Authors: Daniel Finn
‘Other people you can ask, tell you thing.’
She didn’t respond, just sat hunched up; skinny arms hugging her skinny self, chin resting on her bony knees.
He felt she had turned so small he could almost lift her up, rest her on the palm of his hand. He sat back down beside her. ‘We find our way back, Mi. We find a way round these things,
nothing so bad we can’t find a way round it.’
She leaned her head against his shoulder. ‘I feel I taken us a wrong way, Reve. Got a bad feeling . . .’
‘Shh,’ he said. ‘We stay here for a little. We safe here. Wait for the sun go down. Then we can move, find our way to the market, find a truck goin our way, ask for a ride. We
can do that . . . or I find a little work in the market, earn some dollar before we go back . . .’
They slept there on the roof, leaning against each other. When he opened his eyes, the sun was low. Down over that half-dried-out river long shadows were creeping across the
Barrio; heavy purple clouds were piling up on the horizon. He frowned. Storm cloud. He wondered if it would just sit out there on the coast or move inland. His neck was stiff, and Mi, light as she
was, felt a dead weight on his shoulder. She was muttering in her sleep, frowning.
‘We been lookin for you.’ Baz was standing at the top of the steps. ‘Fay told us we got to find you.’
Reve didn’t move for a moment. ‘Why?’
‘Señor Moro looking for you and your sister. Got his men in the Barrio and out in the streets. Fay want you out the city to where you come from. She don’t want you go with
Señor Moro. You know she shout sometimes, but she don’t mean what she say to be so bad.’
He eased his arm out from behind Mi, wiped her damp forehead with the tip of his T-shirt and then stiffly got to his feet. He leaned over the parapet, looking down into the shadowy
courtyard.
‘I’m on my own,’ the girl said.
‘A’right.’
‘Where is Demi?’
‘Looking for you.’
‘But you found us.’
‘Yes. I’m good.’
‘How old are you?’
She shrugged.
Mi woke and sat up. When she saw Baz she looked puzzled. ‘You come to take us back? Fay change her mind, want to give us to the señor?’ she said, sounding like she’d
chewed on something sour.
Baz shook her head.
‘Why that man Moro bother with us?’ Mi said. ‘We nothing to him.’
‘Fay don’t tell us thing like that, but . . .’ Baz hesitated as if she was about to say something else about Fay, but then this solemn little girl just said, ‘I’m
goin show you the way out of the city. You coming?’
They followed her down from the roof. Outside the courtyard she put her fingers to her lips and whistled, high and piercing. She stood for a moment, listening. A half-moment later they heard
another whistle, answering hers. She made them wait in the shelter of a doorway, and then a couple of minutes later, Demi came running up to them.
There was a short exchange between the two children. Demi clearly saw himself as the boss and didn’t like Baz making the decisions, even when she was right. He blustered
and bounced on his toes while she stood quiet. ‘Why go that long way?’ he said. ‘Fay say take ’em out quick; nothing quicker than Agua, skip a tram out to the quarter. Take
no time. Your way we goin be duckin and hidin all night. You want that?’
‘Safer. Señor got shady men looking a’ready.’
‘Baz, you so full of worry you fill a worry bucket. Come on – we go this way.’
He set off, and after a moment’s hesitation, first Baz, then Mi and Reve followed him. They wound their way quickly through the alleys.
Ten minutes later they were at the foot of the cut that led up to Agua. ‘See?’ Demi grinned. ‘Nothin hard when you follow Demi. Tram we want is up on the west side; if we run I
bet we catch one right now . . .’
‘Check no one waiting on us up there, Demi. Go on.’
‘Me? I’m not—’
‘Go on.’
He pulled a face and went. They watched him run up to the corner, stop, look left and right and then beckon them.
They were on their way home. These two could take them to the edge of the city; then they would catch a bus back along the coast. Theon would figure a way of dealing with Calde. Tomas would be
stronger . . . That was it. A day at a time and let the storm blow itself out.
He took Mi’s hand. ‘You all right?’ The air seemed even heavier and stickier, if that was possible, and the brightness had gone out of the day. The light felt yellow and a
black cloud that only a little while ago was hanging on the horizon was now sweeping inland.
Mi didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, ‘I think we should be runnin, Reve.’ They were just up at the corner and she suddenly took off along the edge of the square,
moving fast, Demi sprinting to catch up. Reve cursed. Why did she do these things?
And then he saw the car.
It came squealing across to the cut where Baz and Reve were standing and slammed up on to the pavement right in front of Mi and Demi. Three men piled out. One grabbed Mi, and though Demi was
fast, spinning around and taking off back down the pavement, the men were fast too. One of them caught his arm and swung him off his feet. Demi skidded across the pavement, managing to break the
man’s grip, tumbling in a ball. Then he was up again, jinking round the second man and flying past Baz and Reve. ‘Go!’ he shouted at them. ‘They comin on my heel.’
Baz was already running, but Reve was rooted to the spot. He saw Mi tumbled into the back of the car. The man that had started after Demi pulled back. ‘Get you next time!’ he
shouted, and snapped his fingers. His companion laughed and they swung back into the car, which bumped off the pavement, its tyres squealing on the hot tarmac as it accelerated away, screeching
around the fountain roundabout, then down the east side of the square, and pulling up with a jolt outside the Slow Bar no more than three hundred metres from where Reve was standing.
Moro had taken her! Reve felt sick in the pit of his stomach. He was stupid. He was an idiot.
He felt a hand on his arm.
It was Baz. She must have just slipped round the corner and out of sight and then sneaked back as soon as the car had pulled away. Demi was right behind her, shuffling his feet, glancing this
way and that, looking like he hardly needed to be there; that it was nothing to do with him that Mi had been taken.
‘No.’ she said to Reve. ‘You don’t go there. Not now.’
Of course he was going there. He shook her hand off. ‘You plan this? Fay plan this?’
‘No.’ She pulled at him again.
‘Leave him be, Baz. Country boy’s all cooked in his head.’
‘That right?’ Something snapped. ‘You the one take us this way, Demi. Hey! Maybe you done it on purpose, feed Mi to that man!’ He wanted to grab the little boy and shake
him like a rat. ‘That what you done, eh!’ Abruptly he turned away, disgusted with himself. Why blame the boy? He, Reve, he was the one to blame. He should have had his eyes open.
‘You want to go ’cross to that place,’ Demi said sullenly, ‘you go, but we seen kids goin in there, all ages – that right, Baz? Goin in and not comin out. So you go
if that what you want to do.’
Baz was standing right beside Demi, his shadow, two or three inches smaller, eyes that would melt a soft woman. ‘Seen ’em, Demi.’ Her eyes were fixed on Reve, looking up at
him. ‘Fay say we never go near that place. Never. She rage if we do wrong thing. That man the spider,’ she said.
Reve stared across the broad dusty square, half shadowed now, the old buildings cracked and peeling, boarded windows. In the middle the fountain spluttered silently and then died. The tram they
had been going to catch swung round the far end and slipped away down an avenue to the right. There was hardly any traffic: a truck, dirty vans pumping oily smoke from their exhausts. The only
thing shiny in all that wide space was down the far end of the square, where the buses and the trams stopped, where there was a row of cafes, a corner market and the glinting blue lights of
Señor Moro’s bar.
Mi would be so frightened.
‘Come on, we got to get back, tell Fay,’ said Demi. ‘She know the señor, don’t she, Baz? She can give him talk. Get your sister maybe . . .’ He didn’t
sound convinced.
‘Why’d she send you looking for us in the first place!’ exclaimed Reve. ‘Cos that man over there told her to, tha’s why!’ They didn’t answer.
‘Your Fay just his runaround.’
‘Fay different to what you sayin,’ said the boy defensively. ‘An’ why Fay so sweet on you an’ the girl?
You real slow, nothin like me an’ Baz. An’ we been with her a long time, yeah. Long time. Almos’ family. That right, Baz?’
Something warm and wet slapped the top of Reve’s forehead. Rainwater trickled into his eye. He blinked.
Baz didn’t answer and Reve wasn’t listening, not really, but the word ‘family’ jostled him. ‘A’right,’ he said bitterly, ‘I tell you what you do.
You go tell her that if she help us this time, she won’t see us never again.’
The rain was slow and lazy, slapping the dusty ground here and then there, like it was testing where it should fall. Demi stared at him for a moment, then he and Baz ran off back into the
Barrio.
The blue lights of the Slow Bar flickered at him from the far side of the square.
Cars passed and then he darted across the road and into the wide open space of Agua, jogging down the length of the square, the rain falling around him, running down his neck. He didn’t
even feel it.
He just kept thinking. How do you walk into the middle of a web and not get caught?
A minute or so later Reve was crossing the road on the far side of the square, skipping round behind a tram and then stepping up on to the wide pavement. The market at the
corner was closing, the thickening rain hastening the traders to pack away the remains of their vegetables and the few stallholders selling cheap clothes were bundling jeans and shirts in plastic
and then tossing them into the back of vans. The pavement was almost empty, just a man standing in the doorway of the Slow Bar, and opposite, parked on its own, a police car.
What did Moro want Mi for? Because she was pretty? She didn’t look so special, not after a night in the city . . . What was his plan? A man like that always had a plan. He was clever, like
Theon.
The man at the door of the bar was small, whip-thin, his head tilted forward, arms folded, an S-shaped shadow man. Reve straightened his shoulders and walked up to him. ‘I got business
with Señor Moro.’
‘That so?’ The man lifted his head: a thin, weathered, familiar face, a heavy black moustache . . . It was LoJo’s father!
‘Pelo!’ Reve couldn’t believe it. ‘What you doin?’
‘Working for the man,’ Pelo said drily, ‘That what it look like to me.’
Reve shook his head. The last he’d seen of Pelo was in that boat, the spreading white V of his wake into the darkness, his family left standing on the pier. And then Calde giving his name
to the police . . . Reve suddenly registered the police car parked right there. ‘Pelo, don’ you know police lookin for you? Theon said . . .’
‘S’all right. Theon got me word. Told me keep low.’ He grunted. ‘Never been lower ’n this place.’
‘But that car!’
Pelo pulled at the end of his moustache. ‘No,’ he said, that same dry tone in his voice, ‘I’m safe enough.’
‘But you goin back? You heard what happen?’
‘When this man let me drive his boat –’ he tilted his head towards the closed door – ‘he done me favour,’ he said. ‘Now I owe him. That’s what he
say . . . and he got a long reach.’
Yes, thought Reve bitterly, he had – reached right out of the bar and snatched up Mi, easy enough.
As if reading his mind Pelo said, ‘I seen your sister gone in not ten minutes ago. You hopin’ to get her?’ Reve nodded. ‘There wasn’t anything I could do. You
understan’? I just hold the door here.’
The rain had started to hiss against the pavement. Reve stepped closer into the doorway. ‘Tha’s my plan.’ It wasn’t a plan at all. Just one of those things you have to
do.
A hint of a smile crossed Pelo’s face. ‘Jus’ like that? I hear you took on Calde’s men in the cantina – you an’ the Boxer.’
‘How you hear ’bout that?’
‘Word always get back to Señor Moro. You know what I mean? An’ you done favour to my family.’ He shook his head. ‘You something, eh.’
Reve didn’t feel he was something.
‘You gonna do the same thing here?’ he said still in that same dry way he had.
Reve shrugged. The business in the cantina had been different. ‘Someone pull a knife on Tomas.’
‘I know. Someone always pull a knife. You got to have someone watch your back, Reve, that’s what you got to do.’ He pushed open the door.
For a moment Reve thought that maybe Pelo would come in with him, stand at his shoulder.
But the door swung behind him and he was on his own.
‘Well. Well. Well. The bull boy from the sea. What did I say, Captain? Everyone come to Moro’s bar. Everything happen here.’ Moro laughed, a rich oily sound
from deep in his chest.
It took Reve a couple of seconds to adjust to the bluish gloom of the long room. There was no sign of Mi.
The shirtsleeved barman with the long face was on his left, drying glasses. The counter was gleaming, and bare apart from a tray of tall thin glasses, a jug of iced water and a bottle of red
wine. Down the room two tables had been pushed together and covered with a white cloth. Moro was at the head of the table, a big bowl of pasta in front of him from which he was scooping out vast
helpings for his guests. Zavvy was on his left and beside him was the shark who’d snatched Mi. Sitting with his back to Reve was a broad-shouldered man in the full rig of a police commander,
silvery tabs on his shoulder. A policeman sitting down with the spider. Same all over.
Reve didn’t care if they wrapped their arms around each other; they could eat and drink and tear up the city as much as they wanted. It was Mi he was looking for.
The policeman twisted round to look at Reve. ‘Since when you interested in street rats, Moro?’ he said dismissively, turning back again, accepting the bowl that had been passed to
him and immediately spooning the pasta round his fork and funneling it up to his mouth.