The Clockwork Three (5 page)

Her sisters fought on the floor, crying. They looked up when she came in and called Hannah’s name at the same time. Her mother leaned over a steaming pot, forehead glistening with sweat, her hair lank, and the skin around her eyes dark and sunken.

“Hannah!” she said. “You’re home early?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Miracles do happen. Come take over supper. I’ve got to help your father turn over.”

Hannah met her father’s eyes. “Hello, Papa.” She walked over to him and kissed him on the forehead.

“Hannah, please.” Her mother held out the ladle.

Hannah sighed. She stirred and cooked. They ate together near her father so he could sit up and join them, something Hannah always came home too late at night to share in.

“One of the guests asked that I be assigned to her,” Hannah said between bites.

“What does that mean?” her mother asked.

“I’ll be her personal attendant.”

“That’s wonderful,” her mother said. “It sounds like you’re certainly securing your position at the hotel.”

Hannah looked at the food on her plate. “Uh-huh.”

That night, the straw and the fleas in the mattress itched Hannah, and she tossed, fighting for sleep. Street noise kept her awake for hours: the factory men on their way home, shouting and cursing; barking dogs; a baby screeching. She lay there, remembering the whispered conversation she had overheard, and thought about hidden treasure, a room somewhere on the top floor of the hotel that opened with a spoken word or a spell.

But then she heard the pure sound of a violin over the top of it all. One note, as if calling her name, and then it was gone. Hannah sat up, waiting.

The violin returned, birthing a folk song she had heard before, but never like this. It reminded her of walking to school on a fresh spring morning, of playing in the garden outside their old home. But more than a memory, it was as if she were there again. She smelled the lilac growing against the house and felt the warm dirt between her toes. Her mother smiling from the kitchen window, ruddy and plump, and telling her to get back to weeding. The song stopped.

Hannah listened for another tune, but none came. The warmth left behind in her chest reminded her of the hope she had felt earlier. She
worked for Madame Pomeroy now. What was it the woman had said? That Hannah stood on a balancing point, a reversal in the order of things.

Hannah glanced across the room and saw that her father was awake. He stared at the ceiling, and she saw glistening tears trail down his temples. He had also heard the violin, and she imagined it had freed him for a few moments from his weakened body. She wondered where the music had taken him, and then felt a pressure building inside, a rising swell of grief. Monstrous in size, it licked her toes and threatened to overwhelm her, drag her down and drown her.

She hit the mattress at her side as if to beat it back.

No. Everything was fine.

A Boat Ticket

G
IUSEPPE KNEW THAT STEPHANO WOULD BE WAITING. STEPHANO
watched the front door of his den the way a rattlesnake might watch a mouse hole, poised, patient, and cold-eyed. Giuseppe strode through the door with all the boldness he could muster. No sense cowering when he knew what was coming. He shut the door, and before he had even turned around, Stephano was there.

He gripped Giuseppe’s shoulder. “Have a good day, did you?”

“No.” Giuseppe fought the urge to recoil from the man’s touch.

“No?” Stephano bent down to look Giuseppe in the face, his skin as brown and dry as bark beneath a granite-colored beard flecked with food. “And why is that?”

“Ezio took it all.”

“So you’re a rat.” Stephano stood up. He wore a thick vest of woolen lambskin and a wide-brimmed hat stuck with the tattered feathers of a peacock. A huge knife hung from his side on a leather belt. “Rats are vermin, boy. I crush vermin with the heel of my boot. You want to feel the heel of my boot?”

A few of the other boys hung about the room, trying to watch without being noticed. Little Pietro was not among them. Neither were Ferro
or Alfeo. They must have already gone into the kitchen for their suppers or upstairs to sleep.

Stephano took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. “How much do you have, Giuseppe?”

Giuseppe laid his old fiddle on the floor. “None. I don’t have anything.”

A couple of the other boys whispered. Stephano looked around at them. “You hear that, boys?” He hung his hat on a hook near the door. “Nothing.”

“I told you, Ezio took —”

Stephano punched him in the gut. Giuseppe doubled over, fell to the ground, and gasped for air.

“Didn’t you hear me, boy? I kill rats! If you were careless enough to lose all your money, then you should have gone back out and made more! Get up.” He yanked Giuseppe to his feet and breathed alcohol in his face. “And what’s this I hear from Paolo? You have something you want to show me?”

Giuseppe could only shake his head.

“You sure about that?” Stephano tossed him to the floor. “’Cause I hear you somehow got yourself a new violin.”

Giuseppe tried to speak, choked, and tried again. “Paolo’s a liar.”

“You’re all liars.”

He seized Giuseppe by the collar and dragged him down a dim hallway. He wrenched open a small, low door. “You want to be a rat? Fine.” Stephano kicked him into the darkness. Giuseppe fell several feet and landed hard on a floor of packed clay. Stephano’s silhouette seemed to swell above him, framed by the light coming down from the doorway, as
if hanging in the air. “Live with the rats,” Stephano said. The door shut, and all the light died.

Giuseppe rolled onto his back and coughed. He rubbed his stomach. That could have been worse. At least he had kept his shirt on and avoided the whip. In his mind he imagined taking that whip to Ezio and Paolo, shredding their clothes and the skin on their backs. He would even let little Pietro take a swing at them.

The daydream lasted only a moment. Giuseppe rolled up to his knees and then to his feet. Lying down was how they got you.

Stephano kept the rats supplied with rags for nesting and just enough food to keep them alive and hungry. Giuseppe had heard the stories. More than one boy had died down here, stripped to the bone. If you stayed on your feet, you could kick them away and keep them at bay. But if you lay down, they would swarm and you would be finished. He did not know whether he believed the stories, but it was better not to take chances. All he could do was stand his ground until Stephano decided to let him out, and hope he lasted that long.

The cellar was rank with the smell of musk and urine and feces. After a few minutes Giuseppe had a headache and felt sick. His eyes adjusted, and he picked his way to the center of the room. The rats scurried and massed in the corners and against the walls all around him. He could hear them clicking and grinding their teeth, like chains through a winch. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them chattering away in the darkness.

He had been much younger the last time he was down here. He had screamed the whole time and flailed wildly whenever he felt something brush his legs. He did not scream this time, but he flinched and kicked at the curious noses, tails, and teeth.

Minutes passed.

Then hours.

Or were those minutes, too, and they only seemed like hours? He tried to hold still and breathe slow. He grew tired and swayed on his feet.

To keep awake and alert he sang to himself. Quiet tunes at first, then riotous songs, and he pantomimed fiddling on a violin. The green violin. He played with a fury, and a madness of music took him. He kicked his feet high and jigged like the piper in the fairy tale, the one who led the rats to the swift river and danced the children into the deep cave. He whooped and spun, the king under the mountain, lord of the rat cellar.

He played and sang until exhaustion brought him down, sweaty and panting. He had fiddled away his fear, and he lay down on the ground. The rats watched him from a safe distance, whiskers twitching. He laughed into their rags. He closed his eyes and he slept.

A hammer of light woke him. He blinked and shielded his eyes. The floating doorway hovered over him, and Stephano’s silhouette spoke. “Sleeping? Too old for the rat cellar, I see.”

Giuseppe got to his feet.

A rope fell on his head. “Take hold of that, boy.”

Giuseppe looped the rope around his hand and walked over to stand beneath the door. A few heaves later and Stephano had lifted him into the hallway.

The building sounded empty. “What time is it?” Giuseppe asked.

Stephano shut the cellar door. “Nearly lunchtime.”

That left only half a day to earn a full day’s take. Giuseppe would have worried before. Now he had the green violin.

“Grab a crust of bread if you like.” Stephano had his hands on his hips.

Giuseppe shrugged. “Not hungry.”

Stephano chuckled without smiling. “Liar. But suit yourself. Your fiddle’s still on the floor where you left it.”

Giuseppe turned to leave.

“Wait a minute, Giuseppe. One more thing.”

“What?”

“The rat cellar’s lost its hold on you, and that’s fine. Happens to all you boys sooner or later. But know this. Now you’re too old for it, I got ways to punish you like a man.” He raised a fist, sporting knuckledusters that could break bones. Giuseppe had seen it happen. “You take my meaning?”

Giuseppe swallowed.

“You’re the best musician I got, boy. That don’t mean you can get anything past me. You hide something and I’ll know it, sure as flies on a dead dog.”

Giuseppe grabbed up his old fiddle and opened the front door.

Stephano called after him. “You better make up for last night, boy. I want two dollars!”

Giuseppe slammed the door behind him. He would make Stephano’s two dollars with the green violin. He would make more than that.

He retrieved the instrument from the churchyard and found a corner where he could toss his cap. The sky above was overcast, and the mood on the street matched its somber hue. The music of the rat cellar still echoed through his body, so Giuseppe decided to set it free and try to lighten the day for his audience. He struck up the jig, slow and easy at first, tempting as a child calling friends to come play. But then he gave it some
musical laughter, and used the notes to hoot and holler. He let the song gather speed, because the violin seemed to want it, too, and the bow leaped against the strings like a pebble skidding across the surface of a pond, carrying all the joy of his remembered summers back home.

Then Giuseppe became aware of another sound, a stomping, and he looked up. His audience, the people in the street, were dancing. Arm in arm or by themselves, they spun and hopped and flew about until the song came to an end. Then they reached into their pockets for money, tossed it into his cap, and wandered away as though their minds did not yet know what their bodies had just been doing.

Giuseppe looked at the violin in his hands, almost frightened of it. But that day, he made four dollars. He could have made more, but he only dared play the green violin twice. When he returned the instrument and deposited his money in Mister Stroop’s tomb that evening, he kept one dollar and thirty-eight cents for Stephano, because actually bringing in two dollars for half a day’s work would raise suspicions. He also brought along a few extra coins in case Pietro needed help again.

It was well into the night before Giuseppe returned to Crosby Street, and at the entrance he found the little boy waiting for him. Giuseppe smiled and gave him some money, and they went in together, arm in arm, avoiding Ezio.

Pietro took to waiting for him every night, hanging about like a little ghost, and every night Giuseppe had a few coins for him, enough to make up the difference between supper and a beating. Some days Giuseppe even secured a good corner for Pietro to play, and taught him a couple of tunes on the little boy’s tin whistle. Two weeks went by like that before Giuseppe felt it would be safe to go down to the harbor and ask about the cost of a steamboat passage to Italy.

He had not been to the docks since the day of the shipwreck, and nothing of the treasures or debris remained. He squinted in the sunlight and felt sweaty at his hairline. Sailors stalked up and down the wharves and scrambled over the rigging out on the ships. Fishermen hawked their morning haul right there on the pier, and cooks and fishmongers hollered their bids for the choicest catch. Brazen gulls hopped around, eyes on the fish, snatching what they could.

Giuseppe strolled on in the direction of the passenger boats and ticket offices. Along the way he saw a group of severe-looking old men in suits, standing close together like a bundle of railroad ties on end, their eyes all trained on a particular ship. They looked out of place here on the docks, and Giuseppe grew curious. He stood back and watched as a wooden crane lifted crates from the deck of the ship, swung them around, and set them on the dock. The sailors checked and rechecked the ropes, and the old men held their breath until each crate touched ground again.

One of them held a stack of papers, and he kept looking back and forth between the papers and each crate as it came down, nodding to himself. Giuseppe drew nearer, and noticed that the crates were stamped with strings of numbers and strange words like
KARNAK
and
UR
. Giuseppe had never learned to read well, but these words made no sense at all.

“You there!” The man with the papers pointed a long finger at him.

Giuseppe had not meant to come so close.

“What are you doing?” the man asked, barreling down upon him. He had a sharp, hooked nose and wild hair the color of dust. “Are you spying on me?”

“Spying? No.”

“Who sent you? Was it the clockmakers?”

“No one sent me. I wasn’t spying.”

“Scoundrels! You go back and tell those thieves that these artifacts belong to the Archer Museum!”

Giuseppe did not know what to say.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.” Giuseppe spoke the words slow and even. “But I was not spying on you.”

One of the man’s eyelids fluttered. “The clockmakers didn’t send you?”

“No. No one sent me.”

An uncomfortable moment passed, in which the man looked him over. Giuseppe noticed that his hair was not the color of dust. It was filled with it. “Hmm,” the man said. “Perhaps I was prematurely carried away. Who are you, then?”

“Just a busker.” He held up his fiddle. Over the man’s shoulder, Giuseppe saw another load of crates rise up from the ship. A sailor shouted something.

“What are you doing down here? Aren’t you supposed to be on a corner somewhere?”

Giuseppe shrugged. “I play for the —”

A sharp twang cut him off.

They both looked up. A rope had snapped, and the load of crates careened overhead. One of the smaller boxes toppled off the stack. Giuseppe’s eyes traced its fall to the ground where it shattered, scattering straw and splinters of wood. Something round and made of brass clanged and rolled toward them.

The man with the dusty hair screamed as if in pain. He fell toward the brass ball to catch it, while the rest of the men in suits stood completely still, mouths open wide in shock. Giuseppe took a step forward, as if he
meant to help. The man scooped up the brass object, and Giuseppe saw that it was not a ball at all.

It was a head. A brass head, with eyes, a nose, ears, and lips, and hair made of wire. The man huddled over it on his knees. He whipped off his coat and wrapped it around the head as if swaddling a baby. He stood up, cradling it in his arms, and when he looked at Giuseppe, there were tears in his eyes.

Giuseppe backed away and ran before anyone could blame him for the broken cargo. He fled down the docks, dodging between wagons and carts loaded with goods, past warehouses and trading companies stacked high with barrels and sacks and boxes. He looked over his shoulder and slowed to a trot when he saw that no one followed him.

Up ahead, almost at the edge of the docks, a large steamship bellied up to a pier. Sometimes, several passenger ships like this one crowded the wharf at once, from all parts of the world, and waterfalls of people came down the gangplanks, flooding the city.