The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid

  “Thanks, Jackie,” he said. “Thanks, everyone.”

  At that moment, Bertuccio appeared, announcing that dinner was ready. He came into the catacomb with a large chopping block piled high with freshly grilled meats and vegetables. A bottle of grenadine was produced from one of the chamber’s alcoves and placed on the table.

  “May I?” asked Charlie, sliding a glass toward the bottle.

  “Ah, yes,” said Bertuccio. “I had not forgotten. Charlie Fisher, a true connoisseur of soda à la grenadine.”

  “No gin this time, please, Bertuccio,” said Charlie.

  “Of course,” responded the waiter, smiling. He proceeded to fill Charlie’s glass. “Anything for the Grenadine Kid.”

  Charlie felt a palm slap squarely in the middle of his back. It was Borra, who shouted, “Your nom de guerre, Charlie!” He, too, held up a glass of the bright red liquid. “To the Grenadine Kid. May his kicks be full and his marks fat!”

  The pickpockets sounded their approval, leaning in to meet Borra’s glass with theirs above the center of the table. Charlie beamed inwardly as he took the first sweet sip from his brimming glass. Everyone, at Bertuccio’s insistence, then laid into the rich repast the waiter had supplied. Once the Whiz Mob had eaten their fill, Bertuccio pulled out his Spanish guitar and, like before, lulled the crowd into blissful silence with another lilting, soaring song. Borra, kicked back in his chair, dozed, snoring quietly. Sembene and Fatour curled together on a bench, back to back. Jackie watched the singer thoughtfully, her fingers toying with a stack of franc coins on the table. Charlie found himself sitting alongside Amir; they were both caught up in the spell of Bertuccio’s strange and beautiful song. Amir seemed to shake this bewitchment, because he gave Charlie a quick swat on the arm.

  “Hey, Charlie,” he said.

  “Yeah?

  “Follow me.”

  Together, they left the dozing pickpockets in the catacomb and wound their way up the spiral staircase, along the stone corridor, and out the secret door into the deserted main room of the Bar des 7 Coins. Charlie then followed Amir as he went through the swinging door behind the bar and into a kitchen thick with the scent of thyme and rosemary and garlic.

  “This way,” said Amir. He led Charlie up a cramped staircase that climbed several flights till it ended at a large wooden door. Opening it, Amir waved the way forward, and Charlie stepped out into the open air, finding himself standing on a tall rooftop that commanded a view of the city of Marseille the likes of which Charlie had never seen before.

  “Wow,” said Charlie.

  “Beautiful, yeah?” said Amir.

  The building stood some ways up the hill that defined the Panier’s geography; from this vantage, there was very little to block one’s view of the surrounding cityscape. Much of the Vieux Port could be seen, its waters forever crowded with fishing boats and little schooners. The port ferry, plying between the Quai du Port on the north side of the harbor and the Quai de Rive Neuve to the south, chugged unhurriedly across the rippling water. It being early evening, the port-side cafés were brimmed with their rosé-sipping clientele. Several brightly painted dory boats dotted the quays, from which fishmongers advertised their catch to the milling crowds of tourists: mussels, oysters, sardines, and herring, all laid out invitingly on beds of seaweed. Across the port, atop the high hill, the great black-and-white-striped basilica looked down on this gregarious city, a priest watching his congregation with some equal mix of admonishment and endearment. A boat blew its horn on its way out of the mouth of the port, passing just below the opulent Palais du Pharo; seagulls cried and whirled about in the evening air.

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “Really beautiful.”

  “Wait,” said Amir. “Smell.”

  “Smell?” Charlie took a long, lingering whiff.

  “What do you smell?”

  “I’m getting—ocean. A bit of fish, maybe?”

  “Hold on,” said Amir. He was leaning against the building’s low plaster balustrade; he craned his neck out and surveyed the street below. “Try again.”

  Charlie did so; this time, his senses were assaulted by an incredible smell: the scent of freshly baked bread, intermingled with some kind of pungent herb Charlie could not identify. “What is that?”

  “This woman, next door, she makes flatbread with olive oil and herbs every evening for dinner, for her family. She does this like clockwork, you know. I come up here just to catch the smell.” He took another long inhale. “I’ve never met her, this woman, but I know she must be Lebanese. Or at least from somewhere around there. She makes manakish with the za’atar herbs, I can tell. That is how my mother made it.” Inhaling again, he said, “That, Charlie, is the smell of my childhood. The smell of my home. There is nothing like it.”

  “Do you ever get home, to see your parents?”

  “Me? Oh, no,” said Amir. “Once you’re on the whiz, that’s it. The Whiz Mob is your family.” He was quiet for a moment before saying, “I miss them, though. I had two sisters. I wonder what they are doing. They were very tough, smart girls, Charlie. Maybe you would’ve liked them. I think they would have liked you.”

  Charlie blushed at this mention. “Why don’t you go back? Just to visit?”

  “It is not so safe anymore, my home. Wars. Fighting. I worry for my mother, my father. But this is life, yeah? A boy must leave his mother, eventually.”

  “Or his mother leaves him,” said Charlie quietly.

  Amir turned his back to the cityscape and pushed himself up to sit on the balustrade. He looked squarely at Charlie. “Really?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “That’s maybe worse, I think,” said Amir.

  “It’s okay. I’m over it. She wasn’t much of a mother to begin with.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, Charlie,” said Amir.

  “That’s life, yeah?” said Charlie, doing his best Amir impression.

  Amir smiled. “But life is long, Charlie. And we don’t know how it’s all going to unfold. I won’t be in Marseille forever. Headmaster’ll call us away and we will be assigned to a new city, a new country. There are always new adventures on the horizon. New places, new people. It’s always changing. We can’t all be the lady making the manakish in her kitchen, every night.”

  “Maybe she gets tired of it,” surmised Charlie. “Maybe it’s the same dull routine, every day. She might not even notice that smell anymore.”

  Amir took this in, thoughtfully. “True. We’re the sentimental ones, ain’t we? Us on the outside. Though sometimes I come up here and I smell that smell—the baking bread, the za’atar—and I think, what if I just stopped? Just declared out? There’s a Lebanese café in the Vallon des Auffes, just below the Corniche, that I’ve seen. I think a family from Beirut owns it. What if I just hopped off the mob, what if I just got a job in the kitchen, yeah? They could use a kid like me. And I’d have a little fishing boat in a slip there, a little bed inside.”

  “Sounds incredible,” said Charlie. “But would you really give all this up?”

  Amir waved his hand in the air in front of his face as if dispelling a momentary dream. “Nah, never.” He smiled at Charlie. “Whiz Mob for life.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” said Charlie.

  “Keep working it at, maybe you will,” said Amir.

  The two were silent for a moment, before Charlie said, “Hey, Amir.”

  “Yeah, Charlie?”

  “I just wanted to say thanks.”

  “What for?”

  “For doing this. For helping me. For being a friend. I—” Charlie paused, gathering his thoughts. “I’ve never really been great at making them. Friends, I mean. I’ve moved around a lot. First with my mother, but then when she left and I was with my dad—we’ve just been everywhere without really stopping. Maybe if I was good at it, I could make friends in the places we go, but it just hasn’t really happened. This is the first time I feel like I’ve found a home. That I’ve found my friends.” He
was suddenly embarrassed by this long admission. “I mean, I don’t want to corner you. I can call you that, can’t I?”

  “What, a friend?”

  “Yeah.” He waited cautiously for Amir’s answer.

  “Of course, Charlie,” said Amir. He smiled warmly at Charlie—though did Charlie detect some hint of sadness in his voice? Some sudden, heretofore unseen chink in Amir’s emotional armor? “Of course you can.”

  “Oh, good,” said Charlie, beaming. “To friendship, then,” he said, putting out his hand.

  Amir shook it. “To friendship.”

  Just then, a woman’s voice called out from the street below, speaking in Arabic. The two boys on the rooftop looked over the edge to see a middle-aged woman, wearing an apron, standing in the doorway of the neighboring building. Charlie needed no translation from Amir; he could tell that the woman was calling her children in for dinner. Before too long, a scrabbling gang of kids appeared from around one of the corners and came dashing toward the woman, nearly bowling her over in their excitement. The woman laughed and chided the children before turning and following them inside.

  “Come on,” said Amir. “We should get back to our family. Our friends.”

  Charlie nodded and began to walk across the sun-bleached roof of the building. He’d only just arrived at the door to the stairway when he noticed Amir was not with him. He turned to see the boy still standing at the edge of the balustrade, looking out over the city, framed in a sort of gilded halo by the drifting sunlight.

  “You coming?” called Charlie.

  “Yeah, Charlie,” said Amir. “Right behind you.” He jogged across the rooftop to catch up with Charlie.

  Chapter

  THIRTEEN

  Watch closely. You are looking down from the topmost spire of the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde; you are witnessing the passing of time in this ancient port city. It is early spring and the air is warm, even at your great height. The city below lays itself out before you as if it were a model landscape, a construction of foam and clay and balsa wood. It is teeming with people, some walking, some piloting small, puttering cars or riding clanging streetcars. From your vantage, you can see it all. Let’s not spend too much time pondering how you got up to where you are, or more pressingly, how you expect to get down; let’s instead marvel at your omniscience, your incredible perspective from that height as the world turns around you.

  And there is Charlie Fisher—do you see him?—bicycling his way home along the Corniche, the wind at his face and the sun over the Mediterranean Sea. It is an eclipsing sliver, just setting beyond those distant islands, little black mounds in the pitching green of the sea. Boats are splitting the waters, some ferrying homeward the many tourists who have braved the trip to Château d’If and witnessed the place of Edmond Dantès’s brave, if fictional, escape. The light is a vibrant pink. But look at Charlie: he is the very picture of a self-satisfied boy as he sits upright in the saddle of his bike, a wayward grin arriving and departing from his lips as he replays in his mind’s eye whatever whirlwind adventure he’s just left.

  It’s all right if you don’t immediately recognize the boy—this Charlie would appear very changed from the Charlie of a scant two weeks before. He has spent his time in the interim ferrying himself, much like those sunburned tourists out in the bay, between two distinct lives: one in which he was the obedient son of the American consul general to Marseille, and one in which he was the Grenadine Kid, the promising acolyte to a gang of pickpockets. As a consequence, a sort of glow had attached itself to Charlie, and it had not dissipated by the time he’d walked his bike up to the front gates of the Fisher residence. Pierre, the groundskeeper, let him in.

  “You’re looking very well today, Charlie,” said Pierre.

  “Merci, Pierre,” replied Charlie. He strolled alongside the bicycle, letting it drop sidelong against a manicured row of boxwood shrubs.

  Simon was at the front door, gesturing to the watch on his wrist. “You’re nearly late,” he said.

  “Nearly late,” said Charlie, smiling, catching his breath. “But not quite.”

  His tutor grumbled something, but agreed.

  “You were looking forward to a scolding, weren’t you?” asked Charlie.

  “Come on,” said Simon, ignoring the comment. “The concert is in an hour. Get out of those filthy clothes.”

  Charlie was walking a fine line, living these two lives, but he was managing it with something almost like finesse. For example: he was still keeping pace with his studies, all the while spending half his days clambering about the more-trafficked squares, parks, and cafés of greater Marseille, playing duke man for the Whiz Mob. He’d had to drop out early from the day’s divvy to make the eight o’clock curtain call for the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, something Simon had arranged for his field studies in baroque composers. Tonight’s concert was a Handel concerto, and Charlie had arrived home just in time to leap into his tuxedo, shove a ham-and-cheese croissant down his gullet, and catapult alongside Simon in the backseat of the family Citroën.

  “What were you doing today?” asked Simon archly, as Guillaume drove the car out of the gravel drive and out into the street.

  “Oh, you know,” replied Charlie. “Things.”

  “Perfect day for it, really. Things.”

  “Some things more than other things,” replied Charlie.

  “Well, a jack of all things . . . ,” said Simon. He did not, however, press for specifics. It was a tacit agreement between the boy and his tutor: Charlie would show up on time for lessons and he would endeavor to finish his assignments. In return, Simon would not question Charlie’s activities outside of his schooling, nor would he report anything unusual to Charlie’s father. One could assume that Simon, thinking he knew Charlie as well as anyone, figured that the worst possible trouble that the boy could be getting into was perhaps testing the patience of the librarians at the Marseille Library by lingering too long after closing.

  Cécile, Simon’s paramour, was waiting for them by the bollards in front of the Opéra de Marseille. She had her brown hair pinned back and was wearing a pale chiffon gown. Simon’s whole gait changed when he saw her, and it became clear to Charlie that his studies were not the only reason for their outing tonight.

  “Hello, Charlie,” said Cécile, giving him a quick peck on each cheek in greeting.

  “Hi, Cécile,” said Charlie.

  Simon, after exchanging an amorous greeting with the girl, extended his arm. She took it, and the three of them walked toward the theater. This was not the first field study Cécile had accompanied them on; ever since it became clear that Charlie’s time was occupied elsewhere, Simon had apparently decided there was room for indiscretions on his part as well. Again, Charlie, happy with his tutor’s collusion, wasn’t about to point it out to his father.

  They followed the princely dressed crowds through the lush interior of the opera house; they found their way to the box that Charles Sr. had happily loaned them. The lights dimmed and the orchestra struck up a humming drone that filled the concert hall like a blanketing fog.

  “Tuning,” pointed out Simon, keen to find moments where he might fulfill his responsibilities as tutor.

  The music began; Charlie fell into a reverie. Simon, his hand resting on Cécile’s, watched his pupil proudly. Clearly, his instruction in music history had resonated with Charlie, as the boy was taking in the performance like a happy sponge. However, what Simon could not know was that Charlie was not watching the orchestra.

  He was watching the crowd.

  He was watching the purses and the pockets, laid out below him in the warm light of the hall. He was watching the men’s black jackets, opened at the front, and the sliver of lining that suggested their coat pit, that most fertile inside jacket pocket where a man might carry things closest to heart, there, closest to his heart. He was watching the women’s clutches, held closed by a tweezer or a button that could be undone, silently, with two fingers witho
ut ever alerting the owner. The clock faces of a hundred watches caught the glare of the stage lights and flashed, like little stars, all over the orchestra floor, a constellation of treasures just waiting to be teased away.

  When the final note had been played and the lights came on full and the crowd meandered noisily from the concert hall, Simon tapped Charlie on the shoulder.

  “What did you think?” asked the tutor.

  “Very educational,” replied Charlie.

  Do you see them? From where you sit, from your vantage at the topmost spire of the Notre-Dame de la Garde, you can see everything unfold below you. Watch Charlie as he heads back home, back to his bedroom, back to the silent dummy in the corner. In the weeks that have transpired since he first set it up, Charlie has adopted a friendly camaraderie with his practice dummy, whom he’s named Dennis. That night, he spoke to him as he shed his tuxedo jacket like a reptile’s skin.

  “What’s that, Dennis? Oh, the concerto was positively charming. Just lovely, you know. Handel. Or was it Bach? Hard to keep those two straight. How was your night?”

  The mannequin stared back, still wearing the jacket he’d worn for two weeks now.

  “Oh, you don’t say?” asked Charlie. “You lost a centime coin? How tragic.”

  Charlie rounded the mannequin, and, feigning to wipe a bit of lint from its shoulder, he appeared on the other side with a single coin in his fingers.

  “Here it is,” said Charlie. “It was right in your pocket. Try to keep it safe, why don’t you?” With a quick movement, he tucked the coin back into the dummy’s front pocket, giving it a loving pat as he did so. The boy then flopped onto his bed and fell quickly asleep, still wearing his formal shirt and trousers.

  The dummy watched over him like a proud, protective parent.

  And he had every right to be proud. You see, it had been a mere two weeks since he’d suited up the practice mannequin, since his first outing to the racetrack with the Whiz Mob; by now Charlie was binging the keys from Guillaume’s belt clip and swapping the head butler Michel’s handkerchiefs with the housekeeper Madame LaRouche’s dusting cloths. And he did so unsuspected, never rumbling his victims. Only you can see him work his newfound trade, you up there on the basilica. Watch your step.