Two Crafty Criminals!

by Philip Pullman

  Thunderbolt loved his pa, and he knew his pa loved him, but neither of them would have dreamed of saying so. Instead, Mr. Dobney was always nice about his son’s cooking, and Thunderbolt always thought his father’s latest invention would be the best of all, and there was nothing nicer than sitting by the fire of an evening with the kettle simmering and the brass Buddha gleaming on the mantelshelf and Mr. Dobney reading scandal out of the paper while Thunderbolt arranged his Museum.

  “See you’ve cleaned the old frying pan, then,” said Mr. Dobney. “What you got there?”

  “It’s a bit of lead,” said Thunderbolt. “It came off that statue of King Neptune outside the Lamb and Flag. You remember.”

  He took out the brass-bound chest that belonged to his uncle Sam, the sailor, and which contained all the treasures of his Museum: the walrus tooth engraved with a picture of the Cutty Sark in little scratchy black lines; a dried sea horse; several cowrie shells; a genuine bone from the nose of a cannibal chief, which Uncle Sam had won in a poker game; a great lump of rubbery stuff from the Sargasso Sea, which Thunderbolt thought was probably a dried jellyfish. And then there were Thunderbolt’s own discoveries: a halfpenny which had been run over by a tram; a twig off one of the bushes in Battersea Park, which, if you held it the right way and squinted a bit, looked exactly like a little old man; a broken glass slide from a magic lantern, showing Glamis Castle with what Thunderbolt knew was a ghost at one of the windows; and forty-six bits of old-fashioned clay pipe from the Thames mud. When they broke a clay pipe, in the olden days when they used to smoke clay pipes, there was nothing to do with it but throw it away, and most of them ended up in the river.

  He laid them all out on the table and noticed that he’d spelled “Sargasso” wrongly on the card that belonged to the dried jellyfish. He rewrote it carefully and scraped a bit of fluff off the lump, which was looking fairly battered. It was a dull color, sort of gray, really, with sooty streaks. Some of it came off under his fingernail, and he looked at it dubiously.

  “Wossat?” said Pa. “That’s old Sam’s petroleum wax, innit?”

  “I thought it was a dried jellyfish,” said Thunderbolt.

  “No, no, son. That’s petroleum wax. He got it from Trinidad. They have this blooming great lake there made of tar. You can walk on it. Here! That’s a thought! Shoes with soles made of tar—they’d be waterproof, wouldn’t they? I’ll have to look into that. No, that’s wax, that is.”

  “Wax! Dippy! The Waxworks!”

  Thunderbolt jumped up excitedly. Pa looked across the top of his paper in mild astonishment, and Thunderbolt explained about Dippy’s ambition.

  “Ah, I get it,” said Pa, rolling the heavy lump towards him. “Make a nice head, this would. Funny color, mind. Still, Dippy’s not a healthy color hisself …”

  “We could make a body for it and smuggle it in … Dippy Hitchcock, World-Famous Hot-Chestnut Man. Pity he’s not a murderer, really. He’d get in easy then.”

  “You wouldn’t have to smuggle the whole thing in,” said Pa. “Just the head.”

  “He can’t just be a head! Dippy Hitchcock, the Famous Hot-Chestnut Disembodied Head!”

  “No, no. Just whip the bonce off Charles the Second or Admiral Nelson or someone and bung Dippy’s nut up there instead.”

  Thunderbolt felt doubtful. “I dunno. I think he ought to be hisself, not masquerading as someone else. Wouldn’t be the same, somehow …”

  He rolled the petroleum wax towards him. There must have been four pounds of it—maybe five. Then he saw the newspaper, which Pa had picked up again, and read a little headline off the back.

  “Fraudulent utterance of forged coins … What’s that, Pa? That story there.”

  “Oh, that? Nothing. Lot of fuss about nothing. Come on, Samuel, put yer stuff away, it’s nearly bedtime.”

  His pa had never called him Thunderbolt. In fact, he’d only been Thunderbolt since the summer, when he’d knocked out Crusher Watkins from the Lower Marsh Gang. Crusher had said something about Thunderbolt’s ma, and Thunderbolt had flown at him with one colossal blow that knocked him out cold—a thunderbolt. Ever since then he’d lived in mortal dread of meeting Crusher again, but it had been worth it.

  “That’s exactly what I was going to suggest,” said Benny the next day.

  That wasn’t quite true. What Benny had really been going to suggest was that the gang set up their own Waxwork Museum to compete with the one in the New Cut. The vision of it was already shimmering in his mind like a gigantic soap bubble: an ornate entrance, queues a mile long, waxworks so real they just about sang and danced. A Chamber of Horrors that would freeze the blood of a ghoul. In Benny’s mind, Kaminsky’s Royal and National Waxworks expanded to fill a space roughly the size of the Crystal Palace, and it was such a success that they had to take it on a tour of America, and he came back a millionaire, and before long he was Sir Benny—Lord Kaminsky—the Duke of Lambeth … Were there any princesses he could marry?

  But in the meantime all they had was Thunderbolt’s lump of petroleum wax, or dried jellyfish, or whatever it was. They were sitting in the loft over Hodgkins’s Livery Stables, surrounded by straw and the rich smell of horse, and Thunderbolt was showing them the potential head of Dippy Hitchcock.

  “I reckon it’s beeswax,” said Bridie.

  “That ain’t beeswax,” said Benny. His father was a tailor, so he knew. “Beeswax is hard and yeller. This is petroleum wax, no error. They make candles out of it. Easy to carve and all …” He was busy shaving bits off with his penknife. “Eyes,” he said. “What we gonna do for eyes?”

  Thunderbolt held out a faded, watery-looking blue marble.

  “This is about the same color as Dippy’s,” he said.

  “What use is one?” said Bridie. “Though I suppose he could be winking. Or have a patch over it like Lord Nelson.”

  “I got a blood alley too,” said Thunderbolt doubtfully, fishing out a large white marble with red streaks.

  “That’ll do,” said Benny. “He can have one good un, and the other can be bloodshot. We need summing for his whiskers and all …”

  Making the waxwork took the best part of a day. Benny hung around his father’s workshop and borrowed a suit someone hadn’t paid for, Bridie contributed a pair of her uncle Mikey’s boots, and Thunderbolt managed to snip some hair off the tail of Jasper, the bad-tempered horse in the stable below.

  And while Bridie and Thunderbolt stuffed the suit with straw, stuck a broomstick through it for a spine, and pummeled it all roughly Dippy-shaped, Benny set to work on the head.

  The wax was easy to carve. He excavated two holes for eyes, and put the wax he’d dug out aside to make a nose with. Getting the eyes to look right took a long time, and still he wasn’t sure it looked exactly like Dippy, not exactly; but then it needed a nose, after all. He reached for the wax he’d taken out, and found it was gone.

  He knew where to look. Sharky Bob was licking his lips.

  “It might be poison,” Benny said hopefully.

  “It’s nice,” said Sharky. “I likes that.”

  Benny sighed, dug a lump out of the back of the neck to make a nose with, and carried on. After an hour of squeezing the head and pulling it, of smoothing it and rubbing it and squinting at it through half-closed eyes, of trying to shove horsehair under its nose for a mustache and bits of broken china into its mouth for teeth, he reckoned it was done.

  “There,” he said proudly.

  The others clustered round.

  “Hmm,” said Bridie. “He looks as if he’s going to puke.”

  Benny shut the mouth. At once the head took on the pursed-up expression of someone who’d just swallowed a caterpillar.

  “He’s cross-eyed,” said Thunderbolt. “He looks as drunk as a fish.”

  With a heavy sigh, Benny licked his finger and repositioned the dots of licorice that he’d stuck on the marbles for pupils.

  “I’m still not sure about his gob-box,” said Bridie. “Dippy’
s is always hanging open.”

  With an even heavier sigh, Benny prized the mouth open again. Now Dippy looked like an apprehensive patient about to undergo a new and untried form of dental surgery.

  “That’s better,” said Thunderbolt. “But his eyes … I dunno …”

  “You do it, then!” said Benny passionately. “You’re so blooming clever, you show us how his eyes ought to go! I s’pose you been making eyes all your life! I s’pose you’re an expert on eyes! I s’pose no one knows anything about eyes except you! I s’pose people come from all over the world to ask you about eyes! Well, go on, then! You make ’em look right, since you’re the only one as knows how!”

  He thrust the sticky head at Thunderbolt, who prodded and scraped and shoved for a minute or two. When he’d finished, the blue eye was gazing at the ceiling with the air of a desperate appeal for help, while the red one leered at the floor like a murderer gloating over his victim.

  They all stood back and studied the head critically.

  “Well …,” said Bridie.

  “It ain’t got a body yet, has it?” said Benny impatiently. “Shove it on the broomstick. Course it don’t look right just sitting there like a … like a head.”

  Thunderbolt and Bridie waggled the head to and fro till it was well and truly jammed down on the broomstick.

  “Ah!” said Benny, and Bridie said, “That’s more like it!” and Sharky Bob said, “Cor!”

  It was a masterpiece.

  Thunderbolt had been carefully writing a label for it, with all the words spelled correctly, and now he pinned it to the dummy’s coat like a medal:

  “What’s that last word?” said Bridie.

  “It means ‘benefactor of mankind,’ ” said Thunderbolt. “I found it in the dictionary. It’s real, all right.”

  “Come on, then,” said Benny. “Let’s get him to the Museum.”

  This was the part of the whole business they’d thought about least. At the back of everyone’s mind had been the vague notion that they’d just walk in, set the wax Dippy in a prime position, and walk out again without being seen. But they soon realized that it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  In fact, the closer they got to the Museum, the more they realized that it wasn’t going to be easy at all. For one thing, it cost money to go in, and there was only enough of Benny’s shilling left for two of them.

  “It’ll have to be me and Bridie,” said Benny. “Sharky’s too little, and Thunderbolt’s too clumsy.”

  It was true, and Thunderbolt had to admit it; so he and Sharky Bob stood across the road from the entrance of the Museum. It was just getting dark. The first lamps were being lit, and the shop windows on either side of the Waxworks glowed bright with their abundance of china plates and hardware, their red and green apothecary’s flasks and mahogany drawers of pills. The placard inside the Museum’s window flickered dimly in the gruesome light shining on it. The proprietor, Professor Dupont, was too canny to put an actual waxwork there, where people could see it for free.

  Benny and Bridie, carrying the dummy between them with a fine display of casualness, as if it was the sort of thing that everyone took about as a matter of course and they were surprised to see no one else carrying one, dodged across the road between the carts and the omnibuses and ran up the steps to the Museum entrance. There was a little window inside the door where you paid your threepence to the grim lady dressed in black. The tickets were a different color each day, so you couldn’t save yesterday’s and go in with that.

  They sauntered in, with the dummy’s feet bumping on the steps behind them and an inquisitive dog sniffing in their wake. A second or two went by and Benny and Bridie came out again, in a hurry. In fact, they were running, and no sooner had they skidded to a halt and turned back indignantly than the dummy came hurtling out after them. Bridie caught it neatly, and had to hold it up over the excited dog while Benny shook his fist at the Professor, who took one disdainful look and shut the door.

  Thunderbolt and Sharky Bob hadn’t even had time to speak.

  “Huh,” said Benny with profound scorn. “Seems to me he doesn’t want his blooming Waxworks to be successful. Seems to me he wants the same old boring Kings and Queens as every other Waxworks. He’s jealous, that’s what he is.”

  They didn’t want to stay there for too long. People were beginning to make unfunny remarks about dummies, and three or four dogs were leaping up and trying to kill it, so the gang trooped crossly back to the stable before going their different ways home.

  Thunderbolt was the last to leave. He was feeling fed up. His petroleum wax, and Benny had commandeered it to make the head; his idea in the first place, and he was too clumsy to take the dummy into the Waxworks … Nothing was right, somehow. The cold, dim light filtering in through the filthy skylight of the stable loft didn’t help, and nor did that blooming dummy propped up against a wall. Now that he looked at it properly, Thunderbolt thought that he’d never seen anything so horrible.

  With a shudder, Thunderbolt closed the trapdoor and climbed down into the stable, avoiding the teeth of old Jasper, to find the stable dog Jezebel whining and scratching at the bottom of the ladder.

  “What is it, Jez?” he said.

  Jezebel licked his hands with more than her usual friendliness, and howled mournfully. Thunderbolt hurried home through the gathering evening, keeping an eye out for Crusher Watkins and the Lower Marsh Gang.

  As he passed the market, he heard Mr. Ionides, the costermonger, shout at a baffled customer: “Get out of it! Go and pitch yer snide somewhere else!”

  More fake sixpences, Thunderbolt thought.

  Then, from nowhere and for no reason at all, an idea came into his head. Supposing … No, he couldn’t even put it into words. But the idea wouldn’t go away. Supposing it was Pa doing the coining?

  And once he’d said it to himself it was easier to go on thinking it, though it made him feel hot and heavy, as if he was ill.

  Because things had been tight recently. The “Handi-Cheep” Combined Glove Holder and Dog Whistle had been a failure, and Pa had put a lot into that. And no one seemed to want the self-adjusting pipe-bowl cleaner, and all the “Eesi-Snip” Smoker’s Companions had fallen apart because of a faulty hinge.

  And now Pa was busy at something he refused to talk about, even though he and Thunderbolt usually shared everything.

  By the time he got as far as that, Thunderbolt had stopped walking altogether. No! The idea was crazy!

  (But yesterday, when he’d seen the newspaper article about the forged coins, Pa had folded the paper up hastily and sent him to bed.)

  His pa would never do anything criminal!

  (But Uncle Sam had stolen the little brass Buddha on the mantelshelf from a hotel in Rangoon. At least he’d always claimed he had. And crime ran in families, everyone knew that.)

  His family weren’t like that.

  (But hadn’t he, Thunderbolt, become a receiver of stolen property? He was a criminal himself!)

  He came to, miserably, outside the butcher’s and remembered what he was going to get for tea. In he went, scuffling up the sawdust, and waited while Mr. Graham, the butcher, parceled up a leg of pork.

  “That’s one and sixpence, my love. And a proper sixpence if you please, none of these fancy ones.”

  “My neighbor got one in her change yesterday,” said the customer. “Blooming wicked. How can poor folks live with rotten money going around? Why don’t they forge gold sovereigns like that what rich people use? Eh?”

  When the customer had left, Thunderbolt said, “A tuppenny pie, please.”

  He paid for the pie, and when it was wrapped he said, “Are there lots of these snide coins about, Mr. Graham?”

  “They’re turning up all over the place, son. All over Lambeth, anyway. And shillings and half crowns. There must be a whole gang of smashers going round.”

  Smashers were the people who actually passed fake coins into circulation. Thunderbolt’s heart lifted: Pa wasn’t
part of a gang, that was certain.

  “So one person on their own, like, they couldn’t be doing it?”

  “One person could be making ’em,” said Mr. Graham. “Old Stamper Billings used to work on his own, and he kept going for years.”

  “Who?”

  “Stamper Billings. You remember him, Arthur!” said Mr. Graham to a thin old man who’d just come in.

  “Old Stamper, yeah, I remember him,” wheezed the old man. “He turned out all kinds, old Stamper. Course, they caught him in the end—the year Sefton won the Derby. He had a regular crew of smashers. They used to come down from the West End, Soho, and from east as far as Limehouse. That’s where he was clever, see. He never uttered ’em round here, so folks was less inclined to peach on him. There’s always a nose nearby; you don’t last long in that trade. But old Stamper lasted longer’n most.”

  “ ‘Uttered’ means ‘passed,’ ” said Mr. Graham. “That’s the legal term for it. They got him for uttering.”

  “Have you taken any of the snide ones, Mr. Graham?” said Thunderbolt.

  “Yeah, worse luck. D’you want ’em? They’re no good to me.”

  The butcher fished into the pocket of his apron and brought out three coins.

  “Don’t you try to spend ’em, now,” he said.

  “No! I don’t want to spend them. I’m going to put them in my Museum.”

  Thunderbolt took the pie to the bakery to be heated. He could think of nothing but the forged coins, and when the pie was in the oven he asked Mr. Solomons, the baker, if he’d taken any counterfeit coins.

  “No, I’m too fly,” said Mr. Solomons. “They won’t get any of them things past me.”

  “What do they do to forgers when they catch them?”

  “They hang ’em, me boy. It’s a capital crime, defacing Her Majesty the Queen. Making false coins is as bad as treason.”

  Thunderbolt gulped. “Do you know how they make fake coins, Mr. Solomons?”

  The baker looked around, saw there was no one nearby, and leaned over the floury wooden counter of the shop to speak confidentially.