Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [93]
Sam looked as if he was on the point of collapse. Dealing with so many people milling around him, all speaking different languages, when he hadn’t slept for two nights, was indeed hard on him.
Jack was tired too. He felt he must have asked the same questions at least a thousand times, and there were moments when he was tempted to use his cudgel, just to provoke some real reaction rather than the blank stares. A few old crones clutching shawls around their bent shoulders held out filthy hands for money, many of the men hurled insults, and the children darted around them constantly, getting in the way.
To Jack’s surprise, Theo was very good with the children. Most of them spoke English, or at least enough to communicate with him, and he worked his way diligently among them, questioning, cajoling and promising a reward for information.
‘Come over here, Jack!’ he suddenly called out, and as Jack pushed his way through the throng, he saw Theo was with a little girl of six or seven. She was typical of all the children, painfully thin and white faced, with matted hair, and her dark eyes seemed too large for such a small face. She wore only a thin, ragged dress, her feet were bare and dirty and a shawl was criss-crossed across her chest and tied in a knot at her back.
‘She heard something,’ Theo said as Jack reached him. ‘But her English isn’t good. She keeps going off into Italian.’
Jack got Pasquale, who knelt down in front of the child and spoke to her in his language. Pasquale was handsome, with curly black hair, olive skin and soft, dark eyes, and although the little girl was shy and peeped through her fingers at him, she gradually began to respond as he kept talking to her and smiling to reassure her. Theo held out a silver dollar, and her eyes fixed on it greedily. ‘Tell her she may have it if she can tell us what she heard and where it was.’
The silver dollar seemed to work. All at once she was jabbering away.
‘What’s she saying?’ Jack asked.
‘She heard banging yesterday and someone calling out. She told her mother who said people are always banging and calling out here. But the girl said she’d never heard anyone calling like this lady was.’
Jack’s heart seemed to leap into his mouth. ‘Where was this?’ he asked.
Pasquale asked the little girl and she took his hand as if to lead him there.
Jack followed with Theo, right along the far end of the alley they hadn’t yet searched. The child stopped by a small piece of waste ground, clearly the site of a building which had burned or fallen down. It was full of rubbish and rubble and a crazy-looking tumbledown shack which could’ve once been a stable. She looked up at Pasquale and began speaking again.
Pasquale smiled. ‘She hides in the shack when her pa is drunk. She slept in there and was woken up in the morning by the banging and calling. She said it came from over there.’ He pointed to the house on the left.
Jack felt a surge of excitement. The houses on either side of the waste ground were very old and shored up with big timbers, but squeezed behind them in what should’ve been a backyard, were newer buildings. These places, known as back lots, were a common sight all over the Lower East Side.
‘Let’s get in there,’ he said.
Going round to the front of the house, Jack saw the door was padlocked and the windows boarded up. He asked the child if anyone lived there. She shrugged her shoulders and said something in Italian.
‘She doesn’t think so,’ Pasquale said. ‘But sometimes men come there.’
Before Jack could even express his opinion that they’d found the right place, Theo thrust the silver dollar into the little girl’s hand, ran round the back again and shinned up the wall