by H. B. Lyle
They reached the front of the demonstration without too much difficulty. Purple, green, and white banners ruffled in the breeze and a gentle burble of conversation and laughter carried over the throng. Next to their little group stood a delegation from India, dressed in thick saris with furs slung over their shoulders against the October cold.
A row of speakers stood on a raised platform, taking turns to rally the crowd. “There’s Clarrie,” Nobbs called.
“My, that is a pretty sari,” Constance said to a tall, thin woman in Indian dress with a red dot on her forehead. She leaned forward and fingered the material. “Thank you for supporting us, in our struggle,” Constance said eventually. “Do you know Princess Sophia Duleep Singh?” The Indian woman looked at her oddly, but nodded and smiled.
“Constance,” Dinah hissed. “Over here. It’s Clarrie’s turn to speak.”
She smiled again at the Indian woman, who looked back, bemused. Up on the stage, Nobbs’s cousin Clarrie belted out her diatribe at a good volume. “The Conciliation Bill will go to Parliament next month. We have high hopes that enough MPs will see reason to grant this small, first step in getting women the vote. Consequently, we are formally announcing a cease in all hostilities until the bill gets to Parliament, as a sign of our good faith, and our reason.”
A big cheer went up, and some scattered clapping. After that, a small band readied themselves and the women on the podium held hands. “I still say Fairyland’s the place,” Tansy muttered. “I still say it.”
“We must certainly be ready,” Abernathy growled. “When they skewer the bill at Westminster. I second Tansy.”
“Second her about what?” Constance finally asked. “What an earth are you talking about? What is Fairyland?”
“Is it safe?” Nobbs looked at Abernathy.
Suddenly, the stage and then the whole crowd burst into song.
Shout, shout up with your song!
Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.
“We need to know what the police know about us,” Abernathy said as the singing continued around them. The four women, Dinah, Nobbs, Abernathy, and Tansy, had formed a tight knot, leaving Constance hanging off the edge.
March, march, swing you along,
Wide blows our banner, and hope is waking.
Dinah frowned back at Constance. “Can you help?” she said at last.
“Help how?” Constance replied, cupping her ears.
Song with its story, dreams with their glory.
“The police.”
Lo! They call, and glad is their word.
Constance searched Dinah’s face, the bright pink cheeks shining against the cold, her eyes hopeful but wandering. Dinah started to turn away.
Loud and louder it swells.
Constance caught hold of Dinah’s hand, made her turn. “I think I know a way,” she said.
15
Wiggins eyed the huge dome above him. The British Museum Reading Room. He’d had a reader’s card for years, but he didn’t go often. Great glass windows striped the lower half of the roof, like inverted petals. The glass at the very top of the dome let in the last of the afternoon light. He straightened his collar and walked around the perimeter of the huge circular room. Books lined the walls in dark leather colors. A further gantry above held thousands more volumes. But Wiggins wasn’t looking at the books.
He circled the entire room, then chose one of the spindles that led to the center. Each of these spokes, fanning out from the returns desk, was lined with desks. Readers stooped over books. Each spoke had a letter, and each desk a number. Wiggins walked down aisle G. As he walked toward the central hub, where three or four of the librarians busied themselves, Wiggins slowed.
Symes’s billiard-ball head caught the light when he moved. Wiggins went up to him at the returns desk and handed him a book. They exchanged a nod. Wiggins glanced the way he’d come, then left the room.
The concourse in front of the museum teemed with late-afternoon visitors. Pigeons swooped and pecked, fluttering aside as he strode out of the building and across Great Russell Street. He went into the Museum Tavern, ordered a pint of half-and-half, settled himself beside the window with a view of the museum entrance, and waited.
Two hours later, as the museum closed, the man who had been sitting at desk G7 hurried across the concourse. He wore a long overcoat and a peaked workers’ cap, in a Continental style, and he held a raft of papers under his arm. Wiggins finished the last of his latest pint, waved a hand at the barman, and went after the man.
Ivan, for that’s how Wiggins thought of him, cut through the traffic at Theobald’s Road. He looked around often. Wiggins dipped behind a bus, then reappeared on the other side of the road from Ivan and up ahead. For Wiggins knew this stretch of the road; there wasn’t a turning for a quarter-mile at least. Ivan would catch up and pass him. It was always the best move to tail someone from in front.
Wiggins kept his pace even. This was the most promising Ivan he’d seen, a ferrety man with sharp features and bad teeth. Wiggins had no difficulty following him to the Crown Tavern, a lively corner boozer by Clerkenwell Green. The Ivan went in, and Wiggins risked going in after him—after all, if there was one place in London Wiggins could blend in, it was a pub.
He called all the men who sat at desk G7 “Ivan” because that’s what Symes called them. It was the desk at which Karl Marx had written Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. Wiggins had been too busy watching Constance at the King’s funeral to listen to what Symes was telling him at the time, but he’d realized it later on.
According to Symes, Marx was a hero to many of the revolutionaries. When he returned from Germany, Wiggins had gone back to Symes to see what he’d meant when he’d talked about the Ivans. And sure enough, desk G7 was a magnet for young immigrant scholars vying for a spot at or near the famous desk.
When he could, Wiggins followed an Ivan after the Reading Room had closed. Most of them behaved like real scholars, despite their wild hair and uncut beards. They returned to sober if cheap boarding houses, or ate moderate meals in coffeehouses—not one Ivan had led him anywhere near a criminal gang.
That evening, though, as Wiggins regarded his latest Ivan in the Crown Tavern, he knew this was different. Or rather, that the Ivan’s friends were.
Two men sat opposite the little Ivan, in an alcove. Empty beer glasses cluttered the table. Cigarettes buzzed between them. It was dark, but Wiggins could make out their muscular frames, the hang of their coats. One of them, a yellow scarf stuffed at his throat, cast glances around the pub at regular intervals. His eyes lingered on Wiggins for an instant, then flicked away. Wiggins didn’t look out of place in a pub like this. He never looked out of place in a pub.
The pub was busy, but nevertheless Wiggins could hear the three men talking—though he couldn’t understand what they said. Russian, he guessed, the way they barked out the vowels like they had their mouths full. The little Ivan was trying to make a point, but Yellow Scarf and his heavily bearded mate never let him get a word in. They spoke with great passion, and Wiggins might have thought they were having an argument, had he not seen Peter and Yakov and the rest speak like that. He didn’t know whether it was a quality of the Russian language, or of anarchists in general, but for all they spoke of unity and equality, he couldn’t listen to a conversation without thinking it would end in either a pistol or a knife.
“Drowning ’em?”
“Eh?”
“Your sorrows.” The barmaid gestured at the near-empty glass.
Wiggins picked it up. “They’re clinging to the wreckage.” He knocked back the last of the beer and handed her the glass. She smiled but Wiggins looked away sharply, his eye caught by movement in the mirror behind the bar.
The little Ivan was leaving. He gathered up his papers, nodding at Yellow Scarf and the Beard. Wiggins checked himself. Another pint on the way; too odd to scarper without drinking it. But more to the point, the Ivan wasn’t made of the right stuff. He
wouldn’t put a bullet in anyone and he certainly wouldn’t run with the likes of Peter and Yakov, at least not unless they had him in a headlock. Wiggins put a coin on the bar, and waited for the pint. The Ivan wasn’t going anywhere interesting.
Yellow Scarf and the Beard continued drinking. Wiggins—in the mirror—even saw them add a couple of shots to their beer glasses. They laughed. They argued. They got drunker. But they looked like the kind of men who would sober up in an instant. The instant it took to kill you. Wiggins nursed his beer.
Eventually the two men got up. Wiggins finished his drink and kept watch as the Russians bumbled through the late drinkers and out onto the street. He stood up and glanced at the clock. Gone midnight.
“I’ll be done here in half an hour,” the barmaid said lightly, almost under her breath.
Wiggins hesitated, out of politeness more than anything else. “Night.” He saluted with one finger, averted his eyes, and was gone.
On the way out, he stole a small hunting cap from the hooks by the door and thrust his own flat cap into his pocket. He made out the two Russians as they headed east. The yellow scarf flashed in the gaslight, then he saw their forms by the windows of the Kodak HQ on Clerkenwell Road, lit up like a gunnery.
The two men kept up a good pace. Wiggins could hear them breaking out into song as they went first right, then left, then right again, down ever-tightening alleyways. They skated north of Smithfield and into the poorer areas. The streetlights grew sparser, and the noises less pronounced. It was deep into the night by this time. It was never truly dark in London, the center of the world, but it was dark enough to die.
Wiggins found it easier and easier to keep to the shadows, to know that he hadn’t been seen. Following two people was far easier than one, for a pal acts as reassurance. There’s nothing like a friend to make you feel safe.
But he was alone. And all of a sudden, it felt like a trap. The ever-darkening twists and turns, the seeming oblivion of the two men ahead, falling back into the hellhole of the East End. But it was too late now. If he was ever going to find Peter, then this was the walk he had to take.
Suddenly, Yellow Scarf cried out in satisfaction. Wiggins crouched down behind a pile of rubbish. The bearded man slapped Yellow Scarf on the back as they pushed open the door of a terraced house on the corner. A pale light fanned onto the street for a second, and then they were gone. Wiggins let out his breath. They hadn’t been doubling back at all. They’d been lost.
He pushed himself deep into the rubbish and wished he was two pints lighter. They were in one of the poor streets near Bethnal Green. The front windows of the house were dark, but Wiggins knew these houses had back rooms, and small yards behind. They were normally multiple occupancy, with a family to each room on all three floors.
A rotten-egg smell caught in his nostrils and wouldn’t let go. Wherever the two men had gone, it hadn’t been the front rooms. Wiggins held a hand over his nose and considered his options. He couldn’t stay in the street. There was no cover. The rubbish worked in the dark, but come dawn he’d be there for all to see—and not just the Russians across the road. Everyone would be out. He could go back to his digs, but there was no guarantee the Russians would still be there come tomorrow. He could hardly go in. Last time he gate-crashed a dive like this, he’d ended up near dead and in prison.
Wiggins stood up. He carefully scraped eggshells from his trousers, keeping his eyes on the door of the house. Nothing moved. Faint light spilled from a gas lamp on the far corner. Far off, a dog barked once. He stumbled across the road, like a drunk, and fell on the pavement near the house. He cursed, hauled himself up using the wall, and carried on his way. At the door to the house, he tripped again, cursed drunkenly, and rose onto one knee.
People were inside and awake, and not just the two Russians he’d followed from the Crown. Wiggins could feel the movement, he could sense it. He put the palm of his hand to the door. It fluttered and creaked. A distant murmur of conversation. Not a murmur, Wiggins realized, but a muffled roar. There were people in there, in a back room, and there were a lot of them.
He carried on stumbling. At the corner, he turned, straightened, and felt the side of the end-of-terrace house. It was darker than the pit on this side street, with only the faint memory of a light spilling from the main street’s far-off lamp.
But Wiggins couldn’t wait for the moon. He cracked his shoulders, pulled his cap tight, and reached up. In one fast movement, he was astride the wall that ran alongside the pavement. He crawled until he reached what he was looking for. Another wall, perpendicular to the one he was on, that ran along the back of the terrace. He turned along it, so that he was looming above the house’s backyard.
That was when he heard them.
Three voices, Russian again, barking at each other in the yard behind the house. Wiggins, teetering high above them, didn’t move. If he even crouched down, the movement would betray him. Not that the men seemed intent on anything other than themselves and their cocks. Wiggins felt the steam in the air, the hot stench, the splatter, as all three relieved themselves against the wall beneath him.
He could only make out the tops of their heads. None of them spoke while they pissed, but the bulky one on the left finished first, stepped back, and pushed the other two against the wall. They exclaimed angrily. The bulky form laughed and turned back to the house. Wiggins began to let out his breath as the other two turned to follow him.
A lantern appeared at the door, casting a sudden golden glow. Wiggins dropped from view before he could see who carried it, holding on with arms stretched above him, on the other side of the wall. He daren’t drop down to the ground, for fear of alerting them.
The man with the lantern barked at the pissers. His voice had an air of authority, of sophistication, superiority. It had the ring of power, lightly worn.
And to Wiggins, it had the ring of familiarity.
His body strained against the wall. He listened as the men grumbled their way back inside. The lantern’s buttery glow did not move. Over the death-cold air, Wiggins heard the rustle of a sweet being unwrapped, the paper tossed aside.
Wiggins shook with the strain. Not only his fingers, his wrists, and his arms, but now even his chest protested. His heart beat rapid and raw. For he knew the owner of the voice, the man who stood not five feet away, sucking on a sweet.
Finally, the lantern light flared above him and swung away into the house.
Wiggins clambered back onto the wall, legs astride. He rested his head flat on the bricks, breathing hard, realization, relief, and terror breaking over him like a wave off the Cape.
The relief didn’t last long. He could barely make out the back of the house, but he knew now it contained at least four men, probably more.
And one of those men was Peter the Painter.
He’d waited more than a year for this moment but now his mind was flooded with indecision and fatigue. He was tired, oh so tired. He kept his head on the brickwork, let his hands hang either side, and tried to think. Going in there now would be suicide, even if he wasn’t spent. He realized he’d been up since six, he hadn’t eaten since forever, and he was at least six pints down. The thought crossed his mind that he should wait, or find a lookout post further up the road, or go to the police. As these options flitted through his mind, he closed his eyes at last.
“Oww!”
Wiggins’s eyes popped open with a start. Someone had fallen into the yard beneath him.
“For Christ’s sake!”
“Jax, is that you?” Wiggins hissed into the darkness.
“My ankle’s bust.”
“Shh . . .”
But the warning came too late. The back door of the house swung open. “Privet?” someone barked.
The lantern swung into view. “Quick.” Wiggins reached down toward Jax. The light caught for a second in her startled eyes. She put her hand upward.
The first man came thumping toward them. Wiggins sensed others at the door. Dresse
d, awake, alive, angry. “Fack sake,” Jax screamed.
“Now!” Wiggins pulled at her arm.
“Moy pistolet,” someone shouted.
Wiggins pulled Jax up just as the first man lunged for her legs. They scuttled along the wall, Blondin style.
A brick skimmed his shoulder. Another burst of angry Russian.
Wiggins dropped Jax to the pavement, then jumped down after her.
“My ankle.”
Wiggins swung her onto his back and sprinted, the shouts of the Russians ringing in their ears.
They pushed west, then a left and a right. Wiggins’s breathing grew louder and more labored. Yet still they heard faint cries in the distance. He couldn’t carry her much longer. They turned into an open artillery ground. Black as hell’s teeth. He hustled her deep into the darkness.
“Where are we?” Jax whispered.
“Lie down, next to me. Flat, quiet.”
They both lay on their chests in the dust. Wiggins took great gulps of air.
“Is it him?”
“Shh.”
They were in a small artillery ground in the City. It was like a square, with a barracks building at one end and buildings lining each side. Wiggins knew the place long since, and he hoped the streetlamps didn’t penetrate this far into the space. Certainly, he could see almost nothing around him.
But he could hear all right. “Razbros!” More hushed Russian followed; he guessed at least five, maybe six men.
“Wiggins,” Jax whispered. Her voice quivered. Wiggins put his hand on her back, soft. He could outrun them alone. Not with Jax. And he couldn’t fight either. They were sure to have guns.
He felt Jax’s heart beating with his hand on her back, too fast. The Russians had gone quiet. Nothing stirred. Maybe they’d skirted around the square, maybe they’d—
BANG! BANG!
Jax cried out. Another Russian shout, more.
