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She sells it out of thigh-holsters like a gunslinger. Ask her for liquor and she opens her legs, pulls out heaven, and charges you way too much for the privilege but you don’t even mind. She’d show up to a party, giggle and dance and tell the one about the guy on 42nd St with the hippo in his handbag, sell out her stock, and pass out asleep under the dining table. After 10 pm, every party played Find Zelda. So when suddenly there’s no holsters and no black bottles of white petals and no new Christs vomiting in the bathroom, everybody notices.
Josie Shadduck loses his damn mind. Puts reward sheets up in the elevators like he’s living in the Old West. Threatens anybody he thinks so much as smells like her. Starts carrying around a flickie-knife so he can keep to a tight schedule of screaming and brandishing. The things he accuses those boys of you never heard in all your days! Fuck-and-kill combos not even that Ripper fella in London could dream up. What did you do to my wife? Tell me! And God in his heavenly hammock help you if you point out that Josie wasn’t even the least littlest bit married to her. Which is where he crosses Tommy Germain, who wanders around the halls like a Gothic gentleman, wailing and weeping about his wife, which Zelda was also not, and it’s a little known fact I don’t mind sharing that eventually Josiah Shadduck III stabbed Thomas Wyclyffe Germain outside Room 1633 for sniffling over how much he missed his dear, beloved, precious wifey-poo.
Oh, calm down. Josie got him in the love-handle. Germain dropped like a cartoon anvil but it wasn’t much of anything but funny. The joke comes out best when you consider those two made a bouncing baby electricity company together about ten years later, and they’re probably the fellas keeping the light on while you read right this very instant.
William Hessen-Hyde hoards. Hoards all the bottles he could get off of anyone. Buys, steals, grabs, swaps. Even a half-drunk bottle. Even a snifter with a little left at the bottom. Hoards it all up in his room till he’s surrounded by glasses full of black booze like church
candles. He doesn’t call Zelda his wife. He doesn’t promise a million bucks to the guy who brings her home. He just sits seething in the middle of all that bum-rum, snorting through his nose like a boar. And then he starts drinking.
So Zelda’s skedaddled. Sure. Okay.
But when Pearl pops off, all hell breaks loose.
288
See Frantic Frankie do the Lost Girl Rag!
He doesn’t hear the news till everyone else already knows. See, Frankie doesn’t get invited to the good parties. He’s never even tasted that hellcat hooch Murray’s always on about. Murray comes home at end of shift wearing his rowing crew New England ivy-up-his-ass looks. Looks like that irritate Frankie. They don’t mean anything. They’re as good as a $50 tie and they come for free. Anyhow, Murray comes home with a little nip in his pocket one night, a nip of something new. He’s barely nabbed more than a damn test tube of the stuff, but he doesn’t share. Murray sits in the window nook and slurps down his loot and after awhile he starts talking to the fire escape. Tells it all his secrets. Calls it Mathilda. Tells it he loves it, his rust iron golem princess, and when he’s saved up enough he’ll take Mattie away from this awful place. When he’s made a man of himself. They’ll go out west together. Maybe Iowa. Have babies with rungs so strong you could hang all your faith on them and they’d never bend. If she’ll just let him have his way this once. Frankie stops feeling quite so hung up on Murray’s $50 pinstriped face.
But Room 212, she’s getting pretty empty these days. Frankie never sees his roommates anymore. Everyone’s busy, he supposes. Everyone’s got a sweetheart somewhere. He lays about the room like the kind of guy who doesn’t need to split the rent. It’s nice. He looks at Enzo’s drawings under the windowsill. A satyr is licking the ledge. He’s got a fawn in each hand, and the fawns have girl-faces. The same girl face, which Frankie never noticed before now. Oleander Coy’s face, with the quirk in her jaw that says go ahead, impress me. I’ve got all night. Huh, Frankie thinks. Would you look at that.
Frankie still reads the news through the tubes. Copies it out before his poor brain can chew it soft enough to swallow. So he reads it in his own hand, like he did it, like he made it happen.
Zelda’s bugged out. Haven’t seen her in a week. No more black punch. Think she went to Canada. —Ollie, Room 1550
Frankie’s stomach drops down to his shoes. His hands sweat. Canada? What does a girl like that want with Canada? Then his thoughts wriggle out of his head, crazy on panic and gin-shakes. Did he have enough money to head up there? Probably not. Montreal’s closest—but maybe she didn’t speak French. Don’t be stupid, of course she speaks French.
Frankie saw Zelda just once after the bathtub. She came to 212 and knocked like she didn’t really know how. He’d answered in his pajamas, a little striped number like you see in the pictures. She looked at him with big old circles under her eyes like a raccoon in the daytime, like she didn’t expect herself to be where she was, and maybe didn’t even know where that might be. She just stood there in the hall in a bathing suit, but she wasn’t wet. Shivering, but not wet. Stood in the hall in a bathing suit and opened her mouth and closed it and perched sort of on one leg like one of those goofy flamingoes.
“Zelda?” He’d asked.
“Yeah?” she whispered.
“What…can I do something for you?”
She stared at him, just so confused, like he’d asked her to dinner in Hungarian.
“I thought you wanted me.”
And she ran off. Like she was running from his wanting. He didn’t run after her, more fool him, and if you asked, he couldn’t tell you why, why not then, when in just a minute he’s going to run after her harder than a hunting dog.
Frankie Key gets called into Room 288. It’s where Raspail Bayeux, the Head Concierge, makes his digs. But Raspy isn’t alone behind his big old warship of a desk, with its green lamp glowing at one end like the light at the end of a dock. Caspar Slake is there, the man up top, the guy who owns the whole shebang. Frankie’s never seen him before. The cat’s not as old as he figured. Wears his clothes like he was born in a three-piece suit.
“I have a job for you, Francis,” Raspy says in the voice he uses to direct guests to one restaurant over another. The paprikash at the Blue Heart Cafe is particularly good today, sir. “There will be good compensation, both financial and otherwise. If you’re interested.”
Caspar Slake gives him the up-and-down. “My wife’s gone missing,” he growls, like Frankie did it, somehow, and did it on purpose.
Frankie’s written this kind of thing a hundred times. He twigs to the situation double quick.
“I’m no detective, sir,” he hurries.
“You kids all know each other,” Caspar hisses. He hasn’t slept in a dog’s age. Eyes all red like his eyeballs could smoke the cigarettes themselves. He’s put holes in the wall on six floors with his fists. Little Cass is hiding in the libraries on seventeen, at least, Big Cass thinks so. He’s got bigger problems than his boy. But Little Cass isn’t there anymore, only his daddy doesn’t know it yet. “You all cover for each other. You must know. If one of you knows, you all know.”
“She’s not the only one,” Mr. Bayeux says quietly.
“She’s the only one that matters!” Slake snaps.
“Of course, sir.” Might I recommend the lobster at the Silver Umbrella? Frankie wonders if Raspy ever stops using that voice. If he even has another one. Raspy pushes a sheet of paper across the bow of his desk.
