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By Root 2928 0

was cargo, and the best way to case the docks was to take an innocent swim and see what they had to offer. Not that shipping freight was Hickie’s usual target; like I’ve said, he was a second-story man, a housebreaker, good enough at his trade to operate independent of any single gang, but respected enough to be able to join forces with whichever group suited him for a given job. All in all, he was a bit of a loner, was Hickie—except when it came to animals. He lived in an abandoned basement on Monroe Street, north of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a whole collection of dogs, cats, squirrels, snakes, raccoons, and nobody-ever-knew what else. The only animal he wouldn’t keep was a rat, and he trained his other pets to keep his house clear of them, too. You see, when he was just two or three years old, Hickie’s mother and father, who’d been immigrant cigar makers in a tenement on Eldridge Street, had been robbed and shot to death, and it had been more than twenty-four hours before anyone had discovered the crime and the young boy who’d survived it: plenty of time for the rats to set to work on the bodies. Seeing his own folks get halfway eaten by the things was enough to set Hickie on a lifelong campaign to kill every rat he saw—which, in a city like New York, meant that he was never at a loss for something to do.

Sure enough, that afternoon Hickie was down behind the Fulton Fish Market—a big, clapboarded building with three little towers what they called “cupolas”—swimming naked with a few other boys. A couple of cargo schooners and a paddle steamer were docked in the river near the swimmers, along with the Fulton Ferry, the station of which stood next to the fish market. A couple of the littler kids were taking dives off the bowsprits of the schooners, and coming within an ace of breaking their necks on the docks, too. But nobody seemed to care, least of all Hickie, who oftentimes told me that so far as he was concerned, any kid left to swim unattended in a river with currents as dangerous as them in the East was qualified to decide when and where he’d bust his own head open.

I made my way through all the smelly, noisy huckstering that was going on outside the fish market, then crawled down around the bottom of the building to where the kids were splashing in and out of the eternally shadowy, roiling waters below.

“Hey, Hickie!” I called, seeing his head bobbing up from under the surface. “You wanna die of pneumonia, you found the right way to do it!”

He gave me a grin, showing a big gap in his front teeth what had been left by two cops. “What’re ya thayin’, Thtevie?” he answered, his s’s getting lost in the gap. “Ith a perfeck day for a thwim!”

“Come on out,” I answered. “I got a business proposition for you!”

Whipping his black hair back on his head, he began to swim, quickly and expertly, over to where I was sitting. “Well, there’th thwimmin’, and then there’th buthineth,” he said, shooting up out of the water in a pale white flash and running over to his little pile of clothes. He dried himself off with a rag that might’ve been a towel once, then got dressed in a hurry. “How’ve you been, Thtevie? I ain’t theed you round for a bit.”

“Ain’t been around,” I said, noticing that Hickie’s voice had gotten lower. He was probably a year or two older than me, but small for his age. “Workin’. The legitimate life, you know, it tends to keep you busy.”

“And becauth of that, I thtay away from it,” Hickie said, now covered up in an old shirt, wool trousers, and suspenders. He pulled on a beat-up pair of shoes and shook hands with me, then slipped a miner’s cap onto his head so that it slouched over one eye. “If I couldn’t walk away for a thwim whenever I felt the urge, I wouldn’t thee the thenth in life. Whath on your mind, old thon?”

I picked up a few rocks and started tossing them into the river. “You still got Mike?”

“Mike?” Hickie said, like I just mentioned a member of his family. “Thure, I got Mike! Couldn’t get rid o’ Mike, Thtevie, he’s my boy—born rat-killer, ith that Mike.”

“You ever hire him out?”

“Hire him out?