Artful: A Novel

by Peter David

  The Artful suddenly seemed far more interested in the fire. He prepared the tea meticulously and hunched his shoulders as if he were expecting a blow to land upon them. “I would rather, if it be all of the same never mind to you, not speak of her . . .”

  “How now?” said Drina. “I have been nothing less than honest with you.” And then she paused, for she knew that she had in fact not been entirely forthcoming, but Dodger was preoccupied and thus did not notice the telling expression on her face that hinted at her lack of candor. “I would appreciate your reciprocating.”

  Dodger frowned at the word and then said, “A gentleman never repricates in front of a lady, and I’m shocked that you’d even suggest that I’d consider such a thing.”

  “Reciprocating means . . .” She shook her head, deciding it was pointless to pursue it. “I am simply saying that I wish to hear what happened to your mother.”

  “The thing of it is—”

  She did not allow him to finish. Instead, she said even more firmly, in as commanding a voice as Dodger had ever heard, “Tell me. ”

  Dodger was surprised at the change in her tone, and more than that, he felt as if he could not help but do as she commanded, if for no other reason than that commanding seemed to come ever so naturally to her.

  And so he told her thusly:

  “We lived in this place from when I was small. This was my home from as far back as I can remember. Me mum, she was a drab, I admit it, no different from Mary and Sarah and their like. She made her livin’ off the streets, doin’ everything she could to make enough money to support us. Me, I tried to do my bit. I begged in the streets, ’cause it’s not as if I had too much pride not to. We were a team, me mum an’ me. And if I sound like I’m proud of what she did, sellin’ her body and all, well I’m not. Not of what she did. But I’m proud of her, you can bet your soul on that. I’m proud of the woman she was, ’cause no matter what it was like for her out in the streets—and there was days she’d come home cold, or wet, or bloodied or bruised if some rotter had done her dirt—when she was at home, she had a smile for me, and a hug. I heard preachers and such in their pomp-o-city, railing against the likes of me mum and sayin’ we’re just soulless sinners, but I’m tellin’ you right now, they don’t know nothin’ and they don’t know her.

  “And then there came a time where I was fierce sick. Had a fever and the ague. I lay there, right over there, right where I got that pile of blankets now—that’s where my bed used t’ be . . . I lay there shiverin’ and feelin’ like I was dying of thirst, and I lost track of night and day. Didn’t know what was what. All I knew was that right then, I needed my mum.

  “When my dad left us, he left some of his clothes behind, ’cause he went durin’ the summer and didn’t feel like takin’ nothin’ heavier. I was so cold, like I said, that I grabbed one of his old coats—this one right here”—and he indicated the one he was wearing—“and one of his hats—this one right here—and I went out lookin’ for her ’cause I wanted to see her so bad. Even if it meant less money that day, that was all well with me, ’cause it weren’t like I was all for eating much of anythin’ anyway.

  “I went out into the streets lookin’ for her, knowin’ her reg’lar haunts, her reg’lar places. She weren’t there. And then I got to one alley, and I was startin’ to get sore dizzy and could barely stand upright, and I heard a scream and thought I was gone, just dreamin’ while I was awake, or maybe I was asleep and didn’t even know it, but there it was, right in front of me. Me mum was halfway down the alley, and there was a man holdin’ her tight, but there weren’t no love in what he was doin’ or even the daft fakery of love that substitutes for whatever it is men feels or thinks they feels when they’re with workin’ ladies. He was crouched over her, and she was screamin’ and strugglin’ and tryin’ to shove him away.

  “And here’s my shame, my secret shame what I never told no one, and I’m not even sure why I’m tellin’ you, but I am. My shame is that what I should have done was run right at him then, shoutin’ and shakin’ my fists and tryin’ to hurt him and make him leave me mum be. Instead, I stood there, and my feet were like rocks and my head like lead, and I didn’t move a muscle, just stood there and watched and trembled like I was in a livin’ nightmare. I couldn’t have been more’n five years old, but that ain’t no excuse. There’s no excuse, really; it just is what it is.

  “And then he stepped back from her, just threw wide his arms and let her fall, and she thudded to the ground like an empty sack of clothin’, because really, that’s all she was at that moment. She lay there on the ground, starin’ at me with eyes that wouldn’t see nothin’ ever again, and there was a gash in her neck. He’d stabbed her in the neck, although he must have done a rubbish job of it, because there weren’t hardly no blood. But she was just as dead as dead could be anyway, I figure from the shock, prob’ly.

  “And I still couldn’t see much of him, because it was like he was part of the shadows. I couldn’t see him, but I could tell he saw me, because he hissed like a huge snake, and it was like I unfroze all at once. I started runnin’ then, because damn me, now it was me own neck on the block, and I couldn’t do nothin’ to help me mum but to save myself, like I had wings on my heels. I turned and I ran, ran as fast as I could, ran faster than I ever had, ran across the street, ran like my life depended on it.

  “And that’s when I ran into him. He was right in my path, and he grabbed me and crouched down to talk to me.

  “ ‘Here now, my dear, what’s all this then?’ he said to me. ‘You’re the fastest lad I ever did see, and I seen more than my share.’

  “For a heartbeat, I thought he was the one what attacked me mum, but then I realized, even in my panic, I realized that couldn’t be, ’cause that murderin’ monster was way far behind me, and there was no way he could’ve gotten ahead of me unless he could fly over rooftops, so that’s not likely. I blabbered at him, told him what’d happened, and he said, ‘Let’s go see, my dear, let’s go see.’ He was rail thin, he was, with fiery red hair and a villainous air, but at that moment I was as happy to see him as I would have been to come upon a police officer. Happier, in fact, because the coppers, they ain’t exactly friends of me and mine, and are as likely to toss us in the dock in the good times as help us in the bad times.

  “I led him back to where my mum had been, and he went to her and looked her over. I’ll never forget the way he picked up her hand and then released it, letting it flop down, and he turned and said with great sorrow, ‘Sorry, my dear. She’s in the arms of her Lord, now.’ And I started to sob then, great huge tears of grief, for I had not had much place in the world, and now I had none. And he came toward me, moving sideways, like a great crab or some such, and looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re sick, my dear. If your skin was any more waxy, I could be stickin’ a wick in you and light my lodgings for a month.’ I said, ‘But my mum—I have to do somethin’ about my mum.’ I said that even as the whole world was startin’ to go white around me. And he said, ‘Don’t worry; old Fagin will take care of everything.’

  “And I’m sure the name is one what sounds chimes with you. When you think rotter, you think of Fagin.”

  For the first time, Drina interrupted his narrative. “Actually, no,” she said. “I’ve heard nothing of him. News of such things doesn’t reach me all that often.” Sounding as if she did not wish to appear wholly ignorant of such vile pleasantries as typically entertained the riffraff, she said hopefully, “I’ve heard tell of Spring-Heeled Jack, though. He’s quite new, I understand, and supposedly very much the rogue. Leaping in front of women, terrifying them, rushing off. The police are all in a lather about it.”

  The Artful waved it off as if Spring-Heeled Jack were not worth the slightest mention. “I got no patience what for someone whose main claim to fame is raising boorishness to the level of art. When Spring-Heeled Jack starts robbin’ people or murderin’ ’em,
then he’s worth a fig. Till then, he ain’t worth nobody’s time, and the police can chase their tails in a circle lookin’ for him, and it’s fine with me ’cause it draws their attention away from more legit criminals.”

  “Such as yourself?” asked Drina.

  “I ain’t no criminal. Criminals break the law ’cause they enjoys it. I merely does what I gots to, to survive. If society wants me to stop takin’ what I need to in order to be able to serve up loverly meals such as this one, then all it needs to be doin’ is findin’ me a way of not doin’ what I’m doin’. Some way that don’t involve transportin’ or swingin’, if ya catch my drift.”

  “It’s very well and truly caught,” said Drina. By that point, she had handed the remaining sausages—exactly half of what had originally been available—to Dodger, whose impulse was to eat them greedily all at once; but instead, he took his time and tried to appear as genteel as possible out of deference to his guest. He then took a deep gulp of the tea before continuing.

  “Fagin, he was someone what got a bad name from a lot of people. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that there were times when he was fierce with me. But he took me in when the only other place for me woulda been the workhouses, if even that. He nursed me back to health. He took care of gettin’ me mum a decent burial. And he taught me a trade which a lot of people would say weren’t no good at all, except you saw some of the tricks I learned from him on display this evenin’, and they certainly worked to your con-vee-nee-ence, am I right?”

  “I cannot deny that,” she said. “Still . . . taking a small boy and bringing him into a life of crime . . . .”

  “D’pends on what you take the meanin’ of crime to be now, don’t it?” said the Artful, sounding a touch defensive. He leaned forward and regarded Drina intently. “Who are the guardians of the law, after all? The magistrates and judges what swear an oath to be just to all, but never temper that justice with care or compassion? The fat councilmen who eat at one of their meals more food than a workhouse full of orphans sees in a week? The right bast—sorry, miss, blackguards would be the more politer term—what passed the poor laws what said that unmarried mothers are the ones what got to pay for raisin’ the children while the fathers are off doin’ whatever?”

  “But Fagin . . . from what you’ve said, he took you in in order to teach you to be a criminal . . . .”

  “Not just me. Lots of other lads.”

  “He preyed on you!”

  “How is it preyin’ when it’s someone what’s not got any other kind of prayer?”

  “But . . . it’s not right.”

  Looking as serious as the grave, the Artful Dodger said, “Live on our side of the road for a long time, Miss Drina, and you’ll see the truth of it. Right, wrong—those are words thrown around by those what is in power in order to sit on the backs of those what ain’t. The biggest evildoers in the world, the ones who do what’s not right, are the ones who have all the power, and that’s what makes it right. It’s right not ’cause you say so, or I say, or even if the Lord on high says so. It’s right ’cause them what’s got the money and the power, they say it’s right, and that makes it right even if it’s dead wrong. Dead wrong. I seen stuff that all those pompous windbags who says what is right and wrong would nod and smile and say that justice is served and God’s will be done, but they wouldn’t know justice if it bit ’em and wouldn’t know God if His words showed up in flaming letters thirty feet high on their walls. And sitting above it all, the royal family, looking down like gods from Mount Olympia, not caring about nothin’ that matters to the everyday folk like you and me.”

  “Really.” Her mood was turning frosty, not that the Artful Dodger noticed. “You think the royal family doesn’t care?”

  He gazed at her levelly. “Prove that they do.”

  She returned his gaze but then, as much to her surprise as his, lowered it and said softly, “I can’t, actually.”

  Dodger bobbed his head in triumph, but then, for no reason that he could readily discern, he didn’t feel as if he had won much of anything at all.

  The two of them stared at their empty teacups for a brief time, and then the Artful Dodger said, “Seems to have stopped raining. Care to walk around a bit? See the sights?”

  “With you as my guide?”

  “None better.”

  “I would like that, Dodger,” she said, and she hesitated for a moment and then reached over and placed her hand atop his. “I would like that very much.”

  The room suddenly seemed much warmer to the Artful than it had been only moments before.

  SEVEN

  IN WHICH IS TREATED THE ARTFUL’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE SECOND PERSON OF INTEREST IN THIS OVERWHELMINGLY SINGULAR EVENING

  It is indeed a remarkable night when you meet someone who is going to have a significant impact upon your life, and to meet two upon the same night admittedly strains credulity, and yet coincidence does happen, and indeed seems to do so with unusual frequency in the presence of the Artful Dodger, if one considers—as a single example—that the Artful, in the company of Charley Bates and Oliver Twist, sought to liberate the pocketed contents of one Mr. Brownlow, who turned out—through a staggeringly unlikely series of circumstances—to hold a key piece to the puzzle of Oliver’s parentage. Dubious, and yet, in sum, the way that life is: replete with odd happenstances that in works of fiction would be dismissed as absurd. Indeed, fiction is a harsher, more demanding mistress than fact.

  So be kind and understand when you read of the following events and know that, when it comes to the caprices and manipulations of the gods or God, whichever philosophy you may embrace, we are all of us merely pawns in their games, rather than players.

  So it was that Artful and Drina emerged from Dodger’s home into a cool, crisp London evening, which was to say, a typical London evening. Dodger thumped his chest several times and declared, “The city is splendid after a rain.”

  “It is,” she said. “The cobblestones glisten so nicely, and the drops hang just so from the rooftops.”

  “That and the stink is largely washed away.”

  “I had not noticed,” said Drina, when in fact she had but was simply too refined to make note of it aloud.

  Dodger had an entire plan for his random stroll that would take Drina through all the best parts of town, which was to say, the least odorous. He had had a rather successful week in terms of earning money, and if you do not believe that picking pockets clean of funds therein is hard work and therefore the dipper has earned his income, then we defy you to try it and see how well you do. So, being rather flush, Dodger had the wherewithal to genuinely purchase some niceties for Drina or perhaps even hire up a ride for them, a nice hansom cab that would emulate the sort of gentlemanly behavior to which the Artful aspired.

  As they were heading out, however, Mary called from her corner, “ ‘Oy! Dodger! Goin’ somewheres with yer dollymop?”

  Drina looked at Dodger questioningly. Rather than inform her that Mary was referring to her as an amateur prostitute, Dodger shrugged as if he had no idea what Mary was talking about. Then he turned to Mary and called back, “Sing to someone else, me fine ladybird. I got no ears for you tonight.”

  “Well, yer lucky I have eyes for you, or better to say, eyes out for you! You owe me, Dodger, ya do.”

  “Owe you?” This comment puzzled him tremendously, for he had never sought to avail Mary of her services and so could not imagine what possible monetary transaction between them was outstanding. “What’cha talkin’ about?”

  “There was some lad lookin’ fer ya. Some boy what swore that only the Artful Dodger could help ’im.”

  Drina and the Artful exchanged confused looks. It was Drina who said, “Why did he say that?”

  “Said he was in trouble and could’na trust th’ crushers,” she said, her face screwing up as if talking to Drina was distasteful.
r />   Now it was Drina’s turn to look back at Dodger. “Crushers?”

  “Rozzers,” said the Artful, and when he saw the continued confusion on her face, he further explained, “Coppers.”

  “Oh. Policemen. You have a great many names for them.”

  “Keep comin’ up with new ones so we can talk about ’em while they’re near, and they don’t know.” Dodger turned back to Mary. “Did he say what kind of trouble?”

  “Naw. Just said that he was askin’ other lads where t’go to if he was in a fix and hadda stay lavendered in.”

  This time Dodger didn’t even wait for Drina to ask. “Stay hidden from the law,” he explained.

  “Ah,” she said. She looked around. “So . . . where is the boy, then?”

  Mary smiled proudly. “Sent him off that way,” she said and pointed west. “Told ’im ye’d most likely be at the common house up the King’s Road.”

  “By Aldwych?” When she nodded, he laughed. “Good girl,” said Dodger. “You’re right, I do owe you.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Drina, even more confused than she had been. “Your lodgings were in the other direction. Why send him that way?”

  At that question, Mary rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t’cher little midinette know nothin’ at all, Artful?” With a great show of insincere patience, she said to Drina, “The boy was likely a nose, tryin’ t’ sniff out Dodger for the . . .”—she paused and then overpronounced with as arch a tone as she could—“. . . po . . . lice . . . men.”

  “You mean you think he was a spy of some sort?”

  “Oooo, she’s a bright one, she is,” said Mary sarcastically. “And the boys at the commons house there, the Broken Nail, they don’t take well t’ spies. Which is what he most likely is.”

  With a touch of pride, Dodger said, “We get at least one new nose pokin’ around every few months. I got a bit of a reputation, ya know, and the coppers are always tryin’ to send someone down here to see if they can get a sniff of the ol’ Artful.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Never sent a young one before. Gettin’ more cleverer, I’ll give ’em that.”