by Will Thomas
“So, here we are again. I’m going to set you up proper here, like old Peter, and see how Barker likes losing his new assistant. But you don’t look much like Peter, I must say. Here.” He raised a hand to his ear and pulled the false whiskers from his face. Underneath them was the man we’d been looking for, with the birthmark on his chin. He stepped forward and set them over my own ears.
“Very nice,” he decided. “Artistic-like. You didn’t know you was sending Albert to his doom last night, did you, boy? Barker should get a kick out of this. I’m afraid he turned out to be a disappointment, not much better than the peelers. I was just making things up as I went along. Old Push never suspected a thing.”
I was starting to lose consciousness. My whole body had gone cold, and breathing had become almost impossible. I was beginning to hallucinate. I thought I heard my employer’s voice.
“I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Racket. I’ve had my eye on you for some time.”
The cross spun in a circle, and when it stopped, a pistol was clapped to my head. It was my own revolver. I recognized the filed-down sight. I closed my eyes and felt surprisingly at ease. I was ready to die now. I gave it all over. At that point, I would have preferred a bullet to slow death. There was a short scream in my ear, and I opened my eyes in time for them to be sprayed with blood. One of Barker’s copper pennies was imbedded in the back of Racket’s hand. Racket dropped the gun and slammed into me, sending my makeshift cross spinning in wide circles. New paroxysms of pain began, as the centrifugal force pulled my entire body away from the post.
Abruptly, I was dragged aloft, into the darkness above. There were stairs, and I saw the second level and the hayloft. A gun went off almost in my ear, and my cross began plummeting, plummeting to earth. I came to an abrupt stop, and strong arms grasped my chest. I felt flesh rip and sinews snap.
“I’ve got you, lad,” Cyrus Barker said. Then I heard no more.
I opened my eyes dully. Terence Poole was lifting me up and putting a flask of brandy between my lips. I was off the cross. Who knew how long I’d been out? I began to sputter, and with the kind assistance of the inspector, who thumped me soundly between the shoulder blades several times, progressed to a full-blown cough.
“Thank you, Inspector,” I finally managed to squeak out.
“Don’t mention it, young fellow. Looks as though you had a close call here.”
“Where’s Mr. Barker?” I asked, for I couldn’t see him for the swarm of blues. There must have been a dozen constables combing the stable.
“He’s out front, helping with Racket’s body.”
“What happened?”
Poole’s bucolic face broke into a grin. “I’m still figuring that out, myself. Barker spat it at me so fast, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Something about Racket jumping out the upper granary door on a rope attached to your cross. He went down, and you went up. He would have escaped, leaving Barker behind to save you, only Barker was too clever for him. He parted the rope with one shot. You and the cross fell into his waiting arms, while Racket fell and dashed his brains out. Very messy way to die. But I can’t say I feel sorry for the blighter, considering all the pains he put the Yard to.”
Barker and a further handful of constables brought the body of our former cabman in, wrapped in a blanket. It was probably the one he had used to conceal the body of Louis Pokrzywa. I could see part of the head under the bloodied blanket. As Poole said, it was a very messy way to die.
My employer came over and looked down at me.
“Alive, are you, Thomas?”
“I’ll pull through, I reckon, sir,” I rasped.
“Don’t try to talk. You have a bad rope burn on your throat. I believe you’ll be spending some time in hospital.”
“No, sir!” I have no love of hospitals any more than any other public institution. “Could I not recuperate at home?”
“What did I tell you, Terry?” he said, turning toward the inspector.
“You’ve got a corking little terrier here, Cyrus,” he responded. Terrier, indeed!
“He’s in no condition for questioning. I’ll stop by your office in the morning with a prepared statement. You can question him in a day or so, if that is agreeable.”
“Be at my office tomorrow for questioning,” Poole countered, “and I think we can wait until he can talk again.”
“Done. Let’s get him home.”
Racket’s corpse was to remain for the coroner, Vandeleur, to issue a death certificate. A constable was assigned the task of taking Barker and me back to Newington in that fateful hansom which had twice brought me so close to dying. Death had no sting for me at the moment. After Barker gingerly lifted me into the cab, still clad in blankets, I lay back in a corner and drifted into a sound, dreamless sleep.
29
I FLOATED ON OPIUM CLOUDS FOR SEVERAL days. Barker’s physician, a dried apple core of a fellow named Allcroft, kept me on a steady diet of morphine and little else. I had endured a severe trauma not only to my body but to my brain as well. Dr. Allcroft feared brain fever, and with good reason. Due to the heavy tissue damage, I ran a high fever. Any weight I may have gained due to Dummolard’s cooking and the nice restaurants in which we had dined, melted off my frame quickly. I must have looked quite the apple core myself, I suppose.
Barker decided that the logistics of the situation called for turning the infrequently used sitting room into a convalescing room. He and Mac carried my bed and mattress down the stairs and consigned much of the sitting room furniture to the lumber room upstairs. Nurses were hired round the clock. Apparently, things were rather touch and go one night. I had an irregular heartbeat, and Allcroft feared there might have been damage to the muscle itself. Somehow I pulled through. Later, Barker asked me how it was to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I recalled intensely vivid dreams, constantly changing like a child’s kaleidoscope, but the events in these dreams slipped through my fingers when I finally woke.
A woman’s face came into view, a careworn but friendly enough face it was, with a healthy dusting of freckles.
“Who are you?” I croaked. My throat was raw.
“So you’re awake, are you?” she said. “That’s a mercy. How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been crucified.” My throat was afire.
“You just take it easy-like, young gentleman. I’m your nurse. We’ll fetch the doctor in. You’ve had a lot of people here concerned about your health.”
“May I have some water, please?”
She sat me up a little, to pour a tumbler of water down my parched throat. It was the first time I realized I was in the sitting room. I tried to raise my arms but found myself almost incapable of movement. My shoulders and back had received a great strain, and only time and the Great Physician Himself would ever heal them again.
“What o’clock is it?” I asked.
“ ’Tis three in the afternoon, if you must know,” the nurse said. “Did you have an appointment you must be off to?”
“And the day?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Thursday,” I repeated to myself. Four days. My mind was on the case. Was it over? What had Barker been doing without me these last hundred hours? I tried sitting up, to get out of bed. I’ve made many mistakes in my life, and that was definitely one of them.
“Now you’ve gone and done it, young man,” the nurse chided me as I lay, my teeth gritted, and every muscle in my body screamed at once. “You stay there and don’t you move, or so help me, I’ll have straps brought in and we’ll lash you to this bed. I’m calling in Dr. Allcroft directly.”
The doctor came within the hour. He looked in my throat and under my eyelids, he took my pulse, he prodded me in a thousand places, then asked me a thousand times if that hurt. Finally, he pronounced me on the mend, though not completely out of danger, and reduced me to only partial doses of morphine. Had I been able to move, I would have tossed him down the front step. As it was, I just lay there, whi
le the tide of dreams washed over me again.
“Lad.” I opened my eyes.
“Hello, sir,” I answered weakly.
“Back among the living, are we?”
“So it would seem. How’s the case?”
“Spoken like a true assistant. It’s all but over. I’ve just been tying up the loose ends. All that remains is the presentation of the bill, and I won’t do that until you are up and about.”
“Tell me about the case. How did you—”
“Another time, Thomas. Allcroft is a capital fellow. He’ll soon set you to rights. You just get some rest. Plenty of time to discuss the investigation later.”
I relaxed and the spectacles faded away into nothingness.
It was morning, presumably Friday morning, although I couldn’t be sure. Mac was opening the curtains.
“Good morning, Mr. Llewelyn,” he said. “I trust you’ve slept well.” He came round and fluffed my pillows. “The nurses have all been dismissed, more’s the pity.”
“Sorry I missed them,” I rasped.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starved,” I admitted.
“Guv’nor’s spread the word to Cook that he’s to fatten you up a bit. I saw Dummolard bringing in a goose liver pie a half hour ago. I’ll tell them you’re awake.”
He glided out, and I closed my eyes. I was in a rather enviable position if one forgot for the moment that I couldn’t raise my arms. I had nothing to do but lie in bed and wonder what a first class chef was preparing for my breakfast. It turned out to be crepes with heavy cream and strawberries. The strawberries had been preserved in kirsch brandy. The meal came with a tisane, hot honey and lemon with a bit of single malt.
“I suppose you can’t raise your arms.”
“Not an inch.”
Mac grumbled under his breath and cut the first crepe into quarters. I opened my mouth just in time, before he would have plastered cream all over my face. It was very rich. It wouldn’t take much of this to put the weight back on me.
“Drink!” I said, almost gagging on the clotted cream in my throat.
“This will wear thin rather quickly, I think,” Maccabee complained, bringing the cup to my lips.
“I’ll remind you, I was injured trying to save your people,” I told him, when I could breathe again.
“We are forever in your debt,” he said archly, cramming another bite in my mouth. The combination of preserves and cream was delicious, but I wasn’t much up to swallowing yet.
The meal was mercifully short. Mac replaced the empty plate and cup on the silver tray. He turned back at the door.
“Actually, you have a visitor waiting.”
Was it Rebecca, perhaps, or Zangwill? Possibly it was Ira Moskowitz. I had made more friends in the last two weeks than during my entire previous time in London.
Mac opened the door, and a streak of black fur shot across the room. Harm leapt onto the bed and walked up onto my chest. The little dog looked back to his old self again. He cocked his head to the side and regarded me quizzically for a minute, then walked past my head and curled up on the edge of the pillow behind me.
“All right, dog,” Maccabee said. “None of that. Come on.” Harm gave him a low growl. “Mangy cur! After I announced you and everything! Very well, stay if you like, but I’m booting you out the door at the earliest opportunity.”
“Were you referring to the dog or me?” I asked.
“Don’t tempt me,” he responded, and left with the tray.
Harm and I settled back on the pillows and soon drifted off to sleep together.
Shortly after noon, Inspector Poole and a constable arrived to take down my statement. Poole wanted to be sure that Barker and I had not compared notes, and I could honestly say that we hadn’t spoken more than a few sentences to each other since that day. The case, according to Scotland Yard, was officially closed, although they wanted the names of the sword-wielding Jews. Strange, but my memory was rather hazy about the specifics. As for the press, the papers spoke of little else for weeks, but the Golem Squad had disappeared without a trace.
After a slice of goose liver pie, which Mac fed me successfully, Dr. Allcroft stopped in for a short visit and pronounced that I was healing rapidly. Before leaving, he traded the morphine injections for a green, laudanum-based syrup that was particularly vile. Licorice is a flavor best left in the nursery. With the doctor out of the way, Barker and Mac brought in a little oriental fellow, who gave me an all-over massage. It was torture during the actual process, but when he was done, I felt a little better than before. He left me his own Chinese tonic in a blue bottle beside the laudanum. I had no intention of taking that, either.
It was shortly after six when Barker and Mac appeared with my dinner tray. Barker settled a napkin on my chest and prepared to feed me. I had never seen him looking so domestic. Mac returned to his duties.
“I think you dismissed the nurses too quickly, sir,” I told him.
“It was necessary,” he said, cutting up some roast beef on my nightstand. “A few more nights and there would have been an understanding between Mac and one of the nurses. Two, if he was persistent. Open.”
I opened. It was beef in some sort of wine sauce. No doubt it had a fancy French name. Dummolard had outdone himself, but there were more pressing matters.
“Can we talk about the case now?”
“Of course,” he said. “What did you want to know?”
“Only everything.”
He loaded my mouth again. “Everything, is it? That’s a tall order. You’ll have to be a wee bit more specific.”
“Very well,” I said, after I swallowed. “When did you first suspect Racket?”
“I noted him at the beginning. I’ve had him as a cabman once or twice in the past, but only randomly. His sudden attentiveness, coinciding with the start of a new investigation, put me on my guard. However, he was only one of several leads at the time. I gave him more serious attention after the shooting. Later, he gave us information that proved to be suspect. I knew that Serafini didn’t fire on you, and to believe that there was another assassin out there matching his description stretched my credulity.
“He was my key suspect after that, but I couldn’t be certain he was working alone until we found poor Miriam Smith’s body. That scripture he quoted made me certain of his sole guilt. He wanted me to know, I believe. Were the case to remain unsolved, no one would ever know how clever he had been.”
“How far behind me were you when I was in the cab alone with Racket?”
“I saw you getting in the cab, but there were two dozen men trying to spill each other’s blood between us. I also hazard some of the bigger fellows had been ordered by Racket to attack me personally. It took me a moment or two to get through the crowd. By then, the cab was halfway down the street and going at a fast pace. I had to run like the dickens to keep it in sight, all of five or six blocks. Of course, I had no idea he was choking you as he went along. I’m sorry about that, lad.”
I smiled.
“What?” Barker demanded, frowning. I was getting better at reading his expressions behind those huge spectacles of his.
“ ‘Some danger involved,’ ” I quoted. “Is it often this dangerous?”
“Not often, no,” my employer said. “Sometimes it is. I won’t lie to you. I’m very sorry that you were hurt, that I was unable to stop Racket from almost killing you. I cannot control every situation. I can understand if you wish to leave my employ. I shall pay you handsomely for your services and give a sterling reference.”
I actually thought about it for a moment. Perhaps I could find a more normal position, something unthreatening, a quiet job clerking for a solicitor. But could I stand being locked in an office every day, dotting i’s and crossing t’s, after this? Could I live in a lodging house, wondering what Barker was doing just then or whether Dummolard had taken offense, and never seeing Mac in a hair net? Would I be able to sleep without Harm snoring at the foot of my bed? Most
of all, could I live my life knowing that someone else was using my room, sleeping in my bed, and using my desk, because I had disappointed Cyrus Barker by turning him down?
“No, sir,” I found myself saying. “I’d like the position permanently, if you’ll have me.”
Barker patted my shoulder and smiled. “That’s grand, lad. Just grand.”
“But have I given satisfaction, sir? I feel as if I’ve failed miserably.”
“You did well,” Barker answered. “Your survival in such a dangerous case is an achievement in itself. I threw you in, untrained, and you adapted yourself and worked very hard under threat of your life. I have no possible cause for complaint.”
I have to admit, the words felt good.
“So, what happened in Racket’s stable?” I asked, picking up our earlier conversation. “Was I already tied up when you arrived?”
“Yes,” Barker continued. “He must have planned it all beforehand, because he had the cross already prepared for you. He hoisted you up on pulleys and tied the other end of the rope to the bale hook that overlooks the street. Racket must have been desperate, to use his own stable like that. Perhaps he planned to escape to the Continent. Some details we shall never know.”
“I remember his taunting me. He said he enjoyed watching us take all those wrong turns in the investigation.”
“As I said before, an enquiry agent must cultivate patience. One must be thorough, investigating every lead. There is no way to know which one will lead to the proper conclusion.”
“You heard him, then?”
“Of course. I can’t tell you what a pathetic sight you were, suspended upside down like Peter. I thought you were lost to me, as Quong was. But you’re a plucky fellow, and a tough one, too, to have survived all you’ve been through.”
“So what happened then?” I asked. “I must admit it was all a jumble after you struck Racket with one of those coins of yours. By the way, that was an incredible throw.”
