A RIND OF MOONLIGHT

Several blocks and a thousand years from the city’s ritzy nightclubs and theaters, a rind of moon sweated in the sky, but its glow did not reach the gloom of the tenements along Tenth Avenue, where Tommy Duffy and his friends welcomed the feel of the cool night air as they swaggered through Hell’s Kitchen. They called themselves the Street Kings, for they were rulers of the rubble piles and the railyards. Makers of mischief. Sultans of the goddamned West Side.

“… I heard dere’s a cellar ’round here where dey take snitches,” one of the boys crowed. “I heard ’a floors is covered wit teeth ’at you can pry da gold right outta and sell it over to da pawnbroker on Eighth and Forty.”

“You’re as full of it as yer old man.”

“You take back what you said about my da.”

“Yeah, the only thing his old man’s full of is Owney’s whiskey!”

The two boys fell on each other with fists and curses, more out of habit than a sense of honor, until Paddy Holleran broke them apart.

“Save it,” he ordered. “We might need our knuckles for what we’re doin’ tonight.”

Paddy was fourteen and already running some small rackets for Owney Madden’s gang, so the boys followed him without question, shouting “Street Kings!” and toppling garbage cans and throwing rocks at windows. No one could touch them. This was what it meant to be in a gang. Without your boys, you were nothing. A chump. A nobody.

When they reached the empty yards along the Hudson where the warehouses stood sentry, Paddy shushed them. “Gotta be looking out. Dey got a guard dog, a big German shepherd with teeth a foot long dat keeps watch. He’ll eat your face off.”

“What’s the plan, Paddy?” Tommy asked. He was only twelve and looked up to the older boy.

“See dat warehouse at the end? I heard Luciano’s men got their whiskey from Canada hidden in there. Got a distillery in dere, too. We steal some whiskey, bust up the still, I bet Owney’d be chuffed. Bet we’d look good to him. We’ll let dem Italian bastards know we Irish was here first.”

“Didn’t Columbus discover America?” Tommy said. He’d learned that in school, before he’d quit in fifth grade.

Paddy thumped Tommy’s nose. “Whatsa matter wit you? You wanna run wit the Italians now? Is ’at it?”

“N-no.”

“Hey! Tommy Gun here wants to be Italian! He’s too good for us!”

“Am not!” Tommy shouted over their insults.

“Yeah? Prove it.” Paddy had a mean glint in his eye. “You go in first. Stay in for five minutes, then come out with somethin’ and we’ll believe you.”

Tommy glanced down toward the shadowy end of the yards, where the warehouse sat. Winos slept there. Perverts, too. Sometimes rival gangs patrolled with lead pipes. And there was the threat of the guard dog Paddy had mentioned. Tommy’s stomach knotted in fear.

“Do it or you ain’t part of the Street Kings no more.”

There was no worse fate. Even the thought of some geezer showing his bits was better than being left out of the gang, a nobody.

“Okay, okay,” Tommy said. He walked on shaky legs toward the looming warehouse on the river. Feral cats slunk through the weeds, carrying things in their teeth. One hissed, its eyes gone to glass in the dark. King of the Streets, King of the Streets, Tommy chanted to himself. At the warehouse’s big doors, he hesitated for a second. It wasn’t padlocked. There was only a wooden bar looped through the handles. One of the boys howled like a dog and Tommy’s heart beat fast at the thought of what might be on the other side of those doors.

King of the Streets…

Tommy slipped inside and saw at once that it was not a secret distillery but a slaughterhouse. The place had a terrible smell of river water and dead flesh. Behind him, Tommy heard the wooden bar being slipped back through the handles. He fell against the doors, pounding with his fists. “Lemme out! I’ll kill youse!”

“Give our regards to the Italians, chump,” Paddy yelled from the other side, and the other boys joined in with their own insults. Tommy could hear their laughter moving away from the warehouse, along with their quick footsteps. Tommy threw himself against the doors, with no luck. Unless he could find another way out, he was stuck there till somebody came. That somebody might be one of Lucky Luciano’s men, which was a scarier thought than spending the night alone in the old warehouse. From the riverside, the moon pushed through the building’s high, narrow windows. Its fractured light fell first on the chains and hooks suspended from the ceiling, then across the pale carcasses of the pigs hanging in a long line to the back of the warehouse. A rat scuttled across his foot and he shouted.

“Big fellow, wasn’t he?” a man’s voice said.

Tommy whipped around. “Who’s there? Who said that?”

The man stepped out of the shadows. He was as big as a boxer, and he looked important and out of place in his full suit and bowler hat. Tommy swallowed hard. What if this man was one of Lucky Luciano’s goons?

“It was a dare. M-my friends locked me in,” Tommy managed to say. “I swear, mister. I don’t want no trouble.”

“What is your name?” the man asked.

“Tommy.”

“Tommy,” the man said, tasting the name. There was something about his eyes that didn’t seem right. Tommy chalked it up to the weak moonlight. “Thomas the disciple. Doubting Thomas, who had to be shown before he could believe.”

“Huh?”

The stranger smiled. It was an unsettling smile, but Tommy felt drawn to it. “Since you seem to be in a bargaining mood, Thomas, I will also make you a bargain. Tonight is the sort of night in which men of great daring can be made. But you will have to put your doubts aside, Thomas.”

The man pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and snapped it taut between fingers blue-black with markings. Tommy’s eyes widened.

“Whaddoo I gotta do?” he asked warily.

“All you have to do is walk to the far end of the warehouse and retrieve my walking stick. It has a silver tip.”

The man waved his hand and Tommy saw the walking stick’s silver knob glinting in the distance on the other side of the pigs.

“What’s the catch?”

“Ah. That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Life is a game of chance for men of daring, Thomas. You must be willing to risk in order to be rewarded. What say you?”

Tommy thought it over. In his brief life, he’d found that most bargains weren’t bargains at all. And the thought of walking through those pale dead pig bodies to get to the stick at the far end seemed daunting. Then he remembered that he was there because his so-called friends had locked him in for laughs. He would not show up without that hundred dollars to rub in their faces.

“Okay, mister. I’ll do it.”

The man smiled his discomfiting smile. “A man of daring after all. May I see your hands?”

Tommy frowned. “What for?”

“A man in my position must take precautions. Hands, please.”

Tommy held out his hands, turning them palms up, then palms down. The stranger’s eyes gleamed.

“You may put them down now.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a leather pouch, shaking what looked like dust into his palm. He blew it into Tommy’s face.

“Wha-what’d you do that for?” Tommy sputtered, wiping at his nose and mouth.

“Upping the ante,” the stranger said, holding the hundred-dollar bill between his second and third fingers like an offering. “Game of chance. Men of daring.”

Tommy snatched the bill from the man’s fingers and stuffed it into his own pocket. The man’s eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, and Tommy looked away quickly. He focused instead on the walking stick at the far end of the warehouse. He took a deep breath and entered the long, dark tunnel between the butchered pigs. All those dangling dead bodies, the eyes fixed and staring, the mouths open in a final silent scream, made him feel a little sick and woozy, and he struggled to keep his own eyes on the silver tip, which seemed a million miles away. Tommy chanted to himself quietly, King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets.

“That’s it, Thomas. Keep walking. You’re doing very well. Soon you’ll put all those doubts to rest.”

Tommy kept moving. A hundred bucks was a world of money. When he showed up at Paddy’s in new clothes, his hair freshly oiled and green in his pocket, he’d show the others who was really the chump. Nobody’d be locking him in a warehouse again.

The stranger sang an unnerving song: “Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with his apron on….”

The song made Tommy break out in a cold sweat and he took the last few steps at a clip till he reached the stick. It had been shoved into the ground like a sword. Beside it was a pamphlet for something called The Good something or other—the last word started with C, but Tommy had always had a hard time reading; the letters got mixed up in his head. Tommy gripped the stick with both hands and tugged, but it would not yank free, and the stranger’s song was starting to work on his nerves. It seemed to come from everywhere, and under the melody he could swear he heard, very faintly, terrible growls and hisses, like voices released from the very depths of hell. He had the money in his pocket. He could run. But something told him he’d better see this through. Tommy positioned himself over the stick, wiped his hands on his filthy trousers, and tried again. It wouldn’t budge. He made a third attempt, pulling so hard that he fell backward into the wood shavings. It was wet where he fell, and a drop of something hit his cheek, followed by another. Tommy wiped at his face. His hand came away smeared with blood. Still on his back, he looked up to see a German shepherd dangling on the hook above him, the kill so fresh the animal still twitched. Its belly had been slit open and its insides pulled out.

Tommy scrambled quickly to his feet. The stranger’s laughter startled him. He was suddenly right there in front of Tommy, who backed into one of the pigs and sent it swinging against the others. With shaking hands, Tommy patted the dead pig into stillness, as if he could bring order to this nightmarish turn of events. The stranger was right there. How is that possible? How could he have gotten all the way over here?

“I… I can’t get it out,” Tommy whispered. He was not aware that he was backing up.

“Shame. Maybe he could help you?” the stranger said, nodding gently toward the dead dog. Then he frowned playfully. “No. I suppose not.” He drew the stick from the ground without effort.

Tommy felt his head swim. He wasn’t seeing so clearly anymore. The pigs’ legs jerked like marionettes. They were moving, writhing on their hooks and squealing till Tommy, too, was screaming. The man’s eyes burned with a terrible fire and he seemed to be even bigger than before.

“Game of chance, my boy. You’ve already rolled your dice.”

“Paddy! Liam!” Tommy screamed. “Johnny! I’m in here!”

“Your friends have deserted you.”

Tommy cut his eyes in the direction of the barred door at the other end of the warehouse, which was now slightly ajar. How far was it from here to there? Two hundred yards? Three hundred?

“Ah, one last game, I see,” the stranger said, as if reading Tommy’s thoughts. “Go on, then, Thomas. Place your bets. Roll the dice.” His voice echoed in the cavernous slaughterhouse. “Run!”

Tommy was off. His knees moved like pistons, his elbows jabbing back against the dead air. The door bounced in his vision as his legs gobbled ground. It was known that he was the fastest boy on Tenth Avenue. He’d outrun cops, priests, gangs, and his own mother, who was quick with a belt when he made her angry, which was most of the time. A hanging chain clanged into him and he batted it away, feeling the sting as it hit his wrist, but he did not slow down. Far behind him, he could hear the stranger’s voice ringing out above the clang of the slaughterhouse chains. “ ‘And the sixth offering was an offering of obedience….’ ”

Tommy could see the door. It was maybe sixty yards away, and still there was no sign of the stranger. A frantic chorus pounded in Tommy’s head as he cleared the last carcass: King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets! Fifty yards. Forty. Beautiful moonlight peeked through the crack where the door was slightly open. Tommy didn’t stop to ask himself how it had been opened. All he could think about was pushing through it to freedom, racing for the shortcut to Thirty-ninth Street.

Thirty yards. Twenty…

Tommy no longer saw the door. One minute it had been within reach, and now it was gone. Instead, the stranger stood before him. It took Tommy a moment to slow down, for his brain to signal to his legs that there was trouble ahead—a cliff’s edge in the shape of a man with burning eyes. He had run in the wrong direction. How was that possible? How had he gotten so turned around? Nothing looked right to him anymore. Tommy turned the other way and saw hideous shadows crawling along the walls and ceiling of the slaughterhouse, as if devouring it whole, the stranger walking just ahead of the movement like a carnival barker leading a parade of darkness.

How? Tommy thought. He dashed left, fighting through the smothering pigs only to find himself facing a brick wall that surely hadn’t been there a minute ago. He went right, and there was another wall. When he faced forward again, the stranger was once more before him, standing in a patch of terrible moonlight. He was stripped to the waist, and Tommy stared at the glowing skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath was waiting to come out.

“You lose, Thomas.”

Devilish growls filled the warehouse. The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape.

“ ‘I am he, the Great Beast, the Dragon of Old. And all will look upon me and tremble….’ ”

The stranger kept talking, but Tommy was beyond hearing. He kept his eyes on the moving dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing form of the stranger who loomed above him.

“P-please…” he croaked.

The stranger only smiled.

“Such perfect hands,” he said as the darkness descended.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 686