The Shining Girls

^POSTSCRIPT Bartek ^{3 DECEMBER 1929}

The Polish engineer pulls the car over two blocks away and sits with the engine running, thinking about what he’s seen. A bad scene, that much he knows. He couldn’t make out exactly what was happening. The man lying in the middle of the street bleeding in the snow. That shocked him. He nearly ran him over. He wasn’t really concentrating on the road. Steering the car through the streets by rote equation that equals home, all the way from Cicero.

He’s a little drunk, Bartek admits to himself. A lot drunk. When he starts losing, the gin comes easier to hand. And Louis kept the drinks flowing all night and into the small hours of the morning, long after he’d spent the last of his coin. And gave him credit on top of it. Enough to sink himself utterly. Now he owes Cowen $2,000.

The ugly truth is that he was lucky to be able to drive away in his car at all. They’ll be coming for it Sunday morning right before church if he doesn’t find a way to raise the money by the weekend. Better than coming for him, but that’s next. Diamond Lou Cowen does not fuck around.

Gambling with known gangsters. Chumming around with personal friends of Mr Capone. What was he thinking? He has enough problems on his plate without getting in the middle of a bloody altercation at five o’clock in the morning.

But he’s intrigued. At the glow spilling out onto the street from the ruined house and the improbable sumptuousness he spied through the open door. He should go back and help, he tells himself. Or just go and have a look-see. He can always call the police if it’s serious.

He turns the car around, circling back to the house.

The key is waiting for him on the front porch, barely on the threshold of the closed door, spattered with snow and bloodstained.