Eye of the Crow (4 page)

But today he doesn’t see anyone who matters, because the front page of the paper stops him in his tracks. “
MURDERER FOUND!
” it proclaims. There under the headline is a crude drawing of a young man named Mohammad Adalji, depicted with a big, hooked nose and nearly black skin. “It seems an Arab did the dirty deed,” reads the first line. Sherlock scans the story, “… lives not five blocks from the scene … found with a butcher knife … blood … to be bound over today at approximately 9:00 a.m…. the Old Bailey Courthouse.”

Sherlock had heard the faint bong of Big Ben just as he snatched the paper. Nine o’clock. The Old Bailey: it’s only minutes away.

He turns and runs.

The crowd is still gathering when he arrives, spilling out into the road waiting for the murderer. Sherlock jostles his way up to the front, hearing men and women cursing the Arab and his horrible crime. Some clutch rotting vegetables and even broken bricks in their hands. Nearly a
dozen Bobbies, London’s respected policemen, stand nervously nearby, gripping their rock-hard, black truncheons in their hands.

On the north side of the Old Bailey looms infamous Newgate Prison, where “the Jew,” Fagin, was held in one of Sherlock’s favorite novels, Mr. Dickens’
Oliver Twist.
The scaffold is always placed directly in front of the main doors of its dreary, windowless exterior. These streets are packed on hanging days – enormous audiences stretch as far as one can see, the best spots reserved at top price, Mr. Dickens often somewhere in the crowd.

Soon, two thick dray horses pull a big coach up the street: the frightening
Black Maria
used to transport the worst villains. Its ominous appearance has the effect of throwing coal on fire and the mob’s mood instantly grows angrier.

“That’s ’im!”

“Get ’im!”

“
MURDERER!
”

As Adalji descends the dark wagon from the rear, manacled at his hands and feet, shoved roughly forward by the Old Bailey’s jailers, an onslaught of filthy projectiles is launched at him. One strikes him in the face and he lowers his head, another hits him in the groin and he grimaces and bends over. The jailers drag him toward the gate, stretching out his arms almost as if to expose him to the crowd. Sherlock sees his face. It shocks him. He wonders if Mohammad Adalji has even reached eighteen. His skin is lighter than in the drawing, his nose smaller, and he looks terrified.

The Arab’s eyes wildly survey the crowd, reflecting the hatred he sees. He notices Sherlock, and glimpses sympathy. Instinctively, he turns and attempts to take a step. A big man in the crowd reaches out and trips him. The Arab tries to keep his balance, but another knocks him down. He almost lands on Sherlock. His head is facedown on one of the boy’s worn, heavily polished boots. As he rises to his feet, their eyes meet. There are tears streaked on the Arab’s cheeks.

“
I didn’t do it!”

The police pull the Arab away. One of them notices the boy to whom the criminal has spoken and glares at Sherlock with suspicion. The constable says something to his partner. Then he glances into the sky.

Crows are circling.

The Arab sees them too. An expression of horror comes over his face.

“Sod off, crow devils!” shouts the big man, as he fires a rotten apple at the biggest black bird.

On his way to Trafalgar Square, Sherlock can’t get the Arab’s words out of his mind. He ’d known the scene would be sensational, but it had sickened him. He can’t tell a single soul, of course. If anyone asks, he’ll say that it served the murderer right. But he keeps wondering. Did that frightened boy
really
do it?

Lost in thought, he walks on to the Strand through the ancient Temple Bar Gate, where long ago, traitors’ severed heads were once displayed.

“Don’t I know you?”

A wind-worn face is suddenly inches in front of his, sending a cloud of fish-breath up his nostrils.

“Don’t I
know
you?!” it shouts.

Sherlock’s heart nearly stops.

Then he realizes who it is: a one-legged lunatic he’s often seen here near Charing Cross, his filthy clothes held together with strings and pins he’s scavenged on the river-banks, begging from pedestrians by exaggerating his lunacy. Word is he’s a Crimean War veteran and the Bobbies seldom have the heart to take him away. Drool drips from his toothless gums as his vacant eyes stare into Sherlock’s. The boy steps adroitly past him.

At Morley’s Hotel, he looks both ways into the mass of traffic that claps along the stones, then darts across Trafalgar, artfully dodging the wagons and hansom cabs, horses with riders, and vendors with their carts. He looks back. The crows have returned. Three are perched on the hotel to resume their watch, two others atop the glorious golden lion above the gates of Northumberland House.

The boy leans against the carved stone wall that runs around the exterior of the main part of the square, turning his back on the crows, thinking about the Arab. Every now and then he pulls a rusty brush from a coat pocket and makes sure his straight black hair is perfectly in place.

He loves to watch birds almost as much as people: cardinals, finches, robin redbreasts, magpies, anything. Most of all, he likes to watch them fly. “That’s the one thing they do that human beings wish we could do,” his father often tells
him. “We’d all love to fly. It would free us from the bonds of Earth.”

Sometimes, he’s spotted hot air balloons drifting over the tall buildings and church spires of the city like they’ve floated away from some strange dream of the future. It isn’t truly flying, but it is close. Oh, to be up there!

Feeling restless, he gets to his feet and makes his way across the square toward the Art Gallery. He walks up the big steps. He feels compelled to come here where he can see so many rich folks. Rich is something he will never be. All he can do is watch and dream.

He knows that nearly a third of the children in London don’t attend school, and very few go after the age of twelve. Most are put to work or worse. Yet he is still in the cramped National and Foreign Society School on Snowfields Road near the London Bridge Railway Station. Three damp rooms on three floors: one for the little children, one for upper form girls, and a big one for boys. The last is at the top of the stairs with a high ceiling (beckoning you to stare up and drift into a better world), where the masters, monitors, and all the students also gather for assemblies. He has been in school for seven years, his parents insisting that he read better than the others, cipher better … think better. But there is a ceiling on his future lower than the one in his classroom.

He thinks of his earlier days, in the dirty Ragged School in Lambeth, sitting in one of the many rows at his narrow wooden desk, beside other miserable pupils. He is fortunate to be gone from there. Unlike those destitute children, he at least has some sort of future, some expectations. In the summers he’s helped the old hatter in the shop under their flat, adding what he can to the family income; it was said he did well. He may become a full-time shop assistant some day, a clerk, or a teacher; nothing better.

“But look at Disraeli,” his father often tells him. “He will be prime minister one day, mark my words. Other Jews are getting places too. They let us sit in Parliament now. It’s 1867! When I was a boy things were much worse.”

But Benjamin Disraeli isn’t the sort of Jew that Sherlock is, or like any he knows. Those who succeed, like the Rothschilds and a recent Lord Mayor of London, have never lived in the slums of Southwark or Whitechapel; their blood isn’t mixed; their parents haven’t suffered a great fall. In fact, Disraeli comes from a middle-class family and was baptized in the Church of England: his life has been filled with opportunities. And yet the boy recently saw the great man drawn with a grotesquely long nose and caricatured as Fagin in a copy of
Punch
magazine he found in the streets.

The boys at school call Sherlock “Judas,” or “Old Clothes,” the name for conniving Jewish street vendors. He is a loner to begin with, doesn’t like to talk: it seems he just reads and thinks. He wears preposterous suits with waistcoats (bought “passed on” at a market), threadbare but as clean as he can make them, his only way to be somebody, though it
separates him even more. He’s had a few fights at Snowfields. He won’t give in or let other boys go unpunished for mean things they say. But some still taunt him. They resent his many first-place finishes, his razor-sharp mind.

One fight still bothers him more than any other. It happened nearly a year ago. The school bully had teased him so mercilessly that he’d challenged the boy on the street. A big crowd gathered. His opponent was a hulking, eleven-stone pure-English lad. Sherlock went down with the first blow, was pounced upon, his thin arms pinned until they nearly snapped on the pavement. The boy spit on him and slapped his face as the others looked on and cheered.

“’elpless, ain’t you, Judas? Absolutely ’elpless!” cried the boy. “You can rub your grades in our gobs and wear those clothes and take those snooty ways, but you still ain’t goin’ anywhere remarkable. You’re pinned down, you are, like you should be!”

When the large boy finally relented and climbed off, Sherlock wouldn’t get up. The crowd stood and looked down at him. He lay there, flat on his back on the street, until everyone was gone.

He’d been absent from school maybe once a week before that fight, but since then his record had drastically declined. He tries to attend: knows he owes it to his parents. But he can’t. Education
can
get you somewhere, but where has it gotten his father?

A goldfinch is flying by against the gray clouds. The air has cooled and it looks like rain again. Sherlock is thinking about the murder.

The new
Illustrated Police News
is still in his pocket. He hasn’t read much of it yet, just the headline and a few words about Mohammad Adalji. He pulls it out and turns to the second page. There the lurid drawing has been reproduced from the day before.

The blood. The woman. That crow.

The story flows onto the next page where another picture of the victim is drawn for the reader. Her pretty eyes look just like his mother’s in the little painting back in their flat.

The woman’s identity has still not been revealed. He reads on.

It is an open-and-shut case. There is no doubt that the Arab did it. The police are certain. An old detective named Lestrade is in charge.

Further down the page Sherlock reads that the Arab’s trial will take place in about three weeks. Punishment will swiftly follow. The clock has begun ticking on Mohammad Adalji’s life.

When Big Ben strike 5:00, it sounds like a distant gong in another county to Sherlock. He gets up and walks mechanically toward the river. Before he’s gone far he notices that the crows are nearby again. Two of them are flying above him. But then they veer away. He decides to follow. He should go straight home, but something inside urges him to go with them.

They are flying toward the oldest part of London, the city proper, the area inside the ancient London Wall, where spooky little streets wind around like snakes slithering into stone burrows. It is filled with banks these days, but it’s where the Romans once lived, where the Vikings and Saxon lords ruled, where witches told gruesome tales, and wretched medieval men and women were whipped and tortured in public.

The crows fly, then roost, and then move on. Following them gives him an uneasy feeling … like he’s with the devil’s birds.

Where are they going? Where do they stay at night? Usually they find tall trees.

Before long the Tower of London with its famous prison is to his right down by the Thames. Soon after it slips from sight, the crows start flying lower.