Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  One ear went to Thadeus Lowry, the other to the radiators. As the evening went on, Thadeus Lowry came to make less sense, the radiators more: There was a more certain rhythm and accurate responsiveness to what was going on in the pipes than in the human colloquy.

  Tintinnabulation vanquished confabulation.

  Sleep mastered Robby.

  Robby had slept at Wolsley School in a room with five other boys, undisturbed by sniffling, snoring, sudden cries in the night for nannies who could not answer, the traffic of uncertain, sleepsodden prowls to the water closet and back. He had slept aboard H.M.S. Sacramouche, lying on a steel-plate deck, vomit and disinfectant in his nose, undisturbed by sudden shifts in elevation and direction, strategic wallowing, undisturbed by Evacuation Ladies stepping on him in the dark to see if he was all right.

  Robby’s first night’s sleep in New York City was disturbed. Thadeus Lowry was giving witness to his day in a waning voice. The radiators hissed at him. Robby slept. A few meters from his head, just the other side of the living room wall, an argument broke out. A man’s voice shouted “I love you!” and there was the sound of smashing glass. “I love you!” and the sound of crashing furniture. “I love you!” and a body thudded against the living room wall. “My head! You broke my head!” Seven stories below a woman passed by, singing Carmen. A fire department went through the narrow street, its sirens amplifying up the walls. (Somnus said, Right Robby—they’re just moving hell.) An anguished human scream came up from the alleys as the first light of day glazed the windows. (Someone’s just discovered he’s alive.) Snorting, trundling snowplows scraped the streets and shovels sang on the sidewalks. Rubbish barrels were tympanized. Buses roared in the morning like lions looking for people to devour. Robby awoke feeling the concerns of the whole world had prowled his sleep.

  Yellow pools of weak light surrounded the table lamps. Robby was still on the divan. Thadeus Lowry was still in his chair, chin on his chest. His chérie was curled in her chair, ginger hair on garnet chair arm. The radiators had stopped, and the room was cold. Time had stopped. Getting up quietly and moving around the room, Robby felt himself an imposition—animation in an otherwise still picture.

  He looked at his supper plate from the night before and at his empty glass of water and at Thadeus Lowry and his chérie and gauged the distance between himself and breakfast as equal to the distance between himself and the nearest school. Even if he’d missed Chapel, he might still be in time for breakfast.

  In the bathroom, his suitcase remained gaping on the floor. He took his overcoat and cap from the bathroom doorknob where he had left them the night before, and put them on.

  And then Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob., English-speaking, dressed in a blue blazer and red striped tie, cap and coat emblazoned by stags butting oak trees, short pants and kneesocks, yellow hair over his ears, after finding the elevator and descending in it, stepped out onto a New York City street on a winter morn.

  The snow was black. Robby would have sworn the snow had come down white. He shook his head.

  Robby walked the four blocks around Thadeus Lowry’s apartment house and found himself back at his front door. Although some people had looked at him curiously, and others hadn’t seen him at all, Robby was relieved: He had gotten around the block without being accosted once. Neither had he found a school.

  Continuing to take Thadeus Lowry’s navigational advice, Robby went up a street, went left, and navigated an eight block square. It did not bring him back to Thadeus Lowry’s door. He went up another street, went right, and navigated a sixteen block square. In nearly three miles of walking, Robby found nothing which looked like a school to him. Nowhere were there iron gates, a gatekeeper’s lodge, a long driveway with playing fields on either side leading to a compound of gray-stone, slate-roofed buildings. There were apartment buildings and office buildings, big stores and little stores. There were people hurrying everywhere, heads down to ignore anyone who might accost them. Robby began up another street, remembering Thadeus Lowry’s comment that it was the law there be a school in the neighborhood (and that schoolchildren are drawn to school as are ladies to hat shops), when the simple arithmetic of his search overwhelmed him.

  His next square, in the search plan, was to have thirty-two blocks each side. Was New York City big enough? Was he? If he failed to find a school in that square, his next would have sixty-four blocks to a side! Two-hundred-and-fifty-six blocks to a side! Five-hundred-and-twelve blocks to a side!

  Robby would miss lunch again.

  Therefore, at the corner, he stopped. He looked left, and he looked right. He went in no direction. There were blocks in front of him, blocks behind him, blocks to his left, blocks to his right. Blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks.

  Across the street there was a woman who had also stopped. She stood on the curb, squinting at Robby. She wore a brown cloth coat, overshoes, and carried a purse. She was plump.

  Robby crossed the street to her. “Please, ma’am, where’s the piss?”

  “The what?”

  “The piss, ma’am. I was told to look for the school which is called a piss. I can’t find one.”

  “The P.S., you darlin’ boy.” Her hands clutched her purse strap firmly. Through narrowed lids she looked up and down the street. “Yes,” she said. “You’re lost, aren’t you?”

  “No, ma’am. I just don’t know where I’m going.”

  Her right hand grabbed Robby’s. “I know just where you’re goin’, you darlin’ boy. I’ll bring you there.”

  Greatly relieved, his hand in hers, Robby went down the sidewalk with her. The speed with which the woman moved surprised him. Perhaps she knew that if they didn’t hustle he would be late for school. Or perhaps by helping him she was falling behind her own schedule. Attached to her as he was he found that running ten steps, walking five, running ten again was the only way to keep up with her and not have his arm freed from his shoulder.

  They came to what appeared to Robby to be wide stairs leading to the basement of New York City.

  “Down here, darlin’.”

  “Is my school underground? No wonder I couldn’t find it anywhere I looked.”

  “That’s right, you darlin’. You just come with me.”

  They went down the steps together. The woman paid money for them both and they went through a turnstile. Robby was astonished to find himself in a train station.

  “Oh, ma’am. Do I get to take a train to school?”

  “Just this once, darlin’.”

  With one hand clutching his, the other, with purse dangling from her wrist, pushing his back, the woman shoved Robby aboard a crowded subway train. The door behind them closed, compressing them further. Robby found his face embedded in the rabbit fur of another passenger’s coat.

  “Glumph!” he said.

  The train accelerated quickly to a speed beyond the passengers’ ability to adjust. Vertically they squirmed together like eels in a jar. Waist high to most, sometimes Robby’s head was twisted upwards. All the tall passengers were pressed so close together they had their faces turned up to the roof for air. Sometimes Robby’s head was twisted downwards. The air in neither quarter was desirable. Overshoes, mostly not buckled, took up all but a few inches of floor space. There were two ladies’ boots, which did not match, between a pair of man’s boots, which did match. One man’s boot was way over here; its mate way over there. There was one lady’s boot for which Robby could find a match nowhere.

  Robby’s head was twisted up again. People’s arms were raised as if in surrender, clutching at poles and straps. Some ladies’ arms appeared to extend from men’s armpits. Some men’s arms led to ladies’ heads.

  As they rattled and swayed from stop to stop, the people writhed. More burrowed themselves into the crowd. They turned slow, full circles as people snuggled against them and wriggled around them. All the while their cool, adult, upturned faces studied advertisements above the windows for Alka Seltzer
and United States War Bonds. Some tunneled through the crowd to leave the train; others rowed through the crowd with their elbows.

  Across the aisle, there was a puddle on the train floor. As the car proceeded and righted itself, the puddle moved to the middle of the floor. The train banked, and the puddle returned to its original bed. The train righted itself again, tipped a little more, and the puddle passed the center of the car. It retreated. At the next inclination of the train, the puddle rushed across the floor and surrounded Robby’s shoes. Instantly his feet felt wet.

  “Ma’am?” He tugged on her hand. “I’m being stood under by a puddle!”

  “This stop’s ours.” She gave the crushed bones of his hand a further grinding.

  “Is my school near here?”

  The woman had positioned them so that when the door slid open they virtually were catapulted onto the platform. They ascended stairs carpeted with chewing gum.

  Robby rose into a world entirely different from any he had ever seen.

  Everywhere there were pushcarts. In each pushcart was an oversized sign saying 23¢ or 12¢ or 9¢ or 32¢. Behind most pushcarts stood men with long white aprons over their overcoats, hats pushed back on their heads. Women at the pushcarts wore bulky sweaters and thick shoes and kerchiefs. They were all singing about potatoes a nickel, oranges a dime. More properly dressed people, men and women, snaked among the pushcarts, testing a tomato here, a melon there. They skirted cast-off cardboard boxes and walked on wood shavings and sawdust and excelsior and slush. Robby’s guide pulled him by the hand on a circuitous route through the pushcarts. And on the pushcarts were oranges and apples and bananas and melons and potatoes and tomatoes and heads of lettuce and cabbages and sausages and hams and pudent chickens and many foods Robby had never seen before and whose names he did not know.

  Behind the pushcarts the woman rushed Robby down an alley piled high on both sides with empty boxes. They entered a building, went through a cold room of hanging beef carcasses and out again onto a side street. They crossed that street and went along the slush on the sidewalk until they came to the building at the top of a T-intersection.

  She pulled him up the steps, through a door, along a dark corridor to an interior door. There she used a key from her purse.

  “Is this my school, ma’am?”

  She pushed open the door and gently pushed Robby inside.

  He was in what appeared to be a kitchen. There was a sink and a stove and a refrigerator. There were also three cots against the walls.

  A man in a plaid shirt sat in a wheelchair at the kitchen table. He looked up from the picture puzzle he was doing. He looked directly at Robby, at the woman behind Robby, then even more directly at Robby.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, as if provoked.

  The woman let go of Robby’s hand. She closed the door behind them.

  Still in her cloth coat, looking at the man in the wheelchair, her body sagged. Her purse dangling from her wrist, she covered her eyes with her hand.

  “Oh, Frankie,” she said. “I don’t know. Someone important, I think. I recognize him from the morning newspaper.”

  The man wheeled back from the table, and turned. Full-faced he stared at Robby.

  She said: “I think I’ve kidnapped him!”

  10

  Kidnapped

  “Whaddaya mean, kidnapped?” shouted the man in the wheelchair. “What kidnapped?”

  “Shush, Frankie. Someone might hear you.”

  “Someone might hear me! Call the cops! Whaddaya mean, kidnapped?”

  “Please, Frankie.” The woman who had escorted Robby through the labyrinths of the world now stood quaking by the door. “I don’t know what it is I’ve done.”

  Frankie banged the heel of his hand against his own forehead as if trying to escape the immediate situation by knocking himself unconscious. He recovered from the blow. “You kidnapped this? This kid?”

  “I think I did, darlin’.”

  He stared at Robby. There was sleep in the corners of the man’s huge brown eyes.

  “You’re kidnapped?”

  “I was on my way to school, sir, and this nice woman offered to guide me.”

  “This nice woman kidnapped you? This nice woman, my wife, Marie Savallo, she kidnapped you?”

  “Please, sir, she took me on an underground train and through a market where there was a great lot of food, and it was all jolly interesting.”

  Frankie’s big eyes darted to Marie’s face. “Did anyone see you come in?”

  “We took the back ways, Frankie.”

  His arms flung out with astonishing speed. He swept the picture puzzle off the kitchen table. Pieces of it flew to the corners of the room.

  “You’ve kidnapped a child? You, Marie? Marie of the neverending novena? You musta gone nuts!”

  “Saints, I don’t know what it is I’ve done, Frankie. It just came over me in a rush, it did. I saw him in the street. He was so cold and hungry lookin’. So beautiful…lost.” Still in her overcoat, Marie Savallo was fighting tears. “So I took him home with me.”

  “You want a child—so you kidnap one! Right! Call the men in the white coats to come get Marie Savallo! Booby hatch for her!”

  She looked to him truly for an explanation. “What’s this I’ve done, Frankie?”

  “You’ve kidnapped a child, that’s what you done! You went out to get a job and you come back with a child you kidnapped! That’s what you done!”

  “I never did get the job, Frankie.”

  “Of course you didn’t get the job! That’s what you went out for! Instead you brought home another mouth to feed!” The flat of his hand made an awful bang on the kitchen table. “And you brought him here! My brother Tony’s here, the damned draft-dodger, and you walk in—not with a job—not with a loaf of bread—but with a kidnapped kid!”

  Marie Savallo agreed. “Things aren’t so good, Frankie.”

  “‘Things aren’t so good,’ she says. Kidnappin’ a kid will make things good?”

  “Shush, darlin’, please. People shouldn’t hear you shoutin’ kidnap so loud when there’s about to be a child found missin’.”

  “Have you gone nuts, Marie? Who knows about kidnappin’?”

  “They’ll never suspect us, darlin’. If only you’ll lower your voice.”

  Frankie lowered his voice. “You want to get me sent to prison, is what you want. You want to get rid of me for life?”

  “No, darlin’. Never say such a thing. How could I get on without you?”

  “God!” said Frankie Savallo. “A wife who kidnaps children!”

  “I couldn’t resist him, Frankie.”

  “I marry a sweet Irish girl and she sets me up to go to prison just like a member of my own family!”

  “He’s such a darlin’ boy, Frankie. Just look at him.” She took off Robby’s hat. “Lost and cold and half starved he was.”

  “My uncle says it’s always the Irish who get the Italians in trouble. My uncle says the prisons are full of good Italians put there by the holy Irish!”

  “Frankie, darlin’, this opportunity might be the answer to a prayer, you understand.”

  “Opportunity! What opportunity! Since when is being sent up for life an opportunity?”

  “I tell you, Frankie—he’s in the newspaper. This lad’s a very important package.”

  “What paper? Lemme see the paper.”

  “It’s here, darlin’. I wrapped the garbage in it.”

  While another mouth to feed, which hadn’t been fed, watched, Marie Savallo went to the sink’s sideboard and dumped garbage out of a newspaper. She spread it out on the kitchen table in front of Frankie. “The New York Star,” she said. “See? His picture, through the eggshells. The very same boy, it is.”

  Frankie Savallo looked back and forth from Robby in the flesh to Robby through the eggshells.

  His left hand plowed percolated coffee beans off the newspaper.

  He read.

  Frankie Saval
lo exclaimed: “He’s an orphan, Marie! You kidnapped an orphan!” His fist banged the kitchen table. In truth, Frankie Savallo had the biggest shoulders and chest Robby had ever seen. The man’s body was like a triangle with the broad shoulders on top and the shriveled legs in the wheelchair. Robby knew the legs of the kitchen table couldn’t absorb too many more blows from the man’s fist. “Who’s gonna pay ransom for an orphan?”

  “Read the paper, Frankie. He’s an English duke, or somethin’.”

  “What’s a duke?”

  “It’s royalty, darlin’. Up there with the King.”

  “A king?” Frankie looked around at Robby again, his eyes even wider. “You’ve stolen a king?”

  “Like a king, darlin’, only not so royal as all that.”

  “What the hell are you, kid?”

  Robby shrugged. “Burnes, sir.”

  “See, Marie? He says his name’s Burnes. There was a kid in school named Burnes. His father did five to ten for aggravated assault.”

  “I think he’s tryin’ to say his name, darlin’. If you’d just look, you’d see in the newspaper that one of the names in this magnificent long string of ’em he has is the name Burnes. See that? You know the English, darlin’: When one word will do they squander ’em.”

  “Oh, yeah. Says here, ‘The decision was made in England’s highest corridors of power.’ Where’s that at?”

  “Must be the Tower of London, Frankie. Oh, some terrible things have gone on in that place!”

  “It says ‘special ship,’ Marie. Look, it says he was sent to America on a ‘special ship.’ A special ship for this kid!”

  “It quotes the Prime Minister, Frankie, Mr. Winston Churchill himself. You’ve heard him on the radio. Talking about our wee friend over there.”