Shadow Dancers (12 page)

More unsettling yet, she knew that if suspicious enough, or provoked, he could do her harm. She knew well his fits of towering rage, but she felt reasonably confident in her ability to control them — at least keep them in check. Regardless of how much he professed to hate the old, crumbling, derelict house, she assured herself that he needed it to come back to after the periodic orgies of self-indulgence and self-loathing.

If things got too bad, if Warren were to become dangerously unmanageable, there was always the law. But in her heart of hearts, Suki knew she could never betray him in that fashion. She despised the legal establishment and all of its lackeys — the police who chased her out of the terminal on cold nights, and the judges and lawyers who even then conspired to swindle her out of all her “earthly possessions,” — too much to seriously contemplate such an action. She loved Warren (or whatever it was in Suki that passed for love) far too much ever to surrender him to the jackals and hyenas. If they ever got their hands on him, they would surely lock him away forever. They might possibly even kill him.

On the radio that day she’d heard people clamoring for his head. Community groups were out on the streets, in front of City Hall with placards. The press was railing against the police, and neighborhood surveillance groups were threatening to take the law into their own hands. The “Shadow Dancer,” they called him. Suki laughed gleefully over that. Her boy a celebrity.

* * *

Upstairs in the little room beneath the cupola, Warren Mars continued to stamp and fling things and flail about. The floor was now fairly littered with a variety of debris, from this and earlier eruptions. It was odd, he thought, how whenever the old lady was around, he was angry. Angry and a bit scared. He couldn’t say precisely why, but it had been that way since childhood.

He was, possibly, six or seven when she’d first taken him in. That was shortly after she’d found him in Grand Central. He was living down there in the dead of winter with a band of nomadic adolescents in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the tracks. She found him there one night, shivering and feverish, and took him back with her to Bridge Street. The child was reluctant to go but too weak to protest.

He hadn’t eaten in several days and so when she asked him, he went eagerly with her. Assuming that he’d remain with her a night or two, steal what he could when she wasn’t looking, then slip away, he complied with her wishes. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, it turned into a collaboration, a fifteen-year partnership, and a comfortable habit he was unable to break.

Of his life before Suki plucked him from the terminal and brought him home to Bridge Street, Warren recalled little. He could not remember his parents except for a vague pang of distaste whenever the subject came up. He had some woozy recollection of a basement apartment far over in the West Forties where he seemed to think his father was the janitor. He couldn’t be certain about any of that since, beyond the age of six or seven, he spent little time there. What he recalled, in mostly broad, unspecific terms, was that the apartment was always crowded and dirty and there was never anything to eat.

Once as a child he came home crying. The other kids had told him that his name wasn’t a real name since he had no real parents. Suki told him that she was his “parents” and that he had been named after a brave and powerful “god of war” whom everyone feared and that he must live up to that heroic heritage. After that he felt much better about his name.

With Suki things improved one hundredfold. At least with her he ate regularly and slept in a bed, even if it was just a foul, licey mattress with malodorous, urine-stained ticking resting on the cold floor.

As he grew older, Suki occasionally would toss him some pin money to put in his pocket. It was her way of tendering a bit of independence while still keeping the boy on a tight rein. He was still too young and too much of an innocent to realize that it was his own money she was giving him back — the small sums he’d panhandled, swiped from countertops, scrounged from telephone coin slots in the terminal and dutifully turned over to her. At the close of each “working day,” Suki would relieve him of all that, putting it on a lofty moral plane, however, by proclaiming that if he was ever to grow up and take his place in society, he had to learn to pay his fair share, meaning, no doubt, the cost of the exiguous bed and board she provided him on Bridge Street.

In those early days, their routine was simple. Suki and Warren would sleep or sit around all day on Bridge Street. In late afternoon, they’d have a bite of supper and go up to the terminal, planning their arrival to coincide with the great homeward rush of commuters spilling out of all the surrounding offices.

They would take up their position at the entrance of Track 28, Suki perched like some obscene carrion bird atop her many bags of trash, Warren sitting small and appealingly pathetic beside her. As an image of social displacement, it was irresistible. Poster-perfect. People seeing them would, of course, conclude they were homeless and that he was her child, although the disparity of their ages made that biologically unlikely. In no time, the battered hats and small tin cans they put out were filled with coins and bills of small denominations.

When activity in the terminal would start to subside, they’d haul all of their baggage crosstown to the theater district and sit on the ground straddling the warm gratings, waiting for the intermissions and the shows to break. With all the people streaming from the theaters at eleven
P.M.
, she would gently propel the boy forward out of the shadows where he’d been dozing. Waiflike and pathetic, he’d move through the well-heeled crowds, his small hand out, his eyes large and beseeching. Needless to say, they would give him change. A lot of change. It was easy.

There were nights, particularly in spring and summer, they would work the streets till three
A.M.
, then repair to the Night Owl Diner on 11th Avenue, where a lot of nocturnal folk, not unlike themselves, and having no better place to go, would gather for coffee and cake, and talk and laugh and smoke until dawn.

Afterward Suki and the boy would grab the IND at 6th Avenue and take it down to Church Street. They never paid fare at that hour of the morning. They merely ducked the turnstile. The attendants in the change booths knew them and would never say a word.

They’d be back on Bridge Street just as the sun was coming up over the Stock Exchange. Inside, they’d unload their bundles, take inventory of the night’s haul, and stash it in a safe place. They would then, like a pride of lions that had hunted all night, sleep for the rest of the day. At four
P.M.
, they would rise again. Suki would prepare some small, makeshift supper and they would make ready to go back up to the terminal.

For a small, practically wild child, unaccustomed to any fixed regimen, it was a lark. It provided a sense of security unfamiliar to him, and, to his delight, he never had to attend school. Suki wouldn’t permit it, maintaining that the moment she registered him for classes, some do-gooder social worker would undoubtedly come down to Bridge Street and carry him off. Clap him in an institution or some foster home where they’d bang him around as an integral part of his rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the old lady had a high regard for education and insisted that the boy learn to read and write. Accordingly, she taught him herself. Her methods were unorthodox, to say the least, and she was a difficult taskmaster. She made him add sums and write his alphabet over and over again, banging his knuckles with a steel ruler until he’d gotten everything correct. Later on, she brought stacks of scrounged newspapers home with her at night, and he would have to read them aloud to her.

All in all, it wasn’t bad, and the boy didn’t seem unhappy. But still, from time to time, with no apparent warning and for no evident cause, a profound gloom would descend upon him. At such times he would grow listless and remote, withdrawing to his room like a sick cat, and keep to himself for days on end.

This despondency was invariably attended by a series of daydreams, no less vivid than they were rambling. The content of them was always the same. The setting was a large, rather grand house in some undefined location. Only two people appeared to inhabit the daydream — himself and an ethereally beautiful lady, all attired in the pristine white of the fairy godmother in a book of children’s tales. He would be seated on her lap. She would whisper in his ear and tickle him. They would giggle and laugh and delight one another all day with jokes and riddles and drawing pictures with crayons. She would hug him and mess up his hair and stay with him all day. Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as she’d appeared, she would go. Shortly, the cloud would lift and soon he was his old self once more. He would wander downstairs and into the kitchen where Suki puttered about. She’d be waiting for him there with a bowl of junket or a small cup of chocolate pudding. So it had been since childhood, and so it still continued, only now these sulks would take the form of disappearances from the house of two to four weeks’ duration.

It was therefore not unnatural that over the years Warren had developed a strong sense of attachment to the old lady. But along with that came a decided edge of resentment. From childhood on, he’d always given her his “fair share” of the night’s take. But now, at twenty-two, he was into far more profitable ventures, and her unceasing demand for tithes had begun to rankle.

Aside from the gold-mine property she occupied on Bridge Street, Suki was a rich woman. Warren always said she had the first dime she’d ever stolen. Her instinctive antipathy to banks caused her to keep sizable sums of money in old pots and tins hidden around the house. A great deal of it was hoarded down in the abandoned sewer line beneath the house. The line was part of a network of tunnels, some of them one hundred years old or older, that ran, roughly, from 14th Street south to the tip of Manhattan Island. They were not made of brick like the present-day sewer lines, but of clay. Time and hard use had badly undermined them, so that over the years the city had replaced most of them with modern systems. The old ones, like the one running beneath Bridge Street, had simply been sealed off. That’s when they became an ideal spot for Suki to store her rich cache of “collections.”

The house on Bridge Street was a queer sort of place. Wedged in between factories and warehouses, grimy, soot-stained commercial buildings, the tiny red-brick Federal was something of an anomaly. “Built during the 1840s,” Suki liked to say, “during the Polk administration,” as if that carried a great deal of weight with the world.

It was a three-story structure with long, high windows of a noble scale, in perfect proportion with the house. There was a cellar and an attic and a tangled, unattended stretch of garden out back with a statue of Diana with a cracked nose and a missing ear. It leaned off to one side, half in, half out of the ground, looking as if a mere whisper might send it toppling.

At the front of the house and running around one side was a big old porch with crumbling banisters and paint peeling from its ceiling and floor. Several of its original pine planks were sprung. At its corners stood a few cast-iron pots in which Suki at one time had planted flowers. Now they sported little more than weeds and the occasional parched sprig of geranium.

In the back, at the bottom of the garden, was a graveyard where the old lady would bury her cats. All about the house dwelled myriad cats, drawn there by the sweet fetor of fresh garbage Suki strewed about for them.

At the very top of the house, at its apex, was the glass, boxlike cupola. From there one could look out on Battery Park and see the Verrazano Straits, the squat, humped outline of Staten Island slumbering like a whale in the hazy distance. At night there was the Statue of Liberty all lit up. It was up there where Warren retreated after the rigors of his various “enterprises.”

There was little in the way of furnishings inside the house. What there was of it was a congeries of abandoned things Suki had plucked out of the dumps or off the streets, where they’d been left for the sanitation people to pick up.

The old lady slept on the second floor in a dark, curtained room that smelled faintly of mushrooms. The curtains were never drawn and sunlight seldom strayed into those dark precincts. In the center of the room, occupying most of the livable space, was a big old dark wood bed with an immense headboard, upon which a bestiary of creatures had been carved. Deer, bear, stags, ferrets, and ravening wolves slinked through a gnarled, twisted forest fashioned out of Bavarian oak.

As a child, left alone for long periods in that house, Warren would steal up to the old lady’s bedroom and stare in rapt wonder at those carvings. The bed had been sent over from Germany by Mr. Klink’s family on the occasion of his first marriage, some forty years before he’d met and married Suki. Generations of Klinks had slept and procreated and died in that bed.

Now there were at least ten pillows on the bed and Suki slept beneath nearly as many blankets. They gave the appearance of a small, steep slope. Even in the dead of summer when the house was an oven and there was no air to breath, Suki reposed beneath that unwholesome weight. She slept in all of her clothing as well. In fact, rarely did she take her clothing off, except to bathe, and that was none too often. Her reluctance to disrobe had nothing to do with reasons of modesty or laziness. She argued, and with some merit, that if there were ever a fire, being dressed at all times meant that she could get out fast with just about everything she owned, including the stash in the basement, for they had agreed that in the event of such an emergency, they would flee the house from there.

Once, when Warren was about nine or ten, Suki took him down into the cellar. She’d always told him never to go down into the cellar alone. There were bad things there. Evil things. If he went down there himself, they would get him.

But on this particular occasion, she took him down herself. It was a dark, cramped, dirty hole of a place. The only illumination came from two narrow rectangular windows set just above ground in the stone foundation. Years of grime and muddy winters had rendered the glass in those windows nearly opaque. What light filtered through had the gray, lugubrious look of perpetual dusk.