• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2801 0

can take in all the affairs of the avenue with nothing more than your shirtsleeves for cover, blowing the smoke of a dozen good cigarettes up to the stars above the city and feeling, on balance, like maybe there’s some point to living in this madhouse after all. The traffic—gasoline-powered automobiles and trucks these days, not just clattering old nags dragging carriages and carts—has slowed quite a bit with the passing of midnight, and soon the after-supper ladies and gents will be over from the Albemarle Hotel and the Hoffman House to pick up their fine-blended smokes. They’ll wonder why I’ve closed early, but they won’t wonder long before heading for some other shop; and after they’ve gone, quiet will settle in around this grand Flatiron Building with a purpose. She still lords it over Madison Square, the Flatiron does, with her solitary, peculiar silhouette and her fussy stone face, all of which, at the time she was built, had architects and critics going at each other tooth and nail. The Metropolitan Life Tower across the park may be taller, but it doesn’t have near the style or presence; and next to the Flatiron, buildings like Madison Square Garden, topped by its once-shocking statue of naked Diana, just seem like hangovers from another age, an age that, looking back, feels like it passed in the space of a night. It was a gay night, many folks’d say; but for some of us, it was a strange and dangerous time, when we learned things about human behavior that most sensible people would never want to know. Even the few that might’ve been curious got all the grimness they could stand from the Great War. What people want now’s a good time, and they want it with a vengeance.

Certainly that drive is what’ll be powering the type of folks who’ll be on their way over to my shop to try and buy the smokes they’ll need for long hours at the city’s gaming tables and dance halls. The weather alone would rule out any darker, motivations. The breezy, light arms of the night air will wrap themselves around all those keen, hopeful souls, and they’ll tear into the town like a meat district dog who’s smelled out a bit of bone at the bottom of an ash heap. Most of their activities won’t amount to nothing, of course, but that doesn’t matter; part of the strange fun of getting rooked into thinking that anything’s possible on the beaten, dirty streets of this Big Onion is knowing that if you don’t find what you’re looking for tonight, it’s all that much more important that you try again tomorrow.

I remember that feeling; I had it many times myself before I reached my present lamentable state. Being forever on the verge of coughing up a lung has taken away much of my joy in this existence, for it’s hard to relish the world’s pleasures when you’re leaving pools of blood and pus wherever you go like some wretched, wounded animal. Still, though, my memory’s as good as ever, and to be sure, I can recall the raw joy that nights like this used to bring, the feeling of being outside and on your own, with the whole world stretched out and waiting. Yes, even with the hack I know that you don’t come in from a night like this without a damned good reason. But that’s exactly what Mr. John Schuyler Moore has given me.

He came in about an hour ago, drunk as a lord (which will surprise exactly nobody what knows the man) and spewing a lot of vitriol about the cowardice of editors and publishers and the American people in general. To hear him talk (or maybe I should say, to hear the wine and whiskey talk), it’s a miracle this country’s made it as far as we have, what with all the secret horror, tragedy, and mayhem that infest our society. Mind you, I don’t argue the man’s point; I spent too many years in the house and employ of Doctor Laszlo Kreizler, eminent alienist and friend to both me and Mr. Moore, to write my guest’s gloomy estimations off as a drunkard’s ravings. But as oftentimes happens with your inebriates, my visitor wasn’t going to let his bitterness stay generalized for too long: he was looking for somebody specific to go after, and in the absence