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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:
← Previously, in The Scepter: Part IX: Etta was faced with a choice between her own safety and the survival of the people she left behind.
“Put in my mouth persuasive words in the presence of the lion, and turn his heart to hatred for our enemy…”
-Esther 4:24
From the bottom drawer of her dresser, hidden under a cool, glimmering pile of silk nightgowns, Etta pulled out a worn wooden box. She eased the sticky hinges open. Beside a pressed flower she’d picked in Central Park and a secondhand imitation pearl ring that Paul had given her on her thirteenth birthday, there was a thin leather strap from which hung a delicate six-pointed star.
The angles of the star had poked her skin beneath her threadbare dress when she and Paul had stood on the frigid, windswept deck of an ocean liner and watched the city grow from a speck to a sprawling jungle on the horizon. For so many years, the little necklace had waited, shoved away in the furthest corner of her memories and belongings.
Etta slipped the necklace out of the wooden box, clicked the lid shut, and laid the box back in its drawer. Then, sliding the strap over her head, she tucked the star beneath her dress.
Her lipstick was bright; her hair was in place. She wore one of Ricky’s favorites, a deep amethyst dress that clung to every narrow curve. In it she was small, harmless, not troublesome or threatening. Etta pressed a cloche over her curls and pushed her arms into the mink coat.
As she made her way through the parlor toward the door, she shot a vindictive glare at the telephone. This could all be solved by a telephone call if she knew how to get in touch with Ricky. But no, he contacted her; he came to her; he summoned her. It didn’t work the other way. She paused by the coffee table, where she’d left her newspaper. That face, where had she seen it before? It had been bothering her all morning. Picking up the newspaper, she frowned again at the photograph.
It was a young man, not many years older than she was, with an oddly soft face and a laughing smile. But there was something about his pale eyes that chilled her, something about the grinning ferocity with which he looked directly into the photographer’s lens that made her skin crawl.
Bugsy Siegel, the article called him.
The Bugs and Meyer Mob. Paul had said his name yesterday. The man who had stolen Verna’s affection from Ricky.
Etta had seen Bugsy Siegel somewhere before, she was certain. Likely one of Ricky’s parties. Sometimes he invited rivals, keeping his enemies close. That must have been where she’d seen him.
But that was enough dilly-dallying. She had somewhere to go, and she couldn’t put it off any longer by trying to jog her memory about a pale-eyed mobster. The sooner she started, the sooner it would be over. Or the sooner she would be over.
Dropping the newspaper back to the table, Etta took a shaky breath and strode out the front door of her apartment.
Billy stood as she came out.
“I need to run an errand.” Her voice was breezy, carefree. An errand, that was all.
With his usual silence, Billy pulled on his coat and followed her, leaving a book beneath his chair.
At the elevator, Etta tossed a glib question over her shoulder. “What’re you reading?”
There could be nothing problematic about a little question like that; she was bored and making innocent conversation. She would have asked the same question of any of Ricky’s other thugs if she had spied them reading a book. Naturally she had no particular interest in Billy McManus’ reading choices, just as she had no particular interest in Billy McManus. Even if the elevator operator were to open the door and catch them in conversation, there would be nothing to arouse suspicion.
A faint, skeptical frown flicked over Billy’s face before he answered. “Of Human Bondage.”
“Oh.” Etta adjusted her hat as the elevator door opened and the operator pulled back the grate. “Sounds cheery.”
Etta, Billy, and the operator each stood in a separate corner of the square elevator, as far from each other as possible, and no one spoke a word down the whole, long height of the towering building.
When Billy pulled the car around, Etta’s knees were shaking inside her coat. Sliding into the back seat, she focused her attention out the window and clutched her purse to stop her hands from trembling.
Billy glanced in the rear-view mirror, waiting for a destination, but her voice was paralyzed inside her throat. She couldn’t seem to remember how to speak. Did she need to take a breath first, then force air up and out? How was it that she went through every day talking carelessly, and now she’d forgotten how to produce a sound?
From the driver’s seat, Billy turned back to look at her. “Where to, Miss Cohen?”
“The Ibis Club,” she said at last, covering up her shaking voice with a toss of her hair.
Billy’s expression didn’t change, yet his eyes were sharper, his face tighter. “What do you need from the Ibis Club?”
“Just going to pay Ricky a visit.” Recovering, her voice rolled out airy and nonchalant.
For a moment, Billy didn’t say anything, and it seemed as though he would turn back to the steering wheel. Then he spoke again, his voice hardly above a murmur. “This have something to do with Cohen?”
Ice sank like a stone in Etta’s stomach, but she only brightened her smile. “I just have an invitation for Ricky.”
“You don’t want to surprise Ricky, especially not at his club.”
“We’re wasting daylight, Mr. McManus, and this time of year it’s in short supply.”
“Ricky has meetings at his club, business meetings. If he wanted you there, he’d tell you to come.”
“Thank you for your advice, Mr. McManus,” Etta said, the ice in her stomach chilling her voice. “Now please drive.”
His face never changing from his neutral frown, Billy turned to face forward. Shoulders a little higher than usual, his fists kept a tight grip on the steering wheel. Pulling out into traffic, Billy wound the car through the city toward the Ibis Club.
If she made it out this afternoon, then tonight she’d drop the full story on Ricky at her own apartment, after a dinner and some wine. The apartment was his, like most places were; with Ricky there was no such thing as a neutral location. But she would put as many variables as possible into her own hands. That is, if he didn’t shoot her dead right in his meeting room, leaving her convulsing on the floor like Martin, her blood spilling like wine over the floorboards.
No, she wouldn’t think like that. She was a harmless, vapid, beautiful woman inviting her lover for a meal. She mustn’t be anything else.
The white stone and scarlet awnings of the Ibis Club appeared far too soon. Pulling the car to a stop, Billy climbed out and opened her door before the doorman could reach it. He held out his hand – casually, as if wary of ice on the sidewalk – but when she took it there was an urgency in his grip.
“You can go back right now,” he said.
The doorman came up alongside the car and directed a small cough at Billy. Pasting a smile on her face, Etta looked away from Billy and stepped out of the car.
Her legs shaking but her face bright, Etta followed the doorman inside, let herself be handed over to the maître d’. Billy walked along a few steps behind, depositing both their coats at the coat check.
Though it was midday, the club was packed with New York’s elite in their best daytime winter clothes, criminals mingling with businessmen until they melded into a soup of glossy suits, deep pockets, and thinning hair. Watching each other and watching her, they picked at quail and salmon and liver pâté from gleaming white plates.
Before Ricky, she’d tasted salmon a handful of times, but never in a restaurant. In the tenements where she and Paul had hunkered down and eked out something like a life, her friends’ mothers had always been the first to haggle with the fishmonger and the butcher in the mornings, snagging the freshest meat before the staff of New York’s wealthy could go out for their day’s shopping. On a few occasions, the friendlier mothers had slipped her a piece of still-hot salmon from their stoves, along with some bread or a crumbly gingerbread cookie. She’d never tasted anything better than the seared, fatty fish, but at the Ibis Club the salmon’s flaky pink flesh was smeared with coagulated yellow sauce and sprinkled with tiny chunks of green scallions and parsley. A flare of useless anger rose like bile in Etta’s throat, but she kept her smile even, kept her steps graceful and unbothered through the winding maze of the club’s rooms.
The club seemed impossibly huge, the rooms lengthening with each step as she followed the maître d’ toward Ricky. Never before had it taken so long for her to reach the door of Ricky’s round, sound-proofed private room, and yet it came upon her suddenly, like waking from a dream.
“Miss Cohen.” The maître d’ flashed pearl-white teeth and retreated.
Moving before she could think and falter, Etta raised her hand to the door and knocked.
The hubbub of the restaurant was muted by the pounding in Etta’s ears as she stared at the blank wooden door.
She could sense Billy behind her, the air slightly warmed by his proximity, but her hands were ice cold and she wished she’d kept the mink coat.
The door opened, and cigar smoke leaked through the slit. Eyes in a rough, lumpy face raked over Etta and flitted up to Billy, and the man opened the door.
Stepping through the curtain of earthy smoke, Etta stifled a cough. At a table, Giacomo Gardini and a small group of men clustered around maps and lists and notes and Ricky, who stood with a cigar clutched between his fingers and his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was a moment of stillness, and then Ricky’s gaze moved from the map, across the floor to Etta’s feet, and then up the length of her body to her face.
The calculating frown in Ricky’s eyes stuttered, and like a damaged film reel the dead-eyed blankness fluttered over him.
Something within Etta quailed, her bones threatening to give way beneath her. But she smiled, fiddled with Ricky’s pearls at her neck. She was harmless, thoughtless, unthreatening. Ricky had no reason to hate or fear her, no reason to punch through a wall or shatter her cheekbones or pull a trigger. She was a well-dressed, insipid girl with an invitation, nothing more.
Flashing over the amethyst dress, the pearls, her hair brushing against her chin, his eyes suddenly cleared, and Ricky stuck the cigar between his teeth and grinned.
Holding out his arm, he drew Etta closer, pulling her against his side with a tightness that pressed the breath from her lungs. He paused, his small eyes narrowing slightly. “McManus,” he said, and something in his tone squeezed Etta’s lungs harder than his grip. “Wait outside.”
From the corner of her eyes, Etta saw Billy back slowly out of the room, and the rough-faced man shut and locked the door.
She was alone.
“What’s brought you out this way?” Ricky was all affability, all smiles, proud of his mistress in the clinging purple dress.
Gardini’s gaze needled her, and the memory that all day had been straining somewhere in the recesses of her mind broke through the ice, emerging into cold sunlight.
The realization hovered before her, so stark it seemed to shake the ground beneath her feet, but she didn’t have time for it now. Not now – later, when she could think.
Swallowing the memory that had burst from the depths, Etta touched Ricky’s loosened necktie, scarlet with tiny dots of white, the reverse of his blood-spattered, cloud-white suit in this very room only weeks before.
But she wouldn’t think of blood now. She would only think of smiling. “I have an invitation for you. And Mr. Gardini.”
Billy was outside the door when she emerged from the round room. Walking quickly, she hurried through the bustling, chattering network of dining rooms and bars, and he hastened his steps to catch up with her.
She wouldn’t make it all the way outside.
Ahead was a hallway to the ladies’ room. She could make it that far, she was almost certain.
Taking the corner too sharply, her feet betrayed her, and she bumped against the wallpaper of the dim hallway. Her lungs clenched inward, collapsing, and her clammy skin turned frigid.
Leaning against the wall of the hallway, Etta gasped in heavy breaths, praying that none of the businessmen’s diamond-clad wives would round the corner.
The first part was done. He hadn’t shattered anything, hadn’t reached for his gun. He’d only smiled and leered and squeezed her too tight. She could survive this, perhaps, if her luck held out.
The memory that she’d shoved under the ice crawled once again into the harsh daylight, and Etta’s stomach roiled. But she wouldn’t be sick in the Ibis Club; that wasn’t an option. How had she not remembered before; how had Paul not realized it?
She’d seen Siegel before, but not at a party. On a night-dark street, in a puddle of orange, shaking hands with another man she knew, the man pulling Ricky’s strings like a puppet-master.
Billy stood at the hallway entrance, hands in his pockets. A lookout, again.
Desperate for cool air free of smoke, Etta swallowed her nausea. She didn’t have time for this.
Her thoughts in a tumult but her feet once again almost steady, Etta straightened up, tugged her rumpled dress back into place.
She nodded at Billy, and he stepped aside, then followed her back toward the entrance, through the slant-eyed horde of diners.
Chin high, shoulders back. Let them know that she knew they were watching and that she didn’t care. Etta Cohen, mistress of Ricky Melchiorre, wasn’t bothered by curious eyes.
She had a supper to plan.
← Part IX
As The Scepter is rounding the corner to the finale, please feel free to comment with any questions you have about the writing, the characters, or the historical and Biblical background of the story! In late December or early January, I’m planning to do my first ever live debrief of a serial, and I would love if you’re able to come and bring your questions along! I’ve recruited my sister to “interview” me because I’m too chicken to do a livestream all by myself, so you’ll also get to meet my lovely sister!
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My heart's in my mouth reading this chapter, even though I know how the bones of the story are going.... great stuff.
Also, Billy McManus has great taste in literature!
Thrilling! I'm both nervous and excited for the next chapter!