“What of David and Gavril? They’ve no hand in this game. Let them go. Get them out of the way.”
Rolfe pulled the pipe stem from his mouth. Smoke leaked through the bottom edge of his mustache. “No hand? My dear man, they are the very stakes!”
Ikey planted his palms on the desk and leaned forward. “This is not a game. If you want my continued cooperation, you will let them go. You will get them out of here.”
Rolfe leaned back and popped the stem of the pipe back under his mustache. “They will remain here precisely because I want your continued cooperation.”
Another roll of smoke puffed out from under his mustache. Rolfe then pointed the stem at Ikey. “I know you, my dear man. As I can see the bigger picture, I can see through men like you. You have no regard for yourself. You harbor a deep-seated contempt for yourself over something you have done, or failed to do. And so your life means little to you. It is but a mere penitentiary sentence to be served out until you can redeem yourself in the eyes of others. You do this by placing yourself in servitude of others, placing their lives above your own. So threatening you would be worthless, would it not? And since you cannot see that serving my cause would bring you the redemption you seek, I must therefore threaten others in your place. And since you have grown quite fond of that pair of sodomites out there, I’m afraid their continued presence is required to ensure your ongoing cooperation.”
Ikey’s mechanical hand clicked as both his hands drew up into fists.
“Let them go,” Ikey growled. “You have Cross.”
“Indeed,” Rolfe said as he placed his elbows on the desk and drew a puff of smoke off the pipe. “But I hear that Mr. Cross is fond of both drink and talk. And my friend tells me that Cross says you are inordinately fond of his wife, which he says very matter-of-factly, and which, I must say, gives me reason to doubt your loyalty to Cross, or to any man, for that matter.”
Ikey slapped the pipe from Rolfe’s hand. It struck the bookshelf in a spray of sparks and clattered to the floor. Ikey lunged forward, grabbed Rolfe by the lapels of his coat, and yanked him to his feet. “Don't speak to me of loyalty!”
“You asked for the truth, did you not?” Rolfe asked. His face was expressionless, bland. The odor of tobacco rolled thick off him.
Ikey held the man a moment more as he worked on the gumption to drag Rolfe across the desk, thrash him to the floor, and beat the tar from him. But instead, Ikey’s strength leaked away until Rolfe pulled himself from the grip.
Rolfe straightened his coat, then stepped over to his pipe. “You are not a killer, Ikey.” He stooped down, picked up the pipe, and brushed it off with his hand. “There’s no shame in that.”
“I’ve killed a man before.”
Rolfe produced a handkerchief from a pocket and rubbed at the pipe stem. “You do not know what it is to have hands steeped in blood until you kill for a reason.”
Ikey turned his attention to the desk blotter. “What makes you think I didn’t have a reason?”
“A man who kills for a reason isn’t bothered with finding an excuse. But now I know…” Rolfe wagged the pipe stem at him, then shook his head. “No. I suppose I don’t. Would you tell me the truth? Would you tell me why you despise yourself so?”
Ikey looked away and took a deep breath.
“As I thought,” Rolfe said. “And so how is it that I am the liar who cannot be trusted?”
“Because you are threatening my friends and holding them captive.”
“Yes,” Rolfe said, “but I am being perfectly honest about it, am I not?”
Ikey snatched the book and ruler from the desk and stormed from the room. He slammed the door behind him. It didn’t bang loud enough. Didn’t let him feel the percussive force of it deep in his chest.
Ikey stomped past David and Gavril and slipped back into his makeshift workspace. He tossed the book and ruler to the bed and stood before the mechanical ass, hands on his hips as he considered what it would take to instruct the automaton to throttle Rolfe.
“Everything all right?” David asked from behind.
Ikey pressed the tips of his fingers to his forehead. “Yes. It’s only—Rolfe and I don’t quite see eye to eye.”
“I don’t care for him,” David said. “I mean, I know he saved Gavril’s arm. And no one has said a peep to me about tacking this repair bill on to my reconciliation.” David wiggled his fingers in the air. “But there is a ruthlessness to that man that makes me uneasy. The way he dealt with those last two women...” David shook his head.
Ikey fished through the toolbox for a pair of pliers. Metal jangled. The scent of iron drifted up to his nose. He inhaled deeply. Tools had their own smell, and he missed that odor. He missed sitting over the workbench with his uncle, figuring out some busted tractor part or fixing a widow’s stalled clock.
Pages chattered. Ikey looked over his shoulder. David thumbed through the new ledger.
“What’s this?” David asked.
“New instructions. Rolfe wants me to tell this thing to break the water line that feeds a boiler.”
David cocked an eyebrow. “You can’t be serious.”
Ikey pulled a pair of pliers out of the toolbox. “It’s what he said. He showed me a diagram. Where he wants the pipe broken and everything.”
David chewed at his lip. “That can’t be right. Why all this secrecy if he’s after a broken water main? And why send that thing to do it? He can break a pipe on his own.”
“He won’t tell, and I didn’t ask.”
“It’s fishy. I got a bad feeling about this. I really do.”
Ikey knelt down before the mechanical ass and fed his pliers into the machine’s innards. “He knows about you. You and Gavril.”
David snapped the book shut. “What about us?”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, seriously. What does he know? He hasn’t seen anything. It’s only sodomy that is illegal in this country. I’m allowed to love whoever I please.”
The piece Ikey was manipulating snapped off. “Piss!” He sank back on his heels. “You know as well as I do what a load of codswallop that is. If Rolfe takes his suspicion to the magistrate, that suspicion alone will be enough to convict you.”
David shrugged. “And they’ll do what? Put me in a workhouse?”
Ikey stared at David a second, then began to chuckle. “Filching bread? Ha.”
David smiled and leveled a finger at Ikey. “That part is true.”
“What’s your story, David?”
David sat on the bed and folded his clicking hands over his knees. He heaved a sigh and rocked forward. “It’s a sad tale, to tell the truth. But it doesn’t matter, and it bores me to death to even think about it. All that matters is what has happened to me since I got here. I’ve met the best people, strangely enough, and I couldn’t be happier, though the price is a mite bit high.”
He held his hands up before him. The feigned air of indifference cracked as he curled his fingers. They clicked and stuttered in tiny, jerking movements as the tin-plated fingertips settled against the iron rods of his palms. As David watched, the color drained out of his face and left his eyes vacant and glassy.
“How can you leave him?” Ikey asked.
David opened his mouth to protest, but then let it go. His gaze dropped to Ikey’s chest. “If you have to ask, then I can’t explain it to you. It is what you do when you love someone more than your own miserable life. When you love that person twenty-fold. When you wake up and you see that person next to you and you realize how much bigger you are on the inside than you thought you were, because how else could so much love and feeling be packed inside? And the enormity of that…” David drummed his fingers across the tops of his thighs. “It’s a responsibility. I’m more because of him. And so I have to be better than I was before him, because I am more. More of a person. And that responsibility can’t be ignored. And if that means that he’ll live a better life without me—“
“He won’t.”
David started, as if slapped.
“You know that,” Ikey pressed. “He won’t be better off without you.”
“And what makes you such a blasted expert on the subject?”
Ikey glanced at the part in the screens. It was empty. He then stepped up to the part and made sure no one stood nearby. Rolfe was apparently still in his office, and Gavril lay in bed, sleeping fitfully.
Satisfied, Ikey sat next to David. He threaded his fingers together and stared into the junctions of iron and flesh.
“Do you ever feel confused?” Ikey asked his hands, then looked over at David. “I… I don’t know how it is for you and Gavril—Hell.” Ikey shook his head. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know how it is for anyone else. It’s not like anything, you know? The stories. The songs. The plays, like Romeo and Juliet and all that. I thought love would be so clear and simple. Like a roaring fire. A huge, roaring fire that I walked around with in my heart and my head and it would make everything so… But it would be clear, you know? It would be obvious. But it’s not. I don’t think. It’s… I love Rose. I’m sure I do. But loving her is not like the fire. It’s like the… you see the shifting light on the wall behind the fire, right? Loving her is like the darkness between the shifts. Those patches of shadow that slide around. But it's not like shadow, you know? … I’m not making any sense, am I?”
David shook his head, then patted Ikey on the back. “Not a lick, sir. Not a blessed lick.”
Ikey smirked. “Loving Rose is like that bigness you mentioned. But in me, it’s not filled with anything. It’s empty. It’s dark space and it makes me feel hollow on the inside, yet that makes me happy. Because I know… It’s better to have that emptiness than to have that filled with rage and hate and anger. I was afraid that was all there would be to me. My dad. He beat the living hell out of me and my brothers, my mum and my sister. All of us. And I thought for sure that that was all that would be inside of me, too. But Rose showed me that it was empty. And I realized I could fill that up with anything I wanted. Love, even.”
David nodded.
“That’s not how it is for you and Gavril?”
David shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I… assumed it’d be the same between a man and a woman. But I can’t say I know from experience. I’ve never really… pursued that avenue. And I never really talked about it before. I mean, you know how it is. You’re an Englishman.”
Ikey smirked again. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it?”
David rolled his eyes. “Completely. But that’s what… I don’t know. I’m so used to hiding my feelings that I forget that they’re there sometimes.”
“You don’t hide it very well.”
“Not here, no. I got nothing to lose here. Nowhere to fall. The blokes in here like me, and those who don’t have learned to keep their distances. But out there, outside these walls, it’s a different world. Out there, love is an act of bravery. And Gavril, bless his soul, hasn’t got long to live. The consumption will get the best of him. I want him to pass peacefully, outside of here, outside of Kerryford. If you can’t take him back to Russia, then take him to Whitby, please. Let him sit on the shore and breathe the fresh air. Let him get enough to eat, plenty to drink. Find him a church to pray in proper. I can’t do these things. And I can’t…” David glanced away and took a deep breath.
“Blast it all,” David said and slapped his hand on his knee, then winced. “All right, I’m going to be honest with you here. Completely honest. I can’t stand the thought of having to pretend that he is not the center of my every thought. I can’t stand the idea of putting that distance between us that proper men keep, and pretending that he’s nothing more than an old chum as I watch him die.”
At the last of that, David bit off the word, as if he wanted to pull it back, wrench it into his throat before it escaped into the wild. He swallowed hard and his Adam’s apple bobbed, like he got a piece of it, and it tasted awful. So bloody awful that his face reddened and his eyes watered.
Ikey put his left arm around David. The man let loose with a muffled sob and fell into Ikey’s shoulder. One of David’s hands gripped the front of Ikey’s shirt and clutched it tight. David shuddered, and Ikey tried to recall the series of movements needed to make his fingers pat the back of the other man, but he couldn’t recall. Instead, he pressed his lips to the mop of David’s hair, and as he did so, he saw through the part in the screens that Gavril was sitting up in bed, his splinted arm nestled in his lap, his face stuffed into a mask of stoicism.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The following day, as Ikey knelt before the automaton and worked a pair of pliers into the delicate and tiny rows of switches near the bottom of the mechanical ass, he shook his head at how ridiculous he was to think that Rose might have been an automaton. As he in turns marveled and cursed at the complexity required to get the mechanical ass to do even simple things, he truly grasped how far the limits of mechanics would have to be pushed to simulate something as complex as personality. Rose could not be an automaton any more than the pile of rubbish before him could be Rose.
Still, he looked forward to meeting with Cross again, and soon. So much he wanted to tell the man. He wanted to show off his arm and his eye. He wanted to confer with him late at night as they hovered over a spray of parts and tools and a dwindling bottle of scotch. He wanted to work with him as they teased out the secret limits of mechanics and built something that would stun the world and make this heap look as sophisticated as a child’s wind-up toy. With his ingenuity and Cross’s penchant for sophistication, they could build a wonder.
Ikey placed the pliers on the floor. He clenched his right hand into a fist, then spread his fingers wide several times. He wiggled them, then stretched them back on his thigh.
He glanced back at David and Gavril. They were still asleep. Gavril lay on his side, curled into a ball, his splinted arm before his chest. David lay wrapped around him. It was plain to see his arm around the Russian man even though a sheet covered them.
Ikey picked up his pliers and returned his attention to the automaton. He snaked the points into a groove, paused, and then pulled them out. He closed his eye, then shook his head again at having forgotten the always-open glass eye. He missed feeling Rose close by.
In Cross’s house, it wouldn’t be an issue. Ikey smirked and smiled at the thought of hiding inside the house, troubled by his sighted nature. What a pair they would make; himself sitting in the dark and staring at the woman who hid her face from the man whose eye could not close.
Ikey set the pliers aside again and reached up to his face. His fingertips brushed the rubbery tissue around the glass lens.
With a muffled grunt, he staggered to his feet. His knees throbbed. He stretched his back and his spine popped in several places. He slipped out through the dividers. Stepping lightly, he passed David’s and Gavril’s bed and moved on into the hallway and stopped at an open door on his right. Beyond lay shelves of goods. One whole wall was comprised of medical supplies. The shelves on the opposite wall brimmed with food in canisters and liquids in bottles, a variety of elixirs and medicines.
Ikey entered and turned his attention to the medical supplies. Among the bandages and bottles and boxes sat a lamp with a mirrored flue. He picked it up and held it before himself, turning it in his hands in order to see his reflection. The flue presented his glass eye, staring out of a warped mass of scar tissue like a porthole in his face. Pink and white scar tissue ran in webs across the left side of his brow, and in spots, he could see the pattern of the gauze that used to bandage his head when he first came to the hospital. The scarring went up over his hairline and left bald patches in the stubble of his dark hair.
Ikey shifted the flue to his right hand and reached up with his left as he tilted his head and took in the mats of scars that ran down the side of his face, past his ear which looked to be made of half-melted wax. His fingertips ran along the ridges of scar tissue, and he felt nothing more than a sl
ight pressure where his mechanical hand pressed against his face.
The mechanical hand dropped away. With a grunt, Ikey dashed the lantern to the floor. The glass exploded. Mirrored shards slid and skittered across the floor and caught glints of the burning sconces above and tossed the light back as if the light itself had been shattered.
Ikey looked up. The silhouette of his reflection glared back from a jar stuffed with cotton wadding. He drew back his left fist, then let it fly. The jar popped and collapsed around his mechanical fist. Cotton spilled around his hand and rolled to the floor.
He felt none of the satisfying feeling of force against flesh and bone. None of the electric charge of a punch ringing up the length of his arm. None of the pain that shot back, that let him know how hard he had hit his target. None of that sense of control, of power, of taking back what had been torn from him.
Ikey swept his arm along the shelf. A spray of jars and canisters cascaded to the floor. The resulting crash hit his ears like Cross’s music boxes gone mad. Ikey stomped in the glass. He whirled around. His fist slammed into a tin of biscuits. The lid popped off. The tin crumpled in a crunch that sounded hollow and empty when his mechanical fist gave no report.
He spun around and punched a bottle of some dark liquid. It exploded against his fist. The odors of anise and alcohol swelled and swirled around him. He punched the bottle next to it, and the one next to it. Each exploded. The splash. The shattering glass. Shards washed from the wooden shelf and tinkled across the floor as a great, swelling homesickness enveloped Ikey.
He passed his fist through the front of a wooden box. Rolls of gauze spilled out to the floor where they soaked up the soup of liquids.
Ikey clenched his monster’s fist and stared into it, the knuckles of iron, the round hinges, the rods and gears and everything that his dreams were made of when his dad went into a rage. All of it at the end of his shoulder.
Tin Fingers: Book 2 in the Arachnodactyl Series Page 24