Paradise Alley (10 page)

That was when the woman began to scream again.

“Food! Food! Food!”

He heard it, too. She could see he did, that it wasn't just her, the way he cocked his large, terrible head to one side. Listening as a dog might. Sizing up the sound with perfect, blank-faced equanimity, then scratching hard at one of the bright-red boils above his right ear.

“Food! FOOD!”

He tucked his butchering knife back into his boot, and looking back up at Ruth, gave her a command for the first time.

“C'mon!”

She hauled the pieces of dog along for him, able to keep from jamming the still-warm flesh and organs in her mouth only by thinking of what he was liable to do to her if she should. Instead she followed him down a row of cabins. Barely able to keep up with him, he moved so rapidly in that odd scuttle. He was obviously in much better health than she was, still strong and quick. Not even looking ill-fed, though where he could have found that much food she could scarcely imagine—

The screaming grew louder, the woman's voice sounding as if she were in mortal agony, and he began to walk even faster. At last they reached the house it was coming from, Ruth panting with the effort. The man looked at her curiously, waiting for her to catch up—then he pushed the door of the house open and stared hard into the gloomy inside. He walked in, motioning for Ruth to join him. She did as he wanted, though the stench inside was terrible, worse even than in the death cabins, and she swayed and tried to back out. But he only grabbed her by the arm, holding her where she was.

“Stay! I might need ye,” he insisted, and pointed to the straw bed, in the corner of a dark room.

They lay there under the blanket, the woman and her husband, or at least that was who Ruth assumed they were. She thought it likely, for they were both very handsome, or at least they had been. The man still alive but too weak to do anything save move his eyes back and forth, his mouth stuck open. The woman lying flat on her back as well. Her eyes unseeing, staring up into the roof thatch. Still screaming out that single word to the heavens:

“Food!
Food!
”

And yet, Ruth could see, it was too late for food. All of their teeth were gone, her's and her husband's, their cheeks caved in like old grandparents. The skin already beginning to change. The man tall, with a broad chest. The woman with dark brown eyes, large in her head now, and her hair streaked with white. All but helpless now—

The man who had saved her from the dogs drew out his knife and picked at one edge of the blanket, turning it slowly off them. They made no objection, but lay where they were, the man still silent, his wife still screaming futilely. The two of them fully dressed, she saw—but their clothes burst through where their arms and legs had swelled up at the joints. She could not keep from looking at it, the dark patches of blood so thick under their skin it looked almost black.

The dog killer let the blanket fall and walked back out of the house, Ruth following him as fast as she could move. He squatted down in a little circle of white stones by the side of the cabin, a place where a vegetable garden had been before it was stripped bare, even the shriveled husks pulled out by their roots. There he picked up one of the white rocks, weighing it in his hand—then told Ruth to do the same.

“No,” she said immediately, and regretted her bluntness as soon as the word had left her mouth. Yet he was almost gentle, this once, in his response.

“We'll need somethin' heavier than the stick. They're not dogs, you know—”

“I'll have nothin' to do with that,” she told him.

“Won't ya now.”

He reached over, grabbing hard along her arm.

“You will tell me what you'll do an' not do, will ya—”

She tried to shake herself loose from him, but he held on to her arm.

“Goddamnit, it's the black leg! Ye must've seen it before,” he cursed at her. “There's not a thing to be done for it!”

“Still, I won't have it on my soul.”

The dog killer snorted at this.

“Your soul! Worry about your belly first.”

“FOOD!”

He scratched fiercely at his head again, listening to the woman inside.

“Besides,” he muttered, “that screaming's got to stop.”

He picked up the large white marker stone again and walked back in. She waited out in the ravaged garden while he did it. She could have run, down into the bog, or hidden herself in one of the cabins, and she didn't know that he would have come after her.

But instead she waited, standing in the garden. That was the decision she made then, knowing she could not last much longer without him. Standing in the garden, feeling the east wind blow through her hair. Waiting until she heard the woman stop—

After a few more minutes, the man came out of the house again, carrying the bloodied stone in his hand. He walked out and hurled it as far away as he could, out into the bog. Then he turned his eyes back upon her.

•
11
•

He walked up past the jewelers' and watchmakers' shops along Maiden Lane, looking idly at all the shiny sparks and fawneys in their windows and thinking what an easy smash-and-hoist job they would make—

And what about my treasures?
The whole collection of them he had hauled across the sea, miraculously safe behind their own glass case. His cabinet of wonders.
Where were they now?

He didn't want to think too closely on that, just yet.
Most likely sold it off, or junked it.
Ruth had never appreciated what a thing like that was worth. No one had, once they'd reached Amerikay, which he had never understood. It had paid for their whole passage over, after all, and that was just peddling it through some Dublin popshop. Yet they had only laughed at him in that saloon Finn McCool had taken them to, cracked it and jumbled it all up, then handed it back to him.

Some plan to cheat him, no doubt—as she had done. Well, he would find out what it was worth now, one way or the other—

He turned north on Pearl Street, following it up through the Bowery. The sounds of dice and piano music already coming through the doors of the theatres and the free-and-easy halls along the street, even this early in the morning. The bars festooned with large window signs, advertising their attractions—

The Handsomest Young Lady Waiter Girls in the City!

We still live—beautiful danseuses, charming lady vocalists, attractive ballet troop!

Who Complains of Hard Times?? Free Lunch!

He stumbled, jostled by the crowd, though all of them seemed to be moving with him, toward the north. No doubt some new sensation of the City.
An opera singer or a stuffed ape, anything that would hold their interest for a few minutes.
He stared all about himself, a sense of panic rising in his stomach. Still not used to so many people after all those years in the prison—

That was when he saw the face. Looming above the crowds of sailors and shipwrights, teamsters and longshoremen moving slowly around the corner into Catherine Street.
His
face—Patrick's face. The one he had almost given over looking for, even in crowds.

Yet there it was. Taller than Dolan had thought he would be, but the right age. It might not be him. There were only so many faces in the world, and he thought he had glimpsed traces of it before, along Broadway, and on the Embarcadero, and all the way back in Dublin, for that matter.

Still, it
looked
like Patrick, the same distracted but friendly eyes, mouth slightly addled into a lopsided smile. It half-turned, to look back at something, and in profile it looked so much like Patrick that Dolan tried to fight his way up the crowd to him, forgetting everything else he had come to the City for.

But he was no longer so good at maneuvering his way along crowded sidewalks as he had been. He tried to shove his way past, only to run smack into more backs, and elbows. He followed the face—followed
Patrick—
on up the Bowery, unable to close the gap between them at all. Until just before Grand Street, when he was no more than ten yards behind, the face vanished, as abruptly as if it had dropped into the sea.

Dolan bulled his way through to the place where he had last seen it, but it was no use. He looked into every bar and store along the block, even knocking on the doors of homes, despite the risk. All useless. He tried to stammer out a description of the face he had seen, of Patrick, to the curious, wary faces that peered out at him. But it was as if he had forgotten how to speak their language. His words tumbled out in rough, useless fragments, which only further served to frighten them—

The face of me brother? Mine! Only younger. Like a boy, do ye have him?

The people he tried to speak to only shook their heads, and moved quickly back into the gloom of their houses and tenements. Dolan felt the old rage growing in him, but he kept it down. It just confirmed his decision not to board in some house. He was well past being able to talk civilly with people, to even seem fully human—

He backed out into the middle of the street, moving heedlessly around the horses and carts. Still wondering if there were some place he might have missed, some slit of an alley. They were common down here, he remembered, and most of them barely wide enough to fit a man. The young divers and hoisters used to light out for them when the police came down the waterfront—

Finally he spotted what he was searching for. A wide, dead-end cut, knee-deep in mud between two buildings on the east side of the street. Cat Alley, as he remembered. It was empty, but maybe there was another alley, a door at its end. He started down it, so engrossed in his search that he didn't see the man coming up behind him, the arm reaching out for him.

“Dolan!
Dangerous
Johnny Dolan!”

The voice boomed above his head. Arms as thick and long as a bear's grasping him around the shoulders.

“Dolan, it
is
you, ain't it? When the hellja get back?”

He let himself go limp, thinking he would have only one chance if it was the police, one opportunity to go for the long knife in his boot. But the great bear arms let him go, and turning he saw another familiar face, one he remembered by the huge protuberance that sprawled across it.

“Big Nose Bunker,” he said in wonder, more to himself than the large man in front of him.

“That's right!” Bunker grinned, clapping him on the shoulder. “Ya knew me, too! Ah, there's the boy.”

He remembered Bunker from when he had run with the Dead Rabbits.
A thief, but never much of one for mixing it up despite his size.
Now he looked nearly middle-aged—run to fat, his huge chest and belly crammed into a soiled black-and-yellow-checkered suit. He laughed unpleasantly and nudged Dolan with his elbow.

“I ain't seen you since Old Man Noe got his. Was it true what they said?”

“What's that?”

“You
know.
”

“No. I don't know.”

“
You know—
that you used to keep his eye in your pocket? The one you gouged out?”

Dolan stood for a moment in the entrance of the alley, shifting his weight from foot to foot while he thought. Bunker grinning obscenely at him through his thick, greasy whiskers—the whiskey and onion smell on his breath nearly sickening him, so like the hose he had sucked up to in The Yellow Man. Big Nose was always a free one with the velvet, as he remembered. It wouldn't take more than two or three drinks and he'd be telling everyone who'd listen that he had seen Dangerous Johnny Dolan himself on the Bowery, big as life.

“C'mon! I'll be dumb as an oyster!”

He grinned back at Bunker.

“C'mere,” he said, reaching out to put a hand around his shoulders and drawing him deeper into the alleyway.

“C'mere. You wanna see somethin', I'll show ya—”

Big Nose walked right down the alley with him, still grinning lasciviously. Dolan smiling back at him, his arm firmly on his shoulder, until he was sure they were far enough down to be invisible from the street. Cat Alley hooked off to the right, and ended at the back of a derelict building. He remembered it. There were huge gaps in the brickwork of the abandoned building—enough for a man to pass through, clean out to Chrystie Street on the other side—

He stood before Bunker, still grinning, and pulled his thumb gouger out of his pocket—pretending to fumble it into one of the bright orange-and-yellow crates. Big Nose went for it at once, leaning over as far as his bulk would permit him, straining to see the disembodied eye of James Noe. Dolan shook his head in disgust, even as he reached for the knife in his boot.

As if an eye would last that long—

Big Nose saw the blade coming at the last moment, out of the corner of one eye, and stuck up his hand to block it. Normally that would have made no difference, but Dolan was still off, from the yellow jack and his night in the alley, and all those years in the prison. He half-staggered to one side, slashed wildly at Bunker's hand, and sliced off most of four fingers before Big Nose could stumble back, his eyes wide.

“Jay-sus, Johnny!” he protested, sounding affronted more than hurt as he stared down, uncomprehending, at his severed digits in the alley mud.

“Jay-sus, I ain't got any money, you know—”

“No. No, but you got a tongue now, don't ya!”

This time he pushed the knife, thick and sharp as a butcher's blade, right through Bunker's hand and into his gut. Big Nose wheezed out a scream, but they were too far down the alley and it went unheard amid all the hubbub of commerce, the roll of barrels and the horses and wagons and the shouts of men, marching along the street. He struck again and again, six times in all, aiming for the killing spot, the vital organs and arteries, before Bunker went down. Silent now but still looking a little baffled. A big, beefy slab of a man, falling slowly to his knees and then keeling over, face first in the mud. Johnny stood over him for a moment, wiped his blood on the tail of Bunker's coat, then leaned down and rifled quickly through his pockets, just in case.

“Ah, goddamn ya, Big Nose,” he cursed under his breath, coming up empty-handed, without even some battered old copper watch he could pawn.

“Ya always was a fine one for the truth.”

He ducked quickly through the crumbling building then, back out onto Chrystie Street. There he fell seamlessly into the crowd, marching with the rest of them to the north, forgetting about the face of his brother for the moment.