by Eoin Colfer
Vengeance from above, thought Garrick. As I came down the chimney.
George Billtoe had heard rumors that papers had been passed on him, and he grew increasingly secretive and prudent, barricading himself into the upstairs apartment, employing an urchin to run his errands. Garrick was forced to use all his skills as a contortionist to inch his way down the man’s chimney.
Garrick chuckled. On that night he had actually roused Billtoe before slitting his throat, just so the mark would realize that his precautions had counted for nothing.
Happy days. How he and Riley had chortled over that faker’s folly.
Garrick remembered acting out the entire episode, right down to Billtoe’s stunned final plea for mercy before he gave him a close shave across the Adam’s apple.
The magician smiled at the memory as he scaled the hotel fire escape to the third floor, sliding silent as a shadow across the cast-iron steps. The top step stood eight feet below a flat copper roof, which offered a wide lip and ample grip for a man of Garrick’s abilities. He trusted the strength of his fingers and launched himself upward from the railing, grasping the cold copper rim and swinging himself bodily onto the flat roof.
Across the dull copper he ran, hunched to avoid the prying eyes of curtain twitchers, bent so low that his torso was horizontal and Orange’s sharp nose cut the night air like a beagle’s.
This is indeed the life of champions, thought Albert Garrick. A fresh breeze from the Thames, preternatural quantum powers, and a room full of Yankee bully boys to test my skills against. Magic is real and lives inside my person.
The chimney was where he remembered it, a red and yellow brick stack bound with crumbling mortar, weather-stained, perhaps, but otherwise virtually unchanged. Even during Billtoe’s residency the chimney had been out of service, plastered up at the base with a line of cracked clay pots that had not diffused smoke in many a decade. Garrick brushed the pots aside with a cavalier sweep of his arm and heaved the chimney cap from its perch.
Not even a slap of mortar, he thought, almost disappointed. These federals are supposed to be the world’s finest. The chimney pipe stretched below him from dark to pitchdark. There was no comforting smell of soot that would have reminded Garrick of home, but there was the feeling of depth and drop and the sour gust of damp. The magician swung his legs easily over the stack and sat on the rim, peering down.
It’s narrow as I remember. Garrick’s breadth of shoulder could barely squeeze down that shaft, even on the diagonal.
Last time descending this box took some time and a fifth of nerve, thought Garrick. This time will be different.
Garrick used his quantum abilities to order his shoulder ligaments to slacken so that the ball of his humerus popped out of his socket.
No pain, he told his sensory neurons. I need my senses sharp, and last time I descended through this shaft the agony was a chink in my plate.
Garrick had always been a touch shortsighted but enjoyed excellent night vision, which he attributed to boiled vegetable poultices that he molded into his eye sockets two nights a week, then ate for breakfast in the mornings.
Even so, he thought, using his good arm to hoist himself into the black shaft, no harm in opening my pupils a little to trap the ambient light.
Garrick smiled, his teeth shining like candied lemon drops in the gloom.
Ambient light? Smart, my friend, I cannot thank you enough for educating thyself so thoroughly on your multifarious interests.
Garrick’s pupils zoomed till they filled his irises and he could see black spiders hiding in the black hole of a dark chimney at night.
This is what magic really is, he thought. An open mind. Garrick cranked his knees apart until they braced his body weight, then lowered himself into the darkness like a demon descending into hell.
Inside the bathroom of the safe house, Riley was wondering if his brain had been somehow etherized by his trip. Or if he had suffered some form of mind malady brought on by a life of continual terror.
I feel nothing. Even my fear is fading. Perhaps I am in a sanatorium somewhere wearing the lunatic’s overalls.
And yet this futuristic fantasy was particularly detailed. Miss Sav-a-no was plainer to him now than any individual he had ever spied. He could make out the drops of sweat on her brow as she worried the plastic ties on her wrists. He could hear her teeth grind in frustration and see the cords of her long neck stand out like a schooner’s rigging.
“Are you looking at something in particular?” said Chevie.
Riley started to mumble a denial, but Chevie interrupted him.
“You want to hear something ironic, kid?”
“Yes, miss. As you please.”
She tugged on her cuffs, which held her arms fast around the toilet’s plumbing. “I find it ironic that I could really use a bathroom right now.”
Riley tried not to smile.
“And this is ironic because you are tethered to a bowl and yet cannot use it?”
“Exactly.”
“Thank you, Chevie. I have often encountered the term irony in my reading but never truly understood it till now.”
“To educate and protect,” said Chevie. “Though I’ve been falling down a little on the protecting.”
“It was bad luck that you came up against Albert Garrick. Of all the coves you could have scooped out of the past, he is the worst, no doubt about it.”
“He’s just a man, you know, Riley. Whatever you think about him, that’s all he is.”
Riley slumped in the bath. “No. There are men who are somehow more than men. Garrick has always been one of these, and now even more so. The trip from the past has given him gifts, I would swear on it.”
Gifts, thought Chevie. Or mutations.
“Garrick is truly beyond your experience,” continued Riley. “Mine too.”
“You make him sound like Jack the Ripper.”
This casual reference caused the blood to drain from Riley’s face as a memory hit him like a mallet, and while his mind wandered, Chevie shifted her focus to the room beyond. For the last fifteen minutes the only sounds had been typical agents-on-babysitting-duty noises: sharp comments, jock laughter, coffee percolating, and an almost incessant flushing from the second bathroom.
“Hey!” she called. “Waldo! Duff! You want to open the door? We’re feeling a bit unloved in here.”
In response someone turned up the TV. The loud bass of dance music bounced off the door.
“I hate those guys,” muttered Chevie. “I am going to work real hard, get promoted, then fire every last one of them.” She noticed Riley’s stricken face. “Are you okay, kid? Riley?”
Riley’s eyes came back to the present. “Garrick told me a story once about old Leather Apron, Jack the Ripper. He playacted the whole thing in our digs.”
“Don’t tell me, Garrick is Jack the Ripper.”
Riley’s head jerked backward as if Garrick would hear this accusation. “No. Certainly not. Garrick hated Jack the Ripper.”
Chevie kept one ear on the noises outside and the other on Riley’s tale.
“He hated the Ripper? Weren’t those guys like peas in a pod?”
Riley sat up as far as he could. “No. Oh, no. Old Jack did what Garrick would never do. He courted the bluebottles and the press gentlemen. Sent ’em notes and so forth. Gave himself a nickname. Garrick prided himself on being a like specter with his business, and here was this night slasher leaving kidneys and hearts strewn about all over Whitechapel.”
Riley’s eyes glazed over as he lost himself in the story.
“The Ripper was busy before Garrick got me, but the case obsessed him for years after. I knew to stay clear if the papers were running a story on Jack. Until one night Garrick comes home, just as the sun hangs between the spires. He shakes me gentle, like we are genuine family, and his touch was so soft that I came out of my dream thinking my father had come and I says, ‘Father?’”
Riley paused to spit toward the plughole. “
I was barely eight years in the world and knew no better, but the word is magical to Garrick, and he smiles like Alice’s cat. ‘I suppose I am,’ he says. ‘That is my responsibility.’
“I am full awake by this point and more than a little afraid. Garrick is covered from head to foot in blood, like he’d been swimming in the slaughterhouse trough. Even his teeth are red. He must’ve seen how scared I was, for he says then, ‘Don’t worry, son. This is not my blood. Jack will be ripping no more.’ And then he waits for this nugget to sink in.
“It takes me a moment, but I gets it. ‘You killed Leather Apron? Ripper Jack himself? But he is from hell,’ says I.
“This draws a guffaw from Garrick. ‘He’s in hell now,’ he says. ‘His soul, at any rate. His body is sleeping with the rotting corpses of common hoodlums in the sludge on the Thames’s bed.’
“I know Garrick doesn’t like questions, but one pops out before I can stop it: ‘How did you find a demon, sir?’ But he isn’t angry; he seems to be in a mood for questions.
“‘Aha,’ says he, tapping his forehead. ‘With man’s deadliest weapon: the brain. Jack was a creature of habits, and that was his undoing. The first five girls were done in a frenzy, but after that Jack calmed himself and used the moon as his clock. For three years now I’ve been patrolling Whitechapel and Spitalfields on the nights of the full moon, and finally he shows outside the Ten Bells.’ Garrick laughs then. ‘It’s barely credible, this so-called genius plans to snatch yet another girl from the Bells. I spotted him right off, a toff in common getup, all twitchy with nerves.’
“Garrick leaned over me then. I remember blood dripping onto my forehead and I thought, That’s Leather Apron’s blood.”
Chevie was so enthralled by the story that she wouldn’t have moved even if the plasti-cuffs had miraculously fallen from her wrists.
“‘I let him take a girl, just to be sure,’ Garrick says. ‘And I trail him from the rooftops down to Buck’s Row. I can hear them talking and joking about poor Polly Nichols, who was done for at this very spot. Old Jack had a surprisingly feminine giggle on him, something he never boasted about to the papers. And all the time I am looming overhead with my favorite Cinquedea blade all blacked up and ready for blood.’ He showed me the short sword then. It had not been washed, and the blood was thick and lumped with gore.”
If Chevie had not been so engrossed in the tale, she might have noticed that, while there was still noise coming from outside the bathroom, the sounds of agents joking had ceased and there were thumping sounds that could not be attributed to the music pumping from the television’s speakers.
“‘As soon as he pulls out his own blade, a common-as-muck scalpel, I leaped down from on high and had him open from neck to nave. It was a clean swipe, like something from the theater. He went down like they all do, no special powers, no memorable last words. The girl was rightly grateful and fell to her knees, calling me Lordship. I should have killed her, I know, me lad. But the street was dark and my face was blacked, and so I simply says, “Tell your friends that London is rid of Bloody Jack,” and lets her run off for herself. It was a moment of weakness, but I was feeling well disposed toward the world. And then, what’s this? A little moan from the cobbles. My boy Jacky is still breathing. “Not for long,” says I, and set to work. Before he goes, Jack confesses to nineteen murders, with something of a gleam in his eye. “Nineteen?” says I to him. “I done twice that last year alone.” His heart gave out after that.’”
Riley drew a shuddering breath. “And that was when I realized that Albert Garrick was indeed the devil.”
The bathroom door buckled suddenly as a body was hurled forcibly against it. The crash startled Riley from his reverie. Again the door heaved, this time coming away from its hinges entirely, falling into the room, weighed down by the unconscious form of Agent Duff.
A dark figure appeared in the doorway and seemed to glide into the room.
“Orange?” said Chevie, but she saw almost immediately that, while the figure resembled the FBI agent, it was not in fact him.
Riley looked into the man’s cruel, dead eyes. “No. No, it’s my master. Now do you understand?”
Albert Garrick hammed it up for Chevie, striking a pose, then he gave a deep bow.
“Albert Garrick, West End illusionist and assassin-for-hire at your service, young lady—come down the chimney to introduce myself proper.”
As he bowed, a drop of someone else’s blood fell from his nose, landing on Chevie’s forehead, and she was struck to her core with a terror that she could barely contain.
“Now I understand,” she said.
Victoriana
LONDON. 1898
Albert Garrick had been apprenticed to the Great Lombardi for more than ten years, and in that time the little Italian became like a second father to the orphan boy. But young Albert never forgot his first father, who had killed for him, and it was years before the nightmares of those cholera days in the Old Nichol faded and he stopped worrying every time a patch of dry skin appeared on his elbow or his eyes seemed a little sunken.
Lombardi worked him hard but was not cruel and never once struck him unless he deserved it. They traveled the length and breadth of England, working the theaters, and once even took the Boulogne ferry for a summer season in Paris’s Théâtre Italien, where sections of Lombardi’s act were woven into a street scene for a Verdi opera. Lombardi wept at the final curtain every night and often told young Albert that he saw working with Verdi as the crowning achievement of his career.
“I have searched all my life for real magic,” he said some years later as he lay dying from tuberculosis in their digs in Newcastle upon Tyne. “And I found it in the music of Verdi. An Italian. Dio lo benedica.”
Lombardi died that night, forcing his apprentice to appear in his stead at the Journal. The night was not an unqualified success, but many of the doves survived, which encouraged young Albert to adopt the Lombardi name and to fulfill his master’s engagements.
Garrick inherited not only his master’s bookings but his assistant, too. Sabine was the most exotic and beautiful creature Albert had ever seen, and he’d been in love with her since that first day, when he had watched, slack jawed, as she emerged unscathed from Lombardi’s Egyptian saw-box.
THE GARDEN HOTEL, MONMOUTH STREET. LONDON. NOW
And now, in the Garden Hotel, Garrick felt an echo of the passion of his youth as he took his first proper look at Chevron Savano.
She looks like Sabine, thought Garrick, gazing down at the girl.
He cupped Chevie’s jaw in his hand, tilting it back. It’s uncanny, the resemblance.
And another part of his brain told him, There’s a passing likeness, nothing more. Garrick was shaken, all the same. His resolution to pierce this maid’s heart had evaporated like morning mist.
What is happening to me?
Garrick bowed once more to Chevie. “Beg pardon, Miss Savano. I need a moment to gather my thoughts.”
Garrick ducked out of the bathroom and strode to the kitchenette, where there stood what looked like a squat refrigerator of the American style. Garrick pulled open the door and inside, instead of rows of chilled food and beverages, he saw Agent Waldo Gunn, sitting behind a sheet of bulletproof glass.
Garrick knew from Orange’s expertise that this fake fridge was a personal panic pod and was just as secure as the president’s bunker under the White House.
Waldo sat shivering behind the glass, as though he were seated in a real refrigerator. He punched numbers into his phone with shaking fingers.
“This pod is not in the system, is it, Waldo?” said Garrick. “You have been augmenting your security.”
Garrick slammed the door so hard the catch snapped, and the door swung open. The fact that Waldo had been able to secure himself made Garrick’s own escape more urgent. The FBI would be aware of his existence now and would soon be—what was the expression?—hot on his trail. This century was becoming a dangerous place. Time to go ho
me.
No more dallying! he told himself. In there you go, mate. And kill her. She is puny and helpless. One slice across the windpipe will more than do the trick. The noise will be distasteful, but there it is—too late now to be letting your qualms get in the way.
Garrick froze in mid-pace.
My qualms? But I don’t have qualms.
And, in a bolt of self-awareness, it came to him.
These are Smart’s qualms. He was fond of this Savano girl, and this fondness bleeds across my neurons, reinforcing this false identification with Sabine. This young woman is no more a reincarnation of Sabine than she is of Her Majesty, Queen Vic. I shall kill her and be well rid of an adversary.
Garrick stocked up on weaponry from the FBI arsenal, including Duff’s switchblade, which he had casually knocked from the agent’s grasp.
How charming, thought Garrick. The standard of weaponry has really improved. Killing in this time will be so much easier.
This notion cheered him immensely and he reentered the bathroom, bolstered for his grisly work.
Inside the bathroom, Chevie had her foot hooked underneath the unconscious Agent Duff’s chin and was trying to haul him toward her when Garrick’s frame filled the doorway.
“Most enterprising, Agent. Perhaps he has a blade of some sort on his person? One never knows, eh?”
Chevie glared at the assassin belligerently. “You killed them all, didn’t you? Smart, the hazmat team, those officers outside?”
Garrick twirled the blade. “Not all,” he said, nodding pointedly at Duff. “Not yet.”
Chevie withdrew her foot, hoping that Duff at least would be spared. “Riley was right about you.”
“Oh?” said Garrick, prepared to listen to this before silencing this girl forever. “And what did my wayward assistant say?”