Posted by After a long hour of trying, with minimal success, not to doze, Maggy saw the two men shake hands. The grift is on, the hook is set, she thought. Now, just wait for it. As he approached from across the room, she imagined he had a new and unusual air of confidence. Perhaps, she marveled, he even had a bit of a proprietor’s swagger. He flashed his, “I have a plan” grin and suggested they get some fresh air, have a chat. And how many times had she heard this invitation? Well, she had to admit that at times his plans, not always above board – often downright illegal – had been quite profitable.
The two of them had, for instance, lived not lavishly but quite comfortably through last late spring and then summer on the spoils from what Peleg referred to as The Ashcan Man Scam. Most of the metropolis’s best neighborhoods had an alley running the length of the neighborhood to the rear of the houses. Here were found the household’s stables, garden sheds and miscellaneous outdoor domestic operations. Only after a thorough reconnaissance of one such neighborhood, had Peleg been convinced that, in the guise of a street sweeper, he could move freely about the back streets without anyone raising the hue and cry. Maggy had made him a white smock with pockets in which Peleg concealed a couple of flasks of Minnie’s Hi-Flyer Rye Whiskey distilled and bottled across the river somewhere in the bowels of Hoboken. Over the course of a month, Peleg had become a part of the daily scene recognized by the grooms and gardeners as a solid sort good for a leisurely chin wag and a shot or two of Hi-Flyer. And, of course, the payoff for Peleg had been any information elicited regarding the summer vacation plans of the householders, the whereabouts in the house of any remaining staff and any other scraps of information of use when late at night or early in the morning he shimmied up the rainspout and in through whatever window wasn’t locked. He liked to work his way down from the top floor exiting from the back door carefully locking the door behind him. Afterall, you can’t be too careful these days. An experienced and disciplined professional he pinched items least likely to be noticed, at least for a while – a ring or bracelet out of a drawer full of them or, perhaps, two silver spoons from a set of two dozen. Surely small potatoes to a master criminal or greedy amateur, but, when skillfully pawned in “the best” shops, the proceeds were more than enough to support Peleg and Maggie in the style to which they quickly became accustomed. These were good times and, when Peleg decided in early September not to push his luck, the pair had enough put by to get them through the winter, warm and fed.
Some of Sardine’s schemes, however, had been disastrous. Case in point? The operation on which the final curtain came down as our hero sat in a flooded-to-the-gunnels rowboat, at the mouth of Newtown Creek watching as the gentle current shepherded fifteen wooden crates of smuggled bourbon into the lowering fog of the East River. Even if he could swim, which he couldn’t, there was no way to retrieve the smuggled booze. And so, he was left in a stolen boat which, while it would not completely sink, would never rise again. And this unforeseen baptism, dispiriting as it was, hadn’t a patch on the fact that he now owed his investor two hundred dollars’ recompense. This benefactor was a particularly vicious Dead Rabbit knifeman who went, to his mother eternal shame, by the name of Slasher Jack Mudge. So, there he sat for the rest of the night shivering, miserable, doomed. In the morning he was picked up and dropped ashore by a passing fisherman. After a thorough drubbing courtesy of Mr. Mudge, Sardine and Hell Cat, spent the next three months trawling the wealthier parts of the city on the lookout for citizens willing to reimburse Slasher out of their own pockets.
The Bardine Gang, Sardine and Hellcat, late of The Five Points, Manhattan, New York, strolled a little way down High Street, found a green bench and sat. Peleg drew in a deep breath and on the exhale launched his opening gambit, “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. All too likely, thought Maggie. “He wants to apprentice me!” said Peleg.
Maggie was startled to the degree that the slightest degree more of startlement would require a much more emphatic word to describe her condition. “He doesn’t even know you, Peleg. You’ve just met. He knows nothing about you!”
“And a good thing, too,” Peleg grinned. “He says I remind him of his son. Son was apprenticed four years when he went to the Caribbean on a buying expedition, got the Bronze John on board the ship and died directly he got there. “Anyway,” he forged ahead, “There are rooms upstairs over the shop where we could stay until we get a stake together for our own place.”
“Do you know anything about fixing clocks?” Suddenly Maggie felt utterly discombobulated, knew she was feeling utterly discombobulated, and hadn’t a clue how to get dis-discombulated. She stood up and walked away from the bench. Jesus wept. This was a long way away from the usual “Peleg shares the plan with Maggie” session in which he suggests how they might pull a fast one, raise a road stake and leave town, unnoticed if possible. Where was he going with this? Clearly, he was suggesting they settle down. After all this time? What the hell was he thinking. She turned and looked at her partner. And the man who had made his living since the age of eight reading people to his advantage knew the deal was not yet done.
“Look, Mag, we’re not getting any younger. Is our line of work going to get us through our fifties and sixties with something put by? You know, as well as I, we can go weeks without a score – watching every penny, hungry and without a bed. This is a chance for me to get a trade, support us, live in the same place for more than two weeks, and stop having to constantly be looking over our shoulders for the local beak runner.” Peleg laid into it, “I, for one, am tired of paying a big slice of everything to the Rabbits and going up against the likes of Slasher Jack.”
When he put it like that, all of a piece and every bit of it true, Maggie began to soften, come around. She recalled how comfortable they had been over the brief duration of the Ash Can Man Scam and the opportunities unlocked by the proceeds. A place to come home to, little things done to make their room homey. But, as always, it hadn’t lasted. At the tail end of that winter, when the wind could still be cold and sharp, the money had dwindled down to almost nothing, and they were out on the street once again searching out an affordable flop. It was scary to think of the change Sardine was contemplating for them. Respectable? She had no idea how to be that, had she? But then she thought of all the roles she and Peleg had played so successfully. ‘Struth, she had easily passed for “respectable” many a time. Certainly, she could do that part again and watch as always to see the things other people did and how the people around them reacted. She walked back up the High Street to the bench. “OK,” she said, “Show me the rooms.”