Touched by Angels (24 page)

“
Go on,” he finally taunted, losing patience. “Talk! Say something.”

It blinked again, and stepped from side to side, wondering what was afoot.

“
Go on,” he pushed. “Betcha can’t.”

Nothing happened.

Then inspiration gripped him, as he said in a low voice, “Tell you what, say… shit.”

It raised the tops of its wings, as if questioning what, ‘shit’ meant, squawked and carried on watching.

“
All right then.”

He looked around, to be sure the lady who had been making him nervous wasn’t there, before adding in a whisper, “Say… fuck!”

Nothing happened for a few moments, but then the bird mimicked him with such suddenness and volume, he couldn’t stop laughing even after seeing Mrs Frank looming up behind.

She whacked his ear so hard, he nearly fell over. She slapped him again and again, as he stumbled backwards, trying to get away.

Her face was a hideous red grimace, her eyes standing out, white and mad. Her teeth were clenched into rows of endless small dirty teeth.

He fetched up against a footstool.

She grabbed him by the neck as he fell and frogmarched him to a large open Bible on a stand, while his eyes streamed from the pain of his cuffed ears.

With her massive fingers digging cruelly into the flesh of his neck, she shoved his face so far into the pages, his nose was pressed into a bulb. He tried to scream, but couldn’t.

She was ranting about the sins of vulgarity and cruelty, when he managed to squirm out of her grasp.

He darted around to the other side of the varnished stand the gilded book rested upon, heart-skittering, as he gasped for air.

She darted after him, with murder on her face. The parrot danced from side to side, bleating words of encouragement. She snatched a thick leather strap from atop an upright piano, knocking over a vase of dried-out flowers in her rush.

The glass shattered over the keys, making a tinkling sound.

She was chasing him around in circles and lashing him all over, as Jack Quint leaned lazily against a wall, half a mile away, in the most densely populated place on earth, the Lower East Side.

Quint
struck a match on the wall and lit a cigar. The tip glowed like a coal in the shadows, as push carts passed by from all directions, selling absolutely anything.

There was a fistfight underway in the apartment above, while across the street, a consumptive retched up pieces of lung and spat them into the gutter. A dog barked out the misery of mange. From another window came the screams of childbirth, and in another, the tinny sound of a gramophone. Terrible singing bleated from somewhere else.

Quint grinned as he heard the clang of what might be a frying pan. The singing stopped abruptly. Gunshots punctuated it all, some near, some far, but Quint knew what he wanted to hear.

It came towards noon, as he was tossing a quarter to a woman breastfeeding her baby. The coin glinted in the sunlight as it flew, then tinkled and spun as it struck the ground beside her. Her hand crawled out like a dying spider to take it.

He drew hard on his cigar, and moved on, his ears focusing in on the source of the noise.

It was a running of many feet in an alleyway, youthful shouts, a yell of triumph, and a cry of, “Get the bastard! He can’t get away.” A gun banged.

Quint drew his own piece, as he stood at the corner of the wall, peering around gingerly.

A boy of about fifteen, in brown corduroys and with blond hair, was cornered at the far end by six others, three of whom looked Italian. He held a gun at his hip.

One of his tormentors hissed, “You’re outa bullets,” and another said, “Tell us where it is or you’re dead.”

“
It’
s mine. Fuck off!”

They were advancing on him, slowly, two of them holding lengths of wood, another a knife.

The boy looked terrified, as he turned and started jumping up, to grab the top of the wall. It was too high. Then, as they were about to rush him, a shot rang out.

One of the boys went down, screaming, his hand over a cut in his thigh, where Quint’s well-aimed shot had torn it open. Blood started pumping down his leg.

He made his way towards them
casually, pulling back the hammer on his gun with his thumb. He took his cigar from his mouth with his other hand and cast it away.

The youths fanned out, as he aimed at each of them, arm outstretched. They ran, with the bleeding one hobbling behind, shouting they would get him next time.

“
You can lower your piece,” Quint told him, seeing it shaking in the boy’s hand.

As he did, Quint could see him fighting back the tears.

“
They nearly got me,” he said miserably. “They would have killed me.”

He whispered, “Thanks,” as he swung the cylinder out and six empty cartridges fell to the dust.

“
What do they want?”

“
My money.”

“
What money?”

“
The two hundred bucks I’ve saved. I’ve got it hidden away. I’m saving up to go to South Africa. If I don’t, I’ll die here.”

He wiped his nose and eyes with a tatty sleeve.

“
You’re not wrong there,” Quint assured him, seeing rats tucking into a dead cat nearby. “But why South Africa?”

“
Cos there’s fortunes to be made.”

“
So I’ve heard.”

He glanced around again and said
pushing back his hat, “Well, they’re gone. They can’t get you now.”

He slipped his gun back into its holster.

“
No but they will.”

“
What’s your name?”

“
Billy Tweed.”

“
Jack Quint. Come on, let’s get a drink. Then you can tell me all about it.”

***

They were sitting in a smoky saloon five minutes later, where Quint listened to
Billy’s tale above a piano being hammered at the far end by a little pink man in a bowler hat.

Several women lounged around with wanton looks in their eyes. Quint knew that for a dollar, a room was free upstairs. Their make up was so thick, it was impossible to tell the age of any of them. Beneath the paint of some, he was sure, were syphilitic sores.

It seemed the boy was living in a sort of makeshift orphanage on Mott Street, run by a fat Irishman called ‘Porky’ Warren.

“
He is a pig too,” Billy grated. He spat.

“
Doesn’t like us bettering ourselves. I’ve even taught myself how to read and write… well nearly, and he laughs and says we’re all the sons of whores. He says we’re shit and shit don’t read nuthin.”

He rambled on bitterly
for some time, about how food and lodging were free, as long as they spent their days relieving the unsuspecting of the contents of their pockets; not here of course, because there was nothing to be had, but mostly in rich lower Manhattan and sometimes beyond. They were paid a small cut to keep their mouths shut.

Quint started sketching on a piece of paper, thinking that, where the other kids had quickly frittered their money away, Billy had had the sense to put some by.

“
So how much do you think you need?”

“
Five hundred, to book passage, and set me up when I get there.” His eyes took on a dreamy look. “Then I can go prospectin’ for diamonds.”

“
Diamonds?”

“
Yeah, like the Cullinan they found in ’05. It’s as big as an apple, worth millions and they cut it up… I reckon if a nigger can find one,
I
can, and then…”

Quint eyed the boy’s face, covered in tick and lice bites, briefly. He held his hand up, and said, “You can dream all you like, but how long has it taken you to save this two hundred bucks?”

“
Nearly two years.”

He looked down at the stain covered table, feeling more dejected than ever.

“
How would you like to earn the three hundred you need?”

Billy looked up so suddenly, he knocked his drink over. The glass rolled off the table and shattered.

“
All you have to do,” Quint told him, “is go to every tailor and hotel you can find, in and around the harbour and ask if an attractive, well-spoken Englishwoman and a boy of about ten have entered their establishment, carrying this.”

He handed him the sketch of a suitcase.

“
And if they have, where they might be now. They stole it from me and I must have it back, understand?”

Billy nodded.

“
She might be going by the name of Lady Emma DeVere, but by now she could be using another. Start as close to the docks as you can and work your way out. If you find them, I’ll give you the money.”

Billy felt his mouth drop
and whispered, as he gazed at the sketch, “I’ll find them. I promise you. I’ll find them.”

Quint grinned as he drained his glass.

H
e wouldn’t find them above the tailor’s though. When Lil had dressed and seen the cause of the commotion coming from the parlour, she did the only thing she could think of at such short notice.

She broke a pot over the woman’s head, shouting, “Leave my boy alone, you crazy bitch!” before staggering back towards the parrot cage, unsure what might happen next.

Robert had darted behind her
and was peeking around nervously, as Mrs Frank sat up and shook the shards from her hair. Her face was grazed above the left eye and her lip was cut, but even that didn’t deter her. She was up in an instant. She snatched up the strap and flew at both of them, screaming and lashing out blindly.

Lil parried her blows
and sent her flying headlong into a jardinière, which crashed to the floor, where she lay dazed among the wreckage. Her thick stockings and skirts were rucked up, while dried out petals festooned her head and shoulders.

As the parrot squawked in delight, Lil grabbed the suitcase and they bolted out the room before she could recover. As they were charging down the stairs, they collided with Mr Frank who was about to investigate, nearly knocking him flying.

It wasn’t till they had run through the throng, as storm clouds were gathering, that they collapsed into each other’s arms. It seemed hilarious and surreal now they were safe.

As they felt the patter of drops around them though, Robert asked, “Where should we go now?”

“
A hotel, and this time, we’ll stay there for a week.”

With the euphoria subsiding and s
till without a disguise, that naked feeling was creeping back. There were hundreds of people about.

***

Quint
could be anywhere among them, though by sheer coincidence, Billy Tweed passed by as he emerged from another tailor’s, after getting the same response he had in every place he’d been to so far; a shaking head.

He kept on walking, the disappointment pricking more at every rebuff, but with the feeling he was getting a mite closer every time.

He was forced into a pawnbroker’s by the sudden downpour. When the rain had slowed to a trickle, he resumed his search.

Another quarter hour passed before he walked into Frank’s Tailors, to see the little owner holding his bruised nose.

He pulled the sketch from his pocket.

Seeing it, Mrs Frank strutted across, with such anger on her face, he thought she was going to hit him. She was dabbing blood away from her lip with a wad of cloth. She recognised the case instantly. Her husband flinched out of her way, as she snatched it and stared.

Billy
knew before he’d even asked his question that he’d struck gold, and lots of it.

“
English woman and a kid
,” she hissed, going red in the face, as she cast the drawing back. “Touched in the head, crazy, terrorising a frail old lady’s like me.” For a moment, she looked utterly woebegone.

Then she suddenly rounded on her husband, who could see the bridge of his own nose and he flinched back as she raised her meaty hand.

“
Where’d they go, and when?”
Billy asked.

“
Few minutes since,” she said, lowering her hand, but Billy heard no more as he charged out onto the street, nearly knocking a passing priest flying.

He looked in both directions, knowing they couldn’t have got far. He was unprepared for the strange accent that came to him through the masses. He had heard a woman say, “…
two
weeks if I think it necessary.” He caught a glimpse of the same stripy pattern on the scrap of paper he held in his hand and grinned as he saw them enter a small hotel.

The lobby was cold and drab, paint hanging from the walls in long strips
. Dust was thick on everything. A Union flag, from the Civil War, torn here and there by shrapnel and bullets, hung above the door that led to the owner’s private quarters. A battle-scarred Springfield musket was wired to the wall on the other side, with a fixed bayonet that still carried the rust of dried blood.