Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [58]
Tony’s hands were in wild motion. His left felt for the coin no longer there, his right worked at steadying the cart.
He struggled to his feet and brushed what offal he could from his trousers. Rage surged, all but suffocating him. He shook his fist at the rampaging youths and damned them, their forms and faces indelible in his mind.
The organ grinder knew that he could not pursue these filthy little devils. If he did, one would surely circle back and steal his organ. He was not so green a horn to let that happen. No. He clamped his teeth tighter on the twisted cigar.
The boys had shown disrespect. Antonio Cerasani from Ciminna, a village on a hill in north-central Sicily, never forgot an insult.
Anyone watching the rude boys would have seen them running along Jefferson down to South Street. Here the East River and the docks stopped their straightaway rush. Nine or ten blocks farther south was the bridge to Brooklyn. It was their playground, all of it.
The four, dressed alike in tattered knickerbockers and vests, their broken shoes wrapped with cloth and cord, ducked past horse carts and drays, shouting to each other, snatching food from pushcarts, brandishing their broomsticks, jabbing, threatening anyone in their path. Frequently they used their sticks to knock a hat from an unsuspecting head.
At South Street, the broken pavement created a channel that cut through the sidewalk and ran into an empty, filth-ridden lot on Jefferson. South Street and the streets leading to it and the harbor were overlaid with a sludge different from elsewhere in the city. This filth bore elements of tar and seawater, for the East River, like its sister the Hudson over to the west, was not truly a river but rather a tidal estuary.
Ships dotted the harbor. The boys could hear the water lapping at the docks, the noise and bustle of the sawmills at the lumberyards. Sawdust smelled sweet amidst the fetid odor of the salt and the tar. Stevedores unloading a ship shouted at one another and cursed the heat.
Butch threw a rock at a seagull resting on a piling and missed. The gull gave a raucous caw, flapped its wings, and flew away. “Shit. Seagulls make good eatin’.”
“They’re tough as an old woman’s ass,” Colin said, gnawing on the remnant of a potato he’d filched on the way.
“Yeah,” Butch shot back, “your ma’s.”
It was Colin who finally broke the stare between them, saying, “Let’s see if we can get some work on the docks.”
Butch Kelly swung his stick. “Too hot to work.” He pointed the stick into the lot. “Run out, Patsy.”
Patsy made an ugly face.
“Run out.”
Patsy Hearn shielded his eyes from the sun as he ran toward the heap of refuse near the back of the lot. Beyond it was some skimpy brush, and amid more garbage, a dying black walnut tree, its trunk slashed by lightning.
“Feckin’ Butch Kelly with his feckin’ games,” Patsy muttered. Forever making Patsy the goat. When they played pitch-and-toss, Butch always cheated, stealing his feckin’ penny. Just like now with the dago’s coin. Butch would pocket the money and never share. And when they played tag or hide-and-go-seek, Patsy was always it. Now this cat-stick game. Here Patsy was in the hot sun, sweating buckets while Butch was swinging his stick, mostly hitting the air, sometimes hitting the pussy, and Tom Reilly and Colin Slattery was up close and catching it. And dumb shit-ass Patsy was out here in the stinking wilderness being cooked by the sun.
Butch hit the pussy and it flew high, way over Tom’s and Colin’s heads.
“Open your eyes, Patsy.” Butch’s laugh was nasty.
Patsy ran like a greyhound. If he caught the feckin’ thing, maybe they could stop and get something to wet their throats. Nail some bloke toting the growler. Beer would taste good just about now. That’s what he was thinking on when his wiry body slipped in the slimy runoff from the rotting waste. He took a header smack into the disintegrating trunk of the tree. Still, he reached up and damn if the feckin’ pussy