently down the stairs.

“It’s a hundred a month,” the big man was saying. “If you don’t pay the hundred, we’ll close ye shut.”

Cormac saw him clearly now. Most reporters were coming to know him. Hughie Mulligan from the Five Points. One of the gang of young men called the Dead Rabbits. As a reporter, Cormac had witnessed him a year ago, standing before a judge in the courthouse, charged with gouging a man’s eyes out in a brawl. His mother sat weeping without conviction. “My son, my son,” she moaned, “my poor wee boy.” But the judge was fixed and Hughie Mulligan walked free, while his fellow Dead Rabbits cheered.

His face was veined and red now, his eyes glittery with danger, his arms hanging from his shoulders as if prepared to punch. Two others, smaller and younger, stood behind him. Most of the women were on the stairs, peering down, while the night’s last customers huddled in the rooms. Mulligan glanced at Cormac as he came down the final flight of stairs. And saw the sword.

“Look, lads, this poof’s got him a sword.”

The two smaller men grinned and each drew a new English-style revolver, made to fire five bullets without reloading. The countess backed up, eyes wide. The women on the staircase made a sighing sound. Millie the Weeper was weeping.

“You’re in the wrong house, aren’t you, Hughie?” Cormac said. “If you want a woman, you should be at thirteen Baxter Street, isn’t that the case, Hughie?” He smiled and moved around, turning his shoulder toward the three men to make himself a smaller target. “That is where your mother lives, isn’t it?”

Mulligan howled Youdirtybastardofawhoringponce and charged, and Cormac turned into the charge and put the tip of the sword under the larger man’s chin. Everything stopped. Mulligan seemed to stop breathing.

“Oh, poor Hughie Mulligan!” Cormac said. “What’s that red stuff coming from your neck?”

Mulligan’s face went pale. He started moving a hand to his neck, and Cormac jabbed with the tip of the sword and then blood actually did trickle down the man’s neck.

“Now, tell these two midgets of yours to hand those pistols to the countess. If you don’t, this sword will come out the back of your fucking head.”

Mulligan made a gesture with his hands, directing the two smaller men to hand over the guns.

“Hold the barrel with your thumb and forefinger, boys. You know which fingers they are? That’s it. Nice and easy, now. Real dainty-like.”

The countess took the guns, gazing at them with a curious respect.

“Countess, you can now shoot these three idiots for breaking into your establishment.”

“What a marvelous idea,” she said. “Look what they’ve done. Those three vases are worth, oh, a hundred dollars. And the door…” She shouted up the stairs. “Ladies, you saw what happened, didn’t you?”

A chorus of yeses.

“Should I shoot them?”

The words came rolling down from above: Right now, of course, between the eyes, why not?

Cormac took the tip of the sword away from Mulligan’s chin, and the big man swiped at his neck and saw blood on his finger-tips. His nostrils widened in rage.

“You’ve got some nerve,” he said.

Cormac laughed out loud.

“You come in here to break the place up and try to extort money, and we’ve got some nerve?”

“You’re foolin’ wit’ the wrong people.”

“In that case, we should kill you. To make sure you never come back.”

Mulligan turned as if to leave, then charged. He shoved Cormac against the banister of the stairwell, and Cormac fell, rolled, came up with the sword in both hands, and put its point against Mulligan’s heart.

“That was stupid.”

He turned to the countess, who was holding both revolvers. He nodded. She aimed.

“Take off your shoes,” Cormac said to Mulligan. Then turned to the other two. “And you two idiots: shoes, jackets, and trousers.”

The two smaller men were alarmed. They looked at Mulligan’s back, at Cormac, and the guns in the hands of the countess. They started undressing.

“You too, big boy,” Cormac said to Mulligan.

“I’ll not do that.”

“Let me help.”

He sliced Mulligan’s belt and the man’s trousers fell. He wasn’t wearing drawers. From the stairs came giggles and titters and one woman’s loud sob.

“The rest,” Cormac said.

Within minutes, all three men were naked, using hands to cover themselves, and the chorus on the stairs erupted in applause. Even the countess was grinning.

“Now go home.”

“It’s ten bloody degrees out there!” one of the younger men said. His teeth were already clacking.

“If you run hard, you’ll be warm enough, boys.”

They went out, and Cormac saw that it was snowing.

The next afternoon, with a foot of snow upon the ground, a mob showed up at the door of the brothel of the Countess de Chardon. It was led by clergymen, who declared themselves firmly against sin. One Methodist, one Anglican, one Presbyterian. They prayed. They hurled anathemas. They chanted. They sang. A few policemen watched carefully but did nothing. There were no laws against prostitution, since, as the countess observed, the laws were written by men. The age of consent in New York was ten. Watching with the countess from a high window, Cormac saw Hughie Mulligan and a dozen other Dead Rabbits on the edge of the crowd.