Mr. X (29 page)

Two streets vivid with neon signs and theater marquees extended eastward from Chester. A fat crimson arrow flashed like a neon finger. The darker red, vertical stripe of
HôTE PARIS
hung over a smoked glass door. People in groups of three and four, most of them men, meandered down the streets.

Low Street to my left, Word Street to the right. I picked Word because it was closer, and before I had taken two steps noticed a bronze plate designed to look like a curling sheet of parchment. At the top of the scroll were the words
OLD TOWN.
I moved up to peer at the legend.

The only signs of restoration I could see on Word Street were the lamp posts, two per block, which had the white glass globes of old Art Deco gas fixtures. The buildings, bars, movie theaters, liquor stores, transient hotels, and tenements had a hangdog look, as if they expected to be ordered off by a policeman. Splashes of neon light lay across dirty brick and flaking timbers. Men in worn-out clothes ducked in and out of the bars. Here and there, better-dressed people cruised up and down the sidewalks. A few residents sat out in lawn chairs, enjoying the night air.

A little way ahead, a couple straight from an advertisement for organically produced soap-free soap detoured around a drunk propped against the front of a bar. A familiar-looking rodent in a
goatee and a black leather jacket slid past them and darted across the street.

I watched him slip out of sight into a neon-flickering passage and realized that I had entered what remained of the raffish village Uncle Clark had described. Here was the survival of the Edgerton where crews and passengers from the steamers had disembarked to gamble, visit bordellos, gape at the dancing bears and two-headed goats at the fairground, have their palms read and their purses cut. The town had remained essentially the same, at least if you stood in my great-great-grandfathers’ Edgerton late on a Friday night.

I moved across the street in the direction of the lane and the rodent in the leather jacket.

37

Seconds after entering Dove Lane, I learned that there were two Old Towns, the one comprised of Low and Word streets, and the other, separate Old Town hidden behind them. A maze of twisting lanes sprouted smaller, darker passages as they meandered into postage-stamp squares on their journeys toward dead ends or one of the wider streets. Stewart Hatch’s philanthropy had not extended to the hidden Old Town, and the lamps on byways like Dove were glassed-in bulbs on top of iron columns at least seventy years old. Every third or fourth bulb had been broken, but the district’s neon signs and illuminated windows washed the narrow lanes in light.

At the next corner, Dove continued past dark storefronts and abandoned buildings. I turned right into Leather, where the brightness had lead me to expect strip clubs and massage parlors. Light spilled from a glass-fronted laundromat, where a half dozen tired-looking women idled on benches in front of churning dryers.

From Leather I turned into Fish, then Lavender, Raspberry, Button, Treacle, and Wax. About the time I left Button, I became aware of footsteps behind me. The quiet footsteps continued to
follow mine through Treacle and Wax, though I saw no one when I looked back. Wax led into Veal Yard, where light shone upon a dry fountain from the windows of the Brazen Head hotel. I circled into Turnip, walked past a bar called The Nowhere Near and again heard footsteps sounding behind me. I looked over my shoulder and glimpsed a dark, moving shape. My heart missed a beat, and the shape melted away.

I hurried over the slippery cobbles and emerged once again into the bustle of Word Street. What I saw on its other side told me exactly where I was.

Outside the glass doors of a two-story bar, the furtive character I had followed into Old Town’s lanes jittered in a hipster shuffle as he explained something to a chunky blond woman wearing a half-unbuttoned denim jacket. She was Cassie Little, Clark Rutledge’s beloved, and the rodent was named Frenchy La Chapelle. I had seen both of them in St. Ann’s ICU.
SPEEDWAY LOUNGE
blared in pink neon above the doors.

A hand closed on my left elbow, and a well-rubbed voice whispered, “Buddy, I don’t know about brains, but you do got balls.”

The disheveled old man beside me grinned up at my surprise. Dingy gray curls escaping from a flat cap; concave cheeks shiny with gray stubble; layers of unclean clothes; a clear, pervasive smell of alcohol. “Piney Woods,” he said. “Remember me?”

38

“I wasn’t here on Thursday night,” I said. “But I heard about you from my Uncle Clark.”

“Unless you don’t happen to be here now, either, you better slide back into Turnip.” He pointed at four men with rocky faces and shirts open over T-shirted guts who were assembling in front of the Speedway. They had the look of small-town roughnecks who had changed in no essential way since the age of sixteen. Cassie Little had disappeared inside the bar, and the rodent had
exercised his talent for evaporation. Three of the men carried baseball bats. I let Piney pull me back into the lane.

“My old poker buddies, I suppose,” I said.

“Staggers and them.” Piney moved to block me from view. “They got some ornery mothers over in Mountry.”

I looked over his shoulder. “Which one is Staggers?”

“Him in the fatigue pants.”

Him in the fatigue pants had the spoiled, seamed face of a man who had never recovered from the disappointment of learning that he did not rule the world, after all. He was smacking his hands together and growling orders and, despite his belly, looked as though he spent his work day pulverizing boulders with a sledgehammer.

“Seems like the boys are getting ready to break up again, take one last look around.”

“I heard someone following me,” I told him.

“Like I said, you’re lucky. You want to stay that way, you should get out of Hatchtown, pronto.”

I hurried back into Veal Yard. On its other side and to the left of Wax, Pitch Lane wound deeper into Hatchtown. I ran down it, hoping that it would lead me to the vicinity of Lanyard Street and Toby Kraft’s pawnshop.

Pitch joined Treacle for the length of a listing ruin exhaling the odors of ammonia and rotting apples. I heard again the click of approaching footsteps. On the other side of the ruin, I dodged into the continuation of Pitch and jogged down dark twists and turns. The pursuing footsteps rang with a deliberation more frightening than haste. Midden intersected Pitch, but … forget Midden. Use your imagination. When I came to Lavender, I looked to my left. Two ragged boys who appeared to have sprung unaltered from a slum photograph of New York in the 1890s regarded me from the door of an abandoned building. To my right, high-pitched female laughter came through the window of a shoebox called No Regrets. From beyond it, heavy footsteps plodded forward. Whoever the first man might be, this was one of Joe Staggers’s friends.

My two would-be assailants drew nearer, one approaching from behind, the other from my right on Lavender. One of the boys jerked his thumb toward his shoulder and stepped back, and I jumped through the opening into lavender-scented darkness.

Broken bands of light streamed through chinks in the front of
the building. Against the rear wall a huddle of boys slept beneath tangled blankets. I prowled down the wall, looking for a gap wide enough to see through. My savior followed me.

“After ya?”

“Thanks for your help.”

“Wheere’s a bit o’money, den?”

I pulled a bill from my pocket, held it before a glimmering quarter-inch crack to expose George Washington’s secretive face, and gave the dollar to the boy.

“Wanna hurt ya?”

I squatted on my heels and put my eye to the crack.

“You kin speer anudder dollar.”

I gave him a second bill.

From the back of the warehouse, someone whispered,
“Shove ’im in the Knacker, Nolly.”

The lane before me was still empty, but I could hear the approach of heavy footfalls. From further away came a lighter
tap tap tap
. The boy lay down and pressed his eye to another crack.

“The Knacker for ’im.”

A T-shirted paunch and a thick arm holding a baseball bat heaved into view. The man came to a halt and looked behind him, at the building across the lane, then at the old lavender warehouse. He ticked the bat against a cobble.

“See a guy come down this way?”

The boy in the doorway said, “Seen a couple.”

“A tourist.”

“Ran down there,” the boy said. “Puffin’ hard.”

The gut swung around. “How long ago?”

“Just passed by.”

The man with the bat moved away, and soon my rescuer and I slipped back through the door. I asked if they lived in the old building.

“We sleeps here when it’s hot.”

“Sometimes we gets fetchin’ money,” said the smaller boy.

“For instance,” Nolly said, “if you needed a certain thing, we maybe could find that thing for you.”