Winter's Tale Read online

  PEARLY SOAMES wanted gold and silver, but not, in the way of common thieves, for wealth. He wanted them because they shone and were pure. Strange, afflicted, and deformed, he sought a cure in the abstract relation of colors. But though he was drawn to fine and intense color, he was no connoisseur. Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily sated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, passion and expertise. Not Pearly. Pearly’s attraction to color was like an infection, or religion, and he came to it each time a starving man. Sometimes, on the street or sailing along the waterfront in a fast skiff, he would witness the sun’s illumination of a flat plane of color that was given (like almost everything else in New York) a short and promiscuous embrace. Pearly always stopped, and if he froze in the middle of the street, traffic was forced to weave around him. Or if he were in a boat, he turned it to the wind and stayed with the color for as long as it lasted. House painters were subject to interludes of terror when Pearly would burst upon them and stand close, staring with his electric eyes at the rich glistening color flowing thickly from their wet brushes. It was bad enough if he were alone (they all knew him, and were well aware of his reputation), but he was not infrequently accompanied by a bunch of Short Tails. In that case, the painters trembled because they would be punished afterward for the time that the Short Tails were obliged to stand in silence with their hands in their pockets, observing the inexplicable mystery of Pearly’s “color gravity,” as he called it. Unable to complain to Pearly, they would leave a few of their number to beat up the painters.

  Once, on their way to a gang war, Pearly and sixty of the Short Tails went marching through the streets like a Florentine army. They carried not only their customary concealed armament, but rifles, grenades, and swords as well. Ready for a fight, they were excited beyond measure. Their hearts smashed from inside their chests. Their eyes darted. Halfway to the site of battle, Pearly spied two painters slapping a fresh coat of enamel against the doorposts of a saloon. The little army came to a halt. Pearly approached the trembling painters. He put his eyes near the green and stood there, smelling it, lost in it. Refreshed, moved, and amazed, he stepped back, enwrapped in the color gravity. . . . “Put more on,” he said. “I like to see it when it goes on, when it’s wet. There’s an instant of glory.” They started another coat. (The saloonkeeper was delighted.) Pearly watched contentedly. “A nice landscape,” he offered, “a fine landscape. It reminds me of certain parts of rich men’s estates, where they don’t let the sheep onto the green, and the green stays unfouled. You fellows keep it up. I’ll be back in a day or two to see how it looks when it dries.” And then they went off to the battle, with Pearly at the front fighting as no man could, having drawn from the wells of color.

  This color gravity made him steal paintings. At first he had gone himself to art stores or sent his men, but they found nothing there except easels and paints. Then they caught on and began to raid the secure vaults of prestigious dealers, and the best-watched palaces on upper Fifth Avenue, where they found the most coveted of all paintings, the ones that sold for tens of thousands of dollars, that attracted the harried young hounds of the press, and about which critics dared not say a bad word. These were the paintings that were brought over from Europe in yachts, riding in their own private cabins with three Pinkerton guards. Pearly knew to steal them because he read the papers and received auction catalogs.

  One night, his best burglars returned with five rolled canvases from Knoedler’s. Pearly couldn’t wait until morning. He ordered the paintings to be restretched and called for two-dozen storm lanterns and mirrors to light an enormous loft down near the bridges, the headquarters of the moment, for the Short Tails continually shifted from place to place in imitation of the Spanish Guerrillas. Pearly had the paintings put up on stands and covered with a velvet curtain. The lamps were lit, blazing clear light against the soft cloth. He stood back and prepared for a feast. With a nod of his head, he signaled his men to drop the velvet. “What!” he yelled, instinctively putting his hands on his pistol. “Did you steal what I told you to steal?” The burglars frantically rustled through the auction catalogs, comparing the titles Pearly had circled in red to those on the plaques they had stolen along with the canvases. They matched. Pearly was shown that they matched.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, peering at his collection of great and famous names. “They’re mud, black and brown. No light in them, and hardly any color. Who would paint a picture in black and brown?”

  “I don’t know, Pearly,” answered Blacky Womble, his most trusted lieutenant.

  “Why? Why would they do that? And why do all the rich people and the experts like these things? Don’t they know? They’re rich, they must know.”

  “I told you, Pearly, I can’t figure it,” said Blacky Womble.

  “Shut up! Take ’em back. I don’t want them here. Put them back in their frames.”

  “But we cut them out,” protested the burglars, “and besides, in an hour it’ll be light. There isn’t enough time.”

  “Then put them back tomorrow night. Damn them! What a waste.”

  The next day saw a great stir when Knoedler’s discovered that half a million dollars’ worth of paintings had been stolen. And the day after that, the papers went wild reporting that the paintings had been replaced. They published on their front pages the contents of a note found pinned to one of the frames.

  I don’t want these. They’re mud and they’ve got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I’m used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil’s opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn’t worry about your paintings anymore. I’m not going to steal them. I don’t like them.

  Sincerely yours,

  P. Soames

  To comfort his wounded color gravity, Pearly’s men went out to get him emeralds, gold, and silver. He didn’t speak for days, until the warmth of the gold and the visual clatter of the fine silver healed him. Occasionally they would bring back the work of an American artist, or a Renaissance miniaturist, or any of the lively and unappreciated experimentalists, or some ancient whose work had not been boiled in linseed oil, and Pearly would have his feast—under a pier, upstairs at a stale-beer house, or amid the vats of a commandeered brewery. But the wonderful sights and scenes, the subtleties of true sacrificial color, the holiness of its coincidence in integral planes and intermingling currents, were not enough for Pearly. He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.

  “I want a room of gold,” he said, “solid, polished all the time with chamois, pure gold: the walls, ceiling, and floor of gold plate.” Even the Short Tails were stunned. The city was theirs, but they had never thought to be like Inca kings, or to build a heavenly palace, or even to have a fixed address.

  Blacky Womble risked contradicting his chief. “Pearly, no one in New York has a golden room, not even the richest banker. It’s a waste of time. To steal that much gold would take a hundred years.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Pearly said. “We’ll do it in a day.”

  “A day?”

  “Like stealing poultry. And you think there’s no golden room? You’re wrong. There are many millions of rooms and enclosed spaces in this city that stretches limitlessly down below the ground, up into the air, and into an infinite maze of streets. There might be more golden rooms in the city than there are stars in the heavens.”

  “How could that b
e?” asked Blacky Womble.

  “Have you ever heard of Sarganda Street, or Diamond Row, or the Avenues of the Nines and Twenties?”

  “In New York?”

  “Indeed—thoroughfares hundreds, thousands of miles long, that twist and coil and have branching from them innumerable intertwining streets each grander than the one before it.”

  “Are they in Brooklyn? I don’t know Brooklyn. No one does really. People always go there and never come back. Lotsa streets in Brooklyn nobody ever heard of, like Funyew-Ogstein-Crypt Boulevard.”

  “That’s some sort of Hebrew thing. But yes, they are in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan too. They run through each other, and are overlaid.” Pearly’s eyes were electric lights. Blacky Womble didn’t always understand Pearly (especially when Pearly would send him out late at night to fetch a gallon of fresh paint), but he knew that Pearly got results, and he loved to watch him bristle and sweat, going at things like a wrestler or a boxer, unearthing treasures from the empty air, possessed and directed like an oracle. “The Avenues of the Nines and Twenties are coiled around one another like two copulating snakes. They run for thousands of miles.”

  “In which direction, Pearly?”

  “Up! Straight up!” answered Pearly, pointing at the dark ceiling, his eyes disappearing only to leave behind blank white eggs. Blacky Womble, too, stared at the darkness, and saw gray coilings and blue flashes. It was like being held over an infinitely deep pit. He forgot about gravity. He flew. His eyes were swallowed up by the loom of streets that Pearly had opened to him for just that instant. When he returned, he found Pearly gazing into his face, all set for business, as calm and sober as a laundry clerk on the day after Christmas.

  “Even if Sarganda Street and the Avenues of the Nines and Twenties . . .”

  “And Diamond Row.”

  “And Diamond Row, do exist, how are we going to steal enough gold to make a golden room? Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea. But how will we work it?”

  “The only way to do it is to steal it from one of the gold carriers that come through the Narrows.”

  Blacky Womble was taken aback. The Short Tails were the best of the gangs, the most powerful, the most daring. But they had never even robbed a major bank, except once, and that was one of those temporary branches that could be broken into with a can opener. The gold carriers were out of the question. First, no one really knew when they made port, because they set their courses on random generators (wire cages inside of which tumbled surplus Mah-Jongg blocks engraved with longitudes and latitudes). These ships zigged and zagged over the seas in incredible patterns. For example, to go from Peru to New York, one of the fast carriers might call at Yokohama six times—though a nondelivery port call for a gold carrier consisted of saluting from fifty miles at sea with a blue flare, and then vanishing into the night and distance. There was no way to know where one would be and when; they abhorred the sea-lanes; their arrivals were swift and unexpected. In fact, most people in New York did not know of them. Bakers baked their endless rows of cookies; mechanics worked at oily engines that smelled of flint and steel; and bank clerks worked their lines, piecing out and taking in tiny sums through the organizational baleen of their graceful human hands, never knowing that the wealth of great kingdoms was all around them, filtering through the streets of lower Manhattan like a tide in the reeds.

  Of the many millions, perhaps ten thousand had seen a gold carrier in the harbor or tied up at its fortified pier for half an hour of off-loading, and of these no more than a thousand or so had known what they had seen. Of this thousand, nine hundred were honest, and did not think of larceny. Of the hundred who did, fifty were broken-down wrecks, not even criminal enough to steal from themselves. Of the rest, twenty might have been able, but had turned their talents to other things (such as opera, publishing, and the military); twenty were qualified criminals but lacked organizational skills, followings, and resources; five came up with inept and laughable schemes; and four might have tried it but for fatal accidents, coincidental distractions, and sudden dyspepsia—which is not to say that they would have succeeded. The one left was Pearly Soames, but even for him it was almost an impossible task, as these ships were the fastest and most agile in the world. They were well armed and armored. Deep in their hulls were stupendous vaults that could be opened only when the ship docked at one of the fortified piers, and special extraction mechanisms had pulled from the hull a series of alloy steel rods which tightly caged time-locked doors behind which were ten high-security stalls where the gold was locked in explosive strongboxes. An army guarded each removal.

  Though Blacky Womble was a Caucasian, he was blacker than cobalt, and unlike the rest of the Short Tails, he wore a shiny black leather jacket. His hair was meshed about his ears in frightening whorls much like the path of Sarganda Street. His teeth were the closest match there was to Pearly’s eyes. They were pointed like spires, serrated like long mountain ranges or institutional bread knives, crescent-shaped like scimitars, as sharp as finely honed scalpels, as strong as bayonets. And yet, somehow, he had a gentle, pacifying smile that could have rocked a baby to sleep. Despite the teeth, he was a nice man (for a Short Tail). He knew that Pearly’s color gravity was all-consuming, that Pearly walked a thin line between madness and capability, always upping the stakes in service of his lust for color, and thereby retaining the loyalty of the Short Tails in never failing to amaze them. But it had to crash sometime, and they were waiting for Pearly to lose his touch. Blacky thought the time had come.

  “Pearly, I fear for you,” he said directly.

  Pearly laughed. “You think I’ve gone around the bend.”

  “I won’t tell anyone about this. I won’t say anything. That way, you can think it o—”

  “It’s decided already. I’m going to tell the others. At the meeting.”

  They held their meetings underground or far above it, for the secret deliberations of thieves could not take place in healthy locations such as common rooms or town squares, where they might have become democratic and open, aired-out, unfestering, and cool. They were held in deathly chambers or on the highest towers, confronting either the grave or an open abyss. Pearly used these sites to cook up his plots and galvanize the Short Tails. They felt privileged to convene on the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, waist-deep in not entirely empty water tanks, nestled in terror between the spars of the Statue of Liberty’s crown, in the cellar beneath an opium den on Doyer Street, or at the edge of the central sewer fall, sitting like picnickers in the dark by the side of Niagara.

  “Spread the word,” Pearly said to Blacky Womble. “The meeting will be at midnight, Tuesday next, in the cemetery of the honored dead.”

  Blacky Womble choked and his eyes collapsed into his face. He might have understood a gathering in high wind atop the city’s tallest tower, or one of those plucky convocations they had in the rafters of Central Police Headquarters. But the cemetery of the honored dead! Words of protest gushed out of his mouth, shredding themselves through the ivory sluice.

  “Shut up, Blacky! Do as I told you.”

  “But lemme . . .”

  Pearly Soames locked his eyes onto Blacky’s. For Blacky, it was like looking through the peephole of a Bessemer furnace. Any more resistance from him, as well he knew, and out would pour rivers of orange flame flaring into hot golden tongues to lash at the newly burning world.

  Meekly, Blacky asked how many were to be at the meeting.

  Pearly had cooled somewhat, and answered straight. “Our full complement, the hundred.”

  Loyal Blacky Womble collapsed in fear.

  IT WAS indeed an honor to be buried in the cemetery of the honored dead. Pearly had decided that a dead Short Tail deserved to be interred as close to hell as possible, and that the burial should entail as much risk to life and limb as could be imagined (the ultimate honor to the fallen). Thus, all Short Tails killed in service were transported to crypts at the bottom of the Harlem River siphon.

  To g
et Croton water into Manhattan, the city had built a monumental siphon. On both sides of the Harlem River, two shafts led straight down for a thousand feet to a quarter-mile pressure tunnel hewn through the rock. Halfway between the shafts was a silt chamber twenty-five feet square and twenty-five feet high. Here, one summer when a drought had rendered the siphon inoperable from July to September, the Short Tails had placed one hundred watertight crypts. It had been difficult enough at that time to ride on a tiny platform for ten minutes, holding your elbows at your sides so that they would not scrape the rock walls of the narrow shaft, and then to crawl at a mossy slitherous pace through 650 feet of tunnel so narrow that you felt as if you were being ramrodded into the barrel of a gun, until you broke out into the pitch-dark silt chamber, lit the candle, and listened to the rats scream in fright. It was bad to be a quarter of a mile and an hour away from the surface, from air, from the open; and straight up there was nothing but six hundred feet of solid rock and a hundred feet of mud, rubble, and filthy water. The two round openings in the silt chamber were exactly the size of the tunnel, smaller than a manhole. The sandhogs who worked on the crypts did so only because, had they not, Pearly would have killed their families. They finished quickly, and were grateful to be done, for it was frightening to go there even in a drought.