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The Found Boy

Blair Hurley During the war there were curfews at night, to save on lamp oil. Boston was in the middle of a great transition from whale oil to the new camphine. The wealthy families—they called them Boston Brahmin—had their gas lamps and even the new Edison bulbs, but in the poorer parts of towns, the Irish and the Italians got used to eating dinner by candlelight and going to bed in the darkness. When the war ended, they kept up the game because of the money it saved, and at night in the little room the boy shared with his mother and father, he could look out the window and see other people’s lights, hear the sounds of partying and black market boozing and laughter. The boy didn’t mind. His mother and father made a game of it, seeing if they could finish eating their fish tail stew before the candle burnt down, eating and laughing in the dark. They ate whatever fish were the rejects of his father’s catch that day, the spiny bony little fish that barely had names: trash fish, grouper, skate. But whoever found the tail had to slurp it up and let it hang from their lips, as though a whole fat beautiful fish were there in their mouth. They passed the meal this way until the candle made the tiny fizz of its extinguishing, and they washed up in the dark, bumping into each other in the tiny kitchen space with overly formal “Pardon me, madam”s and “sir”s. In July, after she died, there were fireworks in the Navy Yard and along the harbor. The boy’s father took them out in their skiff to get the best view in the city, better than the richest families in

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town he said. They bobbed in the darkness and looked back at the city, some in the light, some in the dark, while the fireworks popped and flowered over their heads. The water was illuminated by the fireworks, so they could see a rowboat nearby, drifting out onto the water with a couple of men rowing hard. The boy could only see their silhouetted shapes in the boat, backlit by the fireworks, but he could tell their heads were down and they weren’t looking at the show. His father watched in silence as they eased several wooden crates into the water with ropes, tying off the ropes to a floating harbor buoy. He asked his father what they were doing and his father only said, “Hush now. Look at the fireworks.” He explained when they were rowing home that they were bootleggers, and there were dozens, if not hundreds of cases of fine wine, champagne, and real Scotch whiskey in crates at the bottom of the harbor. Occasionally the Boston police sent divers down to retrieve them, and a few cases were found, and the divers were paid to bring up a few cases but not too many. Like fishing: catch some, throw some back. Bootlegging was a complicated business, hiding what you could and losing a few to the police. Ticks on a balance sheet somewhere in the city. Of those recovered cases, a few were smashed and poured down the gutter, so that the rainwater ran golden and foaming with champagne; and a few more went home with the cops. Everyone needed their taste of forbidden things. “Good money in what they do,” his father said, then. And, “A little booze never hurt anybody.” He was not a heavy drinker himself. Before the prohibition he had a few on Friday nights with friends at the pub down the street and came home grinning and warm, singing old Irish songs. Not like the fathers of other boys in his class at school who came home mean. Not like the boys whose mothers had to take the paycheck direct from the factory and dole out a little bit to them so they wouldn’t blow their rent money. His mother had been a factory

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girl in Lowell like many of the others in the boy’s neighborhood, but she was determined that their family would rise above that station. In addition to saving her father’s fish money each week, she conducted palm readings and did chaomancy, which was an Irish form of divination using cloud shapes. She liked to tell her customers the power of divination had been given to her on a moonless night by the devil himself. As long as she told the truth to anyone who asked, he wouldn’t take her soul, so she was committed to that truth with the fear of God, the devil, and her own immortal soul in the balance. Some of the sterner Catholics in their crowded building disapproved, but most of them liked the story and lined up for a reading in the shallow run of stairs in their tenement’s foyer. The boy could see how the newcomers’ eyes widened and they listened with close attention to every promise she made and warning she gave. She did tell things more directly than the average palm reader. She told them if their thieving ways were going to catch up to them at work, or if there was a beau who was cheating. “My livelihood depends on my straight telling,” she explained to him. “If you want someone to believe in you, you can’t sugar-coat a thing. Tell them something they don’t like to hear, and they’ll believe.” “Is it real, though?” he asked her. “Now if I said yes, I wouldn’t be a very good Catholic,” she said. “But if I said no, I wouldn’t be a very good fortuneteller. You have to believe, if you want to tell a good story. Didn’t you hear my soul’s in the balance?” They were on their way to the harbor to meet his father’s boat at the dock, and he was carrying warm soda bread wrapped in a checked cloth. The clouds were drawing in fat and heavy over the maze of masts clustered in the harbor. She tilted her head to watch them, a sly little smile on her face. “Storm’s coming,” she said. “He’ll make it home, though.”

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Sometimes a good customer paid in bottles, something illicit wrapped in paper, and his mother and father stayed up late singing their songs, slumping happily into each other by the fire, letting the candle burn down to nothing. She died in the spring. They don’t know what it was, only that it was some kind of woman’s ailment, but the paupers’ hospital would only take her when she was very far gone. His father mortgaged his boat for a church funeral. Now the fortunetelling money isn’t coming in anymore, and the rich people that used to buy his lobsters are going farther afield, something about the dirty water of Boston harbor. They want lobsters shipped by rail car from Maine in crates of ice and straw. In school that fall, the teacher sometimes picked one of the poor boys to go down into the basement and refill the coal bin. It doesn’t matter if you miss a lesson here or there, he said, and his hand scanned over the bent heads of the boys and more often than not settled on his. You. Get the fire going, will you? It was a long way down a rattling steel staircase into the dark. The black coal dust coated his hands and refused to wash away. All the other boys could see that he’d been marked in this way by the teacher, singled out for labor. He wondered why he’d been chosen, but he thought it was because they lived near the molasses factory and the stink of it never really left him. It smelled like sweet toxic things, like charnel. He couldn’t disagree that he should be the one to go. He would be twelve in the spring, and many of the boys, his kind of boy, would be leaving school soon. His father had hardly sold a lobster in days and now when the lights went out in their little apartment, not by choice, when they were eating, they ate on in silence, pretending they could still see each other. In the dark he could sometimes pretend that his mother was there too, a quiet presence in the room, no more than a disturbance of air.

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“I have to sell the boat,” his father announced into the darkness. He couldn’t keep up the payments; and the fish weren’t jumping into his nets or lobsters into his pots the way they used to. “What will you do?” the boy asked him. He could almost hear him shrugging. “This and that. They always need longshoremen. We’ll get by.” “But you’re a fisherman.” His father always had been proud of this, his relationship with the water, the uncertain trip you took out there each day, hoping for good fortune. “It’s not always so fixed, you know. Life isn’t always fixed like that.” He couldn’t sleep. The night air was too hot, it was still so humid that the air seemed to sit on his skin like a second blanket. His father snored restlessly in the bed beside him, the moon too bright in the window. He could hear partying outside, the low sound of laughter, a drunk caterwauling. All of Boston spilling noise and laughter down its dark hidden streets. He dressed quietly, and remembered to bring his sturdy galoshes and extra rope. There was no one on the harbor at this hour. Just dark shapes on the docks, women and men meeting in secretive couplings, sometimes men and men. He knew what they were doing—his mother had no interest in shielding him from the world and told him many things boys were not supposed to know. Better to know how people really are, she said. They teach you in school about what’s good and right, and they teach you about resisting temptation in church. But mostly, people want what they want, and there’s little stopping them from reaching out for it. He rowed out in the rocking skiff, the clank of distant ships and mooring ropes all around him. One part of the city was all lights blazing. The dome of the state house a moonlit gold. His father took him there once on a trip to the Common and the grand

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old buildings, and they walked down a quiet residential street full of stately townhouses with tall black doors and brass knockers until a policeman asked them what they were doing there. I’m a fisherman, his father said, nonsensically. “Then where’s your fish?” His father held up the dripping bag. They could all smell it then, the wet brine, a smell the boy normally loved, but here it was all wrong. He felt ashamed that they were carrying this smell around with them in this place. The policeman waved his baton. “Sell at the service doors, then.” He grabbed the first rope he saw and began pulling it up. The cases were very heavy even in the water but he was used to hauling up lobster pots, and he knew to brace himself against the boat and haul steadily and slowly so the boat wouldn’t tip. He worked quietly, huffing to himself. It was cooler on the water than in the hot city and the whole night felt like a strange dream, some pleasant memory of another life when he was small and chosen to ring the bells in their church, and felt their massive potential weight far above him in the darkness, and he pulled the rope and felt it rush between his hands (he had burns, later) and the bell tumbled above him with its transcendent clang! The crate was rising. He hauled it into the boat and then lay breathing a while. He had to get back before his father missed him. He knew if someone saw him there would be some kind of trouble, but he wasn’t sure what kind of trouble it would be. His father had said there were always some losses that the men accounted for. Slippage. Still, he waited for a little while, cradling the prize. He could see the gold foil labels between the slats of the crate, wet but undamaged, the treasure within. The city lit up all around him on one side, and on the other, the dark entry point to the ocean beyond, a dark line on greater darkness.

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He hid the crate in a lock box that fishermen used to store extra bad weather gear, pulling a few layers of oil cloth over it and hoping no one would go digging in a calm weather season. After school he went back to the tony street where his father hawked fish, dragging the crate in a small wagon they used for toting coal. He went to the garden level door, easing his wagon down bump by bump, and rang the bell. A girl in a scullery maid dress and frilly headpiece came to the door. “I’ve got wine to sell,” he said. “Good wine, for your master?” “There’s no master here,” she said. “Just a mistress.” She wasn’t much older than him, with freckles and thin reddish hair done up tightly but straggling out of its bun anyway. She reminded him a bit of his mother, with her wary eyes. “Does she like wine? It’s good stuff. For a good price.” “Let me see what you’ve got,” the girl said. Her accent was full Boston like his, but she looked down her nose at him, the way all servants looked down at tradies. They all seemed to think they shone by the reflected light of their masters, whoever they were. He hadn’t even pried the nails out of the crate. They had to bring it into the warm, cramped kitchen, where a cook was sitting by a hot oven smoking a cigarette. “Who’s that, then?” she asked. “A boy selling wine.” “Don’t go letting in urchins off the street,” she said, but in a cursory way. “Mm-hmm,” said the girl in a docile voice, and after a minute the woman heaved herself from her stool and left. Together they pried open the case. “You liar,” the girl said, holding up a bottle. “I’m not,” he said, but in a frightened little voice, because maybe she could tell right away that they were stolen. “This isn’t wine, it’s champagne,” she said. “See here?” She pointed to the label.

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“Well—does your mistress like champagne?” The girl rolled her eyes. “Drinks it like water, she does.” “I’ll take half whatever you normally pay for it.” She thought about it, then went to the blue flowered vase on the kitchen window and poured out a handful of coins. “The grocery cash,” she said. “You sure you can buy things for them?” She drew herself up. “They let me buy all kinds of things. I pick the vegetables and the eggs.” He counted the coins carefully, trying not to show any special excitement on his face. “I’ll come back,” he said. “If I can get more.” He walked home with the money jangling, strange and heavy, in his pants pocket. Trying not to attract the attention of the older boys who hung on street corners waiting to rough up kids for their loose change. Too scared even to use it, to get an ice cream or a Coney Island from the man with the stripy vest and the push cart. Just wanting the feeling of it, hoping he could keep it safe. He let himself into the empty apartment—his father looking for work back on the docks at this hour—and shoved the money under his mattress and sat on the floor with his back to it, breathing awhile. It was dusty in their apartment, no one was cleaning much anymore, and he could see dust floating everywhere in the afternoon light; everything was gold. * * * They had a regular thing going within a few weeks. He didn’t want to visit the spot in the harbor too often, for fear of catching the attention of the unknown men who left the bottles there. Better just to skim a case or two, be patient, let the stores replenish. Like a good fisherman, his father used to say, who is steward of the

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fish, and doesn’t overwork this part of the bay or that one, but lets them replenish themselves, even the score in the age-old fight. His father used to say things like that. He read Shakespeare: a tattered leather copy of Henry IV Part One and The Winter’s Tale were on the shelf over the fireplace. He liked grand sayings, declarations of men who went to war, musings on the consuming power of love. He used to say these things to the boy’s mother. She always rolled her eyes and smiled at the same time, his first lesson in how you could feel more than one thing at once, and hide both. The money the girl gave him for the champagne was more money than he had ever seen in someone’s hand at one time. The bills, wrinkled and faded but real. The fat flutter of them in his fist. The numbers an abstraction, like the kind of sums the teacher put on the chalkboard and asked the boys to add and subtract, meaningless. These bills weren’t meaningless, though. They were bread and milk and light. He kept them stashed under his mattress, and carefully put just one or two in the tin by the fireplace each week, so that his father would think he’d miscounted what they had, and the lights stayed on while they ate. When he came by once with some new wines and they were haggling a little, the girl sat at the kitchen table and showed him how to smoke a cigarette. He puffed cautiously at first, and she laughed and said she could tell he’d grown up poor, he was scared to use up anything. “Here, you drag on it,” she said, and breathed in and out again in a long gust. “My mistress, she don’t just drink for fun, you know,” she said. “She’s sad. The saddest person in this city.” “Why’s she so sad?” The girl settled in for a story she’d clearly been longing to tell. “When she was young and beautiful, her kid got kidnapped.” This was all eight or nine years ago now. The child had been stolen for ransom, when its mother was a young and fabulously

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wealthy widow. Half the Boston police turned out to find him. A suitcase of cash was prepared. The girl seemed particularly impressed by this detail—so much money, you needed luggage to carry it. But the kidnappers never surfaced; they never showed for the agreed-upon handoff. Kidnappings happened this way sometimes, apparently, where the kidnappers lost their nerve and killed the child rather than get caught. But that wasn’t where the story ended, the girl said, her eyes widening. Two years later, the kid surfaced in an orphanage. “How did they know it was him?” “He was left at the orphanage at about the right time.” “People just—leave kids there?” “You don’t have to be an orphan to end up in an orphanage.” The girl looked sagely at him. “Lots of people just can’t afford ’em. Especially those Irish, there’s another kid every time you look around. They drop them off there when they can’t feed them anymore.” He kept quiet. “But she”—the girl jerked her head upwards—“She goes there and looks at the kid, who was six or seven by then, and all she could say was, I’m not sure, I’m not sure. She goes home and the newspapers all print that she’s lost her motherly instincts as a result of her elevated position in life. They say money has estranged the heart from its natural affections. I remember reading that,” she added proudly. “So what happened?” “Well, the next day she goes back and says, I’ve thought about it, and this is my son.” “So he was?” The girl smiled, her mouth thin and wicked. It wasn’t nice, taking pleasure in the problems of strangers. But he’d seen it before among the boys in his class who snickered when a rich person’s car

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went barreling through their narrow streets in the North End and got stuck in the pothole that hadn’t been fixed in years. Among servants, who spent so much time rubbing up against that life, maybe you couldn’t help developing a little delight in their strange self-made problems. “That’s what no one really knows,” she said. “Ain’t it?” He thought about it. “If I got a look at him, I think I’d know.” “How? You ain’t his Ma, and she don’t even.” He thought if he could just see the boy—almost a man by now—and be in the same room with him, he’d know if he was the boy who belonged in this house with its hardwood floors creaking and full of dust and lavender. He knew what the poor boys in his class smelled like, even with their faces scrubbed red and raw; you could never really get rid of the smell of old hissing radiators and the high ammonia reek of a shared bathroom down the hall from your family’s apartment. He’d know. And what would he do with that information, if the boy still smelled of the orphanage? Would he tell anybody? He’d have no proof. No one would listen to his version of events. He thought he’d probably just keep the knowledge to himself. * * * When he was out on the water another warm night, rowing home with a dripping case beside him, he remembered the story his mother told her clients about the devil. Dealing with the Forsaken One was always dangerous, but the secret was that you had to be known: the devil could never claim your soul if someone who loved you could identify you. When he was small, the story frightened him, and he asked his mother, What if no one knows me? What if the devil disguises me?

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I’d know you, she told him. I’d always, always know you. In the quiet night, he could hear other disturbances in the water. Another row boat was approaching the buoy, with two dark huddled shapes in it. He rowed harder, watching them grow a little smaller with each stroke, watching them pull up the rope, watching them find it attached to nothing. Funny how you had to face backward in a rowboat, staring down the people you’re fleeing from, hoping they don’t see you. If they didn’t turn this way— He made it to the dock, stowed the boat, and hid in an alley for a long while, afraid to go home in case they were watching and following. When he finally returned and crept back to the apartment, his father was sitting up with a cigarette. “You want to tell me where you went?” He thought about it, then shook his head. It wasn’t rebellion; it was protection. He lowered his head, expecting a smack. His father was a gentle man, but all fathers had their limits. His father just finished his cigarette, though, tapping it slowly to ash in the crumby plate by the bed. “What are you up to, boy?” he asked, his voice thick with smoke. “Nothing.” “Not nothing. Your mother always had plans, too. You’re just like her, you know.” This, delivered more gently. He knew that if his mother was here, she’d be down at the docks dragging him home by his ear. But his mother was gone, and his father was fragile, and ultimately he could do nothing. They turned over and went back to sleep, both uneasy, both pretending not to be. * * *

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He got his chance to see the found boy that fall. On a wet, chilly day, the girl ushered him in as always. He was damp and shivering, he’d forgotten his oilcloth coat and was wet through. “Come by the fire for a while,” she said with a weary patience, and he sat warming his hands while she rolled a lump of buttery yellow dough over and over again, making knots and shapes and folds and making them disappear. She was talking busily about her favorite topic—advancement. Some of the maids rose high, and became ladies’ maids, when you got to travel with high ladies and dress them and arrange their bedthings and click their pearl necklaces together with their tiny fiddly clasps. She got this glow when she talked about the ladies. The boy could tell, she was one of those people completely enraptured by beauty and glamor and nice things. His mother had been like that, too, though she rarely got the chance to show it, just lingering in front of a shop window once in a while and going on and on about the necklace arrayed there on the model of a woman’s severed neck. He’d seen men just as caught by beautiful things—fast horses and automobiles that went roaring up Tremont Street, the men with their arms on the window rests, their ties flying loose, cigars in mouths, kings of their own small countries. The young man came slouching down the stairs barefoot, but wearing the clothing of a fancy party: a white dress shirt and black bow tie hanging loose around his neck, the black pants crumpled but still of unmistakable crispness and quality. His eyes roved about the kitchen, took in the boy by the fire, the girl kneading dough. “Where’s Mrs. Gates?” he asked. The girl did not look up, kept her eyes studiously on her work. “Out. Went to the market.” That seemed to catch his attention. “Bonnie,” he said, and swept gracefully to the table, careful not to touch the floury cutting board. “Bonnie, you’re not still mad, are you?”

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She stayed silent, rolling and kneading the dough. It would be overworked at this rate. He laughed. The boy kept quiet, watching them. The girl hunched her shoulders up high around her collar. “Oh, Bonnie,” he said. “Silly Bonnie. You’re like some sort of a fussy baby.” The boy coughed. The young master’s gaze slid over, traveling without interest or recognition over him. “He’s the boy that brings the champagne,” the girl said. He was pretty sure her name was not Bonnie. “Ah.” Then he seemed to arrive at an idea; he tucked his hands neatly behind his back, more like a butler or attentive servant than a rich man. The boy watched him. “Actually, I have a use for you,” the young master said. “Care to earn a dollar?” “What’s the job?” the boy asked. His voice came out low and growly, like a suspicious dog. The young master laughed. “Nothing nefarious, if that’s what you’re asking. I’d pay more than a dollar for that.” He turned and went back up the stairs. After a moment the girl whose name was not Bonnie said, “You’d better go after him, then.” He followed the young master up the narrow staircase and through a door that magically opened out into a long, black and white tiled hall with giant chandeliers—more than one of them— hung low and scarily pendulous over their heads. The young master was already well ahead of him, climbing a far grander staircase with brass railings that wove and twined upward, shaped like vines bearing heavy brass clusters of grapes, with frolicking shepherd boys and goat children leaping and dancing between the railings. He hurried after his potential employer, struggling to take in the dark oil paintings crammed into every available inch on the walls of wig-wearing men and pale, fainting women; hunting dogs and thoroughbred horses and dramatic seascapes.

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The young master was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. “Yes, she likes her paintings,” he said. The way he spoke of her—it could only be his mother. The lady of the house, who enjoyed her champagne in such great quantities. But he had never heard someone speak so disdainfully of their own mother. The young master led him down the upstairs hall, on carpet so plush his dirty boots disappeared into its purple softness. He abruptly opened a tall door and waited for the boy to walk in first. He did so tentatively, as if sensing a trap. Maybe this man with his oiled hair and curled lip had figured him out, knew where the bottles came from, and a copper was waiting behind that door, tapping a night stick restively in his hand. He tensed himself on the balls of his feet, ready to run. But the room beyond the door was empty, except for a dusty piano, more paintings stacked and leaning against the walls, and several waist-high piles of yellowing newspapers. “She’s finally said I could get rid of them,” the young master said, with a wave. “The papers, I mean. I’ll pay you a dollar to cart all these to the kerb.” Simple enough. The young master stood in the doorway, restless, looking at his watch. “Why’s she have all these?” The boy had never been able to do a thing without knowing exactly why it needed to be done, and everything about the doing. His mother lamented that. The young master looked over his shoulder at the boy, lighting a cigarette with an elegant silver lighter. “They have some significance for her,” he said. The boy lifted the first paper: the headline, marching boldly across its top line, along with the weather and the stocks. MISSING BOY FOUND. And others, out of order: BOY KIDNAPPED

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FROM OIL TYCOON ESTATE. And others: the feverish search, the investigation, the arrests of servants and staff. “You’ve heard it all? The story?” the young master said. It seemed like a test. “Yes sir,” he said. The young master tapped one stack with the hand holding his cigarette, the burning tip of ash coming perilously close to setting it alight. “It was all over Boston, when it happened. I suppose you’re too young to remember.” The boy looked quickly through the photographs on one cover page: a tumble of policemen surrounding an elegant townhouse, maybe this one. “It must have been a relief. To be found.” The young master nodded. “Oh, yes.” Still, he stood there in the doorway. As though he wanted to be asked about it. The boy said, “What was it like, being kidnapped? Where were you all that time?” “I don’t remember much,” he said. “We were lots of places. I don’t remember exactly. They kept me in the dark, most of the time. I remember being cold and dirty and being yelled at a lot. You get so tired of being hungry.” He looked the boy up and down again. He felt the eyes on his holey boots patched with tar, smelled the sticky-sweet molasses smell on his clothes, burnt and evil and ever-present with him. “But maybe you have some idea,” he said. “I remember the orphanage the most. Where they dropped me, when I became too much of a burden to them. You get to feeling that you’ll never get out. Time doesn’t mean very much.” He stared down the end of his cigarette at one chalky black and white photograph, the woman in furs clutching the boy. In the blurry photo, the boy’s face was white and featureless as a small moon. “How did you prove it was you?” the boy couldn’t resist asking. “Was it something you said? How did she know for sure?” The young master’s eyes narrowed. “A mother knows.” They looked at each other in the vast, high-ceilinged room.

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“Get moving,” he said, in a changed, sharper voice. “Come find me for your dollar when you’re done.” He worked in silence for a while, trotting up and down the back staircase with his stacks of papers, carting them load by load to the kerb. Even the garbage was handled better here than his home, where it piled up in foul heaps outside the buildings, disintegrating when it rained. Here, he imagined these papers would be whisked away in the early hours sometime, carrying their unpleasant memories with them. There must be grand parties thrown here most nights, with the doors flung open and music spilling out into the street, great roaring crowds and dances and silver trays with his champagne swept about by expert staff. But in the light of day, the long hall he traversed seemed dark and forbidding, the paintings leering in cold and unfriendly from the walls. Resting between trips, he flipped through one of the papers. There were crime stories here about bootleggers, gangster dramas, the sorts of stories his father read in paperbacks that he folded over the cover of and read at night with his holey socks up on the bed. But these were real. Informants and stoolies and anyone who crossed them, found spread-eagle and bullet-struck in the streets of the immigrant neighborhoods. His heart pounded a little, a slow stomp of blood through his veins: he was part of that story now. When the papers were all gone he returned to the great shadowed hall and followed the sound of voices to an open door at the end. Thick, tarry cigar smoke was creeping out around the edges of the doorframe, as well as some type of music he had never heard before, creaky and wise, a woman singing like he sometimes heard spilling from the negro churches on the other end of his street. Something wrecked and laughing about it. He leaned into the crack of the door. The young man was lounging there, smoking, and another man was sprawled across one of the fine leather chairs, a tumbler of something golden in

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his hand. “God, I feel like shit,” he said. His wet-looking blond hair dangled in strands over his forehead. “What do you expect, after the night you’ve had?” “I swear to the heavens above, this is the last drink I’ll ever let pass my lips.” The young man tilted back the glass, slowly, slowly, savoring it. “Oh, sure. You’ll be back at it by nightfall, you old lush.” Neither of them were older than twenty, but they spoke like much older men, the kind of men whose girths bulged out of their shirtwaists, who owned the world and knew it and could snap at each other and then sink back onto their haunches like overfed dogs. He wondered if this was something you decided to do, or if you just gradually became like them, those men. The man saw him in the doorway and waved him in. “So you’re all done? Everything cleaned out?” The boy nodded. To his companion he said, “I finally convinced her to get rid of those newspapers. All of them.” “The old bird didn’t object?” “Well, it took some convincing. And some champagne. I know how to handle her.” He said this smugly. “Don’t you, though,” the other man said. And something crackled in the air between them. “How about my dollar?” the boy asked, roughly. He wanted to be out of this smoky, sour-smelling room. “A dollar for all those papers? I saw the stacks, old chap. You’re a skinflint.” There was something smug in his bored gaze. “What do they say about new money? They’re the tightest of all. Don’t know how to share a little brass with the less fortunate.” “We go back generations in this town.” The other young man ignored this. “If you’re going to work so hard for this fellow, you should at least get to try some of this fine champagne you’ve been selling,” he said. He rose languidly, moved

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to a dark, shiny wood cabinet and produced one of the bottles, popping the cork expertly. “Go on, have some.” He poured a tall foaming glass and held it out. The boy took a step back. “It’s yours,” he said. “It’s not for— the likes of me.” The young man’s smile dropped. “But people are always taking what they’re not entitled to,” he said. “It happens all the time. You must know something about that, eh, kid?” “Leave him alone,” the young master said, but in a cursory way. The boy grasped the offered glass and took a gulp. It went right to the back of his throat and he coughed, the sharp sting of alcohol burning. The young man laughed heartily. “It burns, if you’re not accustomed to it.” He turned to his friend. “Remember your first time? We made you drink the bottle, to see if you had the stomach. Oh, that was a long night.” “Here’s your dollar,” the young master said, and took the boy’s hand roughly, shoving a coin into his palm. “Bring us some more champagne and I’ll pay you double.” He knew to pull his cap off and bob his head, eager and subservient, tail wagging as he backed out of the room. Double. Just one more case and he’d have enough, he figured. Enough to buy his father’s boat back, get him out fishing again. Maybe enough for a deposit on the old market stall. They could sell beautiful striped bass and winter flounder all bug-eyed and gleaming, laid out on sawdust and blocks of ice shipped from frozen lakes in Vermont. On his way out he stopped by the kitchen again. The girl who was not Bonnie had put the dough in the oven by now and the room was filled with its warm smell. “So you met his royalness,” she remarked dryly. “What do you think? Is he one of them?” “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think he knows either.”

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She nodded. “Just when I think I do . . . ” she trailed off. “You end up feeling sorry for him a little, don’t you?” Her face darkened. “I wouldn’t go that far.” He slipped out the garden door and stopped to look at the high black wrought-iron fences surrounding the house with their fearsome spikes. The always-shut curtains, the air of special quiet on every narrow cobbled street. He tried to imagine what it would be like to come from his own street, his steamy little cabbage-smelling tenement, and one day be taken here, and told this was your home. He thought it would be terrifying. Like you’d been granted a ticket to heaven by mistake when you knew you belonged in purgatory at best. You’d be wondering all the time when they’d come for you, when you’d finally be found out. The orphanage, waiting. If you were a six-year-old foundling, and a woman in furs smelling of roses and champagne arrived one day and told you she was your mother, wouldn’t you agree? If it had been awhile since you’d seen your own, you might even believe it. His own memories of his mother were getting more and more blurry at the edges, like a painting left in water. Sometimes he dreamed of her holding him, just the pressure of her thin arms around his body, but when he tried to twist around and look at her, he couldn’t see her face. When he rowed the boat out to the buoy, the city blinked and glittered behind him, and all around him, the harbor embracing and closing him in. The buildings were more lovely than he remembered. He wanted to stay out there, rocking on the water, watching time pass and the city people live their lives, from this safe distance. When he finally hauled up the rope with the case attached, something prevented it from coming up all the way. Sometimes it got stuck on seaweed or the other ropes and chains trailing down

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from the buoy. Then he had to kick off his shoes and dive. He was a good swimmer, he learned from summers long ago spent on the Cape when they took the bus out to the beach, a basket filled with sandwiches and pop swinging between them. You had to take a lungful of air with you, tuck your head and go down, down against the force of your body trying to rise. You couldn’t take too much air with you, or it would be too hard to fight your way down. You could only take a half breath. Now, diving in the dark scared him, with no reference point of milky sunlight above his head, and the risk of getting tangled in the buoy’s many chains. But he half-filled his lungs and dove anyway, feeling his way down the rope until he encountered the slippery tangle of seaweed holding the crate in place. When he burst, gasping, to the surface, he saw unfamiliar lights bobbing on the water: another rowboat, with two huddled shapes, rowing fast. He hauled himself back into his boat, pulling up the crate as he went, the boat rocking crazily. Quick, quick. He could let it go this time and row away, but then they might change the location, this might be his last chance. The other boat was getting closer, moving with intent against the harbor’s currents. He gritted his teeth and dug into the oars. He could outpace them if he kept breathing and pulling, if he kept his head turned, looking for the shore. He heard a metallic sound behind him, the harbor was so still tonight, still enough for him to hear the gun slide and click its safety off, the rotation of a chamber. A shout, a warning, an entreaty. “Hey, kid—” There was still time to escape, he would fly back across the water to his father and never steal from gods again. The men in the darkness took their shot.