The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 Read online

  Testina d’agnello was brought before us on a silver platter and Testa basked in the aroma. It was a fitting repast: baked lamb head, cloven in two, with both eyeballs still in place to monitor its own consumption. Abigail Finch would have fired the cook who dared place such a dish before her. I, therefore, was impatient to dig into the brains—the best part, insisted Testa.

  My second bite was on my fork when I heard myself ask, quite gaily, if I might be allowed to compose extortion notes. Testa stopped chewing his brains. The shoulders at either side of me bristled. I filled the silence by saying that I fancied myself not half bad at writing and that my ink fists were coming out more realistic each time I drew them and if he thought he could use some help—

  “Che cazzo?” Testa surveyed his associates. “Is this a playwright I’m hiring? Was that Willie Shakespeare giving the business to Fratelli? Was that a feathered quill bashing in that dago’s head?”

  I shan’t forget that gut-twisting moment before he broke into laughter. His relieved colleagues chuckled back. Testa wiped at his eyes and shook his head in disbelief as he took another forkful of brains.

  “This kid. This kid’s all right. Look, you nut. No openings for playwrights at the moment. Not in the market for poets either. But do what you did tonight, when I tell you to do it, and you can fancy yourself whatever you like. Capisci?”

  IV.

  I CAME TO KNOW THE ACRID smell of piss evacuated by the bladders of cornered men. I became attuned to the eggshell crunch of an Adam’s apple giving way beneath my pressing thumbs. There is a certain force required to tear off an ear and I can describe it. Italian never made much sense to me but I came to recognize the words being repeated by victims during the same critical moments: Salvami. Madonna. Rapidamente. Mi dispiace, sono molto dispiaciuto.

  Half of my cohorts were teenagers. I had a hunch that Testa liked his thugs young for the ease with which he could transfix them with danglings of reward. Most were runaways like myself, though from backgrounds more unwashed. I affected their boorish demeanors as best I could: contests of belching or urination, boasts about innovations in the thriving business of coercion, and meticulous chronicles of perversities shared with fast floozies.

  Eighteen months after taking up with Testa’s Black Hand, I met Wilma Sue. Do not think that I hadn’t enjoyed other whores before her. Ridiculous! Fratelli had dragged me to a cathouse within a week of our first bread-breaking, and though I cannot say my performance there was laudable, my confidence and ability doubled—no, tripled!; no, quadrupled!—with subsequent visits. Identifying yourself as one of Testa’s men had advantages. Rarely did I wait for service and often I was allowed to keep tabs. I was tireless in my pursuit of orgasm. I was, after all, fifteen.

  Wilma Sue lived and worked alongside three other demimondes on the second floor of Patterson’s Inn, a serviceable club that sold their beer flat but in large quantities and encouraged their women to hold court near the first-floor balustrade. My first time with Wilma Sue was coming off a fabulous drunk and I fear that I was a bellering lout as she helped me up the stairs, sat me on the bed, yanked off my boots, and set to stripping my relevant half.

  As a boudoir artist she was more than competent. Even in my sapped state she knew how to bring me to attention. I was in no condition for rolling over so she climbed on and did the work herself, though my most vibrant memory from the intimacy was her strange, tilted expression, as if I were murmuring something of great interest.

  The next morning I was struck by how beautiful she looked brushing her brown hair in the peach rays of light, and so I brought out some more bills and asked for another go. Her fine pale face and darling underbite was untroubled at my request and I found myself comparing our ages (I estimated she was nineteen) and wondering if I was as proficient at my job as she was at hers. Finally she responded that another round would be acceptable, yet she continued to brush. After a spell she asked for my name. I told her and she frowned.

  “Zebulon? So sophisticated for one so young.”

  I shrugged. “Last name’s Finch.”

  “Like the bird? You’re no bird. Puppy, maybe.”

  “Puppy?” It was my turn to frown.

  The glissando of her laughter swept away my irritation like dandelion fuzz on a breeze.

  “Fine, not a puppy. A proud, healthy horse.” She brought a hand to her forehead, playing the fool. “Of course! I should’ve said that at first. All young men appreciate comparisons to horses.”

  In the off chance that you do you not frequent brothels (you poor thing), let me assure you that it is atypical of trollops to goad customers in this fashion. Wilma Sue, though, jabbed as if it were sport, and instead of gall I experienced a pleasant flutter of excitement. The corner of her lips climbed in anticipation of further skirmish. I was glad to oblige.

  “Oh, yes, miss,” said I. “A horse indeed. You’ll want to find yourself a saddle if you don’t wish to be bucked.”

  “Bucked?” She turned on her stool. “What kind of horse are you?”

  “Just a horse like any horse. I see you’ve got a couple of apples there. Let me show you how well I nibble them.”

  Wilma Sue brayed like an ass and clapped a hand over her mouth as if that might retract the unfeminine sound.

  “No, do not blush,” said I. “It’s good to know that you are a donkey. A donkey and a horse—this union might not be as unnatural as I feared.”

  “You’re a cruel one.” Her carriage was one of complete relaxation, her spine curled, the ruffles of her nightgown gathering over the soft dome of her stomach. It was the most fetching posture I had ever seen held by a professional. “Such cruelty deserves a name. I will not call you Mr. Horse, for fear that you’ll call me Miss Donkey.”

  “The other girls call me Zebby.”

  She dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “You have a middle name?”

  “Aaron.”

  The sardonic lines of her face smoothed and she placed both hands over her heart. She nodded, struck speechless in a way I still do not understand, and I nodded back, glad that I had bumbled into an answer so favorably received. There was silence then; I shuffled my feet and discovered the money still in my hand. I held it out to her but for a time she did not look at it, as if hoping to sustain an alternate reality for a few more seconds. When she removed her garments and reclined upon the bed I found myself mad with desire, not just for her luscious body but for that unguarded smile and acerbic tongue.

  From that day forward Wilma Sue became not just my favorite prostitute but my favorite person. Oh, I hear your doubt fulminating across the centuries. “But Zebulon, old boy,” you chide, “had you a single other acquaintance with a woman to whom to compare this girl?” The answer: no, not really—and what of it? I required no parade of the fairer gender down Western Avenue (though that sounds like good fun) so that I might juxtapose and judge, not when Wilma Sue, with her every sweet breath, rebutted each adverse aspect of womanhood I’d learned from Abigail Finch.

  Under Abigail, my every word of English—and for a time, French—required exacting evaluation for accuracy and suitability before I voiced it. I’d be a dead man if I played that slowly with Wilma Sue, whose conversation demanded a spry tit for tat. Where Abigail had shrunk from the outer world and each new day’s fresh frights, Wilma Sue was nosy, posing inquiries and immediate follow-ups regarding all I’d done since last we met. And of my elocution, that stigma nailed into me by Abigail Finch? Wilma Sue found it charming, particularly when used for lecherous repartee.

  Put simply, she liked me. Not because I served her purpose, as I had Abigail Finch and still did Luca Testa, but because I was Zebulon Aaron Finch—the one and only.

  In the privacy of Wilma Sue’s room I was bellied with butterflies and rabbity of heart. My muscles ached all day, if not all week, to press her girl parts against me, and the tilt of her spine when I entered
suggested she wanted those girl parts pressed. Behind her closed door I dropped every crude pretense, engaged in solicitous intercourse, and laid so that I might feel her heart beat like a clock—tick, tick, tick. It was a rhythm over which we spent nights uncoupling from our unpalatable professions and discussing which wonders of Chicago the two of us might one day enjoy together: an egregious supper at the famous Allgauer’s Fireside, a clackety streetcar ride to the North Shore beach, a trip up the preposterous piston-powered invention dubbed the “Ferris wheel.”

  Now, it is true that other men cycled through Wilma Sue’s room. It was not my business. Yet I yearned to find fault in how those arrogant bastards looked at me when they passed through the bar so that I might find an excuse to flatten their noses. I had to be careful. For a Black Hander to display affection for a person was to risk that person’s safety. So I doused my silly, chivalric urges in alcohol and tried to celebrate how I’d become my own man. I made a good show of gruffness: I snarled over Scotch, stewed over stew.

  There was no hiding my vocation from Wilma Sue, so often did I come to her bruised and eager for her brown paper and vinegar poultice. It was a heady time for Zebulon Finch. Newspapers doted upon the Black Hand like a favorite child and I became a fanatic collector of their breathless accounts, pasting into a scrapbook any headline of which I felt partially responsible. I could not resist sharing the compilation with Wilma Sue, and while we dawdled in bed I gave each headline my most orotund tone:

  THOUSANDS IN TERROR SINCE BLACK HAND ATTACK WAVE

  SIX INJURED BY FIRE, RESIDENTS PLEAD FOR PROTECTION

  MILLIONAIRE DRIVEN TO EXILE BY RELENTLESS BLACK HAND

  ITALIAN CRIME ORGANIZING—A PERILOUS CONDITION

  Was it so wrong, my pride? Does not every boy long to begin adulthood with prodigious success? Chicago teetered upon a fulcrum that, should it swing in the direction of Testa, could change the centers of power and influence of the entire country—and I was at the center of it! From time to time, I fluffed my feathers before Wilma Sue’s mirror and flapped about her room in the excitement of it all.

  On this single subject, however, she did not match my mood. Shall I be truthful? It stung. Everything else about me—the socks I purchased, the way I wore my hair, my posture when I peed—she challenged until she had me riled enough to tear off my clothes, then hers, between hiccups of laughter. But regarding my job she maintained the reserve befitting a paid courtesan. Let me be truthful again despite how it pains: I attempted to purchase her opinion with cash, tight rolls of Black Hand dollars that I doled out in gross overage. See? I tried to say. Can my line of work be so bad if it pays for pretty new dresses or knickers to replace those worn ones?

  What else could a girl in her position do? She took the money. Never, though, did she submit a word of gratitude.

  On occasion, late of hour, after the awkward matter of payment was lost behind us, Wilma Sue would play with my gun. (By that, randy Reader, I refer to my sidearm!) I lodged no protest; she was the one living soul I trusted not to shoot me. Two years into my Testa tutelage, I’d traded my derringer for what I fantasized would become my signature weapon: an 1873 Colt single-action revolver known colloquially as the “Peacemaker.” I relished the nickname even if “peace” was obverse to the Black Hand objective.

  One night, Wilma Sue languidly popped the cylinder and let the six golden .45 caliber bullets drop silently to the sheets. She then arranged the Peacemaker upon the mattress in odd fashion, with the butt and open cylinder propping it into a triangle. Over the barrel she draped the edge of the bedsheet.

  “Look, Aaron,” said she. “It’s a wee little house.”

  Abigail Finch had boiled my hands upon catching me with a gun-shaped stick. Seeing Wilma Sue look with affection upon a gun of actual polished silver jangled my insides with optimism. She was adjusting, thought I, to my criminal obligations.

  “A house?” said I. “I’m afraid your architecture is too primitive. A teepee at best.”

  She set one bullet on its flat end beneath the sheet overhang.

  “Here is wee little Zebulon Finch.”

  “Oh, come now. Don’t I rate a larger caliber?”

  She set a second bullet next to the first.

  “And here is merry little Wilma Sue.”

  “Were you that unshapely, I doubt either of us would be merry.”

  She took up the other four bullets and arrayed them in nativity configuration.

  “Children,” announced she. “Two of them.”

  “The spitting image of their mother. And those other two?”

  She shrugged.

  “A dog, I think. Maybe a chicken?”

  “A pastoral scene,” declared I. “I might feel remorse now when forced to fire them.”

  The conversation left me discomfited. I shifted upon the bed so that the gun-house collapsed. I chambered the bullets, secured the cylinder, slid the gun into the holster upon the floor, and made a series of jokes, the best garrisons I had against the gleam I’d glimpsed in Wilma Sue’s eyes as she watched the transmogrification of our bullet proxies back into nameless utensils of death.

  In the end, Dearest Reader, our sad story must pass through the thorny thicket of February 12, 1895. I was sixteen and stood at Wilma Sue’s stove fixing us tea while the battened window fought a howling winter storm. She’d been swaddled in blankets to her neck since I’d arrived thirty minutes prior with my coat cottoned with snow. We were too cold to converse, preferring to wait until we could bring our bodies together for warmth. Finally I could wait no longer and brought her the cup. As she dipped into the candlelight to accept it I noticed her consternation. I sat upon the edge of the mattress to enjoy the tentative stretching of her lips. She saw me watching and glared.

  “What’s the matter?” asked I.

  “Well, this tea, for one. Your tea is for children.”

  “Or those with childlike minds. Hence, your drinking of it.”

  “Don’t forget I’m older than you. If I’m a child, you’re an infant.”

  “Then you must bare your breast and suckle me.”

  She rolled her eyes and sipped the unsatisfactory liquid. I crossed my legs and arms; it was freezing and I wanted into that bed.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” said I. “That dour face of yours.”

  She held the cup so that its steam clouded her face.

  “You have a cut over your left eye.”

  I lifted a hand to my brow and felt wetness. I’d assumed the laceration had scabbed over. Hours earlier, I had bludgeoned a storekeeper with his broom in front of his twin daughters. As sometimes happened, my prey scored a lucky blow. The snow was still light when I was finished, so I headed down the block and got myself a leg of lamb. The woman who served it said nothing about the blood gushing from my head. Afterward I crossed the street and drank two beers. The man who poured them said nothing about the blood, not even when it made patterns upon his counter. The walk to Patterson’s Inn was a long one and not one I managed without several more interactions. Blood shows quite well in the snow and yet no one I met said a word.

  It was only here, in a cold black box that stank of cheap perfume and cheaper sweat, that there existed a person who cared about my physical body and, by extension, the possibility that one day, in the course of my duties, I might die. Death was the last thing upon which I made a habit of dwelling, and yet shivering beside Wilma Sue I had the abrupt, surprising notion that not only did I wish to avoid death but I wished to avoid injury, too, if it meant the happiness of this girl.

  But such an arrangement required a pledge of commitment. Had I not made a competing pledge to Luca Testa?

  I stood, shaken by these ideas, and went for my coat.

  “Aaron.”

  “I’ll find a doctor. Have this stitched.”

  “In this weather? I will take care of it. Ge
t in.”

  “Doc Wallace won’t be under the table quite yet. I know his tavern of choice.”

  “I’m wearing no clothes,” she pouted.

  Her underbite was enticing. It filled me with sadness.

  “Yes, you are. I can see your collar. As well as the cuffs of your sleeves.”

  I pulled on my boots, grimacing at the slush puddled inside, and opened the door to the hallway. Noises to which I was intimately accustomed—drunken mayhem, general depravity—swept inside. It was this other intimacy, the one in this low-lit room, that would require the effort, not to mention the courage.

  “My Aaron,” said she. “My stupid Aaron.”

  The Peacemaker latched to my hip was heavy—heavy as a house, you might say.

  “I’ll be back, Miss Donkey.” Something caught in my throat. “Keep the bed warm.”

  V.

  I NEVER SAW HER AGAIN. That night I failed to find Doc Wallace but found his favorite pub all right, and drank until I sweated alcohol, which slid down my temples, partner to blood. I awoke squinting into morning light with a tin stein in my hand and stumbled out into the street. Turning left would lead me back to Patterson’s and unanswered questions. I turned right and checked in with Jonesy, the man who acted as liaison between Testa and boys such as myself. There was no work for me that morning but I bumped into two of my fellow heavies and together we banged on the window of a pub, wakening the wild-haired proprietor. We drank throughout the day; only during gaps in the gulping and shouting did I allow myself to think of Wilma Sue and how she wanted me to give up this life, and for what? To love her? Best to drink such thoughts away. The night passed in the same delirium as had the afternoon, and the new day brought new misadventures, new debtors, new opportunities to intimidate and extort. Another day or two passed. Jonesy supplied me with an envelope of money. I spent two full days perusing shop windows and dreaming about which kind of pocket watch I could afford if I could just get myself to save up, which I could not. Soon I was watchless but dressed as fine as you please, and though it had been a full week since I’d seen Wilma Sue, a part of my brain—she may have called it the stupid part—believed that my fresh duds would dazzle her and we might blame our recent discussion on winter fevers and fall again into comfortable rhythms.