Page 16 of If Looks Could Kill

Our days and nights were full with the new routines of Soup, Soap, and Salvation.

Full of people, full of noise, full of small cuts to our fingers, but not much that was really new, other than the decision to add barley to our soup, a recipe change that threatened to tear the women into barley and non-barley factions.

Lieutenant Dillinger, whose mother authored the original recipe, wouldn’t speak to Captain Jessop, leader of the barley party, for almost an entire day.

Somehow we survived, and so did the barley.

Pearl and I had nearly reached our apartment after second Sunday services, and I was longing to take off my boots and have a quick lie-down when someone fell into step beside us.

“The trouble I’ve had tracking you down,” Freyda began. “You’re harder to locate than a nervous bridegroom.”

“Hello to you too, Freyda,” I told her. “Have you been looking for us?”

“I go to your apartment, and nobody answers when I ring the bell,” she replied. “I go to your Salvation Army church or whatever you call it, and they say you’re at the Mission School. I go to the Mission School, and you’ve gone to the Foundling Asylum. I go there, and you’re—”

“Back at the base,” I supplied.

“No,” Freyda barked. “You’re terrorizing taverns and saloons.”

“Well,” Pearl said with her nose held high, “you’ve certainly been sniffing around.”

Freyda grinned. “I warned you. That’s what I do. But you two are harder to pin down than this mysterious brothel girl you hope to find.”

Pearl stopped in her tracks, to the annoyance of those behind us. “Have you found her?”

Freyda shrugged. “Mebbe I have, and mebbe I ain’t.”

“Can you take us there?” demanded Pearl. “Can we go now? Is it far? Do we have time?”

“We’ve got two hours,” I told them, “before we need to be back at base.”

“Let’s go,” Freyda said. She hurried off, beckoning us to follow her.

“Not exactly two hours,” Pearl told me in a low voice.

“Why not?” I whispered back.

She blushed. “Er, Mr. Laurier asked if he could walk me to the evening meeting.”

So that’s what they’d been talking about at lunchtime. Well, well. Courting in earnest, were they?

“I don’t see why that should take you any longer than walking there with me,” I told her, all na?veté and innocence. “We can all three go together.” She’d been extra Pearlish today, and I felt she deserved a little grief.

“You wouldn’t,” she jabbed back, the little witch.

Just because I didn’t have the suitor she had—and she was welcome to him—didn’t mean no male had ever cast a glance my way.

And furthermore, a pretty face isn’t the only thing there is.

Certainly not the only reason two people might be drawn to each other.

And just because one face is prettier than another doesn’t mean the other face might not be perfect to somebody.

Not that any of this mattered, and I scolded myself for letting Pearl get to me.

It did cross my mind, briefly, that Mike hadn’t returned to any more meetings. Not that this surprised me. Nor did I know why I was thinking of him. Nor was I thinking of him. It’s not thinking about someone to be thinking about why you’re not thinking about them.

Drat that Pearl! Drat her insufferable Purse Laurier, too. May they marry and bear children twice as pretty and four times as conceited as either of them.

Freyda, Girl on a Mission, strode along oblivious to these little dramas percolating in the tortured hearts of the Salvation Army. She headed downtown from our apartment, away from the Lion’s Den. Just beyond the intersection of Allen and Broome, we turned down an alley.

“Nearly there,” Freyda whispered.

“Nearly where?” wondered Pearl.

There didn’t seem to be anything near other than trash cans, fire escapes, crates of milk bottles, and laundry strung up between windows, all smeared with the smoky grime of the city.

“Are we headed for one of those secret saloons?” I whispered. “The hidden, unlicensed ones? That no one is supposed to know about?”

In answer, Freyda held a finger to her lips. She turned suddenly and climbed up to the first landing of a fire escape, then squatted there, watching the alley. We followed her lead.

A woman opened an upper window and called something across in German. Another window opened for a yelled response.

“Why do we have to hide up here?” Pearl asked.

Freyda’s pointed look at Pearl put a cork in her complaint. “Because you’re Salvation Army girls,” she said testily. “You blend in like circus clowns at a funeral.”

My thighs began to cramp. My fingers had stiffened and my brain had fallen asleep, when Freyda finally hissed through her teeth and pointed our gaze down the alley.

A man in a suit walked out of a gap I hadn’t noticed and hurried away down the alley, to our right.

“Who’s—” began Pearl, but Freyda silenced her once more with a glare.

She pointed downward, beneath us, as someone else approached from the opposite direction.

The flat top of the man’s beaver-trimmed hat passed directly below and turned into the same hidden gap.

He disappeared, and we heard a heavy door open and shut, and a murmur of voices before it closed. Then all was quiet once more.

Freyda rose, and we did the same. My joints groaned as we followed her down the iron stairs.

“Is that the brothel?” whispered Pearl. “Let’s go take a look.”

Freyda dragged Pearl out of the alley toward the street. “Only if you want all your knuckles broken,” she muttered. “Or worse. Pretty face like yours.”

We turned back uptown. “And you think our girl, er, works there?” I asked.

“Look, I don’t know her from Adam,” said Freyda, “or I guess I should say Eve. You saw her mug, remember, and I didn’t. But, yeah.” She nodded grimly. “Pretty sure this is where the girls holed up above the Lion’s Den earn their bread. At least, that’s what my source tells me.”

Freyda Gorbady, Girl Journalist, had sources .

“Disgusting,” Pearl spat. “Those were… well, I would’ve said respectable men, but they’re not. That last one wore a wedding ring! And they both looked like, I don’t know…”

“Partners at a law firm?” supplied Freyda. “Deacons at church?”

Pearl blanched. “I don’t know as I’d go that far….”

“I would,” I said. “Yes. They could be anybody. Ministers, even.”

“But not in the Salvation Army,” Pearl said loyally.

Freyda just shook her head and trudged onward.

“What was that for?” Pearl grumbled.

“I think,” I said, sotto voce, “it was for thinking our group is somehow immune to vice.”

“We’re soldiers in God’s army,” she said, as if I didn’t know this.

We reached our barracks. Freyda followed us up the steps.

“Would you like to come in?” I asked her. “Have a cup of tea?”

“Another time,” she said. “I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

“Ours?” inquired Pearl.

Freyda rolled her eyes. “First of all, no. Second of all, never. And third of all, it’s a meeting of anarchists. All right?”

Pearl reacted as though Freyda had said she was meeting with a legion of devils. Anarchists were the source of deadly bombings, the wrath of government and industry, and the dreaded bogey-men in newspaper editorials.

“Oh,” Pearl said, relief washing over her, “it’s because you’re a journalist, right? Going undercover? Attending the meeting for an article?”

Freyda watched Pearl curiously. “Sure,” she said. “We’ll go with that.”

Time to change the subject. “So what comes next?” I said. “To find our mystery girl?”

“We know where she lives—” Pearl began.

“Maybe,” interrupted Freyda.

“—and we know where she works.”

“Maybe,” insisted Freyda. “And both places, you can bet, are guarded by plug-uglies.”

Pearl and I glanced nervously at each other.

“So what’s your plan?” pressed Freyda.

“Rescue her,” I said.

Freyda folded her arms across her chest. “How?”

An excellent question.

Pearl’s reply: “Pray.”

“Well, good luck with praying,” said Freyda. “I gotta go. I’ll keep my nose to the ground. What’s this girl of yours look like, anyway?”

“Tragic,” said Pearl.

I said, “Dark hair.”

“Battered by the cruelties of life,” said Pearl.

“Young.”

“But not broken,” added Pearl.

“Thin,” I said. “Hungry. Could use a month of good meals.”

Freyda watched us like a spectator at a lawn tennis match. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve just described almost every single girl our age on the Lower East Side.”

I spotted Purse Laurier weaving his way through street traffic toward us.

“You’ll see me soon.” Freyda trotted down the stone steps.

“Don’t forget, you owe me an interview. A big piece.

Human angle. Photographs of your rosy cheeks and pure souls.

A day in the life. I’ve got a better name for it now: ‘Salvation on the Bowery: To Hell elujah and Back.’ Editors love a little wordplay in the headline.

Though they might balk at the cussing.” And she was gone.

“That headline could use some work,” Pearl called after her, a good deal louder than she would’ve done if she’d known her Lancelot was within earshot.

“Miss Davenport,” he said, doffing his officer’s cap and flashing her a toothy gleam.

She turned scarlet. “Mr. Laurier. How pleasant to see you.”

Which just goes to show you, there’s no accounting for taste.