something's wrong with the morning

The place is like a tomb, but once you’ve made it like J.J. has you can afford stuff like good taste. It’s a man’s place — the razor and the soap, the stiff comb and the drinking glass. Nothing of Susan’s has been left behind here, and frankly it’s difficult to imagine anything of Susan’s was ever allowed to encroach on this room at all, not a tube of lipstick or a single hairpin.

Falco used to sleep in a one-room apartment with a broken sink and a communal bathroom down the hall with the smell of black mold — a Murphy bed, a mirror the size of a playing card. That was before J.J. plucked him out of the pack and set him up in their dirty little business. Take a look in the great man’s closet, run your fingers over all the nice starched shirts, don’t mind the skeletons. Breathe the scent of his aftershave lotion, drink his liquor, try on all his neckties, sleep in his bed. Sidney could get used to living here — all holed up on the top floor like an ancient housecat, or a purebred Alsatian with bad knees.

This place is a good place. Solid architecture, good bones. Thick walls, unblemished plaster. And the floorboards don’t squeak. The door slips closed behind him with a click, and Falco’s spine goes steely with animal fear. He can feel J.J.’s passage brush over him like cold air, feel it tugging at the bloused-out back of his shirt like the passage of a hand. Always there but never touching, in motion behind Sidney’s back.

“So she’s gone, isn’t she.” Sidney doesn’t want to look at him, can’t look. He’d gone and left the door unlocked for him, hadn’t he, or had it been for her? Hoping she’d come back, like a prize pigeon. She didn’t even take a coat.

“You came all this way to wash your face, Falco. You look like a choirboy.” From behind him, Hunsecker’s big hand paws at Sidney’s forelock dismissively; in the mirror he makes a dark blot. He is dangerously close now, the kind of proximity that never meant anything good to a fellow like Sidney.

Why’d Susie have to go and do a thing like that? J.J. might as well have the state police in his pocket, and if that dumb guitarist so much as thinks about helping the young lady across state lines, he’ll have hell to pay. But Dallas is still strumming away nights at the same rat-trap club as ever, like his reefer-smoking Red days never happened, and Susan is —

Sidney wheels around, lips pulling back in a reflexive, doglike smile. “I’ve never been much of a singer. What were you, J.J., some kind of acrobat? Or were you a dancer? I forget.”

He’s still got the body of an athlete, and it’s not goddamned fair. The mass of him prevails on Falco like a freight train and he crushes him back against the hard porcelain.

Hunsecker’s patrician mouth presses against him bruisingly, but Sidney is ready. He can open J.J. up like a book, like a book opened wide enough to crack the spine in two — there’s nothing else to do but force his way into him, to fit his tongue against those icy veneered teeth and make his hands into fists in the lining of J.J.’s suit jacket.He’s ready to grind against him like flint chipping steel, just to get a spark off this, but when he grinds against Hunsecker’s hard thigh the man shoves him back again against the sink’s edge, lifting him up enough to rattle the light fixtures.

J.J. eases back just far enough to keep him frustrated, still near enough to bring down one of those mighty hands across his face and slap him stupid. He never lets Sidney touch him — because it’s queer or because it makes Sidney absolutely crazy to deny him, because J.J. likes to make him beg and plead for what he won’t give him.

“Keep your shirt on,” Falco says, with that warning hand parked in the middle of Sidney’s chest.

Sidney gives a bark of laughter. “Not getting away that easy, am I?”

“When you touch yourself you think of me. You can’t help it.”

He’s not the only one, either — that golden voice goes ringing out of every radio set in the country three nights a week and it’s got people who never even cracked open the performing arts section of the newspaper listening to J.J. Hunsecker declare the virtues of Americanism. That alone must put a quiver into some people. But that’s not the man Falco knows and it’s not the voice he hears in his head when he’s got his hand down the front of his shorts in the middle of the night, miserable as a kid — and if J.J. knows what he’s got in his shorts then that’s another sick strand in the rope that ties them together like a couple of cinder blocks. Old secrets, sour secrets.

Sidney can feel his pulse beating away in the pit of himself, in a state of dull arousal. His hand worries over his fly, more gestural than purposeful. Falco says, “Does that matter?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see what I can do for you?”

J.J. holds him there, pinned against the plaster and white china, and Falco can’t look him in the face. That’s a hell of a thing for one man to offer another, but it won’t come cheaply.

“How do you know she’s still in town? She could have gone anywhere.” He doesn’t say, how do you know she’s still alive. Sad-eyed slip of a skirt like that — desperate people make gestures. Even in New York — she’s in some Harlem flophouse somewhere, she’s stashed away in some blue-rinse bulldagger’s house of horrors, she’s in the state hospital, she’s swimming around in the Hudson like a mermaid. Susie is out from under her brother’s thumb. Lucky girl.

J.J. is smiling but his eyes aren’t. “Where else is there? Go and get her for me, Sidney.”