City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (4 page)

“Thirty! Thirty minutes!”

“Twenty-five!”

The terrier took its time, waiting to get the rats it could grab in one bite. They let them out ten at a time, every few minutes, and the dog broke them all with the same sure, efficient shake—
So like a cat,
Kid marveled—or it ripped their throats out, or bit their heads off, whatever was quickest. It had been well trained.

“How many? How many?”

The dog paused, seeing everything dead in the ring around it, and gave its paw a short, satisfied lick. The next ten rats ran out, swift and furtive as a fog, and the killing began again.

“That’s fifteen! No—nineteen!”

The rats careened around the sides of the ring, they tried to scramble up the five-foot walls. Some of them hoisted themselves, somehow, all the way over the top—only to be flung back into the pit by the roaring, jeering crowd.

“That’s thirty! At least thirty!”

Kid could see the dog was starting to tire, but he kept up a champion’s steady, killing pace. It was harder to maneuver, the pit floor slippery with rat blood and rat pieces now, the long, gray creatures burrowing and gnawing under the carcasses of their own to get away from the pitiless, snapping jaws.

“Clean the pit! Clean the pit! It’s not fair!” the same drunken clerk who had assured Kid you couldn’t fix the game cried out—as brokenhearted as if he’d lost his only sweetheart. His friends took up the call.

“Clean the pit!”

“Hazard of the game, hazard of the game!” the short-bettors yelled back at them.

It didn’t matter; Shadrach the dog had a second wind. She spotted the live ones by the twitches of their long, scaly tails, dragged them back and ripped their life out. Kid put more finiffs up high and low, to cover himself, then tried to gauge the action and hit the middle.

He glanced over at Gyp the Blood, across the pit—who was not trying to lay any more wagers at all. He stared evenly down at the ring instead, black eyes patient and luminous. The Kid had a bad feeling.

“How many?”

The rat door slid up again, and another ten rodents tumbled into the pit. Seeing so many of their own already heaped up around the ring they went for the dog now, out of sheer terror and desperation.

This was where a rat-baiting always got interesting. They ran right at the terrier, leaping at her legs and face and throat. She was able to bat the first couple down with her paws but then one got past her, tearing at one of her forelegs near the shoulder. Then another, and another, until they were hanging from her snout and ruff and legs, clutching on by their awful little jaws.

The dog gave a low, plaintive howl. She managed to shake some of them off, leaving ragged red tears through her wiry fur. They rolled over and jumped right back on, clinging to her with all their strength.

The small boy invisible behind the ring wall slid open the door for the next ten rats. These were bigger rats than the others, a black, greasy color, leaner and longer. Kid smelled a fix. He beckoned to the closest bookkeep to cover himself.

“No bets! No more bets!” the man declared, snapping shut his little black book—but under Kid’s steady gaze he came over and took his wager anyway. Looking across the ring, Kid saw that Gyp was still gazing down imperturbably at the action; the faces of the boys around him gleamed with excitement.

“Cover me on a wash,” Kid told the bookkeep.

Sure enough, the dog was tiring fast now; it had lost some blood. The big, bold new rats ran right for her throat. The proud little fox terrier stood her ground, knocking them aside, ripping the snout right off one, which went tumbling away with a horrible, wounded squealing. But she was losing blood, and the rats kept coming. One of them leapt up and got itself wedged halfway down her throat, so the dog couldn’t use her jaws. She fell back on her haunches, flailing away—then on her side, still fighting, the slick black rats scratching and scrambling over each other to get at her.

“No more! That’s enough, she’s had
enough!”

Weisberg the trainer leaped over into the pit to rescue his dog, stomping at the rats. When he came in the ring, some of the rodents were still so frenzied they leapt at
him,
hanging from his pants and sleeves. He brushed them off without a second glance, grinding their heads under his boot heels. He had eyes only for his dog, trembling on the ground, her ruff and throat steeped in blood. He cradled her head in his arms, wrapped her up in his coat and carried her from the ring.

“My poor girl,” he crooned to her, the dog’s alert little eyes still shining up at him. “My poor girl, what’ve they done for you?”

“There’s no throwin’ in the towel here!” one of the boys near Gyp called out, disappointed not to see the finish—any finish.

“Water rats! Water rats!” the clerk and his friends chanted now, looking around them for the bookies.

“Fix, fix!”

A few of the Baxter Street Dudes had hurried down into the pit, pushing Weisberg away from the rats and rushing to corral them back into their cages. Gyp and his entourage still sat gloating quietly by the ring, the bookies hovering around them defensively.

The crowd surged sullenly out toward the makeshift bar in the back, planks set up over trash barrels, while the older boys kept trying to round up the rats, yelping and clutching at their fingers as they skittered around the ring. The younger boys doled out the whiskey and took the dough, lanks of hair hanging down in their eyes, scrambling up on crates to reach over the bar.

A few trimmers moved around the crowd, trying to find the smiling winners. Most of them were no older than the Dudes themselves, Kid noticed, hoisting up their paper-thin dresses to hide their tubercular chests and necks. They found their marks, and slid their arms around their necks, settled into them as confidently as another girl their age might be sliding into her daddy’s lap.

Kid would just as soon have taken off then: he had broken even, more or less, maybe even a few dollars ahead on the night, and he would just as soon not have talked to Gyp the Blood. Spanish Louie was ready to go: the Grabber hadn’t showed after all and there were no mollies on hand to impress with his twirling moustachios and matching, inlaid-pearl-handled Mexican revolvers.

The trouble was how to get past Gyp at the bar. Kid had a pop in each coat pocket, and a good blade in his vest watch pocket, and a razor in his shoe, and as a last resort there was a blackjack in a back pocket, but he still didn’t like the odds. Gyp had his boys with him, Lefty Louie and Dago Frank and Whitey Lewis, and he had only Spanish Louie, who made a very good killer if this was a nickelodeon show.

There was no hope for it, though; the current of prostitutes and boy gangsters and sporting swells forced them up toward the bar, and by the time they got there Gyp was already holding court like the King of Siam, seated in a huge rattan chair the ever-resourceful Dudes had acquired somehow. He peeled a few bills off the enormous wad he had won, handed it to Dago Frank for the boy behind the bar.

“This round’s on me,” he called, and the crowd around him cheered and bellowed, and pressed in closer.

“Hullo, Kid,” he said when Kid came up, face to face with him, with Whitey Lewis and Lefty leaning eagerly over their boss’s shoulders, smiling evilly as a couple of watchdogs on a long leash—while at the same time Kid could sense the less-than-reassuring efforts of Spanish Louie to hide behind his back.

“Hiya, Lazar,” he said, trying to use his real name to throw him off. The Gyp’s eyes never wavered—except to flick over to a newsie and some clerks who had moved too close to his right shoulder, a boy carrying a shovelful of dead rats over to the trash barrel. He picked up everything, and he was goddamned quick, Kid knew.

“You had the run of ’em tonight—”

“You thought anymore about what I said you oughta think about?” Gyp cut him off, picking his nails with a stiletto sharp as glass and concealable as a toothpick. The papers made out that Gyp read philosophy in his spare time, and that his favorite authors were Voltaire and Darwin, and Huxley and Herbert Spencer, but somehow Kid really didn’t think philosophy was the man’s major preoccupation.

“Leave it alone, Gyp, that’s cop business. Let ’em take care of it their own selves, we don’t gotta do their dirty work for ’em.”

“Gyp’? You’re Gyp the Blood?” It was the drunken clerk he had heard talking so ignorantly outside the Grand Duke’s.

“Sure,” said Gyp, keeping a cold, speculative eye on Kid.

“Is it true what
they
say? Is it true you can break a man over your knee on a bet?”

“You wanna find out?”

When he said that the Kid began to back away, right hand reaching as surreptitiously as possible into his coat pocket. He saw that Lefty Louie and Whitey Lewis were reaching into their own pockets—though Gyp himself never moved.

“Hell, yes!” the clerk snorted greedily. “I’d pay to see that!”

Gyp’s terrible eye stayed on Kid.

“It’s gonna happen,” he said. “The question is whether you’re on that train or not.”

“Well? Is it true?” the clerk demanded.

Gyp looked at the man for the first time while the Kid kept moving back, circling around a little to Gyp’s right.

“You wanna know? Then make the play.”

“How’s that?” the clerk asked, a little unsteadily now.

“Two dollars. Make the play.”

“All right, sure,” the clerk laughed nervously, figuring he was being put on, and he pulled a couple of silver dollars from his vest pocket and dropped them in Gyp’s lap.

“I’ll bite. Who’s it gonna be?”

Without another word, Gyp grabbed the clerk by his tie and yanked him down, smashing his knee into the man’s face. His legs buckled, and Gyp tossed him over his lap, face up, and held him tight by the neck and legs.

“All right, you wanna see?”

The whole room was suddenly quiet, everyone pressing in to stare, the newsie, the trimmers, the Baxter Street Dudes. Only Kid kept moving, working his way slowly around until he was just behind the Gyp’s right shoulder. He noticed that Whitey Lewis’s and Dago Frank’s eyes were off him, fixed on the clerk themselves. The boy who had been scooping up rats stood beside him, shovel lowered to his side.

“Two dollars.”

The clerk’s eyes were dazed and round, he was too terrified even to beg, choking up little yellow spurts of vomit over his mouth and face. He was a slight man, Kid could see, pathetically small and helpless over Gyp’s legs in his rumpled suit, worn bowler wobbling around on the floor.

Gyp looked up at the rest of them. Then, without further warning, he lifted the clerk up and pressed him down—bringing his knees up as he did.

“One, two,
three!”

—right, left, and right again; three distinct cracks louder than pistol shots reverberated through the room. The clerk screamed like a woman, and Gyp pocketed his coins.

“Two dollars.”

He tossed the wreckage of the clerk onto the floor, beside his hat, where he still flopped about, no longer a man, arms and legs paralyzed, unable even to scream anymore or do anything other than make short, terrible, gasping noises.

“Any more action?”

A low, impressed murmur ran through his audience and then everyone was talking at once. Men were pushing forward, waving their money in the air, ignoring the clerk still gasping in the dirt. Gyp’s watchdogs were pounding him enthusiastically on the back; they had forgotten all about Kid now.

“Who’s next?” Gyp cried out, and the crowd surged forward.

“Do it again! Do it again!”

“I wanna
see
it this time!”

“Who’s it gonna be?”

They stopped short as Gyp turned his fierce eyes on them all, waiting for his selection. Then his great hands reached out and grabbed the newsboy, before anything could stop him, before even the newsie himself realized they were upon him.

That was when Kid felt the rat collector’s shovel in his hands, the boy himself oblivious that he had taken it, his attention riveted on the action. Gyp the Blood laid the newsboy out across his knees, gauging his height and weight, one hand rubbing contemplatively over his throat.

“This one’ll take a short shot,” he grinned, and the crowd laughed appreciatively.

He turned back to his prey, preparing to break the boy’s back with one thrust of his knee—and it was then that Kid lifted the shovel up over his head and brought it down as hard as he could right along the part line of Gyp’s fine, jet-black shock of hair. He didn’t know why he did it, he never would know why, but it was done and what was done could not be undone, particularly not Gyp the Blood’s fractured scalp. The next thing he knew all the bummies and the Dudes and the slumming shipping clerks were shouting, and the mabs and goohs were screaming, and everyone was going for the stairs—

Kid brushed a couple of the trimmers out of the way and leapt up on the first step. Some sporting gent in a top hat loomed ahead of him, coming down the steps, his mouth agape, hands still buttoning his fly, just coming down from God only knew what for still more fun. The Kid kicked him in the balls and flung him aside, still making for the door, Spanish Louie and the little newsie glued to his side. A couple of the Baxter Street Dudes tried to stop him at the top of the stairs and it was too close even to get a pop out but he ploughed the flat of his hand into the first one’s nose until it was halfway back in his head and backhanded the second one away and then they were free—up on the ground floor, and out the front door.

Behind him, he could hear more screams as Gyp’s boys started to blam away, cutting a path through the crowd, but he didn’t look back, he didn’t look back until they were out the door and long gone down Baxter Street and all the way over to the Bowery—a couple of wild, hopeless long shots clanging off the lampposts behind them like hail on a tin roof, a few distant curses and cries rising up from the dark streets, and then they were back among civilization (if that’s what you could ever call the Bowery) leaving only the question of what the hell did he do now that he had mortally offended the most dangerous lunatic in New York?