I Am Abraham by Jerome Charyn Page A

pies.
    I asked to see Mr. Fred Niles.
    He came down into the parlor wearing a cummerbund and a silk cravat. I was startled some. I’d expected to see a former prize fighter, like the ruffians in Orleans who watched over the crib-houses and could knock a man senseless with a single blow. But Niles was a mulatto man with the exquisite bones of an aristocrat. There wasn’t a mark on his face. His eyes seemed much too soft for a brothel keeper.
    “You’ve come here to see about the Louisville boy,” he said in a Kentucky drawl.
    “Sir, Joshua Speed’s not a boy. He owns the biggest general store in town.”
    “He’s still a boy,” intoned the mulatto man. “His people would never tolerate Sybil. He could bring her to Kentucky as his concubine, and I offered to sell her as such. But she’d only come back here in six months. It would break her heart, having a whole damn society snub her.”
    I didn’t know how to answer Niles. I considered sending for the Clary’s Grove Boys and having them stir up a tiny tornado at the mansion, but Jack and his Boys had gone over to the Democrats, and I was loath to ask a favor of them. Besides, that wouldn’t solve a thing. Niles could move his sporting club out of the mansion and settle someplace else. I had to defeat him with pure sagacity.
    “Mr. Niles, couldn’t he purchase Miss Sybil from you and have some sort of trial marriage? You could keep his cash on deposit, and if the marriage don’t work, well . . .”
    I could see the ripples in his cummerbund as he guffawed.
    “Mind you, Counselor, we don’t have rental brides at this establishment. I groom every gal, teach them manners, and marry ’em off at a whopping profit. Sybil is a rare breed. I’m saving her for a general from Ohio.”
    I had to sabotage that sale, yet I didn’t have much insight into Niles, who seemed to own Illinois from a mansion near the cornfields.
    “Sir, Joshua is twice as rich as your general. You’d have a better sale with him.”
    I had offended this sporting-club man, and I could feel the anger well up inside. He clapped his hands and a blonde angel appeared in petticoats, clutching a parasol. Her hair was piled into a beehive, like Marie Antoinette and some of those other royal ladies. She had no blush on her cheeks. Her eyes weren’t painted. She bowed to Niles and permitted me to kiss the white glove on her hand. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but I could tell that something was going on between our local Marie Antoinette and her fancy feller in the silk cravat.
    Niles introduced us. “Sybil, meet Joshua’s man . I suspect he’s come to kill me, and he’s shy about it. He sits up in the Legislature, with other nabobs—the Honorable Abraham Lincoln.”
    Sybil twirled her parasol, as if a body told her it might rain under the chandeliers.
    “Joshua has talked about you,” she said, in a voice that was savage and cultivated at the same time. I wondered if Niles had found her in some lonely corral. He purred at Sybil, but I saw the menace in him now, the wild twitch under his cheek that was a touch away from murder. He must have had a pike in his cummerbund.
    “Honey, tell Mr. Lincoln why you could never marry Joshua Speed.”
    Suddenly all that polish and high tone were gone, and she was a seventeen-year-old child who had no more education than I ever did. Niles hadn’t groomed Sybil—he’d just about manufactured her.
    “Mr. Lincoln, Louisville would swallow me raw. I’m not cultivated like Mr. Josh and his people. Why, his family is from the finest linen.”
    That son of a bitch had rehearsed every syllable for her.
    “But Joshua loves you,” I said.
    She twirled her parasol again, blinked, as if she’d half forgotten her lines, and then she pulled out of that slumber Niles had put her in.
    “We’ve never left this establishment, not once. We’ve never had a proper dinner, just wine he pays for by the glass. Mr. Lincoln, I have ten marriage proposals a