Eye of the Crow

(beckoning you to stare up and drift into a better world), where the masters, monitors, and all the students also gather for assemblies. He has been in school for seven years, his parents insisting that he read better than the others, cipher better … think better. But there is a ceiling on his future lower than the one in his classroom.

He thinks of his earlier days, in the dirty Ragged School in Lambeth, sitting in one of the many rows at his narrow wooden desk, beside other miserable pupils. He is fortunate to be gone from there. Unlike those destitute children, he at least has some sort of future, some expectations. In the summers he’s helped the old hatter in the shop under their flat, adding what he can to the family income; it was said he did well. He may become a full-time shop assistant some day, a clerk, or a teacher; nothing better.

“But look at Disraeli,” his father often tells him. “He will be prime minister one day, mark my words. Other Jews are getting places too. They let us sit in Parliament now. It’s 1867! When I was a boy things were much worse.”

But Benjamin Disraeli isn’t the sort of Jew that Sherlock is, or like any he knows. Those who succeed, like the Rothschilds and a recent Lord Mayor of London, have never lived in the slums of Southwark or Whitechapel; their blood isn’t mixed; their parents haven’t suffered a great fall. In fact, Disraeli comes from a middle-class family and was baptized in the Church of England: his life has been filled with opportunities. And yet the boy recently saw the great man drawn with a grotesquely long nose and caricatured as Fagin in a copy of Punch magazine he found in the streets.

The boys at school call Sherlock “Judas,” or “Old Clothes,” the name for conniving Jewish street vendors. He is a loner to begin with, doesn’t like to talk: it seems he just reads and thinks. He wears preposterous suits with waistcoats (bought “passed on” at a market), threadbare but as clean as he can make them, his only way to be somebody, though it separates him even more. He’s had a few fights at Snowfields. He won’t give in or let other boys go unpunished for mean things they say. But some still taunt him. They resent his many first-place finishes, his razor-sharp mind.

One fight still bothers him more than any other. It happened nearly a year ago. The school bully had teased him so mercilessly that he’d challenged the boy on the street. A big crowd gathered. His opponent was a hulking, eleven-stone pure-English lad. Sherlock went down with the first blow, was pounced upon, his thin arms pinned until they nearly snapped on the pavement. The boy spit on him and slapped his face as the others looked on and cheered.

“’elpless, ain’t you, Judas? Absolutely ’elpless!” cried the boy. “You can rub your grades in our gobs and wear those clothes and take those snooty ways, but you still ain’t goin’ anywhere remarkable. You’re pinned down, you are, like you should be!”

When the large boy finally relented and climbed off, Sherlock wouldn’t get up. The crowd stood and looked down at him. He lay there, flat on his back on the street, until everyone was gone.

He’d been absent from school maybe once a week before that fight, but since then his record had drastically declined. He tries to attend: knows he owes it to his parents. But he can’t. Education can get you somewhere, but where has it gotten his father?

A goldfinch is flying by against the gray clouds. The air has cooled and it looks like rain again. Sherlock is thinking about the murder.

The new Illustrated Police News is still in his pocket. He hasn’t read much of it yet, just the headline and a few words about Mohammad Adalji. He pulls it out and turns to the second page. There the lurid drawing has been reproduced from the day before.

The blood. The woman. That crow.

The story flows onto the next page where another picture of the victim is drawn for the reader. Her pretty eyes look just like his mother’s in the little painting back in their flat.

The woman’s identity has still not been revealed. He reads on.

It is an open-and-shut case. There is no doubt that the Arab did it. The police are certain. An old detective named Lestrade is in charge.

We found him not far from the scene, blood on his hands, a butcher’s knife concealed under his coat. She wasn’t a wealthy woman, but well turned out. This villain must have thought she had money. There are signs that he took her coin purse, though we haven’t recovered it. He must have ditched it somewhere. Remnants were found at the scene. We will talk to him, talk to him smartly. The purse shall be found. And he will swing for this.

Further down the page Sherlock reads that the Arab’s trial will take place in about three weeks. Punishment will swiftly follow. The clock has begun ticking on Mohammad Adalji’s life.

When Big Ben strike 5:00, it sounds like a distant gong in another county to Sherlock. He gets up and walks mechanically toward the river. Before he’s gone far he notices that the crows are nearby again. Two of them are flying above him. But then they veer away. He decides to follow. He should go straight home, but something inside urges him to go with them.

They are flying toward the oldest part of London, the city proper, the area inside the ancient London Wall, where spooky little streets wind around like snakes slithering into stone burrows. It is filled with banks these days, but it’s where the Romans once lived, where the Vikings and Saxon lords ruled, where witches told gruesome tales, and wretched medieval men and women were whipped and tortured in public.

The crows fly, then roost, and then move on. Following them gives him an uneasy feeling … like he’s with the devil’s birds.

Where are they going? Where do they stay at night? Usually they find tall trees.

Before long the Tower of London with its famous prison is to his right down by the Thames. Soon after it slips from sight, the crows start flying lower.

He is a long way east now, in a working-class area. There are rag-and-bone shops, candle makers, costermongers and their carts everywhere: an immigrant neighborhood even poorer than his own. This wide road isn’t so bad, but down the smaller streets he sees desperate people walking about, many in bare feet, others lying against soot-stained buildings. He sees Jews too, crowds of them, some selling clothes, yes, with long beards and piles of hats on their heads. Languages he can’t understand fill the air.

There are no gas lamps down these back-ways. Soon the sunlight will grow dimmer; the famous London fog, beginning to settle in, will get thicker. People are rushing home, leaving the main road. He goes by a street named Goulston.

He shouldn’t be here. Sinister-looking men pass, eyeing him.

“Easy mark,” he thinks he hears a dusky one in a sailor’s cap murmur to another.

He keeps his eye on the crows. But suddenly they vanish. They drop somewhere to his left, just a short distance ahead. He is beginning to feel lost. The side streets here seem darker, like wolf dens.

He stops at a narrow one … Old Yard … his best guess as to where the birds have gone. There are two shops on either side of the entrance and their upper stories, grim-looking lodgings, are built right across and over the little street.

He takes a deep breath and ventures down it, his heart pounding.

It is like being in a tunnel. The sides of the two-storey buildings lean out over the road, cutting off the setting sun. Filthy children dressed in rags crawl out from nowhere, begging with pleading eyes and outstretched hands. Others have lined up their pathetic shoes on the grim, dirty footpaths, hoping for a sale. They smell as if they’ve bathed in cesspools. Many cough horribly, and their skin looks green. These are the sorts of areas where four or five families live in single rooms.

It is time to leave. Past time.

But then he spots the crows down an empty alley.

What are they doing?

He can barely see them. They’ve landed right on the ground. They are bobbing about on the cobblestones deep in the alley, hardly visible in the dimming light. He looks at the street name on the brick building at the corner. It seems familiar. He isn’t sure why.

Sherlock hesitates. He is in an area his parents don’t allow him to even go near, let alone enter. He is beyond late. They’ll kill him when he gets home.

He hears the crows muttering.

He turns down the alley.