“Mice,” he said.
“I’m real sorry, Jimmy,” Fin said. “I don’t know if they’ve shut the sugar lockers tighter or they finally brought in their own catchers, but it’s like I’ve told ya-these past few months the pickins has been slim.”
“Mebbe,” Jimmy said, “or mebbe anymore, you’re not a proper ratcatcher.”
Finlayson’s face became a wound. “Whadaya mean, Jimmy? Ain’t I spent most my life bringin’ you the best?”
“Yesterday and a nickel rides the horse car, m’boy. Look at you. You used to be the pitcher of your occupation-dressed in rags with that stable’s manure attached. Same shirt and collar every day. Never could tell if it was gray from dye or dirt. And the stink! I could always tell you was comin’ before you ever hit the door. That popcorn smell of rats mixed with your own sweat and the blood from where you’d been bit. It did a man’s heart good to inhale that smell and know there was a true professional about the premises, a man you could trust. Now look at you.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“I was up Big Hearted John’s on Tuesday to buy a shirt and John tells me you been in. He says you bought that new coat and tie you’re wearin’ and what a bargain it was. Then I go to pay my bill at Mitford’s and the old man tells me you lit out and were holed up at the Caledonia Hotel. Now, the Cal’s a flea circus and them clothes are just what some guinea didn’t pick up after alteration. But for a ratcatcher, it’s like rentin’ out Vair-sye and wearin’ soup and fish. You ain’t dressin’ the part no more, bucko, nor actin’ it neither.”
Jimmy took the cigar from his mouth and crushed it on the floor. Then he turned to the poor excuse for vermin Fin had spent the night collecting.
“I can’t use these,” he said. “You can either drown ’em or I’ll set Blackie on ’em just for practice. Besides, it looks like the game’s dead. I’m sure as hell outta business.”
Finlayson made to say something but the words stuck sideways like fish bones. He certainly couldn’t tell O’Mara that twenty of the refinery’s finest specimens were presently in training to replace and enlarge Swain’s current troupe, or that thirty more were at this moment rutting in a series of breeding cages in the basement of Knox’s Triangle Saloon. In the preceding six months, Swain had paid him nearly one thousand dollars for his rats: more than he usually earned in five years. As for his clothing, it reflected his new station, as would the clothes of any man who’s come up in the world. Yes, he was still a ratcatcher, filthy and despised by the decent. But now, instead of being a supplier to a dying sport, he was a man of show business, a talent scout as it were, bringing new performers to a public blessed by a six-day work week and a hunger for amusement in the leisure time between factory and church. Finlayson took the canvas bag and turned toward the door. Jimmy O’Mara had already lit another cigar and turned to his ledgers.
Outside, autumn had come. The clouds gathering all night had broken into a gentle rain. Fin turned up his collar and crossed Delaware Avenue. He made a right onto Kenilworth and found the Schooner already open.
Without a word, Henry Kulky placed two shots on the bar and then pulled the tap for Fin’s Esslinger. Except for the two men, the bar was empty. It wouldn’t begin to fill until eleven when the dockworkers came off graveyard. As Fin downed the whiskeys he measured Henry’s silence. After all these years he knew his good quiet from his bad.
“Hey, Kulk. Wanna see something new?”
“I already seen your suit,” Kulky said.
“No, this ain’t the suit. This is something so new, nobody except me’s ever seen it. So when you see it, you’ll be the second.”
“Take much time? I’m busy.”
“A minute.”
“Cost me anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Finlayson reached into his inside coat pocket. From it, he pulled a good-sized rat.
“Get that fuckin’ thing outta here!” Kulky snapped. “Ya want me to lose my license?”
“Just wait a second, Henry boy, please.”
Kulky reached beneath the bar for his bat but before he could grab it, Fin placed the rat on the worn wood and clapped his hands. The rat stood at attention like a rookie cop.
“Hut!”
With a squeak, the rat ran over his right hand, up his coat sleeve, across his shoulders, and down his left arm. Finlayson again shouted, “Hut,” and the rat stopped cold.
Kulky brought the bat from beneath the bar but didn’t raise it.
“Hut, hut!”
Fin held his arms a few inches above the bar and the rat jumped over them both and then returned, jumping to and fro until he whistled for it to stop. He took an old baseball from his pocket, placed it on the bar, and clapped again. The rat leaped onto the ball, rolling it across the bar like an elephant in the circus. He double-clapped and the rat turned, rotating the ball back toward him. Finlayson opened his coat and whistled once more. With a powerful spring, the rat leaped from the bar and back into the pocket, where it disappeared.
“Hey,” Kulky said, “that’s pretty good.”
“It’ll be better,” Finlayson said, “with an orchestra.”
GHOST WALK BY CARY HOLLADAY
Chestnut Hill
I.
September 1899
In a basement in a stone house in Chestnut Hill, Frances Watkins, aged seventeen, and her mother are treated to a tour of an unusual collection: a group of preserved bodies owned by Vaughan Beverly, who is the widowed Mrs. Watkins’s fiancé.
Vaughan gestures to a glass-topped casket and says, “This woman turned to soap.”
Frances feels sick. The dinner at the restaurant where Vaughan took them was rich and heavy, and she drank too much champagne. She wishes her mother had never met Vaughan Beverly on his mysterious trips to Baltimore, where Frances and her mother resided. Tomorrow, her mother will marry Vaughan Beverly, and this is the house where they will live together. I won’t stay here, Frances vows. Not with dead people in the basement. She and her mother have known about them: Vaughan boasted of them at the party where Frances and her mother first met him, at the home of wealthy relatives. Vaughan is a man of science, everyone says.
Her mother acts as if it’s a grand joke, these bodies. Maybe after the wedding, her mother will come to her senses and have them taken away. Surely it is wrong to have them here, as if they are of no more consequence than Vaughan’s display cases of butterflies and beetles, with their carefully printed labels. Vaughan collects many things-guns, knives, and trophies of exotic animals. Last night, Frances stayed up late in his extraordinary library, reading about birds.
The basement is furnished as beautifully as the rest of the house, with electric lights, upholstered couches, and paintings on the walls. Frances can’t help but be intrigued. “She turned to soap?” she asks, peering through the glass. The cadaver is naked except for strips of cloth over its breasts and loins, and it appears whitish-gray.
“Tell us about her, Vaughan,” says Mrs. Watkins gleefully. She sips from a glass of wine and places a hand confidingly on her fiancé’s arm.
Vaughan pats her hand and says, “She died of yellow fever, probably in the epidemic of 1792, and was buried near the river. Some of those old cemeteries filled up with water. This woman, being rather rotund, well, her fat combined with chemicals in the wet earth. The substance is called adipocere. It’s much like lye soap.”
Frances’s mother repeats, “Adipocere. What a lovely word. It sounds French. Like an exclamation, au contraire. Adipo-cere!” she says in mock dismay, waving her hand.