“Don’t be.” The yellow stumps grinned up at him. “They gimme eight million dollars for it and the land. Three acres, it was.”
She must have caught the incredulity in his face. She started to cackle, and in the next moment, her red, edematous hand, like a lobster claw, ducked into a large beaded reticule and plucked out a bank book from the mounds of debris stuffed inside. She flipped it open and Mooney suddenly had a glimpse of a bank balance with more zeros parading out behind it than he’d ever seen in a passbook before.
“Looks like the number of light-years between Jupiter and the earth,” he observed.
She gazed up at him blankly. “Eh?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. What are they doing with the place, anyway?”
“Doing? They done it already. Ploughed it under. Bulldozed it. Putting up a new building there.”
Mooney smiled knowingly. “Well, what else would they do?”
“I got me a new place,” she beamed. “Loft building down on Varick Street.”
“You living there now?”
“In one of the lofts. Rest of it I let out. Lots of artists and crazy people. They pay their rent, though. Prompt and regular. They wrote an article about me in the paper couple months back. You see it?”
“Afraid not.”
The puffy red hand swept down into the bag again and rummaged about for a while. It reminded Mooney of one of those wax gypsies in the glass booths you see in the penny arcades on 42nd Street that tell your fortune with a little printed card. Then something like a magnetic claw pulls out a cheap plastic prize from a heap of trash at the bottom and pokes it at you.
At last she fished out what she wanted and poked it at him. “They call me The Landlord Baglady.” She made an unpleasant gurgling sound when she laughed. Sure enough, it was Suki — a full cover portrait on the cover of American Business Week. There she was, in full baglady regalia, standing out in front of her loft in TriBeCa. Printed just beneath the picture in large bold print were the words, “THE LANDLORD BAGLADY — AN AMERICAN DREAM.”
“They tried to steal it from me. Take it for nothing.” She giggled with renewed zest. “But I got me my own lawyer. Made ‘em pay big. Who they think they’re kidding?” She howled gleefully and so did Mooney, suddenly aware she was no longer looking up at him but at a scruffy, diminutive figure that stood with a disquieting stillness before her.
“Well, looky here,” she trilled. “Here’s the little seeker now.” She reached up and clasped a small child to her. With a yielding that seemed more like resignation and distaste, the boy, attired in a bizarre combination of rags, allowed himself to slip lengthwise against her, drawn into the smothering heat and copious folds of her garments.
At the same moment, his head turned and he gazed up at Mooney. It was the eyes. Something about the eyes. It would not be sufficient to say they were old beyond their years. The word troubling came to mind.
The old woman fussed over the boy and kissed him wetly. To this, the child submitted with sullen apathy. It was as though he’d been sedated, but by things far more potent than drugs. Everything of life had been hammered out of him.
Suki looked up at the detective and read his thoughts. She put a hand up to the side of her mouth and averted her head toward Mooney. “Poor little thing,” she whispered up at him. “Poor little tyke. Got no home. Lives with me, he does. I’m teachin’ him to read and write. Ain’t that so, darlin’?” She cooed over the child and chucked him beneath the chin. “What have you brought nice for old Suki? Have you brought old Suki a little present, sonny?”
Mooney watched the grimy little fist, clenched tight as a knot, slowly open. He could almost see it struggling to overcome its own inertia. At last, the hand hung open, limp and indifferent, to reveal in its palm a dirty wad of coins and rumpled bills of small denomination. “Oh, my, see what the little entrepreneur has here. You done splendid, you little scamp.” Clucking happily, she scraped the money into an apron she had banded around her middle. She lifted the apron, revealing beneath it a change maker such as bus and trolley-car conductors used to wear. The coins vanished quickly into that. The bills went into a small purse she’d fished out of her reticule. Into the child’s hand, which still hung limp in midair in the timeless attitude of the mendicant, she pressed two one-dollar bills.
“Now that’s for supper, sonny. Go get yourself an orange juice and a red hot. And mind, if there’s any change, bring it back.”
Undoubtedly, the boy had come to the old lady via the same route taken by Ferris Koops years before, and just like Ferris, had been introduced into the unconventional domestic arrangements of the house on Bridge Street. How much, Mooney wondered, did the old lady really know of the part played by Ferris in the Dancer’s nocturnal forays? At the time of the inquiry she denied knowing anything. Possibly that was true, Mooney thought. But, on the other hand, it very likely wasn’t. Mooney had no way of knowing, and at his present juncture in life, he didn’t much care. The matter by then was academic. All he knew was that the old lady was alive and thriving, much to the regret of the district attorney and the board of directors of the Amalgamated Mercantile Bank. Clinging resolutely to her former style of life, which simulated most closely some species of vermin, she’d become a millionaire many times over. Surrounded by her bundles and packages, installed within those mounds of undifferentiated rags and fuming debris, she was happy as a clam. She came and went as she pleased. She owed nothing to anyone. She fed off her foragings and had nothing to do but collect her rents. She’d beaten the system at its own game.
And, then again, there was the child. All of his various needs had now devolved upon her. He would require protection and love. He would have to be taught the ways of the world. She’d suffered her losses with Warren, but she had a new prodigy now. He was her future and that made all the difference.
Table of Contents
PART I
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
PART II
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
PART III
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
PART IV
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
PART V
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
PART VI
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
Shadow Dancers Page 41