The Screaming Statue, Page 3

  “Chubby is as chubby does,” he had said, somewhat confusingly, the one time Thomas had ventured to ask him about his name, which did not exactly suit. Chubby resembled nothing so much as a string bean, with a few features not normally found on the vegetable: a great knob of a nose, sharp elbows and knees, bright green eyes, and patchy straw-colored hair that poked out from beneath the filthy cap he always wore. He looked like a stiff wind might knock him backward.

  But he had a voice like a foghorn. Even from three blocks away, they could hear him bellowing: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

  “Heya, Chub,” Thomas said, waving.

  Chubby raised a paper to his hat in recognition, but kept on squawking: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

  “Does he ever breathe?” Pippa muttered. Pippa disliked Chubby, largely because he was always mispronouncing her name.

  As if he’d heard her, Chubby at last turned and sucked in a deep and wheezy breath. “Heya, Tom. Heya, Sam. Heya, Max. Heya, Philippa.”

  “It’s Pippa.” Pippa squeezed her hands into fists. Thomas knew she hated it when people called her by her full name.

  “Like you say.” Chubby grinned, showing off the huge gap in his long front teeth, which made his face look endearingly like a rabbit’s. He nudged Thomas. “She looks more like a pip-squeak though, don’t she?”

  Pippa looked as if she wanted to punch Chubby in his sunburned nose. Thomas changed the subject quickly before she could decide to do it. He was not altogether certain that Max wasn’t rubbing off on her. “What’s the latest, Chub?”

  “You heard the news?” Chubby asked. He pronounced “heard” as “hoid.” Pippa rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything. “This wacko Rattigan’s running loose in Chicago. Building an army on the sly. That’s what they say.” Even as he spoke, he managed to fob a newspaper onto a passing businessman, flipping the dime that was given to him from his palm to his pocket. “The coppers are offering one hundred dollars for a reward. Just my luck, huh? One hundred big ones on the table, and not a chance we get even a scratch.”

  “Oh? And if he was in New York, you think you’d be the one to bring him in?” Pippa said scornfully.

  Chubby’s expression shifted. He smiled slyly. “Why not? I hear lotsa things. See lotsa things, too. I got my nose to the street.”

  “You’ve got your ear to the street, you moron,” Pippa said.

  Chubby shrugged. “Yeah, sure, ears too.” He rocked back on his heels. “All’s I’m saying is, Rattigan better not show his mug around here or else.”

  Thomas couldn’t agree with Chubby more. Rattigan better stay far away, or else Thomas, Pippa, Max, and Sam were in serious danger. Just thinking about Rattigan—his long white fingers, like something dead you find floating in the water; his strange, twisted smile—made his stomach give an uncomfortable lurch, like he’d just eaten too many hot dogs. He decided to change the subject.

  “So how’s business?” he asked, and then quickly added, as Chubby disposed of another paper, this time to a woman wearing a hat that looked like an upside-down bowl, “The other business.”

  Chubby was the official head of an informal underground gambling ring. He collected bets from neighborhood kids on everything: whether it would rain or not on the Fourth of July, and which color fireworks would be the first to explode over the East River; whether the Yankees were going to win the home game; how many pigeons would perch at any one time on the head of Father Duffy’s statue in Times Square; the likelihood that Stewie Horowitz, the nearsighted delivery guy who worked for Manny’s deli, would get through the day without clobbering someone on his bicycle; and on and on. Thomas had had a string of good fortune on Chubby’s circuit. Chubby had regretfully banned him from placing wagers ever since, but there were no hard feelings.

  Chubby’s face fell. “Oh, yeah. That. Not so good since the flatfoots got wind of it.” He looked to Pippa and clarified, “The cops.”

  “I know what you meant,” she said haughtily. “The cops are just doing their job, you know, and I think it’s very rude of you to—”

  Max cut her off. “Don’t mind Pip,” she said, clapping Pippa so hard on the back that Pippa yelped. “She’s got a bad allergy to fun. Makes her pop out in hives all over her body, start itching like crazy.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Chubby scratched his forehead. “I got a peanut allergy. Makes my throat swell up like a balloon.”

  “I do not—” Pippa stuttered. Her face was the color of a storm cloud. “It does not.”

  Once again, Thomas jumped in, this time before Pippa could take a swing at Max. “Sorry to hear it, Chubby,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be up and running again soon.”

  “Yeah.” Chubby toed the sidewalk with a scuffed-up shoe.

  “Want a cookie?” Sam said, obviously hoping to cheer Chubby up. By now, the cookie had mostly disintegrated in his pocket, both from the heat and the fact that Sam had accidentally crushed it. Still, Chubby accepted the sticky mass of wax paper gratefully.

  His face brightened. “You been to Mr. E’s house?” he said.

  Thomas and Sam exchanged a look. “You know Mr. Eckleberger?” Thomas asked.

  “Sure I know Mr. E!” Chubby was happily unfolding the wax packet and shaking crumbs onto his tongue. Then he proceeded to lick the wax clean of chocolate. “He takes all the papers—every single one—and pays me extra to deliver ’em direct. Funny bird.” Chubby stared regretfully at the now-clean wax paper, as though debating whether he should feed it directly into his mouth. Instead, he crumpled it up and basket-tossed it into a nearby trash can. “Let me see here . . .” After licking clean his fingers, he began fumbling around in various pockets, fingers wiggling through the places where the lining had worn thin. Finally, Chubby fished something out of his pocket: a silver medallion, fitted with a faded silk ribbon. “Check it out,” he said. Thomas saw that Eckleberger’s name was inscribed in the silver. “Mr. E gave it to me for Christmas. He’s a good egg, even if he has got a funny kind of name. He said it would bring me good luck.” He frowned. “So far, it ain’t working.” He slipped the medallion back into his pocket and leaned in, as though about to confess a deep secret. “It ain’t just the cops who got it in for me. There’s something even worse. There—”

  All of a sudden, he stiffened. His eyes became unfocused, and his face went white with terror. His mouth worked up and down, up and down, like a horse trying to chew through a bit.

  “What is it?” Thomas cried out. “What’s the matter?”

  “Are you all right?” Sam started to put hand on Chubby’s shoulder, and then obviously thought better of it.

  “It’s—her,” Chubby choked out, his eyes still blazing with terror. “You gotta hide me. You gotta help me! Don’t—let—her—take—me.”

  “Don’t let who take you?” Thomas asked.

  But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he felt a shadow fall over them, as though an enormous cloud had skated over the sky. He smelled the sickening perfume, a mix of rotted fruit and mothballs. And he felt the hideous breath tickle the back of his neck.

  “Why helloooo, children!” Andrea von Stikk trilled. Thomas, Sam, Max, and Pippa turned slowly to face her, while Chubby cowered behind them, making small whimpering noises.

  Andrea von Stikk was wearing her typical getup, despite the sweltering heat: an enormous dress that had been out of fashion for the past twenty years; gloves trimmed with dead animal; and a hat that could have doubled as an umbrella in a sudden storm. Her face was so red it reminded Thomas of a stewed tomato. Her eyes were like two small bruises, simultaneously puffy and sunken. Her mouth was arranged in a customary expression of self-satisfaction. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said in her falsetto. “Alone again, I see. Mr. Dumfrey left you to go wandering about the city on your own, did he?”

  “We’re not kids,” Sam said. “We go where we like.”

  “Mr. Dumfrey had an important business appointment,” Thomas said.

/>   “Oh, yes.” Andrea narrowed her eyes so much, they practically disappeared. Her tone turned sour. “Adding to his little . . . collection, isn’t he? I heard. Just what this city needs. Another freak.”

  Max made a strangled noise. Her hand moved to her pocket. Thomas grabbed her wrist and shook his head. He knew Max wouldn’t think twice about puncturing Von Stikk like an overpuffed balloon.

  “What do you mean, he’s adding to his collection?” Pippa asked.

  But Von Stikk had spotted Chubby. “Leonard? Leonard! What are you doing skulking around back there?”

  “Leonard?” Max repeated, looking as if she had just swallowed her tongue.

  Chubby straightened up with a groan.

  “Surely you don’t think Chubby is an appropriate name for a nice young man,” Andrea von Stikk snapped, eyeing Max warily. She had obviously not forgotten about the time Max had punctured her hand with a fork.

  “Nice young man?” Max’s eyes nearly popped.

  Andrea von Stikk licked a finger and began vigorously scrubbing at a smear of chocolate on Chubby’s—Leonard’s—cheek. Chubby looked a bit like a wild dog that had been forced into a tutu and required to perform tricks. Andrea von Stikk prattled happily on, “There now. Much better. You would be so handsome, Leonard, if you only learned to care for yourself a little better. Once you’re at school—”

  “You’re going to school?” Sam interjected. Chubby only grimaced.

  “Of course he is,” Andrea von Stikk said. “Leonard will be one of the first students at the Von Stikk School for Underprivileged Youths. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Wonderful,” Thomas said, sharing a smile with Sam.

  Only a few months earlier, Andrea von Stikk had been threatening to remove Sam, Thomas, Pippa, and Max from the museum for another one of her projects: Von Stikk’s Home for Extraordinary Children. Luckily, the home had suffered a run of bad publicity after two of Andrea von Stikk’s wards simply vanished. Thomas was convinced they’d run away—nearly anything was better than Andrea von Stikk’s particular brand of “care,” and he was quite sure he’d rather live on the streets than be subjected to her ice pick of a voice every day.

  Miss von Stikk had apparently decided that wrangling publicly with Mr. Dumfrey would bring her more trouble than it was worth, and had launched into a new endeavor in order to redeem her name: a charitable school for runaways, criminals, and, apparently, paperboys.

  Help me, Chubby mouthed as Andrea von Stikk placed a meaty arm around his shoulder and began piloting him down the road.

  “Come along, come along,” she was saying. “We have to get you fitted for your new uniform. And of course you’ll need a haircut . . . and what is that smell?”

  “Poor Chubby,” said Sam, shaking his head.

  “Better him than us, Sam,” Thomas said, clapping Sam on the back and then wincing. It felt like hitting a brick wall. “Better him than us.”

  They heard shouting just before they turned onto Forty-Third Street. Thinking immediately of trouble at the museum, they began moving faster, and tore around the corner as a group.

  Several doors down, a man with skin the exact color and texture of ancient parchment was surrounded by a group of kids Max vaguely recognized from the streets. There were five of them. Ruffians, pickpockets, and petty thieves, they traveled in packs, like wild dogs. They were hooting and pegging the old man with eggs—rotten eggs, Max knew, from the stink of sulfur in the shimmering hot air.

  Pippa stopped walking. Her mouth fell open, as if her jaw had become unhinged. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

  Max cupped a palm over her nose. Her skin still smelled a little like chocolate chips. “Believe what?”

  “That’s Eli Sadowski,” Pippa said in a hushed voice, as if she were saying unicorn or winged fairy. “Or maybe it’s his brother, Aaron. I can never tell them apart. I’ve hardly ever seen them, except in the window. They never leave their apartment during the day. Ever.”

  “I can see why,” Max said, still speaking through her palm. She had heard of the hermit brothers who lived at 346 Forty-Third Street. According to neighborhood legend, the Sadowski brothers were eccentric millionaires who ate nothing but crackers and canned peaches and only emerged at night to scavenge junk from the streets. Though no visitor had been inside their home in fifty years, rumor had it that every inch of their sprawling five-bedroom apartment was crammed from top to bottom with everything from towering heaps of old clothing to ceiling-high stacks of newspapers dating back to the Civil War. Max had occasionally seen their narrow faces peering down at the street from an upstairs window. But she had never seen them up close.

  The old man was dressed in a high-collared velvet jacket that must have been stifling—and had surely gone out of style a hundred years earlier. His whole outfit, in fact, looked as if it had been plucked from the grave of a long-dead man. He was wearing ruffled shirtsleeves and a top hat, dusty boots with small brass buttons, and high-waisted pants, all of it covered with a fine, clinging sheen of egg.

  Thomas was already sprinting down the street. “Hey!” he shouted, waving his arms, as if the group of teenagers were a pack of pigeons, and he hoped to frighten them into flight. “Leave him alone! Hey!”

  The kids barely spared him a glance. They continued shoving the terrorized old man as he tried unsuccessfully to fight his way out of their circle.

  “Leave. Him. Alone.” Thomas had just reached the assembled group. A kid with shaggy dark hair was reaching for another egg. Thomas grabbed his arm and tried to stop him. The boy with shaggy hair shook Thomas off easily, and his friend—a tall boy wearing a battered hat, with buckteeth and a mean, stupid look—gave Thomas a hard shove. Thomas sprawled backward on the pavement.

  “Awww, how cute.” The boy with the shaggy hair grinned, displaying a mouth missing several teeth. “The little rat wants to play, too.” And he cracked the egg in his hand, letting the mess and the stink dribble down over Thomas’s shirtfront.

  Now it was Pippa and Sam’s turn to shout. Max felt a sudden hot surge of anger, like a bright light exploding in her mind. She had always hated bullies. She dropped a hand into her pocket and felt the familiar weight of her knives, a calming force, like a good-luck charm. Just as Pippa reached Thomas and dropped to her knees to help him up, Max threw. For a moment, both blades glittered together like a single weapon; then the wind broke them apart, as Max had expected, as she had felt.

  One knife whipped the hat right off the bucktoothed boy’s head, hitting only a few inches above his hairline. He went stiff and white as if he’d suffered a physical blow. At the same time, his shaggy-haired friend let out a tremendous howl. He had dropped his carton of eggs and was clutching the top of his head—where the second blade had shaved his hair all the way down to the scalp, before embedding itself in the exterior wall of the Sadowskis’ apartment building. The three other boys stood gaping, too stupid and surprised to react.

  Pippa had just helped Thomas to his feet. As Max approached, she could hear Pippa yammering on in a very Pippa-like way.

  “Terrible . . . ought to be ashamed . . . terrorizing an old man . . . disgusting . . . raised by wolves!” She jabbed a finger into the bucktoothed boy’s chest as he sniffled.

  “Are you going to let some girl push you around, Robbie?” Another boy in the group spoke up, although Max thought he sounded nervous. He had a face full of acne, and dandruff flaked from his scalp like a swirling, personal snowstorm. He and a redheaded boy had poor Sadowski pinned between them. The old man looked as if he might crumble to dust at any moment. He stood blinking eggs from his eyes and opening and closing his mouth, as if he wanted to scream but couldn’t remember how.

  “Shut up, Scratchy,” the bucktoothed boy, Robbie, muttered. He was still white in the face and keeping a good distance from Max, but he turned his attention back to Pippa. “Get your fat finger out of my face, or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Thomas’s hands were clenched, and ev
en his hair stood up wildly, as if it, too, were angry.

  “We’ll send you screaming back to last Sunday.” The redhead, whom Max had originally mistaken for a boy, spoke up. Max saw that she was, in fact, a very square and very ugly girl, with the squashed face and speckled complexion of the frogs that sometimes washed, belly-up, onto the concrete banks of the East River.

  Max realized that she knew her—Gertrude was her name, though everyone knew her as the Crab, because of her reputation for pinching anything that wasn’t nailed down, and even, occasionally, things that were. The Crab would steal the cross off a nun or a pacifier from the mouth of a baby. “We know what you are,” the Crab went on, her eyes narrowed to little slits in the flesh of her face. “You’re the filthy little monsters from that freakhouse down the street.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Pippa snapped.

  Gertrude sneered. “Try and make me, freak.”

  “Don’t call her that.” Max wished, now, that she hadn’t thrown both her knives. The Crab’s face was as red and swollen as a bull’s-eye. Max’s fingers were itching to feel the smooth handle of her knife, the grooves that matched the impression of her fingertips, the blades as sharp as a predator’s teeth. She longed to stake the Crab right in the middle of the forehead and watch her face deflate like a balloon.

  “Freak?” The Crab grinned. “You don’t like that word, do you, freak?”

  Max dropped and scooped up the first thing she could reach: a battered leather shoe, which had somehow gravitated to the gutter. She was shouting without realizing it. “We’re not the freaks! You’re the freaks! Nothing better to do than pick on an old man! Why don’t you try messing with someone your own decade, you pickle-faced bully!”

  She threw. The shoe clocked Gertrude directly in the forehead. Gertrude staggered but didn’t loosen her grip on Sadowski. A low growl worked its way from Gertrude’s throat and began to peak, crest, and turn to a scream.

  “Get her!” she screeched. A vivid red bruise was already forming on her head, exactly where the heel of the old shoe had imprinted it. “Get that lousy little worm!”