“Hope the B-Boss is as excited as you are about the whole idea. You know how he is about b-business. He l-likes sure things.”
The passage took an abrupt turn into a shut iron door. Skate knocked out the right rhythm. The eyehole slid open, a pair of eyes examined them briefly, and then the eyehole slid shut. With a heavy thunk, the door slowly groaned open. Only two or three handspans wide to begin with, the opening began to slowly swing shut as the pair passed through.
“Morning, Bart,” Twitch said to the doorman, who grunted and nodded vaguely. He reeked of alcohol, as usual. The Boss let Bleary-Eyes Bart get away with his habits, because the doorman could remember and recognize the people even when apparently blackout drunk.
The tables and stools of the underground common room were scattered around. Various other burglars milled about them, drinking, conversing, throwing dice, or playing cards to pass the time. Two dozen or so of these sneaks filled the room, and the chatter and laughter were only occasionally broken up by a cough or the intermittent thuds of darts landing on the board at one end of the room. Someone else was thumping his table regularly, the thud running through the floor and giving the room the feeling of a cadence underneath the general relaxation.
Pipe smoke hung in the room like a sour fog, trapped and heavy. Skate found the smell a little nauseating, but Twitch took a deep breath through his nose and sighed. He loved the stuff but only rarely had a chance to indulge. He claimed that it helped with his tics, but Skate knew it only made them worse when he was done smoking. “Let’s go see the Boss,” she said, nudging Twitch and pointing toward the Boss’s private area, an office and bedroom separated from this main area by a sturdy wooden door.
“He ain’t in,” a reedy, nasal voice said, a little more loudly than necessary. Twitch and Skate were passing the thumper’s table, and she fought to keep her face blank despite her revulsion. Kite was a tall and thin young man of about sixteen. He was holding a knife, which he had been throwing into the table in front of him, over and over again, leaving groove marks in its surface. He threw it again while he was watching them, and it sank about an inch into the wood. “He’s at the monthly.”
Skate cursed; the Bosses of the Ink were required to meet with the Big Boss once a month to give a report of dealings, income, losses, recruits, imprisonments, and any other notable developments within their respective crews and disciplines. Boss Marshall wouldn’t likely be returning today.
“’Course, if you’d been here, you’d know that. Wasn’t you lot s’posed to be robbing a place somewhere in the Old Town?”
Several people nearby had stopped their activities and were watching the conversation. The room at large was uninterested. When neither Skate nor Twitch answered, Kite’s deep brown eyes focused on Twitch. “So where’s your haul?”
Twitch jerked his head to the side, grimaced, and responded, “We’ll t-tell the Boss a-all about it, Kite.”
“I bet,” he said, taking the knife out of the table and smiling without a trace of humor. “And I bet there won’t be no lies in it, neither. Am I right about that?” He put one of his grimy fingernails on the blunted side of the knife and flicked some gunk away. He continued doing the same to his other fingers.
“We don’t lie to the B-Boss, Kite.”
“Oh, I know you don’t, kid,” he said, jabbing the knife in Twitch’s direction, “but your friend there has trouble telling the truth, don’t she?” He still wore his snake’s smile. He turned his gaze toward Skate, and she did not blink. “She lied to him before, remember? Got her in some hot water, if I remember right. And I do. I always do.” He wiped his blade on his trousers. “Whatcha say, girlie? Gonna tell the truth, or what?”
Skate felt the heat rising from her neck to the top of her head. She could ignore jabs about getting in trouble, but the intentional reference to “hot” had started her off. She heard roaring flames in her ears, and whenever she blinked, she saw fire. It was the fire that had changed her life, the fire that had put her here in the first place. She heard her voice begin talking, not even sure what she was saying. “I’ll tell you something you can do with that—”
“Skate, don’t. H-he’s a waste.”
“A waste, huh?” Kite still smiled, but it was a strained thing now. His voice became thinner. “I could show you lot what a waste looks like.” The nasal voice was low and threatening. He held the knife delicately between his two index fingers, looking at the blond boy over the top of it. “I’ve left people as one of those before, ain’t I?”
Thieves who went with Kite on jobs had a nasty habit of sustaining injuries during burglaries, and Boss Marshall wasn’t happy with that, but Kite was mostly unconcerned about Boss Marshall’s displeasure. He had made it no secret that he planned to join Boss Shade’s crew, the crew that handled all the Ink’s wet work: assassinations and petty contract killings. It was known, even among the rank and file, that Boss Shade hadn’t ruled out the possibility of Kite’s defection.
“Enough,” a voice called out from the Boss’s rooms. The sound carried across the room, because Kite’s threats had caught several tables’ attention; even the game of darts had ceased.
Kite’s smile vanished. “Sure, Haman,” he said, dropping the knife into the table once more, “sure. We was just joking around. No harm done, yeah?”
“See that it stays that way. Spilled ink flows both ways.”
That was one of the axioms of the gang, warning that blood spilled against a member of the gang would be paid back. The Bosses didn’t condone infighting.
Kite dropped his gaze to the knife in the table. Haman turned his attention to the children. “You two. Come see me. Now.” He left the door open as he returned to the office. There were a few seconds of silence, and then some chuckles as the room resumed its clinking and thudding and chattering. Kite’s eyes followed Skate and Twitch as they moved. The resumed thumping of the knife in the table remained audible until Skate pulled the Boss’s door shut.
Haman Vaerion was sitting in Boss Marshall’s chair behind Boss Marshall’s desk. The lieutenant had put on his spectacles and was examining several pages while taking notes in a book of his own. In the Boss’s absence, he alone was responsible for keeping track of everyone’s hauls and making sure the Ink got its full share. Recordkeeping was an indispensable part of running any complex enterprise, Boss Marshall was fond of saying, and Haman was skilled at finding “errors” that the various thieves under him “missed.” Boss Marshall regularly delegated this activity to his lieutenant even when he was present to run things, simply because the younger man had a better head for numbers. If Haman minded this extra unpaid responsibility, he never let on.
“Take a seat, and I’ll begin working on your reports in a moment,” Haman said without looking up, waving toward two empty stools across from him. He made a few marks on the page and, apparently satisfied with the end result, nodded and removed his glasses. Skate could not help but feel a twinge of jealousy as he worked. Reading and writing is power, she thought while he took a delicate-looking cloth from the breast pocket of his smooth gray-and-red vest and wiped the ink from his fingers, though there was little; the man was very careful with his work.