Joshua Joseph, between bouts of hero worship and merciless inadequacy, occasionally feels that his father is laid across his shoulders in much the same manner, and that he must pull him everywhere he goes, whether his father is there or not.
Papa Spork burns the eggs, which in his curious vision of the world is just further cause to believe in the inestimable genius of the House of Spork, so they have cornflakes instead. On some level or other, however, Joshua Joseph’s father must realise that this morning has gone astray from the usual perfect march to dynastic hegemony, because he makes a concession for which Joshua Joseph has been striving for weeks:
“D’you want to come to the Night Market tomorrow?”
“Yes, Dad, please!”
“I’ll ask your mother if she’s all right with it. And you look out some smart clothes.”
“I will.”
The Night Market is a dream. It is the magic heart of the city Mathew asserts confidently is the greatest and most magical on Earth. Joshua Joseph knows with an instinctual passion that it is the most secret, most remarkable, most improbable place in the entire world; the more wondrous because it moves around. It is a clearing house for everything and anything. It is beyond the reach of tax and tariffs; a shadowed, lamplit holdfast which bustles with forbidden trades and pirate’s treasure. Mathew claims it was born of the wrecker’s trade, that the Kindly Men came up the Thames from the inshore water, from Cornwall and the Channel Coast, with booty looted from sunken ships. He says it was Britain’s first landside democracy (the pirate ships themselves being the first constituted parliaments). Perhaps it was. Mathew’s occasional, unlikely erudition is startling even to his father, Daniel, who knows all things. And then, too, this Market, which Mathew has revived and of which he is anointed king (or elected president for life, if you prefer to retain your grip upon that great democratic heritage) is the one aspect of his profession to which Daniel Spork does not object, the one part of Mathew’s life, aside from Joshua Joseph and his mother, Harriet, for which Daniel will smile.
Perhaps it’s the hearthfire glimmer of the stalls. As reported, the Market is like a hanging garden of antiques and jewels, tiered and terraced or sprawling across some great space, or piled higgledy-upon-piggledy above one another in an old brewery or giant crypt. Each pitch is designed according to the owner’s likes and lights, but must run from a single three-pin plug, for power is at a premium, and therefore most often the Market is lit by gas and heated by small coal fires in Swedish stoves or Victorian grates, and chimneyed out by whatever contrivance Mathew has arranged for the occasion. Food smells, too, Harriet said once, like a huge spiced kitchen: cake and meat and fish and herbs and condiments unknown in Merry England, but common in France and Italy. There’s garlic and basil and turmeric and curry, and a kind of black fungus which smells of—but here, Harriet changed course rather abruptly. Of something exotic, anyway.
And amid all this, the trades and deals, marked by a flicker of torchlight as the buyer takes a moment to illuminate his—or her—prize, inspect it, assess or assay it, weigh it, measure it, accept or reject it. Money changing hands in purses, billfolds and bill rolls, occasionally in cases, and of that, each deal kicking back just a little to Mathew Spork himself.
But so far, all Joshua Joseph himself has witnessed—has been required to learn by rote, by heart, as one of the many curious rules of the House of Spork—is the trick with the newspapers.
Every Market culminates in the announcement of where the next one will be. The majority are small gatherings, but every month there is a grand one, the true Night Market, and that one is heralded by strange, encrypted messages in unlikely places. The clew—the thread by which the maze may be unravelled—is a lonely-hearts advertisement in a local paper: “Come home, Fred, all is forgiven!” The ad immediately beneath—by arrangement with the setters—gives a veiled time and date. A second paper yields a street or locality, and a third, a specific name or number. It is a jigsaw. From within, it’s entirely simple. From without, impenetrable.
“Can you tell me where it is, then?” Mathew Spork demands, ferocious.
“Of course, Dad.”
And indeed, that evening, with his mother’s nail scissors and a half-hour of cutting and pasting, Joe has the address.
“We have a winner! A true son of the House of Spork!” Mathew cries proudly, and Joshua Joseph repeats it happily as his father whirls him through the air.
“You like to win, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. I do.”
“All right, then, we’ll call this your exam: three-card monte!”
The traditional three-card monte is also known as “Find the Lady.” It is played with three cards, one of which is the queen, and the dealer moves them around face down in an effort to confuse the player. The player then picks which one he thinks it will be—which it is, the first and maybe the second time he plays, but the third time inevitably pays for all, and the dealer comes away richer. It is the first con Mathew ever learned—from his father, of all things, for which the old man daily curses himself.
The simplest trick of the monte is the knuckle cast. In the language of the sharper, the dealer has a light hand and a heavy one, the latter so-called because it carries two cards, one above the other. The dealer moves the heavy hand and deals once. The mark tends to assume that the card dealt is the bottom one, and in the early rounds it will be. In the pay round, however, the upper card is released by a slight flex of the knuckles, so that the player is reversed. It’s a magician’s force.
Mathew is not asking Joe to perform this trick with his small fingers. There’s time enough for that as he grows older. On this day it is the Gangster King’s concern only that his son know a fiddle when he sees one, and the monte is a perfect metaphor for any game or trick you can name. See the world through the monte, and you won’t be taken for a sucker. At least, not often.
Mathew rolls his wrists and flashes the cards, showing the heavy, the light, the heavy. He lays them out, exposes them face up. It is all so much distraction, hands not quicker than the eye but cleverer than the watcher. Joe grins as his father fakes a fumble, trying to get him to focus on the wrong thing, and Mathew nods appreciatively. Then abruptly Joe’s father stops, alarmingly sincere.
“Your grandfather’s told you about strictures, I suppose?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“He’s a good man, son. He tries his hardest. He believes in the game. He thinks if you play by the rules long enough, the right sort of fellow will win out. He may be right. Thing is, in my experience, the right sort run out of money or the wrong sort leave the table. The game is fixed. Always has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster’s road. Take what you can, do what you must, and know that being a right sort never saved anyone from anything.”
Joe nods, taken aback by his father’s sudden need to explain himself.
“I did listen your grandfather when I was little, Son, just the way you listen to me. Truth is I still do, but don’t tell him I said so. So here’s a stricture of the monte—of the Market, I suppose: if you can see what’s going on around you, when other fellows walk through life blindly, then you’re a better man. And like to turn a profit, which is life’s way of letting you know your quality. All right?”