A large woman ambled over to me and peered into my face. “She like a little fat lamb,” the woman said. I stared at the stubble beneath her chin, hoping to distract myself from her dead eyes. “She look good enough to eat-don’tcha, baby?” She pulled a hunting knife from the folds of her skirt and began running her finger along the blade.
I struggled harder to break free from my captors but it was no use. All I managed to do was spit out the gag. I swore in Danish: “Pis og lort!”
“Iddn’t she cute? She just say ‘Peace, O Lord!’-Never had anybody pray before.”
I didn’t give her a Danish lesson. Let her think I was praying. Maybe it would help. She edged closer to me, the knife wavering at my throat. I had closed my eyes, wondering if I should have chosen prayer, when suddenly the fat woman drew back and screamed.
I opened my eyes and saw that a small brown girl had jumped on the woman’s back and was biting her ear. The woman began to swing around, waving the knife, and swearing. “Get down, you devil of a child! What you want to do that for?”
“Give her to me!” said the girl. “I want her. She can give me her fancy clothes and her rings, and she can sleep with me in my bed!”
The men began to laugh and nudge each other. The fat woman shook her head, but her daughter bit her ear again, and she screamed, and everyone laughed even harder. “She’s playing with her cub!” somebody said.
The small brown girl got her way. They bundled us into her set of wheels, and we took off through a maze of streets, all neon and no stars. The girl was about my height, but stronger, with nut-brown skin, big dark eyes, and white wolf teeth. “She won’t kill you as long as I want you!” she told me. “Are you a movie princess?”
“No. I’m looking for somebody.”
The dark girl cocked her head. “You lookin’ for somebody? Down here? At this time of night? Girl, you were lookin’ for Trouble, and you sure enough found him. You ain’t goin’ nowhere, but at least you’re safe with me. I won’t let nobody hurt you. And if I get mad at you, why I’ll just kill you myself. So you don’t have to worry about none of the rest of them. You want a drink?”
We stopped at the curb in front of a ruined building. Some of the windows were boarded up, and some had the glass smashed from the frames, and birds flew in and out of the dark rooms. A sign on the double front doors said CONDEMNED, which was true enough, I thought. This was the place the gang called home. As they marched me into the building, lean snarling dogs clustered around us, but they did not bark. One looked up at me and growled in his throat.
“You will sleep with me and my little pets tonight,” said the brown girl, patting the snarling dog. We went inside the derelict building. The gang had built a campfire on the marble floor of the entrance hall, and they were cooking their evening meal. I was given something greasy on a sort of pancake, and when I had eaten as much of it as I could, I was led upstairs and through a dark hall to the girl’s room. There was no furniture in the room, only a sleeping bag on the floor, and some straw. Holes had been punched in the walls of the room, and the windows were empty squares looking down on the lights of the city. Pigeons milled around on the floor, occasionally rising to sail out the glassless window, then drifting back in on the next puff of breeze.
“These all belong to me,” said the girl. She reached out and grabbed a waddling pigeon from the floor, and thrust it into my face. “Kiss it.”
I pulled away, and worked on the rope binding my hands.
“The pigeons live in the hole in the wall,” she said, smoothing the bird’s feathers. “They come back at night. But I got to keep old Rudy tied up, or he’d run off for sure, wouldn’t you, Rudy?” She opened the connecting door to another empty room. A frightened boy shied away from her as she approached him, but he couldn’t go far because he was chained to the floor by a copper ring encircling his neck. His face and ragged clothes were caked with dirt. The dark girl drew her knife. “Rudy’s a special pet. I’m saving him. Every night I got to tickle him a little with my blade just to remind him what would happen if he tried to run.” She passed the knife gently across the boy’s throat. He struggled and kicked at her, but she laughed and turned away.
“Are you going to sleep with that knife?” I asked her as she climbed into the sleeping bag.
“I always sleep with the knife,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen-do you, sunshine? Now why don’t you tell me a bedtime story? Tell me what you were doing out here all by yourself with no more protection than a pigeon got?”
“If I tell you, will you untie me then?”
She shook her head. “Make it good, and maybe I’ll untie you tomorrow.”
I started telling her about Kay, and how he had hitched his sled to the sleigh of the Snow Queen. The dark girl laughed, and said in a sleepy voice, “Boy strung out on the powder. Sure is. I heard about buying a one-way ticket on an airline made of snow. Old song. Never heard it called hitching a ride onto a sleigh before. Guess that’s what they mean by cul-tu-ral di-ver-si-ty.” Her voice trailed off into a slur of sounds. Soon her breathing became slow and even, and I knew she was asleep.
“I’ve seen her,” said a soft voice in the darkness.
It was the boy. I heard the rattle of his chain as he edged closer.
“You can talk,” I said. Somehow I had thought he wasn’t quite right in the head, I guess. But he sounded okay-just scared to be talking with his tormentor so near.
“Yeah, I can talk. I been around. After I ran away from home, I lived on the street for a while-until they got me and brought me here-I used to see her-the one you call the Snow Queen. She’d ride by every now and again, and there was always a good supply of that white powder on the street after she’d been around. Oh, yeah, the Snow Queen. I know her, for sure.”
“But do you know where to find her?”
“She got a place up in the hills. Couple of hours from here, where it’s so high up it stays cold. She likes the cold. Big white showplace in the mountains, all by itself. I never been there, but I heard talk. I could find it.”
“I wish I could let you try.” I eased out of the sleeping bag and leaned back against the wall, listening to the pigeons cooing in the darkness, but I didn’t sleep. I thought about Kay.
The next morning the dark girl crawled out of the sleeping bag. “I dreamed about that guy you talked about,” she said. “Dreamed he was sitting on ice somewhere, trying to spell some big word with a bunch of crooked pieces of glass. Kept trying and trying to spell that word, and he couldn’t do it. You believe in message dreams? I do. He’s in a bad way, all right. Yes, he surely is that.”
I nodded. “Rudy says he knows where to find him.”
“What? Chain-boy? He don’t know nothing.” She reached for her knife and scowled at her prisoner, but this time he did not cringe.
“I do know,” he said. “I seen a lot. Seen her on the street. I can find her, too.”
“Maybe that’s what your dream meant,” I told her. “Maybe you’re supposed to send us after the Snow Queen.”
The dark girl looked afraid. “Even us don’t mess with her.”
“She won’t know you’re involved. It’ll just be Rudy and me. We’ll go after her.” I stared at her until she looked away. “You’ve been told to let us go,” I said. “Your dream.”
“Yeah, okay. What do I need you two for? It’s not like you were any fun or anything. Go chase the Snow Queen. Get yourself killed in a cold minute.”
The boy and I waited in silence while she made up her mind. At last she said, “Okay. The men are all out for the day, but Mamacita is downstairs, and she won’t like it if I let you go. So you have to wait a little until she goes to sleep, and then I’ll lead you down the fire escape so she won’t see you.”