The Good Thief (35 page)

The office door opened. McGinty came in, followed by two hat boys, who took their places on either side of the entryway. One of them was the Bowler. His nose was broken, his neck covered in welts. The other wore the top hat, with the same dark stain on the brim. But the face underneath was different again, as if the hat had grown a new body, straight up from the ground.

McGinty did not say a word, just shoved the boy hard against the factory window and began tearing through his pockets, throwing all that he found—the collar and the scalps and the rock—to the floor before finding the watch. Once he had it in his hand he pushed Ren away. He opened the cover to check the portrait, staring at Margaret’s face with relief, and started cleaning it with his handkerchief. When he was finished, he closed the watch and began to wind it, squinting first at Ren and then at the timepiece, setting the hands in place.

“Yahra thief,” said McGinty.

“I guess so,” said Ren.

“Not a very smaht one,” said McGinty. “I’ve caught yah. Twice.” He tucked the watch inside his waistcoat. He sat behind the desk. Then he took Pilot’s knife out of his pocket, the same one that had cut the bartender’s hand, and set it down in front of Ren.

“I undastand theah was a man with yah.”

“Is he all right?”

“He killed Pilot, and three moah besides.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Some friend.” McGinty rubbed the end of the blade with his finger. “He came heah ta kill me about a month ago. I sent two a my boys ta get rid a him. But I guess he got rid a them instead.” McGinty picked up the knife. “Maybe he’s tha man I’ve been looking foah. Maybe he’s ready ta do some ansahring.”

“He’s not my father.”

“Then tell me who.”

“I told you I don’t know.”

Ren waited for the man to strike him, but instead McGinty jammed the knife into the desk. “I’m goanna make yah remembah.”

He opened a drawer and removed a silk bag, embroidered with black thread. The tassels that tied it together were black too, and it took McGinty a few moments to untangle them. Then the bag was open, and McGinty revealed a small, square cube of glass. He set it on the table. There was something inside, suspended like a fracture breaking out in five different directions. It was a tiny, tiny hand.

McGinty pressed his lips together. “Look familiah?”

Ren stared at the hand on the table. Behind the glass the fingernails were translucent as pearls. The skin still pink. But there were wrinkles. Hundreds of tiny wrinkles that made the hand look as though it belonged to someone very old. Someone who had already lived a thousand lives.

“I saved it,” said McGinty. “A souveneah.” He bent over and whispered the rest in Ren’s ear: “All she had ta do was give me tha fathah’s name. And she wouldn’t do it. Even when I had yah on tha table. Even when tha knife was going in, she wouldn’t say a word.”

Ren pushed McGinty away. He made a dash for the door, but before he could get his hand on the knob the Top Hat and the Bowler had him. After a nod from McGinty they lifted him onto the desk. The boy fought back, but the men easily mastered him and soon had his arms straight out on either side and jammed tightly against the wood.

“I tried ta bahgain with yah. I tried being nice.” McGinty pulled Pilot’s knife from where it was stuck in the desk. He took hold of Ren’s left arm. He examined the scar. Then he gave the boy a look and moved to the other side of the table.

Ren could feel the blood leaving his right arm, the fingers on his hand going numb. McGinty leaned in, close enough for Ren to feel his breath. He took the edge of the knife and ran it gently across the boy’s wrist, right at the base of the thumb. It was a thin break of the skin, just enough to make a clear red line. “I like ta have a mahk,” McGinty said. “A place ta aim fah.”

A bit of blood trickled down Ren’s arm. McGinty set the blade against the boy’s wrist, against the cut he had already made. In the reflection of the metal Ren saw himself, handless—nothing but two empty ends of arms—and he screamed and he screamed and he screamed.

“I want his name,” said McGinty. “I wanna know everything about ’im.”

The air around Ren was suddenly different—heavy and tasting of metal, like a storm was about to come. He could feel the thunder building up in the room, the air charging with electricity. All he needed was a crack to release it. A glittering vein set against the dark.

Underneath him was a floor. A floor his mother had walked on. The chair was a chair she had sat in, this very desk a place she had leaned her elbows. The same hum from the machines had come through the window. The same small tremor tickling her feet. This room had once held her. And now it held Ren. When she was in this place, she had loved him. And that love was still there, in the walls. He could feel it. He opened his mouth, and the words came out.

“My father was from the West,” Ren said. “He was an Indian hunter, even though he’d been raised by a tribe himself. No one knew who his mother or his father was. Some said that he’d been stolen by some Gypsies from a wagon train and passed on to the Indians for beads and a rifle—but he was white for sure and he even learned English from a schoolteacher passing through who took a shine to him and to the Indian life and stayed on and married a squaw named Happy Feather.”

McGinty slowly lifted the knife from Ren’s wrist. He gave the Top Hat and the Bowler a nod. The hat boys relaxed their grip and Ren continued talking, straight to the ceiling, his heart beating in his chest.

“When he was still young, my father began to track down scalps. He did this for a fee, paid by the relatives of the dead. He’d look at the body of the victim, and he’d be able to tell by the way the hair was taken which tribe was involved, what kind of knife was used, and sometimes even the warrior who’d done it. Then he’d get on his horse and be gone for weeks, sometimes months, and a few times even a year. But he’d always come back, and in his saddlebag he’d have the scalps of braids or curls, and the people would dig up the graves and open the coffins and put the missing pieces inside so the dead could be at peace.

“After a few years he grew restless on the plains and traveled east. He sold his horse and went to sea. He sailed around the world on a merchant ship, to Africa, to India, to Europe, and the Orient. Places where people live high on mountain peaks that no one can reach, in glass boxes suspended under lake water, and in giant castles made of ivory and gold, with so many thousands of rooms that you could live in one for a day and just leave it behind you.

“From there he joined a whaling ship and spent years chasing down monsters in the sea. He battled pirates and discovered faraway islands with nothing on them but volcanoes and monkeys. He became a famous wrestler of strange creatures, diving into the waters to battle with giant squids and sea serpents, with his shipmates watching from the rail and making bets.

“And then one night there was a terrible storm, and it broke the boat into pieces and then into flames, scattering the men in all directions. My father was the only survivor. He decided to swim home. And he did, thousands of miles across the ocean, battling jellyfish and sharks and turtles and anything else that tried to take a bite out of him along the way. When he finally washed up on shore he was nothing but skin and bones and half-mad from being in the water so long.

“He was found by a fisherman, who fed him until he was healthy and then sold him into the army to cover a gambling debt. His commander was an angry dwarf, who barked orders and ate as much as ten men, but who also looked splendid on his small white pony and inspired great courage among his soldiers. After five years the dwarf gave my father a leave of absence so that he could visit his Indian family. But instead my father set out for the countryside, and he stumbled upon an entrance to an old mine, and it was in that mine that he met my mother.”

McGinty was leaning back in his seat, his face expectant. He had the glass square, and he was spinning it now, round and round against his palm. Ren watched the tiny hand turning, like a gear in a clock, and the rest of the story came forward.

“My mother told him about the workers trapped under the earth. She led him through the tunnels, to the places where the bodies lay huddled together for warmth. When death comes, she said, all that matters is this: to be next to one another. My mother was wearing a silk dress, and as she pressed her fingers into his, all of my father’s adventures and hard living melted away. He knew that he had met the woman he would love until he couldn’t love anymore. She made him forget what it was like to be bitten by sharks and chased by wild natives. He opened his arms, and she stepped inside.

“After his troop moved west, he wrote my mother every day, and nearly lost his senses over worry and fear and desire for her. Finally a letter came in return. She was going to have his child. She asked him to come back to her, to take her away from North Umbrage, to give her and the baby his name. That very night he deserted. He left his army post and became a wanted man. He traveled after dark and hid in the forest during the day, calling on tricks he’d learned over the years to stay alive. But even with all those lessons it wasn’t enough, and the soldiers caught him. They starved him and beat him until he became not a man anymore, but a living skeleton—a hollow shell of what he’d once been, until months passed and he forgot who he was and where he came from, until the only thing he could remember was my mother’s face and he didn’t even know who it belonged to.

“They put a killer in my father’s cell, a man with giant hands. The two became friends, and when the killer finally crushed the throats of the soldiers and broke through the bars, he made sure that my father escaped too. But by the time my father’s mind returned and he had made his way to North Umbrage, it was too late. My mother had died, and my father turned his back on the world. He began to drink. And it was there, in cheap taverns and the bottoms of mugs, that he fell into the deepest and darkest place of his life.

“Years and years went by. He associated with the lowest of people, kept himself going with the lowest of pleasures, and performed the lowest of tasks to pay for the next round. But he also began to hear rumors that I was alive. And he remembered the part of himself that used to wrestle sea creatures and climb volcanoes and swim oceans, and he knew that surely he could uncover that strength again and use it to find his only son. He drew on all of his hunting skills from long ago, the navigation he’d been taught on the seas, the discipline he’d learned in the army. Every night he looked up into the immense darkness of the sky and told me he was coming. He told me not to be afraid. He said that soon I would never be alone and that, even then, he was searching for me with his heart.

“And then one day he found me. He looked over a group of a thousand children and picked me out in an instant. And I knew him at once, because he’d visited me in my dreams. So I wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t a stranger. We held on to each other and we were together and we knew we’d never be parted again.”

McGinty slammed his fist onto the desk. “That’s enough,” he said. “I don’t wanna heah anymore. I want his name. I want his real name.”

“His name,” said Ren, “is Benjamin Nab.”

E
verything that happened next happened quickly. McGinty was screaming at the Top Hat and Bowler, who called down the hall as more hat boys came bursting through the door and falling into the room, one after another. “Bring him,” McGinty shouted. His breath was short and wheezing. “Bring him now.”

Ren rushed to the window. He watched the hat boys running through the mousetrap factory. The girls stopped working and stared from their stations as the men rushed past. Only the Harelip stayed in place and continued to stack and cut, stack and cut.

McGinty sprang from his seat and paced back and forth in front of his paintings. He paused at the window, looking out at the factory, his face contorted with glee. He slapped Ren on the shoulder, then squeezed it, as if some kind of deal had been made between them. “Yah did it fah me, boy!”

The door opened and in came Benjamin Nab.

He was supported on either side by the Bowler and the Top Hat. Around his head was tied a bit of blue cloth with blood soaking through. Benjamin’s face was pale and bruised, the black eye he’d taken from the accident settled in a dark line beside his nose. One of the sleeves of his jacket had been torn off. It looked as if one of his arms was broken. But he was there. He was alive.

“Mistah Nab,” said McGinty. “My money was on yah, right from tha staht.”

Benjamin lifted his head. When he saw Ren, he smiled. But it was not the bright and beaming smile that Ren remembered. His front teeth had been broken and his lip was split and bleeding. The hat boys dumped him on the floor. He held out his hand, and Ren took it.

“I heard you told them quite a tale,” said Benjamin. “I hope I had a good part.”

“I thought you were gone,” said Ren. “I thought you’d left us.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Benjamin winced, then shifted so that his arm was cradled in his lap. He looked the boy in the eye. “If you remember how to pray, this might be a good time to do it.”

“Yoah fatha’s been my guest,” said McGinty. “In a special room I got in tha basement. I try out all my traps theah. I had a feeling he was tha one, as soon as I saw yah. Nobody but a fatha wouldha picked a cripple outta that orphanage.”

“I was lying,” Ren said. “I was making it up.”