The Clockwork Three

by Matthew J. Kirby

  The daydream lasted only a moment. Giuseppe rolled up to his knees and then to his feet. Lying down was how they got you.

  Stephano kept the rats supplied with rags for nesting and just enough food to keep them alive and hungry. Giuseppe had heard the stories. More than one boy had died down here, stripped to the bone. If you stayed on your feet, you could kick them away and keep them at bay. But if you lay down, they would swarm and you would be finished. He did not know whether he believed the stories, but it was better not to take chances. All he could do was stand his ground until Stephano decided to let him out, and hope he lasted that long.

  The cellar was rank with the smell of musk and urine and feces. After a few minutes Giuseppe had a headache and felt sick. His eyes adjusted, and he picked his way to the center of the room. The rats scurried and massed in the corners and against the walls all around him. He could hear them clicking and grinding their teeth, like chains through a winch. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them chattering away in the darkness.

  He had been much younger the last time he was down here. He had screamed the whole time and flailed wildly whenever he felt something brush his legs. He did not scream this time, but he flinched and kicked at the curious noses, tails, and teeth.

  Minutes passed.

  Then hours.

  Or were those minutes, too, and they only seemed like hours? He tried to hold still and breathe slow. He grew tired and swayed on his feet.

  To keep awake and alert he sang to himself. Quiet tunes at first, then riotous songs, and he pantomimed fiddling on a violin. The green violin. He played with a fury, and a madness of music took him. He kicked his feet high and jigged like the piper in the fairy tale, the one who led the rats to the swift river and danced the children into the deep cave. He whooped and spun, the king under the mountain, lord of the rat cellar.

  He played and sang until exhaustion brought him down, sweaty and panting. He had fiddled away his fear, and he lay down on the ground. The rats watched him from a safe distance, whiskers twitching. He laughed into their rags. He closed his eyes and he slept.

  A hammer of light woke him. He blinked and shielded his eyes. The floating doorway hovered over him, and Stephano’s silhouette spoke. “Sleeping? Too old for the rat cellar, I see.”

  Giuseppe got to his feet.

  A rope fell on his head. “Take hold of that, boy.”

  Giuseppe looped the rope around his hand and walked over to stand beneath the door. A few heaves later and Stephano had lifted him into the hallway.

  The building sounded empty. “What time is it?” Giuseppe asked.

  Stephano shut the cellar door. “Nearly lunchtime.”

  That left only half a day to earn a full day’s take. Giuseppe would have worried before. Now he had the green violin.

  “Grab a crust of bread if you like.” Stephano had his hands on his hips.

  Giuseppe shrugged. “Not hungry.”

  Stephano chuckled without smiling. “Liar. But suit yourself. Your fiddle’s still on the floor where you left it.”

  Giuseppe turned to leave.

  “Wait a minute, Giuseppe. One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “The rat cellar’s lost its hold on you, and that’s fine. Happens to all you boys sooner or later. But know this. Now you’re too old for it, I got ways to punish you like a man.” He raised a fist, sporting knuckledusters that could break bones. Giuseppe had seen it happen. “You take my meaning?”

  Giuseppe swallowed.

  “You’re the best musician I got, boy. That don’t mean you can get anything past me. You hide something and I’ll know it, sure as flies on a dead dog.”

  Giuseppe grabbed up his old fiddle and opened the front door.

  Stephano called after him. “You better make up for last night, boy. I want two dollars!”

  Giuseppe slammed the door behind him. He would make Stephano’s two dollars with the green violin. He would make more than that.

  He retrieved the instrument from the churchyard and found a corner where he could toss his cap. The sky above was overcast, and the mood on the street matched its somber hue. The music of the rat cellar still echoed through his body, so Giuseppe decided to set it free and try to lighten the day for his audience. He struck up the jig, slow and easy at first, tempting as a child calling friends to come play. But then he gave it some musical laughter, and used the notes to hoot and holler. He let the song gather speed, because the violin seemed to want it, too, and the bow leaped against the strings like a pebble skidding across the surface of a pond, carrying all the joy of his remembered summers back home.

  Then Giuseppe became aware of another sound, a stomping, and he looked up. His audience, the people in the street, were dancing. Arm in arm or by themselves, they spun and hopped and flew about until the song came to an end. Then they reached into their pockets for money, tossed it into his cap, and wandered away as though their minds did not yet know what their bodies had just been doing.

  Giuseppe looked at the violin in his hands, almost frightened of it. But that day, he made four dollars. He could have made more, but he only dared play the green violin twice. When he returned the instrument and deposited his money in Mister Stroop’s tomb that evening, he kept one dollar and thirty-eight cents for Stephano, because actually bringing in two dollars for half a day’s work would raise suspicions. He also brought along a few extra coins in case Pietro needed help again.

  It was well into the night before Giuseppe returned to Crosby Street, and at the entrance he found the little boy waiting for him. Giuseppe smiled and gave him some money, and they went in together, arm in arm, avoiding Ezio.

  Pietro took to waiting for him every night, hanging about like a little ghost, and every night Giuseppe had a few coins for him, enough to make up the difference between supper and a beating. Some days Giuseppe even secured a good corner for Pietro to play, and taught him a couple of tunes on the little boy’s tin whistle. Two weeks went by like that before Giuseppe felt it would be safe to go down to the harbor and ask about the cost of a steamboat passage to Italy.

  He had not been to the docks since the day of the shipwreck, and nothing of the treasures or debris remained. He squinted in the sunlight and felt sweaty at his hairline. Sailors stalked up and down the wharves and scrambled over the rigging out on the ships. Fishermen hawked their morning haul right there on the pier, and cooks and fishmongers hollered their bids for the choicest catch. Brazen gulls hopped around, eyes on the fish, snatching what they could.

  Giuseppe strolled on in the direction of the passenger boats and ticket offices. Along the way he saw a group of severe-looking old men in suits, standing close together like a bundle of railroad ties on end, their eyes all trained on a particular ship. They looked out of place here on the docks, and Giuseppe grew curious. He stood back and watched as a wooden crane lifted crates from the deck of the ship, swung them around, and set them on the dock. The sailors checked and rechecked the ropes, and the old men held their breath until each crate touched ground again.

  One of them held a stack of papers, and he kept looking back and forth between the papers and each crate as it came down, nodding to himself. Giuseppe drew nearer, and noticed that the crates were stamped with strings of numbers and strange words like KARNAK and UR. Giuseppe had never learned to read well, but these words made no sense at all.

  “You there!” The man with the papers pointed a long finger at him.

  Giuseppe had not meant to come so close.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked, barreling down upon him. He had a sharp, hooked nose and wild hair the color of dust. “Are you spying on me?”

  “Spying? No.”

  “Who sent you? Was it the clockmakers?”

  “No one sent me. I wasn’t spying.”

  “Scoundrels! You go back and tell those thieves that these artifacts belong to the Archer Museum!”

  Giuseppe did not know what to say.

  “Did you hear m
e?”

  “I heard you.” Giuseppe spoke the words slow and even. “But I was not spying on you.”

  One of the man’s eyelids fluttered. “The clockmakers didn’t send you?”

  “No. No one sent me.”

  An uncomfortable moment passed, in which the man looked him over. Giuseppe noticed that his hair was not the color of dust. It was filled with it. “Hmm,” the man said. “Perhaps I was prematurely carried away. Who are you, then?”

  “Just a busker.” He held up his fiddle. Over the man’s shoulder, Giuseppe saw another load of crates rise up from the ship. A sailor shouted something.

  “What are you doing down here? Aren’t you supposed to be on a corner somewhere?”

  Giuseppe shrugged. “I play for the —”

  A sharp twang cut him off.

  They both looked up. A rope had snapped, and the load of crates careened overhead. One of the smaller boxes toppled off the stack. Giuseppe’s eyes traced its fall to the ground where it shattered, scattering straw and splinters of wood. Something round and made of brass clanged and rolled toward them.

  The man with the dusty hair screamed as if in pain. He fell toward the brass ball to catch it, while the rest of the men in suits stood completely still, mouths open wide in shock. Giuseppe took a step forward, as if he meant to help. The man scooped up the brass object, and Giuseppe saw that it was not a ball at all.

  It was a head. A brass head, with eyes, a nose, ears, and lips, and hair made of wire. The man huddled over it on his knees. He whipped off his coat and wrapped it around the head as if swaddling a baby. He stood up, cradling it in his arms, and when he looked at Giuseppe, there were tears in his eyes.

  Giuseppe backed away and ran before anyone could blame him for the broken cargo. He fled down the docks, dodging between wagons and carts loaded with goods, past warehouses and trading companies stacked high with barrels and sacks and boxes. He looked over his shoulder and slowed to a trot when he saw that no one followed him.

  Up ahead, almost at the edge of the docks, a large steamship bellied up to a pier. Sometimes, several passenger ships like this one crowded the wharf at once, from all parts of the world, and waterfalls of people came down the gangplanks, flooding the city.

  The immigration buildings sat opposite the docks and took up almost a whole city block, like a warehouse for people. Giuseppe entered the main building, lined on either side by walled booths and barred windows through which the shipping agents and the immigration officers conducted their business. The arrangement struck Giuseppe as a mix between a bank and a stable. Hundreds of families massed inside like the cattle and sheep waiting in pens down on the Quay. The shipping companies had offices near the entrance where they sold tickets for passage.

  Giuseppe fought his way through the crowd to get there, but before he reached the desk he noticed a little girl waiting in line with her parents. They all looked haggard. The father rubbed his neck while the mother simply stared up into the rafters. The little girl sat on a trunk, and in spite of the dark circles under her eyes and a dirty dress she must have worn the entire voyage, she swung her short legs and smiled.

  She did not look timid or scared. She seemed excited to be in a new city, a new country. But she had come over with her family. Giuseppe remembered his own first day, drowning in loneliness like an ant in the ocean. The man who had paid his uncle had led him from the dark bowels of the ship, and they had waited in the pressing crowd. He had held Giuseppe’s hand in a painful grip, and never said a single reassuring word.

  Then Stephano had come, the man had handed Giuseppe over, and everything had changed. Giuseppe tipped his cap to the girl and kept going.

  When he stepped up to the shipping company’s window, the man behind the counter looked down at him over half-moon spectacles that rode low on his nose. Small eyes, sharp as needles, peered out from beneath bushy eyebrows.

  “What do you want?” His eyes appeared to focus only on Giuseppe’s fiddle.

  “Uh …”

  “Speak up, boy. Does your padrone know you’re here?”

  Giuseppe realized that he had made a mistake. He looked around. He remembered now how Stephano had slipped money into the hands of numerous men that first day, shipping agents and immigration officers alike. The men here were with Stephano and the other padrones.

  “Never mind.” Giuseppe turned to leave.

  “Hold on, I asked you a question. Who’s your padrone? Stop!”

  But Giuseppe had already started to run, for the second time that day. He burst out of the warehouse. He thundered back down the docks, off into an alley, and soon emerged onto the bustle of Gilbert Square. He cut right across the middle and headed for the Old Rock Church.

  After watching the street for a few minutes, he entered the churchyard and smiled at the angel on his way to Stroop’s tomb. “Pardon me,” he said as he opened the tomb, held his breath, and reached inside, withdrawing the green violin.

  A few minutes later, he headed for a block of factories down on the Old Fort Road. He had wasted most of the morning in his failed effort to find out the cost of a steamboat ticket. Soon the factory whistles would blow and the workers would take their noon break. Giuseppe arrived outside the gates and waited amid the vendors setting up their lunch carts. Black kettles bore fried fish, roasted corn, and potatoes boiled with parsley, with fresh milk and cider to drink.

  The aromas set his stomach working on the nothing he had eaten for breakfast, but he had no money on him to buy any food. Yet. The vendors eyed him sidelong. He ignored their suspicious glares and sat down on a building stoop to wait. He thought about his morning at the docks and cursed his carelessness. Stephano could find out what he was up to if Giuseppe went there himself. He had to figure out another way to learn the price, let alone buy the ticket and board the ship.

  Several minutes later, the whistles blared. A few minutes after that, the streets choked up with men from the steelworks, and women from the fabric mills. They formed lines at the food carts, while some sat down with lunches in tin pails they had brought from home. Giuseppe watched them for a few moments, set his hat on the ground, stood up on the stoop, and started to play.

  The notes cleared the air, as if peeling away the steam and the smoke and the despair. People stopped chewing their food. They gathered. Even the vendors set down their ladles. Giuseppe played them a country tune about an apple orchard, a silly tune really. But it spirited all the listeners away from where they were, just as Giuseppe had intended it to. He freed them from the city like pigeons from an opened coop, and they took to the sky in droves.

  It seemed that everyone there tossed in a coin, and by the time the second whistle blew, calling them all back to the factories, Giuseppe figured he had earned at least three dollars. He stuffed the money into his pockets and put his hat on. He ambled over to a food cart and bought a steaming potato. The vendor, a man by the name of Fleischman, gave him a pinch of coarse salt. Giuseppe took a bite too big for his mouth and cooled it between his teeth. As he chewed, he closed his eyes and sighed. He finished the potato and strolled away just like the satisfied rich folk he had seen walking through the tame side of McCauley Park on Sunday mornings.

  A little farther along the road he heard some scuffling and shouting. He peeked around a corner, down a pocket street between factories, and saw a couple of big street kids pounding another boy. The two were gang runners, not buskers, but the boy they had on the ground looked like he came from somewhere up near the Heights. His clothes were nicer, his knuckles were clean, and he looked scared. But he was actually trying to fight them off.

  Giuseppe had to do something, but he could not fight them both on his own, and by the looks of it the boy on the ground would be worthless in a scrape. He looked older than Giuseppe by a year or two, but Giuseppe figured even he could take him.

  Then Giuseppe caught an idea, and he set his violin safely aside where no one would see it. He stepped around the corner, picked up a small rock, an
d chucked it. It caught the bigger of the two attackers on the side of the head and bounced hard. They both turned toward him.

  “He’s mine,” Giuseppe said. He leaned up against the alley wall, arms across his chest. “And we’re with Stephano.”

  The one boy rubbed his temple. The other stepped up to Giuseppe. “But he didn’t have no instrument.”

  “He made more than me, so I broke it,” Giuseppe said. “I was gonna throttle him, too.”

  “What about his clothes?”

  “That’s what he was wearing when we nabbed him a couple weeks ago.”

  The gang boy made a gesture of stepping aside. “Well, pardon me. Kid didn’t have no money, so we was just havin’ some fun with him.” He held out his hand like an usher. “He’s all yours.”

  Giuseppe hesitated. He stepped around them and walked up to the boy on the ground. The kid looked dazed, like he was lost in a blizzard. Giuseppe balled his fist.

  The one with the goose egg on his head called out, “What’cha waiting for?”

  He shook his head. “I better not.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause Ezio wants him.”

  The two gang runners looked at each other.

  “Yeah, Ezio’s coming.” Giuseppe turned away from them. “He’ll be mad enough as it is when he sees what you two did. He wants some for himself.” When he turned back, the two were gone, torn off, running down the street.

  Giuseppe laughed and held out his hand to the boy on the ground. “I never thought Ezio would save my skin. I wonder what’ll happen when this gets back to him. Come on, chap. I’ll help you up.”

  The boy said nothing. He did not move. He just stared at Giuseppe’s hand.

  “Relax. I wasn’t really going to hit you. You all right?”

  The boy stiffened. He struggled to his feet like his back was sore. “I’m fine, and I don’t need your help up. I didn’t need your help at all.”

  Giuseppe withdrew his hand and lifted both eyebrows. “That’s a fine thank-you-kindly. From where I stood, you were getting thumped pretty bad.”