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Viviana Marino twisted her hair up into an elegant French twist, a roll of shining silver that still had the last hints of the strawberry gold it once was. Her heart sank like a rock in a river. Somehow she had to go out there, go oversee her girls in their show when half of them were heartbroken too. But they could never know how affected she’d been by the death of one of their most popular dancers. The young, talented Lisa Matthews hadn’t been with them longer than a handful of months, but she managed to capture the attention of the owner of the establishment and the imagination of every man who saw her.
But no one knew that she’d once been his girl, when she was still eager to see what the life of a dancer had in store for her, when she’d been as bright-eyed and sweet as Lisa.
No one knew what she’d run away from at home that a job as a show girl, as a sex toy for rich and powerful men to use and discard, was an exciting prospect with better possibilities than if she’d stayed with her uncle. Oh, how the feathers and the lights and the appreciative clapping wooed her. How thrilling the first night a man picked her for his personal entertainment. How…confused…she felt after he left. Wasn’t it supposed to be more fun? But at least he didn’t hurt her. The next time would be better. It would. It would!
No one knew the thrill that coursed through her when the esteemed Francesco Juliano noticed her. When she herself had a mishap as Lisa had, she’d run off the stage in tears, and that had been when Francesco took notice of her. No one knew she’d thought it providential at the time, a sign that tripping on her own skirt had been predestined so she could find comfort in the arms of a man she’d soon learn had a temper when he didn’t get his way.
But he’d had been so handsome, with thick, dark hair and blazing brown eyes that ignited a fire in places she didn’t know existed. The way he looked at her from beneath his smart Homburg hat drove the ability to think out of her mind. He’d had that effect on her once, as he did on all women. What a catch he was, broad-chested and strong. What he lacked in the bedroom he made up for with skilled hands and charm and sweet words of nothing.
No one knew that that only lasted until she had his baby and given him a girl he didn’t want. No one knew how it killed her to hold their daughter as the tiny thing took her last breath, nothing more than a relief to the frighteningly mad Francesco Juliano. No girls. He only cared to have sons. But she’d failed and given him an unwanted girl. So he cast her aside. The memory of begging on her knees for him to not throw her out of the Sparrow Room, the only place she had to call home, still brought stinging tears of shame to her eyes. She’d been nothing to him, but held tight to futile hope when he forgave her and took her back to his bed again.
And just then, a few tears of aching fell down her cheeks. She brushed them away and pawed through a box of earrings. No time for lousy sentiments and thoughts of what never truly was.
Hadn’t her dancing suffered from the weight of pregnancy? When no man wanted her fat belly, and she’d almost lost her place while still carrying Francesco’s unborn baby? Only the possibility of a son kept her under his roof, and she couldn’t let her girls now get bellies and fail to lure men. She didn’t want to have to kick any of them out under the orders of Francesco himself. But no one knew that. They believed she wanted to starve them. No, she didn’t want them to be ordered out, not when so many of them had nowhere to go.
No one knew that that was the beginning of the end of Viviana Marino, not even she. Back in his bed, he thought she’d give him a son next time. The closer she got to Francesco, the more they tried for that son, the more she became known as his moll. Juliano’s moll. The moll. Molly. And no one knew how much she hated it and what she’d turn into for him. No one knew how awful the night had been to her when, after a days-long labor that the doctors thought she wouldn’t survive, his longed-for son has been born into a little coffin. No one knew it ruined her more than it ruined him. He could find comfort in the arms of another woman. She had to hide her battered body and cry alone.
But he took just enough pity on her. Pity? No, it wasn’t really pity. She owed him a debt for her repeated failure, and he knew that she’d been ruined enough that her status would stop her from getting other work. Who wants to hire the whore? Even she didn’t know how easy it would be for him to turn her from an honest woman trying to run the Sparrow Room in the wake of the former mistress’s sudden departure to one having cut-throat decisions about who would stay and who would go. She didn’t see it happening, and when she did, it was too late. No one knew how much she hated herself every day for not seeing it come, but no one knew the other truth: That if she hadn’t been the one, it would have been someone else, and that someone else might be okay letting children suffer. But was she really any better for deciding which adults should suffer instead, which adults should go to that underground club that even she’d never seen?
The clientele of his secret club…they had particular tastes, and he expected her to keep him knee deep in desperate girls. Those men…they weren’t men. Real men don’t want their girls to be children, and real men don’t want their girls to be dancers with tear-stained cheeks, scared of what might happen to them. At least those…whatever they were…liked the tearful dancers more than the inexperienced children who supplemented them, and her job had become breaking dancers to send. The more she could send him distraught dancers who’d committed imagined infractions so that the clients of his secret club could punish them, the less he’d have little girls snatched off the streets, the less he’d trick unsuspecting immigrant parents wanting their daughters to have a chance at school, the less he’d have unwed mothers committed to the asylum so that no one would look for their beloved children. And how many of them had stayed until they became dancers themselves?
No one knew, except for her. She never forgot any of the dancers who came to her from the basement in a club somewhere. She didn’t know where it was. That’s what she didn’t know.
Two terrible choices, and no matter what, she’d burn in hell. So she picked the sacrificial lambs to spare children. One way or the other, without knowing where that basement was, she couldn’t stop him, only lessening how many little girls went there. Would her own daughter have ended up there, had she not died? Would Francesco have sent his own young daughter to the wolves? She couldn’t say No to that. Francesco probably would have sent the unnamed baby there at some point.
But no one knew she’d given her baby a secret name. Serafina. Her angel. No one knew she kept a lock of Serafina’s soft hair in the oval locket she wore every single day, a trinket to remind her who she had to put first, no matter the cost, no matter how much it made everyone hate her, no matter how lonely and friendless she was for it.
She found her favorite pearl earrings and scoffed. She’d once told Lisa to pierce her own ears, though none of the other girls had theirs pierced. She hadn’t thought of it at the time, but she’d already seen some of herself in Lisa, and if her own ears were pierced, then Lisa needed hers pierced too.
Death might have been a mercy for Lisa. Viviana had no doubt Francesco would want a son from the dancer he’d forced to marry him. But if Lisa had given him a daughter, might he have accepted that baby? After all, he married Lisa, did he not? He didn’t marry his former moll, but he married Lisa….
Viviana…Moll…reached for her rouge and dipped a finger into the pot. No one knew that, like the dancers, she had a part to play too. Her part just happened to include having to decide the next lamb to send to the slaughter in the basement. Surely Francesco would want an extra girl or two to distract him from the death of his new wife, and he did seem to love her. Moll hadn’t expected that. Love? What’s love in the world of a man who could shun his own child? In the world where the Moll had to hurt innocent people to spare even more innocent people from being hurt?
No one knew how much she detested the prosecutor. How many times had she gone to see Diane Boseman, or her predecessor, Randall Feldman? Boseman and Feldman both said they believed her, but both also said they wished they could do something, and that without her bringing them something solid… Solid! What a concept. Wasn’t it their job to dig for the solid evidence? Of course they wouldn’t do anything to help. Nothing would happen to those mafia men. Only tax fraud could take them down, and even that is probably only because richer men with power don’t like feeling like they’re subsidizing taxes for anyone. They couldn’t care less about regular people.
So she was powerless to stop him, and could only decide who would be sent away. No one knew how much that hurt her.
Another tear left a streak in her rouge. She might as well wipe it all off. No one would notice that night anyway, not with how distracted the girls already were, and the patrons for the night would probably be on the watch for Francesco losing his temper.
Well, she decided, she looked as presentable as she was going to that night. No one knew she wasn’t as old as she looked, except perhaps Francesco, if he remembered her age. The stress and strife of the daily issues she dealt with turned her blonde hair silver, and grief left her face lined. In truth, she wasn’t much older than some of the dancers, and she even danced a short time with the oldest of them. If that brunette, Livia, could hold on a few more years, she might take her place as the madame of the Sparrow Room when Moll finally broke.
No one knew that that break was close. She knew, and she had to prepare herself for it.
She wandered out of her quarters, a room much grander than the dark rooms the girls stayed in, and down a hall. The somberness of the night hung thick enough in the air that she thought it would suffocate her. But she was Miss Molly now, not Viviana, and she had to tuck her emotions away and make a hard decision. Whoever wasn’t bothered by Lisa’s death would go. She couldn’t add the punishment of the basement to grief. Wasn’t it all hard enough without that?
That night’s dancers lined up in the hall, waiting for the band to start their first number. She didn’t bother giving them instructions. No one knew that if she said a single word, she’d crack and cry. The strain of holding it in hurt her throat. She wiped Natasha’s cheek in passing. That girl had been especially close to Lisa, and now she was gone. She raised her hand to cue the band to start the first number, and the girls filed on.
What was she going to do? She’d faced many things in the club, many bad things. Patrons getting drunk and violent. The occasional girl getting drunk and belligerent. Francesco getting angry. But somehow she’d never lost a girt to an accident. Well, she lost that one to a botched abortion, and she’d vowed to help any girl who’d dared ask her for it, but that wasn’t the same. She knew that the man she sent Lisa with wasn’t one of Francesco’s men. She knew he was one of Mr. Puzo’s, the chief rival of Francesco. She thought the man wanted to help. Hell, she thought Mr. Puzo might had had feelings for Lisa, but maybe she was wrong and he only wanted Lisa to spite his rival. If she hadn’t agreed when that suave bastard asked her for her help, then Lisa might still be alive. She’d thought the rumors she’d heard were true, that he was a kinder man than any of the others, more careful, gentle, a gentleman who didn’t treat any of the girls he bedded as worth less for prostituting through dancing to show off the goods.
No one knew how much she blamed herself for misjudging him as a decent man. It was her fault. She might not have been able to protect the girl from all things, and she even may have taken a turn in the basement, strong as that girl was, but she’d be alive and have a chance to get out.
Where was he? It was Saturday. Of course he’d be there. It was all but mandatory for those bosses to be there on Fridays and Saturdays. She wanted to find him. She wanted to tell him herself, tell him the car had exploded as he’d planned and that Lisa had died. Of course the sick son of a bitch would know, but she wanted to see him gloat so she had an excuse to slap him across his smug face.
She found him just before he went into the lounge. “Mr. Puzo,” she said, as cold as shards of ice, “follow me. Now.” She spun about and stormed down the hall until they were far enough that no one would stand there listening, though it’s not like there was anyone there who didn’t know. “I trusted you,” she snapped while glaring at him. “I trusted you with her! Why did you do it?”
He shook his head. “What did I do?”
“The explosion! Lisa! Why did you kill her?”
His brow furrowed. Miss Molly stared. Where was the smugness? Why did he seem confused?
“What explosion are you talking about?”
Miss Molly covered her mouth. Her eyes widened. “You really don’t know? That man she left with…they were on the bridge, and the car exploded. Some of her things were retrieved, something with this address. It was returned by an officer who asked some questions.”
Mr. Puzo stared.
Miss Molly continued, “I managed to get some information from him. Parts of your man’s body were found. Parts that could have been her. A reporter was hit by shrapnel. None of them made it.”
Pale as death and visibly stunned, Mr. Puzo swallowed hard. “I didn’t know this, Madame. I’d never hurt her. Thank you for telling me about this. I’m sorry. I…I need to find Nino.” He didn’t wait for a reply before retreating back toward the lounge.
He didn’t know? She hurried back to the lounge herself to see what was going on. What was going on? She’d thought, surely, that he was behind it. But if he wasn’t, who was? Francesco wouldn’t have known that she left with one of Mr. Puzo’s men, and he wouldn’t have killed her…would he? No. No, he wouldn’t have killed Lisa. No one knew, no one but Miss Molly, that he’d have gone on a rampage if anyone else were to hurt her. He could strike her, but Lisa belonged to him even more than Miss Molly once had, and he’d have shot anyone who laid a hand on his property. No one, not even Miss Molly, knew that Francesco still saw her as still his. But maybe…maybe.
The somberness hanging in the air hadn’t let up, not really, though men tried. Francesco had a couple wine bottles in front of him, bottles she knew contained strong whisky, the very ones he saved for the nights he wanted to drown his troubles. He wanted to forget his dead wife. She knew it. But no one knew how much she wanted to change places with the girl, to be the one dead and gone from this life.
No, she had to go on instead and carry on with the show…with her own show. No one knew the secret behind her job. No one knew her hard choices. There were many things that no one…no one…could ever know.