On top of it all he was so tired from lifting, carrying and hauling things about that his very bones ached. He had hacked his way through jungles, trailed across the blazing desert with an empty canteen and fought the Ashanti warriors tooth and nail on strict rations, but even he found the daily grind of a dockside worker almost too much. Every night he would crash down on the cot in their lodgings in Limehouse and sleep like an old drunk, snoring away while Mr. Clumps sat in the only chair in the room, his mechanite furnace slowly ticking over and the glowing end of his cigar going up and down as he exhaled through the night—not sleeping, but watching and waiting.
Lazarus was responsible for keeping Mr. Clumps up and running. The bureau had supplied him with a quantity of mechanite which he kept wrapped in an oilskin beneath a loose floorboard in their room. It seemed absurd to keep such a valuable trove in such an unassuming and seedy location with only a flimsy wooden door and his own British Bulldog pocket revolver to defend it. But nobody was looking for it, and even if some lowlife managed to prize it from his possession they likely wouldn’t know it from a few chunks of schist.
Lazarus had not given up his private concerns, and in the slow wait for information on the socialist groups that may or may not have infested the warehouses of Shadwell Docks, he had time to pursue them, even if he was dog tired. One Sunday afternoon he decided that it was time to pay the old lime oast Mansfield had mentioned a visit.
Rows upon rows of tiny worker’s cottages lined the canals of one of London’s worst slums. Dilapidated barges rested upon the mud, awaiting the evening tide. Public houses and opium dens were common, and shabby-looking children played with mangy dogs in the streets. Rising up above all of this were the conical lime oasts that lent the district its name. Several were still in use, but a great many were empty shells with broken windows and crumbling chimneys, their fires long left untended.
Lazarus had come alone. Mr. Clumps had expressed a surprising degree of trepidation at allowing his superior to wander off alone on this overcast Sunday afternoon, but Lazarus had insisted. He was a private man, and when they were not pursuing their mission’s goals he must be allowed some private time. Perhaps he had family he wanted to visit, or a lady friend who missed him. These were things that the steam-man could never understand, Lazarus explained, and Mr. Clumps did an alarming impression of a man sulking when he had left him sitting on his chair in their lodgings.
As Lazarus made his way across the weed-ravaged yard towards the address Mansfield had given him, his footsteps echoed across the cracked concrete, reverberating off the red brickwork of the surrounding buildings. He looked up at the lime oast with its dark eye-like windows of broken glass and conical kiln looming over him. He patted his coat pocket instinctively, feeling the shape of the Bulldog revolver. The smallness of it made him feel uneasy. He missed the reassuring bulge of his Enfield and especially the heavy weight of his Starblazer.
The main door was secured with heavy, rusted chains, so he followed the building around to the left, looking for another entrance. He came across a small wooden door that was barely hanging from its hinges. He pushed it aside and he stepped in.
Some pigeons, startled by his entrance, burst upwards in a flurry of feathers and out through a gaping hole in the roof. The place was dim. All about were scattered the remnants of the kiln’s former life. Worker’s tools, rusted and filthy, lay strewn on ancient benches and a thick layer of dust and grime coated everything. At the far end of the building, the floor dropped away to a set of slime-encrusted steps leading to the water. It had once been used as a small dock and now a thick layer of scum sat on the water, obscuring its depths.
He poked around a little more, but to no avail. If anything had been amiss here, then someone had since removed all trace. It didn’t look like it had been used for anything since its fires cooled, many years ago. Disappointed, he left the building and made his way back across the yard.
Some children were playing on an old heap of broken masonry and looked a little startled to see him emerge from the lime oast. There were four in all, three boys and a girl, all dressed in shabby jackets and caps.
“Oi, mister!” shouted one. “Are you a copper?”
“Nope,” Lazarus replied, walking past them.
“I’ll bet you are. I’ll bet you’re investigating ghosts,” the lad said.
“Why would a copper care two pennies about ghosts?” Lazarus asked. “Not that I am a copper. And what’s all this about ghosts, anyway?”
“Cos a ghost lives in there,” the boy replied. “I seen it.”
“What did you see?” Lazarus asked.
The boy wiped the back of his hand across his nose and sniffed. “Well, it weren’t really me,” he admitted. “It was me brother Ben. He saw it late at night, a real ghost it was. It was all dressed in black and floated over the ground.”
“Your brother’s been on the gin,” said the girl. “Seein’ things.”
“S’all a load of cobblers anyway!” exclaimed another of their companions. “It ain’t no ghost. My dad saw him in daylight and he weren’t floating. My dad reckons its Todd.”
“Todd?” Lazarus enquired. “Who’s he?”
“Everyone’s heard of old Sweeney Todd,” exclaimed the second boy incredulously. “He’s the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. He invites people into his shop for a shave and then he cuts their throat with his razor. Then he sells their bodies to a woman what makes ‘em into meat pies!”
“Good grief, child!” Lazarus said. “Where do you hear such things?”
“Everyone’s heard of ol’ Todd,” he repeated. “Ask anyone. That’s his lair where he hides from the coppers.”
Lazarus had heard enough. He left the children to their playing and headed towards his lodgings. On the way back he thought long and hard about his encounter with the street urchins. Apparently someone had been going in and out of the old lime oast, that much was certain.
During those dull, exhausting days, Lazarus also found time to enquire of Limehouse’s Asian population if anybody knew of the recent arrival of a man from Siam. Limehouse had its share of Buddhist temples and he surmised that his attacker, if he were a true Siamese, would likely be a Buddhist, and if so would undoubtedly visit some temple in the area for his devotions.
The Chinese population of Limehouse had grown in recent years. Tea and opium merchants from Shanghai and Tianjin sought homes and business opportunities amidst the chandlers and rope makers. Cantonese sailors, marooned by shipping lines that offered no return journeys to their deckhands, were left to build new lives for themselves in London’s dockside communities. Stalls and shops had sprung up to cater to the new settlers, selling dried foods, herbs and medicinal remedies while gambling dens and oriental restaurants clustered together in the narrow streets.
It took several days of asking around before he was told by one Chinese man that yes, a number of tough Siamese men had been seen frequenting a temple on Pennyfields. It surprised Lazarus and unnerved him to think that his would-be assassin was not alone. He had already surmised that the man must be working for somebody higher up who held a grudge against him. It then stood to reason that this individual had several Siamese fighters in his employ. And to find the snake’s head, they say, one must follow its tail.
He watched the temple on Pennyfields for several evenings, and finally spotted his man emerging from the unremarkable building of plum-colored brick. It was most definitely the same man; those loose-fitting clothes that suggested a previous trade at sea and the smooth, nut-brown face unadorned with beard or moustache. He grabbed a nearby street urchin of his own race and pointed the oriental out.
“See that man?” he asked the child who blinked up at him, unsure if he was going to be given a farthing or a thick ear. “How would you like to earn half a crown?”
The boy’s eyes goggled at the prospect.
“I want you to follow that man, not now, he’s too far gone, but he’ll be back. I want to know where he g
oes and who he sees. If he stops at a house I want the address. I don’t care if he trails you all over London. If he takes a cab, I want you to keep on it. I’ve seen you lads do that, right?”
“Right!” nodded the boy, his peaked cap wagging up and down.
“Half a crown. Here’s sixpence for the time being. I’ll be back on Sunday for your news.”
Still nodding vigorously, the child went on his way, giddy with his new employment. Lazarus hadn’t the time to spend any more evenings and weekends waiting and watching but London’s hordes of unwashed, illiterate and abandoned urchins was a more effective grapevine than anything the metropolitan or municipal police forces could muster between them. His lad would turn up the goods, he had no doubt about that.
Chapter Five
In which the journal is obtained
The daily grind of working life in the big city was taking its toll on Lazarus. He was a man who had spent most of his life either in exotic places or in a library reading about them. The past was what fascinated him, with all its colors and infinite lives entwined along paths of mysticism and strange faiths. The grey, gloomy drudgery of the industrial age and its modern rationalism was a terrible drag on his soul. He felt hopelessly out of his depth in his mission, not least because there seemed so very few leads open to him.
Then, by a twist of fortune, Lazarus was brought into contact with a man who might just have the connections he desired. It was on Tuesday that Lazarus and Mr. Clumps were told by Tappy that they would be better suited—owing to Mr. Clumps’s massive strength—to loading the carts that left the warehouse. It was harder work than unloading the derricks, as it involved heaving large crates and sacks up onto the back of the carts while their drivers stood idly by smoking their pipes.
Lazarus found himself despairing even more at this new burden on his already waning strength, and was cursing his companion for his efficiency when he discovered that the majority of the men who did the tougher jobs in the warehouse were Jews of Polish or Russian extraction.
There was a distinct anti-Semitic streak in most of the workers, and so it stood to reason that the real back-breaking labor fell upon the shoulders of the Jews whose very existence caused their colleagues to despise them for taking jobs that might have otherwise gone to Englishmen.
Lazarus did his best to strike up friendly conversation with them and found himself rebuffed on a number of occasions. Distrust, it seemed, came from both sides. But there was one fellow who did not seem as reluctant to converse with him.
His name was Kovalev. He was an elderly Russian with rough hands and a stooped back that suggested many years of backbreaking labor. His English was good and he possessed a vocabulary far beyond those of Lazarus’s fellow countrymen in the rest of the warehouse. This made Lazarus think of him as one of the many educated Jews who, pushed out of their homeland by pogroms and the hate of their countrymen, found themselves diminished to physical labor in London’s East End.
Their conversations never drifted into the realm of politics. Lazarus was reluctant to push them in that direction, lest Kovalev grow suspicious as to his reasons. He decided that he would have to bait him and see if the old Russian, or anybody else for that matter, might be drawn into a discussion that would reveal their political standings. He had the bait in the form of a copy of the Commonweal; the official journal of the Socialist League that he carried around in his jacket pocket. All he needed was the opportunity to reveal his taste in literature to his colleagues. He developed a plan to do just.
That Sunday Lazarus spent the afternoon awaiting the appearance of his street urchin on Pennyfields. He sniffed down the scent of opium that drifted from a nearby open window and remembered his days in New York with Mansfield, wallowing in dens very much like these ones. One Chinatown was very much like another the world over, he concluded.
Eventually the boy he sought rounded the corner, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He saw Lazarus and beamed as if relieved that his patron had actually showed up.
“Well, lad?” he asked him. “Good news?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Your man turned up all right and I followed him all over.” He then proceeded to give Lazarus a long list of the gambling dens and cafes the fellow had visited, along with multiple visits to a lodging house two streets over. Lazarus wrote it all down on a small notepad. It seemed fairly run-of-the-mill stuff; the expected routine of many denizens of Limehouse and Shadwell. Then the lad reeled off an address of a none-too-shabby town house in Bloomsbury.
“Bloomsbury?” Lazarus asked, raising his eyebrow at the boy. “Bit out of the way for our fellow, isn’t it?”
“Ain’t ‘alf! He took an hansom and I had to switch growler three times to keep a mince on him! I thought he was going all the way to Westminster!”
“This house, what is it like?”
“A right toff’s gaff. High windows and ivy and all.”
“Was he admitted through the front door?”
“You must be joking! He snuck around the back to the tradesmen’s entrance.”
“See anybody else about? A butler or something?”
“Nah, he slipped in too quick for me to catch a butchers.”
“Well, my lad you’ve earned your half crown.” Lazarus dug into his pocket.
“Half?” the boy exclaimed. “You said an ‘ole crown!”
“I said half. And that was in addition to the sixpence I gave you last week, but nice try. Now hoppit before I give you a toe in the arse.”
“Much obliged, sir,” the lad replied, making the half a crown vanish into his clothes and then himself vanish into the crowded street.
Lazarus returned to Shadwell and whiled away the afternoon with Mr. Clumps. The big fellow had taken to reading newspapers. Lazarus was not only surprised by the mechanical’s ability to read but by his interest and understanding of the articles within. The pubs being shut, Lazarus fished out a bottle of gin he had purchased and sat on the bed drinking from a chipped tumbler. He offered his companion some.
“No, thank you,” Mr. Clumps replied.
“Can you process alcohol?” Lazarus asked him. He had seen him eat and drink when the need required it. It was not essential, for his furnace was the only energy source the mechanical required. Clumps had been discreet about how he deposited any bodily waste, a discretion Lazarus was rather grateful for.
“I can drink just about anybody under the table,” Mr. Clumps replied. “I believe that’s the expression.”
“Very good,” Lazarus said. Conversations with the mechanical were not exactly stimulating and mostly consisted of Lazarus either correcting or congratulating the big fellow on his command of English expressions. He decided that perhaps, head for drink or no, his only bottle of Madam Geneva would be wasted on a mechanical. Not for the first time since beginning this assignment, he found himself missing human companionship.
When dusk approached, Lazarus walked to Commercial Road and took a hansom to Bloomsbury. Being a Sunday evening the house’s occupants—whoever they may be—would most likely be in. But the cover of night was essential to what he had in mind and occupied or not, he wanted to see the abode of whomever it was that wanted him dead and see what he could find out about them.
The red brick three-storied houses facing parks and tree-lined squares were the peaceful seclusions of London’s authors and poets. Behind lace curtains and velvet drapes they enjoyed candle-lit suppers and literary circles. Lazarus knew that behind at least one of these serene, well-kept houses, dwelled a would-be murderer.
The driver pulled up at the address. Lazarus paid him and walked around to the back, where the tradesman’s entrance was screened by a brick wall. The tops of bushes poked up from the other side, and Lazarus smiled at the easy opportunity for a housebreaker. Not that he was really a housebreaker, but it amounted to the same thing in the eyes of the law. After checking that nobody was taking an evening stroll down the back lanes, he scrambled up and over the wall and into the neat garden beyond
.
Lights were on in all the ground floor rooms, none of the top floor rooms and in only one of the first floor rooms. There was no drainpipe near the unlit room (and had there been any he would have only used it as a last resort, owing to his recent misadventure with one). No other form of entry to the upper floors presented itself. There was, however, a cellar-flap with a padlock. Lazarus had expected as much, and had brought a set of skeleton keys for such a job.
It took a good deal of fiddling to spring the lock, but at last it came away and he silently lifted the flap and descended into the cellar. Rows of jars on shelves glinted in the light from the hatch. Pickles, jams, compots and other relishes twinkled between boxes of tea, tins of tongue and potted meats. He fumbled around and found a door—bolted.
He drew his penknife and slid it in the jam, lifting the latch with the barest of ‘clinks’. The kitchen beyond was deserted, apart from a fat old cook snoring softly in an armchair, her mob cap over her eyes and half a glass of sherry resting on the arm. Lazarus snuck out and ducked into the shadows of a passageway, narrowly avoiding detection by the scullery maid who came downstairs bearing a tray of empty glasses.
Upon reaching the hallway at the top of the stairs, he could hear voices—foreign voices. The door to the drawing room was ajar. Although he could see nobody, he could hear a man speaking what he recognized as Siamese from the familiar throat of a fellow Englishman.
The language that had once been his only form of communication came more than a little slowly to him these days. It had been many years since he had mouthed the many tones and monosyllables of Siam and he struggled to follow the conversation.
Onyx City (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 3) Page 4