The other fellow, Vinny with the bony face, had disappeared.
The door had its mail slot set into the top panel instead of the bottom one. Fern was busy wondering why it was reversed when the flap slid to the side, and a pair of dark eyes crowned by thick, silver and jet browspeered out at them.Oh.These men had brought her to a speakeasy.
“What’s the password tonight, Mama Rosa?” Francis asked.
The flap slid shut on him, probably because he was supposed to have said the secret password and failed. But then, the door opened. An old woman with a severe gray bun and a black shawl pinned around her shoulders scowled at Francis.
“You again,” she retorted, waving a hand and allowing them inside.
“Mama Rosa, you’re gorgeous.” Francis caught the old woman around the waist and planted a kiss on her cheek. She slapped at him, landing a blow against his back as he darted away, laughing.
Mama Rosa turned her scowl next to Mr. Black, then to Fern. The old woman’s sharp brown eyes scoured her scarred half without any of the caution she was used to. Fern lowered her face and turned deeper into Mr. Black’s shoulder. She wished her long auburn hair wasn’t braided and pinned up off her neck. It would have been a relief to hide behind it. She hadn’t been out among other people—people who hadn’t expected to see her—in a long time.
“You’re a fool bringing her here,” the woman hissed before slamming the door shut.
“Everything’s fine, Mama,” Mr. Black replied, and Fern wondered if this woman was, in fact, his mother.
“Go. Off with you,” she grumbled. Fear made a rushing sweep back inside Fern’s chest. Even though shewas old and a woman, Mama Rosa would not be her friend or rescuer.
Mr. Black continued to lead Fern, her legs still unsteady, through the hallway that stretched off from the foyer toward the back of the house. Portraits, both photographic and painted, lined the corridor walls, taking up nearly every inch of the flowered, dark-maroon paper. It was a gallery showcase of men: uniformed officers, draped in medals and ribbons; other men dressed in old-world suits and ties, their stiff, square, Italian chins thrust up in pride, their thick, black hair glossy from the pomade used to sweep it back from their foreheads. There were a few women and children shown here and there, but it was clear this house—this family—was devoted to its men.
The patriarchal hallway smelled like mothballs, garlic, and talcum powder—exactly what someone might expect the home of an old Italian woman to smell like. But there was more. Traces of cigarette smoke and sweat.
She and Mr. Black caught up with Francis at the end of the hallway, where he’d opened another door. It led down as if into a cellar. It was dark, but the muted sounds of music reached them. The secret bar was in Mama Rosa’s cellar?
Unlike her brother, Fern had never been inside a speakeasy before, but she imagined what would greet her: people, and lots of them. The mouth of the blackened doorway swallowed them up, and for a handful of confusing moments, Fern was jostled down a dark passageway. The floorboards bowed and creaked,as if they were walking on thin plywood covered by cheap carpet. The rasps of a saxophone and cymbals became a roar. She clung to Mr. Black’s arm, unable to see as the music grew louder with every step.
And then, the passageway spat them out at the top of a staircase overlooking a space more than three times the size of her mother’s dining room. Fern blinked away the dizzying sensation of having entered a room that didn’t make sense. Mama Rosa’s house wasn’t anywhere near large enough to have a cellar this size. As she stumbled down the first few steps, Fern realized this speakeasy must have stretched underneath the neighboring house, and perhaps even the one next to that.
Bright, electric lights from crystal chandeliers shimmered off dozens of mirrors, which were set into the walls and all along the ceiling. A swell of people crammed the center of a dance floor, rimmed by small tables. Each table was covered in a snow-white linen cloth and had a small vase of flowers. It was as elegant as any upscale restaurant in the city, but there was an exuberant air that wouldn’t be found in any proper establishment.
Laughter and conversation vibrated against Fern’s eardrums. A woman in a short, red, fringed dress stood on top of a nearby table, her high-heeled shoes in her hands and her bare feet kicking up a little jig as the table shook. She shrieked with laughter, and a throng of men stood in a circle around the table watching her. A thick haze of cigarette smoke stung Fern’s eyes and clung to the back of her throat. She didn’t think she’d taken asingle breath since stepping inside, and her vision spun as she gasped for air.
Francis had already descended into the crowd below, which seemed to ebb and flow around the bottom of the stairs like a tide. Men and women were decked out in suits as fine as Mr. Black’s and Buchanan’s whenever he’d go out on the town. Women in their short, boyish dresses, long beads, and bared arms congregated at tables and at the bar, where two bartenders shook cocktail mixers and dispensed soda water into tumblers with frothy spurts. A band played on a raised stage in the far corner of the vast room. A saxophone player, a man at the drums, and another playing the bass guitar stood with a woman, her neck wrapped in a bright white feather boa that seemed to glow against her black skin. Rubies hung like teardrops from her earlobes as she sang into the microphone, her eyes closed.
Mr. Black gave Fern a gentle nudge, and she realized she’d gone still on the stairs. Her heels stumbled down a few more steps before his grip tightened on her arm.
“You’re doing just fine, princess,” he said quietly into her ear. There was no need for whispering now. “Make it through the next ten minutes, and you’re golden.”
He took her around the frenzied dance floor and away from the bar, toward a pair of black curtains set between two faux-Greek columns topped with trailing ivy. A large man stood in front of one column, his hands clasped together, legs spread wide like a guard.
“I don’t understand—Mr. Black, tell me what’s happening.” Fern lifted her voice to compete with thesinger’s, whose mild humming had trailed into a crooning wail.
“Don’t call me that,” he said in her ear again. “I told the boys you’re with us, and that means you’re on the up and up.”
She wrenched her arm free. “I don’t know what that means!”
A scream, and then a loud crash, erupted behind them. Fern whirled to find the girl who’d been dancing on the tabletop on her rump on the floor, the table turned on its side. She was now sobbing instead of laughing, tears streaking her mascara down her cheeks.
Mr. Black jerked Fern back toward him, peeling her attention from the delirious girl and forcing it onto him. His eyes brimmed with a warning that needed no words.
“What do I call you then?” she whispered.
“Cal,” he supplied. “You call me Cal.”
“But I thought your name was George.”
An infinitesimal grin began to soften his black glare but then fled. “You really don’t know who I am, then?”
