by Will Thomas
“I will make time,” Barker said.
“I am pleased to hear you say it.”
“Pray tell me, what did you send my ward to do?” Barker asked.
K’ing shook his head. “So direct, yet you spent most of your life in China. It is a business matter. My business, sir. Not your business. It had nothing to do with the ambassador’s death. The general and I had no chance to go beyond pleasantries, and at this point, I’m not certain that the matters we discussed shall be considered again. Had I known the ambassador would be killed, I most certainly would not have sent my wife there. I would not hurt her for the world.”
Barker nodded as if satisfied. “I am heartened to hear it. I care for her deeply. With all my power, I want to see her happy.”
“As would I, Mr. Barker, but fate is not often kind.”
There was that word again. I scribbled “fate” in shorthand and circled it. Mononobe had used it, and now K’ing. I wondered if that was an Eastern concept he had borrowed, or a Western one.
“Is there any other matter you’d like to discuss?” K’ing asked. “I am very busy, but stay for lunch if you wish. We are not as innovative as our old friend Ho, but you will find our food superior.”
“I, too, am busy, sir. If you are able at some point to discuss the events which caused you to send your wife to the embassy, I would be most interested in the information.”
“I will take that into consideration, Mr. Barker.”
He and the Guv bowed to one another.
Three cultures bow to one another, I thought. The Chinese, the Japanese, and the English. The Scots normally do not, nor the Welsh, but we lived in this country and had picked up the custom. Russians don’t bow when they meet, or Italians or Argentinians. It was not pertinent to the case, but it was interesting.
When we reached the lobby again, Barker asked for a chair. He looked tired, as if he were running on sheer will. The hostess saw that chairs were brought and faced the room. A cup of tea was placed at our elbows.
“Vice,” he stated, staring at a table covered in pieces of paper. I recognized the game known as fan-tan.
“As I recall, you won your ship in a game of fan-tan,” I said.
“I did,” he admitted. “But only after having lost enough to pay for it twice. I was young and naïve.”
“Why did we come, sir? If it was to learn what Fu Ying was doing on the roof, we failed.”
Barker leaned back in the wooden chair and it protested under his weight.
“I wanted to see his eyes. He did not have pinpoint pupils. He has not been smoking opium lately.”
“Perhaps he gave it up,” I said.
“One does not simply give up opium, Thomas. It is like an octopus that slowly ingests you. One cannot get away from its tentacles. It will drag you down to the depths.”
Barker frowned at the room. “And gambling is no better. Many of these men will return home with the news that they have lost their family’s food money for the week. Children will go hungry. Men will lose their wives, their homes, their occupations. They will sell their work tools for one more game. This opulence, these fine green baize tables and carpeting, it is at the expense of hardworking families. Goodness only knows how K’ing has skipped around the laws to open this establishment.”
“Does this change your mind about him?”
“I fear it does, but so far he has not broken any laws that I can see, just as before with his opium den. What he does is not illegal. It is merely unsavory.”
“Even if the money goes to a benevolent society?” I asked.
Barker gave a sigh of exasperation. “I don’t know how much of his receipts go to help the poor here. He would not show his balance book. So far, I see little change in the daily lives of the people here in Limehouse. This is my fault.”
“How is it your fault?”
“I have thrown Fu Ying to the ravening wolves. Worse yet, I have been schooled in a harsh lesson by the very man to whom I gave her. It might have been better if I had married her to Ho.”
Barker pushed himself up and out of the chair. He looked gray, as if he had aged a decade in an hour and a half.
“Come, Thomas,” he said. “I need to get out of this perfumed house of sin.”
CHAPTER TEN
Just because Cyrus Barker had just returned from somewhere didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t go right out again. He only had so many working hours before nightfall and didn’t like to waste them. On the other hand, sitting and cogitating might be a better use of his time. It could be either one.
I liken waiting for Barker to decide what to do about a case with waiting for a brown trout to decide whether to bite down on a royal coachman. One had to be patient. Once back in our chambers, the Guv didn’t settle in his chair. He gathered the post and ripped through it quickly with his stiletto letter opener. He stuffed a pipe with his own particular blend of tobacco and set it alight. Then he stood in front of the bow window facing nothing but the offices on the other side of Craig’s Court, and blew smoke at it.
“Reporters,” he muttered. “They are gathering near our door. It appears we arrived just in time.”
When he was done fouling the window and reading the circulars in the post, he settled fitfully into his chair with a good deal of harrumphing. Meanwhile, I read the Gazette, and in particular the article about the shooting.
“You are not mentioned by name, merely that someone has been brought in for questioning,” I said.
“No doubt that is due to Bram Cusp’s influence. Don’t expect it to continue. There are a half-dozen reporters in the alley hoping to get a statement. Jenkins!”
Our clerk appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Mr. B?”
“Make up a sign. State that I will not give interviews but that the agency has been retained by the Japanese delegation to investigate the murder of Ambassador Toda.”
“Right,” Jenkins said, and opened his desk drawer in the waiting room where he kept his pen, ink, and papers. Jeremy Jenkins was a former forger with superb orthography. He could have made a living as a calligrapher or scrivener if he wanted to. The only reason he didn’t, save perhaps out of a sense of loyalty to Barker, was the fact that his favorite pub was one street away.
Barker picked up the telephone receiver from the candlestick set on his desk and spoke a number into the mouthpiece.
“Is he there yet? Where is he? When is he due to return?” There was a brief pause. “Nay, don’t bother. Thank you.”
He hung the receiver back in its cradle, then consulted his turnip watch. It was a battered old thing, much out of date, but it must give excellent time, for he was never without it.
“Call a cab, lad.”
I was up and out in a few seconds. I passed by most of the reporters, but not all, and anyway, I had to come to a stop to hail the hansom.
“Come on, Thomas. Give us a statement. What’s Push up to?”
“Mr. Llewelyn, is there any truth to the rumor—”
“Just a few questions, sir, that’s all we ask.”
“I suggest you be patient, gentlemen,” I told them as the cab drew up, fresh from Scotland Yard. “Our clerk is making a sign even now that I believe you will find interesting.”
A minute later my employer shot out of his chambers, taking the stairs two at a time. Brusquely, he shrugged off the clamor of the questions and pulled aboard the vehicle. I followed suit.
“The City!” he called overhead.
We bowled past the statue of Charles I, which is considered the exact center of London, and Trafalgar Square, where pigeons perched on the hero of Waterloo. We slid into the Strand and Fleet Street and eventually into the City. The cab slowed by an oddly shaped building, or rather, two mismatched buildings connected together, one round, the other rectangular.
“The Temple Church,” I read from a sign as my employer stepped down.
“Founded by the Knights Templar in 1185.”
“What are we doing here?”
“We are trying to learn more about the ambassador’s mission, and who sanctioned it.”
“By talking to a priest?”
“Not a priest, Thomas. Pollock Forbes. There is an initiation going on there this morning. I hope to speak to him.”
“Ah,” I said.
Pollock Forbes is head of an order of the Knights Templar. Not the same order that originally fought in the Crusades and achieved wealth and power; that one was destroyed in the 1400s, or so it is said. The one Forbes led was an organization composed mostly of bankers, barristers, and Scotsmen, an order of Freemasonry. However, I’ve often reasoned, if the original Templars were still in existence, wouldn’t they appear as a harmless group of Freemasons that met in the original church but claimed to have nothing to do with the group?
“This church is peculiar,” Barker said to me in a low voice.
“It looks it,” I replied. “For one thing, it’s round.”
Barker grunted. “I meant in the ecclesiastical sense.”
“Ah,” I said for the second time. “Not strictly run by the Church of England, then. Is it Her Majesty’s?”
“No,” the Guv responded. “It belongs to the Inner and Middle Temples.”
“Barristers. Who else might belong to an organization which no longer officially exists?”
“Exactly.”
“Barristers become members of Parliament, while others don’t get reelected and become barristers again.”
“Correct.”
“And what do the Templars do, precisely?”
“They are a fraternal organization.”
“Extremely powerful men who get together in secret in order to wear vestments and perform rituals no one would understand.”
“If you wish to put it that way, yes.”
“May I assume these fellows would never use their connections to accomplish anything on a large scale.”
“Just charitable events.”
“And they have no idea where the original Templars kept their fortune, which I understand was considerable.”
“Sorry, lad.” Barker shrugged his shoulders.
“Thought as much.”
We arrived at the temple door and entered. The round nave was tiny. It was built of Purbeck marble with a circle of columns and was only about fifty feet in diameter. There were grotesque heads carved into the walls on small medallions, mostly of men making ludicrous faces. I thought to myself, you have the most beautiful marble and this is what you use to decorate a church? Churches are sober, spiritual places. One doesn’t want to look to the heavens and see a face leering at you with his tongue lolling out. There are certain fashions in architecture that deserve to end and be seen no more.
The small chamber was packed with men, dozens of them squashed into this miniature nave. I began to see a similarity between the faces above and the ones below.
The men with Forbes eyed us suspiciously, as if they felt we might have spied on the ceremony. I very much suspected that Barker was already a member, but I had not been invited, and had little curiosity about the whole thing. If they wished to wear aprons and red crosses, that was their prerogative.
A man came forward and pressed my hand. It was our old friend Pollock Forbes. He is whip thin but always expensively dressed, favoring Liberty waistcoats in outrageous patterns. He had curly, light brown hair and a pale complexion. He looked like a young blade loitering about town, and that was how he wished to be thought. No one need know that, like Ho, he was one of Barker’s “watchers,” collecting information which, from time to time, helped in our investigations.
“To what do I owe the honor?”
“I have a new case and I would like your insight. Are you in a hurry to get back or can I buy you an early lunch?”
“I don’t eat much these days,” Forbes admitted, “but my doctor has recommended a half pint of stout every day to build up my stamina.”
“Then I’ll buy you one down the street.”
Just then a priest entered and looked at us as if we were there to loot the silver. By mutual agreement, we exited the church. He could have it all to himself.
Forbes led us along the street and down an alley into one of the most iconic buildings in London: nothing less than Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese itself. I had always hoped to come here, where Charles Dickens liked to duck in for a quiet pint in his favorite public house. It is mentioned in A Tale of Two Cities and in Stevenson’s The Dynamiter. I doubted that either wrote anything in the actual building unless he had the eyes of the Cheshire Cat, for it is the gloomiest building in a city famed for its gloom. One has to stand in the doorway for a while until one’s eyes grow accustomed to the charcoal-gray atmosphere. The flames of candles, lanterns, and gaslights inside produced a nimbus glow around the patrons and henceforth gave up trying to light the rooms. So much for one candle being sufficient to pierce the darkness.
We sat and I tried to decipher a menu, but it was not necessary. Any food in Britain can be found in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. One merely has to call out and it will be brought steaming hot and bubbling from the kitchen. There may be nothing exotic about the food, but it is traditional and wholesome and filling, and were one to somehow return a century after, the exact same recipe would be brought out, possibly on the same plate.
“Fried potatoes, your best game pie, and pints all around,” Forbes ordered. “Oh, and bring some sprouts while you are at it.”
“Thrilled” is not a word I throw around lightly. It sounds overly exuberant. However, I was thrilled to be there. It was as if Dickens himself would pass our table and ask to borrow the salt, or Dr. Johnson, who once lived nearby, would try to squeeze his girth between the chairs. Why had I not come here sooner? That’s London for you. A place of great historical and literary significance slapped into an ordinary street with no signs and an entrance round the corner.
“I never expected to see you outside of the Café Royal, Pollock,” I said.
“I often have meetings at the Temple. This place is convenient and while it’s not a patch on the Royal, it’s such a quaint old place I find I come here often.”
Our seats were in the back row. Forbes looked comfortable here. His reputation as a dandy was bolstered by his often paying Oscar Wilde’s tab at the Café Royal. One wouldn’t think that the pockets of his velvet jacket were stuffed with memoranda and bills from the House of Commons. Nor would one understand that the Masonic Hall behind the restaurant was generally at his disposal. His reputation as a young man who had inherited a lairdship and was squandering it was deliberate, while what work he did through the Templars was anonymous. Those who knew, and precious few of us there were, did our best to keep his incognito a secret. Here I was, having an epiphany, while he and the Guv were looking almost bored.
“I’m going to assume, Cyrus,” Forbes began, “since you are not especially a social man, that there is a purpose to your coming to see me. Is there something I should know?”
“I have been retained to investigate the death of the Japanese ambassador.”
“Really? With a case against you pending in the courts?”
“Apparently, General Mononobe wanted someone he could trust, and on the strength of seeing my garden, he decided that I am the man.”
The pints arrived, large, frothy glass mugs of oatmeal stout which sloshed over the sides and left new rings among the many old ones. If I could have, I’d have purchased one of the ancient tables for my room. Could the BJ carved into the edge with a knife have been the work of Ben Jonson?
“How can I help with your investigation?”
“I don’t need anything beyond facts or rumors that have been bounced around the Houses of Parliament. Did the Japanese make the initial offer for an embassy?”
“They did. The MPs are patting each other on the backs. The Foreign Office has tried for years to get under that Japanese shell but it was considered impregnable. Then, poof! It opened by itself.”
“What did you know about the vict
im, Toda?”
“A Shinto scholar. He lived as a monk for a time until he was dragged into politics. His death is a severe loss to the country. He was much loved, I understand. There will be statues made of him. This death doesn’t reflect well on the two countries’ relationship.”
“Will his death cause changes to the government?”
“Decidedly. He was a pacifist. Also, something of a referee between the general and Mr. Akita, the minister of trade, who is a businessman and espouses free trade. Japan is little more than barren rock and until now the government has been forced to accept the Americans’ price on wood, coal, cotton, and just about everything else. Believe it or not, the Japanese are Anglophiles. While we are wearing dressing gowns with old Japanese woodcuts printed on them, they are trading tweed on the black market.”
“And Mononobe?”
“Obviously, he’s from the military side. The Japanese psyche desperately wants to prove it is the equal of the West. It won’t be caught flat-footed again as it was in 1853 when the American, Admiral Perry, arrived and began dictating terms.”
“So it is Mononobe against Akita?” Barker said. “And now the referee has been shot. Why was Mononobe made second in command?”
“He has the seniority. Apparently, he fought in the Boshin War on the imperial side. As I understand, he saw the writing on the wall early, switched sides to the emperor, and defeated his old samurai comrades. A real slash-and-burn general he is.”
“How much power does he have now? Can he broker arrangements himself, or must he take the information back to Tokyo to be decided there?”
“Oh, he’s got full power now, he and the admiral. Their arrival has the entire navy slathering. He’ll want to order at least one destroyer.”
The game pie arrived, swimming in its own fragrant gravy and accompanied by roasted potatoes, speckled with parsley and salt, and buttery brussels sprouts. We all set to.
“And what of Akita? Does he have power to make deals, as well?”
