Touched by Angels

by Alan Watts

  The vigil went on for another quarter hour, until he saw a dark shape skulking along, low against the dim distant lights of New Jersey, stopping every so often.

  He was wearing a long coat that was swinging pendulously, as if heavy.

  Quint made his way diagonally across, quickly, to be ahead, so he could intercept him. As he grabbed the collar of his coat, the man gave a terrified squawk as Quint drew back the hammer on his gun.

  Quint watched him gazing along the long barrel of the weapon, pressed against the skin between his eyes, and when he gasped, “Have it, for God’s sake! Just let me go, please,” Quint frowned, having not expected such quick and easy compliance, even if allowances were made for his gun.

  As his eyes flicked sideways to where he could see the suitcase being lowered to the ground, he said, “You’d better get running, and if you do anything dumb, like telling the cops, believe me, I’ll find you, and I’ll kill you.”

  “I won’t, honest, just…” He bolted.

  Quint grinned as he heard him trip, followed by a splashing sound and cursing, as he sprawled face first in a puddle. He lowered the hammer on his gun and slid it back into its holster, as he looked around to be sure that apart from the writhing form in the wet, he was still alone.

  Easy pickings, he thought, as he undid the two straps holding the suitcase shut. It was too dark to make the contents out and he daren’t light a match, for fear of being seen. He groped around inside, and although half expecting it, cursed as he felt nothing but layer after layer of clothing.

  He was about to threaten the thief again, but then, remembering that his coat had looked ridiculously heavy, he had another idea.

  Amused, he watched as the thief shook the worst of the water off.

  Just as he started limping away, Quint made his way quickly to him and pressed the barrel of the gun into the nape of his neck, cocked it once more, and said, “Take off your coat.”

  “Eh!” Utter shock. “What do you want my clothes for?”

  Quint pressed the gun harder.

  “All right… all right. I’ll do it.” He removed the heavy garment.

  “Now put it on the ground and start walking.”

  He started off in the direction of the pier. Instead, Quint pushed him in the direction of the river.

  When they got to the edge, Quint said, “Now jump.”

  “What! But it’s….”

  “That or a big hole in your neck.”

  He dithered, so Quint gave him a shove. He squealed in terror, his arms pin-wheeling, before hitting the black water with a huge splash.

  Quint made his way back to the coat, seeing the woman and boy sitting on a low wall, about a hundred yards off, still waiting.

  Knowing they couldn’t see him, he started going through the pockets and found several dozen small leather bags.

  He opened one, tipped the contents into his hand and felt his eyes start from his head. It was a necklace of some sort, which he knew from the glittering and weight was worth hundreds of dollars. Other bags held similar treasures.

  When he put his hand in the other pocket, and pulled out three inch-thick wads of English one-pound notes, he knew he’d stumbled upon the biggest catch of his life. Then his luck got better still, as he found that even after divesting all the pockets, the coat was still absurdly heavy. He groped over the lining. After finding block after block of notes, and even more jewellery, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

  He put everything back in the coat, except the three wads of notes he had found in the pocket.

  These he put back in the suitcase, in the middle of the clothing. After this, he looked around for somewhere to hide the coat, where it would stay while he carried out the next part of his plan. He found it in the form of a small wooden barrel.

  Then, after adjusting his hat, and calming himself down, he wandered back grinning and looking excited.

  “Where’s the boy?” he asked Lady DeVere.

  “Gone to look at the ships.”

  He shrugged.

  “So, a reward?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He passed the suitcase across, sat and rubbed his hands together.

  She clicked it open and groped around the clothing inside, pulling out garment after garment. It took just a second to find the three wads.

  “Where’s the rest?”

  “Rest of what?”

  “The rest of the money?”

  He laughed good-naturedly.

  “Ma’am, that… that’s a fortune. There must be upwards of what… six hundred bucks there? In this town, a seamstress will get just five for a sixty-hour week. There’s more…”

  “Oh, shut up, Quint!” She threw the clothes on the ground. “We left England with tens of thousands more than that. You must have removed the rest…”

  He looked wounded and opened his mouth as if to speak, but seemed choked on the words. He looked off into the void like a martyr.

  After about a minute, seething with temper and unable to prove a thing, she broke open a wad with a trembling hand, pulled away about a sixth and handed it to him.

  “I’m very sorry,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “I expect that awful man was in league with somebody else and they have it stashed elsewhere, where neither of us can get it.”

  He struggled to find his voice, before saying quietly, “I guess so.” He seemed quickly mollified though, as he took the slim wad, flicked through it, and slipped it in an inside pocket, before pulling out a thin cigar.

  He bit off the end and put it in his mouth, striking a match on the wall. “You’ve more than enough to get a passage home,” he assured her. “I hope you make out.” He lit the cigar as he stood, exhaled a cloud of smoke and walked off grinning.

  ***

  A few minutes later, Lil turned to see Robert hidden between several stacks of crates, holding the coat the thief had been wearing and knew then that her suspicions were confirmed.

  She gazed in the direction Quint had walked, but could see no sign of him.

  She heard Robert clambering towards her and whispered, “No, stay where you are. I’ll follow.”

  It didn’t take them long to take the money and jewels from the coat and put them in the case. By now the rain had stopped and day was breaking over the harbour.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “There is only one thing we can do. We must book a passage home.”

  His face dropped, so she explained. “We can’t stay here. It’s far too dangerous, especially when that man discovers we’ve double-crossed him. In any case, this is a wild country. They carry guns and they aren’t afraid to use them.” She hugged him.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll not go back to London. Perhaps we’ll settle in Plymouth, somewhere like that, away from the smoke.”

  He smiled hugging her back tight.

  She knew though that boarding another ship was not going to be easy. Questions might be asked, and papers demanded. What if the luggage was searched? How would she explain such a fortune away and what if they confiscated it?

  After a little hard thinking, she knew there was only one option, and that was to travel home illegitimately, by stowing away, though quite how they were going to do that eluded her for now.

  “Come on,” she told him, hearing the sounds of early morning activity beyond the docks. “We’ll be much safer among the crowds, especially if we change these clothes for new ones.”

  ***

  As they were swallowed up in the strange town, Jack Quint took one last puff of his cigar, as he made his way over to the barrel where he had stuffed the coat.

  His thumbs twitched, as he groped around inside. When he found it empty, he felt as though somebody had thrown ice-cold water in his face. He was so shocked, he even upturned it, so he could confirm its emptiness with his own eyes.

  He growled, “Shit!” before kicking it. Rats squealed as it landed ten yards away.

  He looked in circles, thinkin
g at first that the thief must have survived his fall into the Hudson after all. If so, with no change of clothes, he would be in a sorry state and couldn’t have got far.

  When he walked to the edge however, he saw the drop was even further down than he remembered and that, as far as he could see, which extended at least to the Cunard Pier, a good three hundred yards away, there was no means of climbing back up.

  He looked over the Carpathia too, though he could see no obvious means of scaling that either. Then he remembered that as the woman had been alone when he had left her, so perhaps the kid had taken the money.

  He walked over to where she had been sitting and it didn’t take him long to spot the discarded coat.

  He didn’t even bother picking it up, as he stood there, fuming, gazing beyond the docks, seeing the tall buildings on the edge of the city.

  His city.

  Fifty-one

  Red-eyed with exhaustion and wanting nothing more than to sleep, Lil and Robert walked into a bank, intending first and foremost to convert some English currency into dollars, but what she saw next, on one of the walls, stopped her dead in her tracks.

  There was a large poster, recently printed by the White Star Line, with whom she had sailed. Underneath, in equally large letters, were the words, “To whom it might concern.”

  Beneath this was a reward of one hundred English pounds for information as to the whereabouts of the thief who had robbed so many people on the ship. There was a sketch of the suspect too, a good one, and she prickled with recognition; but it wasn’t that of the waiter. It was somebody else she had met, albeit very briefly. Robert recognised him too, but she told him to keep a still tongue.

  News had travelled fast indeed, which wasn’t, she supposed, surprising, considering the immense standing of some of the people who had sailed. Money clearly talked, and the more there was, the louder it talked. Some of these people were among the richest in the world.

  She looked around to see if she was being watched, before taking the poster down and rolling it up. She slipped it inside a coat pocket.

  After changing some pounds into dollars, they found a clothes store that was gloomy in the extreme, with a high ceiling the colour of burned umber. It was strewn with ancient cobwebs, and the odour of mothballs filled the air. A huge wire cage stood in one corner, containing a mynah bird. In boredom, it had pecked out all its own feathers, save those from the neck up.

  The man who greeted them was thin and elderly, with a black skullcap. He reminded Robert of the corpse in Rice Lane, from whom he had tried to take the pennies.

  He looked at them through drooping spaniel eyes, and to Robert’s amazement, the bird suddenly cackled out, “Hey brother, can you spare a dime?”

  “Mum, it talked!” he said, pointing at the bird in shock.

  “Yes, I know darling.”

  The shop keeper asked, in a soft voice, “Can I assist you, ma’am?”

  She pulled out four ten-dollar bills and asked, “Can you attire and feed us for this?”

  The man shook his head from side to side, smiling regretfully, so she produced another note.

  He spent the next half hour plying his tape measure, as Jack Quint, who had been sitting in a saloon for the last hour, suddenly had a glimmer of inspiration.

  ***

  Quint had almost resigned himself to the impossibility of ever finding the woman and her brat, when he remembered the suitcase. It was quite a distinctive one, with a stripy pattern, that he remembered thinking unusual.

  Since she would never be able to board another ship immediately, she would be forced to stay in New York, at least for a few days, and would therefore need food and accommodation. He guessed that, being unfamiliar with her surroundings, she was not likely to stray too far from the harbour. Even if they had the sense to buy new clothes, he guessed they would still be lugging that thing around.

  The field was narrowing considerably.

  He grinned to himself as he drained his glass, and dropped the stub of his cigar to the floorboards.

  An idea was taking shape in his head, but he needed help to make it work. He knew exactly where to get it.

  Fifty-two

  Lil and Robert sat at a scrubbed table above the tailor’s, where the man’s stout wife, Mrs Frank, ladled lamb stew onto plates.

  Her eyes, clouded with cataracts, darted to and from them suspiciously. She hadn’t spoken yet, though they had already guessed her husband, who was literally half her size, lived his life in abject terror.

  She was a huge boned, big bosomed woman, with abundant grey hair tied back in a bun. Her hands were as large as those of any man. She sawed through a loaf, while they listened to the whirr and clack of the sewing machine downstairs, as her husband effected minor alterations to the garments they had bought.

  Every so often, the door bell tinged and the mynah bird spoke.

  After they had eaten, they would have a bath and don their new clothes. By now, Lil had discarded the idea of stowing away as being utterly ridiculous. They would lay low for a few days, to give the impression they had slipped town, before booking passage to England.

  Half an hour later, she lay back in a cast iron tub and closed her eyes, as Mrs Frank, who had still not uttered a single word, trickled a kettle of scalding water into the far end.

  ***

  Robert was in the parlour, looking after the suitcase, gazing at a green and red parrot in a cage even bigger than himself. It hung from a fixture on the ceiling and the floor beneath was smothered in discarded seed husks and feathers.

  It in turn, watched him through eyes of polished jet, while membranes flicked over them occasionally.

  The room contained several other cages, holding birds of differing sizes, types and colours, but they were boring compared to the parrot, because he knew they couldn’t talk.

  The parrot stood on a swing, staring at him stupidly, with its beak half open, wing tops raised, as a green and white dropping fell from its rear end.

  It had made a few semi-intelligible sounds while Robert had stood there; syllables and half-words.

  “Go on,” he finally taunted, losing patience. “Talk! Say something.”

  It blinked again, and stepped from side to side, wondering what was afoot.

  “Go on,” he pushed. “Betcha can’t.”

  Nothing happened.

  Then inspiration gripped him, as he said in a low voice, “Tell you what, say… shit.”

  It raised the tops of its wings, as if questioning what, ‘shit’ meant, squawked and carried on watching.

  “All right then.”

  He looked around, to be sure the lady who had been making him nervous wasn’t there, before adding in a whisper, “Say… fuck!”

  Nothing happened for a few moments, but then the bird mimicked him with such suddenness and volume, he couldn’t stop laughing even after seeing Mrs Frank looming up behind.

  She whacked his ear so hard, he nearly fell over. She slapped him again and again, as he stumbled backwards, trying to get away.

  Her face was a hideous red grimace, her eyes standing out, white and mad. Her teeth were clenched into rows of endless small dirty teeth.

  He fetched up against a footstool.

  She grabbed him by the neck as he fell and frogmarched him to a large open Bible on a stand, while his eyes streamed from the pain of his cuffed ears.

  With her massive fingers digging cruelly into the flesh of his neck, she shoved his face so far into the pages, his nose was pressed into a bulb. He tried to scream, but couldn’t.

  She was ranting about the sins of vulgarity and cruelty, when he managed to squirm out of her grasp.

  He darted around to the other side of the varnished stand the gilded book rested upon, heart-skittering, as he gasped for air.

  She darted after him, with murder on her face. The parrot danced from side to side, bleating words of encouragement. She snatched a thick leather strap from atop an upright piano, knocking over a vase of dried-
out flowers in her rush.

  The glass shattered over the keys, making a tinkling sound.

  She was chasing him around in circles and lashing him all over, as Jack Quint leaned lazily against a wall, half a mile away, in the most densely populated place on earth, the Lower East Side.

  Fifty-three

  Quint struck a match on the wall and lit a cigar. The tip glowed like a coal in the shadows, as push carts passed by from all directions, selling absolutely anything.

  There was a fistfight underway in the apartment above, while across the street, a consumptive retched up pieces of lung and spat them into the gutter. A dog barked out the misery of mange. From another window came the screams of childbirth, and in another, the tinny sound of a gramophone. Terrible singing bleated from somewhere else.

  Quint grinned as he heard the clang of what might be a frying pan. The singing stopped abruptly. Gunshots punctuated it all, some near, some far, but Quint knew what he wanted to hear.

  It came towards noon, as he was tossing a quarter to a woman breastfeeding her baby. The coin glinted in the sunlight as it flew, then tinkled and spun as it struck the ground beside her. Her hand crawled out like a dying spider to take it.

  He drew hard on his cigar, and moved on, his ears focusing in on the source of the noise.

  It was a running of many feet in an alleyway, youthful shouts, a yell of triumph, and a cry of, “Get the bastard! He can’t get away.” A gun banged.

  Quint drew his own piece, as he stood at the corner of the wall, peering around gingerly.

  A boy of about fifteen, in brown corduroys and with blond hair, was cornered at the far end by six others, three of whom looked Italian. He held a gun at his hip.

  One of his tormentors hissed, “You’re outa bullets,” and another said, “Tell us where it is or you’re dead.”