Read Styx & Stone for Free Online Page B

I can’t always control my sassy disposition.
    The man introduced himself as Pat Duggan and his silent friend as Dennis. I inched toward the wall of the booth, but Dennis closed the gap I’d tried to create.
    “A whiskey drinker, are you?” said Pat. “Dennis has a bottle of rye in his room.”
    “Leave her alone, boys,” called the burly barkeep.
    “We didn’t mean no harm, Jock,” said Pat. “Just trying to make her feel welcome.”
    “Get out of the booth,” said the barkeep, my hero. “Don’t go chasing my customers away, or I’ll toss you out of here.”
    The two men reluctantly slid out of the booth, but continued to watch me with the singular focus of a border collie on a straying sheep. I downed my drink, intending to get out of that dingy place posthaste. But then the barkeep appeared above me and offered an apology.
    “They don’t mean no harm, miss,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. He was a big man of about fifty, tall, with a mammoth belly testing the resilience of the stitching in the seams of his white shirt. “We don’t get many young ladies in here. At least not proper ones like you. Hope they didn’t give you a fright.”
    “Not at all, Mr. Brady,” I insisted.
    Then, to prove a point to the bartender—or perhaps myself—I ordered another drink and moved to a stool at the bar, a few feet from the two leering Lotharios. They looked me over for the next few minutes until they grew tired of the exercise and turned their attention to the numbers they intended to play the next day. When I left an hour and two whiskies later, I felt I’d won the battle. Still, I had wasted my time and money on swill in a dank hole, with all apologies to the kind proprietor, Jock Brady. I thought of Gigi Lucchesi. I wouldn’t find his type in such a place. I wondered where I might find him.
    Out on the street, I walked briskly toward Cooper Union. Seventh Street was dodgy; the wet pavement steamed from a vented manhole, rubbish waited for the street cleaner, and a couple of men watched me from their roosts in doorways. I hailed a passing cab and went home to 26 Fifth Avenue.

    The debris from the burglary still littered the floor of my father’s study. Scotch in hand, I kicked off my heels and dropped into the leather chair behind his desk and surveyed the disorder. It was time to let Nelda clean it up.
    I like to read. Books, magazines, newspapers, even crossword puzzles; the written word has always been my entertainment of choice. So, by second nature, I looked for something to skim while I relaxed in the low light with my drink. A loose manuscript page—154—was the only printed material on the desk besides the big book: the Comedy . The unfamiliar subject matter—something about Helen of Troy in the Inferno —separated from its sister pages lost my interest almost immediately. Nevertheless, I thought I should reunite the scattered leaves of my father’s opus before Nelda threw them away.
    Once on my hands and knees, however, I discovered something strange: the pages on the floor appeared to be older than the one on the desk. After I’d put them all together, my puzzlement grew. There were two pages marked 154: the one I’d found on the desk, and one that had been among the papers on the floor. Furthermore, the two 154s were quite different, one from the other, both in apparent age and content. The slightly yellowed page I’d found on the floor matched the others I’d picked up, with the exception of the very first pages of the reconstituted manuscript. The type was a little worn and the corners somewhat dog-eared. The older page 154 dealt with an early work of Dante Alighieri’s, La Vita Nuova .
    I took the manuscript back to the desk, where I considered it over my Scotch and a cigarette. Curious how the most abstruse text grabs your interest when it’s in the wrong place.
    The title page, as white as a combed-cotton bedsheet, announced: Daughters of Eve: Women in the Works of