by Laura Ruby
The years passed and everything was settling nicely. Sweetcheeks was certain that eventually he would have enough clout to crush his beer-sneezing father beneath his boot. And he would have, if Donatella hadn’t taken up with the plumber and run off to Boise, if the kid hadn’t turned out to be a whiner who had to be pawned off on a bunch of nannies, and if Sweetcheeks hadn’t got bored with robbing banks. No, Sweetcheeks wanted something bigger.
And then he remembered the story of his great-great-great-great-grandfather Mose The Giant. What if that stupid story was true? What if, as Tommy said, Mose The Giant really had managed to capture an invisible girl? And what if Sweetcheeks could do the same thing and catch an invisible girl for himself? Why, an invisible girl could turn everything around. An invisible girl could help change a better-than-average thief with marital problems into the greatest gangster of all time. Imagine what you could steal if you were invisible. You could steal the most powerful weapon in the world!
He had to find her.
How was the question. Sweetcheeks thought he’d conceived the perfect plot, but so far it hadn’t produced satisfactory results. And grabbing that map from that batty old man and his vicious band of cats hadn’t worked either. Some genius that guy turned out to be! The star on the map had marked the location of Kakusaki’s House of Sushi and the very polite, very frightened and very cooperative Mr. Kakusaki hadn’t heard of any invisible girl. (But he did make a luscious California roll.)
Despite some serious evil-planning issues, Sweetcheeks gathered his men in the Armoury, a large round room deep in Sweetcheeks’s basement lair. Circling the room were a dozen suits of English and French armour, each of them positioned at the ready, as if they were about to race off into battle. (Sweetcheeks swore the suits of armour liked to march around at night, and that when he woke up in the morning they had all switched places.) Display cases filled with antique swords, guns and bullets graced the walls. The oval meeting table was clear glass, so that the eighteenth-century cannon that formed its base was visible. The finishing touch was Odd John, standing in the corner with an enormous battle-axe slung casually over one shoulder. (Sweetcheeks thought he looked fabulously menacing that way, and often made John stand there when Sweetcheeks was negotiating with rival gangs.)
Sweetcheeks leaned forward as he finished telling the story of Mose The Giant. “No one knew what had happened, not even my great-great-great-great-grandfather Mose himself. But at that moment, he’d grabbed the ankle of the biggest prize of all. The Wall. The one who wasn’t there, the invisible girl, whatever you want to call her. And together the two of them went on to perform the biggest bank and jewellery robberies of the nineteenth century, all of them unsolved to this day.” Sweetcheeks’ famous cheeks were flushed and a single lock of golden hair fell attractively over one blue eye—the very same way it did in the ads for Luvvie’s No-Pee Pull-Up Pants—as he leaned back in his seat once more and looked around at the men. “Now, have you ever heard a more fascinating story?”
In their collective opinion, his men had heard more fascinating nursery rhymes. But they knew that if they didn’t show the right level of excitement, Sweetcheeks would go back to the beginning and tell it all over again, just like he’d told it 4,000 times before. And if that wasn’t enough to stir up some enthusiasm, he might start chopping off random ears, noses and little toes. It was only with a great effort that the men managed to say, “Wow,” or “Gee whiz,” or “Who’d a thunk?” before tossing back their whiskies and pouring out more.
“So, Boss,” said one of the men, Bobby The Boy, too new at this gangster gig to know when to speak up and when to cork it. “The little guy…uh…the one who was robbed. He had a monkey?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Why?”
“Well, Bobby, I really couldn’t say.”
“I don’t like monkeys,” one of the other men said. “Too noisy. And all that swinging makes me dizzy.”
“Yeah,” said another guy, “and they have those creepy little faces, you know? Like…uh…little monkey faces. Mean ones.”
The group nodded in agreement at these slights against the monkey population. “They smell, too.”
“The monkey is beside the point though, isn’t it?” said Sweetcheeks, sighing in annoyance. “The monkey was just a minor detail.”
“And what about the notebook?” said Bobby. “What do you think he was going to write in it?”
Sweetcheeks was blunt: “Who cares?”
“I mean,” Bobby said. “Could have been something important, you know? Like a secret formula.”
“A secret formula for what?” Sweetcheeks snapped.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Something secret. And the pen. You said it was silver?”
“The pen,” said Sweetcheeks. “Now that’s a totally different story. The pen was something special. And still is.”
But Bobby wasn’t finished with his questions. “Was she ugly or something?”
Sweetcheeks raised one of his delicately arched eyebrows. “Excuse me? Was who ugly?”
The other men stared into their glasses as Bobby The Boy continued. “The Wall. Was she ugly or something? Is that why she, you know…uh…was invisible and stuff? Or maybe Mose never saw her or nothing?”
“Ugly? Ugly?” said Sweetcheeks. “The Wall was beautiful. The most beautiful girl in the world. And my great-great-great-great-grandfather loved her. He loved her dearly. And she loved him. It was the romance of the century! They were like Bonnie and Clyde!” The truth was that The Wall had been no great beauty and Sweetcheeks’s great-great-great-great-grandfather Mose was no romantic. Unless he needed her help for some shady criminal activity, Mose kept The Wall locked in the chicken coop in the backyard of his mother’s house in New Jersey, where she survived on only the eggs the chickens saw fit to give her.
But Sweetcheeks hated to be reminded of annoying things like truth or justice or unwilling invisible accomplices left to suck eggs in chicken coops. “Let’s not get sidetracked here,” he said, glaring at Bobby. “My point is that we need to get our hands on our own Wall. There’s one born every hundred years or so. This new one would be about twelve now. I know that because she and I have…uh…met once before, when she was quite a bit younger.”
“What do we need her for?” said Bobby The Boy.
“What do we need her for? Were you paying attention to my story? Do I need to tell it all over again?”
The other men started to grumble and one them waved a salad fork at Bobby menacingly.
“What I mean is,” said Bobby, “you already pulled off some of the biggest bank robberies, right?”
“Some,” said Sweetcheeks, mollified.
“And some of the biggest jewellery robberies.”
“Go on.”
“And some of the biggest cons.”
“It’s true.”
“With all that, Boss, why do you need some invisible girl?”
“Oh,” said Sweetcheeks. “Well, my young friend, one can’t rest on one’s laurels, can one?”
Bobby The Boy bunched his eyebrows together. “What’s a laurel?”
But Sweetcheeks wasn’t listening. “You have to have a goal, you have to keep moving on to bigger and better things, otherwise you grow old and stale. I’ve got some plans—big plans—that require The Wall’s special talents.” He looked around the room meaningfully. “Some plans that involve The Richest Man in the Universe.”
One of the men gasped, and several others poured themselves double and triple shots of whiskey.
“I hope that satisfies your curiosity,” said Sweetcheeks. “Now let’s move on to the next item on the agenda. I want to know what’s going on with The Punks. I haven’t received my cut of their take, I’ve gotten no word and I’m becoming quite irritated about the whole thing. Unless I get some news from them soon, I’m thinking about gassing the whole subway system just to get rid of them.”
But Bobby The Boy, unfortunately for him, still was
n’t quite done asking questions. “Boss, I thought you said last time that you had some kind of spy looking for The Wall.”
“Yes, yes, I did say that. What about it?”
“How come he ain’t reported in yet?”
“Ain’t?” said Sweetcheeks. “What language are you speaking?”
“And,” said Bobby The Boy, oblivious to the growing hostility of the group and to the purpling of Sweetcheeks’s cheeks, “how do you know that once you catch this Wall girl, she won’t get away from you like she did when she was a baby?”
Sweetcheeks lost his patience and nudged the man to his right. “Lefty, who hired this idiot? I want him fed to the dogs.”
“You don’t have any dogs,” Lefty said, twirling his dark handlebar moustache. “And you’re the one who hired him.”
“Ah. Well, that was clearly a bad call,” said Sweetcheeks. “Mr John, I am in need of some toes for my charm bracelet. You pick the foot. And use a floor cloth, will you? Last time you made such a mess that the cleaning crew charged me extra.”
Thick as he was, Bobby The Boy finally realised the kind of trouble his big mouth had got him into. He leaped up from his chair and flew around and around the table, chased by a cheerful but persistent John and his handy battle-axe. Sweetcheeks and his men were just settling in for a bloody bit of entertainment when one of the guards burst into the room.
“Boss!” he said. “A Sewer Rat!”
“What?” said Sweetcheeks. “Where?”
“Here!” yelled the man. “Now!”
Before the guard could say any more, he was clubbed from behind and shoved to the floor. Standing in his place was a man—or at least someone the general shape and height of a man—wearing a stained and ragged wool coat and holding an umbrella like a baseball bat. The man-thing dropped his umbrella and fell to his knees. He took a deep, shuddering breath, threw back his sloping, rodentlike head and shrieked: “KITTY!”
Chapter 9
Outsides and Insides
HER FIRST BURGLARY LEFT GURL triumphant. Then shaken. Then exhausted. Then ashamed. But whatever she felt, she knew she did not want to go back to the orphanage. Not yet. She walked (numbly and invisibly) for too many blocks to count until she found herself at one of the many mouths of Central Park.
She entered the park, found a restroom, and—after many unsuccessful and nerve-racking attempts—made herself visible again. She left the bathroom to search for a place to rest. A patch of soft grass, a bench, a rock—it didn’t matter. She tried to ignore the ice-cream and hot-dog vendors, the rumbling of her own gut, and the many people who floated and bounced along the path.
As she passed a pretzel vendor, her stomach growled loudly and the vendor laughed, calling, “¿Hola, cómo está usted?” She didn’t understand Spanish and was embarrassed when he pointed to the pretzels and then to her belly. She shook her head and pulled out an empty pocket. The kindly vendor smiled, dressed a fat pretzel with a yellow ribbon of mustard and held it out to her. Even more embarrassed, she shook her head again, but he would not take no for an answer. Gratefully, she took the pretzel and thanked the vendor as best she could. She found a soft patch of grass at the edge of an open field. She leaned up against her tote bag, now stuffed with stolen items, and took a bite of her pretzel.
A particularly spectacular macaw, swishing a two-foot-long tail, ambled over to where she sat. It wore a red velvet collar with the name Darla Jean scrawled in rhinestones. “One bite?” it said. “Pretty please?”
Gurl glanced around at the people who reclined on blankets and benches all around her, but no one seemed to be paying any special attention; no one seemed to care that the bird was bothering her.
Gurl held the pretzel over her head so that the huge bird couldn’t reach it. “Piggy!” it said, angry. “Oink, oink, oink!”
A cockatoo—his name appeared to be Reginald, if you believed the writing on his tiny T-shirt—wandered by. He preened for a taste of the pretzel and squealed like an infant when Gurl said, “No!”
“Mean!” said the cockatoo.
“Piggy,” corrected the macaw.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Soon waves of pigeons washed the ground around her, peering at her with one eye, then the other. Loons and gulls and pied-bellied grebes stopped by, as did black crows that gleamed purple in the dimming light. She was mocked by the mockingbirds and taunted by the bobolinks. The only bird that didn’t make an appearance was the dancing blue-footed booby.
On top of that, dozens of Wings and wannabes darted around and above her. She watched as a pear-shaped man in a shiny warm-up suit bounced along the path in front of her, his loose flesh shaking like half-set gelatin. An older woman with hair dyed an unnatural shade of red held her arms out aeroplane style as she zoomed through the air in weird, shuddering spurts, as if she were having trouble switching internal gears.
Gurl gave up. The birds were right. She was officially a thief, so who was she to deserve a reward, even one as small as a pretzel? Squeezing back the tears that welled up, she broke the pretzel into pieces and watched as the birds fought for the crumbs. She wondered about the salesman, Jules. Perhaps he never saw Gurl at all—the wink another figment of her imagination—or maybe he had seen her somehow and didn’t care enough to get her in trouble. But then again, what if he were just waiting for her to actually leave the store to call the police? Gurl tensed with alarm, looking around wildly. They could be searching for her right now! Here she was, just sitting around, waiting to be caught!
She scooped up the tote bag and ran, scattering the birds like a toddler on the beach.
But no one ever came searching for her. Once Gurl got away with that first burglary, Mrs Terwiliger sent her out almost every night. Fourteen pairs of high-heeled shoes, fifty-seven silk scarves, thirty-nine hats, twenty-two sweaters, ten bottles of French perfume, seven lipsticks and five fur coats (fake, but Mrs Terwiliger didn’t seem to notice the difference)—that was what Gurl stole for Mrs Terwiliger in the month that followed the first outing, and still Mrs Terwiliger had produced Noodle only once a week and then for only a few minutes. Every time Gurl brought back more scarves, hats, shoes and perfume, she asked for Noodle. And every time Mrs Terwiliger told her, “Just a few more errands, Gurl, dear and then you can have your little friend back.”
Gurl was beginning to think that Mrs Terwiliger intended to use her to steal expensive junk for the rest of her life, and that Noodle would die alone and lonely in that horrible birdcage. But Mrs Terwiliger wouldn’t tell her where she was keeping Noodle, and just because people couldn’t see her didn’t mean that Gurl could see through walls or locked doors. Plus, Mrs Terwiliger seemed to know that with every “errand”, Gurl got better at controlling her talent. She had installed brand-new locks on all the doors and windows and rigged the main building with some sort of motion detector. So Gurl was forced to keep doing Mrs Terwiliger’s bidding, hoping that one day, some day, the matron would get careless and leave her alone with Noodle long enough for Gurl to get them both out of Hope House.
Besides her frustration with Mrs Terwiliger, there were her feelings about the stealing itself—the fact that sometimes, she was proud of what she had been able to get away with and yet, at the same time, ashamed of it. How could that be possible? And what did that say about her? Was she a bad person? Was she born that way?
There was one good thing about stealing for Mrs Terwiliger, Gurl thought, as she trudged back to the orphanage after an errand to nab some Russian caviar. She could experience the city in a way she never had before, from the outside in. Sure, she had gone out alone a few times late at night to get some food in Luigi’s alley. But she had never been able to walk undetected into Luigi’s kitchen and see how the food was made, the chef murmuring lovingly to his dishes as if they were alive. She had never been able to go to boutiques so expensive and exclusive that they catered only to supermodels and pop stars (who often whined about the prices, threw tantrums in the changing rooms, and left lips
tick stains all over the $500 T-shirts they tried on). There was the pet shop where a parakeet turned to a lorikeet and said, “So, who is this Polly and why does she want a cracker so bad? I’d take a Mexican tamale any day.” Even the public library was a surprise; the great stone lions that guarded the steps turned out to be two pale and sweaty actors in lion suits, paid to stand still.
And in this city you would have to be paid to stand still because everything else moved so fast! The streets were a blur of glittering eyes, windswept hair, billowing overcoats and shining boots, all gliding and hopping and floating and flying along in a dizzy, colourful confusion. Perhaps, thought Gurl, the city dwellers came to fly because walking wasn’t fast enough to get them to where they needed to be.
Gurl also saw things that weren’t so wonderful: sweatshops where hundreds of women pieced together clothes, homeless people curled up in doorways, the flashing lights of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances. (She also saw Laverna flyers posted on every block, each of them begging for the return of a certain grey cat.) Despite these things, she came to view this sparkling island city as a great buzzing hive, with every single person doing his or her part to make it the place it was, the place where everything and anything could happen, a city of endless possibilities. She often felt as if she couldn’t keep her eyes open wide enough or long enough to take it all in.
If you were to ask Mrs Terwiliger, she’d say Gurl never took in enough. As usual, Gurl met Mrs Terwiliger at the door to the main building after everyone else had gone to sleep. Mrs Terwiliger grabbed Gurl’s hand firmly while she unlocked the main door and then the door to her office. She watched silently, still holding Gurl’s hand, as Gurl pulled jars of caviar from her tote bag.
“A dozen jars?” Mrs Terwiliger said. “Is that all you could get?”
“That’s all they had.” It wasn’t, but Gurl didn’t like to steal more than she absolutely had to. Plus, it made her feel less like a slave to defy Mrs Terwiliger in this small way.