The Speakeasy on the Alley

The alley ran parallel to Commercial Row, between Sierra and Virginia Streets, and in the years before Prohibition it had been called Douglas Alley, which was the name on the city maps, but during the dry years the people who used it most had taken to calling it Bottle Alley, which was not on any map but was accurate.

Danny Russo was twenty-seven years old and he worked at a place called the Wine House, which did not serve wine and was not a house. It occupied the lower half of a narrow two-story building midway down the alley, its entrance unmarked except for a rectangle of paint on the door that was slightly newer and slightly darker than the surrounding wood, which was the system. If you knew it was the Wine House, you knew to knock twice.

Danny had been mixing drinks since he was nineteen, first at a saloon on the north end of Virginia Street and then, when that went officially dark in December of 1918, at a series of arrangements that moved from location to location with the frequency of something that expected to be found. He had landed at the Wine House in the summer of 1923, brought in by a man named Del Stanton who ran the operation with a patience and a caution that Danny found instructive.

The Wine House was three rooms. The front room held a bar, eight stools, and two tables. The back room held the stock, behind a door that was kept closed and latched from the inside, and which was, if you looked at it quickly, indistinguishable from the wall. Between them was a room that held nothing except a man named Leonard, who was sixty and stout and sat on a wooden stool and read the newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp and whose only job was to be between the front room and the back room, which was a job that had turned out to matter several times.

The clientele was regular. Ranchers and railroad men and salesmen who passed through on the Southern Pacific and wanted something other than soda water in the evenings. Attorneys and merchants and one county official whose name Danny did not know and did not ask. Divorce women, occasionally, brought by someone who knew someone. They sat at the tables rather than the bar, and they drank their gin with more relief than pleasure, the way people drink when they have been going without for some time.

Prohibition, Danny had come to understand, had not reduced the desire for alcohol. It had distributed it. Moved it from open rooms to back rooms and from Virginia Street to the alleys that ran alongside it, and in doing so had rearranged who sold it and how much they charged and who got the margin. These people were no longer saloon owners, in the old legitimate sense. But they were not, Danny thought, criminals in any sense that required him to revise his opinion of himself. He mixed drinks and accepted money. The transaction was unchanged. Only the paperwork had been affected.

He poured a whiskey and slid it down the bar to a man named Fogarty, who had been sitting on the third stool every Tuesday and Thursday for two years.

"Slow tonight," Fogarty said.

"Monday."

"You count Mondays now?"

"Del counts everything."

Fogarty picked up the glass and looked at the whiskey. "Where does this come from?"

Danny moved to the sink and rinsed a glass. "I mix it here."

Fogarty smiled. He knew better than to ask further, and Danny knew better than to answer further. This was the understanding. You came to the Wine House because it was there and because you wanted a drink, and you understood that certain questions were not questions, and you did not ask them.

The door opened. Frank Kellerman came in, not from the front but from the alley-side entrance that Del kept for suppliers and people who preferred not to be seen entering at all. Frank was forty-four now, heavier than he had been in the saloon days, wearing the particular expression of a man who has learned to carry a secret with the same ease he once carried his keys.

He and Danny exchanged a nod. Frank went to the back room. Leonard opened the door for him without looking up from his newspaper. This happened twice a month, a delivery of something that arrived in crates labeled HARDWARE SUPPLIES, which contained no hardware.

Frank came back through after fifteen minutes, carrying nothing, his hands in his coat pockets.

"Getting cold," he said.

"November," Danny said.

Frank left. The door closed on the alley smell of cold dirt and old brick.

Danny wiped the bar and thought about nothing in particular, which was a skill he had developed over years of standing behind a bar, the ability to occupy himself with small tasks and let the hours move through him without resistance. Pour. Rinse. Wipe. Listen. The room had its sounds: the creak of a stool, the low murmur of two men in conversation at the far table, the distant sound of a train whistle from the depot three blocks north.

The federal agents had been through twice in the past year. Both times they had found nothing. The front room had held only men drinking soda water when they arrived, which was remarkable given that the soda water at the Wine House tasted, to anyone paying attention, rather better than soda water had any reason to taste. But the agents were from outside Nevada, and Nevada had a long history of appearing, to outside observers, to be in compliance with things it was not entirely in compliance with.

At nine o'clock, a woman he did not know came in with a man he recognized as an attorney named Cabot. She was thirty, with the careful posture of someone who had never been anywhere she was not supposed to be and found the experience both unsettling and agreeable. She sat at the corner table. Cabot ordered two gins. Danny mixed them and delivered them and returned to the bar.

He did not know her name. He did not need to. She was here because she was waiting out something, and the waiting had brought her to an alley off Commercial Row in a city that was officially dry, and she was drinking gin with a lawyer at nine o'clock on a Monday, and this was what waiting looked like sometimes. Not dramatic. Not disreputable, exactly. Just a person in a room, with a glass, in between one thing and the next.

Danny wiped the bar. The train whistle sounded again, farther away this time.

The room was quiet. Bottle Alley was quiet. Reno was complying with the law, officially, and drinking in the dark, unofficially, and the distinction between the two had been thin enough, in this town, for long enough, that it had ceased to feel like a distinction at all.

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