You can also read this flash fiction story in Brave the Castle.
Tonight, book cover model Anne Elroy will strike gold in New York’s granite pavement. She’ll grab her greatest wish and transform into a crimefighter.
Elroy actually reads the paperbacks with the covers she models for and she’s reading Mick Morrison’s latest Dick Conrad on the subway to work tonight. She’s on the cover with a loose towel around her waist and she’s trying to pry open the buttoned front of Conrad’s trench coat with her needle fingertips but this crime buster isn’t taking one bite of it. He’s staring down at that femme fatale like a terracotta warrior.
He’d have to stare down at a new femme fatale in his next case. The one with the towel fell off the Empire State Building and transferred to being a bloody pulp on the street in the last chapter of Morrison’s last novel. Elroy would be her replacement on the cover. Her replacement has gotten in too deep with a gang of New York commies and wants Conrad’s help getting out. This gorgeous red walks into Conrad’s office late at night and she’s dressed and painted in Marxist red from her mascara to her fingernails, and she stands inside the doorframe on the left-hand side of the cover, holding her hand on the doorknob as the pale gold light from the outer office belts past her into Conrad’s dark office and Conrad’s staring across the office at her from the cover’s bottom right-hand corner, and she’s just a scarlet spectre stepping up to him in the night.
That’s why Elroy is on a night-time train bound for Soho. The scene from the book cover happens at night and the photographer Michelangelo “Mickey” Leone said it was best to have natural darkness. “This novel is trash,” he said to her, “but we will make it look like art.” Fine, she’s told him, but can I be the crimefighter instead of the femme fatale for once?
The subway car’s breaks squeeze and the car slows and stops still, and Elroy skips off onto the platform and marches up to street level.
She’s two blocks from Mickey’s studio and she passes an alley and the hands spring out from the alley’s crevice and wrap around her tight and pull her in.
They’re dead rhino-hide hands. They’ve got all the toughness and leathery coarseness but not the fat warmth.
At the end of one is a knife and the knife is hovering under her chin and there’s just a short slash between the blade and her throat.
“Don’t scream,” the mugger says, “I just want your money. Scream and the rats’ll be drinking your blood like milk off the floor until breakfast.”
He reaches into her pocket. But her denim jeans are tight and he drops his eyes to look at his hand struggling to pry the wallet from her denim skin.
The moment arrives.
Elroy whips her arm up and grabs his hand holding the knife. She presses her fingers between his and cracks them apart and breaks them off the knife.
The knife falls towards the pavement, but Elroy catches it before it gets there, and she raises her arm and pulls her arm back like a hitter ready to wack a fast ball and she wacks the butt of the knife’s handle into his eye.
He says “EEEHHH.” He tumbles over. He rolls over onto his side on the ground. He doesn’t get up. He’s crying.
Elroy walks away. She’s got to get to work.
Work doesn’t go so well at first.
“Why can’t you act like a femme fatale tonight?” Mickey screams. He says her pose isn’t vulnerable or dainty or porcelain enough. He says she’s gripping the door handle like a gun. “You just don’t look like a femme fatale tonight.”
“So what do you want to do?” she asks.
“Go and put on the trench coat and hat,” he says. “We’ll make you Dick Conrad instead.”
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 