The City Beautiful Read online

  Aden Polydoros grew up in Illinois and Arizona and has a bachelor’s degree in English from Northern Arizona University. When he isn’t writing, he enjoys going to antique fairs and flea markets. He can be found on Twitter at @adenpolydoros.

  Praise for The City Beautiful

  “The City Beautiful is the haunting, queer Jewish historical thriller of my darkest dreams.”

  —Dahlia Adler, creator of LGBTQ Reads and editor of That Way Madness Lies

  “Like a darkly compelling dream; I dare readers to try to put down this queer triumph of a book where myth, mystery, and death lurk around every corner of the Windy City.”

  —Sarah Glenn Marsh, author of the Reign of the Fallen series

  “An entrancing and chilling tale...this genre-blending story has something for everyone.”

  —Kalyn Josephson, author of the Storm Crow duology

  “Polydoros deftly weaves together a gruesome murder mystery, a beautiful romance, and a rich depiction of Jewish life in the 19th century. I absolutely adored Alter, a boy on a quest for closure, love, and belonging in a hostile world.”

  —Allison Saft, author of Down Comes the Night

  “Polydoros is not afraid to tear aside the façade of beauty and civility to confront the darkest aspects of human nature, no holds barred.”

  —Sophie Gonzales, author of Only Mostly Devastated

  The City Beautiful

  Aden Polydoros

  This book contains content and themes that may be difficult for some readers.

  For a list of content warnings, please visit adenpolydoros.com.

  To the readers who will see themselves in these pages.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Author

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Anguished sobs echoed down the winding stairwell, bouncing off the walls like the cries of strange birds. Here on Maxwell Street, weeping was as common as bawling babies, quarreling, and laughter. Along with housing a kingdom of rats and roaches, the walls between tenements were paper-thin, so I was constantly involved in the personal lives of my neighbors, whether I wanted to be or not.

  As the sobbing continued unabated, I wheeled my bicycle into the third-floor corridor. My next-door neighbor Mrs. Brenner stood in the hall with a red-haired woman I didn’t recognize. Mrs. Brenner was a shadchante, a professional marriage broker. She took her job so seriously, she would try to wed off anything with a pulse. Apparently, this time it hadn’t gone over very well.

  “Moishe’s a good boy,” the stranger said in a quaking voice. Tears streaked her cheeks, her face red and blotchy. “He minds his own business. He goes to night school. He isn’t a troublemaker like that Aaron Holtz; he wouldn’t just run off without saying anything.”

  The woman wiped her eyes and looked at me.

  “Oy, he looks like Moishe!” she exclaimed, pressing her palms to her face. “For a moment, I thought—”

  A sob tore through her body. I reached for my handkerchief, but by the time I pulled it from my pocket, she was already hurrying down the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Mrs. Brenner as the woman disappeared into the stairwell. “I hope I didn’t intrude.”

  She blotted her forehead with a lace-fringed hanky. “It’s fine, Alter. She was just leaving.”

  Even with the gaslights dimmed and the hallway windows cranked open, a swampish heat encased us like mud. I couldn’t wait to get out on the fire escape and enjoy the sliced melon left in the icebox.

  “That was Mrs. Walden,” Mrs. Brenner said as I stuffed my handkerchief back into my pocket. “It seems her son never came home from work three days ago.”

  I tried envisioning Moishe Walden. I thought he might be the slender ginger-haired boy who always had a bisl of mandelbrot or rugelach to share during learning. Shy and soft-spoken, he had never struck me as the kind of person to run off. He was a year or two younger than me and at least four centimeters shorter. Although I had green eyes instead of hazel ones, and my hair was chestnut brown and wavy, I supposed to his mother there must’ve been some resemblance.

  “Did she go to the police?” I asked, resting my bicycle against the wall. I didn’t have much confidence in law and order, but it seemed like something a mother might do.

  “You know how it is.” Sighing, Mrs. Brenner tucked back a curl that had escaped from her tichel. With her yellow dress and dark silk headscarf, she matched the black-eyed Susans sprouting in her apartment’s window box. “Just another immigrant boy wowed by the big city. The third one these last two months apparently.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “They told her that if he doesn’t turn up in a few weeks, they’ll look into it. Feh! You wonder what they’re paid for.”

  “The third one?” I frowned. “I heard about Aaron Holtz, but who was the other?”

  “Another of my clients. Josef Loew.”

  I sensed a pattern here. “Was Moishe also your client?”

  “Yes, and we even had a date picked out. Tonight, Fourth of July. His mother’s been looking everywhere for him, the poor dear. She was hoping he might show up, but as you can see...” With another laborious sigh, she gestured around her. “He’s nowhere to be found.”

  I wasn’t too worried. Boys ran away all the time, and even fathers left without a word to escape having to care for their families back in the old country. Besides, as far as I was concerned, being one of Mrs. Brenner’s clients was more than enough to make a person skip town.

  Ever since I had turned seventeen, she had brought it upon herself to take my case free of charge. With my mother and little sisters across the Atlantic and my father somewhere beneath it, Mrs. Brenner had declared her intervention a mitzvah, a commandment of God. More like a conspiracy of the Evil One.

  The results had so far been disastrous. Just last week, she had tried setting me up with Raizel Ackermann on the first floor, in a dinner that had exploded into a heated argument over anarchism. Raizel believed that society as a whole wa
s corrupt, and that true freedom and liberty would only be achieved once the power structure was dismantled completely and capitalism abolished. I thought it was a pipe dream, and told her as much. The debate had ended with me getting a cup of lukewarm tea dumped in my lap while Raizel’s parents watched on in utter horror.

  Mrs. Brenner gave me a keen look. “You know, she’s still in there.”

  “Who?” Hopefully not Raizel, otherwise Mrs. Brenner might end up with another of her eligible bachelors vanishing into the night.

  “Elkie Strauss. She’s from a good family, not like that Ackermann girl downstairs. Elkie is as peaceful as a dove and as lovely as a lily of the valley.” Mrs. Brenner leaned forward, her eyes gleaming in determination. “You won’t find another like her in all of Chicago, my dear.”

  Right, a dove and a lily of the valley. If Mrs. Brenner thought plagiarizing the Song of Songs would convince me to ruin my Fourth of July, she was sadly mistaken. I volunteered at our shul’s burial society, and every month, I found myself reciting the Song of Songs over a fresh corpse. Not exactly what I’d call romantic.

  “It’s really not a good time,” I said, backing away before she could drag me into her apartment by force.

  “Oh, Alter,” Mrs. Brenner cried, aghast. “I thought you were a kind boy. You wouldn’t be so cruel as to leave a girl and her parents waiting alone, would you? You’ll break her mother’s heart!”

  I hesitated. Well, when she worded it like that...

  “Besides, I made my special kishka. I know how much you love it.”

  Her special—oh God. I cringed at the thought. Her beef-liver kishka was as heavy as cement and came out looking the same way it went in, which was never a good sign. No wonder Moishe hadn’t shown up. Before I could come up with a convincing excuse to avoid death by indigestion, a hand fell on my lower back.

  “I’m afraid Alter already has a commitment tonight,” a teasing voice said from behind us.

  The hand slipped away, and my roommate Yakov stepped around me to face Mrs. Brenner head-on. He was eight centimeters taller than me, but he could move so silently sometimes, like he wasn’t walking on the same cheap, groaning floorboards as the rest of us.

  At the sight of him, Mrs. Brenner’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth pursed tightly. She had been cold to him since the day he arrived. She would ignore him outright when they passed in the halls, and kept a wide berth, as though if she strayed into his path, their proximity alone might scald her. I wondered, what had he said to make her so curt? What had he done?

  “Ah. I see.” Mrs. Brenner wrinkled her nose, probably offended by the scent of coal smoke Yakov had carried with him from the trainyard. She looked like she wanted to argue, decided against it, and stepped inside her apartment.

  “A commitment, eh?” I said, once the door had shut behind her. I couldn’t stop thinking about the patch of warmth Yakov’s hand had left on my back, the heat and weight of his touch.

  “Something a bit more enjoyable than a matchmaking meeting.” He turned, favoring me with a smile that made me weak in the knees. “We can’t have her marry you off too soon. She thinks you’re a real catch, you know that?”

  “More like a real paycheck, and she isn’t even right about that. No money, dead father. Nobody’s going to want to marry a charity case.”

  He cocked his head. “You don’t sound too disappointed.”

  The way he said it made my face itch. Every so often, Yakov would look at me or say something in a certain way, and I’d have the suspicion that he could see my desire. I wished I could tell him the truth. Instead I forced a smile. “One family’s more than enough to worry about.”

  Every extra penny from my job at the newspaper went to my mother and sisters back in Romania. We had over a hundred dollars saved away. Enough to pay for ship tickets, a wagon to Iaşi, and the train ride from there to Bucharest and the port city of Constanţa. They wouldn’t have to walk to the sea like my father and I had done. I had made sure of that. All I needed to do was raise another forty dollars and I’d be able to get them here.

  “Did you see the woman sitting on the stairs?” Yakov asked as he unlocked our garret room door. The key was stubborn, and he wiggled it back and forth. “The one who was crying?”

  “Did she have red hair?”

  “Like a carrot.”

  “That’s Mrs. Walden from shul. Her son, Moishe, went missing.”

  He stopped turning the key. “What?”

  “He probably just ran away to keep Mrs. Brenner from wedding him off.” I waited for Yakov to laugh, but he never did.

  His gas-flame-blue eyes chilled over, and his jawline firmed. “I see.”

  “Don’t look so worried,” I said. “Boys run away.”

  I would know. The boy who I once considered to be my closest friend had only ended up in Chicago because he’d stowed away on a train from Grand Central Depot. He hadn’t even bothered checking the destination.

  “Then again, Moishe’s not the only one who’s disappeared lately,” I added, when Yakov didn’t answer. “Aaron Holtz went missing, too, and so did Josef Loew.”

  “Right. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.” Yakov said the words slowly, carefully, like handling shattered glass. “People leave here all the time.”

  * * *

  The inside of our apartment was a riot of voices and bumped elbows. There was barely enough space for four people, much less the jumble of mattresses, boxes, and clothing filling the cramped room.

  A night on the town meant a nice waistcoat and jacket, polished shoes, and bowler hats. When Yakov and I entered, our two other roommates, Dovid and Haskel, were already dressed and on their way out.

  “Good thing we caught you two in time,” Haskel said, his brown eyes bright and cheerful beneath a thatch of curls. “We’re going to a dance hall down in the Levee. You should come, too.”

  As I got a good look at him, I tried not to laugh. He was trying desperately to cultivate a mustache on his upper lip and had filled in the empty areas with what looked like brown shoe polish.

  Yakov was a bit more unforgiving: “Haskel, I think you have a bit of shmutz on your face. Right here.”

  A burning flush crept all the way to Haskel’s collar. He took out his handkerchief and blotted furiously at his upper lip, his freckles standing out like specks of dirt against his reddening complexion.

  Beside him, Dovid snickered. “I told you it wasn’t convincing.”

  Haskel glowered at him. “Not everyone is as hairy as an ape.”

  “You sound jealous,” Dovid said, tweaking his own mustache. Not only did he seem to be able to grow facial hair overnight, but a generous layer of black hair covered his arms and legs. “You should be. I had a better mustache when I was thirteen.”

  “So then, it’s true that when you were born, your mother took one look at you and said, ‘vey iz mir, it’s a dog?’” Haskel shot back, before turning to us. “Really, you two should come. Please. Don’t leave me alone with him, Yasha. He’ll scare away all the girls. They’ll think he’s a bear.”

  “I’m afraid we already have plans,” Yakov said, then looked at me. “Alter and I are going to the street fair down by the market. Unless he prefers to go dancing.”

  “I’d rather not break a leg,” I said. Besides, I knew how a visit to the dance hall would end—standing alone in the corner, wishing I had stayed home. Maybe a girl would approach, and I’d have to mutter an excuse, drift away, and wait in dread for the long walk back, when Haskel and Dovid would tease me mercilessly.

  “So frum.” Dovid rolled his eyes, heading for the door. “So pious, he can’t even look at a woman. A true tzaddik, that Alter Rosen.”

  “You’re one to talk, Dovid,” Yakov said. “When was the last time you danced with a girl?”

  “Just the other night.”

  “Nu? Who was
she—your left hand or your right?”

  Haskel laughed as Dovid’s cheeks reddened. I began to chuckle, then caught myself as Dovid shot me a sour look.

  As the door banged shut behind the two of them, Yakov turned to me. “Dovid has drek for brains. Don’t let him drag you down.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  Yakov didn’t look convinced.

  “You don’t have to defend me, you know,” I added.

  “But I like to.”

  Yakov had always been this way, ever since he had arrived on Maxwell Street back in April. Collected and steadfast, always sure what to say in the moment. He was predictable when it came to his gestures of kindness, putting down Dovid’s bullying in an instant or bringing home extra meals if he knew I hadn’t eaten. If he saw me standing alone at the dance hall, he would come join me.

  I enjoyed that about him. I had known boys who were unpredictable and short-tempered, who roared through life like a whirlwind and never once looked back. Yakov was different. He lived his life quietly, calmly, and that made me feel safe and secure, as though he were the breakwall that held back Maxwell Street’s noise and chaos. He made this place truly feel like home.

  Yakov exchanged his broadcloth jacket for a pin-striped waistcoat and tied his cravat with deft hands. A trained elegance shone through even his briefest gestures and steady posture.

  Like everyone on Maxwell Street, Yakov had a story to tell, a place he left behind. He had grown up in a small town near Kiev in the Russian Empire. But when he told me of his past, he made it sound as though he had been born in his thirteenth year—vivid narrations of years spent in the cities of Varshe and Lemberg, along with lengthy visits to Italy, France, and Germany in the company of his uncle, some scholar of European history at the Imperial University.

  In his low smoky baritone, Yakov would regale me with descriptions of the River Spree at sunset, spangled with purple and gold; or overgrown ruins along the Mediterranean, fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle and dappled in indigo shadows; Paris in midwinter, a white city spired with icicles and sparkling hoarfrost.