Barney’s expression—that of genuine care and concern—needled Una as she navigated the bustling streets to Marm Blei’s shop. He was a good reporter, hungry, albeit a bit green. And it was high time someone gave a damn about the slums. Someone other than those stodgy reformers whose kindness always came with a catch.
Maybe she should have played the coquette and let him buy her flowers. Lord knew they cost enough this time of year to be prized alongside gold. She slipped a hand into her inside pocket and fingered his tie pin. The pointy end pricked her through her glove.
Una cursed and continued on, the cold and darkness creeping over the city.
At the corner of Orchard Street, a young ruffian dashed out in front of her to sweep the road, the bristles of his broom caked in a day’s worth of dust and horse manure.
“How short are you?” she asked when they reached the opposite side of the street. The boy, with his black hair and olive skin, was familiar, but she didn’t know his name.
“Five cents.”
Una knew the racket. The boy’s father (who likely wasn’t his father at all, but a con man of the vilest sort) set an amount each day that the boy had to collect before returning home. If not, the boy would be beaten. She remembered passing by street sweepers at this very intersection with her mother nearly two decades ago. She’d been the same age as the children then, and they’d been fellow Irishmen, the children, not Italian. Una and her mother had been off on some do-good mission, and instead of giving the boy a penny, her mother had given him a roll from the basket of food they’d prepared that morning. She’d pointed in the general direction of the Points and told him about the House of Industry where he could get not only more food but an education.
“Never give them money, Una,” her mother had told her. “It only perpetuates their exploitation.”
Una remembered nodding, though at the time she hadn’t fully understood all those big words. Now, she fished in her pocket for a coin. This late in the day, he was probably shy only a penny or two. An honest boy would have said so. But honesty didn’t buy you an ear of corn or meat pie on your way home. On these streets you survived by hustling. That was the lesson her mother should have taught her. She tossed the boy a nickel and walked away.
* * *
The front door of Blei Dry Goods store was locked when Una arrived and the windows darkened. But Una never used the front door. Instead, after a glance around, she slipped into the alley that flanked the shop, picking her way past ash barrels, empty chicken crates, and a broken wagon wheel to the back door.
A bell jangled from the door when Una entered, and Marm Blei looked up from the pearl-studded brooch she’d been examining. The first time Una had seen her—this giant of a woman with long, plump fingers and shrewd, beady eyes—fear had stricken her. One misstep and this woman could flatten her like a latke. All these years later, an echo of that fear remained. Never mind that Marm Blei had taught Una almost everything she knew about thieving and saved her more than once from a trip to the Island. She doted on Una, or so the others complained. But that didn’t mean she still couldn’t squash Una flat.
“Come look at this, sheifale,” she said and patted the stool next to her.
Lamb. She’d called Una that from the very beginning.
Una set down her bag and sat beside her at the long narrow table that filled the center of the room. The store had two offices. One opened off the main shop and housed a polished oak desk and neatly kept ledgers of all official business. The other, where Una now sat, was part workshop, part receiving office for all unofficial items. Secret cubbies lay beneath the floorboards, and a hidden dumbwaiter ferried larger goods down to the basement.
Marm Blei handed her the brooch and loupe. “Tangle-foot Toby wanted sixty-five dollars for it. What do you think?”
Una turned the brooch round in her hand, feeling its weight, before examining it more closely with the loupe. The pearls were inlaid in a bed of delicately etched silver. On the backside, the seal of a well-known and high- end craftsman, Martin & Sons, was engraved beside the clasp.
“A fine piece. Worth at least sixty.” “Look closer.”
Una brought the loupe back to her eye and studied the brooch again. At first, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Marm Blei wheezed softly beside her. The cold always troubled her lungs. Una raised the brooch to her nose and sniffed. No metallic smell. Pure silver, then. The weight of it confirmed that too. If it were lighter, she’d suspect the thicker parts of the silverwork were hollow. Heavier, and she’d guess silver plating concealed a cheaper metal beneath. She turned it over and studied the clasp. The soldering work was delicately done, but the clasp itself was rather flimsy. Una picked up a nearby rag, dipped it in the small pot of silver polish on Marm Blei’s workbench, and rubbed it on the clasp. It remained a lusterless gray.
“The clasp isn’t silver. Not pure silver, anyway. And rather cheaply fashioned.”
“What else?” Marm Blei asked.
She flipped the brooch over and reexamined the pearls. They floated amid the filigree like frozen raindrops, uniform in size and color. Too uniform. Beneath the loupe’s magnification, she ought to see more variation. Ought to see the tiny imperfections that marked each pearl as unique.
“Roman pearls. Fakes.” “All of them?”
“No.” She gave each a scratch. A fine powder came away from the real pearls. The others—glass beads coated on the inside with an iridescent liquid made from ground fish scales and then filled with wax—gave off nothing. “About half.”
Marm Blei nodded approvingly as Una handed back the brooch.
“You think it’s been fenced before and someone replaced the real pearls with fakes?” she asked. “Melted down the original clasp and replaced it with this one?”
“Perchance. Smart of them, if they did. They’d have to have skill, though. An untrained hand would have damaged the silverwork removing
and replacing all those pearls.”
There were a few fences in town—Marm Blei included—who could manage such a feat. But it was an awful lot of trouble to go through for a handful of loose pearls and a spot of silver. Una frowned. “You don’t think .
. .”
“That Martin and Sons did it themselves? Seems likely as not to me. Your average customer wouldn’t know the difference.” She laughed and patted Una’s knee. “We’re not the only crooks out there, sheifale.”
“How much you give him, Toby?” “Fifteen.”
A fair price. Never mind that Marm Blei would turn around and sell it for fifty. She tucked the brooch into a velvet-lined box opened on the workbench. When her gaze returned to Una, the laughter was gone from her eyes. “Heard you got in a bit of a scrape today at the station.”
Una shifted on the stool. Who’d ratted on her? She hadn’t seen anyone else from Marm Blei’s crew at the depot, but then, Marm Blei had eyes even Una didn’t know about.
“It was nothin’.” “Nothing?”
“Nothin’ I couldn’t handle. I’m here, ain’t I?”
“Yes. Late, but you are here.” She studied Una a moment longer with that hard stare, then her expression softened. She patted Una’s knee again. “Cook’s making hasenpfeffer tonight. Never was overly fond of rabbit anyway. Show me what you’ve got.”
Una turned out her pockets and laid the day’s loot on the workbench. A gold ring. A pair of kid gloves. A few crumpled bills. The silver cigarette case. But Barney’s pin she held back. She’d taken it to prove a point, not to sell it. Maybe someday she’d give it back. Maybe not.
Marm Blei counted the bills first, then turned her attention to the rest. She tossed the ring alongside a gold watch chain to be melted down later. The gloves were well-stitched with few signs of wear. Marm Blei tried to fit one over her giant hand but managed to get it only halfway on. “Oh well,” she said and threw them into a basket with other bits of clothing. Next, she examined the cigarette case.
“Be worth more without these initials.”
“They’re not deeply engraved. Won’t be but the work of a few minutes to buff them away.”
Marm Blei pursed her lips, eyeing a pile of silver trinkets that, like the gold, were bound for the melting pot. After a moment, she nodded. “Suppose you’re right.” She placed the cigarette case alongside the brooch, then locked the box with a key she wore on a chain around her neck.
Without having to be told, Una picked up the box and took it across the room, where a faded upholstery chair sat against the wall. She moved the chair aside, pulled up the corner of the rug, and stowed the box beneath a loose floorboard.
“You’ll work here in the back room tomorrow,” Marm Blei said to her, handing over a few of the bills before tucking the rest in her pocket. Una didn’t need to count them to know it was less than she’d hope for but more than she deserved.
“But I hate—”
Marm Blei silenced her with that steely gaze. “Besser fri’er bevorent aider shpeter bevaint.”
Una had heard the words enough to know well what they meant: better caution at first than tears after.
