by David Liss
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed at me.
“What?” Elias asked. “Your men know nothing of your living upon Company silver?”
“Of course,” he said, rather quickly. “They don’t turn their backs on money, no matter if it come from the East India or elsewhere. It is an uncomfortable arrangement, but it is one they have come to accept.”
I rose to my feet. “I beg you to listen, men of the silk trade. Is it true that you know Mr. Hale is in the pay of the East India Company?”
All eyes were upon me. I believe I would have been damned for a blackguard liar had not Hale risen to his feet and hurried to the door as quickly as his sickened condition would permit him. A half dozen of his men followed him. I doubted that Hale would get very far, and the only question was what they would do to him once they caught him. He was a sad man and a sick man, and he had sold out his boys for a false hope of a magic cure. There would be rough music, I had no doubt of it, but I also had no doubt that Hale would live to accept his reward of the king’s touch and to discover the falseness of the hope.
ELIAS AND I THOUGHT it best to move to another tavern and found one not too far away, where we sat with our pots and our contemplation.
“I approve your cleverness in discovering Hale’s treachery,” he said, “but the truth is, Weaver, I find it to be too little and too late. I cannot help but feel that we have been here before.”
I raised one eyebrow. “What do you say?”
“Well, this isn’t the first time this has happened,” he said. “You become involved in some inquiry, and it is clear that there are great forces out there trying to manipulate you, and despite your best efforts in the end you are manipulated. Maybe some of the more reprehensible people are punished, but those with power get precisely what they want. Does that not bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me.”
“Is there no way to be more vigilant?” he asked. “You know—to prevent this sort of thing from happening so regularly?”
“I suppose there is.”
“Then why have you not availed yourself of it?”
I looked up at him and grinned. “Who says I haven’t?” I finished my pot and set it down. “With so many spies and so much manipulation involved, I could not but be aware that there were those who would turn it to their advantage if I let my guard down for a moment. As ever when dealing with men of such power, there is only so much one can accomplish, but I believe I have done my best to thwart them.”
“But how so?” he asked.
“Finish your pot, and you will find out.”
WE TOOK A COACH to Durham Yard, where we once more knocked on the door and were greeted by Bridget Pepper, Ellershaw’s wife’s daughter. She was chief, I now believed, among those I had styled the Pepper widows. Elias and I were shown inside, where we waited but briefly before the good woman entered the parlor.
“Good afternoon, madam,” I said. “Is your husband home?”
“What cruel joke is this?” she asked. “You know quite well that he is dead.”
“I thought I knew that quite well,” I explained to Elias, but with the intention that she listen as well. “It was one of the few basic truths I was given by Cobb, but then I began to wonder. With so much deception about, how did I know Pepper really was dead? What if Cobb lied to me, or what if Cobb had been lied to? Given that we know he had a traitor in his midst, I now believe it to be the latter.”
“So Pepper is not dead?”
“No. It was part of the agreement he reached with the East India Company. He would give up the plans—plans they knew he would never be able to duplicate on his own because, as one of his other wives explained, he lost ideas the moment he wrote them down. In exchange for this sacrifice, he would be permitted to remain married to this young lady here. And perhaps something else: a new life abroad, I suspect. You must truly love him, to remain by his side despite his—shall we say—excesses.”
“I know not why you should defame his memory and torment me so,” she said. “He’s dead. He’s dead.”
“I wonder,” I said. I removed something from my pocket and showed it to her. “I wonder if this is the sort of thing that might bring him back from the grave.”
With my warmest smile, I showed the young lady the octavo containing the plans for Pepper’s engine.
“WHAT DID ELLERSHAW HAVE?” Elias asked me, as we walked to the back of the house.
“The first book I received from the lady in Twickenham,” I said. “It appeared remarkably similar in form and content, and there was no way to tell the plans it contained were abortive. Indeed, it looked to me so much like the true plans, that had there not been a slight imperfection on the calfskin of the other, a mark in the shape of a P, I would not have been able to tell them apart.”
In the back of the house, Mr. Pepper sat with a book and a glass of wine. He rose to greet me. “I must admit,” he said, “I had some vague hope this was a possibility, but it was never more than a vague hope. You are indeed an impressive man.”
But it was not I who was impressive. There was in fact something about Pepper that radiated more warmth, more kindness, more contentment than any other man I’d ever met. He was indeed handsome, but the world is full of handsome men. No, he had something else, and though I knew it was false, it was still remarkable and undeniable, like a bolt of lightning that one fears but that still produces awe.
I handed him the book. “I suggest you remove yourselves to some other part of the kingdom. The East India Company may not take well to your attempting to realize these plans.”
“No. As you deduced, that was the agreement. My death should be widely reported in order to keep me safe from the French. The ministry went to a great deal of trouble to make sure that French spies intercepted letters telling how the Company had murdered me.”
“And,” I guessed, “Mr. Ellershaw brokered this deal, providing you with a handsome dowry, allowing you to live happily with his stepdaughter, and ignoring your other—shall we say—entanglements, in exchange for surrendering the plans.”
Mrs. Pepper put a hand upon her husband’s shoulder. “You need not dance about the matter,” she said. “I know the somewhat circuitous path my Absalom walked before we came together. I do not resent him for doing what he had to, and now that we are joined I am content to forget his past.”
“But then,” I proposed, “Ellershaw had second thoughts. He could not risk your continued existence and wished to have you removed. It was then Mrs. Ellershaw who protected you and hid you away. That is why she thought I sought out information about her daughter on her husband’s behalf. I don’t know if she understood the truth of Mr. Pepper’s other attachments, but if she did, it could hardly matter more to her than it did to her daughter.”
Pepper patted his wife’s hand and grinned at me, a look both winning and lascivious. “Actually I must point out—for I am rather proud of it—that this good woman delivered unto me two handsome dowries. The bargain we struck was that Mrs. Ellershaw was to believe her husband violently disapproved of the match. She provided the dowry, and then Mr. Ellershaw matched it. A rather handsome scheme, I believe.”
He did not wait for my approbation, but instead began to look through the book. “Oh, yes. Very clever. Very clever indeed. I do have my moments. At times I think myself the very best of men.” He paused and looked up at me. “You must tell me why you do not keep the plans for yourself. This cannot yield fruit for some many years, and thus I can offer you no reward.”
“I don’t want the plans, and I don’t want the reward,” I said. “I could never understand your designs, and bringing them to any useful state should be far more work than I desire. I shall be honest with you, Mr. Pepper. Though we have never met, I have followed your trail all over the metropolis and have found you to be a most reprehensible man. You take what you will and care nothing for the feelings of those you harm.”
“That’s rather harsh,” he said good-naturedly. “And
you’ll find that there are many who disagree with you.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, “I cannot claim to like you, but I believe that the man who invented the engine ought to benefit from it, even if that man is a rogue. To take the plans for myself would be theft of the highest order. I also believe that in the end you will do much less harm in the world if you are financially comfortable. And, finally, my aim here is that the East India Company be dealt with as it ought, and I believe you are enough of a contriver to see these plans brought to reality.”
“It is very honorable of you.”
“No, it is wicked,” I said. “I want them to know their efforts failed. All this energy expended in keeping a man from improving technology, in preventing people from having more control over the commodities they wish to buy. They think they own mankind when they only own their company. I have been very badly abused, Mr. Pepper, and the greatest satisfaction I can have is doing what I can to make certain that those who abused me are brought low. I do not think that it will happen soon, but I can content myself with knowing that I have planted a seed that favors the future.”
He grinned and slipped the book in his pocket. “Then many thanks to you,” he said. “I’ll use it in good health.”
Back in the hackney, Elias let out a laugh. “He truly is a foul man.”
“They’re all foul. We’re all of us foul, each of us in our own way. We excuse it in ourselves, and perhaps in those we love, but we delight to condemn it in others.”
“That is very philosophical of you.”
“I am of a philosophical bent today.”
“Then here is something to ponder,” he said. “It is a very strange thing that when dealing with these companies the man who acts out of spite and revenge, as you have now, comes across as the most moral. That, I suppose, is the warping power of greed.”
I had no doubt that he supposed correctly. I struck a blow against greed that day—I would not take the satisfaction away from myself by denying it—but I knew it was like striking a blow against a storm. If a man had a delicate enough instrument, he might be able to measure the effect, but the storm would still rage according to its inclination; it would do its damage, and the world would never know that someone had exerted his will, perhaps all of his will, in the effort to lessen its force.
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
OLEN STEINHAUER AND DAVID LISS
___
I first met David Liss in northern Italy at a crime-fiction-and-blues festival. Mr. Liss, hiding behind stylish prescription glasses, comes across as a man lost in his own world … until he begins to speak. From that point on, you find yourself in the company of a man of excellent humor, keen intelligence, and razor wit. This author of six critically acclaimed bestselling novels (and the recipient of an Edgar Award) is probably best known for his character Benjamin Weaver, the early eighteenth-century ex-pugilist and “thief-taker,” whose exploits lay bare the early traumas and extremes of modern capitalism while taking the reader on a thrill ride through the underbelly of London. The Devil’s Company continues his story.
This interview was conducted in our homes in Budapest, Hungary, and San Antonio, Texas, a world away from Benjamin Weaver’s London.
—Olen Steinhauer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tourist
Olen Steinhauer: How did you get started writing fiction?
David Liss: Corny though it might sound, I’ve always wanted to write fiction. I have a very clear memory of writing a short story in the second grade. I believe it involved spaceships. After I graduated from college, I tried writing a novel, but I wasn’t sufficiently prepared for how hard it would be to put a real book together, and I gave up, concluding that my ambitions of being a writer were misguided. However, I never really stopped thinking about it, and several years later, when I was in graduate school, I decided I would try again. This time I was able to apply the analytical and critical thinking skills I’d gained in a punishing doctoral program to figuring out how a novel actually worked and where I’d gone wrong before. Those efforts turned into my first published novel, A Conspiracy of Paper.
OS: In 2008, you were named an Artist for Integrity by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Can you tell us something about how that came about, and how I can get one?
DL: That was, admittedly, something I never expected. I was invited to participate in a UN anti-corruption convention in Bali along with a series of other artists—a director, an actress, and a couple of musicians. I never really understood why they selected me, but it involved a free trip to Bali, so I wasn’t complaining.
OS: One thing that really impresses in The Devil’s Company is the way you use language to evoke the period without it ever feeling stuffy, static, or imitative. Which is to say, it reads like a historic text imbued with modern pacing. How did you achieve this? Did you read a lot of primary texts from the time, or did you simply let your imagination roam?
DL: Historical fiction is always a tricky balancing act. I want to maintain the illusion of bringing the reader into the past, but at the same time, a contemporary audience wants pacing and language to be absorbing and comfortable. When I was in graduate school studying eighteenth-century British literature, I read countless eighteenth-century documents, and I feel like I got a pretty good sense of the rhythm and feel of the language. When I write a novel set in that period, I try to invoke that rhythm and pepper what is essentially modern prose with eighteenth-century vocabulary, idioms, and, occasionally, syntax. When I first tried doing this, I had no idea if it would work, but now I feel relatively comfortable with the middle ground I’ve staked out.
OS: There’s a school of thought that posits that historical fiction is, in essence, fantasy fiction, because none of us were around to know the visceral reality of those times. Do you hold to this view?
DL: I think this is essentially true. Historical fiction often fulfills the same escapist role as fantasy fiction, though the reader has the advantage of learning actual history along the way. Not that the history of orcs is without interest…. Much of the pleasure of reading—and writing—historical fiction is the re-creation of an alien world. The historical novelist takes many of the details of that world from the actual historical record, but there is always a lot of guesswork, connecting the dots, and speculation involved, even in historical fiction that follows the script of history fairly closely. I try and re-create the past as faithfully and as accurately as I can, but I also know that it is my interpretation with my biases and conceptions.
OS: You’ve recently entered the world of comics, writing for Marvel. Has that had any effect on the way you write novels?
DL: I’m not sure it’s had a direct effect, but the experience has been an incredible challenge for me as a storyteller, and an opportunity to grow. Writing a comic book script is an entirely different way of telling a story than is writing a novel, and I think any time a writer gets to rethink the mechanics of narrative, it’s a good thing. I would never write fiction the way I write comics, but I think my experience in one medium affects and informs the way I approach another. And I also think that the core elements of what makes a story successful—tone, character, narrative energy—are all the same in just about every storytelling medium, be it fiction, comics, television, or film. The difference is how the medium permits the execution of these elements.
OS: The Devil’s Company shines a fascinating light on the relationship between Jews and Christians in early eighteenth-century England. Ellershaw, for example, constantly gives Weaver backhanded compliments that belittle his race. How did London compare to other European capitals in regard to anti-Semitism?
DL: In the early eighteenth century, London was probably the most desirable city in Europe for Jews to live. The novel depicts what to contemporary readers must seem like pure anti-Semitism, and of course it is, but it has to be seen within the context of English culture at the time. The English, in general, disliked Jews, but they also disliked Catholics, the French
, Germans, the Dutch, the Italians, and just about everyone else, and they were not shy about saying so. There was very little violent anti-Semitism in eighteenth-century Britain, and Jews were never in any real danger of being expelled or having their property arbitrarily seized, so as distasteful as much of the English attitude seems, it is a far cry from most of Europe at the time, and certainly most of Europe in centuries past.
OS: Benjamin Weaver is a “thief-taker,” essentially a hired gun (or fist), a mercenary. How prevalent was this profession in England at the time, and was there a specific thief-taker you used as a model?
DL: Thief-taking was very real. There was no police force, such as we understand it, in eighteenth-century Europe, and law enforcement was largely a privatized business. Thief-takers received a fairly hefty bounty for bringing in felons who were later convicted, and that was supposed to promote freelance law enforcement. Often it simply promoted schemes by which poor and helpless victims were framed by thief-takers conspiring to find a patsy and share the bounty.
Benjamin Weaver is, in many ways, inspired by Daniel Mendoza, who lived much later in the century. He was a much celebrated Jewish boxer, and later, when he was too old to fight, he earned his living by accepting thief-taking commissions. Like Weaver, he was generally an honorable fellow, but thief-takers of this sort were likely in the minority.
OS: In an interview with January Magazine, you talked about Benjamin Weaver’s love interest, Miriam, who makes only a brief appearance in this book. You said that you’d gotten rid of her because you “felt like the character was done.” What did you mean by that, and does this mean that you can see a point where Weaver himself will be “done”?