A Spectacle of Corruption

by David Liss

  I admit I had begun to lose interest in what I thought was nothing more than another of Elias’s philosophical maggots, but here my eyes went wide. “They will be so busy looking for my right hand, they won’t think to watch what mischief my left hand performs.”

  He nodded sagely. “I see you understand.”

  “Ha!” I shouted, and slapped the table. “Elias, you have earned your drink,” I told him, as I took his hand and shook it with great enthusiasm. “I think you have come up with the very thing.”

  “Ah, well, I thought so too, but I’m glad to hear you say it. How will you proceed?”

  “For now, I will take a room here.”

  I then called for a pen and piece of paper, and together we made a list of a dozen or so inns with which we were familiar but where we were unknown. We agreed we would meet every third day at this time at these taverns, moving down the list one at a time. Elias, of course, would be certain to see to it that no one tracked him through the streets.

  “As for tomorrow,” I said, “meet me at the sign of the Sleeping Lamb on Little Carter Lane.”

  “What is there?” he asked.

  “Why, the right hand is there. And we shall see what sort of glove to put upon it.”

  I had asked Elias to meet me at a shop where a tailor named Swan plied his trade. I had long found him sufficiently competent and good-natured (which is to say, no more than necessarily pressing about my credit) for some years when he approached me—perhaps a year and a half prior to these events—to tell me that he now required my services. It would seem that his son had been making merry with some friends in none the best part of the metropolis—namely, Wapping, near the wharves—and he had taken himself too much to drink. For that reason he had not been so nimble as his companions when the press-gang came upon them, and Swan’s son had been taken into service in His Majesty’s Navy.

  As my reader knows, a boy of the middling ranks, apprenticed to a tradesman, is not the sort usually preyed upon by the press-gangs, so Mr. Swan made every effort to have his son found and released, but at each step he received only denials and dismissals; nothing could be done, they said. Such assertions are never true. These men only mean to say that nothing could be done that was worth the trouble of saving a tailor’s son from serving his kingdom at sea. Had Swan been a gentleman of five or six hundred a year, quite a bit could have been done. As it was, they turned him away impatiently and assured him that the lad could not be found but that surely he would only be better off for his time aboard ship.

  When tapped by the grieving father, however, I found there was much to be done, including contacting a gentleman I knew in the Naval Office who had once hired me to retrieve some silver stolen from his house. He was good enough to make inquiries, and the boy was discovered and released only hours before his ship was to have left port.

  Some six months later I visited Mr. Swan to have a new suit made and found him more fawning than usual. He applied considerable care and attention to measuring me, insisted upon only the finest of materials, and made certain I had my fill to eat and drink while he waited upon me. When I returned to retrieve the suit, he announced that there would be no charge.

  “This generosity is hardly necessary,” I told him. “You paid me for the services I rendered, and there is no further obligation between us.”

  “But there is,” Swan said, “for the ship my boy would have served on, I have recently learned, was lost in a storm with all hands. So, you see, our debt to you is greater than you knew.”

  This gratitude he felt toward me made me inclined to put my faith in him. I could not but assume that Mr. Swan, like all men, would prefer to have an additional hundred and fifty pounds—such as my head might now bring—to his name, but he had shown me already that he valued loyalty more than money and believed himself in my debt. As much as I could trust any man, I could trust him.

  I had sent Swan a note to advise him of my arrival, so he met me at the door and ushered me inside. My tailor was a short man approaching hard on the elderly, thin, with long eyelashes and large lips that looked to have been flattened by a lifetime of pressing pins between them. Though his skills were above reproach, he had no interest in finery for himself and wore instead old coats and torn breeches, caring only for the appearance of his customers.

  “Your friend is already here,” he said. “You’ll ask him to stop talking to my daughter.”

  I nodded and suppressed a smile. “I must thank you again, sir, for agreeing to offer me assistance in this matter. I cannot say what I would have done if you had refused me.”

  “I would never do anything so treacherous. I will do anything in my power to help you restore your good name, Mr. Weaver. You need only ask it. Times are hard, I won’t deny it. Since the South Sea sunk, men aren’t buying clothes like they used to, but times are never too hard to help out a true friend.”

  “You are too good.”

  “But for now, sir, there is the matter of my own girl.”

  We arrived in his shop, where Elias was seated at a table, drinking a glass of wine and chatting about the opera with Swan’s pretty fifteen-year-old daughter, a girl of dark hair and dark eyes and a face as round and red as an apple.

  “Such a marvelous spectacle,” he was saying. “The Italian singers warbling, the momentous stage, the marvelous costumes. Oh, you must see it some day.”

  “I’m sure she will,” I told him, “and I would hate for you to ruin the surprise of it, so you’ll tell her no more of operas, Elias.”

  He flashed me a pout, but he took my meaning well enough and I knew he would not make himself difficult. “Good, then.” He rubbed his hands together. “We are all here, and we may begin.”

  Swan sent away the daughter and closed the door. “You need only direct me, and I will do as you say.” He began picking with distaste at my footman’s livery with his long, unusually narrow fingers.

  “Here is what we want,” Elias began. He rose to his feet and started to pace about the room. “Having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that Mr. Weaver must take on the persona of a man of means, one recently returned to this island from the West Indies, where he owns a plantation. His father, let us say, was always active in politics, and now that he is come to his homeland, of which he knows nearly nothing, he has decided he too would like to become a political creature.”

  I nodded my approbation. “It seems a fair disguise,” I said, thinking that this persona’s newness to the isle would conceal my own awkwardness in society. “As to the clothes?”

  Elias clapped his hands together. “That’s the thing, Weaver. Our worthy Mr. Swan must manage it very carefully. If you do this right, Swan, I can promise you my own business in future.”

  “I can think of no greater incentive to give the man,” I observed, “than the business of a gentleman who never pays his bills.”

  Elias pursed his lips but otherwise ignored me. “If Weaver is not to be recognized, there must be as little about him as we can manage that draws attention to his identity. His clothes, then, must be fashionable and bespeak his supposed station, but they must not make themselves conspicuous in any way. I want that when a man looks at Weaver, he merely thinks he has seen that kind a hundred times before and looks no further. Do you understand my meaning, Swan?”

  “Perfectly, sir. I am your man.”

  “I am delighted to hear it,” Elias exclaimed. “We can use the very principles of a performing trickster to hide Mr. Weaver in plain sight. Why, I believe anyone might look upon him who had seen him countless times before, and not know him for who he is. And as for the rest of the world, which seeks him out from a description of his general personage—why, these strangers will never look at him twice.”

  Swan nodded. “You are right in that, sir. Very right, for in my trade I have long come to know that when we meet each other, we see the clothes and the wig and the grooming, and we form our opinions with only a glance or two at the face. But as to choos
ing the clothes to do what we wish, that shall not be easy. Or, rather, it shall not be easy to hit it just on target. We must be most cautious, I think.”

  And here they entered into a conversation I could hardly even begin to understand. They spoke of fabrics and cuts and weaves and buttons. Swan pulled out samples of cloth, which Elias waved away with contempt until he found what he liked. He examined threads and lace and buckles; he dug through buckets of buttons. Elias proved himself as much an expert on these matters as Swan, and they spoke in their particular argot for near an hour before the course of my wardrobe was determined. Would a coat of silk or wool be more fitting? A dye of blue or black? Blue, of course, but how deep a shade? Velvet, but not this velvet! Of course, they could not use this velvet (which looked to me indistinguishable from the one they could use quite happily). And as for the embroidery—well, that would have to be just so. I believe Elias took as much pleasure from ordering my new clothes as he did his own.

  “Now, regarding your wigs,” Elias announced, when he had ordered clothing to their mutual liking. “That is another matter requiring particular attention.”

  “My wife’s brother is a peruke maker, sir,” Swan said. “He can do the business.”

  “Can he be trusted?”

  “Entire, sir. He can be trusted entire, but there is no need for him to be trusted at all. He need not know who Mr. Weaver is or that there is aught unusual about him.”

  “I fear he must, for we need wigs with a singular design—that of concealing Mr. Weaver’s own hair.”

  “Would it not be easier for me simply to shave my head?” I asked. Though no Samson, I admit to an attachment to my locks, which I thought rather manly. However, I was more attached to my life, and I saw no reason to burden myself with the hangman’s noose if I could squeak by with the barber’s shears.

  “That cannot be,” Elias said, “for you are to make appearances still as Benjamin Weaver, and if you show yourself with a wig or a shaved head, the world will know that you are otherwise disguising yourself, and those who seek you out will look for a man in a wig. Far better for you to be blatant in your exposure so that no one even thinks to peek under the hat of a West Indian planter.”

  I accepted his point, and we agreed that there was no choice but to put our faith in Swan’s brother-in-law.

  Mr. Swan began to take my measurements while Elias continued to chat about how I would carry out his plan. “You will need to choose a name, of course. You want something Christian sounding, but not too Christian.”

  “Michael?” I suggested, thinking of the English version of my uncle’s name.

  “Too Hebrew,” Elias said, waving his hand. “There’s a Michael in your Jewish scriptures.”

  “How about Jesus,” I suggested. “That should be sufficiently un-Hebrew.”

  “I thought perhaps Matthew. Matthew Evans. There is a name neither unusual nor common. Just the very thing we need.”

  I had no objections, so at that moment my identity as Matthew Evans pushed its way into the world through the womb of Elias’s mind. Not a particularly pleasant way to be born, but the alternatives were surely worse.

  Swan informed me that it would be some days before my first suit was ready, but he was able, while I waited, to provide me with a plain and unpretentious costume of the kind I normally wore (he was working on such a one for another customer and merely altered it to fit my frame). I could now safely dispose of my footman disguise, but in doing so I also ran the risk of being recognized, for in these clothes I looked far more like myself than I would have preferred.

  The tailor then took us to his brother-in-law’s shop, where I ordered two fashionable wigs. The peruke maker offered to trim my hair somewhat to make the fit easier, but not so much that a casual observer might notice my hair had been altered. This fellow, too, said that he would work night and day to make certain my wares were ready as quickly as possible. Matthew Evans would have to wait only a little while before making his first appearance in the world.

  In the meantime I had to procure for myself a place to stay, for I thought it best not to linger at a single inn or another for more than a day or two. I therefore found new lodgings, and though the innkeeper appeared suspicious of my lack of belongings, I bespoke a fiction of relocation and lost baggage that he found satisfying enough once I promised to pay for my stay each night in advance and for my meals as I ate them.

  Thus, with a tolerable roof over my head once more, I commenced my political studies, a program that began with a visit to Fleet Street to buy several of the common newspapers. I learned less of politics than I did of myself, for I discovered that there was no more celebrated topic than Benjamin Weaver. Our British papers love nothing so well as a notable cause, and no hack writer wishes to be so unoriginal as to have the same thought as any other writer in the land, so I could not be utterly astonished at seeing my name so used. I had seen these journalistic eruptions many times in the past. Nevertheless, it was somewhat disorienting to see one’s name used so freely, with so little regard for the truth. It is a very strange thing to be transformed into metaphor.

  I stood to each writer as a mere representation of his own political beliefs. The Whiggish papers lamented that so horrific a criminal as myself might have escaped, and they cursed the wicked Jacobites and Papists who aided me. The Whigs painted me a rebel who conspired with the Pretender to murder the king, though the mechanics of this plot were mentioned only in the vaguest of terms. Even I, a political naÏf if one had ever been born, could see that the Whigs merely wished to turn a potential embarrassment into a political tool.

  The same held for the Tories, whose papers suggested that I was a hero, having attempted to prove my innocence in a crooked Whig court. I must be commended for taking matters into my own hands when the government had betrayed me. And as Whigs were known for their relative tolerance toward Jews (a mere side effect to a greater laxity in matters of religion), and Tories for their intolerance, I thought it interesting that neither camp made reference to my being of the Hebrew nation.

  None of this, however, was as interesting as an advertisement I found in the Postboy. It read:

  Mr. Jonathan Wild announces that he has found himself in possession of a box of missing linen and should very much like to return it to its wayward owner. If that gentleman will present himself at the Blue Boar tavern this Monday at five o’clock, being sure to stick to the right-hand side, he will find many of his most pressing questions answered.

  Here was surely a hidden message, for my true family name, Lienzo, signifies linen in the Spanish tongue, and my first name, in the Hebrew language, means son of the right hand. I understood the code at once. Wild, my old enemy, the greatest criminal in the history of the metropolis and the man who had defied all expectations by defending me at my trial—this man wished to meet with me.

  I would find out his intentions sure enough, but I had no intentions of walking blithely into his lair. No, I would take quite another route.

  CHAPTER 9

  JONATHAN WILD’S secret message indicated that he wished me to call on him come Monday, but I found his note on a Thursday, and I had no intention of waiting so long for my answers. I continued to believe that the pretty girl with the yellow hair and the deftly hidden tools of escape had been his creature, but I could not know that with any certainty. I only had a hunch and the knowledge that Wild was inclined to send off pretty girls in disguise to do his bidding. But even if he had helped to orchestrate my freedom, I did not for an instant believe that he would be immune to the lure of a hundred-and-fifty-pound bounty. He could not truly expect that I would walk into his offices in the Blue Boar—a tavern located across from the Little Old Bailey, just a few paces from where my death had been mandated by law—and present myself to be disposed of as he saw fit. Wild had used me ill in the past, and even his kind words at my trial could not entice me to trust him now.

  Instead, I thought to learn more of his interest in me through quite differe
nt means. I visited a butcher in a part of town where I was unknown and there took for myself some choice cuts of beef, which I noticed were wrapped in newspapers featuring a story about the notorious villain Benjamin Weaver. From there, I sat in a tavern until dark and then made my way to Dukes Place, my own neighborhood, where I had not been now in more than two weeks. It was an odd thing, being back in such familiar surroundings, hearing the chatter in Portuguese and accented English and occasionally the tongue of the Tudescos from eastern Europe. The streets smelled of food now being prepared for the Sabbath, to begin at nightfall the next day, and the air was ripe with cinnamon and ginger and, less appealingly, cabbage. Ragmen and trinket peddlers and fruit sellers cried out their wares. It was all too familiar, for I was only a few streets from my own rooms, rooms that had surely been picked clean by the state in compensation for my having been convicted of a felony. I felt a strange urge to go there, to see what had been done, but I knew better than to indulge such a feeling.

  Instead, I found the house I sought, which was none the best guarded, and it was no difficult thing to slip inside a window that faced an alley and climb the stairs to my desired chamber. The locked door proved no great obstacle, for, as my reader already knows, I have in the past proved myself handy with a lockpick.

  The barking and growling on the other side of the door, however, would present more of a challenge. Nevertheless, I had always heard that the man I sought made a habit of coddling his dogs, feeding them sweetmeats and fondling them like children. Here, surely, were beasts who had never tasted human flesh. That, at any rate, was the wager I had made.

  I opened the door, and the creatures lunged at me—two enormous mastiffs the color of day-old chocolate—but I was ready and held out my package from the butcher. Whatever urge to protect their territory that drove them they now set aside, as they tore at the little package, devouring flesh and paper all. I, in turn, closed the door and took a place in a chair I found convenient, acting all the while as though there were nothing more natural than for me to be in this room with them. It is the trick with dogs, I had long since discovered. They are strangely canny at discovering your mood and responding to it. Act with fear, and they will lunge at you. But toward a calm and relaxed man they will show indifference.