stood out, huddled together, babbling and pointing. I could see the source of their agitation from where I stood by the station’s doors, but moved closer to get a better view and be part of the gathering.
It was an exact, concentrated shower of rain. It fell in a literal sheet, about five feet wide and a couple deep. The drops fell in straight silver lines. I looked up and traced the thin streams to the clouds as if they were strings hanging from massive balloons.
A woman to my left crossed herself. “It’s a waterfall from Heaven,” she murmured, wonder in her voice. “More like God taking a leak,” a man replied, but the glares of his colleagues silenced the joker and we watched in uninterrupted awe for the next few minutes.
Just before the shower stopped, a man stepped into it. He was small, dressed in loose white robes, with long hair that trailed down his back and flattened against his clothes under the force of the water. I thought he was just one of the city’s many cranks, but then he extended his arms and raised his face to the sky, and I saw he was blind. Pale white orbs glittered where his eyes should have been. He was pale-skinned, and when he smiled his face became one unblemished blob of white, like an actor’s painted face in those old silent movies.
He turned his head left, then right, as if scanning the crowd. I moved closer for a better look and his eyes immediately settled on me. His hands fell by his sides and…
I’m not sure what happened. It must have been a shadow, or dust in the drops of rain, because all of a sudden his eyes seemed to come to life. One second they were pure white, the next there was a brown spot at the center of each, a spot that flared and spread until the eyes were full.
He stared at me with the new eyes. He blinked and the brown was still there. His hands lifted toward me and his mouth moved. But before I could cock my ears he stepped out of the rain and back into obscurity. People moved between us and when they parted he was gone.
Then the rain stopped. A last few drops made the long descent and that was it. The crowd dispersed and people went on their way like nothing had happened. I remained longer than the rest, first checking for the blind man, then in the hope of a repeat performance, but finally I gave up and hailed a taxi.
The driver asked where I was going. He spoke strangely, accenting lots of words, grimacing whenever he stressed a syllable. I gave him the address but asked him to drive me about a bit first—I wanted to see some of the city. “Your money,” he said. “What’s it to me what you tourists do? I’ll drive you till night if you like. Least, till eight. That’s when I knock off.” He was a sour sort and didn’t make any effort to start a conversation, so I concentrated on the city.
It soon started raining—ordinary rain this time—and everything was obscured and warped. Street names, houses, traffic lights, scurrying pedestrians—they all looked the same. They blended into an alien landscape and I felt my eyes start to sting. Leaving the sightseeing for another day, I asked the driver to take me home. Home meaning Uncle Theo’s place. Theo was the man I’d come to the city to live with. He was going to teach me to be a gangster.
Theo Boratto had been a gangster of great promise. He made his mark early on, and by the time he was twenty-five he commanded a force of fifty men and was the scourge of the respectable southwest of the city. He was ruthless when he had to be, but fair—you needn’t fear him as long as you didn’t cross him. Most importantly he had the blessing of The Cardinal. Theo Boratto was a man on the way up, one for the future.
He was a good home man too. He loved his wife, Melissa, with a passion. He fell in love with her ears first. “She had small ears, Capac,” he told me. “Tiny, thin, delicate. They broke my heart, just looking at them.”
He wooed her vigorously and, though she wanted nothing to do with his world of violence, he won her. Their wedding made the society pages of all the papers. He spent a