Chapter Twenty-Four
Polly
New York, New York
Until I was down to my last nickel, anyway. It was then, in one of those coffee shops, I ran into Abe, a friend of a friend of Sidonia’s.
Abe threw me a lifeline of sorts by introducing me to Joan Smith, a tall, icy blond, sapphire-eyed beauty with a penchant for opium and a desperate need for companionship.
She, in turn, introduced me to the life of a kept woman.
I moved into her nine-room apartment on Riverside Drive, rented for her by some Wall Street fellow, and became a sort of mascot for her and her circle, always ready with a joke and quick to pour drinks.
I worried about my future; what if Joan tired of me?
But then one of Joan’s set, a bootlegger named Tony, asked if I’d keep an apartment on the Upper West Side where he and his friends could bring girls from time to time.
And my career as a madam was born. Not before turning a few tricks myself, and not by choice.
Those tricks made me determined to become a madam no longer under anyone’s control—and different from the abusive and heartless madams, johns, and pimps I’d encountered.
I reach the alley that I passed countless times back in my destitute days, always averting my eyes from the activities taking place there.
How green I was, I think, and how priggish.
Today is different. I stride into the surprisingly empty alleyway, push on the nondescript door cut into the brick exterior of the building on the left, and enter the Elk Hotel.
No doorman or front desk receptionist greets me at this establishment, and I would never expect one.
Only a brute of a man with a revolver tucked into his pants awaits me.
This is a hot sheet hotel, where “guests” procured by a group of streetwalkers pay by the hour. Or, in some cases, by the half hour.
“Ginny here?” I ask the thug guarding the door.
“Who’s asking?” he croaks.
“Polly.”
“Polly what?”
“She’ll know which Polly.”
He shoots me a murderous look and ducks behind a curtain.
One grumbled conversation later, a woman with unnaturally red hair pushes aside the tattered mauve fabric and steps out.
“Well, well, well, I never thought I’d see the Polly Adler in my neck of the woods.
” Her tone is not kind or welcoming. It is acidic.
“Good evening to you, too, Ginny.” Ginny and I go way back, to the days when I was running that very first Upper West Side apartment and she was one of Tony’s girls. Now we are two very different sorts of madams in two very different worlds, and she is bitter and resentful.
“What the hell do you want, Polly?”
“One of my girls is missing. A pretty blonde who goes by Virginia?”
Ginny bursts into laughter. “And you think she’d land here?
” She gestures around the dark, wretched entry of the hotel and gives me a mock curtsy before crossing her arms over her chest protectively.
“Never seen some blond whore named Virginia. And if I had, I wouldn’t let her in here if she told me she was one of yours, no matter if she begged.
Now, get the hell out. I’ve got too much trouble breathing down my neck with the damnable Combination to tolerate your shenanigans. Or to worry about one lost girl.”
It takes everything I have not to cry at another failed attempt to find Virginia.
I’ve been reaching out to every brothel owner and pimp in New York and New Jersey I’ve ever heard of to see if Lucky farmed her out to one of them, but they all claim ignorance.
As my search has gone on, I’ve decided that if I can’t find out anything about Virginia from the people I encounter, I might at least find out more about this Combination.
Information might help me protect my house and my girls from this new racket, even if it’s too late for Virginia.
So I’m learning about how this nefarious Combination is working—the way the bookers, lawyers, cops, bondsmen, and mobsters operate.
I need to know what I’m up against. And it’s worse than I imagined.
I take a leap and try to question Ginny. “So the Combination has got you in its grips, too?”
A single one of Ginny’s drawn-in eyebrows rises. She’s never liked me, a disdain that’s grown in proportion to my success, but do I see some softening in her loathing and wariness?
“What of it?” she asks.
“I’ve just heard a lot of stories about this Combination getting into everyone’s business as I’ve been out searching for my girl.” I answer with this open-ended reply. I’ll take whatever crumbs Ginny wants to dole out.
Her arms uncross, and she places her hands on her hips. Then she asks, “You see many johns in the alley? Run into many of my girls in the street out front?”
I shake my head slowly. The traditional territory of the Elk Hotel—the street, the alley, and the hotel itself—did seem oddly barren.
“That’s because today my girls have all been moved to the docks to service some big cargo ship that’s just come in. No warning, no explanation, just a bus pulling up to the hotel and three men with tommy guns ordering my girls inside. Who knows if I’ll ever see them again?”
At this, I definitely see emotion around Ginny’s typically steely eyes.
Although most of her girls—many of them strung out or at the rock bottom of their so-called careers—rotate through her place like a revolving door, she still cares for them, in her way.
No matter how hardened this life has made her.
But she would never, ever want me to see her as soft.
Her arms cross in front of her chest again, and she blurts out, “How am I supposed to make any money if all my whores are taken from me at the drop of a hat? I won’t see a penny from my girls’ work down at the dock, and God knows what shape they’ll be in after servicing a boatload of sailors. This Combination will ruin us all.”
—
“Any news?” I ask Mabel, tromping up the secret staircase to my house at the Majestic. She stands in the parlor, shaking off the cold and hanging her coat up on the rack. I do the same as I anxiously await her answer. Maybe she’s had better luck than me.
“Nothing,” she says, unfurling a soft, pale blue scarf from around her neck.
Its stitching is uneven, and I wonder if it’s handmade.
Alone among my girls, Mabel not only has contact with her family but lives with them.
Most prostitutes end up with me because they have no one.
Or because their own families are far, far worse than the life I’m offering.
Even still, I don’t let just any girl into my house out of pity.
My interview process is the strictest in the business; my girls must be clean from drugs and disease, smart and well-spoken, good-looking, savvy and experienced about this life, and most of all, must feel like my house could be their home.
“You went to her mother’s house?” I ask. Virginia has been estranged from her mother for some years, but Mabel heard Virginia complain about her often enough that she figured out where Virginia’s mom lived in the Bronx. And she volunteered to take the trek.
Mabel nods, stamping her feet to bring back feeling and warmth. The evening is bitterly cold, and all I can think about is Virginia being dragged into the brisk wind and frigid temperatures five nights ago in lingerie and bedroom slippers.
“Her mother wasn’t exactly what you’d call coherent, but from what I could glean, she hadn’t heard from Virginia in years.”
Sighing, I fall into one of the upholstered chairs in front of the parlor fire.
Mabel plops down in the one opposite. Although I can hear the socializing and drinking and gambling happening behind the bookshelf, the sound is mercifully low, and I’m able to block it out.
Worries about Virginia have beset me for the past five days, and I’m finding it almost impossible to interact normally with my guests; thank goodness the Lion has stepped in.
Not that the King Tut bar is populated with a full complement of my usual guests.
Since Lucky’s outburst, several of my regulars have grown fearful of the mercurial man and stayed away, only to be replaced by more and more of the Mob boss’s sidekicks.
I reach for the decanter on the side table and pour myself a stiff brandy. Downing it in one, I lament, “Where could she possibly be?”
Mabel, not typically much of a drinker, leans toward me, grabs a glass, and holds it out for me to fill with brandy. “I hate to even say this—I mean, I hate to even think it—but could that man Lucky brought here have taken her home? Could he be keeping her there as a prisoner?”
“I thought I heard him say something about a wife, although I’ve seen everything in this business,” I say, turning the exchange over and over in my mind, as I have countless times since that night. “Even if that’s true, what would prevent her from phoning us from his house? Or his business?”
Mabel says nothing and neither do I; the answer is too terrible. Virginia could be held captive—by that man, by Lucky, by any number of his goons. Or worse. She might not have phoned because she cannot—because she’s been killed. I feel sick.
“I can’t just sit here and allow Lucky to take Virginia without doing something about it. Who knows who he might take next. And where he might take them,” I say. “I’ve got to act.”
I haven’t told Mabel what I’ve learned in talking to madams from brothels high and brothels low, lower even than the Elk Hotel—and even the pimps I forced myself to contact.
Lucky is indeed consolidating the prostitutes in New York City; he’s working toward creating a single pool of thousands of girls organized by a few central bookers.
By the time he’s done, no girl will have a house or a protector, not even mine.
Lucky hasn’t made a move to ship off any more of my girls, but I am wary.
It feels like only a matter of time before Kit, Angelica, Mabel, and Rosalie are marched out the door toward destinations unknown.
And I’m fearful that if I press him about Virginia, he might respond by rounding them up pronto.
“What can you do, Polly? He’s Lucky Luciano,” Mabel says, sipping her brandy as delicately as a schoolgirl taking her first drink.
I pause for a long moment, processing her words. Mabel is both right and wrong, and an idea surfaces. It’s risky. But the possibility galvanizes me.
“Well, I may not have much power when it comes to Lucky Luciano, but there are two things I can do. The first thing”—I rise from my chair, reaching for the blue scarf that Mabel dropped on the coffee table—“is to get you out of here, Mabel. You are almost done with your education, and you can do without the money you make here for the next few months. If you’re too hard up to pay your tuition, I’ll give you the money to finish up at Columbia.
It’s too risky for you to remain, and I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you, too.
This work isn’t your life, unlike some of the other girls. ”
I wrap the nubby wool scarf around her. This beautiful, brilliant young woman has been with me for nearly four years, operating in this business on her own terms so that she can secure the degrees to become a teacher.
She will have the future that was stolen away from me.
How could I let Lucky get his hooks into her?
Mabel starts crying, gentle weeping, which quickly escalates until her whole body quakes.
Her wracking sobs shock me. After all, she’s a girl who’s shown nothing but perfect reserve all these years, even when I pulled a gun on her that night I came back from jail.
I pat her back gently and wonder what’s been hidden beneath her calm facade all this time.
I allow Mabel’s tears to subside before I reach for and then slip on her coat. While I’m buttoning up the front, she sniffles and asks, “What’s the second thing?”
“Excuse me?” I ask, not sure what she means.
“You said there were two things you could do.”
“Ah,” I reply, then, with false bravado, add, “that’s for me to know and you to never, ever find out.”
This brings a half smile to Mabel’s lips. She doesn’t resist as I gently guide her toward the steps. I wait until I hear her descend and say her farewells to Jerry. Then I head toward the little desk in the corner of the parlor.
As I settle into the ornate mahogany chair that sits before the rolltop desk, I wonder if anyone has ever used this piece of furniture.
When I hired a Broadway set designer to decorate this place, I asked her to furnish and adorn the parlor in the manner of an exclusive English club library.
Elegant and the opposite of a brothel, I’d told her; I wanted the decor to disarm any police officer who wormed his way in here.
The morning that movers carried this dainty desk up these stairs from the Majestic lobby, I demurred, “What on earth am I going to do with a desk in a bordello?” To which she responded, “Isn’t that the point? ”
Rolling back the carved top, I find the clicking sound strangely satisfying.
Beneath the domed surface, I am delighted to find rows of shallow drawers, some of which hold heavy, gold-edged paper for letters, matching envelopes, and even a few fountain pens.
Who would have thought my decorator’s attention to detail would have gone this far?
I slide out a piece of paper and select a blue enamel fountain pen. How do I phrase so delicate a request? An inquiry I never, ever thought I’d be making? One that could get me in a heap of hot water—or worse—should anyone in my world find out?
A phrase comes to me, a snippet of a Robert Frost poem that I overheard one of the creative folks say to another late one night: The best way out is always through. I cannot remember if they were lauding or ridiculing Frost, but the line struck me.
Inhaling deeply, I place the sharp tip of the pen on the surface of the paper.
“Dear Mrs. Carter…”