Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [87]
Sam was back at Heaney’s at nine, to find the door locked, and when he peered through the window he saw Pebbles sweeping up the dirty sawdust on the floor.
He attracted the man’s attention, and reluctantly he opened the door. ‘Mr Heaney told me to keep the door locked and not let anyone in,’ he said.
‘He wouldn’t have meant me,’ Sam said, slipping in and locking the door behind him. ‘Is there any news of Beth?’
‘Dunno,’ Pebbles replied, his expression saying that he cared less.
Pebbles was a bit simple, so Sam knew there was no point in questioning him further. He went through to the back and lay down on the old sofa in there, trying to think what he could do.
The next thing he knew, Heaney’s voice was booming in the bar. Sam jumped up and ran in there, noticing it was now eleven o’clock and he’d been asleep for two hours.
‘You look rough,’ Heaney remarked, going behind the bar and pouring himself a whisky. ‘I haven’t heard anything, so get yourself home and cleaned up. It’s business as usual until I tell you otherwise.’
His brusque tone made Sam angry. ‘You don’t give a damn about Beth, do you? Only that someone’s pulled one over on you. What kind of man are you?’
‘The kind that socks insolent young pups in the mouth,’ Heaney retorted, finishing his drink in one long gulp. ‘Now, get home and shave and put a clean shirt on.’
∗
Jack was as good as his word; at two he came into the saloon. He’d changed his bloodstained working clothes for a very shabby seaman’s navy blue pea jacket and an equally old cap. ‘I was told Fingers owns property in Mulberry Bend,’ he whispered to Sam across the bar. ‘No address, and it’s like a feckin’ rabbit warren around there, but I’m going over now to look around.’
‘I want to come with you,’ Sam whispered back. ‘But Heaney will throw a fit.’
‘You’d stand out there like a dog’s bollocks,’ Jack said with a smirk. ‘I’ll go alone. Besides, it’ll be better if you’re here when Fingers does make a move. We need to know what his demands are. We can’t trust Heaney to tell us the truth.’
‘I don’t think he’ll pay anything to get Beth back,’ Sam said fearfully.
‘That’s why we’ve got to find her, and if Fingers has hurt her then I swear I’ll kill him.’
Jack lit up a cigarette outside a pawnshop in Mulberry Bend, leaned back against a wall and surveyed the teeming street impassively. Beth had told him how horrified and scared she was when she and Sam lost their way and found themselves here, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell her that it wasn’t so different to where he’d grown up in the East End of London, or for that matter the slums of Liverpool.
The main difference was that English people were a tiny minority here, and perhaps only half of the rest spoke little or any English.
They were Italians, Germans, Poles, Jews and Irish in the main, with a liberal sprinkling from other European countries, plus negroes who had moved up from the Southern states. The only thing they had in common with one another was the hopelessness of their situation, for this wasn’t just a ghetto of poor people, this was the absolute bottom of the pit.
If you came to this hell-hole in desperation because you’d nowhere else to go, the sides of the pit were too steep and high to climb out again.
Jack knew that the rents charged here for one filthy, rat-and-bug-infested room were in fact higher than for a decent house or a complete apartment uptown. But then, these poverty-stricken immigrants would not be acceptable to the landlords of those places.
All over the Lower East Side people could only manage to pay high rents on low wages by sharing with others, usually friends or relatives. But here the only criterion for having some sort of roof over your head was the ability to pay a few cents per night, and for that you slept on a floor among dozens of others.
Living a hand-to-mouth existence, with no comfort, warmth or even facilities for keeping clean,