Chapter Thirty
Polly
Honolulu, Hawaii
Largest Vice Raid Ever.
Bosses Nabbed in New York Raids.
Dewey Smashes Vice Ring.
These are the sort of headlines that have been following me for the past month. I couldn’t have missed them if I tried. And believe me, for over a month, I’ve tried. I know so much about the raids at this point, I feel I was there. Even though I did everything I could to avoid them.
I’ve been trying to outrun them ever since Mrs. Carter unleashed her forces through New York City’s five boroughs.
In point of fact, I have been running from the very moment that the messenger stopped by my house to alert me that the raids were about to begin.
Mrs. Carter kept to the bargain we’d struck in that alleyway behind the Chock full o’Nuts.
I’d given her the names of the bookers and fixers I’d heard about when I was searching for Virginia so she could wiretap them.
That way, she’d finally have the right kind of evidence to conduct a large-scale raid.
She promised me that I’d get a heads-up so I could get out of New York if indeed she ever did a sweep based on the evidence I provided.
Tit for tat, so to speak. If you don’t mind pardoning the pun.
Leaving town was and is a tightrope. Although I knew something was coming, I kept my house humming along even on the night of the raids, up until the very last second.
No one could suspect I knew what was what.
So I kept the booze flowing and the cards flying and the mahjong tiles clicking and the jazz strumming until I got word—and the Lion, the girls, Jerry, and I slipped out the back.
The Lion, of course, knew what might be happening—I’d trust her with my life—but the girls were in the dark until we walked out the door.
Anyone would understand why, in my line of work, I hightailed it out of the city in the wake of the raids, but I do wonder if my ability to evade them altogether raises any eyebrows.
While the Lion, Jerry, and the girls holed up with friends in the city and its outskirts on my dime—I’ve got to protect and support them until my return—I’ve been slipping away ever since, traveling farther and farther west. Taking a train by myself in the dead of night and wearing the same drab outfit I sported at the Chock full o’Nuts, I first headed to Chicago.
Steering clear of the Lexington Hotel, which contains a brothel frequented by mobsters, I stayed at the more conservative Drake Hotel.
There, I hosted dinner for my brother Ben and my father, who has lived with him in an apartment since he arrived in America alone several years ago.
Holding my father at arm’s length in Chicago has been instrumental in keeping him in the dark about my life.
“So how’s the corset factory?” my father asked during an awkward silence in our meal of delicious seafood at the Drake’s famed restaurant, the Cape Cod Room.
He usually didn’t bother asking about my fictional job, but I had run out of questions about my father’s position at a shoemaker’s and Ben’s work as a bartender.
After fits and starts in a variety of industries, Ben had landed in a role that suited him, much to my relief.
I knew how easily the siren song of crime could lure a person in otherwise, as it had in his youth.
“Busy as usual,” I answered, keeping it short because I actually knew nothing about running a corset factory other than what I’d learned on the factory line as a young woman.
In fact, I’d chosen a corset factory because I figured my family wouldn’t probe too hard about a job involving women’s undergarments.
“Paychecks still coming in, though, right?” My father asked the question most important to him as Ben averted his eyes. I knew Ben appreciated the financial support I gave him and my father, but I also knew it was embarrassing for him to have to rely on me.
I took a long look at my father’s pomaded hair and three-piece suit—modern finery he could never afford in Yanow—for which my money paid. And in that moment, I knew that he saw me only as a source of moolah. Just as he always had.
“You’re wearing some of those paychecks, aren’t you?” I retorted, unable to keep the mounting anger from my voice.
“You wouldn’t want your father to look a pauper, would you? You wouldn’t want that,” he said, half joking. But I could see that he was miffed at being called out.
“What do I want? I want my father to use the money I give him to help my mother and younger brothers immigrate here.” I scolded him because I knew my mother would never come until he summoned her.
In fact, I’d grown so frustrated with his reluctance that recently I’d sent her money and instructions on the process, which she refused, informing me that her wife’s duty meant that she had to await my father’s directives.
What I didn’t admit to my father, however, was that I felt some relief at his delay; I didn’t know how long I could cling to the ruse of managing a corset factory while staring into my mother’s eyes.
“Do you know how hard it is to get people out of Yanow? You know it sits right near the Poland–Soviet Union border.” He sounded both defensive and angry, although he had no right to either.
“I’ve been giving you money for the whole family’s journey here since before Russia became the Soviet Union.”
He could say nothing to that. We stared at one another until a waiter arrived tableside and inquired about our dessert order. “I think we are done here,” I said, pushing my chair out and standing as Ben shot me an apologetic glance. Then I added, “Put the bill on my room.”
Unwilling to spend a minute longer in the city my father inhabited, I hightailed it to California.
I found the Golden State not so welcoming; folks I’d known well enough in New York and hosted at my house plenty pretended not to know me at the nightclubs I popped into, bending to the pressure to maintain a public facade of morality against the backdrop of the news about the New York raids.
So I took a ship to Hawaii, the luxurious SS Malolo.
I’m not sure anyone is looking for me in these exotic isles, but I figure neither cop nor Mob can catch me if I never land.
—
I stroll across the swanky lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel toward the restaurant for my first morning coffee.
Dubbed the “Pink Palace of the Pacific” when it opened nine years ago, this pink, Spanish-Moorish, beachfront confection—one of the very first on Waikiki Beach—has quickly become the destination in Hawaii.
I figure I deserve to pass my exile in temporary style, even as I understand that the bills here, in Chicago, in Yanow, and in New York are adding up.
As I pass the newsstand, I do my level best to avert my gaze. I need a break from those fraught headlines. But a particular phrase catches my eye: White Slaves Kept for Questioning as Key Witnesses.
I stop dead in my tracks at the phrase “white slaves,” not because I haven’t heard it before but because I know it’s referring to the girls.
It started out as a description of white Europeans captured by African nations, but it’s now commonly used in newspapers to refer to prostitutes.
I reach for the paper. Scanning past the headline to the article, I read: Early-morning raids weeks ago at houses of ill repute have turned into long jail stays for the white slaves swept up by cops.
Authorities hope that infamous prostitutes and their madams bearing names like Jenny the Factory, Gas-House Lil, Red Sadie, Frisco Jean, and Silver-Tongued Elsie will find their tongues loosened the longer they sit behind bars.
All this despite the fact that District Attorney Thomas Dewey has professed that he’s only interested in ‘organized forms’ of vice, not the individuals who perpetrate it.
Dewey’s team continues to build its case with ongoing interrogations of the prostitutes behind bars.
I feel sick. My goal in meeting Mrs. Carter and guiding her toward bookers, fixers, and bail bondsmen who’d provide fruitful wiretap testimony was to bring down Lucky and his Combination, to stop his expansion.
Not to subject girls to weeks of grilling, interrogations that would make them only more susceptible to threats by the mobsters.
Cutthroat madams like Red Sadie don’t deserve protection, but her girls do.
I didn’t expect that a raid would yield weeks upon weeks of jail time for the girls.
I’d just blindly hoped that the madams would spill all the goods right from the start, freeing up the girls from prison stints.
But if I’m really being honest, did I allow myself to think through my plan?
Even as I ask myself the question, I know now—and I knew then—that there’s no way to bring Lucky down without bringing down some girls in the process.
I didn’t want to think about the impact the raid would have on the girls, beyond ensuring the safety of my own.
And this goes against my goal to do better by the girls in this business.
After all, when I examine my own life, the most glimmering moments are those of me and the Lion and the girls sitting around the kitchen table, coffees in our hands, and laughing about the long night before we turn in for our daytime sleep.
They are my strange, illicit family—more precious than my own flesh and blood—and the only shining thing about my existence.
But perhaps I should care about all the girls, not just my own.
After all, for every girl I’ve brought into the safety of my house, there are ten girls who meet the qualifications and need shelter from the storm on the streets, girls I didn’t protect from awful fates.
Am I kidding myself that I provide even fleeting golden moments to my girls—and that I’m entitled to experience golden moments—when the whole business is nasty and dirty?