Winter"s tale.
by Mark Helprin.
PROLOGUE.
A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its a.r.s.enals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpa.s.sed. For the whole world has poured its heart into the city by the Palisades, and made it far better than it ever had any right to be.
But the city is now obscured, as it often is, by the whitened ma.s.s in which it restsa"rushing by us at unfathomable speed, crackling like wind in the mist, cold to the touch, glistening and unfolding, tumbling over itself like the steam of an engine or cotton spilling from a bale. Though the blinding white web of ceaseless sounds flows past mercilessly, the curtain is breaking ,.. it reveals amid the clouds a lake of air as smooth and clear as a mirror, the deep round eye of a white hurricane.
At the bottom of this lake lies the city. From our great height it seems small and distant, but the activity within it is apparent, for even when the city appears to be no bigger than a beetle, it is alive. We are falling now, and our swift un.o.bserved descent will bring us to life that is blooming in the quiet of another time. As we float down in utter silence, into a frame again unfreezing, we are confronted by a tableau of winter colors. These are very strong, and they call us in.
A WHITE HORSE ESCAPES.
THERE was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not deep, and the sky was swept with vibrant stars, except in the east, where dawn was beginning in a light blue flood. The air was motionless, but would soon start to move as the sun came up and winds from Canada came charging down the Hudson.
The horse had escaped from his master"s small clapboard stable in Brooklyn. He trotted alone over the carriage road of the Williams-burg Bridge, before the light, while the toll keeper was sleeping by his stove and many stars were still blazing above the city. Fresh snow on the bridge m.u.f.fled his hoof beats, and he sometimes turned his head and looked behind him to see if he was being followed. He was warm from his own effort and he breathed steadily, having loped four or five miles through the dead of Brooklyn past silent churches and shuttered stores. Far to the south, in the black, ice-choked waters of the Narrows, a sparkling light marked the ferry on its way to Manhattan, where only market men were up, waiting for the fishing boats to glide down through h.e.l.l Gate and the night.
The horse was crazy, but, still, he was able to worry about what he had done. He knew that shortly his master and mistress would arise and light the fire. Utterly humiliated, the cat would be tossed out the kitchen door, to fly backward into a snow-covered sawdust pile. The scent of blueberries and hot batter would mix with the sweet smell of a pine fire, and not too long afterward his master would stride across the yard to the stable to feed him and hitch him up to the milk wagon. But he would not be there.
This was a good joke, this defiance which made his heart beat in terror, for he was sure his master would soon be after him. Though he realized that he might be subject to a painful beating, he sensed that the master was amused, pleased, and touched by rebellion as often as nota"if it were in the proper form and done well, courageously. A shapeless, coa.r.s.e revolt (such as kicking down the stable door) would occasion the whip. But not even then would the master always use it, because he prized a spirited animal, and he knew of and was grateful for the mysterious intelligence of this white horse, an intelligence that even he could not ignore except at his peril and to his sadness. Besides, he loved the horse and did not really mind the chase through Manhattan (where the horse always went), since it afforded him the chance to enlist old friends in the search, and the opportunity of visiting a great number of saloons where he would inquire, over a beer or two, if anyone had seen his enormous and beautiful white stallion rambling about in the nude, without bit, bridle, or blanket.
The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road. He came off the bridge ramp and stopped short. A thousand streets lay before him, silent but for the sound of the gemlike wind. Driven with snow, white, and empty, they were a maze for his delight as the newly arisen wind whistled across still untouched drifts and rills. He pa.s.sed empty theaters, counting houses and forested wharves where the snow-lined spars looked like long black groves of pine. He pa.s.sed dark factories and deserted parks, and rows of little houses where wood just fired filled the air with sweet rea.s.surance. He pa.s.sed the frightening common cellars full of ragpickers and men without limbs. The door of a market bar was flung open momentarily for a torrent of boiling water that splashed all over the street in a cloud of steam. He pa.s.sed (and shied from) dead men lying in the round ragged coffins of their own frozen bodies. Sleds and wagons began to radiate from the markets, alive with the pull of their stocky dray horses, racing up the main streets, ringing bells. But he kept away from the markets, because there it was noontime even at dawn, and he followed the silent tributaries of the main streets, pa.s.sing the exposed steelwork of buildings in the intermission of feverish construction. And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city"s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.
The tail of the white horse swished back and forth as he trotted briskly down empty avenues and boulevards. He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising: a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music. With a certainty that perplexed him, the white horse moved south toward the Battery, which was visible down a long narrow street as a whitened field that was crossed by the long shadows of tall trees. By the Battery itself, the harbor took color with the new light, rocking in layers of green, silver, and blue. At the end of this polar rainbow, on the horizon, was a ma.s.s of whitea"the foil into which the entire city had been seta"that was beginning to turn gold with the rising sun. The pale gold agitated in ascending waves of heat and refraction until it seemed to be a place of a thousand cities, or the border of heaven. The horse stopped to stare, his eyes filled with golden light. Steam issued from his nostrils as he stood in contemplation of the impossible and alluring distance. He stayed in the street as if he were a statue, while the gold strengthened and boiled before him in a bed of blue. It seemed to be a perfect place, and he determined to go there.
He started forward but soon found that the street was blocked by a ma.s.sy iron gate that closed off the Battery. He doubled back and went another way, only to find another gate of exactly the same design. Trying many streets, he came to many heavy gates, none of which was open. While he was stuck in this labyrinth, the gold grew in intensity and seemed to cover half the world. The empty white field was surely a way to that other, perfect world, and, though he had no idea of how he would cross the water, the horse wanted the Battery as if he had been born for it. He galloped desperately along the approachways, through the alleys, and over the snow-covered greens, always with an eye to the deepening gold.
At the end of what seemed to be the last street leading to the open, he found yet another gate, locked with a simple latch. He was breathing hard, and the condensed breath rose around his face as he stared through the bars. That was it: he would never step onto the Battery, there somehow to launch himself over the blue and green ribbons of water, toward the golden clouds. He was just about to turn and retrace his steps through the city, perhaps to find the bridge again and the way back to Brooklyn, when, in the silence that made his own breathing seem like the breaking of distant surf, he heard a great many footsteps.
At first they were faint, but they continued until they began to pound harder and harder and he could feel a slight trembling in the ground, as if another horse were going by. But this was no horse, these were men, who suddenly exploded into view. Through the black iron gate, he saw them running across the Battery. They took long high steps, because the wind had drifted the snow almost up to their knees. Though they ran with all their strength, they ran in slow motion. It took them a long time to get to the center of the field, and when they did the horse could see that one man was in front and that the others, perhaps a dozen, chased him. The man being chased breathed heavily, and would sometimes drive ahead in deliberate bursts of speed. Sometimes he fell and bolted right back up, casting himself forward. They, too, fell at times, and got up more slowly. Soon this spread them out in a ragged line. They waved their arms and shouted. He, on the other hand, was perfectly silent, and he seemed almost stiff in his running, except when leapt s...o...b..nks or low rails and spread his arms like wings. As the man got closer, the horse took a liking to him. He moved well, though not like a horse or a dancer or someone who always hears music, but with spirit. What was happening appeared to be solely because of the way that this man moved, more profound than a simple chase across the snow. Nonetheless, they gained on him. It was difficult to understand how, since they were dressed in heavy coats and bowler hats, and he was hatless in a scarf and winter jacket. He had winter boots, and they had low street shoes which had undoubtedly filled with numbing snow. But they were just as fast or faster than he was, they were good at it, and they seemed to have had much practice.
One of them stopped, spread his feet in the snow, raised a pistol in both hands, and fired at the fleeing man. The pistol crack echoed among the buildings facing the park and sent pigeons hurtling upward from the icy walks. The man in the lead looked back for a moment and then changed direction to cut in toward the streets, where the horse was standing mesmerized. They too changed course, and gained on him even more as they ran the hypotenuse of a triangle and he ran its second leg. They were not more than two hundred feet from him when another dropped behind to fire. The sound was so close that the horse came alive and jumped back.
The man who was trying to escape approached the gate. The horse backed up behind a woodshed. He wanted no part of this. But, being too curious, he was unable to keep himself hidden for long, and he soon stuck his head around the corner of the shed to see what would happen. The fleeing man opened the gate with a violent uppercut, moved to the other side of it, and slammed it shut. He took a heavy steel dirk from his belt and breathlessly pounded the latch into an unmovable position. Then, with an agonized look, he turned and started up the street.
His pursuers were already at the fence when he slipped on a pool of ice. He went down hard, striking his head on the ground and tumbling over himself until he came to rest. The horse"s heart was thundering as he saw the dozen men throw themselves at the fence, like a squad of soldiers. They were perfectly criminal in appearance, with strange bent faces, clifflike brows, tiny chins, noses and ears that looked sewn-back-on, and hairlines that descended preposterously far (no glacier had ever ventured farther south). Their cruelty projected from them like sparks jumping a gap. One raised his pistol, but anothera"obviously their leadera"said," No! Not that way. We have him now. We"ll do it slowly, with a knife." They started up the fence.
Had it not been for the horse peering at him from behind the woodshed, the downed man might have stayed down. His name was Peter Lake, and he said to himself out loud," You"re in bad shape when a horse takes pity on you, you stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d," which got him moving. He rose to his feet and addressed the horse. The twelve men, who couldn"t see the horse standing behind the shed, thought that Peter Lake had gone mad or was playing a trick.
"Horse!" he called. The horse pulled back his head." Horse!" shouted Peter Lake." Please!" and he opened his arms. The other men began to drop to the near side of the fence. They were taking their time because they were only a few feet away, the street was deserted, he was not moving, and they were sure that they had him.
Peter Lake"s heart beat so hard that it made his body jerk. He felt ridiculous and out of control, like an engine breaking itself apart." Oh Jesus," he said, vibrating like a mechanical toy,"Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, send me an armored steamroller." Everything depended on the horse.
The horse bolted over the pool of ice toward Peter Lake, and lowered his wide white neck. Peter Lake took possession of himself and, throwing his arms around what seemed like a swan, sprang to the horse"s back. He was up again, exulting even as the pistol shots rang out in the cold air. Having become his accomplice in one graceful motion, the horse turned and skittered, leaning back slightly on his haunches to get breath and power for an explosive start. In that moment, Peter Lake faced his stunned pursuers, and laughed at them. His entire being was one light perfect laugh. He felt the horse pitch forward, and then they raced up the street, leaving Pearly Soames and some of the Short Tail Gang backed against the iron rails, firing their pistols and cursinga"all twelve of them save Pearly himself, who bit his lower lip, squinted, and began to think of new ways to trap his quarry. The noise from their many pistols was deafening.
Already out of range, Peter Lake rode at a gallop. Pounding the soft snow, pa.s.sing the shuttered stores, they headed north through the awakening city in a cloud of speed.
THE FERRY BURNS IN MORNING COLD.
LEAVING the Short Tails behind would be easy, because not one of them (including Pearly, raised in the Five Points just like the rest) knew how to ride. They were masters of the waterfront and could do anything with a small boat, but on land they walked, took the trolley, and jumped the gates of the subway or the El. They had been chasing Peter Lake for three years. They hunted him from one season to the next, driving him back down into what he called "the tunnel"a"the condition of continuous struggle from which he always expected to emerge and never did.
Except when he found shelter with the clamdiggers of the Bayonne Marsh, Peter Lake had to be in Manhattan, where it was never long before the Short Tails got wind of him and took up the chase. It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity. During those frenetic three years, he had often contemplated moving to Boston, but had always concluded that there was nothing in the place interesting enough to steal, it was laid out badly for burglars, it was too small, and he would probably run afoul there of the Simian Cantarellos (the leading gang, which wasn"t much) in the same way that he had run afoul of the Short Tails, though undoubtedly for different reasons. In Boston, he had heard, when it got dark at night, it really got dark, and you could hardly move without b.u.mping into men of the cloth. So he stayed on, hoping that the Short Tails might grow tired of the chase. They didn"t, however, and his life in those years (except for peaceful interludes on the marsh) had been one of pursuit at close quarters.
He was not unused to being awakened just before dawn by the stampedelike pounding of the Short Tails" boots as they rushed up the rickety stairs of whatever temporary lodging he had procured. He had been diverted from the pleasures of hundreds of meals, scores of women, and dozens of rich unguarded houses by the sudden appearance of the Short Tails. Sometimes they materialized around him, by means that he could not fathom, not four feet away. Things were too close, the field of maneuver too tight, the stakes too high.
But now, with a horse, it would be different. Why hadn"t he thought of a horse before? He could stretch his margin of safety almost immeasurably, and put not yards but miles between himself and Pearly Soames each time Pearly tried to close the gap. In summer, the horse could swim the rivers, and in winter, take him over the ice. He could make a refuge not only of Brooklyn (at risk, of course, of being lost in its infinity of confusing roads) but of the pine barrens, the Watchung Mountains, the endless beaches of Montauk, and the Hudson Highlandsa"all places difficult to reach by subway and discouraging to the citified Short Tails, who, despite their comfort with killing and corruption, were afraid of lightning, thunder, wild animals, forests, and the sound of tree frogs in the night.
Peter Lake spurred the horse. But the horse did not need encouragement, because he was scared, he loved to run, and the sun was high enough to sit on the roofs of buildings like a great open fire warming everything and limbering up his already limber muscles.
He loved to run. He was like a big white bullet, his head up and out, his tail down and back, his ears streamlined with the wind as he vaulted forward. He took such long strides that he reminded Peter Lake of a kangaroo, and sometimes it seemed as if he were about to leave the ground and fly.
There was no sense in going to the Five Points. Though Peter Lake had many friends there and could hide in the thousands of underground chambers in which they danced and gamed, his arrival on an enormous white horse would electrify all the stool pigeons until they glowed with song. Besides, the Five Points wasn"t that distant. He had the horse. He would take a tour, and go far.
They raced along the Bowery and were soon at Washington Square, where they flew through the arch like a circus animal slipping through a hoop. By this time, many pedestrians were on the streets, and these people frowned upon the recklessness of a horse and rider darting in and out of traffic. A policeman on an enclosed pedestal in Madison Square saw them coming up Fifth Avenue. Sensing that they wouldn"t stop, he began to redirect traffic, for he had seen the horrifying results of a speeding horse in collision with a fragile automobile, and did not want to see it again. He had just managed to halt the various streams of automobiles, electric trucks, and horse-drawn wagons weaving past his stunted minaret, when he turned to see Peter Lake and his mount approaching at great velocity. The horse looked like a war monument sprung to life, and it sailed toward him like a missile. He blew his whistle. He waved his white gloved hands. This was unprecedented. They were charging the minaret, and must have been going thirty miles an hour. Nannies crossed themselves and clutched their children. Drovers stood up in their wagons. Old women averted their eyes. And the policeman froze stiffly in his golden booth.
Peter Lake spurred the horse again, and extended his right arm like a lance, pointing it at the motionless officer. As they went by in a blur of white, he lifted the man"s cap from his head, saying," Allow me to take your hat." The enraged policeman pivoted, took out his notebook, and furiously wrote a description of the horse"s b.u.t.tocks.
Peter Lake shot left into the Tenderloin, where the streets were so tied up that he found himself stopped dead, trapped by a water tanker and several entangled carriages. The teamsters were screaming; the horses whinnied to show their impatience; and a group of street arabs took the opportunity to start an artillery barrage of snow and ice b.a.l.l.s. As he dodged these, he looked behind him and saw half a dozen blue dots running up the street from the east. They were far away, they were closing, they were slipping, they were sliding, they were police. Having neither saddle nor stirrups, he stood on the horse"s back to see over the tanker and the carriages. The street was mortally choked and would need half an hour to revive. He dropped down and turned the horse around, intending to charge through the approaching phalanx and b.u.mp the blues. But the horse"s courage was of a different sort, and he would have no part in it. He shuddered and shook his head as Peter Lake tried unsuccessfully to spur him on. The horse could not go forward and would not go back, and found himself moving sideways toward a lighted marquee which, even in morning, shone out with the words," Saul Turkish Presents: Caradelba, the Spanish Gypsy."
Half full for the morning show, the theater was dark and overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with dazzling blues and greens, except for center stage, where Caradelba danced half nude in a flash of white and cream-colored silk. At first Peter Lake and the horse stood at the top of the middle aisle, watching Caradelba and hoping that they had entered un.o.bserved. But when the police came charging through the lobby, Peter Lake kicked the horse again and they galloped through the theater toward the orchestra pit. The musicians kept on playing, though they did slur as they saw the tremendous head and body of the horse speeding at them from the darkness, like a white jack-o"-lantern mounted on the front of a locomotive.
The horse picked up speed. Peter Lake said," Not likely that you; re a jumper, too," and closed his eyes. The horse did more than jump. To his own surprise, he soared over the orchestra and landed almost soundlessly onstage next to the Spanish Gypsya"twenty feet across and eight feet up. Peter Lake was amazed that the horse had jumped so far and landed so gently. Caradelba was speechless. She was no more than a child, covered with pounds of makeup, slight of build, and confused in demeanor except when she was dancing. She the instant appearance (as if from the air) of a horse and man upon it, suddenly sharing the stage, as a grave insult. It was as if by materializing full-blown on his enormous stallion, Peter Lake was making fun of her. She seemed about to cry. And the horse himself was not entirely self-possessed. He had never been in a theater before, let alone onstage. The lights beaming from darkness, the music, the soft subtle smell of Caradelba"s makeup, and the vast molten blue velvet curtain, entranced him. He threw out his chest like a parade horse.
Peter Lake could not bring himself to leave until he had comforted Caradelba. Trading blows with resentful musicians, the police were forcing their way through the orchestra pit. Beguiled by the magic of the footlights, the horse discovered the glories of the theater and wanted some time to try out various facial expressions. Peter Lake, who had always been cool under fire, gathered his wits about him, dismounted, and even as the police began to struggle up the velvet ropes that hung from the ap.r.o.n, walked over to Caradelba, police cap in hand. In the Irish English in which he spoke, he said," My dear Miss Candelabra. I would like to present to you, as a token of my affection and the admiration of the people of this great city, a souvenir police hat, which I just took from the tiny little head of the tiny little policeman who stands in the tiny little booth in Madison Square. As you can see," he said, motioning to the half-dozen police wading back through the musicians because they had been unable to scale the ap.r.o.n," this is a real police hat, and I"ve got to go." She took it from him and put it on her head. Its sober blue puffiness made her bare arms and shoulders seem even more voluptuous than they were, and she began to move once more in her arabesque fandango, as much for her own pleasure as for that of the audience. Peter Lake edged the horse from the blinding footlights. Then he jumped on his back and they exited stage right through a maze of ropes and flats to the winter street, which had cleared now, and they followed it back to Fifth Avenue, resuming the gallop uptown.
The law had recently been distracted from pursuit of Peter Lake by the fervor of the gang wars, which left a pile of corpses each morning in the Five Points, on the waterfront, and in unusual places such as church towers, girls" boarding schools, and spice warehouses. They had little time now for independent burglars like Peter Lake, but he imagined that if in galloping helter-skelter through fashion-high thoroughfares he disturbed the "gentiles" (to his credit, he suspected that this was the wrong word), the police would have to come after him again, and that if they did, the Short Tails would back off. The trouble was that once the Short Tails had marked a man they never gave up on hima"ever.
But he had many strategies to see him through the deadly traps of the wintry city, and schemes bloomed in front of him like rising storm clouds, opening their arms, willing to be embraced. There were as many ways to survive and as many ways to die as the city had in it streets, lines, and views. But the Short Tails were themselves so capable and knowing that they used the angles and lines of the maze, and the fluid roads and rivers, with a ratlike expertise of runs and burrows. The Short Tails had a terrible air of inevitability and speed like insatiable time, the flow of water to its own level, or the spread of fire. Evading them even for just a week was a marvelous feat. He had been their prime target for three years.
With the police and the Short Tails after him, Peter Lake decided to leave Manhattan and let the two arms of the pincers pince themselves. Were both organizations to come up face to face in search of their vanished prey, the shock of collision might provide Peter Lake with three or four months of freedom. But such a convergence would come only if he removed himself. He decided to join the clam-diggers on the Bayonne Marsh, knowing that they would give him shelter and a place on dry land for the horse, since they had found Peter Lake and raised him (for a time) much in the style of benevolent wolves. They were fiercer than the Short Tails, who now dared not dip an oar or push a pole within miles of their s.p.a.cious domain for fear of being instantly beheaded. No one had been able to subdue them, for not only were they extraordinary fighters and impossible to find, but their realm was only half-real, and anyone entering it their approval was likely to vanish forever into the roaring clouds which swept over the mirrorlike waters. New Jersey had decided to bring them to the mainstream of life, law, and taxes. Thirty marshals, state police, and Pinkerton agents disappeared permanently in the blinding white banks of speeding cloud. The lieutenant governor was cut in half in his sleep at his Princeton mansion.
One of the Weehawken ferries was blown out of the water, rising twenty stories in a ball of flame with a report so deep that it shook every window for fifty miles around.
Peter Lake knew that though he might find refuge on the marsh he would always be drawn by the lights of Manhattan back across the river, no matter what the danger. The Baymen lived too close to the rushing infinity of the cloud wall. They were silent, intent, and hard to fathom, for time sped by them as fast as the sides of a railroad tunnel. A typical Bayman was too much the feverish aborigine, a professional oracle forever examining fish livers and talking in highspeed inexplicable runicisms. For Peter Lake, who had grown used to ringing pianos and pretty girls who played hard to get, a stay on the marsh was difficult. But he was capable of expedient reversion, and was always willing to bend and test his soul.
Perhaps he would spend a week or ten days there ice fishing, going to bed before the moon rose, eating endless rounds of roasted oysters, poling through the salty unfrozen estuaries, and exhilarating in the naked embrace of several women who found with him a certain breathless beauty in wild trancelike bouts of lovemaking while the unruly white wall shook their little houses in the reeds and the gales of winter piled snow on all the paths across the ice. He thought of Anarinda, the dark-haired, the peach-breasted, the star-eyed... and he headed for the North Ferry.
"d.a.m.n!" he said as they crested the rise before the docks facing the southernmost palisade. The ferry was burning in the middle of the ice-choked river, unable to move, unreachable at first, a blaze of orange bursting forth swollen bundles of disentangling black smoke. Ferries were always burning, and their boilers exploding, especially in winter when they were attacked by rushing islands of sharp heavy ice. The wonderful new bridges were the only remedy, but who could build a bridge across the Hudson?
It was a perfectly blue day. On the opposite sh.o.r.e, bands or color, individual trees, small white frame houses, and veins of red and purple in the high brown rock were all searingly visible. A strong cold wind brought the ice crashing down from upriver. Amid its bell-like shattering, black-coated firemen in whaleboats and on steam tugs struggled to pick up survivors and to pour icy water on the flames. Hundreds of spectators had arrived in spite of the morning cold: girls with hoops and skates, plumbers and joiners on their way to work servants, dockmen, draymen, river men, and railroad work-There were also vendors, antic.i.p.ating the thousands who would arrive only after the ferry was a sulking trap of drifting charcoal, and then feed their curiosity on chestnuts, roasted corn, hot pretzels, and meat-on-the-spit. Peter Lake bought a bag of chestnuts from a wily man whose hands were inured to the heat of his fire. He picked the steaming chestnuts from amid the blinking red coals in the round fire pan. They were too hot to eat, so (after glancing left and right to see if any ladies were present) he put the steaming sack into his pants. Next to his stomach, they warmed his whole body. As he watched the ferry burn, the wind grew stronger, and long rows of willows bent south and shook off their white ice.
One of the spectators was staring not at the burning ferry but at Peter Lake, who dismissed this affront with contempt, because the man looking at him was a telegraph messenger. Peter Lake hated telegraph messengers. Perhaps it was because they should have been sleek matches for winged Mercury, and were invariably rotund, elephantine, mola.s.ses-blooded monsters who walked at a mile an hour and could not climb stairs. He surely would not take his attention from a burning ferry for fear of a chubby nitwit in a baglike uniform, a boxy hat with a little nameplate that read "Messenger Beals." And so what if Messenger Beals backed off into the crowd and disappeared? What if he did alert the Short Tails? All Peter Lake had to do if they showed up would be to leap on the horse and leave them far behind.
Several fireboat men were trying to board the burning ferry.
They had no apparent reason to do so, for all the pa.s.sengers were lead or saved and the firemen could not hope to extinguish the simply by being closer to them. Why then were they working their way hand over hand on an alternately slack and taut rope that had started to burn, and dipped them now and then into the freezing the crowd took in its breath all at once? Peter Lake knew they took power from the fire. The closer they fought it, the stronger they became. The firemen knew that though it sometimes killed the fire gave them priceless gifts.
Peter Lake applauded with everyone else as the firemen crossed on the burning line and dropped to the deck. As he watched, he peeled the chestnuts and shared them with the horse. After half an hour the ferry was just about to upend and a tug was charging intervening shelves of ice, trying to retrieve the exhausted firefighters, who, with their rope burnt away, stood alone and likely to go under if the ferry were to sink fast in midchannel.
With the corner of his eye (an area most highly developed in thieves) Peter Lake saw two automobiles coming down the road. There were a lot of these things, nothing strange about them, but this particular pair was coming at him full speed, one after the other, stuffed with Short Tails. As Peter Lake swung himself up onto the horse he saw Messenger Beals jumping up and down (very slowly) with excitement. The Short Tails would probably reward him with a huge dinner and a ticket to a music hall.
Peter Lake galloped south, abandoning the burning ferry for the open avenues that would take him past factories, milk plants, breweries, and railroad yards. He and the horse were quickly lost in the precincts of barrels, rails, and cubic mountains of lumber, among the gasworks, tanneries, rope walks, tenements, vaudeville houses, and the high gray spires of the iron bridges.
The Short Tails were once again not too far behind him, swift though embarra.s.sed in their automobiles. But Peter Lake stayed ahead and pounded southward as the horse took strides so powerful that he almost flew.
PEARLY SOAMES.
IN all the universe there was only one photograph of Pearly Soames, and it showed Pearly with five police officers around him, one apiece for each of his legs and arms, and one for his head. They held him spread-eagled on a chair to which his waist and chest were firmly strapped. His face was clenched around tightly shut eyes, and it was possible to hear, even in black and white, the bellow that emerged from his throat. The enormous officer behind him had obvious trouble keeping the subject"s face toward the camera, and he grasped Pearly"s hair and beard as if he were holding an agitated poisonous snake. When the powder flashed in the pan, a coatrack toppled off to the left as a casualty of the struggle and was caught for all time, like the hand of an ornate clock, pointing toward two. Pearly Soames had not desired to be photographed.
His eyes were like razors and white diamonds. They were impossibly pale, lucid, and silver. People said," When Pearly Soames opens his eyes, it"s electric lights." He had a scar that went from the corner of his mouth to his ear. To look at it made the beholder feel a knife on his own skin, cutting deep and sharp, because Pearly Soames" scar was like a white trough reticulated with painful filaments of cold ivory. It had been with him since the age of four, a gift from his father, who had tried and failed to cut his son"s throat.
Of course, it"s bad to be a criminal. Everyone knows that, and can swear that it"s true. Criminals mess up the world. But they are, as well, retainers of fluidity. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance. It might even be said that criminals are a necessary component of the balanced equation which steadily and beautifully eats up all the time that is thrown upon its steely back. They are the sugar and alcohol of a city, a red flash in the mosaic, lightning on a hot night. So was Pearly.
So was Pearly all of these things, knowing at every instant exactly what he was and that everything he did was wrong, possessed with an agonizing account of himself, his mind quick to grasp the meaning of his merciless acts. Though he cared not at all for the mechanisms of equilibrium, if he had stopped, the life of the city would have fallen apart. For it required (among other things) balanced, opposing, and random forces, and he was set in the role of all three. Imagine the magic required to make a man cringe at the sight of a baby, and want to kill it. Pearly had that magic: he hated babies and wanted to kill them. They cried like cats on a fence, they had enormous round mouths, and they couldn"t even hold up their own G.o.dd.a.m.ned heads. They drove him crazy with their needs, their a.s.sumptions, and their innocence. He wanted to smash their a.s.sumptions and confound their innocence. He wanted to debate them despite the fact that they couldn"t talk. He also hated small children too young to steal. What a tragic paradox. When they were small and could fit between bars, they didn"t know what to do and couldn"t carry anything. As soon as they got old enough to understand what they were supposed to bring back from the other side, they were unable to get through. And it wasn"t just children that he disliked for their vulnerability. He felt his chest heave with waves of uncontrollable violence at the sight of any cripple. He gnashed his teeth and wanted to kill them, to crush them into pulp, to silence their horrible self-pity, and bend the wheels of their chairs. He was a bomb-thrower, a lunatic, a master criminal, a devil, the golden dog of the streets.
PEARLY Soames wanted gold and silver, but not, in the way of common thieves, for wealth. He wanted them because they shone and were pure. Strange, afflicted, and deformed, he sought a cure in the abstract relation of colors. But though he was drawn to fine and intense color, he was no connoisseur. Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily sated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, pa.s.sion and expertise. Not Pearly. Pearly"s attraction to color was like an infection, or religion, and he came to it each time a starving man. Sometimes, on the street or sailing along the waterfront in a fast skiff, he would witness the sun"s illumination of a flat plane of color that was given (like almost everything else in New York) a short and promiscuous embrace. Pearly always stopped, and if he froze in the middle of the street, traffic was forced to weave around him. Or if he were in a boat, he turned it to the wind and stayed with the color for as long as it lasted. House painters were subject to interludes of terror early would burst upon them and stand close, staring with his electric eyes at the rich glistening color flowing thickly from their wet brushed. It was bad enough if he were alone (they all knew him, and were well aware of his reputation), but he was not infrequently accompanied by a bunch of Short Tails. In that case, the painters trembled because they would be punished afterward for the time that Tails were obliged to stand in silence with their hands in their pockets, observing the inexplicable mystery of Pearly"s "color gravity," as he called it. Unable to complain to Pearly, they would leave a few of their number to beat up the painters.
Once, on their way to a gang war, Pearly and sixty of the Short Tails went marching through the streets like a Florentine army. They carried not only their customary concealed armament, but rifles, grenades, and swords as well. Ready for a fight, they were excited beyond measure. Their hearts smashed from inside their chests. Their eyes darted. Halfway to the site of battle, Pearly spied two painters slapping a fresh coat of enamel against the doorposts of a saloon. The little army came to a halt. Pearly approached the trembling painters. He put his eyes near the green and stood there, smelling it, lost in it. Refreshed, moved, and amazed, he stepped back, enwrapped in the color gravity...."Put more on," he said." I like to see it when it goes on, when it"s wet. There"s an instant of glory." They started another coat. (The saloonkeeper was delighted.) Pearly watched contentedly." A nice landscape," he offered," a fine landscape. It reminds me of certain parts of rich men"s estates, where they don"t let the sheep onto the green, and the green stays unfouled. You fellows keep it up. I"ll be back in a day or two to see how it looks when it dries." And then they went off to the battle, with Pearly at the front fighting as no man could, having drawn from the wells of color.
This color gravity made him steal paintings. At first he had gone himself to art stores or sent his men, but they found nothing there except easels and paints. Then they caught on and began to raid the secure vaults of prestigious dealers, and the best-watched palaces on upper Fifth Avenue, where they found the most coveted of all paintings, the ones that sold for tens of thousands of dollars, that attracted the harried young hounds of the press, and about which critics dared not say a bad word. These were the paintings that were brought over from Europe in yachts, riding in their own private cabins with three Pinkerton guards. Pearly knew to steal them because he read the papers and received auction catalogs.
One night, his best burglars returned with five rolled canvases from Knoedler"s. Pearly couldn"t wait until morning. He ordered the paintings to be restretched and called for two-dozen storm lanterns and mirrors to light an enormous loft down near the bridges, the headquarters of the moment, for the Short Tails continually shifted from place to place in imitation of the Spanish Guerrillas. Pearly had the paintings put up on stands and covered with a velvet curtain.
The lamps were lit, blazing clear light against the soft cloth. He stood back and prepared for a feast. With a nod of his head, he signaled his men to drop the velvet." What!" he yelled, instinctively putting his hands on his pistol." Did you steal what I told you to steal?" The burglars frantically rustled through the auction catalogs, comparing the t.i.tles Pearly had circled in red to those on the plaques they had stolen along with the canvases. They matched. Pearly was shown that they matched.
"I don"t understand," he said, peering at his collection of great and famous names." They"re mud, black and brown. No light in them, and hardly any color. Who would paint a picture in black and brown?"
"I don"t know, Pearly," answered Blacky Womble, his most trusted lieutenant.
"Why? Why would they do that? And why do all the rich people and the experts like these things? Don"t they know? They"re rich, they must know."
"I told you, Pearly, I can"t figure it," said Blacky Womble.
"Shut up! Take*em back. I don"t want them here. Put them back in their frames."
"But we cut them out," protested the burglars," and besides, in an hour it"ll be light. There isn"t enough time."
Then put them back tomorrow night. d.a.m.n them! What a waste."
The next day saw a great stir when Knoedler"s discovered that million dollars" worth of paintings had been stolen. And the that, the papers went wild reporting that the paintings had replaced. They published on their front pages the contents of a note found pinned to one of the frames.
I don"t want these. They"re mud and they"ve got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I"m used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil"s opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn"t worry about your paintings anymore. I"m not going to steal them. I don"t like them.
Sincerely yours, P. Soames To comfort his wounded color gravity, Pearly"s men went out to get him emeralds, gold, and silver. He didn"t speak for days, until the warmth of the gold and the visual clatter of the fine silver healed him. Occasionally they would bring back the work of an American artist, or a Renaissance miniaturist, or any of the lively and unappreciated experimentalists, or some ancient whose work had not been boiled in linseed oil, and Pearly would have his feasta"under a pier, upstairs at a stale-beer house, or amid the vats of a commandeered brewery. But the wonderful sights and scenes, the subtleties of true sacrificial color, the holiness of its coincidence in integral planes and intermingling currents, were not enough for Pearly. He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.
"I want a room of gold," he said," solid, polished all the time with chamois, pure gold: the walls, ceiling, and floor of gold plate." Even the Short Tails were stunned. The city was theirs, but they had never thought to be like Inca kings, or to build a heavenly palace, or even to have a fixed address.
Blacky Womble risked contradicting his chief." Pearly, no one in New York has a golden room, not even the richest banker. It"s a waste of time. To steal that much gold would take a hundred years."
"That"s where you"re wrong," Pearly said." We"ll do it in a day."
"A day?"
"Like stealing poultry. And you think there"s no golden room? You"re wrong. There are many millions of rooms and enclosed s.p.a.ces in this city that stretches limitlessly down below the ground, up into the air, and into an infinite maze of streets. There might be more golden rooms in the city than there are stars in the heavens."
"How could that be?" asked Blacky Womble.
"Have you ever heard of Sarganda Street, or Diamond Row, or the Avenues of the Nines and Twenties?"
"In New York?"
"Indeeda"thoroughfares hundreds, thousands of miles long, that twist and coil and have branching from them innumerable intertwining streets each grander than the one before it."
"Are they in Brooklyn? I don"t know Brooklyn. No one does really. People always go there and never come back. Lotsa streets in Brooklyn n.o.body ever heard of, like Funyew-Ogstein-Crypt Boulevard."
"That"s some sort of Hebrew thing. But yes, they are in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan too. They run through each other, and are overlaid." Pearly"s eyes were electric lights. Blacky Womble didn"t always understand Pearly (especially when Pearly would send him out late at night to fetch a gallon of fresh paint), but he knew that Pearly got results, and he loved to watch him bristle and sweat, going at things like a wrestler or a boxer, unearthing treasures from the empty air, possessed and directed like an oracle." The Avenues of the Nines and Twenties are coiled around one another like two copulating snakes. They run for thousands of miles."
"In which direction, Pearly?" Up! Straight up!" answered Pearly, pointing at the dark ceiling, his eyes disappearing only to leave behind blank white eggs.
Blacky Womble, too, stared at the darkness, and saw gray ceilings and blue flashes. It was like being held over an infinitely deep pit.
He forgot about gravity. He flew. His eyes were swallowed up by the loom of streets that Pearly had opened to him for just that instant. When he returned, he found Pearly gazing into his face, all set for business, as calm and sober as a laundry clerk on the day after Christmas." Even if Sarganda Street and the Avenues of the Nines and "The only way to do it is to steal it from one of the gold carriers that come through the Narrows."
Blacky Womble was taken aback. The Short Tails were the best of the gangs, the most powerful, the most daring. But they had never even robbed a major bank, except once, and that was one of those temporary branches that could be broken into with a can opener. The gold carriers were out of the question. First, no one really knew when they made port, because they set their courses on random generators (wire cages inside of which tumbled surplus Mah-Jongg blocks engraved with longitudes and lat.i.tudes). These ships zigged and zagged over the seas in incredible patterns. For example, to go from Peru to New York, one of the fast carriers might call at Yokohama six timesa" though a nondelivery port call for a gold carrier consisted of saluting from fifty miles at sea with a blue flare, and then vanishing into the night and distance. There was no way to know where one would be and when; they abhorred the sea-lanes; their arrivals were swift and unexpected. In fact, most people in New York did not know of them. Bakers baked their endless rows of cookies; mechanics worked at oily engines that smelled of flint and steel; and bank clerks worked their lines, piecing out and taking in tiny sums through the organizational baleen of their graceful human hands, never knowing that the wealth of great kingdoms was all around them, filtering through the streets of lower Manhattan like a tide in the reeds.
Of the many millions, perhaps ten thousand had seen a gold carrier in the harbor or tied up at its fortified pier for half an hour of off-loading, and of these no more than a thousand or so had known what they had seen. Of this thousand, nine hundred were honest, and did not think of larceny. Of the hundred who did, fifty were broken-down wrecks, not even criminal enough to steal from themselves. Of the rest, twenty might have been able, but had turned their talents to other things (such as opera, publishing, and the military); twenty were qualified criminals but lacked organizational skills, followings, and resources; five came up with inept and laughable schemes; and four might have tried it but for fatal accidents, coincidental distractions, and sudden dyspepsiaa"which is not to say that they would have succeeded. The one left was Pearly Soames, but even for him it was almost an impossible task, as these ships were the fastest and most agile in the world. They were well armed and armored. Deep in their hulls were stupendous vaults that could be opened only when the ship docked at one of the fortified piers, and special extraction mechanisms had pulled from the hull a series of alloy steel rods which tightly caged time-locked doors behind which were ten high-security stalls where the gold was locked in explosive strongboxes. An army guarded each removal.
Though Blacky Womble was a Caucasian, he was blacker than cobalt, and unlike the rest of the Short Tails, he wore a shiny black leather jacket. His hair was meshed about his ears in frightening whorls much like the path of Sarganda Street. His teeth were the closest match there was to Pearly"s eyes. They were pointed like spires, serrated like long mountain ranges or inst.i.tutional bread knives, crescent-shaped like scimitars, as sharp as finely honed scalpels, as strong as bayonets. And yet, somehow, he had a gentle, pacifying smile that could have rocked a baby to sleep. Despite the teeth, he was a nice man (for a Short Tail). He knew that Pearly"s color gravity was all-consuming, that Pearly walked a thin line between madness and capability, always upping the stakes in service of his l.u.s.t for color, and thereby retaining the loyalty of the Short Tails in never failing to amaze them. But it had to crash sometime, and they were waiting for Pearly to lose his touch. Blacky thought the time had come.
"Pearly, I fear for you," he said directly.
Pearly laughed." You think I"ve gone around the bend."*I won"t tell anyone about this. I won"t say anything. That way, you can think it oa""
"It"s decided already. I"m going to tell the others. At the meeting."