‘With what?’ Care has been out of the loop too long. Away from AD too long.
‘Scat, silly.’ Pleasure has replaced boredom in Freddie’s voice. The pleasure of being the one who knows.
‘But AD is the cook around here.’ Care is talking to herself. Piecing together what she’s heard. I think of an alley at night. ‘Or he was …’
‘He isn’t anymore.’ The hand stops and settles on my back. Freddie is done. ‘He’s moving up. He’s going to handle distribution, at least for the waterfront. You can ask him yourself.’
‘AD? I don’t think so.’
‘Well, if you want to see Mister, that’s who you’re going to have to go through. Him or Diamond Jim. They’re going to be down on the docks tomorrow night. They’re managing the whole thing.’
‘Wait.’ Care sits up with a start. Freddie pulls back and I tumble from her lap. ‘Diamond Jim?’
‘Yeah, That’s why he’s getting to play. I heard he bought in with something big.’
Care walks more slowly after we leave. She stops at a cart that smells deliciously of meat and, a half a block later, settles against a building to share her purchase. Chicken, I think, though rat is a possibility – it has roasted so long it is both the color and consistency of leather. We eat in silence, both of us licking up any traces of the salty sauce.
The silence suits me. I am musing over my dream, the echoes of that half-waking memory taking on the names and faces of those we seek. They are monsters, I know for sure. As I scour the leather bottom of my toes, I remember how I batted furiously against the water. How I gained no purchase against the flood. How it pulled me under. How I sank. Yet there is some part of this that eludes me still, something I do not understand.
‘I don’t get it, Blackie.’ Care has been sucking on the skewer that held the meat. Now she taps it against her teeth, considering. ‘I mean, I get Diamond Jim wanting in. A deal that big could finance him for a long time. And I figure he’s fronted before. AD wouldn’t know a swell like him otherwise. But why hire the old man? He gave him a deposit and everything – for information. That was specially agreed to. It’s in the contract. And why kill Fat Peter?’
She pauses, the stick resting against her lower lip. ‘That might be unrelated. Fat Peter was greedy. Greedy and stupid, everyone said. But Jonah, too? He was just a poor old man.’
The sun is high and I have fed. Her voice is low and soft, blending with my memories of the waking dream. The old man …
‘The answer has to be in something he said. But what …’
My eyes closed, I can visualize the older man. Gaunt and scared, Jonah started at every shadow, yet he had risked his life to tell this girl something.
‘The marker? No, they took that. Took Tick, too.’ She sighs and shakes her head.
He had shaken his head, too. Hung it as if weighed down by grief or a memory. What had he said?
‘I kept it straight.’ The words come from the girl’s mouth as she, too, remembers. ‘He refused. He thought he could—’
She jumps up so quickly I mew in protest, but she does not apologize. Rips her bag open and pulls out a handful of papers, half of which she drops on the broken pavement. One she grabs, holding it in both hands. It’s the contract, which she has already read so many times that I recognize its scent – the markings on its surface. ‘Rivers.’ She says the name out loud. ‘The reference. The blank in the ledger – and the ticket that had no name. The whole thing was a set-up, Tick. The whole job. There never was any robbery. That was never what this was about. They just hired the old man to make it look real, and when he found out the truth they had to shut him up.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
As a cat, I have little sense of time. For me and my kind, life flows in an uninterrupted stream, from dreaming to waking and meal to meal. We do not bother ourselves with deadlines or watches, and our sense of the passage of the hours comes only from such concrete issues as a certain stiffness in one’s hindquarters, the yearning for food or the comfort of another.
Therefore, it would be foolish of me to venture how long we remain on that street. How long I do, at any rate, soaking up the weak early spring sun. Although the girl doesn’t go anywhere, she is in constant motion, pacing and cursing, grabbing at the papers from her bag and shoving them back in again. I can tell she’s bothered by the way she murmurs, her voice almost a growl. I wake and stir as she kicks a paving stone. I cannot but feel calm, however. The news of a double cross, of a trap set for one of her own seems inevitable to me in this world of predators and prey.