I counted it twice before I believed it.
One hundred and three pounds, laid out on a table that wobbled if you leaned on the left side. Four for the revolver. Six for three months over Kettle's pawnshop, paid up front because the old man wanted the rent before he wanted a Shelby in his building. Two pounds ten for a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet with a dent in the side, hauled up the stairs by two lads who charged me a shilling each and complained the whole way.
Ninety pounds, near enough, still sitting in front of me.
In Small Heath, ninety pounds was a house. It was four years of a factory man's life. It was the sort of money that got a man's throat cut on a Tuesday for the crime of having it on a Monday.
And I couldn't explain a penny of it.
That was the part I hadn't thought about, sitting in my room with a glowing screen in my eyes and a number that made me feel rich. Money in this family didn't just appear. Every shilling that came through Watery Lane had a name on it. Polly kept the books like scripture. Tommy could tell you what a bookmaker in Aston had taken on a Wednesday six weeks ago and whether it was short.
I had ninety pounds that had come from nowhere.
I put eighty of it under a floorboard, kept ten in my coat, and went out to find a man I'd cut.
James lived in two rooms off Garrison Lane with a wife and a boy who couldn't have been more than four. The wife opened the door, saw my face, and her whole body decided something before her mouth did.
"He's not here."
"He's here."
She didn't move. Behind her the boy was standing in the doorway to the back room in a shirt too big for him, staring at me the way children stare, without any manners about it.
James came out with a hand already half raised. The cut had healed the way I'd meant it to — a clean line from the cheekbone down, pink and shiny, the sort of thing you'd notice across a room. He'd tried to grow whiskers over it. Hadn't worked.
"Mr Shelby." He got the door off his wife and put himself in the gap. "I paid. That same night, I paid every penny, ask Arthur, ask—"
"I know what you paid."
"Then what—"
"Put a coat on."
He looked at his wife. She looked at me. Nobody in that doorway thought he was coming back.
We walked to the end of the lane and I let him be frightened for two streets, because a frightened man listens better than a comfortable one, and because I'm not a good person and I'd stopped pretending otherwise around chapter five of my new life.
"You kept books for us for three years," I said.
"Aye."
"And in three years the numbers were right until the week they weren't."
He didn't answer.
"You're not a thief, James. A thief steals the first week. You stole in the hundred and fortieth week, and you stole small, and you tried to put it back before anybody counted." I stopped walking. "Which means you needed it. Which means somebody's got a hook in you."
His mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.
"Who is it?"
"It's not—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "There's a fella on Coventry Road. Lends. I took a bit for the boy's chest, he had the fever in the spring, and the doctor wanted—" He rubbed his face and caught the scar with his thumb and flinched off it. "It doubles. The way he does it, it doubles."
"How much now?"
"Eleven pound."
I took the ten out of my coat and put it in his hand.
James stared at it like I'd handed him a live rat.
"That's not—" He tried to give it back. "Mr Shelby, that's not how this works. Nobody— I cut for you. You cut me. That's the end of it, that's how it goes, you don't—"
"I don't what?"
"You don't pay me."
"I'm not paying you." I put my hands in my pockets. "I'm buying you. There's a difference and you'll feel it every day."
He went very quiet.
"I've taken rooms over Kettle's. Two floors up, front window. I need a man who can keep a ledger straight, who knows every bookmaker between here and Sparkbrook by name, and who has an extremely good reason never to lie to me again." I nodded at his face. "You've got the reason on you. Saves me asking for references."
"And the fella on Coventry Road?"
"Give him the ten. Tell him where you work now. If he wants the other pound he can come and ask me for it."
James looked down at the money in his hand and I watched him understand that the worst thing that had ever happened to him had just turned into the best week of his life, and that the two things were the same thing, and that he was going to be grateful to a man who'd opened his face with a razor in front of forty people.
That's what this city did. I didn't invent it. I'd just learned the rules faster than most.
"Two pound a week," I said. "Starts Monday."
He nodded. He couldn't speak.
"James."
"Aye."
"Everyone on that street watched me cut you." I started walking. "Now they're going to watch you go to work in a collar and tie. Let them chew on which one of those they'd rather have."
Lizzie arrived at the office at eight on Monday morning, which surprised me, and in a plain grey dress buttoned to the neck, which surprised me more.
She stood in the middle of the room and turned around once, taking in the desk, the dented cabinet, the window with a view of a chimney and half a wall.
"It's horrible," she said.
"It's a start."
"It smells of the pawnshop."
"That's Kettle. He boils something."
She put her bag down on the desk, and that was her claiming it, and both of us knew it. She ran a finger along the wood, looked at the dust on it, and gave me a look.
"Two pound a week," I said. "Paid Fridays. There's a key being cut for you today."
"And what am I doing for it?"
"Answering the door. Writing down who came, when they came, and what they wanted. Not what they said — what they wanted. There's a difference and you'll be better at it than any man I could hire."
Her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. She was too careful for that this early.
"And when your brothers ask what Lizzie Stark's doing sat behind a desk with a Shelby name on the door?"
"They'll ask me. Not you." I set the ledger down in front of her. "That's the deal. Anything comes at you, it comes through me first."
She sat down. Took a pen. Tested it against her thumb.
"You know what the worst part is," she said, not looking up. "Six months ago you'd have come up my stairs with two shillings and a cheap bottle and I'd have known exactly what you were. Now I've got a key and a wage and I've no idea at all."
"Is that worse?"
"Ask me in a month."
The pressure came behind my eyes then, soft as a hand on the back of my neck.
INFLUENCE +6Current Influence: 21
Territory: Watery Lane — Contested (partial)
Note: Assets acquired. Assets can be taken.
I read it twice.
The system had never given me a warning before. It gave me numbers and let me work it out myself — that was the whole shape of it, a scoreboard with no coach. But there it was, sitting under my territory line like a hand on my shoulder.
Assets can be taken.
I'd spent nine days building things that could be broken. A room. A ledger. A bookmaker with a scarred face and a wife and a boy in a shirt too big for him. A woman at a desk who'd just told me she'd stopped being able to read me.
Nine days ago all I had was a body and a razor, and nobody in Birmingham could hurt me by hurting anything else.
"Jack." Lizzie was watching me. "You've gone somewhere."
"I'm here."
"You do that. Your eyes go off." She turned a page. "Tommy does it too. It's not a good habit in a man with enemies."
I spent the day walking the streets I'd just been told I half-owned.
Not collecting. Just walking, slow, hands in pockets, letting men see me and letting them work out for themselves what it meant that I'd stopped being the Shelby who drank. Twice somebody crossed the road. Once a woman outside the bakery said good morning to me, properly, by name, and looked pleased with herself for having done it.
Fear buys the first thing. It doesn't buy the second.
By the time I came back up Kettle's stairs it was dark and my legs were aching in a way that told me stamina at ten was still stamina at ten, and I was already thinking about the second bedroom and whether Finn could be trusted to carry messages.
There was light under my office door.
Lizzie went home at six. I'd watched her lock it.
I put my hand on the revolver inside my coat, pushed the door with my other hand, and let it swing.
Tommy was in my chair.
Hat on the desk. Coat still on. My ledger open in front of him and his finger resting on a line of it, and he didn't look up when the door hit the wall, because he'd heard me on the stairs and had already decided he wasn't going to be surprised.
"Sit down, Jack."
I didn't move.
He turned the ledger around so it faced me, and tapped the page once, and now he did look up, and his eyes were the coldest thing in that room by a distance.
"Desk, chairs, three months' rent, a wage for the Stark girl and ten pound paid off a moneylender on Coventry Road." He let that sit. "That's near thirty pound out of a man I gave two lads and a collection round nine days ago."
"Tommy—"
"Two pound of that was mine to give." His voice didn't rise. It never did. "So there's twenty-eight pound in this city that has no name on it."
He leaned back in my chair.
"Now. There's three kinds of man carries money that isn't his. There's a thief." He held up a finger. "There's a man being paid by somebody he shouldn't be."
Second finger.
"And there's a copper."
He didn't put up a third.
"Which are you?"