Page 5 of My Darling Girls

It’s a question she isn’t sure how to answer. At least he’s not questioning her abilities as a photographer.

When called, come.

The gnawing dread lodges itself between her ribs. No, she can’t think about the courtyard. About the girl. “I just can’t.”

“Millie didn’t die of anything contagious. There’s no need to be afraid,” he says and pulls out a stack of dollars. “The dead don’t bite.”

He has no idea, does he?

He pushes the money into Jo’s palm. “Here, take this. It should be enough. It’s twenty dollars.”

Twenty dollars is a lot of money, especially for a photo session. Even if it’s a photo session of a dead girl in the middle of the night. There was a customer once, when she was still living on State Street, who came to the studio looking for August. When she told him her husband had died, the man handed her five dollars for a portrait of his dead lover, a young man who had died unexpectedly. Jo followed the man to the Palmer House hotel, where she gaped, open mouthed, at the lobby: the grand piano, the garnet-draped chandeliers, the red-carpeted stairs—her brown coat a blemish against the rich colors—and the stunning ceiling fresco. She gave herself a few moments to appreciate the grandeur, the exuberance, and the beauty. Especially the beauty, a stark contrast to her small studio. What she didn’t appreciate was taking pictures of the subject, who appeared to have been dead for days. The stench of death was not just nausea inducing but suffocating. Jo had to wrap a scarf around her face to endure. She had to be inventive with lighting to hide signs of decomposition. She used double exposure and superimposed negative to create a mirror effect and a certain dynamism of a setting, to make sure it looked like the subject was moving during the photo session. When the customer saw his lover’s photos, he broke down in sobs and tipped Jo five more dollars. She thought she’d made a fortune.

The twenty dollars will take care of her for a few weeks, if not months, if she stretches it. People do come to her studio, as she had hoped when she moved to Commercial Avenue; she wasn’t wrong about that. But only a few will let a female photographer take pictures of their families. It’s been a long stretch of not working, not having any orders at all. Sometimes she wonders if she made a mistake by moving to the South Side. None of the stores in the area will sell her anything on credit. And to add to her misery, her opium supply is low. Last week, she went to Old Zhang and begged him, crawling on her knees in his dirty den, to give her something, just a little bit to get by. Old Zhang had never been known for giving credit to anyone, but that day she was in such a bad state he made an exception. “Just this once, Jo,” he said, his eyes trailing her humiliating moves on the floor. “You’re one of my best clients. I want you around.” It was comforting, in an odd way, to know Old Zhang considered her one of his best.

“It’s a lot of money,” she says and puts the bills into her skirt pocket. This, after all, might be a proposition she can’t refuse.

Ignoring her remark, the young man checks his watch again. “Should we go, then?”

Jo hesitates, but of course she knew she’d do it as soon as her fingers touched the dollar bills. “Are we walking? The cable car doesn’t run this late.”

“I have a hansom waiting outside.”

“Let me fetch my camera.”

She throws on her coat over her wrinkly clothes and buttons it up, her fingers shaking slightly. She takes her Kodak No. 3A, a folding compact camera that’s good for snapshot photography. She puts it in her camera bag.

He opens the door for her. “Call me Finn.”

Together they walk into the night.

By now, the wind has acquired a rough edge, and Jo trembles in her thin coat, a little from the chill and definitely from the fear that returned at the thought that this grieving man might be taking her to her death.

On a corner, a few feet away from her studio, a black hansom is waiting for them, indeed. The horse is massive, almost as big as the one she encountered in the dreamlike courtyard. The driver, tall and slightly stooped, clad in a dark woolen greatcoat and black boots, is motionless as he watches them approach. Finn opens the door, offers his hand to Jo, and helps her climb inside. The wind blows and messes up his blond hair, making it stick out at odd angles. He doesn’t put his bowler hat on. Doesn’t smooth his hair back.

“My sister’s place is quite far from here,” he says, patting his pants pockets as he settles into the seat. A second later, he pulls out a silver cigarette case. He takes out a cigarette, sticks it between his lips, but doesn’t light it up. “Would you like one?” He offers Jo the silver case, but she shakes her head. She rarely smokes. Whiskey, though, she wouldn’t refuse that.

“Where are we going?”

“In the direction of the Levee. My sister lives in Old Town.”

The name of the notorious Chicago entertainment district plunges Jo into frigid waters. August was killed there, on his way to a cable car, presumably in a dark alley between Polk and Taylor. His body was recovered days later in the Chicago River.

“Why did you come all the way to South Chicago? Surely there are photography studios in Old Town,” Jo asks. What she doesn’t say is Surely the Snakes employ their own photographer.

He shrugs. “Ira, my uncle, told me to check out South Chicago studios.” It’s dark inside the hansom, but Jo feels his eyes on her.

“Why?”

“I didn’t ask.”

She looks out the window and watches the streets of Chicago float by.

The Snakes first appeared in the Levee district in the late 1800s. No one knows where they came from, but rumors were circulating about a mining town in Colorado and the family who came into significant capital in those mines. The newcomers knew how to handle local politics and how to enter the business scene of Chicago. Soon after their arrival, they bought a dive saloon at 2135 South Dearborn. The business grew, and now the Snakes own almost every saloon, dance hall, and brothel along the south and west sides of Dearborn. August once told her a story of a girl who worked in one of their brothels. She went to a police precinct and reported being kidnapped, raped, and forced into prostitution by the Snakes. A week later, she was found crawling by the river, beaten to a pulp, her lips sewn shut. She died in a hospital.

Everyone knows that many of the most important business deals in Chicago happen in the establishments on Dearborn Street, amid crime, violence, and fear.

“How long have you been doing this photography . . . business?” Finn asks after a few beats of silence.