Winter's Tale, Page 2

  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 Highlands—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 buttocks.

  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 balls. 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 bump 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 overbrimming 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 unobserved. 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 Gypsy—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 took 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 apron, 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 apron, “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 fashionable 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 him—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 clamdiggers 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 spacious 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 without their approval was likely to vanish forever into the roaring clouds which swept over the mirrorlike waters. New Jersey had decided once 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 high-speed 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.

  “Damn!” 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 shore, bands of 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 workers. There were also vendors, anticipating 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, molasses-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 passengers were either dead or saved and the firemen could not hope to extinguish the flames 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 river as 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 them, 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 embarrassed 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 goddamned heads. They drove him crazy with their needs, their assumptions, and their innocence. He wanted to smash their assumptions 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.