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The Scepter is a noir retelling of the Biblical story of Esther, with a hint of supernatural mystery. You can find the Table of Contents here:
Tribulation and distress, evil and great confusion, lay upon the earth.
-Esther 1:7
She once had crossed a frigid, hungry ocean with nothing but a threadbare dress and a six-pointed pendant. She didn’t need a mink coat now.
Throwing the soft, shimmering fur onto the floor, from the back of the wardrobe she snatched instead her old dark-gray wool overcoat.
As she grabbed for her suitcase, a whimpering cry pricked her ears.
Not now, not now. Sleep just a little longer.
From a distance, down the long stretch of noisy, neon-drenched sidewalks that droned like an ever-busy hive, grew a sound that drowned the small cry down the hall.
The shriek of sirens.
It was done, then.
She shoved the suitcase shut and clicked the locks. The flat was torn apart, clothing heaped on the floor where she’d ripped it from the dresser, searching for the most mundane, the most functional, the least conspicuous. Anything she hadn’t packed was staying here.
Then, through the growing wail from the back bedroom, through the din of raucous voices on the street below, through the screech of sirens, a sudden noise sent a jolt of ice fizzing through her limbs.
Aftershocks thudded through her body alongside her racing heartbeat, and it came again –
A heavy knock on the door.
Three years earlier
Paul Cohen prophesied from a broom closet in the basement of a tea shop on the Lower East Side. The locals turned their eyes away from the bland bookkeeper’s comings and goings, determined not to wonder about the small groups of sharp-eyed, sharp-dressed men who trickled down the steps at odd hours.
On a chilly October evening heavy with misting rain, Paul Cohen descended the tea shop’s basement steps and unlocked the door. Three men detached themselves from the bruised twilight shadows and followed him inside.
“You have something I can use?” Taking off his coat, Paul laid it over a chair, the only furniture in the dim concrete room. “Something of hers?”
Ricky Melchiorre’s mammoth shoulders jostled beneath the fabric of his overcoat as he dug one huge fist into his pocket. Pulling his hand back out, he dropped an impossibly huge, glinting ruby ring into Paul’s outstretched hand. The two thick-jawed men behind Ricky watched Paul with unflinching eyes as he curled long fingers around the jewel.
With a nod, Paul stepped into the tiny closet and clicked the door shut behind him.
The mustiness of mouse droppings hovered beneath the harsh scent of ammonia that stung his nostrils with every breath, but he needed the closeness, the darkness. It focused the visions, cleared the noise. Usually. Some prophecies had a way of making themselves known, whether he was looking for them or not.
Paul pulled on a chain, lighting up the cramped space. From the back of a shelf, between stacks of cleaning rags, he pulled a rough woolen bundle. As he unfolded it to its full length and draped it over his head and shoulders, the fringe brushed his skin. An irritating, unreachable itch scratched at his mind. This shawl had not been woven to serve Ricky Melchiorre or his mistress’ blood-red ruby.
With a determined flick, Paul struck a match and lit the incenser he kept nestled near the shawl. Then he returned the closet to darkness as tendrils of fragrant smoke drifted up toward him.
The ancient, familiar scent engulfed him, unlocking childhood memories of rose windows and domed roofs looming in the frigid sky.
The jewel grew heavy in his hand, and a face bloomed in his mind, plump, red-lipped, keen-eyed – Ricky’s mistress, he knew. Everyone knew Verna Dooley.
Beside her was another face, tight and shrewd and nothing like broad, mercurial Ricky Melchiorre. There were murmurs, caresses, secrets slipping like needles from her mouth.
Thunder and earthquakes, confusion and darkness shrouding the streets –
No, that wasn’t right. Paul closed his hand around the ruby, letting the sharp edges dig into his palm.
Whispers of disdain and repulsion, sharp as poisoned darts. Plotting, planning –
Two dragons rising, a cloud of rage and blood
A tiny spring nudging against the soil
With his empty hand, Paul clutched one of the shelves, steadying himself. Wrestling the intrusive images from his mind, he dragged his thoughts back to Ricky Melchiorre’s unfaithful mistress.
He saw Ricky, a spray of bullets lodged in his barrel chest –
But as the incense filled the closet, the tiny spring surged back into his vision.
A trickle of water on a mountainside, growing, bursting into a tumbling river. A torrent rushing through the streets, washing away the shroud and the blood in a flood of sea-blue water.
Ricky Melchiorre and Verna Dooley were gone, shoved from his mind, and Paul’s breath came hard, cold sweat beading on his forehead.
He grabbed at the dangling chain, snapping the light back on. With shaking hands, he snuffed the glowing incense. He yanked the shawl from his shoulders, folded it carefully, and placed it back on the shelf, several inches away from the still-warm incenser. Then, stifling a cough, he opened the door and stepped back out of the broom closet.
“Well?” Ricky’s voice was harsh, staccato as it always was. But beneath the roughness was a prickling apprehension, almost a pleading.
“Your suspicions,” Paul said, breathing in a lungful of the stuffy basement air. “They’re right.”
“She’s two-timin’ me.”
“It’s more than that.” Handing back the ruby, Paul snatched his overcoat from the chair and shrugged his hands back into the armholes. “She’ll be your downfall.”
Ricky’s stony face contorted for the flash of a moment, then shifted back to a glower. “How d’you mean?”
“I didn’t see specifics,” Paul said, moving toward the exit. “Just what I told you.”
Ricky stepped in front of the door. “What kind of downfall?”
“I saw you getting shot.” Paul licked his dry lips. “I didn’t see a line of cause and effect; it doesn’t work like that.”
“Verna’s fixing to kill me?”
“Not necessarily. It could just be that Verna’s connected somehow, even by accident.” Paul tried to wrangle the words – that his prophecies were only glimpses into the future, that the force of time was inexorable, unknowable, that he could never account for what could be changed and what was set in stone – but in front of Ricky Melchiorre the words tangled in his mind before they could make their way down to his tongue.
“You tell me if you see anything else.” Beneath his brittle toughness, Ricky’s bulk tightened with a frightened rage, his thick mouth shrinking to a slitted line as he pushed an envelope into Paul’s hand.
“Of course.” Paul’s stomach churned as he forced himself to breathe. “I always do.”
Darkness and dragons, a cloud of bloodlust shrouding the city, a tiny spring growing into a rushing river. It had been more cryptic than his usual vision. And much more insistent too, like a child yanking on his sleeve trying to get attention.
Paul counted the crisp bills tucked inside Ricky’s envelope, then shoved his hands back into his coat pockets against the autumn chill. He made his way toward the East River and the seedier streets that siphoned toward the dank, cold water.
Ducking beneath a glowing neon sign, Paul slipped inside out of the wetness.
Amid the muffled throb of music, Paul checked his coat in the threadbare lobby. Then he passed into the nightclub itself, and brassy waves of sound engulfed him.
A full band was somehow squeezed into the cramped room, their foreheads gleaming under the hot stage lights. The trumpeters’ cheeks puffed in and out in unison, and the pianist’s fingers jumped like spiders, inhumanly quick.
There were still a few empty seats in the dimly-lit club, but the tables were filling. Etta must be up soon.
Glasses cluttered the white tablecloths, filled with various colors of newly-legal liquids, and a mixed crowd that ranged from the barely-respectable to the opulent jostled for space. Squinting through his narrow glasses, Paul spied an available seat up against the wall in a far corner. He set off toward it, snaking between crowded seats, then paused.
He knew that man.
Paul moved forward again, weaving through the crowd until he reached the back table and the familiar wiry, dark-haired man.
“Mind if I join you?”
The man nodded without looking up, but Paul knew that Billy had seen him coming. Nobody could sneak up on Billy McManus.
Paul leaned forward on the table, his eyes on the band as they filled the low-ceilinged room with noise. “Ricky came to see me today.”
Billy’s shoulders stayed loose, his face as calm as though Paul were commenting on the weather.
“It was about Verna,” Paul said. “Did she do something to make him mad?”
His eyes still downward, Billy said in his low voice, “Wouldn’t come to a dinner he hosted. For his business partners.”
Business partners. Paul almost chuckled. He wouldn’t want to find himself in a dark alley with anyone Ricky Melchiorre considered a business partner.
“She ought to leave town,” Paul said.
Billy nodded again as the music swelled and banged its way to the final crescendo.
Paul shifted to look more closely at him. “You ever seen Etta perform before?”
“Who?”
“One of the acts. She’s been drawing a crowd lately. Thought that might be why you’re here.”
“Just wanted to get out of the rain.”
Getting more than two words out of Billy was a chore, but of all the reprobates who worked on Ricky Melchiorre’s dime, Billy was the only one Paul would willingly approach in public.
“She’s my cousin,” Paul said.
“Who?”
“Etta. She’s up next, if I’m not mistaken.” Paul leaned over slightly, searching for what held Billy’s attention.
In one hand Billy clutched a pencil, in the other a small notebook which he balanced on his knee. A sketch of the crowded stage – a trumpet player, saxophonist, and Mikhail the conductor rendered in shades of gray, with bright lights falling over the moth-eaten curtains behind them.
“That’s not bad,” Paul said.
Billy grunted, then tucked the notebook back into his pocket.
With one last crash of the drums, the music died to a smattering of applause.
“And now,” the conductor turned to the crowd and said through his dense accent, “Miss Etta Cohen.”
Paul smiled as the music drummed back to life. He knew it irked Etta to no end that she never got more than a flavorless, cursory introduction from Mikhail, even now that she’d moved up to the headlining act.
Leaning back in his chair, Paul scanned the ragtag audience. Some of them, the ones staring at the curtain, had seen Etta perform before, and they’d come back. Others were chatting, drinking, turned half-away from the stage, barely hearing the music. But that wouldn’t last long.
Then the curtain fluttered, and Etta was there on the tiny, creaky old stage as if it existed only for her. Black hair and black dress and sea-blue eyes that drew everyone else’s like a magnet. And above the brassy wail of the trumpet, she started to sing.
Etta’s voice was good enough, though untrained. She was beautiful in photographs, stunning at a quick glance. But what brought the crowd’s attention to her and kept it there like an orbiting moon was how she moved, utterly at home in her own skin. It didn’t matter to her whether she pleased the crowd or not, and so they couldn’t get enough.
Paul glanced sideways at Billy McManus and smothered a grin. Billy’s eyes were wide, fixed on Etta, his notebook forgotten in his pocket. Paul had never before seen Billy without his shield up, even for a moment, but Etta had that effect on people.
All the chatter of the thronging nightclub faded, and the band and Etta’s voice reverberated from the walls and ceiling. The band played better when Etta was onstage. The scuffed floorboards, the old water stain browning a corner of the ceiling, the frayed edges of the tablecloths, all seemed veiled with a hazy, iridescent sheen of beauty.
The music swung from a ballad to jazz and back again, until the last notes gave way to applause and an encore, then more applause. When at last Etta disappeared back behind the curtain, the crowd was not the same as it had been before.
“What d’you think?” Paul raised his eyebrows at Billy as the applause quieted and the next act took the stage. “Think you’ll come back for another show?”
Billy’s eyes swiveled to Paul, returning suddenly to reality. He cleared his throat. “What?”
Paul finished the last of his Gin Rickey. “You wanna meet her?”
“Meet her?” Billy’s voice held the barest glimmer of panic, the most emotion Paul had ever heard him express.
Looking down to hide the hint of a smirk, Paul shrugged. “Sure. She’s my cousin, after all.”
“Saying goodnight already?” Etta’s voice burst out on them before she finished opening her dressing room door. “You go tiptoe on home, drink your hot milk, and go to bed early with a good book, grandma.”
“Naturally.”
She stood in the doorway in a silk dressing gown, her black performance dress draped over a screen behind her. Reaching up to brush a kiss on Paul’s cheek, her eyes caught Billy standing silently behind him. “You gonna introduce me to your friend?”
“Billy McManus. His first time seeing your show.”
Etta shook Billy’s hand with a quirked smile. “You wanna come in? I don’t bite.”
Billy cleared his throat. “Got to be going. Pleased to meet you.”
Without another word, Billy set his hat on his head and turned down the hallway toward the side exit.
Etta frowned, her eyes following Billy. “Your friends are so sociable,” she said loudly as Billy opened the door to the alley.
From somewhere came the sound of water – trickling, gurgling, rushing, bursting.
A flood of sea-blue water
Washing blood and shadow –
This prophecy, whatever it meant, was more persistent than usual, and it was beginning to annoy him. Paul fixed his eyes on Etta, willing away the phantom sounds. “He must be impervious to your wiles.”
Smacking his shoulder, Etta beckoned him inside the tiny room. She sat down in front of a brightly-lit mirror and got to work scrubbing off her stage makeup. “How’s life in the world of bookkeeping?”
“Since when have you been interested in the world of bookkeeping?”
“I’m being a gracious hostess. You’re welcome.”
“Bookkeeping’s fine,” he said, leaning against the vanity table. Fine was the last word he’d use to describe his side business, but she didn’t need to know about that. “How’s the world of entertainment?”
“Say entertainment like a dirty word if you want, but this place is completely legal now. Gin and whiskey and all –”
Thunder and earthquakes
“– walking me home, so you don’t need to stay –”
A shroud of blood and rage –
“I’d better get home,” Paul said, jerking to his feet.
“You’re not getting sick, are you?”
“No –” Paul fumbled for his coat, exhaustion suddenly catching him like a clenched hand. “Just tired.”
“Well, then.” Etta gave him a quick embrace, and for a moment the dingy nightclub walls and her curls and caked makeup morphed back into the stricken-eyed little girl who’d clung to his hand as they stepped together onto unfamiliar soil beneath a stern copper giant. “Don’t be a stranger.”
A tiny spring, a mighty river –
Paul stepped back, his head pounding. “Take care of yourself.”
Etta winked, one hand on her hip. “I always do.”
→ Keep reading! The Scepter: Part II
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I’m first! It’s already not going where I expected, but it’s fascinating. I love the book of Esther, so it’s fun to see the parallels and the differences.
Extremely evocative. I can see some of the characters, i like how you use the names to establish some flavor: if im not mistaken, im picking up jewish, irish, and italian names—perfect mix for a gritty mid century new york. Excited to follow this!