“Ah,” I said,
She cocked her head and favored me with a horrid grimace of sentimental wistfulness, “It lived for a week. He had to feed it out of a tiny bottle, poor thing. It was a night-and-day job, ministering to that helpless little creature. A night-and-day job. It nearly wore him out. And then when it died I thought his poor heart would break, like an egg. He enshrined it under the floorboards along with the others. Held a service and all.”
I shook my head, wondering at the notion of a heart breaking like an egg. They were both barmy, and no doubt about it. And given Pule’s years in apprenticeship with Narbondo, all this stuff about vivisection very likely wasn’t just talk. I glanced over at the table. Pule had managed to stuff a piece of candle through the holes where the beast’s ears had been. He lit it with a match at both ends, so that the twin flames shot out on either side of its head, melting the wax all over the tabletop and filling the room with the reek of burning rubber.
“Willis!” shrieked the mother, wrinkling up her nose at the stink. In a fit of determination she leaped up and raced toward the sleeping room. She was immediately out again, brandishing a broad wooden paddle, and her son, suddenly contrite, began to howl and beg and cry. Then, abruptly, he gave off his pleading and started to yell, “Fire! Fire!” half giggling, half sobbing, as he slammed away at the burning elephant with his cap, capering around and around the table and chair as his mother angled in to swat him with the paddle.
It was an appalling sight—one I hope never again to witness as long as I live. I was up in a shot, and leaping for the door, getting out while the getting was good. The getting wasn’t any good, though; the door was locked tight, and both the mother and son turned on me together, he plucking up the razor and she waving the paddle.
I apologized profusely. “Terribly sorry,” I said. “Terribly, terribly sorry.” I couldn’t think of anything else. But all the while I looked around the room, searching out a weapon, and there was nothing at all close to hand except a chair cushion. I believe that if I could have got at something with a little weight to it I would have pounded them both into jelly right then and there, and answered for the crime afterward. There wasn’t a court in all of England that would have condemned me, not after taking a look at that mad pair and another look beneath the floorboards of their house in London.
They advanced a step, so I shouted, “I know the truth!” and skipped away against the far wall. It was a nonsensical thing to shout, since I didn’t any more know the truth than I knew the names of my fictitious cousins, but it stopped them cold. Or at least it stopped her. He, on the other hand, had fallen entirely into the role of being a menace, and he stalked back and forth eyeing me like a pirate, and she eyeing him, until, seeing her chance, she walloped him on the posterior with the paddle, grinning savagely, and very nearly throwing him straight razor and all into the chair I’d been sitting in.
He crept back to his table tearfully, like a broken man, whimpering nonsense at her, apologizing. He slumped over the ravaged elephant, hacking off its feet with the razor and then slicing its legs to ribbons, the corners of his mouth turned down in a parody of grief and rage.
“Where are they?” she asked.
What are they; that was the question. I ought to have had the answer, but didn’t. It could be she meant people—St. Ives, maybe, and Hasbro. She thought, perhaps, that they were lurking roundabout, waiting for me. It didn’t sound like that’s what she meant, though. I scrambled through my mind, recalling her conversation at Godall’s shop.
“I can lead you to them.” I was clutching at straws, hoping wasn’t as utterly obvious as it seemed to be.
She nodded. The son peered at me slyly.
“But I want some assurances,” I said.
“An affidavit?” she asked, cackling with sudden laughter. “I’ll give you assurances, Mr. High-and-mighty.”
“And I’ll give you this!” cried the son, leaping up as if spring-driven and waving his straight razor in the air like an Afghani assassin. In a sudden fit he flailed away with it at the remains of the elephant, chopping it like an onion, carving great gashes in the tabletop and banging the razor against the little gear mechanism inside the ruined toy, the several gears wobbling away to fall off the table and onto the floor. Then he cast down the razor, and, snarling and drooling, he plucked up the little jumbo trousers and tore them in half, throwing them to the carpet, alternately trodding on them and spitting at them in a furious spastic dance, and meaning to say, I guess, that the torn pants would be my head if I didn’t look sharp.
His mother turned around and slammed him with the paddle again, shouting “Behavior!” very loud, her face red as a zinnia. He yipped across the room and sank into the chair, sitting on his hands and glowering at me.
“Where?” asked the woman. “And no games.”
“At the Crown and Apple,” I said. “In my room.”
“Your room.” She squinted at me.
“That’s correct. I can lead you there now. Quickly.”
“You won’t lead us anywhere,” she said. “We’ll lead ourselves. You’ll stay here. There’s not another living soul on this floor, Mr. Who-bloody-is-it, and everyone on the floor below has been told there’s a madman spending the night, given to fits. Keep your lip shut, and if we come back with the notebooks, we’ll go easy on you.”
Willis Pule nodded happily. “Mummy says I can cut out your tripes,” he assured me enthusiastically, “and feed them to the bats.”
“The bats,” I said, wondering why in the world he had chosen the definite article, and watching him pocket the razor. So it was the notebooks…Both of them donned webby-looking shawls and toddled out the door like the Bedlam Twins, she covering me all the time with the revolver. The door shut and the key clanked in the lock.
I was up and searching the place for a window, for another key, for a vent of some sort—for anything. The room was on the inside of the hallway, though, and without a window. And although both of them were lunatics, they were far too canny to leave spare keys roundabout. I sat down and thought. The Crown and Apple wasn’t five minutes’ walk. They’d get into my room right enough, search it in another five minutes, and then hurry back to cut my tripes out. Revolver or no revolver, they’d get a surprise when they pushed in through the door. She would make him come through first, of course, to take the blow…I studied out a plan.
What the room lacked was weapons. She had even taken the wooden paddle with her. There were a couple of chairs that would do in a pinch, but I wanted something better. I had worked myself into a bloodthirsty sort of state, and I was thinking in terms of clubbing people insensible. Chairs were too spindly and cumbersome for that.
I went to town on the bedstead—a loose-jointed wooden affair that wanted glue. Yanking the headboard loose from the side rails, I listened with satisfaction as the mattress and rails bumped to the floor, loud enough to alert anyone below that visiting lunatic was doing his work. Then I leaned on one of the posts of the headboard itself, smashing the headboard sideways, the posts straining to tear away from the cross-members. Dowels snapped, wood groaned, and after a little bit of playing ram-it-against-the-floorboards the whole thing went to smash, leaving the turned post free in my hands. I hefted it; I would have liked it shorter, but it would do the trick,
The doorknob rattled just then. They were back, and quick, too. Either that or else maybe the landlady, noticing that the lunatic had been doing his job too well, had come round to investigate. I slid across to stand by the door, thinking that I wouldn’t smash the landlady with my club, but would simply push past her instead, and away down the stairs. If it was a man, though…
Whoever it was was having a terrible time with the lock. It seemed like an eternity of metallic clicking before the door swung to. I tensed, the club over my shoulder. A man’s face poked in from the dark hallway, the rest of the head following, I closed my eyes, stepped away from the wall, and pounded him one, slamming the club down against the
back of his head, and knowing straight out that it wasn’t Willis Pule at all, but someone perhaps even more deadly: it was Higgins, the academician-gone-to-seed, still gripping a skeleton key in his right hand.
The blow left him half senseless, knocking him onto his face on the floor. He lay writhing. I stepped across, thinking to give him another one, a sort of cricket swing to the cranium, but he was already down and I couldn’t bring myself to do it—something I’m happy about today, but which took all my civilized instincts at the time.
The door lay open before me, and I was out of it quick, bolting for the stairs, throwing the post onto the floor of the hallway, and wondering about Higgins sneaking around like that. He wasn’t expected; that was certain. He had seen them both go out, perhaps, and had crept in, no doubt searching for the very notebooks that they were off ransacking my room for. They weren’t in league, then, but were probably deadly enemies. The Pules would take good care of him if they found him on the floor of their room.
I peered cautiously down the dark and empty stairwell, and then leaped down the stairs three at a time toward the second-floor landing, thinking to charge into the foyer at a run, knocking down anyone between me and the door and maybe shouting something clever at the landlady to regain some lost dignity. I fairly spun around the baluster and onto the bottom flight of stairs, straight into the faces of the two Pules, who puffed along like engines, coming up, she holding the revolver under her shawl and he going along before, both of them with a deadly resolve.
“Here now!” piped the son, clutching my arm in the devil’s own grip.
“Hold him!” she cried. “We’ll make him sing! Up the stairs, Bucko!”
I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could, my momentum lending it some mustard. He howled and slammed backward against the railing, nearly knocking his mother down. He didn’t let go of my arm, though, but pulled me over with him, both of us flailing and rolling and me jerking free and scrabbling back up toward the landing like an anxious crab, expecting to be shot. I was on my feet and jumping up the stairs three at a time toward the third floor, listening to the curses and slaps and yips behind me as Mrs. Pule rallied her son.
There was no shot, despite the way being clear for it and the range close, but I ducked and danced down the third-floor hall anyway, trying to convince myself that she was loathe to fire the gun in public and bring about the collapse of her plans. I should have thought of that an hour ago, when she collared me at the window, but I didn’t, and wasn’t convinced of it now.
I blasted past the room again, its door still open and Higgins on his hands and knees on the floor, ruminating. The sight of him brought the Pules up short as they came racing along behind me, and for the moment they let me go in order to attend to him. I headed straight toward a French window, grappled with the latch, pulled it open, and looked out, not onto three stories of empty air, thank heaven, but onto a little dormer balcony. There was a hooting from the open door of the room, and a grunt, and then an outright shriek, as the Pules visited the sins of Jack Owlesby onto the head of poor Higgins.
I closed the window behind me, although I couldn’t latch it. In a moment they’d be through it and upon me. Without a bit of hesitation I hoisted myself over the railing, swinging myself down and in, landing on my feet on an identical balcony below and immediately crumpling up, my ankles ringing with the impact. I was up again, though, climbing across this railing too, and clutching two handfuls of ivy tendrils with the nitwit idea of clambering down through it to safety like an ape in a rain forest. I scrabbled in the vines with my feet as the ivy tore loose in a rush, and I slid along through it shouting, landing in a viney heap in a flower bed.
The window banged open upstairs, and I was on my feet and running, trailing vines, wincing at the pain in my ankles, but damned if I’d let any of it slow me down. I expected a shot, but none came—just a litany of curses cried into the night and then cut off abruptly when a voice from a window in a nearby house shouted, “Wot the hell!” and the strollers down along the street to the pier began to point. Mrs. Pule, blessedly, wasn’t keen on calling attention to herself just then.
I ran straight toward the gap between the two houses that would lead me to the seawall, not slowing down until I was there, clambering over the now-damp stone and jumping to the shingle below, where I found myself slogging through ankle-deep water, the tide having come up to lap against the wall. I nearly slipped on the slick stones, and forced myself to slow down. There was no sound of pursuit, nothing at all, and the wild sense of abandon that had fueled my acrobatic leap from the top balcony drained away, leaving me cold and shaking, my shoes filled with seawater.
I climbed back over the wall and tramped along to the Crown and Apple, up the backstairs to find the door unlocked. I slipped into my room, dead tired and even more deadly thirsty. In fifteen minutes I strolled into the dining room in dry shoes, feeling tolerably proud of myself, and there sat St. Ives and Hasbro, stabbing at cutlets and with a bottle of Burgundy uncorked on the table. It did my heart good, as they say.
***
“Not with a revolver, she didn’t,” said St. Ives. “You were too far away for anyone to have brought off so close a shot. My guess is that it was a Winchester, and that it was your man Bowker who fired it. Clearly they and the Pules are working at cross-purposes, although both of them chase the same ends—which have little to do, I’m convinced, with drawing ships to their doom. That’s a peripheral business—quick cash to finance more elaborate operations.”
St. Ives emptied the bottle into Hasbro’s glass and waved at the waiter, ordering a second bottle of wine and another pint for me. I’m a beer man generally; red wine rips me up in the night. St. Ives studied his plate for a moment and then said, “It’s very largely a distraction, too, the ship business, and a good one. Godall seems to think that the Crown is on the verge of paying them what they ask, in return for their solemn assurance that they’ll abandon the machine where she lies. Imagine that. Those were Parsons’s words, ‘Their solemn assurance.’ The man’s gone round the bend. Now that we’ve found the machine, though, they’ll wait on the ransom. We’ve accomplished that much. The Academy has the area cordoned off with ships and are going to try to haul it up out of there.”
St. Ives drained his glass, then scowled into the lees, swirling them in the bottom. “If I had half a chance…,” he said, not bothering to finish the sentence. I thought I knew what he meant, though; he had harbored a grim distrust of the machine ever since Lord Kelvin had set out to reverse the polarity of the earth with it. What were they keeping it for, if not to effect some other grand and improbable disaster in the name of science? I half believed St. Ives knew what it was, too—that there was far more to the machine than he was letting on and that only the principal players in the game fully understood. I was a pawn, of course, and resolved to keeping to my station. I’m certain, though, that St. Ives had contemplated on more than one occasion going into that machine works up in Holborn and taking it out of there himself. But he hadn’t, and look what had come of his hesitating. That’s the way he saw it—managing to blame himself from a fresh angle.
I tried to steer the subject away from the business of the machine. “So what do they want?” I asked.
“The notebooks, for the moment. The damnable notebooks. They think that they’re an ace away from immortality. Narbondo very nearly had it ten years ago, back when he was stealing carp out of the aquarium and working with Willis Pule. He was close—close enough so that in Norway Higgins could revive him with the elixir and the apparatus. For my money Narbondo was pumped up with carp elixir when he went into the pond; that’s what kept him alive, kept his entire cellular structure from crystallizing. Higgins’s idea, as I see it, is that he would revive the doctor, and the two of them would search out the notebooks and then hammer out the fine points; together they would bottle the Fountain of Youth. How much they know about the machine I can’t say.
“Higgins had been tracking them
—the notebooks—and he wrote to Mrs. Pule, who he suspected might know something of their whereabouts, but his writing to her just set her off. She came around to Godall’s very cleverly, knowing that to reveal to us that the notebooks existed and that Narbondo was alive would put us on the trail. She and the son merely followed us down from London.”
It made sense to me. Leave it to St. Ives to put the pieces in order. “Why,” I asked, “are they so keen on killing me, that’s what I want to know. I’m the lowly worm in the whole business.”
“You were available,” said St. Ives. “And you were persistent, snooping around their hotel like that. These are remarkably bloodthirsty criminals. And the Pules, I’m afraid, are amateurs alongside the doctor. Higgins didn’t have any idea on earth what it was he was reviving, not an inkling.”
St. Ives pushed his plate away and ordered a bit of custard. It was getting along toward ten o’clock, and the evening had wound itself down. The beer was having its way with me, and I yawned and said that I would turn in, and St. Ives nodded thoughtfully and said that he’d just stroll along over to the icehouse in a bit and see what was up. I slumped. I wasn’t built for it, not right then, and yet it was me who had found out about the business up in Norway. I was pretty sure that I understood the icehouse, and it didn’t seem fair that I be left out. “It’s early for that, isn’t it?” I asked.
St. Ives shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I suggest a nap. Just a couple of hours to rest up. Let’s tackle them in the middle of the night, while they sleep.”
St. Ives considered, looked at his pocket watch, and said, “Fair enough. Stroke of midnight. We’ll be across the hail, just in case anyone comes sneaking around.”
The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 49
