The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence Read Free Book Online

kindnesses in the past. He had no proper jacket or coat and so he and the old man ended up in the back of the alehouse, right by the kitchen, with the companionable fog of frying mutton chops rolling over them where they sat.
    They lingered over their pitcher of ale, neither of them in any hurry to go out into the raw drizzle. The waiter asked if they needed anything else; Stephenson waved him away with the genial air of a man seated by his own hearth. There was some small talk of a circumspect nature about the shop. Stephenson, a strapping fellow in his youth and a match for any man on the floor, now spent most of his days in his office with the frosted half-glass walls, but Toma was his eyes and ears, in the tunnels and elsewhere. When Toma made a reference to the work in the tunnels being stopped for half a day by an inspection team from the MTA, Stephenson sighed in sympathy and allowed as how it was, now, all paperwork. Not like the good old days, God bless ’em, when the emperor of China sends a letter asking would the John T. Stephenson Company please make him twelve trolley cars. A price was quoted. Several weeks later a check arrived—had to hold off a while to see if there was a real bank in Macau behind that fancy letterhead—and that was the last they heard from the Chinaman until the cars were delivered, and a letter—some kind of scroll, you’d say—arrived to express the emperor’s appreciation. But there was something else, come to think of it, a package with a piece of cloth to show what was wanted in the way of upholstery. Well, you never saw such a thing: cloth of gold, it seemed, with a few red or green threads thrown in more or less to give the eye a rest. And you should have seen the cushions that we answered with. Old Fogarty snuck out to the urinals with one of them under his coat and broke his tooth testing the buttons, thinking they were gold.
    But the truth of it was, and here Stephenson set his elbows on the table and dropped his voice to a more confidential tone, the truth of it was that there was more money to be made in this subway business than there ever was in trolley cars and fancy cushions for the Chinaman, even with all the paperwork, and even though it didn’t look so fat, car by car. Look at your map of Manhattan, boy, and you’ll see what I mean: this tunnel to Brooklyn’s not the end of it, not by a long shot. Before long they’ll be building another line, and they’ll be wanting more cars, and new cars, and if we play the cards right, and you keep an eye on the tunnels, and I keep everything square with Tammany Hall, why, there’s contracts that will come our way. Never seen a lad with such a head for details as you, unless I go back to when I was your age. And here Stephenson winked at him.
    Now Stephenson’s thought turned from such pleasing vistas of past and future, landscapes ennobled by monuments to remunerative folly, and entered a forest of rich, obfuscatory praise for the capabilities, mental, moral, and physical, of his valued assistant, praise punctuated here and there by shafts of dazzling light, intimations of success, if only…Toma perceived that their discourse had a destination.
    â€œIf only what, sir?”
    â€œWell, I’m just thinking, boy, that I raised you five dollars more than two months ago, and I’ll raise you again if I have to, but…”
    â€œYes, sir?”
    Stephenson took a long pull of his ale and wiped his mouth on a vast checkerboard of a handkerchief. Then he signaled to the waiter, calling out for a whiskey, a double whiskey.
    â€œYou don’t look like a man who’s on his way somewhere, somewhere as matters. You come off a boat, what, five, six years ago? Well, in this country we’ve all come off a boat, and you look far enough back. But the point is not where you come from, it’s what you do when you get here, see? Now, it’s almost three years since