One
I stole a glove.
It dangled off a table in a decrepit leather shop in Thieves’ Market on the Eastside of Manhattan in sweltering late September 1921, and it was in my bag before I even knew it had been in my hand.
It was white leather, paper thin and butter soft, with irises along the knuckles and a strange brand embossed at the wrist that showed a stamp smashing into a puddle of ink. In that vile shop, where canvas walls kept out sunlight but trapped heat, the glove was a splash of ivory in the darkness. It was surrounded by wallets, boots, belts, caps, jackets, aprons, strops, and straps—all stained, stolen, and badly made. The glove was too fine for that dusty stall, and so the shopkeeper was watching when I took it away.
“Girl!” he barked. I did not turn my head, for that is not my name.
He shoved aside a rack of loafers and strode toward me, bowlegged, sweating, a triangle of moles sprouting hairs just to the left of his mouth. He blocked my exit, and the smell of him made the sausage I’d called lunch lurch in my stomach.
“Think I didn’t see it?” he said. “This is my place. I see everything.”
“That’s no great accomplishment,” I shrugged. “It’s such a small place.”
He bristled. “You give it back, or it’s trouble.”
He wrapped his meaty fingers around a short leather club. My neck brushed against the canvas walls. There was nowhere else to go. I put on my sweetest society girl smile.
“I really don’t know what you mean,” I said, “but trouble is something I strive to avoid at all costs.”
“So hand it here.”
I dug into my long, amorphous sack of a purse, and he smiled a horrid smile. He rolled the club between his hands. “Right, right. Nice and slow, and there’ll be no trouble at all.”
He was right—it was no trouble for me.
My little knife flicked open quick as a stinging wasp. I jabbed it toward the shopkeeper’s ample belly. His balance failed him, and he crashed into a table of leather scraps. I turned away, slashed a hole in the canvas, and leapt through it like an acrobat through a ring of fire.
The leather shop was just one of a jumble of tents erected in the middle of the street, where sagging tables offered chipped glassware, stained collars, limp hats, out-of-date calendars, and purposeless hunks of metal. Most of it had been parted from the original owners, just as I was liberating this glove now. The crowd moved steadily, because no one was buying. They browsed to forget that they had nowhere better to go. From somewhere uncertain came the stink of gutted fish. From behind me came the shopkeeper’s shout.
“She’s a thief! The little bitch is a thief!”
Never mind that half the patrons in the market were thieves, either by vocation or necessity. Never mind that the entire operation was a clearinghouse for items stolen up and down the Eastside. These creatures protected their own. Two other shopkeepers heeded the leather man’s call, and the chase, I regret to say, began in earnest.
A greasy hand reached for my wrist. I twisted away, slamming into the rock-hard gut of a man who sold lace. He leered at me, almost licking his lips, and I slipped under his arm before he closed it around my neck, and ran. They came after me, shoving shoppers and upending pushcarts and threatening unspeakable acts of violence against my person. These men had grown fat selling stolen goods, but I take one glove—not even a pair, but a single glove—and they threaten to remove my skin, tan it, and wear me as a coat.
They were bloodthirsty and determined, those three shopkeepers, but I am small and passably nimble, and have spent my life running from bullies. I leapt over a family sleeping on the sidewalk, darted through a beer hall emptying after the lunchtime rush, and slipped through the alley toward Bleecker. When I was a child, these alleys were empty, but since the city was sliced in half, whole families have crowded into them, packed into ragged tents or huddling under the awnings of all-night oyster houses. The sun was blotted out by the makeshift shelters on the top floors of the tenements, where flimsy structures of two or three—sometimes even four—stories held apartments built of stolen timber and bedsheets that hung limp in the tepid September breeze.
I ran down the narrow strip of pavement, dodging outstretched limbs and sleeping children. The shopkeepers burst out of the beer hall and called after me. My mouth burned with the taste of metal. For that matter, my legs burned too.
I kept running.
The stink of fish faded as I stepped onto Broadway, crowded and gleaming and smelling of money and judgment, and the fence blocked my path. Even in the punishing glare of the sun, it was a dark thing—thirty feet of wrought iron topped by sharpened spikes, stretching up the middle of the avenue, dividing the healthy Eastside from the deserted west. In the middle was a little door guarded by a little man whose uniform buttons sparkled in the light. I danced through the sludgy traffic and slammed against the iron.
“Open the gate,” I said, flashing my license.
A half-witted smile spread across chapped lips. “Just what business has a nice young lady like you got on the Westside?” he said.
“Personal, and urgent.”
“I guess you’re from out of town. I can’t let you through this door without a chaperone, and even then, I would advise against it. Things over there are, well, peculiar.”
“I live on the Westside, I work on the Westside, and I have a Class C permit, which allows—”
“Crossing the fence any time during normal business hours.”
“So let me through!”
He draped his jaundiced fingers across my shoulder and tried to look concerned. The leather man stepped off the sidewalk and waded into traffic, howling for blood.
“You know, miss, you step through that door, the city cannot guarantee your safety.”
“Remove your hand from my shoulder or I will bite the knuckles to the bone.”
“Oh, miss,” he said, as disappointed as if his favorite terrier had just turned rabid. “Very well. Proceed at your own risk.”
The shopkeeper and his friends fought two or three ill-defined lanes of automobiles, pushcarts, and horse carts, screaming for the gateman to stop. He was too preoccupied with the mechanism of the gate to pay them any mind. The squat iron door eased open. The leather man leapt, and his fingers brushed my shoulder as I threw myself through the gate.
Damp moss broke my fall. Broadway was muffled by the sound of falling water. A silver cataract cascaded down the crumbling facade of an abandoned tenement, pouring over broken windows, splashing onto the moss-blanketed street, and rushing into the gutter. I have scaled that unsteady building, and seen the source of that waterfall, which bubbles straight from the peeling black tar roof. It is an impossible wonder. Such things are common here.
When I stopped shaking, I twirled to face the men who had chased me, who now stood before the gate, too timid to cross into the Westside. I waved the glove at them. It was a childish gesture—how could I resist?
The leather man took the gateman by the collar and screamed in his face.
“Retrieve her!”
“Sir. If you would be so kind as to let me go.”
“She’s a thief.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But my authority stops at the fence. Go after her. Cut her. Gut her. It doesn’t matter to me. But I’ll tell you what I told her: step through this gate, and you take your life in your hands.”