Queer fiction. A mob boss takes in a rival’s hostage, and tries to keep him from suicide.
14k, M/M, rated E for equally explicit sex and violence. Set in 1920s New Jersey. Nasty and violent.
Alvis Hunter, boss of a significant crime operation, steals a captive out from under a rival—Naham, a rabbi’s son who immediately attempts to kill himself. In the aftermath, Alvis tries to keep him alive; Naham tries to find something worth living for.
Some philosophy and introspection in this one along the way of the rape recovery. Warnings for rape and sexual violence, mental health issues, a crisis of faith, trauma, homophobia, intersexism, antisemitism, and other assorted violence.
Kit Lettings has been gone from town for a week when they make the raid on his place. He’s been living in the house for some six months now, and they’d had a tip on how the stills were hidden downstairs, where the hatch was under the dining table.
As the boys are raiding the liquor stores and putting it all in the wagon outside — separate to the wagon filled with Kit’s dead goons — Alvis walks the halls, takes a look at the luxury of the place, the fine fucking refinement the little prick has taken on.
He’d been Alvis’ right-hand man, once upon a time, he’d all but fucking breastfed that boy from twelve to twenty-five, and he’d not just been angry when he’d broken out on his own. Hell, he’d been sad. He’d missed the little bastard, even without his swiping territory left, right, and centre, even without his making himself into a fucking kingpin of the liquor business, using tricks he’d learned in Alvie’s company and a few new ones of his own.
Alvie shoves open the bedroom door, wants to see what photographs Kit’s put on display, what clothes he has hanging up in his closet, what fancy furniture he has up here.
He doesn’t pay any attention to all that shit — laid in the centre of the bed with his wrists tied above his head is a boy. Alvie slowly walks forward, taking him in — he’s skinny as anything, so skinny his ribs are showing, and hairless; there’s bruises all along the length of him, spread on his thighs, across his side, blooming on the side of his jaw and on the opposite eye. He’s got white-blond hair with a silver tint to it, so much so that Alvie thinks he’s gone grey at first. His pink lips are split, and his breathing in sleep is a little bit ragged.
Naked, he’s on top of the bedclothes, and Alvie can see he’s been tied pretty fucking tight, and not with nice ropes, either — they’ve bitten in around his wrists, left marks and scabbing here and there. Come is wet and shiny on his thighs, sticky, his asshole open, his cunt similarly abused, and stained with blood.
When Alvie stands over him, his eyes flutter open, and he stiffens, staring forward.
When he glances to the side and sees Alvie — not, Alvie supposes, the expected Christopher — he lurches on the bed, scrambling up closer to the headboard.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Alvie says in his most soothing rumble, trying to inject as much warmth into his voice as he can. “Shh, shh. I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
The boy is whimpering from low in his throat, his bruised and abused body trembling violently, and there are tears wet on his cheeks. The black eye is bloodshot as anything, and Alvie can see that as well as the marks across his back, he’s had the insides of his thighs belted recently, the welts obvious and lined with light scabbing on their either side.
“Fuck me,” he mutters. “I always knew Kitty Lettings had claws, didn’t know he’d grown into this much of a fucking sadist.”
He expects the boy to beg, to ask for help, to scream, something, but he just keeps on whimpering, keeps sobbing, hides his face in his hands. Alvie feels his heart pang for the poor little bastard.
Hey. What’s one more piece of stolen merchandise from an old friend?
“Hey!” he yells down the stairs as he grabs a thick, soft blanket from an armoire and throws it over his shoulder, “Rosa, Felix, come fucking help me up here!”
Turning back to the boy whimpering on the bed, he comes forward, rolls his shoulders. He’s pretty sure muscle isn’t gonna be a problem with this lad — Alvie is easily four times his size — but he doesn’t know yet how much he’ll squirm, if he’ll bite.
“Hey, you speak English?” he asks. “Polsku? Italiano? Elliniká? Deutsch?” The boy freezes for a second, still shuddering, still whimpering, but his eyes flit to Alvie’s. “Deutsch, yeah? Sprechen sie Deutsch?” He narrows his eyes at the boy’s expression, wonders how old he is. With how fucking thin he is, all the bruises, his skin has turned sallow from lack of sun, and he’s gaunt, his cheeks hollowed, bags under his eyes, it’s hard to tell. “Redt ir Yidish?”
The boy’s breath hitches in his throat, his eyes widening, his head tipping back just slightly. It’s like he’s forgotten to cry, all the tears thick in his red-rimmed eyes like water in a glass, but not falling down his cheeks just yet.
“Okay,” says Alvie softly. “Okay. Ikh heys Alvis, olrayt? Uh… Fuck. Ikh… nisht keyn Yidish gut. Ikh — Is that right? Redt ir English?”
The boy is staring at him as if Alvie’s some kind of new invention, as if he’s something he can’t quite comprehend. When Rosa and Felix get to the landing, he hears Felix gasp and mutter something under his breath — Rosa tells him to shut the fuck up.
The boy glances at them, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looks between them — and fuck, that must be sore with the fucking shiner he has on him — and then slowly back to Alvie.
“Redt ir English?” he asks again. “Du bist… kholye? Krank? Es iz schmerzlich? Dayne hent?” He holds up his hands, pushing them together like the boy is holding his, forced to hold his, and the boy looks from Alvie to his hands.
“Hant,” he whispers, holding up one of his hands as best he can from where they’re tied together, wiggling his fingers. Then he pushes his wrists together demonstratively, the way that Alvie just was. “Ha’ntgel’enk.” His voice is thick and hoarse from screaming.
“Okay,” Alvie says slowly. “Nisht… uh, nisht dayne hent. Dayne he’ntgel’enk?”
The boy laughs at him. He looks about as surprised to hear it as Alvie does. Laughing has shocked a few tears free, but he looks a little calmer now, slightly more relaxed.
“Ha’ntgel’enkn,” he corrects him, as if Alvis gives a fuck about the proper plural right about now. His lips are still curved in a smile, and the smile must fucking hurt with the way the skin’s been split — his front teeth are all in place, but Alvie can see a gap where one or two teeth have been knocked out on one side.
“Do they fucking hurt, or not?” Alvie asks.
“Alvis,” says the boy. “Ikh darf ayer hilf. Meg ikh nitsn ayer khalef?”
“Khalef,” Alvis repeats, and he looks around at Rosa and Felix, who don’t have a word of German between them, let alone fucking Yiddish. He’s trying to remember back when he was fifteen and living in a flophouse with a bunch of Russian Jews, and they didn’t fucking talk Yiddish like this boy talks it, his voice all soft and airy, even as hoarse as it is.
“Ayer khalef, ser. Ayer kling. Sprechen sie Deutch, ja?” asks the boy. He’s still trembling like a leaf, but his gaze is pretty steady. “Ayer meser, dein Messer?”
“Messer,” repeats Alvie, feeling in his pockets for his knife. “Yeah, yeah, okay. You want to cut yourself free? Dayne hent, zey zaynen… oyfsitern. Trembling. You won’t hurt yourself?”
“Es iz olrayt,” the boy says. “Bitte. Gib mir dein Messer.” He’s remarkably calm all of a sudden, so much so that Alvie wonders for a second if the boy is going to try to kill him, if he’s going to lunge as soon as the knife is in his hand, but somehow Alvie doesn’t think so. He takes the knife out of his pocket, flicking it open. It’s got a wooden handle carved in with roses, and he offers it to the boy by the blade, so that he can take it by the handle. This was a gift from Kit years ago. The boys examines it thoughtfully once he has it. “Ah, es iz sheyn. A khalef shtaltik oyf a krasavets, yo?”
It’s been years since someone called him a krasavets, and for a second he feels like he’s fifteen again, getting his cheek pinched by some old Russian lady who’s about to tell him he needs to eat more — the fact that the boy calls him that is the only thing that saves him, because Alvis had been about to step back again.
He’s still close enough to grab the knife out of his hands before the boy can finish slitting his own throat.
* * *
Washed up and dressed in the nice pyjamas Alvie had had bought for him, the boy reclines on a bed in Alvis’ house. He leans back into the pillows, a blanket folded over his lap — he has the PJ buttons done all the way up to the collar, and Alvie had brought in a silk robe and a thicker smoking jacket too, but he hadn’t taken either.
Washed up and dressed, his injuries cleaned and attended to, it’s clear to Alvie he’s not a boy after all. He’s twenty-something, if not thirty — he looks older, now that he’s clean, now that his eyes aren’t widened in terror, now that his underfed body is clothed and not trembling violently.
“Vi heyst ir?” asks Alvis from the doorway.
The young man looks up from where he’d been staring into the middle distance, his hands delicately folded in his lap. They’d ended up dosing him with chloroform to knock him out and bring him back here because he’d been screaming and struggling so much, trying to wrestle the knife back to hurt himself, and Alvis had gotten a good look at his body as they’d washed him clean, fixed him up.
He’s got pretty, delicate hands, the palms and pads of his fingers very soft — he’s never been a man put to hard labour, that much is obvious. He’s thin, has a light frame, and Alvis wonders if he’s titless just because, or if his chest is flat just because there’s no real meat on him. If it’s because Kit Lettings has been all but fucking starving him.
“Vi heystu,” the young man corrects him.
“Nah,” says Alvis, and the young man’s gaze flits to him. There are still shadows under his eyes — those are natural, he guesses, not just there for lack of sleep — but they’ve had time to rest, aren’t red-rimmed or wet anymore. Alvis can see the light brown colour of them, how warm it is. “Vi heyst ir?”
“’Kheys Naham.”
“Naham,” Alvis echoes. His German is better than his Yiddish, way better, and he transitions back to that when he asks, “I know the formal versus informal.”
“You are some thirty years my senior, sir. I would not have you use formal pronouns with me.” His German is funny — Alvis has no doubt this kid speaks better German than he does, that he’s formally educated in it too, that he probably reads book after book in German apart from any of his Hebrew texts, but his accent isn’t one Alvis is used to. He’s not a Berliner, anyway, ’cause God knows Alvis is familiar with them. There’s just more emphasis on some of the sounds than he’s used to, more open-mouthed sounds here and there.
“You’re using formal pronouns with me,” he points out.
“Again, I would reiterate, you are thirty years my senior — not to mention my saviour, and evidently a rich man.” He gestures to the room at large with one long-fingered, pretty hand. The ligature marks at his wrists are still very visible, although they shouldn’t be permanent. The cut at his throat, only an inch and a half across before Alvie had interrupted it, shouldn’t be either.
Alvis had put him up in a nice room, the nicest guest room in the house, the one he puts his ma in when she’s visiting from New York. The bed sheets are expensive, the big bed comfortable and large, the furniture antique, nicely made, nicely matched.
“And you’re a scholar,” says Alvis. “Your daddy a rich man?”
“My father is a rabbi,” says Naham.
“Yeah, I see that for you,” Alvis murmurs. “You don’t speak Polish or Russian?”
“No, sir. Yiddish and German, and limited Hungarian.”
“Oh, you’re Austrian,” says Alvis, connecting the dots on the accent, and Naham’s gaze seems to get a few degrees cooler as he concentrates on Alvis’ face.
“I’m American,” he says. “Sir.”
“Sorry,” says Alvis, putting up his hands and spreading them out like Naham is pointing a gun at him instead of just that killer stare. “There’s books for you on the side there — I just picked up an armful of random shit with Hebrew letters. Don’t know what’s good, can’t read it for shit.”
“It’s very kind of you,” says Naham, looking to the pile of books on the bedside table. Alvis knows he’s already had a look through them — it wasn’t Alvis, and it wasn’t one of the house staff, who arranged them the way they’re arranged in a perfect pile, stacked so neat on top of each other it’s almost like someone used a ruler. “Am I correct in assuming, sir — ”
“Alvie.”
“… Alvis, that you are a business associate of Christopher Lettings?”
“Used to be,” says Alvie. “Kit used to work for me — used to be a runner, then my assistant. He struck out on his own a few years back, wanted to be a real mobster. Now he’s a bootlegger with the best of them.”
“Who knew that the prohibition laws would create such a boom in business for your kind?”
“We knew,” Alvie tells him. “Guys who signed it in knew, too. A lot of ’em are getting kickbacks.”
Naham sighs, his head tipping back into the pillows.
“That’s America for you,” says Alvie, and Naham exhales again.
“How long will I be kept here?” he asks.
“My doctor had a look at you,” says Alvie. “He said you should rest up for a few weeks, that you’re emaciated. He’s given my cook some pretty specific instructions about portions — we gotta make sure not to feed you up all at once in case it makes you sick. She’s gonna be going to the kosher butcher from now on.”
Naham’s brow furrows together, his fingers pressing into the fabric of the sheet over his lap.
“Am I given to understand, then,” he says, “that your doctor has advised I stay on for some time?”
“You need bedrest,” says Alvie. “Once you’re up and about, you can get to work.”
Alvie isn’t a cruel man, not on most things. He’s got a sadistic streak in him, sure he has, enjoys other people’s pain in some situations — in this situation, there’s no real pleasure in it, but he can pinpoint the details he would enjoy, if Naham was the right person.
He sees his eyes widen slightly, sees the bob of his Adam’s apple in his throat, the slight parting of his lips. There are marks and bruises on his lips, and they’re pretty new. Maybe they’re from Kitty, a parting gift before the bastard left: maybe they’re from the kid biting his own lips in his sleep.
“Work,” he echoes faintly. There’s a kind of stickiness on the word, an uncertainty, like he doesn’t know if it’s a euphemism or not. “It is your intention to hold me here, then.”
“Can’t just let you out on the streets, can I?” asks Alvie in warm, pleasant tones. “After taking you out of Kitty Lettings’ house, that cat’ll come to find you again. Hunt you down, tear you to shreds.”
“I don’t believe Mr Lettings will pose too much of a danger to me, sir.”
“Why, ’cause you’ll off yourself before he gets to you?”
Naham says nothing, his lips pursing shut.
“Isn’t that a sin for Jews?” asks Alvis. “I know you’re not like Catholics, but a suicide, people don’t mourn for that, right? You get buried and prayed over, but no one rips their clothes or sits shiva?”
“You are more familiar with Jews than I would suspect for a gentile.”
“My daddy was a Polak. Grew up in the ghetto.”
“And your mother?”
“She was Finnish.”
“Ah, so you’re a Russian?” Alvis frowns at him, and Naham gives him a thin smile. “See? You don’t like these conversations about where one really comes from either. Least of all when the old country’s border is called into question.”
Alvis huffs out a laugh at that, likes it from time to time, when someone scores a point on him. “We’re both American, then,” says Alvis, and Naham inclines his head.
“There is no one left in New Jersey to mourn me, whether I die by my own hand or by someone else’s,” he says softly. “In any case, with my recent experiences, I would not be considered of sound mind.”
“How many times he rape you?”
Naham’s expression does not change, staying astonishingly neutral for a few moments. His voice is even as he says, “You are a very direct man, aren’t you, sir?”
“Directness can be good in my line of work.”
“I’m sure.”
“Some of those marks on you are pretty old.”
“Mr Lettings took me hostage about a year ago, I would estimate.”
“He pass you out to anybody else?”
“Now and then. On a gentleman’s birthday. At Christmas. At Easter, he made various jokes about how sharing me amongst his friends amounted to reparations in small part the killing of Christ.”
“Kid always had a mean sense of humour.”
“Mean is not quite the word.”
“You gonna spook if I get closer?”
“How much closer?”
There’s a slight stammer in the words before he gets them all the way out, a kind of halt and hoarseness between “how” and “much” as the sentence gets stuck, but he keeps his face neutral, doesn’t let his eyes dart about, doesn’t shake or tremble. Alvis wonders how much effort it’s taking him to keep up that composure, to not let his fear — not let his weakness — show.
He moves forward and into the room, and he sinks down on the corner of the bed, leaning his shoulders against the big, high footboard. It’s a good, sturdy bed — his ma might not need it, but other guests of his, they want a bed that can take a little abuse.
He doesn’t rest his hand on top of the kid’s ankles under the blankets, doesn’t touch him or reach for him, just sits there for a few seconds. The two of them are both breathing evenly, Alvis nice and slow, Naham a little bit tighter, a little bit faster, but it’s not pronounced — Alvis is far enough away, and in a non-threatening enough position, to let him relax a little.
“This too close?” Alvie asks.
“I don’t know that I’m in a position to complain,” Naham says lowly. For all he’s scared, there’s a good undercurrent of scorn in it, and a strength underlying it too that Alvis likes to hear. A year getting raped, and he’s still ready to sass, to bite back? It’s a good sign — the sign of a survivor. He isn’t broken just yet. “What with your holding me captive.”
“I haven’t tied you up,” Alvie points out. “You aren’t weighted down. You’re not cuffed.”
“And if I get up and commence to walk out from your household, how long until one of your guardsmen catches me by the shoulder and brings me back to my room?”
“Some of ’em aren’t men, they’re women,” says Alvie.
Naham blinks at him.
“Bulldykes,” Alvie adds helpfully in English, but Naham obviously isn’t familiar with the word, furrows his brow, shakes his head. “Kampflesben? Lesben?”
“You hire lesbians as muscle?”
“Why not? I hire gay boys as whores.”
Naham’s throat bobs as he swallows again, and his tongue flits out to moisten his lower lip. He bites it then, chews down on the inside of it — it’s really not a great habit, and Alvie considers the benefits of training him out of it.
“I’m not gonna whore you out,” Alvie tells him softly. “No one here is gonna rape you.”
“What labours do you have set aside for me, then? Accountancy? Money-lending?” There’s no shortage of cold, hard anger in his voice, as polite as it is, as trimmed back as it is. Alvie wonders if his dad was training him up for the position, how good of a public speaker he is, if he does speeches, if he debates in public.
“Oh, just stuff around the house,” says Alvie. “Help me out in the office.”
“Secretarial work.”
“If you want.”
“I don’t want.”
“You can be a maid, then.”
There’s a bit of colour in the kid’s cheeks, two burning pin pricks of colour either side of his face.
“I’d prefer the clerk work,” he says, bites out the words.
“Uh huh,” says Alvie. “I thought perhaps you would. How are you feeling about dinner?”
“About my limited portions?”
“Egh, so long as you’re hungry and you’re not overeating way too much, no one’s gonna smack your hand away. I mean, you gonna eat dinner with me and the others?”
“You eat your meals together?”
“I like to,” says Alvie, shrugging his shoulders as he leans back further against the footboard. He extends one of his feet, resting it on the bed with his heel resting off the edge of the mattress, clad in a sock, no shoe, no slipper. “You don’t have to, if it’s gonna be too much for you today.”
“Not today,” murmurs Naham. “Mr Lettings was not — ” He falters, and he thinks for a second, like he’s wondering how best to phrase it. He’s obviously been talking this past year, although how much and with how much self-censorship, Alvie really isn’t sure. How used is he to talking freely? How much is he talking freely, now? How much does he trust Alvie, and what does he think might happen, if he says the wrong thing? “Ordinarily I was kept in Mr Lettings’ room. Brought out for certain parties, but otherwise kept sequestered.”
“Why’d he take you?”
“He was your apprentice, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“Why did you part ways?”
“He was a big boy, felt he’d outgrown doing what his Daddy told him. Wanted a bigger piece of the pie.”
Naham, unexpectedly, flinches back at that, his lip quivering. He turns his head to the side, breaking eye contact with him, and stares away for a few seconds, looking toward the window. They’re a ways away from the city proper out here, and there’s not a big view out of the window, just the boardwalk in the distance, across the water.
“Will you be offended on his behalf, if I speak honestly of him?”
“Nah.”
“Your boy is a fucking monster.”
Maybe it’s because he’s not used to Naham’s Austrian accent, or maybe it’s just because he has a somewhat scholarly, academic way of speaking, elevated and pretty fucking classy — maybe it’s just that with how tired and ripped apart he looks, hearing anything that amounts to aggression is very striking. He pronounces the word “verfickte” with a harshness he hasn’t applied to any word so far, all but spits out the word so that it comes out dripping with venom.
“I didn’t make him that way,” says Alvis simply. He had been a bit of an asshole when he’d worked under Alvie, sure — a bit of an asshole, and sometimes, Alvie would have to ask the bigger boys to keep the little prick in check, to make sure he didn’t get too violent, too nasty. The rape, though, that’s news to him.
In Alvie’s experience, Kitty Lettings likes to be bent over and fucked, not be the one doing the fucking.
“Did you part ways because he had a lust for further violence and bloodshed than yourself?”
“I’m sure that was part of it. He always believed in aggression when it comes to territory — protecting the stuff you have, and overtaking new territory, too. Expansion, expansion, expansion.”
“You don’t believe in expanding your territory? A curious thing for a businessman.”
“I don’t believe in biting off more than you can chew,” murmurs Alvis. “Kitty never had a good sense for how much was too much — ate too much of a good meal, hurt himself sitting on too big of a cock.”
Naham blinks a few times, like he can’t make sense of that.
“Was never good at realising his limitations at work, either.”
“You’ve…” Naham starts, and then hesitates, peering at Alvis. His eyes narrow slightly, not out of suspicion, it doesn’t seem to Alvis, but more confusion, consideration. “You fucked him?”
“Who, Kitty? Sure did.”
“Your own son?”
“My own — ” Alvie laughs, puts his hand on his belly and feels it jiggle under his palm as the laugh takes him, comes out loud and almost wheezing it catches him by such surprise — the whole time, Naham looks at him with the same bafflement. “Shit, kid. No. No, he’s — Kit isn’t my son. He calls me Daddy, but, uh… It ain’t like that.”
Naham’s cheeks darken in a blush, and he runs his hand through his hair, looking around from Alvie to reach for his glass of water, taking a sip from it. “Sorry,” he says. “I misunderstood.”
“Your daddy’s a rabbi, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“He good?”
“I think so. Many people would say their father was a wise man — I think I’m right in saying my father is wiser than most.”
“But?”
“Why assume there’s a but?”
“There’s always a but when it comes to a man’s father.”
Naham exhales through his nostrils, his smile wan, but he nods his head. “He’s always been quite a soft man — gentle. He has no stomach for violence nor butchery. My mother would be piecing apart a chicken on the kitchen table — he would come in, he would blanch, have to leave, wet his face with water, calm himself down. Even the blood at a bris would sometimes make him faint.”
“Not what I want to hear about a guy holding some scissors to a little boy’s prick.”
Naham chuckles, the smile not meeting his eyes. “He only ever feels faint after, I swear. He gets another mohel to help, if he can.”
“You take after him?”
“I’m not violent by my nature, no.”
“Nor am I,” says Alvie mildly.
Naham’s snort is immediate and derisive — it’s haughty, superior. Alvie can’t exactly blame the kid for disbelieving him, but he’s surprised at the fucking confidence in him, how easily he raises his head, how one of his lips curls.
“Mr Lettings, in his hunt for territory,” Naham says, “has been very aggressive, as you said.”
“Uh huh.”
“The synagogue, he wanted to use its office as a front — to traffic certain papers, money, through the library. He had taken over properties my family leased nearby — my mother’s brother, some cousins.”
“That’d be forbidden, right? Doing — Doing that kind of business in a temple?”
“Even by our own people — let alone some hateful gentiles. And to do so in defiance of the law would be to invite more harassment from the police — as if we need it!” He shifts under the blankets, rolls his shoulders like he can’t quite make himself comfortable. “That it would go against what we believe, I am sure, was part of the attraction for him. A hatred as that man carries in him — it is not enough for him to pervert a place of worship. He needs to humiliate those in it, too, and set upon them.”
Alvie thinks of how Kit had been, when he’d first met him — the boy had been just twelve, bruised up with a torn lip. The kid had been like a beaten animal, trembling, nervous, liable to bite.
He’s a very different breed these days.
“My father told him no. Mr Lettings raised rents on my uncle, my cousins — my father helped them move. He sent bailiffs — my father had some members of the community rally with them, manage to turn them off. He did other things, here and there — acts of intimidation, violence. My father resisted at every turn.”
“Not such a soft guy after all.”
“He is. He’s gentle-hearted, he’s kind, generous, compassionate. He isn’t weak, though. My father remains a rabbi — he is a man of his convictions.”
“But?”
“Again with the buts.”
“Yeah.”
Naham looks at Alvie evenly, and then says, “He paid off some policemen. Lettings.”
“Cops?”
With clear disapproval, Naham says, “You speak German like a Berliner.”
“I only ever talk to Berliners.”
“You don’t read books, I take it?”
“Sure, dirty ones.”
Naham shakes his head, looking not at Alvie’s face for now but down at his own hands, which are resting on his thighs. He’d spent a long time in the bath, and hadn’t let anybody help him, but Alvie had had one of his boys supervise — the kid had been very careful about cutting his own hair, trimming his fingernails, his toenails.
“I am,” he says, “an invert.”
“Now who’s talking like a Berliner?”
Naham gives him a sour look before he goes on: “I was caught in a brothel.”
Alvis slowly nods his head. “With a man?”
There’s no hesitation as Naham answers, his tone even, his eyes dull: “Yes.”
“And you were arrested?”
“Not right away, no. But the threat was there — the intention. The brothel had never before had difficulty with the law, had been left aside — Mr Lettings had advised his policemen to go there and they were searching particularly for me, the Rabbi Cohen’s son.”
“That scared your dad?”
“It did. My mother, too. They knew — They had their suspicions as to what I was. Mr Lettings brought me before my father and mother with his pet politsei, said that if he didn’t agree to Mr Lettings’ terms, he would have me before the courts. I would be charged with felony sodomy, and set to hard labour — I would be raped by every man Mr Lettings could find as I broke rocks until I died.”
“Shit,” says Alvie. “And he, uh… Your dad, he was gonna give in?”
“He faltered,” says Naham softly. “I don’t know that he would or wouldn’t have, but for the first time I saw the conflict in him shadowed on his face. I was their only son. Their only child. My father is a rabbi — but he is a father, too, and a loving one. He hesitated where Avraham did not.”
“And then?”
“And then I broke Mr Lettings’ nose.”
“What?”
“One of his policemen had me only loosely by the arm — my wrists were cuffed, but I was not in heavy bondage. Lettings was standing very close to me — close enough that I could reach him. I saw my father’s face, the shadow in his eyes, the grief there — I saw that he was weakening. He might not have permitted sacrilege in the temple but to accept even one of Lettings’ terms, to allow for even a single one of his schemes… To give that evil man an inch would be to give him a mile. So I slammed my forehead into Lettings’ face, and broke his nose.”
Alvie stares at the kid, at the expression on his face, distant, sorrowful — Christ, no wonder he’s fucking confident himself when he’s got balls on him the size of fucking cannon shot.
“Well,” says Alvie. “Kitty’s got a temper. He wasn’t gonna hand you back after you did that.”
“No, quite correct. I expected to die — my family, our community, we had already been making plans to travel west, to California. These plans were underway already — we had already been threatened here and there, had had our difficulties. We were already on the way out — Lettings’ fixation on us only hurried us along. I told my father as they dragged me away — go. Don’t wait for me: they’re going to kill me. So be it. Take your leave.”
He reaches up, rubbing a thumb under one of his eyes, which are a grey-blue colour, pale like his hair is. Alvie has seen albinos, and he doesn’t think this kid is one of them, but it’s a close thing.
“They left,” Naham murmurs. “My family, my — They all left. They think me dead — and why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t I be?”
“You’re not dead yet, kid,” says Alvie.
“You can’t keep me under your watch forever,” Naham says.
“Naham Cohen.”
“Alvis… Alvis?”
“Hunter.”
“Alvis Hunter,” Naham repeats, and arches one silver-blond eyebrow. “Did your father bring that name with him all the way from Poland?”
“The name was Myśliwiec,” Alvie tells him, swinging his legs off the bed and getting to his feet. “Like a lot of things, easier in translation.”
“Polish is your first tongue?”
“Polish and Russian,” Alvie says. “I was born in New York, 1874.”
“English, it comes naturally to you? You sound American, when you speak it.”
“You speak any?”
“It’s a difficult language — clumsy. There is so much ambiguity, so much slang.”
“But German, that’s easy?”
“German has rules. What has English, but chaos?”
Alvis laughs as he gets to the door, turning to look back at Naham. “You’ll pick it up,” he says. “There’s some clothes in here for you — once you’re up and about, we’ll get you measured, get you some stuff that fits, buy you some off-the-rack stuff. You want me to get you a covering for your head?”
Naham is silent, staring into space with his grey eyes.
“Kid?” Alvis repeats. “I can get you some kippot.”
Naham looks up from the middle distance, and meets his gaze again. “There is no need, Mr Hunter. Thank you.”
“But if you wanna go to a service, I can get you — ”
“There’s no need,” Naham repeats. “I won’t be going.”
Alvis nods, and leaves him be for now.
* * *
It takes him time, but Naham picks up more English in Alvis’ house.
When Alvie is home, he picks up more Yiddish at the same time, the two of them conducting their conversations in some strange middle area between English and German. Naham picks up language best, Alvie finds, when he provokes him and gets him angry, gets him to defend a position.
Fortunately, as stuck-up as the little prick is, he’s got a lot of opinions to defend — provoking him isn’t too hard.
Alvie says art these days is a wash, that it’s all garbage — Naham scoffs at him and says dryly that Alvie wouldn’t know the Mona Lisa from a sketch, were it not that he’d heard it was important in the newspapers. Alvie says he’s no big reader, that if books were really that good, people would talk about them — Naham mutters that people certainly do talk about them, just not within the earshot of great lugs of meat like him.
Alvis says that violence is sometimes the answer — Naham retorts that a knife would say the same thing.
“What if I’m just used for spreading butter?”
“A shame you spread blood as much and as often.”
When Alvis is out, Naham works in the house — he learns to clean from some of the others.
He spends time with Alvis’ cook and one of the maids he’d taken out of the same brothel, both of them from English stock — the cook is in her forties with a hoarse, throaty voice; the maid (he insists on the word, although he doesn’t wear a dress) has never spoken much, but he talks more with Naham, especially when the two of them are alone together, Alvis guesses. Emma and Lukas call themselves brother and sister, although Alvis doesn’t believe they share a parent in common, and you’d easily believe they were mother and son.
Lukas teaches Naham enough Russian that he can insult Alvie in Alvie’s mother tongue, and Alvie can’t say he isn’t halfway pleased about it.
“You eat at the same table as the staff,” comments Naham over dinner one night. He says it in Yiddish, and Alvis takes a moment to look around the table and see if any of the others have learned enough Yiddish to understand, to register what he’s said, but they’re all in their own conversations.
Rosa, Felix, Aurora, and Katz, all of them muscle, are at the far end of the table — Devlin and Yiota are on duty outside; Emma, Lukas, and Maria, the house staff, are in the middle; closest to Alvis and Naham is Rosencrantz, Alvie’s chauffeur.
“What can I say?” retorts Alvie in English. “I’m a commie.”
Rosencrantz says, “Za vash zdarovye,” and toasts the table, and Alvie laughs, raising his own glass.
Naham doesn’t, taking a silent sip from his wine. When the laughter dies down, he says, “Are you?” He speaks in English, and there’s an ever so slight curl to his lip as he does so — Alvie’s heard him bickering with Emma and Lukas in the week, especially Lukas, about the lack of formal pronouns in English.
“Am I what?”
“A communist.”
“I’m a capitalist,” says Alvis, shrugging his shoulders. “Ain’t I?”
“Would you be, had you a choice to be otherwise?”
Alvis stares at him for a second or two, trying not to smile, ’cause of fucking course he hates English, has avoided speaking it, avoiding using it, and when he speaks he uses it like this, all smooth and easy and fucking fancy.
“I don’t know,” says Alvie. “Don’t know that any of us would be anything we are, if we had a choice in the world.”
Naham doesn’t seem to like that answer, his lips thinning as he presses them together.
“What, kiddo, got a criticism?” Alvis challenges him, and Naham hesitates before he answers, because the others at the table are looking over, are listening now, keen, interested.
“It’s a weak man who blames the world for the choices he makes,” the younger man says finally.
“I can make choices,” Alvis says evenly. “Can’t change the world, can I? Not all at once. Can’t change the city around us, control everybody at once.”
Naham puts down his knife and fork. “I suppose not,” he says. He doesn’t sound convinced.
* * *
Alvis Hunter lives in a fine house, beautifully furnished and appointed with handsome and beautifully carved furniture. He’s a beautiful man, in his own right, tall and strong and thick with muscle — his hair, once a dusty blond, was giving way now to a pale grey, his age showing in its loss of pigment — his beard, which is thick as much as he works to keep it neatly trimmed, is grey all the way through. He’s well into his 50s, but he wears those years very well, his skin with a healthy glow to it, no matter that he’s naturally pale.
His suits are properly tailored to his bulk, but it seems to Naham that one day his chest will burst out of the shirts he wears, particularly when on occasions where the older man strips down only to his shirt sleeves and they’re so tight when he flexes his muscles that Naham can see every line and tone in his upper arms.
When first he’d laid eyes on Alvis from his bed in Kit Lettings’ house, the understanding that he was attractive, handsome, had come to him distantly, like the knowledge of something one had learned long ago as a boy and had not thought to revisit since, or like moving to use a device one had not tended to in some time, and had lost the rhythm of.
A year of rape and torture had dampened his desire for other men, quenched its fire, and in the first few months in Alvis Hunter’s home, his libido had remained engaged where his mind had not. His cock would be hard in the evenings and he would tend to it with as little thought to the matter as possible, trying to think of anything but the weight of his prick in his palm, the heat of his own skin, of how much better it would be to have another man’s touch on him — by morning, he would be hard and wanting again.
As the days and weeks and months have gone by, his mind has grown less separated from his body, his brain seeming to sink back into his head, his mind back into his awareness, his soul back into his heart.
The others in Alvis Hunter’s house keep their distance from him, at first, because every touch and petty intimacy makes his knees quake and his body flinch, because it remembers that each such touch carries agony with it, carries pain and betrayal. It learns anew that touch is not inherently something to fear, that touch might be pleasant, or interesting, or merely grounding.
Lukas and Emma touch him, mostly, rub shoulders with him, brush his hands as they pass him things, and they’re careful not to do so overmuch when he’s first sensitive to it, but as Naham grows more at ease with it, so too do they show more ease at touching him.
Mr Hunter doesn’t touch him, of course.
He keeps a very careful distance from him, doesn’t reach for him or touch his body or hair or clothes where it might be avoided. He’s careful in his showing of respect for him, for his personal space, except for the fact that he remains hostage in Hunter’s house, constrained by his walls.
In the first few months, he works alongside Lukas and Emma, once he’s permitted to stand and move by Hunter’s doctor. Lukas is a maid, he says — he is not a valet or a footman or a houseboy or anything else: he is a maid.
“Not a maiden, crucially,” he says, when Naham first hears this and raises his eyebrows. Naham’s English isn’t yet good enough to quite understand the difference until he talks for a little bit to explain the subtle difference between the one word and the other, although he doesn’t know the reasons, precisely, that they are so similar, and yet so different in their meanings.
He was a whore, before coming to work for Mr Hunter. Comparing brothels, it turns out that he and Naham had even had some crossover, although they had never met until now.
“Time will heal you,” he’d said when Naham had first flinched away from his touch, and he’d felt bad — not guilty, merely frustrated, sickened, by his lack of control over his own body, his own reflexes. “A body remembers rape long before it remembers kindness.”
Most of Alvis’ people, as kind as they are, don’t know exactly how to speak to him, or at least, don’t know how to speak about such things as rape — Lukas is very at-home with the subject, speaks on it casually and easily and with the same pleasant, simple habitude that he might speak of food or the weather.
It unsettles them, at times, when he and Lukas and Emma joke about it, or talk about its impact on the body, the brain, the soul. To Lukas and Emma, rape and the natural life cycle of the impact it has and its victims’ recovery, is part of life. They wrinkle their noses or freeze their expressions or hurriedly turn their faces away from the conversation, shocked by the ease of it.
Lukas speaks of rape as many whores speak of rape — whores speak of rape as Jews speak of pogroms.
Naham is more comfortable speaking on it than around it, as he is most things.
His English improves. His Russian does, too — and his Finnish, although Finnish has no impact on Hunter as Russian does, making him jump or twitch or laugh. When he has learned enough English to read the notes in the margins and at the top of the tables in Mr Hunter’s ledgers, he is permitted the secretarial work he was promised — he learns to use a typewriter, and with time, learns certain other machines and their operations, too: the telephone, a cash register.
The dreams come first.
The cleave between body and mind doesn’t heal initially in the waking world, but he has wet dreams — dreams of men he’s fucked, men he’s wanted to fuck, men he’s never dreamed of fucking. Now and then, he wakes with wet sheets and a spent cock, although mostly, he wakes before that, and has to bring himself off, muffling his moans into his pillow and being grateful for a room alone in Hunter’s house.
Now and then, he jacks himself off, then vomits.
The first day he wakes and craves it, needs it, wants it, he sinks himself wet and ready down onto his fingers, comes so hard he sees stars, and then can’t bear to touch himself for three days afterward. His skin feels tight and overdrawn like a drum with the strings knotted more than they should be, ready to burst from his body.
He writes out a letter at Hunter’s dictation, his handwriting neat, his spelling good enough to get by, although he finds himself poring near-constantly over one dictionary or another, trying to force the knowledge of the language into his brain that it should stay there.
With the letter done, he sets the pen aside.
“Are you going to fuck me?” he asks.
Mr Hunter, sitting at his desk with his ledger and a few other letters spread out in front of him, looks almost wounded at the question, his lips falling open, his eyes widening slightly. “What?”
“Do you hold me here that you’ll fuck me too, as Lettings did?”
Hunter raises his head, and Naham takes in the deep brown of his eyes, the green flecks through his irises. He’s a handsome man now — Naham imagines he was even more handsome as a youth, just as big, as muscular.
“I told you,” he says. “I’m not going to whore you out, not going to rape you.”
“Is no one to fuck me, then?”
“If you want to ask a fucking question, kid, ask it,” Hunter says dryly, seeming to relax somewhat.
Naham stares at him, and then says, “I want to leave your house.”
“That ain’t happening.”
“Not forever,” says Naham. “I want to go to a brothel.”
Hunter stares at him, then looks him up and down. He seems caught off-guard by the question, and Naham wonders if he should feel ashamed that this is the first time he should ask to leave Hunter’s home, and that it should be for this, to attend his basest needs.
Hunter exhales, resting his hands on the desk and pushing on the wood, leaning back in his seat.
“Can you get pregnant?” he asks.
“No,” says Naham. “I’m barren. An effect of my condition, no doubt — a mercy.”
“You always been like you are?”
“Always had a cunt, you mean?”
“Now who’s talking like a Berliner?” asks Hunter. It’s not any funnier the second time, and Naham still doesn’t laugh, looking at him placidly. “I suppose, yeah. Have you always had a cunt?”
“Yes.”
“It as deep as…?” Hunter cuts himself off, and there’s a burn on his cheeks, a sweat on his brow.
“It’s as deep as any cunt is,” says Naham when Hunter doesn’t finish his question. “My cock is bigger, granted.”
“Do you bleed?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“But you get wet?” He looks as if he’s scared to keep asking questions, but can’t stop himself from doing it, and Naham prefers it this way, that he should ask. He wonders what Hunter is thinking of, as he asks — is he thinking of the depth of Naham’s cunt, maybe, to consider whether he’ll be able to stuff the length of his prick inside it?
There’s heat between his legs, a prickling warmth in his cunt, in his cock.
“I do,” Naham says. “The bobe despaired at it, examining me — that I should have these parts that work, and yet carry them as a man does, with no ability to bear children. No eggs, she used to guess.”
“Bobe?”
“A, a…” Naham struggles for the word, but doesn’t reach for German, trying to think of it in English. “It isn’t grandmother?”
“Nanny?”
“No, not nanny. A nanny is a maid and nurse of sorts, yes? She gives a child milk and care? But she does not aid a mother in giving birth?”
“Oh,” says Hunter. “You mean a midwife.”
“Midwife,” Naham repeats. “It’s the same in German. Hebamme?”
“You’d know better than me, kid.”
Naham blots the page, and holds out the letter for Hunter to take and read over, his eyes scanning over the text back and forth.
“Can I go, then?”
“To a brothel?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“Yes,” says Hunter quietly, with a neat nod of his head. “Rosencrantz will take you.”
“I don’t need chauffeuring.”
“It’s not up for debate.”
Naham stares at him, then puts his pen aside to go.
“You should be grateful, you know,” says Hunter.
“Why?” asks Naham. “You’re not keeping me to fuck me — you’re not even keeping me to save me, as you like to pretend. You keep me here, and keep me alive, that when Lettings returns from his business in New York, he’ll be humiliated. I’m little more than a gamepiece that you’re pleased to have swiped from his side of the board.”
Hunter looks at him with a softening on his face, his brow furrowing, his lips twisting in something closer to a frown. Naham doesn’t much like to see the expression there, the sadness writ on his face, the vulnerability of it.
“No,” says Hunter. “You never have to lay eyes on that little cunt again if you don’t want to.”
“And all I have to do is stay inside forever, within these walls?” Naham asks.
Hunter sighs.
“I’m going to the brothel,” says Naham, and takes his leave.
* * *
Kit Lettings has been back in the city a few weeks already.
People have been trying not to talk about it where Naham can hear, so the first he hears about it is actually in the brothel, as he’s walking back out to Rosencrantz, hears two men discussing it in the hall. Kit Lettings is back in town, they say — he’s providing to some new speakeasy, and they’re discussing whether they should go.
Rosencrantz must see that he’s pale when he comes out to where he’s smoking outside — he doesn’t say anything as they walk back to Hunter’s house.
For a few days, Naham doesn’t leave his bed, his stomach churning, his skin alive with the memory of Kit Lettings’ hands on it — of his snatching fingers in Naham’s hair, of his claw-like nails digging into his shoulders, his back, his arms, of his cold voice in Naham’s ear. He sleeps, he eats, he touches himself.
He vomits, he sweats, he shivers, he dreams, and every one of them is more miserable than the last.
And then he goes back to work, and Mr Hunter doesn’t say anything about his absence one way or the other.
* * *
Naham sees Kit Lettings in the corridor when he comes into Hunter’s house, and he’s surprised at first that the guards let him through as he dodges behind a door and stands with his shoulders pressed to the wallpapered brick, a set of papers clutched to his desk.
He’s grown familiar with Lettings’ step in the past year, with the particularities of his brisk gait — he’s a short man, muscular but small, and the weight of his steps as he moves is a heavy, audible one.
He realises afterwards that there are other steps dogging him, that two of Mr Hunter’s people are walking behind him — Kit Lettings knocks on Hunter’s door.
Naham’s never thought of him particularly as a man that knocks.
“Aw, Kitty, you came to see me,” rumbles Hunter after the door has opened, and then says, “Thanks. I can handle the pussycat.”
Naham hears more steps shuffling, hears the door close.
He moves through the corridor on the most silent steps he can, moving into the next bedroom and into the adjoining closet, the one with double doors into Hunter’s office and this hidden exit at the other end of the galley-like space.
When Naham slides the wooden panel closed behind him, he’s ensconced mostly in darkness, except for the knife’s edge golden light that glows from Mr Hunter’s office through to the windowless black. As Naham walks slowly forward on slippered feet, making no noise at all, that straight line of golden line seems to cut him in half, threatening to bisect him, one eye to each side, the bow of his lips cleaved in two.
“… good time in the city?”
“A fine fucking time, thank you,” Lettings retorts to Mr Hunter’s question, despite the casual, easy way it’s posed. “I think you have something of mine.”
“Forgot to return a casserole dish, did I?”
“Give me the Jew.”
“What Jew?” Hunter’s tone is almost innocent, and Naham slowly drops to his knees in front of the crack in the double doors, looking through the gap to observe the two of them together. He’d expected to see Mr Hunter sitting behind his desk, or perhaps sitting back in his armchair to the side, but he’s on his feet, and so is Lettings.
Lettings is facing away from Mr Hunter, facing his desk, and Hunter is slowly walking around behind him, as a cat pacing behind its prey.
Naham can see the snarl pulling at Lettings’ lip as he turns his head to look back at Hunter. “He’s mine, not yours. Give him back.”
“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty,” says Hunter softly, pouting his lips and looking at Lettings with a slight smirk on his face as he comes closer, one mighty hand coming to land down on Lettings’ shoulder. The two of them look ridiculous, side-by-side, Hunter obscenely large in contrast to his once-apprentice. “Don’t you know you have to take care of your toys if you don’t want Daddy to take them away?”
Naham’s cock gives a twitch between his legs, and his mouth is dry as he watches Lettings turn to snarl at Mr Hunter and get hauled by the scruff of his suit for his troubles, thrown over the table.
Naham can hardly believe what he’s seeing as Hunter keeps Lettings pinned down over the surface of his desk with one broad hand spread between his shoulders and the other throwing up the tail of his suit jacket, tearing the buttons from his braces, hauling his trousers down.
Lettings’ arse is oddly square for all the muscle on him, and Naham stares from his position on his knees as Hunter leans down and spits loudly between his cheeks. A glob of saliva lands on him and Naham sees the shine of a bit of it on Lettings’ spreading thighs — he’s struggling, letting out growling, hissing sounds, but his strength is nothing compared to Hunter’s.
When Naham sees Hunter’s cock let free of his trousers, he’s not remotely surprised by the size of it, in-keeping as it is with the rest of the man’s prodigious bulk — it’s thick around and long, too, and has a slight downward curve to it and an inclination to the righthand side. Naham’s mouth remains dry, but his cunt is anything but, throbbing, and before he can further consider what he’s doing he’s sliding his hand into his trousers and sinking two fingers inside himself, the heel of his hand grinding against his cock.
“Bad Kitty,” says Hunter, slapping one hand against one of Lettings’ cheeks, and Lettings spits venom.
“You fat fuck,” he growls, “you think you can just go on sitting lazy on your arse forever, just let the world turn around you and assume everything will keep going your way, you don’t understand — ”
“I understand fine,” says Hunter lazily, stroking his cock slowly as he keeps his hand on Lettings’ back, now balling up his suit to keep a better grip on him and to shove his head down. “I’ve told you, Kitty — there’s no such thing as infinite expansion. You might have raised up some cash and capital in New York, but you can’t bully your way around the world.”
“It’s business,” says Lettings. “You just don’t get it — ”
“Don’t I?” retorts Hunter, and then sinks his cock into Lettings’ ass in one sudden, easy movement, and Lettings howls into his hands. Naham can’t get a good look at his face, but from the hitched and breathless sounds that are eking out of his throat, he’s pretty sure Lettings is crying.
The wave of arousal that washes over him is so powerful he actually feels faint for a moment, leaning his forehead against doors to peer through the crack at them, hungrily grinding himself down against his fingers as Hunter thrusts into Lettings’ ass, slapping sounds of flesh-on-flesh mingling with Lettings’ whining whimpers and sharp, wet gasps.
Naham’s never seen him like this.
It’s never occurred to him that Lettings should allow a man to fuck him like this, that he should enjoy it as he so clearly is, his back arching and his thighs spreading wider even before Hunter shoves his knee against the back of his to force them apart.
He can’t decide which of them he’s more jealous of as Hunter leans further over Lettings and fucks powerfully into him, slamming his cock home with thrust after thrust as Lettings squeals and sobs beneath the sheer force of the older man atop him — is he jealous of Alvis Hunter, able to reduce this cruel and pathetic man to sobbing tears, to so overwhelm him, to have him reduced to this shivering mess beneath him?
Or is he jealous of Lettings, to feel the heavy weight of Hunter’s cock piercing him open and the shadow of his body over his back, the heat of his strong hands? Naham wishes he could feel Hunter’s cock instead of his own fingers, so slim in comparison, wishes he could be filled so entirely with it and have Hunter fuck him with such abandon as he’s fucking Lettings.
“Daddy,” whines Lettings, and Naham has to blink the darkness away at the corners of his vision, the word hitting him like a blow. “Daddy, Daddy, please — ”
Naham doesn’t know what Lettings is begging for, but if it’s mercy, Hunter gives him none — he fucks him harder, shoving his head down, and Lettings’ words dissolve into sobs as he’s used like nothing more than a toy, his ass split apart by the thickness of the cock inside him.
Naham comes on his fingers before either of them do, and continues to rock himself down onto his hand until the both of them are finished.
* * *
Lettings had gone to New York, so the gossip runs, to do some trades and deals here and there, such that he comes back to New Jersey with money to spend in spades, and agreements to call on.
He believes in expanding, Naham hears. They used to conduct all manner of business conversations over his head while they were fucking him, but he scarcely recalls them — he’d often be plied with drink or drugs or made so insensible by the line of cocks having fucked him or waiting for their turn that he was rendered deaf and dumb and numb to anything outside of his own body.
Lettings wants territory: he takes it.
He has railroad after railroad, pays bribe after bribe, keeps still after still, and safe after safe — he kills easily when promises are not kept, when duties are not paid, when targets are not reached. He’s brutal, and cold, and tactical.
Hunter keeps a map in the saferoom downstairs, behind a few passages secreted from any police who might conduct a raid on the house, although he’s said he doubts it would ever happen. He’s got friends on the force, he says. Naham doesn’t know that there’s such a thing as having a policeman for a friend, any more than he believes a man might truly tame a bear and believe himself safe within its reach.
He kills other mobsters, other rumrunners.
If Naham were entirely honest, he doesn’t really care about the particulars. Hunter tries to speak to him about it, now and then, but more than him is the other people in his employ, talking about territory or fights or ammunition or raids or any of the rest.
It’s all bloodshed for the sake of cheap whiskey and gin watered down with poison, and his mouth is sour from the taste of it all.
A few months after Lettings’ meeting with Hunter, Naham is jumped by some of his boys as he comes out of one of the nancy brothels — it’s the second time he’s come on his own, without Rosencrantz or one of Hunter’s people accompanying him, and he limps the rest of the way home.
No broken bones, for which he’s not foolish enough to be grateful — it was intentional.
There are bruises all over him, though, and he’s not permitted to come into the house proper until the doctor has been summoned to have a look at him, just to ensure there are no open cuts, no fractures or anything similar. After a bath in warm salt water, he stays in his room with his books.
He’s been teaching Lukas Hebrew, just for the fun of showing him some poetry, and when Hunter comes in, he looks at the little blackboard sitting in its frame on the table instead of at Naham, at the blooming bruise over his eye and his split lip and the graze on his chin and the bruises that are blooming under the pyjama shirt collar.
They’re nice pyjamas — the cool silk is soothing on his hot, overwrought skin. There are benefits to being a kept man.
“I don’t know much,” says Hunter, “but that’s your name, right?”
He points to one phrase on the board, not נחם, but נָקָם.
“No,” says Naham softly. “But close. That doesn’t say nacham. It says nakam.”
Alvis Hunter’s ear is well-trained, but not trained enough that he knows the difference now, because he looks from Naham to the chalkboard, his brow furrowing.
“You know some Hebrew, enough to recognise the letters, even if you don’t read it. Have you known other men named Naham? Do you know what the name means?” he asks as Hunter steps further into the room, nudging the door mostly closed behind him, so that it’s only open by a fraction.
“Uh, maybe,” says Hunter. “Short for Menaham, right? One of the Kings of Israel?”
“Yes,” says Naham. “Menaham, Son of Gadi, sixteenth of the Kings of Israel — he ruled for ten years. But the Hebrew, it means, ah… Comforter. Consoler.”
“Consoler?” Hunter repeats, tilting his head to one side. “You already speak English all poetic, same as you speak German.”
“Perhaps if you read some books, you might pick up the same inclination.”
“Nah,” says Hunter. “I don’t think so.”
Naham huffs out an amused and powerless exhalation. “Menaham is a name one gives to a son had to replace the one who was lost,” he says quietly, and Hunter glances his way and looks at him with curiosity writ on his features, although there’s sadness in his new understanding. “My parents lost my two brothers to polio before I was born.”
“That why your daddy was gonna give in when Lettings said he’d get you arrested?”
“I expect it was a contributing factor, certainly,” Naham murmurs. “He knew twice over already what it was for he and my mother to lose a son.”
“So what is that word, then? Nakam? Not comfort, but…?”
“The phrase means he avenged. Vengeance.”
“Oh,” says Hunter, lowering his hand. “I guess that is pretty different, huh? Then again, they do say that revenge is comfort, of a kind.”
“Cold comfort.”
“Yeah,” says Hunter. His expression is guarded, but he doesn’t look pleased, from what Naham can gather, examining his features. “That’s it. How are you feeling?”
“My bruises hurt,” says Naham, and Hunter nods as he comes closer to his chair, looking down at him. Big beast of a man that he is, Naham is aware of how easily accessible his cock would be, were Naham to reach out and unbutton his trousers. He thinks about how the weight of it would feel on his tongue, how huge it would be in his mouth, filling out his throat.
His eyes would water and he’d feel himself gag, and if Hunter began to fuck his face, the whole world would narrow down to that and the wet twitch of his cunt, and he wouldn’t think of Lettings, or his father, or his bruises, or any of it.
“It was a warning,” Naham says. “I’m not so arrogant as to believe it was a warning for me. It was a warning for you, it seems to me. A boy reminding his daddy he should keep an eye on his toys.”
Hunter’s eyes flicker with recognition, his brow furrowing slightly, but if he’s truly angry or upset at the premise of Naham eavesdropping on his interactions with Lettings, he lends no voice to the thought.
“Going to tell me I can’t go to the brothel anymore?” asks Naham, standing to his feet and biting back a grunt of pain.
“Not alone,” says Hunter, apologetically spreading his hands. “Rosencrantz will go with you again, from now on.”
“Fine,” says Naham, stepping closer. Hunter’s body is warm and heavy, and Naham rests his hand on his chest and marvels at how small and slim his fingers seem in contrast to the sheer breadth of it. He wouldn’t be able to hold one of Hunter’s breasts in his hand without it spilling over his fingers. His fingers now are trembling.
“You’ve still got those men’s skin between your teeth,” says Hunter softly, his voice agonisingly gentle, and Naham wishes he’d put his hand on his shoulder as he’d put his hand on Lettings’, wishes he’d bend him over and fuck him full in the same way. Wishes Hunter would put him in a hot bath and scrub him clean until it was as if neither Lettings nor any of his men had ever touched him.
“I brushed them,” Naham says.
“You broke six fingers between three men,” says Hunter. “Bit a great chunk out of one of them — a whole strip off his face.”
“He shouldn’t have put his face so close to my teeth,” Naham whispers. His fingers are rubbing up and down on the pleasant fabric of Hunter’s tight shirt, over his sternum. “I won’t go to the brothel again, if I’m satisfied here.”
“Won’t you now?”
Naham has to stand up on his tiptoes to reach, nudging Hunter’s chin down, and Hunter lets Naham kiss him for a moment, his lips warm and thickly layered with stubble, although when Naham tries to deepen the kiss, Hunter pushes him away.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“Too much blood between my teeth?”
“I know you think I don’t care,” says Hunter, gripping him gently by the shoulders only for long enough to push him further away, “but I fucking told you, kid. I didn’t bring you here to violate you like Kit did.”
“Is it a violation, if I invite you?” Naham asks softly. “I’ll have no need to go to the brothel, if you satisfy me here. Or is it only fellow murderers you put your cock in?”
Hunter touches the side of his face, and the movement is so tender that for a moment Naham feels like bursting into tears, because he doesn’t know how long it’s been since someone’s touched him like this, cupping his cheek in their warm, steady palm. Who did this last to him? A lover? A friend? His mother, or father?
He doesn’t recall, only that it’s so wholly different to his year of torture and certainly to the men he fucks in the brothels, who wouldn’t dare touch him like that.
“I came to give you this,” says Hunter, and holds a familiar flick knife between them by the blade. Naham recalls how he felt, first laying eyes on it and the pink-painted roses carved into the handle — it’s such a curiously delicate blade for such a big man with such appreciation for blunt, brute force. It had felt like he was laying eyes on his only life line, despite the fact that in the moment, he had wanted it for the opposite.
Naham takes it from him, feeling the weight of the wood, the sharpness of the metal.
It occurs to him in the moment that it would be really very funny were he to slit his throat right here, as he’d planned to do some months ago. Whose reflexes would win out, the second time around? His, or Mr Hunter’s?
Would his throat bleed out faster, were he laughing as he cut it?
“I have my teeth,” says Naham. “Do I really need this as well?”
“You asked for it once,” Hunter says quietly, tapping his thumb gently against his cheek. “Now, it’s yours. So long as you use it on other people, okay? Not yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” says Naham blisteringly, and Hunter softly laughs as he leaves the room.
* * *
Naham is normally found in one of three places: in his room, surrounded by stacks of books or his blackboard or his notes; in Alvis’ office, doing paperwork or inventing new kinds of code to confuse his poor fucking contacts; or in a brothel.
Alvie pays him, of course, and it’s not like it’s his business what the lad spends his money on, although the fact that he spends most of it on filling his head with books and the rest on filling his cunt seems a bit overboard.
He thinks about it, from time to time, Naham’s —
Is it right, to call it an offer? An overture? He doesn’t fucking know, doesn’t know exactly how to keep track of his moods or his fucking head. The lad’s psyche seems pretty fractured to him, one way or the other — rape will fuck anybody up, man or woman, and Naham’s no exception to that.
He wonders, sometimes, if his trips to the brothel are just another kind of suicide, if he wants to kill himself with pleasure, or just hopes to find somebody who’ll kill him at the end of it, even if it’s Lettings’ boys.
They show him through to the room when he walks into the brothel, and a few of them come to him immediately, beautiful boys with painted faces and thick, curling hair, the sort of boys they know he likes from time to time, although not tonight.
He doesn’t knock.
Naham doesn’t flinch from where he is when the door opens behind him, and he doesn’t turn his head, either — he’s set a mirror up in the corner so that he can see the door without turning around. He’s done the same in his room, too. Paranoid little fucker.
It’s not paranoia, though, really, is it?
Alvis feels heat gather in his belly as he pushes the door shut behind him, stepping closer to the bed. Naham’s blank expression doesn’t change as Alvie comes closer, and except for his gaze flickering to the mirror a few times, he doesn’t take his stare off of the boy’s face.
The lad he’s riding is short and muscular, and the resemblance to Kit is more than passing — he’s got the same short, square chin and the same stubby nose, the same sort of handsome features even if the actual specifics of them are different. Naham has him spread out with his hands tied under his body, and there are bite marks all over him, imprinted and bruised and sometimes cut into the flesh.
All of Naham’s own bruises are healed up — this little cunt looks like the fucking night sky over Nevada, he’s so colourful.
“Hey, kid,” says Alvis, standing over Naham’s shoulder and looking down at the little fucker, whose mouth is full of a balled-up handkerchief, whose cheeks are red, whose body is slick all over with sweat from strain. “You wanna double your money?”
The whore whimpers, but nods his head.
* * *
They wash themselves from the same bowl of water after, and Alvis marvels at how fucking different Naham looks now than he did half a year ago — here he is, naked and sweaty and with his cunt dripping cum, lying back on a bed, and yet he doesn’t look scared or small or abused. He looks haughty, if anything, looks more like a king than a secretary, not just laying back, but reclining.
Alvis had fucked the whore’s ass as he’d sucked on Naham’s cock and fucked him with his fingers, and it had felt strange, having a whole other man between them even though he’d like to sink his cock into Naham himself, feel him.
“You really marked that boy up,” he says as he scrubs the sweat from his tits. Naham is looking at him unashamedly and unapologetically, taking in the lines of his body, his chest, his thighs, his arms.
“He’ll heal,” Naham says guardedly.
“You want him to?” Alvis asks.
Naham washes himself in silence for a few moments, the only sound between them the slight creak of the bed’s wooden frame and the wet noises of the cloth in the water and then slapping against his skin before he wipes himself down.
“I thought I knew shame before,” Naham says quietly, staring into a space in the world between them, faraway, distant. “Feygele son of the rabbi, never to marry. Hardly the replacement for my brother they hoped I’d be. They never wanted to say it, but naturally, I disappointed them. Now, though? Now, dead to my parents and yet still living, now, I know shame. I’m a truly, truly shameful thing.”
Alvis stares at him, his stomach churning as he tries to think of something to say, something halfway fucking comforting, or assuring, or something.
“I’m not ashamed of you,” is all that comes out. “I wouldn’t be ashamed of you, if you were my boy.”
Naham doesn’t say anything.
Alvis leaves him be.
* * *
He knew it would come, one day, but it’s still pretty sad, the first time one of the boys gives word to him — Kit Lettings, the little cat desperate to mark his territory, has tried to rob one of Alvie’s distilleries, and he just won’t have it.
It’s a very one-sided turf war, when it all comes down to it, Alvis’ guys taking over Kit’s new territory piece by piece by piece, and giving most of it back to the guys who’d controlled it before.
He’d tried to explain to him, when Kitty was still his, still his little apprentice. There’s no kings in the fucking bootlegging business, no supreme rulers when it comes to gangland fare — you only take territory if you can control it, and you can only control it if you’ve got the support of your guys, if you trust them, and they trust you.
You can’t brute force that shit, you can’t make those networks and keep ’em standing on pain and threats alone.
Kitty’s never learned his lesson, of course, and he doesn’t learn it now — he gets the shit kicked out of him by his New York moneylenders, and instead of killing him themselves, in an honestly real touching act of respect, they drop him bruised and bloody on Alvie’s doorstep.
“Hi, Kitty,” says Alvie.
“Hello, Mr Lettings,” echoes Naham quietly. His face is so blank now it’s like it was made of stone.
Naham is leaning over Kit where he’s spread out on his back on a low table, touching his cheek with careful, delicate fingers. He has Alvis’ knife in his hand.
“I gave you that knife,” Kit whispers from a hoarse, bruised throat.
“And he gave it to me,” says Naham.
“Going to kill me, faggot?” asks Kit, trying his best to raise his eyebrows from his place sprawled out on the coffee table. “What’s the word? Faglick?”
“I’m not going to kill you, Mr Lettings,” Naham whispers, and there’s a slight smile on his face. Maybe he’s so crazy he’ll never heal from the fractures inside him — maybe he’s past the point of no return. “I’m going to fuck you where your daddy can see.”
Alvie’s cock is hard even before Naham has stripped off both their clothes, let alone before Naham has straddled Lettings and sunk himself down on his cock.
* * *
The world seems to have turned itself on its axis as Naham fucks himself down onto Lettings’ cock, his hand spread on his chest, one of the few places where there aren’t new bruises on his flesh — he’s got a swollen eye and a tear under his ear and bruises on his shoulders and arms and hips and lower back, but not here.
His cock is hard enough to sit on, so for all he must be in pain, there must be pleasure enough here too as Naham rides him.
Lettings tries to sit up twice, tries to control the pace from where Naham straddles his waist and fucks himself down onto him — each time, Naham slaps him hard across the face with his open palm, and each time, Lettings moans, his body shuddering, his cock twitching where it’s buried in his cunt.
Naham doesn’t know if he likes it or not, the fact that Lettings is half-enjoying himself. This is nothing like when Lettings was behind him or on top of him, or when Lettings was pushing and pulling him back and forth amongst the other men, spitroasted or otherwise penetrated from each end.
It’s distracting him, he supposes.
It just keeps flashing on the inside of his skull, constant, layered recollections of every moment spent in Lettings’ bed or on his knees in his office, at the various places he was taken to and used and fucked and raped, and although there’s a certain sense of victory in their reversed positions, it isn’t enough to make him spend.
What gets him close is when he turns his head and sees that Mr Hunter is leaning back in his armchair with his legs spread, his hand slowly moving on his own, thick cock.
Meeting his gaze, Hunter says, “Here, Naham. That boy of mine is too small to satisfy you, isn’t he?”
Naham’s blood runs suddenly hotter, and at the same time, Lettings whines beneath him, his body arching.
“Come sit on Daddy’s cock, let him take care of you,” Hunter goes on.
Naham should hate it. He should argue against it, snap at him, but the truth of the matter is that it makes his cock hard, perhaps most of all because it shouldn’t.
Sinking down on Alvis’ cock feels like turning the world on its axis for a second time in twenty minutes, feels like coming home, and he can’t keep the desperate moans from out of his throat as it fills up his cunt so entirely that his head spins with it, his cock crushed between their bodies, rubbing up against Alvis’ powerful belly.
“That’s it, that’s it, I’ve got you,” says Alvis softly, sliding his hands to rest on Naham’s waist, squeezing. He’s got the slightest of smiles on his face, and Naham’s heart beats fast in his chest — when he says, “Daddy’s got you,” Naham clenches down around him reflexively, and Alvis moans loudly. Alvis drags Naham down into a kiss now, and Naham whines at the push down on his waist at the same time, sinking him down so that Naham entirely sheaths his cock.
He’s so crammed full of him he can scarcely breathe, feels as though the tip of his prick might well be brushing his heart directly, and the pleasure so overwhelms him that all thoughts of any and all who touched him before, evaporate to nothing.
He comes twice before Alvis does — he comes twice before he remembers who is watching them.
“Alvis,” Naham whispers, and Alvis kisses him hard as he gently eases Naham out of his lap, lets him stand to his feet on shaky, foal-like legs that have gone weak with pleasure, not to mention holding his position.
Lettings must be distracted by the pain, because still, he cannot come — he’s watching Naham silently as Naham walks toward him, naked but for the sweat on his skin and Alvis’ come dripping out of him, sliding down his inner thighs. His hand moves urgently on his cock, the sound of it frenetic, desperate, little noises eking out of his throat.
“Are you going to come, Kitty?” Naham asks in a whisper, picking up his vest from the floor and rummaging in his own pockets, and Lettings stares at him with his eyes wide, his jaw dropped, moans louder. “At the sight of me? At the sight of the man you thought to destroy standing over you with your Daddy’s spend stuffed in me instead of you?”
“Fuck,” Lettings moans, his eyes squeezing shut, his body seizing up and going stiff as ropes of white cover his hand.
The blood spatters over it as Naham swipes across his vulnerable throat with the knife Alvis had given him, and Lettings opens his eyes again just fast enough that Naham is able to see the life drain out of them, see their colour go dull and glassy.
He drops limply to the table, blood and come puddling beside him on the wooden surface, and Naham holds the blade limply by his side as he looks back at Alvis, who is studying him, watching him.
“I need to wash this off me,” Naham says quietly, and walks naked back to his room.
* * *
Cold comfort, indeed.
* * *
Alvis knocks on Naham’s door the following morning. He wishes he was surprised when he pushes it open and sees that Naham’s packing his clothes into a little suitcase. He’s saved some money after all — it’s all piled up on the side table in neat stacks of bills and coins, evidently recently counted.
“I was gonna offer you his territory,” he says, not seeing the point to bother with the good mornings. “You didn’t want to be my secretary — you’d be good at this, for real.”
“No,” says Naham. “I’m going west, to California. I’m going to find my family — live up to my name.”
Alvis’ heart pangs in his chest. “You could always change it,” he says quietly — helplessly.
“I don’t want to,” says Naham.
“Just one letter,” Alvis attempts. “Easily done.”
“Easy?” Naham repeats, and looks over at him. “What’s easy about it, Alvie?”
“You killed one man,” Alvis says quietly, leaning on the doorframe. “It won’t be so hard to kill more.”
“Cain only killed one man,” Naham murmurs. “Look what became of him.”
“Yeah, but Cain lied about it after,” Alvis points out. “You could tell the truth — maybe it’d be different for you.”
Naham laughs, shaking his head as he looks at him, and then says, “Maybe you should come with me. You’d be a good study partner.”
“I don’t think you need a big goy like me at the yeshiva,” Alvis replies, although for a second, he lets himself think about it — of giving up the house, the work, the people, the action — to go west to California and retire in this kid’s house, lay fires or light cigarettes for him and his family on the sabbath. “But it’s a tempting offer.”
Naham holds out the knife, and Alvis looks at the roses on the handle, remembers how sweet Kit had been about giving it to him, those years ago.
“It’s yours,” Alvis says.
“It isn’t,” Naham replies, and Alvis sighs, but takes it back.
Naham buckles his suitcase, then picks up the money he has set aside and folds it into his coat. “I’ve been very grateful for your hospitality,” he says, and his eyes flutter closed as Alvis helps him on with his coat, smooths down the fabric. “My thanks.”
“You gonna write me?” asks Alvis, letting his hand rest on Naham’s lower back as he picks up his case.
“No,” says Naham, not meeting his gaze, and Alvis nods his head.
“I got you a kippah, after all, you know,” Alvis murmurs, “just in case. It’s in the top drawer in the front hall.”
Naham’s expression is impossible to read, it shows so much emotion at once, but his hand rests on Alvis’ chest as he says, “Thank you.”
Alvis tries to think of something else to say — to suggest that Lukas and Emma go with him, because they’ve always mentioned California; to suggest that Rosencrantz drive him to the train station; to suggest that Alvis walk him to the train station — or apart from offering things, offering favours or more money or more time or more something, saying something else, saying something kind, or poetic, or romantic.
He’s never been good at those last three.
Case in point: Naham is walking away from him before he can even pick one to make a try at.
He doesn’t even have time to say goodbye.
FIN.
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