Shanghai by David Rotenberg

handbrake the carriage careened to a stop at the bottom of the marble steps.
    I leapt up and grabbed the stanchion of a gaslight and shinnied up. The better to see you, I thought. But before I was able to grin at my own cleverness Eliazar Vrassoon was there on the office steps, two of his four sons at his side and six Sikh guards making sure that his eminence was not touched by the rabble.
    The Vrassoon Patriarch descended the steps slowly, as if out for an evening’s stroll. At the bottom he looked up. He seemed to be looking straight at me. He was about to smile, when his face suddenly grew hard. He pointed a bony finger right at me. My heart fell in my chest. The hatred in the man’s eyes cut through me—and I somehow remembered this man—but in a different place. In a bedroom! Whose bedroom?
    A week later as the sun set, I was back at the Vrassoon company playing “spy” when I saw my father standing outside the office. I knew that he should be reporting to work in less than an hour.
    Despite the heat of the evening, the men leaving the building all wore top hats and woollen suits. Finally a gaggle of young, curly-haired men left the office, followed by a richly dressed older man: Eliazar Vrassoon.
    My father stepped forward and was immediately surrounded by the young men.
    â€œPlease,” I heard him beg. “Please, just a word, a word, please.”
    Vrassoon sighed deeply. “Let him speak.”
    My father smiled. “Thank you. Thank you, sir.”
    â€œYou have something to say, Hordoon?”
    â€œMy girl …”
    â€œWhat girl?” There was a moment of stunned silence. “I repeat, what girl? Perhaps the work I have supplied you is too taxing for you. Perhaps a younger man would be better suited—”
    â€œNo! Please, your honour, no. It was just a joke. The heat … just the heat.”
    The Vrassoon Patriarch smiled, secured his hat on his rather large head, and turned to the waiting carriage. I ran home.
    The next day the Vrassoons changed my father’s job. They now have him working through the night lifting and moving heavy freight in their warehouse. He has become an old man. I never remember him as a young man. Maybe he never was. My mother is rotting away—sick by the time we arrived and sicker by the day. And now mad as well. Over and over she calls out for someone called Miriam. It is the last straw for Maxi and me. We’re tired of begging—me of the paltry take, him of selling his skin—so we said goodbye to our parents today. Papa was too tired to protest. I’m not sure if mother in her delirium even knew what I said to her. We are heading up the Ganges to Ghazipur. But not before we stock up our larder from the Vrassoons’ back door.
    â€”
    The smell of cooking fires filled the Calcutta night air. The early summer heat had not given up its hold on the vast city, so people were out on the filthy streets. A chanted melody drifted down the darkened alleyway where Maxi and Richard waited.
    â€œOnce we do this, we can’t come back, Maxi,” Richard said. “You understand that.”
    â€œAre you asking or telling?”
    â€œTelling.”
    â€œNo need. I know that if we steal from the Vrassoons that we’d better leave the Vrassoons’ town. I think that only makes sense, don’t you?” Maxi’s white, toothy smile showed through the darkness, then he added, “Especially if the Vrassoon courier should happen to end up injured.”
    â€œMaxi, we’re looking for seed money to get us up the Ganges to Ghazipur, not violence.”
    â€œAye. So you’ve said. So you’ve said,” Maxi repeated. “But what say you, brother mine, if by chance this Vrassoon courier isn’t interested in being parted from his loot? If, say, he is as frightened of the Vrassoons as he is of us? What if he fights?”
    â€œHe won’t,” Richard said, ending the