The Silver Glove (10 page)

I beat a quick retreat across the street and stood behind a lamppost like a dummy (even I am not
that
thin).

A little Indian lady in a pink sari looked out of the restaurant doorway, up and down the street. She had a thick braid of black hair and a flash of gold at her ear. Did she see me?

She held the door for a couple of patrons and went inside with them, and I started breathing again.

Now what? If Gran was still around here someplace, spying on Brightner (and she had to be, she was my only hope), she'd be in some kind of disguise. So how was
I
going to spot her?

I waited for hours, loafing in the magazine store and hoping every time somebody went in or out of Kali's Kitchen that it would turn out to be Gran and wouldn't turn out to be Brightner.

At dinnertime a steady stream of street people made their way into the alley that ran alongside the restaurant building. They were let in through a side door that was propped ajar. That was how Dirty Rose and Gran must have gone in for their meal last night.

Gran must still be in there. Maybe she was pretending to be a new waitress, or a kitchen hand. Maybe she was busy going through secret files in some back-room office with a little camera, like a movie spy.
Granny Gran and the Restaurant of Doom
.

My job: find her! But how? I came up with the bright idea of making my first effort as a burglar.

Having no handy disguises with me and not knowing whether Brightner himself was inside, I could hardly march in the front door. I would have to sneak in through the side entrance, sometime before the place was locked up for the night.

I stayed across the street in the shadow of the magazine-store doorway with my hands in my jacket pockets, hopping from one foot to another to keep warm. My running shoes were not so great for standing around in cold weather. I only left once, to dash up the block and buy a couple of sticks of shish kebab from a street vendor for my dinner. Then I waited some more.

This was not at all like coming out of a late movie with Barb, say; or wandering around with some kids from school down in the Village. This wasn't like anything I knew.

To tell the truth, I was not used to being out, on my own or in company, so late. The yellow pools of the street lights with all that dark in between, the sounds of traffic whizzing brightly past on the avenue up at the end of the street, and the closed and silent storefronts left and right and across from me all seemed very sinister.

Also my ears were
freezing
. By this time it was very chilly and very dark, and there was barely any traffic, foot or wheeled, on the street.

Suddenly I heard voices calling in a foreign language, and a door slammed in the alley. A skinny little guy in a leather jacket came out of the dark and walked quickly away down the street. A few minutes later two black-haired women left, chatting and laughing, also by the side door.

I looked at my watch: it was one-thirty in the morning.

Quiet again, except for a car horn far off somewhere and a faint sound of barking. I tried to think, but my brain felt like ice floating between my icicle ears.

Two more people came out of Kali's Kitchen with bikes and rode away on them. I heard someone sing out after them, “Good night, good night, don't be late tomorrow,” from inside the alley doorway.

How many staff people could they crowd into that little restaurant?

I couldn't stand it anymore. It was now or never.

Now.

I ran across the street and into the alley. The side door opened easily and quietly. I dashed inside, past a glimpse of the bright, empty kitchen with swinging doors in the far wall leading out to the dining area, where somebody might still be cleaning up.

I flung myself down the stairs into the basement. They were steel steps, with little leaf-design treads embossed on them to keep your feet from slipping. A bicycle leaned into the corner of the landing halfway down.

In the basement, a double door stood partially open. I looked back up the stairs. I'd done it, committed myself: now what if Pink Sari or Brightner himself sneaked up behind me and trapped me down here?

Don't think about it.

I flattened myself against one of the metal doors and peeked inside.

No Claw, no Brightner, no Sari, even, but an odor strong enough to knock out a water buffalo: a mixture of heavy spices, sweaty clothing, and stale liquor. I held my breath and looked into a large room lit only by the dim light spilling in from behind me: bare walls, a cement floor with cracks in it, and high along the walls a few small, grimy, barred windows.

The floor was covered with what I thought were rows of rag bundles. Against the far wall someone had set up a table supporting two big steel pots. The only other item of “furniture” was a large, overflowing garbage can in one corner with a litter of Styrofoam bowls scattered around its base.

One of the bundles coughed and rolled and flung out an arm. Another one groaned and swore. Now that I listened, I could hear them breathing: sleeping people, homeless people who had come in here at dinnertime for a meal and a place to spend the night out of the cold. Looking carefully, I could see holey shoe-soles sticking out of one end of the nearest bundle.

There was another sound, an odd sound, from above my head. It was a sort of rolling, thumping noise, like small boats tied at a dock when a big swell or a wind comes along and bumps them against the pilings. Nothing especially scary in that, so why was the skin at the back of my neck crawling? Because boats don't float in basements.

So what did? I squinted up at the ceiling. It was hidden in darkness.

Then a flicker of movement attracted my attention. At first I thought somebody was getting up to go look for the bathroom.

A shadowy form rose from where one sleeper lay, but as I watched I saw that the lumpish, sleeping shape didn't change. The rising form was just a dim figure like a cutout, drawing itself out of the sleeper and drifting upward toward the ceiling. There it hung, turning and rolling and bumping slowly with a horrible nightmare motion among another dozen shadows like itself, which I had taken for a single layer of ordinary nighttime gloom.

Before my eyes two more shadows drifted upward. I could see the window through one of them.

Understanding bloomed silently inside me like a poison flower: in the morning, the bleary-eyed bums would be wakened and sent away. They would shamble off wondering why they felt a little weird, maybe thinking that Indian food didn't agree with them. Sometime later Brightner would come down into the supposedly empty basement room. He would reach up (with what? a broom? a magic Claw?) and hook the helpless, bobbing shadows down one by one, and send them to join the crowd in the phantom rink.

One shadow, livelier than the others, scrabbled wildly but soundlessly at the ceiling with its fingers. I thought I could make out the scoop-nosed profile of Dirty Rose.

I turned and fled up the stairs, thinking only of getting
out
.

The door to the alley had been closed and locked.

I was shut in with the lady with the sari, and the sleepers in the basement and the desperate phantoms that were oozing out of them.

Not having a lot of other options, I got a grip on myself, more or less, and tried to take stock. Here at street level, I could look straight into the kitchen. It was empty, not a soul in sight.

I listened hard. I heard tap water dripping, and faint twangy piped music, and somebody walking around on the floor above my head—soft steps, quick and light. Pink Sari, probably. Should I be afraid of her? If she was mixed up with Brightner, yes.

The footsteps stopped and I heard someone sigh and the creaking of a chair. Pink Sari or someone was busy doing the day's accounts or whatever you do after a restaurant has closed its doors for the night.

What now? In the stairwell below, the handlebars of the last lone bike gleamed. The idea of the lady in the sari riding her wheels home in the middle of the night, gauzes flying, should have made me smile.

It didn't. My mouth, my whole self was cramped with fear.

I opened an unimportant-looking door on my right. Strong smells, exotic and overwhelming, washed over me. I looked into a narrow pantry of shelves loaded with plastic buckets labeled in black Magic Marker: “Gum,” “cloves,” “mango powder,” “ground cumin seed,” “black cumin,” “black mustard,” “green cardamom,” “black cardamom,” “black salt.”

“Black” flavorings? Black magic! Hastily, I shut the door.

I crossed the gleaming kitchen and went out through the swinging doors into a short passageway that had a sign, “Restrooms,” and two doors, right and left. Nobody was in either of the restrooms, which was a very good thing because suddenly I was desperate to use one, and I did.

The dining area of the restaurant was two large, dim rooms full of round tables with chairs upended on them. An illuminated exit sign gleamed red over a fire door on my left. A partition topped with a row of potted plants marked off the two dining rooms from each other.

I slipped in and padded quietly around, taking a look under the tables, behind the bar, inside the tiny hatcheck room. Beside the cash register was a dish of the same little seed-candies Brightner kept on his desk at school. I could smell them: sugary licorice, sweet and inviting.

The one thing every kid who's ever read a fairy tale knows is, when you're in the ogre's castle, don't eat any of the ogre's food or you'll be stuck there forever.

I turned away from the candies and saw the painting on the wall behind me. I had to jam my knuckles in my mouth to stifle a screech.

Above the booths along the back wall someone had painted a life-sized dancing monster with tusks, a long, bloody tongue, a yellow necklace of cut-off heads with closed eyes, and four flexed and threatening arms: Kali, dancing with curled toes on a heap of people she was trampling underfoot.

How in the world could I see her so clearly in this dim, after-hours light? But I did. She capered, gleefully brandishing her clawlike hands, glowing somehow with her own light, and leering into the dining room with eyes like two illuminated billiard balls.

How could anybody sit under that
thing
and eat a meal? Of course, if you sat under it you wouldn't actually
see
it without craning your neck.

I made myself walk over and touch the paint on the wall. That's all it was: paint on a wall.

Hot paint, hot to the touch!

As I snatched my hand away, something moved up there: a quick flicker of motion in the middle of Kali's forehead. In one blink, an eye appeared, a wide, rolling, bloodshot eye right above the meeting point of the painted eyebrows—the third eye of Kali, staring right at me!

The piped music suddenly blasted out an ear-splitting shriek with wobbles in it, like maniacal laughter.

In a panic I bolted for the alley door, crashing into tables and sending chairs flying on my way. The door was just as locked as it had been before.

Light steps came pattering down the stairs. Where to go—the basement, with the shadows bobbing against the ceiling? Not on your life.

I yanked open the door to the spice room and leaped in. The door shut behind me, closing me in with utter blackness and warm, odorous air.

Outside, two quick steps—and a key turned in the lock.

Trapped! Whimpering, I flapped around in that narrow, stuffy space, gasping for breath as if I were suffocating and knocking the plastic tubs every which way.

Someone who I guessed to be Pink Sari called to me from the other side of the door in this light, musical voice: “Are you all right, young lady? You will be Valentine, isn't it? I was told that you might come. Are you all right? My husband would be very upset with me if he found you hurt in any way.”

Her husband?

“Who?” I squeaked.

“But you have met him,” she said, all tinkling and social, “at your school.”

I had fallen into the hands of the Bride of Brightner.

 

10
Specialty of the House

 

 

“
Y
OU'D BETTER LET ME OUT,
” I croaked. “I'm feeling terrible. I've got a bad heart.”

“Oh, don't say such a thing of yourself!” she cried sweetly. “I am sure you are of very good heart indeed.”

“My boyfriend is outside, waiting for me,” I threatened shakily. I couldn't help thinking of Lennie, who was pretty big and strong for his age, but not, unfortunately, either my boyfriend or outside Kali's horrible, awful, witchy Kitchen.

A delighted chuckle from beyond the door: “Oh, I am trembling—but only a little! If this fine boyfriend so fears to face me that he lets you come here alone, will he be brave enough to face my husband to save you?”

I unpeeled my fingers from a splintery wooden upright of the spice shelves and felt my way to the door, where I sat down because my legs wouldn't hold me. I was now in an icy sweat of pure terror.

“Where is he?” I said. “Your—your husband?”

“I do not ask my husband where he goes or when he comes back,” she said lightly. “It is for him to tell me what he thinks I should know.”

Trying to flatten out the tremor in my voice, I said firmly, “Well, maybe he doesn't think you should know this, but
I
do. He's dating my mother!”

There was a moment's silence. Then she sighed, a fetching little sound of womanly knowingness and resignation. It made me want to gag.

“But this is only a seeming thing,” she said. “I am the true wife, the one he keeps by him always and comes back to always. A little ‘dating' is completely nothing.”

Maybe she actually didn't
know
what kind of monster she was married to?

“If he's such a nice guy, then what's he got going downstairs,” I said, “poor people sleeping in what you tell them is a safe place, while you steal their—their  . . . ” I didn't know what to call the shadows.