The Good Thief (29 page)

McGinty reached into his jacket and pulled out his pocket watch. He pressed the release and the top sprang open. One side held a hand-tooled watch, the other a miniature portrait of a young woman. She was beautiful, her hair the color of chestnuts, her skin so pale it glowed. Her lips pressed into a silky mouth and her eyes were dark blue, with a hint of sparkle to them, as if she were making fun of the artist as he captured her. McGinty closed the watch. He passed his thumb back and forth across the cover, then set it on the table between them.

“That’s my sistah.” McGinty chose another piece of peppermint and snapped it apart with his teeth. Tiny shards of red and white sugar glistened across his tongue. “She told me yah died afta yah lost yah hand. I shouldha known that she was lying.”

The flavored wax had melted. Ren’s hand had gone right through and now his fingers were sticky, the candy in two separate pieces on the floor. He stared at the watch. He wanted to see it open again. He could hear it working on the table, like a tiny metal heart.

“You’ve made a mistake,” he said.

McGinty stopped crunching the peppermint. “I don’t make mistakes.”

Ren could sense all the candy stuck together at the base of his stomach, turning over, pressing its way back up his throat. He grabbed the end of the table, then turned and vomited into an open box of mousetraps. When he was finished he brushed his sleeve across his mouth. “I want to go home,” he cried. But as soon as the words came out, he felt the hollowness in them. He didn’t have a home.

McGinty leaned against the desk. He picked up one of the gold pens and used it to clean the dirt out from underneath his nails.

“Yah said yah weran orphan.”

“Yes.” Ren leaned over the box of mousetraps, frightened and bewildered. If this man believed he was his uncle, then he was also the kind of uncle who kept his nephew locked in a closet.

“Have some moah candy.”

Ren took a piece of peppermint. The smell made his stomach clench. He stuck the peppermint in his mouth and held it with his teeth, trying to keep it from touching his tongue.

McGinty nudged him with his foot. “No one evah came ta claim yah?”

Ren shook his head.

“Yah suah?”

Ren nodded weakly.

“Have anothah piece a candy.”

“I don’t have a family!” Ren cried. “I don’t have anyone!”

“Well,” said McGinty, pausing for a moment. “Now yah got me.” He tucked another piece of candy into the corner of his cheek and left it hanging there, a long, multicolored toothpick.

Ren imagined, for a moment, what it would be like to live in the factory with McGinty. To watch the mousetrap girls come and go. To spend the rest of his days locked in this closet.

McGinty was watching his face. “Yah don’t believe me.”

“No.”

The man’s lower jaw slid forward, until his expression transformed, like a shade slowly being pulled down a window. “I’ll show yah. I’ll prove it.”

He grabbed the boy’s arm, and before Ren knew it, they were out of the room. Hat boys lined the corridor but stood and moved aside as they passed. One ran ahead to push open a door, and then they were making their way down a staircase. All the while McGinty kept a firm grip on the boy, only pausing once to take his overcoat from Pilot before they went through a side entrance and stepped into the street.

It was late afternoon, the shops already closed, the fires lit, and the windows bright. Ren craned his neck around every corner as they passed, looking for Benjamin. He had hoped his friends would be waiting for him, but there were only more hat boys, traveling ahead, to the side, and behind, pushing the people on the street out of the way. McGinty snorted as he walked, his eyes flashing, his hand clamped over the boy’s arm.

They came upon the town square and crossed the common. On the other side was a church, with a tall black railing surrounding the yard. McGinty’s face grew more determined as they pressed forward; his stomach pushed out before him, his yellow suit flapping in the wind. Ren glanced up at the church tower. The building seemed familiar, like something out of a dream. And then Ren realized—it was the place where Dolly had been buried. Where they’d first dug him up from the ground. McGinty was standing next to the lock that Benjamin had picked with a needle, and he was opening it with a key.

The hat boys spread across the perimeter of the church and Pilot stepped into the yard, holding the gate. McGinty pulled Ren through by the shoulder and began shuffling past the rows of graves. Family names repeated themselves on either side: Beckford, Bartlett, Hale, Wood. Ren tripped over a row of tiny markers, a family of newborns, each one a year apart.

At last they turned away from the church and toward a mausoleum, set in the back of the property. The building was the size of a carriage house, with a set of stone stairs leading up to a small portico, enclosed by another gate. On either side stood marble urns filled with pink and yellow roses. Above the portico was a turret, with a bell hanging in the center. Ren watched as McGinty removed another key from his pocket and unlocked the gate. The door behind it was carved with angels, and in the arch above was a window of multicolored glass, showing a fountain sprouting from the earth.

McGinty thrust the boy in first. The floor was made of granite, the room cold and dark. Ren could see a large white table to the left, pushed against the wall. The corners were cluttered with dirt and dead leaves. The ceiling was low, the walls close. The only way out was blocked by McGinty.

“Theah she is.”

McGinty pointed to the table, and Ren saw that it wasn’t a table but a tomb. The boy drew near and read the words: Margaret Ann McGinty. The lettering was finely wrought, the inscription beneath carved in a firm hand: The Souls of the Just Are in the Hand of God. Ren reached down and touched the letters. The marble was polished smooth. He felt no scratches, only the sharp edges where the words cut deep into the stone.

Ren thought of Margaret’s portrait, her look of sly amusement. He slid his hand into his pocket and felt McGinty’s watch. He’d stolen it from the table on their way out of the storeroom. The metal was warm; he could feel the clock ticking against his fingers.

Colored light dappled across McGinty’s yellow suit. There was a cross on the wall, hanging over Margaret’s grave, but the man did not even glance at it. He simply rubbed his hand back and forth over his face, as if he were trying to wipe off the emotion that had settled there. Then he pushed Ren toward the dark end of the tomb.

“Gowan,” the man told him. “Look.”

There was nothing in the room except for a smaller table, set against the back wall. Ren walked toward it, feeling uneasy. The slab was made of the same stone that covered Margaret, and as he drew closer he saw a name cut into the surface: Reginald Edward McGinty.

“Now.” McGinty turned to the boy. “Let’s see if yoah in theah.”

Pilot stepped into the building, along with four hat boys, all carrying long metal bars. They pushed Ren aside, fit the bars underneath the marble slab, and lifted. The scraping sound filled the room as they moved the weight. When they set the piece on the ground, a strange smell drifted from the coffin, a combination of mold and damp tea leaves.

Ren leaned forward and peered inside. There was a small bundle, wrapped in a cloth sack, the size and shape of a baby.

The bundle was covered with a soft gray powder. Spots here and there were eaten through by insects or worn away with time. Ren could see a bit of fabric underneath. It was the same thick linen that held the collar with his name. He coughed and tasted bile at the back of his throat. He knew there was no way he could be in the coffin, but still the hair on his arms began to rise.

Pilot handed over his knife and McGinty cut the bag open, stabbing through the bottom and splitting the seam. When he finished, he stood back panting, and it was only the sound of his hard laugh that made the boy gather the courage to look. The cloth was ripped through the middle, and inside it was full of stones. They were different colors and shapes, some jagged and broken, some still dusty with the earth they had been taken from, some small enough to fit in the palm of Ren’s hand.

As he leaned closer, Ren saw a pair of tiny stockings. Someone had taken the time to sew the rocks into a set of baby clothes. The ends of the sleeves were gathered, the hem attached together, the neck stitched shut. There was lace on the collar, and a matching bonnet, the brim pulled closed with a ribbon. McGinty had torn through it all, the rocks spilling onto the marble. Without thinking, the boy reached forward and lifted one from the pile. The stone was unremarkable. Gray and pockmarked. No boy at Saint Anthony’s would have saved it.

T
hat night Ren found mice in the mousetrap factory. No sooner had the lock been turned against him in the storeroom than the boy heard the animals scurry across the floor. He raised the lamp that Pilot had left and saw a mother and a set of babies feasting on a bar of chocolate. Ren pulled the stool to the opposite corner and sat down, lifting his feet out of the way.

The boy waited in the dark, his mind numb, his toes cold. Eventually he shifted the stool and began to feed bits of wood from the box of broken mousetraps into the stove. He used the lamp to light the pile and soon had a small fire going. He took off his shoes and pressed his feet against the iron door. Slowly, through the drowned boy’s socks, the skin there began to warm.

After unearthing the grave, McGinty had seemed exhausted. He waved to Pilot and had Ren dragged back to the same closet as before. Now Ren looked around at the piled boxes, the sagging ceiling, and the scattering of mice. It was a forgotten room. He imagined days, and then years, passing, all within the confines of these walls.

Ren took out the watch he’d stolen and opened the cover. Margaret McGinty’s portrait gazed back at him. She had a long, elegant neck, her chestnut hair pulled gently behind her ears. She wore a pearl necklace, with earrings that matched. Ren traced a finger along her perfect nose.

He set the watch down on the desk and touched his own face, feeling the shape of his ears, his nose, his mouth, trying to see if they matched hers in any way. He had never spent much time in front of a mirror. There was only one at the orphanage, in Father John’s study, where Ren would glance at himself from across the room as he waited to be punished. Sometimes months would pass before he saw his reflection again. It was nearly always startling. Like greeting a stranger.

The boy dug into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the collar with the letters of his name. They appeared the same as always. The R and the E sewn with strength, the N finished at a slant. Ren felt the tiny bumps. He turned the piece over and examined the knots. Just below the tip of the last letter there was a hole, as if a needle had been pushed through, then stopped before it had the chance to thread. The N wasn’t an N at all, he realized. It was the beginning of an M .

All of the years spent wondering where he’d come from or who had put him through the gate at Saint Anthony’s—none of it mattered anymore. He had a name. He had a mother. And then he remembered. He also had an uncle.

The lock turned and the Top Hat and the Bowler came in, dragging a wooden rocking horse. It had glass eyes and a painted saddle and a tail made out of real hair. The men moved a few crates and boxes aside and set the horse in a corner. When Ren asked why he was being kept there, the man in the bowler looked to the Top Hat, who only laughed, and kicked some papers out of the way so that they could close the door.

The horse was for a child—a much smaller child than Ren. Crammed between the boxes, it was impossible for it to move. Still, it was a magnificent toy, with brass stirrups and a studded leather bridle, and Ren could not help but compare it more favorably to the horse carved by the chimney dwarf, with its crude markings and tiny slits for nostrils. On this animal the head was perfectly suggested and painted white, with nostrils large enough to stick a finger into.

Ren was just slipping his thumb into the horse’s nose when McGinty came into the room. The man’s coat was off, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to the elbows. A thin spray of blood stained the front. His knuckles were cut and swollen, his collar unbuttoned and askew. He patted the horse on the rump. “Yah like it?”

Ren eyed the blood on the man’s shirt. He nodded.

“Gowan and ride it, then.”

The boy swung his body over the horse. His feet would not fit in the stirrups; his legs dragged on either side.

“I said ride it.”

Ren lifted his knees and fit the tips of his toes into the stirrups. He clutched the mane with all his might, trying to keep his balance. McGinty walked behind and gave him a shove, and the boy rocked back and forth, banging into the boxes piled nearby, until the toy horse shifted and began to slowly move across the closet floor.

“Theah,” said McGinty. “Happy?”

The runners beat rhythmically against the wood. Ren gripped the horse with his knees.

“Good,” said McGinty. He patted his fingers against the side of his trousers, then lifted a knuckle to his mouth. He shared his sister’s pointed chin. But his eyes were gray instead of blue, and his neck was short and seemed to fall down between his shoulders.

“That fellow who brought yah heah,” said McGinty. “Yah think he evah killed anyone?”