“I’ve already told you more than I tell anyone.” And she’d done so unprompted. She’d never trusted anyone that much before. “The history is my papa’s. I’d be playing him a terrible trick to share anything more.”
Beyond that, Papa thought they needed to be careful still. She’d not risk more trouble by making their history known.
“Sounds a great deal like m’sister’s feelings about the blue-bottles,” Ganor said.
“Your sister don’t like the police?”
Ganor pounded a nail in before answering. “Not so much a matter of not likin’ them as worrying over them being too nearby.”
He’d said her reasons were similar to those Papa had for worrying about writers. “The police caused her trouble at some point, did they?”
He nodded. “The both of us. We had a spot of trouble with the Peelers—that’s what we call the police in Dublin—and we’d no choice but to, as you put it, make like the waves.”
“What was your spot of trouble?” she asked.
He shook his head quickly and firmly. “That’s a seven-magpie story, that one.”
“I don’t twig you.”
He explained. “That old rhyme about the magpies and what it means to see a particular number of them.”
“Ah.” She understood now. But what was the meaning of seeing seven magpies? She’d read the latest installment of “The Dead Zoo” recently enough to remember without much thought. “‘Seven for a secret, never to be told.’”
“That’s the front and back of it, lass.”
“A seven-magpie story,” she repeated. “That’s a right clever turn of phrase, that is. I’ve said it before, but you’re something of a wordsmith at times.”
“I do try,” he said with a laugh.
“Fortunately for you,” Vera said, “there are two magpies present just now. Two is for joy, not secrets.”
His dipped-brow expression told her he’d not the first idea what she meant.
Vera took pity on him. “Sorokin is a name that comes from the Russian word for magpie.”
“Miss Vera!” Olly’s voice rang out from the street in tones of absolute terror. “Fire, Miss Vera! Fire!”
They ran to the door where the boy stood, frozen with terror. Across the street, smoke poured from the front-facing windows of Overton’s barbershop.
“Cricum jiminy.” She looked to Olly. “Run downstairs to the printing room. Tell Papa.”
He obeyed without argument.
Vera turned to Ganor. “We’ve buckets out behind the shop fit to purpose, and there’s a pump down the street.”
He nodded and rushed off to the back. Vera darted across the street, reaching the barbershop just as Peter stumbled out with Mr. Overton.
“Anyone else inside?” Vera asked.
Peter shook his head. “Everyone’s out, but the fire’s spreading.”
“Mr. O’Donnell’s fetching buckets of water. Has anyone else nipped off for water?”
Her question was answered by the arrival of the Okekes with water-laden buckets. They ducked inside to toss their loads on the flames. The scene replayed with two others. Then others. Ganor joined their ranks as well.
Vera did her best to keep curious onlookers at a distance, all the while listening to the pop of flames and the smoky coughs of her neighbors.
Several fire brigades arrived on the scene with their water pumps. Vera searched the façade of the barber shop for a fire marker. Few businesses in the area could afford to pay the insurance needed to receive the help of the brigades.
Ganor appeared out of nowhere, eyeing the building as well. “No fire marker.”
Fear clung to her heart like a thornbush. “They’ll let it burn if there’s not a marker.”
“We’ll do what we can for him.” Ganor accepted an empty bucket from one of the neighbors just stumbling from the building.
Buckets were nothing compared to the might of the brigades’ pumps. Mr. Overton would lose everything. There’d be no salvaging his livelihood or saving his family from the poorhouse.
The barber sat on the edge of the pavement across the street, watching as his entire life was reduced to ashes. Vera crossed to him and sat at his side, without the first idea what to say to him. How did one comfort a man who was watching the destruction of everything he owned?
They sat in silence as the brigades left, not having offered the least assistance. Mr. Overton hadn’t purchased fire insurance—he no doubt couldn’t afford it—and so they wouldn’t help. That was the horrible, tragic way of things.
“Should’ve paid,” he said, his voice raspy.
“Not a one of us pays for the fire brigades,” Vera said. “How can we? We’re hardly covering our costs as it is.”
He shook his head. “I don’t mean the fire insurance. I didn’t pay the Protector.”
She pulled her eyes from the smoke and looked directly at him. “You didn’t?”
He dropped his head into his hands. “I needed new razors for the shop. Long overdue. I bought them instead.”
“And you think having those extra eyes would’ve helped prevent this?”
His posture slumped with defeat. “A man came to collect my quid. When I told him I couldn’t pay this week, he said that was a shame and that robberies weren’t the only trouble businesses and people needed protecting from.”
There was nothing untrue in that.
“Then he said it didn’t take much for a life to ‘go up in flames.’”
Even with the heat of the nearby fire, cold creeped over her. “You think the Protector set the fire?”
Mr. Overton nodded, his sooty fingers leaving prints along his temples. “I was meant to remember those words. Now, I’ll never forget them.”
Vera pulled in a breath, the ash in the air only making the effort more difficult. “Didn’t take much for a life to go up in flames.”
The street, then, wasn’t paying for help like they thought. They were being extorted.
Pay or suffer.
Pay or be targeted.
Pay or their lives would go up in flames.
Brogan watched, helplessly, as Vera paced the shop, worry deepening the lines on her ash-smeared face. The fire at the barbershop was out, finally, but even the combined efforts of nearly everyone on the street hadn’t been enough to save the building. Heaven knew they’d tried. He’d told himself as he’d frantically tossed bucket after bucket on the flames that they’d manage it somehow. Watching the building collapse, gutted from the inside, he’d felt that failure acutely. Overton’s family would likely never recover.