The Wicked Redhead

“Oh? I thought it ended pretty well, indeed. Best ride I ever took.”

A slow blush climbs over the top of Anson’s collar and up his neck.

“Now I guess you might have been referring to the fact that somebody shot you,” I continue. “But if that bullet hadn’t grazed you, and the good doctor hadn’t prescribed you a brandy cure for the pain, why, the whole evening might have been ruined.”

He says something I can’t quite make out over the wind and the engine. But he isn’t smiling, so I don’t press him. Maybe he wasn’t talking about getting shot at all; maybe he was thinking about what came after, caught in Duke’s trap, and that none of that horror might have come about if we hadn’t ventured out on the waters of New York Harbor in a high-powered speedboat that evening, hadn’t passed through the Narrows and into the wide ocean, hadn’t afterward spent the night in pleasure as we did.

“I guess we paid for it, all right,” I say, mostly to myself, but Anson has got the ears of a cat, I guess, because he replies, Paid for what? and I say boldly, Joy.

He doesn’t say anything to that. Maybe I was expecting the sound of this word—joy—might cause him to shut off the engine and seize me in his arms and deliver some kind of physical comfort to daub the wounds inside us both, but all I detect is a fresh whiteness at the joints of his fingers that hold the wheel and adjust the throttle. The boat pursues its long, clean course down the Indian River, mangrove passing to the left and the buildings and wharves of Cocoa slipping away to the right. Then the buildings thin out and disappear altogether, and Anson speaks up over the deep, angry throat of the engine.

“I telephoned my parents from Fitzwilliam’s office. Asked how Billy was doing.”

“And? Have they put his poor jaw back together again?”

“Yes.” He pauses. “Seems he hasn’t yet woken up. May be some injury to the brain itself, because of the force of the blow.”

I grip the edge of the seat with my good hand. Feel a little sick. “Poor Billy.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t they do anything? Some kind of operation?”

“I don’t know. It was a bad connection; I couldn’t hear half of what she was saying.”

“You mother, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I stare down at the ugly blue serge covering my knees, against which an image of Mrs. Marshall takes shape, as I last saw her. She stands in the moonlight beside a Southampton swimming pool, consuming a cigarette in swift, fierce drags, and she tells me about her sons. She wears a long, shimmering dressing gown, trimmed in down, and an aspect of fascinating beauty, made of delicate, high-pitched bones and preserved skin. In the tension of her face, I perceive a universe of keen emotion, which might be love but also fear. I swallow back a cup of misery and ask, “How’s she taking it?”

Anson lifts his hand from the throttle and works the brim of the flat newsboy’s cap atop his head. His profile is terribly grim. “How’s she taking it? Her son’s lying in a hospital bed with a broken head. I guess she’s taking it as well as the next woman. Considering she’s already lost another son to the war.”

“I hope you’re not blaming yourself. It’s my fault, if anything.”

“It’s Kelly’s fault, Ginger. And mine, for bringing you into this, first, and then dragging my brother into it because of you.”

I rise from the seat and grasp his elbow. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you even think it. You didn’t mean for that to happen. You were doing your job, that’s all.”

“But Billy wasn’t. Billy had nothing to do with this.”

“No, he got into this mess because of me, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. I should never have taken up with him. A sweet wee cub like that.”

“He wasn’t so naïve as that.”

“No, but he was fallen in love with me, and I let him fall, because I was vain and shallow and flattered by him. Because I needed a little solace. Because I hadn’t met you yet.”

Anson makes a noise in his throat, but nothing else.

“Anyway,” I say, “how was I supposed to know poor Billy was serious about me? Men make all kinds of promises. They’ll say anything. Maybe they even mean it at the time; I don’t know. Every man wants to run away with you, until suddenly he doesn’t.”

“Well, I knew,” he says. “I knew he was serious about you.”

“See here. You have nothing to be guilty for, do you hear me? If I’d known you were brothers, the two of you—”

“I knew we were brothers.”

“And you didn’t touch me, did you? I was the one who came to your bed, that night we went out on the ocean. I was the one who gave you that brandy and climbed in beside you.”

“I let you in.”

“You were an innocent before me, Anson. Don’t think I didn’t know.”

“Maybe so,” he says, “but I wasn’t so innocent I didn’t know what we were doing together. Wasn’t so drunk I didn’t mean what I did. I knew I was breaking my brother’s heart, and I did it anyway, because …”

“Because why? Because you’re such a mean, selfish, awful bastard and wanted me for yourself?”

His hand yanks down the throttle, smacking the engine back down to size, cutting our speed to a mere crawl. He turns to me, left hand gripping the wheel, and his face sort of shocks me, bruised and brutal, lit to blazes by the afternoon sun. “All right. Have it your way. You seduced me. I’m just some poor, innocent rube who fell in love with the wrong girl and stuck himself with nothing but trouble.”

“If you want out—”

“Want out? Out of what? Out of loving you? Out of waking up and thanking God you’re still alive, I haven’t killed you with this life of mine, this job of mine—”

“Oh, if that’s what’s bothering you—”

“There is only one thing that bothers me, Ginger. I might ache for my brother, I might burn for my part in what was done to him, but there’s only one thing that makes me so sick I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight, I can’t see reason, and that’s the thought I might lose you. Might not ever again kiss you or lie with you.”

“You can’t lose a thing that doesn’t ever mean to be lost, Anson. You can’t lose a thing that belongs to you. A girl that was made for you, the same as you were made for her, like a handle for a bucket, like a pillowcase for a pillow. A hearth for a fire.”

And I say this brave thing, and I sit back on my heels and wait, gazing at his battered face with my heart right there in my eyes, in such a way that I have never yet looked upon a man, stripped and raw, and still he doesn’t seize me in his arms. Still he doesn’t touch my skin nor kiss my mouth. His stare is that of a man condemned to death. His left hand grips that wheel as if some frightful hurricane be bearing down upon us.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“There’s another thing.”

“So tell me.”

“Something your stepfather said, back there in the springhouse.”

“He said a lot of things.”

“You know what I mean, Ginger. I didn’t say anything before. I figured we had enough to do, making it safely down here to Florida. Making sure you weren’t hurt any worse than I feared. And I know Duke said a lot of things, and most of them didn’t have any truth to them. But if there’s any chance, Ginger, any chance at all …”

He cuts himself off and looks away, blinking back something in his eyes, and how can I blame him? A question like that. And I know why he’s asking it. Not because he actually supposes he might have started a child in me; not even so much as a week has passed since we lay together in the cold, black Southampton night, reckless as two young thieves, while this same ocean spoke outside our window, and though Anson might have lost his wits entirely during the sweet course of those hours, he is yet sensible enough to understand the limits of nature’s bounty. No, indeed. A far more complicated possibility has risen up before him, and my step-daddy is to blame for that, as for most of our troubles.

So I forgive him for the indelicacy of his question. I feel his torment like an ache in my own breast. I take one step toward him and lift his right hand with my left hand, the one that isn’t near to broken by one of Duke’s various methods of torture.

“Do not,” I say, “for God’s sake, do not give that man the power to haunt you still. You just forget every word Duke Kelly said in that springhouse, do you hear me? Every word. It was the devil that spoke through his mouth that terrible morning, and the devil never did speak a word of truth to mortal men.”

He curls his fingers tight around mine and stares out across the boat’s bow. “Speak plain, Ginger. Just tell me. I know it’s a private matter, it’s your own business, but I’ll go nuts if—”

“I’m not carrying any man’s child, Anson. Not Billy’s and not yours.”

The faint, high scream of a steam whistle carries across the water. I take another step to stand but a breath away from his shoulder, and it seems to me that the tension in that coil of muscle is fixing to burst right through his shirt and his ill-fitting Florida jacket.

“You’re certain?” he says.

“As certain as a woman can possibly be.”

He just turns his head, that’s all, turns his head and lets his forehead fall against mine, and the tension in his big shoulder sort of dissolves in our blood. And that’s when I realize I’ve been feeling it all this time, down along the road from Maryland, thinking this wound-up tautness was just his ordinary pitch, his shoulder was just built that way, and it turns out his shoulder is more like a cushion than a rock, more like a cradle than a coil of tarred rope, and it fits the curve of my head like they were made for each other.

9

NOW I wasn’t lying when I told Mrs. Fitzwilliam that I don’t relish this business of messing about in boats. I wasn’t bred up to it, for one thing, and for another I can’t help but think of what happened last time I took ship with Oliver Anson Marshall. You know what I mean. The rough chop of that speedboat across the water, and the rat-a-tat-a-tat of a Thompson submachine gun searching out your flesh. The whisht-thud of a bullet whisking past you in the night air to find purchase in some nearby object, and the sickness of death that clung to you like the smell of blood.

So I try to close my eyes, but that only brings on nausea and the usual visions of broken necks and brass knuckles and blood creeping across a black-and-white floor, so I stand up instead and share the journey with my beloved. The water changes color from deep, tranquil green to an eager blue, and the shore thins out into sand. We don’t say much, just trade observations on the scenery. I wonder if he’s thinking the same things I am, if he’s thinking about all the death and hurt we have left in our wake, but that’s not a question you can ask a man like Anson in the golden light of a Florida afternoon. You ask him in bed, in the dark, when your skin lies against his skin, and he tells you the truth. Here and now, you ask him about the ships that lie ahead. Those smugglers’ warehouses floating atop the skin of the Atlantic, three miles out to sea. Why three miles? Because three miles marks the limit of United States territorial waters, that’s why. The sum total of the Coast Guard’s jurisdiction.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to learn,” I tell him, just exactly as if I know his business as well as he does. “Surely the Florida racket’s got nothing to do with the northern rackets.”

“But they both have the Bureau and the Coast Guard to deal with. Any kind of news spreads fast, believe me.” He pauses. “I used to be assigned down here, remember? They sent me down to help break up one of the big family gangs. That’s how I met Fitzwilliam.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’re going to recognize you?”

He shrugs. “It’s a chance, I guess. I’ll just tell them I’ve left the Bureau. Out on the water with my girl, looking for a little refreshment.”

“Oh, they’ll believe that, will they? Mister Law and Order’s gone all wet suddenly?”

“Nothing corrupts a fellow like falling in with the wrong kind of dame.”

“You mean some kind of wicked red-haired floozy who drinks her own weight in gin and falls into bed with any old meathead Prohibition agent who strikes her fancy? That kind of dame?”

“She sounds just about perfect to me.”

“I see. And how are you going to explain our busted appearance? Don’t you think it might make a smuggler nervous, all these bruises and slings?”

“Don’t you remember? There was a fight at the Palm last night. I was defending your honor, as I often do, and you pitched in to help, as you often do.”

“Oliver Anson Marshall. You disgraceful liar.”

He smiles a little.

“Why, you’re enjoying all this, aren’t you? You relish a little adventure.”

“It’s what I do, that’s all.”

“What you used to do, you mean.”

“Yes. What I used to do.”

I guess I ought to ask him the obvious question. Ought to ask him why we’re out here on this boat, heading into a little adventure, when he’s no longer employed by anybody to do such things, when he’s found himself a nice place of refuge with a floozy who adores him. But what’s the point? When a man’s trying to get back his honor, prove to the world and the Prohibition bureau that he’s nothing but an honest, straightforward fellow caught up in some scoundrel’s game, he’ll keep hunting and hunting until he dies, won’t he? He’s not going to stop trying to find the man who has cast him into purgatory.

So instead of wasting everybody’s time, I just ask, “And me? You don’t mind dragging your dame into this nest of smugglers?”

“Ginger, these Rum Row skippers, they aren’t the kind of fellows you need to be afraid of. They’re just businessmen. Sometimes not even that, sometimes just fellows trying to make a few dollars, who wouldn’t put their necks at risk.”

“Then exactly whom should we be afraid of?”

“Pirates, for one.”

“Pirates! You don’t say. You mean like Bluebeard? Wooden legs and eyepatches? Chests full of gold doubloons?”

“Chests full of Scotch whiskey is more like it. They don’t usually attack the big storage ships on Rum Row. But they’ll stop the boats ferrying liquor to shore, or else the schooners out of Nassau or Havana hauling in more stock. Not small potatoes like us—we’re not worth the trouble—and mostly at night, when the rackets from shore are doing their dirty work.”

“And the men running the rackets? What about them?”

“Pretty ruthless fellows, by and large. You’ll want to give them a wide berth.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Why, you’re not anxious, are you, Ginger?”

“Of course I’m not anxious. The idea.”

“Because if you’re anxious, I’ll turn this boat around and take you back to shore. Can’t have a nervy partner out there. They’ll smell it on you.”

“Thought you said they weren’t dangerous.”

“They’re not exactly sissies, either.”

By now we have cleared the inlet entirely, and there’s nothing but blue sea ahead and yellow sand behind. The Atlantic wind drenches us clean. I savor the word partner on the back of my tongue. Glance across at Anson’s thick neck, pinkened by all that wind and excitement, and his eyes narrowed gleefully at the encounter ahead.

“Why, then, Mr. Marshall,” I say, folding my arms across my chest, “if that’s the case, I guess you’re going to need my help.”

10

THEY LIE anchored in a line from north to south, at intervals so regular it’s practically unnerving, if you’re that breed of person who misplaces his nerves from time to time. From three miles out you can still see the shore, verdant and kind of mysterious, but it might as well be another universe for all the good it does you. The boat bobs nervously under your feet, the ship looms large and black-sided, sails folded neat against masts and spars. I turn toward Anson and open my mouth to tell him about my dream, about the schooner that looked exactly like this one, only packed to the hatches with dead men. But he’s concentrating on bringing the motor launch alongside, on some exchange of hails with the sailors on deck.

I take his arm. “Are you sure about this? You know what you’re doing?”

He gives me this amazed look. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“I just got a feeling, that’s all. Chill down my spine.”

Anson examines my eyelashes, slings his arm about my neck, and pulls me in for the kind of long, soft kiss that draws forth a chorus of whooping from above. I am surely too shocked to resist. When he’s done, he touches his forehead to mine and whispers, “You’re safe. Trust me.”

I want to scream back that it’s not my safety giving me the chills, it’s his, but somebody’s calling down words of some kind—afraid I’m still too discombobulated by the kissing to hear them properly—and then a rope ladder falls at our feet, and the time for turning back has long past. Tick tock. Just swallow back your terror and climb that rope, I guess, doing your best to hold on with your one good hand.

11

TURNS OUT they know each other, Anson and this captain of his, I haven’t yet caught his name. He thinks it’s a great joke that Special Agent Marshall is no longer agent of anything to speak of. Pours him a bumper of Scotch whiskey to celebrate, and to my amazement Anson slings it right back. Yes, he does! Slings it right back, sets the glass on the table, and delivers me a slow wink that sets my insides to bubbling.

“For you, madam?” asks the captain.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

I sip my whiskey with considerably more reserve than Anson does. I figure one of us should remain sober. The captain—turns out his name is Logan or something—pours out another for Anson and another for himself, and Anson asks Logan how’s business since he’s been away.

“Business is booming, Marshall. Business is booming. I can’t keep my vintage champagne in stock. Fellows come all the way from Palm Beach for champagne.”

“Can’t they get champagne in Miami?”

Logan makes a noise of disgust. “These boys out of Nassau, they got plenty of British liquor but they don’t get no French ships no more. So I have a fellow from up north who supplies me.”

“From where? Saint Pierre?”

“That’s the place. Ever been there?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

Logan laughs and tops everybody off from a bottle of what claims to be a fifteen-year-old single malt from Ayrshire, though I have my doubts. In case you’re wondering, we’re sitting in the captain’s own cabin, which isn’t so grand as it sounds. Cramped, damp, dark, smells of fish and piss and wood soaked in brine, all of it baked together like some kind of stew in the oven of a Florida afternoon. There’s a bunk built into the wall, a green sofa—on which I’m presently sitting next to Anson—and an armchair for Logan the color of mustard, everything built of sticks and horsehair cushions and scraps of old upholstery. You’d think they were smuggling milk instead of a commodity so lucrative as rum.

“Neither have I,” Logan says, setting down the bottle, “but I heard it ain’t much. Just some wet rock off the coast of Newfoundland with a port that don’t ice over in winter.”

“I guess that’s useful, in your line of work,” I say.

“Oh, it’s useful, all right. But the real kicker is it’s French.”

“French? But doesn’t Newfoundland belong to Canada?”

“Thrown around between the two of them for centuries. England and France, I mean. The point is, Saint Pierre ended up French, which makes it a gift from God direct to champagne vineyards and Scotch distilleries. And the Canadians, too, by God. Especially the Canadians.”

Possibly my face betrays some confusion. I take in a little more Scotch whiskey and watch Logan as he pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a match kept in this special jar with a lid. I guess sailors worry about such things. Anyway, he watches me watching him and offers me a cigarette, which I accept because a low-down wicked dame like me ought to take a cigarette when it’s stuck in her direction, oughtn’t she? The better to corrupt her menfolk with. And I pick up a little courage with the familiar smell of burning tobacco, so I say, “Why does that make any difference? Being French?”

“Why, because of taxes, Miss Kelly.”

Anson lays his arm across my shoulders and speaks in this low, gravelly voice. “In the first place, Saint Pierre’s import duties amount to maybe a tenth of what they charge in Nassau, which is pure profit for suppliers.”

“And the French don’t even pay that,” says Logan, “so they don’t send no more bottles by way of Nassau. Why should they? You could about bathe in champagne, on the island of Saint Pierre.”

Anson smiles. “And second, the Canadian distillers don’t have to pay duty on export bottles, so the government refunds the tax once the company provides proof it’s been imported into another country. That’s where the good men of Saint Pierre oblige. Unload the liquor, hand the captain a stack of stamped import certificates. Distiller gets his tax bond back from the Canadian government and sells the cargo to whatever racket’s waiting there in the harbor for some merchandise.”

“Or else ships it direct to the Row,” Logan says.

“Now every man, woman, child, and dog in Saint Pierre keeps busy from dawn to dusk in the liquor trade.”

“I bet they never had it so good.” I wave my cigarette to indicate the ship around us. “The liquor trade beats the fishing trade, any day. In price and in general atmosphere, if you know what I mean.”

Logan leans forward. “Listen to this, Miss Kelly. Listen good. I spent seventeen years fishing the coast around here, and I never cleared more than a thousand dollars in a single year. Just enough to get by. Keep my wife and my three kids. Now? I clear more than that in a month. Sometimes a week. I make so much dough, I got a wife and a girl down in Port Saint Lucie.” He roars his joy and slaps Anson’s knee. “Now that’s what I call prosperity!”

“I guess your wife’s over the moon,” I say.

“Aw, she don’t care. Why, she’s sitting in her nice new house right now, wearing a nice new dress.” He inspects the uninspired neck of my own serge frock. “You could use some more dough yourself, Marshall, now that you’re out of the enforcement business. You need to set this doll of yours up like she deserves.”

I suck on my cigarette and say I couldn’t agree more.

“You see, Marshall? A beauty like this, she likes a fellow with a little bread in his pocket. If she don’t get it from you, she’ll be looking elsewhere fast.”

Anson shrugs his big shoulders. Fingers draw a circle or two on my upper arm, through the thick material of the dress. “I might have a plan or two up my sleeve. You never know.”

“Well, you better not wait too long, brother. You better not. I hear there’s some talk of a new treaty. Move the line out another ten miles or more.”

“Is that so?”

“You mean the boundary for United States waters?” I ask.

“That’s what I mean.” Logan points out the nearby porthole. “You can just about see the shore from here, when the haze don’t set in too bad. From ten or twenty miles out, you might as well be in the middle of the ocean, for all you can catch glimpse of the United States. And some fellow carrying a few bottles from ship to shore, why, he’s got a lot of water to cover. Lot of salt water for the Coast Guard to catch him in.”

From the gathering tension in the muscles of Anson’s arm along my shoulders, I figure this piece of information interests him. But his fingers continue that delicious circling at exactly the same pace. His voice continues in the same gravelly drawl. He reaches out the other long arm and gathers up his glass of whiskey, and I guess I’m the only one who feels him wince. Those poor abused ribs of his. “Lot of water,” he agrees.

“Sitting ducks,” says Logan. “Sitting fucking ducks. Forgive my language, Miss Kelly, but it ain’t going to be pretty, if such a thing comes to pass.”