The Heist (episode 5)
Dinner with the Soup Gobbler
“I took it from a reclamation yard on the East Side,” the Soup Gobbler says when Chris admires the long wooden table, dark and scarred enough for a medieval feast; “you mean an antique shop,” says the gargoyle on the left, grinning, “you filched it from an antique shop,” and the Soup Gobbler gives him a sideways look before answering, “Welcome to New York, cousin.”
We eat bone broth and cabbage soup to the tapping and scraping of spoons while the Soup Gobbler crouches on one end of the table, the gargoyles pace its length arguing with a phone that refuses to find a signal, and Hünga, unimpressed by everything except perhaps Aurelia’s satchel, snores beneath the table.
The Soup Gobbler tells us the book passed first through a nun’s brave hands, then physicians, collectors, and one gentleman so lacking in reverence that he used it to steady a wobbling escritoire, until commerce dressed itself as guardianship and placed the volume where the rich might admire what others had once risked dying to preserve.
The right-hand gargoyle interrupts twice to protest that this version omits three thefts, a flood, and a bishop with sketchy opinions about the white sap of a harebell, but the Soup Gobbler only bares his stone teeth and continues as though accuracy were a discourtesy to a good story.
Aurelia takes notes, Chris listens bright-eyed, and beyond the windows Manhattan surges around us in sandstone, glass, appetite and quick money, while I begin to understand that we are not following a book so much as the long procession of hands that refused to let its knowledge disappear.
The Soup Gobbler falls silent and drops his spoon into the empty bowl; Chris looks around the table and says, “Right then,” and for the first time New York feels less like a destination than a door waiting for one of us to open it.
Previous Instalments – To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link. Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “surge”. Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.
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