by John Gardner
In the flood of light, Carbonardo clearly saw Idle Jack Idell standing a little in front of a knot of people, and to his right Daniel thought he could see Sal Hodges, hemmed in by two burly rampsmen. Sal, he would have sworn, looked sore afraid.
There followed a massive thunderclap that sent a further shiver of fear through Carbonardo, and the floor seemed to move under him.
IN POPLAR, DOWN near the West India Docks, in The Sheet Anchor public house they heard the clap of thunder but did not see the lightning flash, for the pub fronted onto a narrow alley off West India Dock Road that blocked out the light and made the landlord, Ebb Kimber, keep gaslights on in his house almost round the clock, for his receipts from the bar were never good enough to cover the expense of putting the electric in.
The thunder came just as they arrived, walking into the saloon bar: Albert Spear, Lee Chow, and foxy little Ember, all three of them smart, dressed in well-cut suits with greatcoats—men about town.
“Was that thunder?” Ember asked.
“Yea. Queer weather.” Spear sucked his teeth. “Strange. Fog and ice when we got in, now there’s a bloody thunderstorm.”
“The weather’s changing. Said so in Reynolds’ News.”
“Well, they’d know, wouldn’t they, Reynolds’ News?” Spear gave Ember what was known as an old-fashioned look and repeated “Reynolds’ News” with a curl to his lip.
“Once I saw pouring rain one side of street and hot sunlight on other side.”
“Where was that, then, Lee Chow?”
“Was in Nanjing.”
“Blimey,” Ember smirked, “I thought the nearest you been to China was Wapping.”
“Ah, in my young days I spent many year in China.”
They came fully into the room, acknowledging an elderly man, sitting on his own by the fire reading the Evening Standard, and the two younger men at the bar with a woman who looked flighty with a smudge too much rouge on her cheeks, a ratty feather boa round her neck, and a cackling laugh that could wake the dead if the wind was in the right direction.
Divesting themselves of their greatcoats, the three men pulled chairs up against the wall behind a pair of round, marble-topped tables and Spear went over, rapped on the bar, and ordered three pints of porter.
No money changed hands, and the landlord greeted him warmly, calling him Mr. Spear, very correct, treating him with respect. Then the door opened and a tall man peeped in, as if checking on who had come into the saloon bar. On seeing Spear his wary eyes lit up.
“Mr. Spear,” he said. “How nice to see you. Unexpected, like.”
“Will Brooking,” Spear acknowledged. “Still lurking round here, then. Good lad.”
“Doing the job you give me, Bert. What? Six, seven years ago?” and the newcomer thrust out a hand like the head of a battle-axe. He had a craggy face, watchful eyes, and carried himself like an army man.
“See him before,” Lee Chow announced, taking a long swallow of his drink.
Spear rarely smiled, but he did now. “One of mine. Prizefighter he was—a boy of the Holy Ground. Used to go round the country fairs, with the travelling people. Keeping an eye out here, in the pub. Good to see him still doing his job.”
“Bet he hasn’t been paid in a while.” Ember had an annoying, somewhat whining voice that went with his ratty, foxy face.
Ranged along the wall, they all had a good view of the door, ready to scrutinize any customer who entered, and they began talking about how good it was to be back in London. “You could put me down in the Smoke and I’d know where I was in minutes,” Spear told them.
“Yea, by the smell of soot and smoke,” Ember said.
“Same for me in Nanjing,” Lee Chow added. “It smell highly of pork. Ve-iy pungent, pork on the butcher stall in market.”
“Raw meat can niff when it wants to,” Spear agreed.
The man reading his paper asked if they were off a ship, and Spear gave him the fish eye. “In a way. Who’s asking?”
“Oh, I’m nobody. Just heard your Chink friend talking about China, so, naturally I wondered.”
“We’ve been out of the country for a while, but we’re back now,” Ember said with stunningly obvious finality.
“I remember this pub from when I was a nipper,” Spear told them. “I used to do the shivering dodge round here with my sister, Violet.”
“What is shivering dodge, Bel’t?” asked Lee Chow.
“Worked best in cold weather.” Spear smiled as if looking back through the tunnel of his memory. “We’d come out in rags. Hardly anything covering us. Nothing on our feet. The trick is to stand there and look pathetic. And shiver of course. Mind you have to do it near a pub and where there are plenty of people about. You stand there, looking miserable and shivering like a leaf in the breeze. Always worked.”
Ember gave a dry little laugh. “They still do it, kids do it in winter. I seen ’em. Fair brings tears to the eyes if it’s done right.”
Lee Chow laughed. “Shivering dodge,” he said.
“Eventually, if you stand there—”
“Shivering—”
“Yea, shivering, well, some person, usually a woman, she’ll say, ‘Ho, Lord love us. Look here, Charles’”—he was doing a posh voice now, exaggerated and quite funny, moving his hands, fluttering them around like a woman might. “‘Ho, my goodness me! Ho dear, ho dear! This child. Ho my. Child, does your mother know you’re out in this cold weather?’… ‘Ain’t got no muvver, miss.’… ‘Your father then?’…’Ain’t got no favver. Only me and me little sister in the whole world.’…’Ho my poor child.’ And if you’re lucky she’d get her husband, or her gent, to take you to the pub and give you some bread and cheese and a pint of porter to warm you, maybe there’d be a bowl of hot soup ‘n’ all—nip of brandy, if you were working well. Sometimes you’d even come away with some money. Sixpence. Shilling maybe. You see, the blokes didn’t want to look cheap in front of their women. They may have suspected you were on the dodge, but the last thing they’d do is show meanness.”
“Yea, I done the shivering dodge an’ all,” Ember nodded.
“And I’d wager that you were very good at it, Ember.”
“Once, a man give me a whole silver crown to show off to his girl, but he come back, clipped me round the ear, and took it from me. I even called a copper, said he was robbing me, but the copper knew the dodge and clipped me ear again.”
Lee Chow was delighted with all this, his sallow little face screwed into a wreath of pleasure.
“Hey, Spear.” Ember leaned forward. “You ever do the dead man’s lurk?”
“Oh, that was good if you had the gift of tongues. If you were a good talker. But let me tell you about a woman I knew: We called her Haggie Aggie. She was an old whore. Past it by then. So she was on the shivering dodge well into her sixties, near seventy. Used to station herself close to a good pub, and she’d rub ash into her face, make her pale and pasty like, mess her hair up with grease. And she’d do more’n shiver. She’d moan, an’ do the fainting stagger an’ all. A real performer. Beautiful to watch. Someone would always take pity and they’d get her to the pub an’ give her a good glass of brandy. She’d move around, mind you, Haggie Aggie. She’d crawl round the pubs up the garden, up Covent Garden, where there’re plenty of young men after a bit of how’s-your-father. And they’d take her from pub to pub. She’d start eight or nine in the morning and she’d be pissed as a loon by midday. Really in need of a quack by noon. Half seas over she’d be. Too drunk to see a hole in a ladder. Pixillated. Oh, but my word, she didn’t half smell an’ all. Ponged something terrible. Don’t think she can ever’ve washed. Smelled like a badger’s touch hole.”
“Covered in fartleberries, eh?” Lee Chow gave a great guffaw, as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever said.
“Very witty,” mumbled Ember.
“Fart-e-bellies,” mused Lee Chow with an almost childish giggle. But he was a man who imagined a rousing breaking of wind to be the h
eight of sophistication.
Lee Chow now asked Spear what this dead man’s lurk was—“Ber’, wha’ dead man ’urk?” The Chink’s short tongue sometimes made it difficult for him to pronounce his Ls and Ts. But he was inconsistent and some said he did it on purpose, to sound exotic, but sometimes he would forget.
Bert Spear started to explain that you had to be very careful: pick a recently deceased person and go round checking up on him. “Then you’d go down the coffin maker, down the undertaker, and ask to visit the corpse, and you’d find out when the family were coming in and place yourself ready to bump into them, like. When they come out from the chapel of rest, after viewing the stiff.
“See, Lee Chow, they’d be overcome with grief, so more likely to believe any old bunny you spun them: how their dad had been a wonderful person and always paid you for odd jobs. ‘Only last week I did this, that, or the other and didn’t see him to get the two guineas he would have given me. No…No, lady…No, I don’t want any money now. It was a privilege to help him out…Well, ma’am, if you insist.’” He laughed heartily at the memory; then the door of the saloon bar opened, and all three heads turned as though they were all on the same string. If you were looking carefully enough you’d have noticed Ember’s hand duck inside his jacket, and Lee Chow’s right arm reach around to his back where he kept his little scalpel-sharp filleting knife safe in a scabbard.
It was Terremant, shaking himself like a big dog, coming in out of the rain. “Bloody hell,” he said grinning at his old friends. “It’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock out there. I’m drenched.”
The man by the fire made way so that Terremant could dry his coat by the flames, and Ember rushed off to get him a drink—“Drop of brandy, please, Ember. Dry out me innards.”
They all huddled together now, heads low and muttering softly.
“Fart-e-bellies,” Lee Chow murmured, then went off into a peal of high laughter.
“Keep quiet and shut up, you evil fucking Chinee,” Ember snapped.
“I got a letter for you, Bert. From hisself,” Terremant said, sliding the envelope over the tabletop.
Spear turned it over, glancing at the seal and flap. “You’ve read it, of course?” he asked.
“Could never break meself of the habit,” Terremant answered, raising his eyebrows.
“You’ll come to a sticky end, reading other people’s letters.” Spear broke the seal and ran his thumb up the flap, then pulled out the four pages.
“You’ve got to find another really big warehouse, like the one we had in Limehouse,” Terremant said. “You’re to buy it through that lawyer he’s always using. Funny-named geezer.”
“Gwyther,” said Spear as though there was nothing strange about Perry Gwyther’s interesting name.
“That’s the one. You buy a huge warehouse.”
“Where?”
“Here in Poplar, or back in Limehouse, Shadwell, wherever you find one. But it has to be near the river. Like before.”
“Then what?”
“You get hold of an architecture and get him to design a place just like we used to have.”
“You mean an architect.”
“If you say so, Bert. You know me and words. You get him, take him out for a steak supper. Tell him what you want, let him make the plans, then report to the Professor. I know where he’s staying for the time being, because I’m staying with him, seeing as how I’m looking after him.”
“And what’ve you been doing, Jim? You and the Professor?”
“I can’t say.”
“‘Course you can, Jim.”
“I can?”
“We’re all on the same team, old friend. You can share with us.”
“Yes,” he said, still a shade uncertain, remembering Moriarty’s admonishment. “Oh, I suppose so.” He paused as though still mulling it over. “Well, we spent some time in Vienna. He was looking for someone.”
“Was he now. And did he find who he was looking for?”
“I think he did. German gent.”
“Not that bugger Wilhelm Schleifstein?”* Ember snapped.
“No, not him. This one’s a fellow called von something. I think it’s von Hartzendov, or Hertzendorf, or something. I seen him somewhere before, but can’t place him. The Professor had dinner with him a few times. He seemed very happy, but he’s not happy now.”
“What’s he unhappy about now, then?”
“Like a bear with a sore head. It’s all there in the letter, Bert. He wants all of us to have a word with our people: all of them, the lurkers, punishers, whizzers, dippers, the madams, the girls, the blaggers, rampsmen, tricksters, and the gonifs. Since the Professor went away, family people have been leaving, defecting. Some forty percent of our people have gone. It’s all in that letter.”
“Wha’ is this?” Lee Chow asked. “Wha’ is defecting?”
“Defecting, Chow. Defecting means to change sides, go over to the enemy; it means to desert, to turn traitor.”
Lee Chow shook his head vigorously. “Not my people. No’ my men or women. No. Never my people.”
“I’m afraid they have, my old yellow friend. About a quarter of your folk have left the Professor’s employ.” Terremant nodded, most serious.
“And he wishes us to speak to each individual?” asked Spear.
Terremant leaned over and tapped the pages of the letter on the table with his forefinger. “It’s in there, Bert. Each of us have to see our people and count them off. Within reason, that is.”
“I’m glad it’s within—”
And this was the moment when the door of the saloon bar crashed open and they heard the rain lashing down outside.
Later, Ember said he had never seen anything like it, except when he saw Maskelyn and Cooke’s conjuring show at the Egyptian Hall. The large pistol appeared in Albert Spear’s hand like magic. He was sitting there looking at the pages of the letter one minute; the next he had a revolver in his hand pointing straight at the door and the bedraggled boy who came tottering through it near to tears.
The lad was soaked to the skin and breathing heavily. “Mr. Spear, sir. I got a hansom for the last few yards. I went on the bus, but I run the last five miles. I’m from the Professor …”
“Shush, lad,” Spear commanded. “Don’t take on.”
“You’re young Walker, aren’t you?” Ember almost spat at the boy, leaning over and taking a handful of the boy’s sopping jacket, dragging him across the table. “You’re Paul Walker’s little brother, always pestering me, wanting to be a lurker. What you doing out this time of night?”
Terremant touched Ember’s arm. “Hear him out, can’t you? Since he’s been back, the Professor’s brought in some of the keen street kids. Them what can run and are brave. Calls them his shadows. The lad’s jonnick.”
“What’s the message, boy?”
“You’re to go to Hoxton. Quick as greased lightning, he said.” He gave the address and added that they had to take Daniel Carbonardo. “You got to take him alive and breathing, bring him to the Professor. And you’ll be fighting time: Get to him before he has it away on his toes.”
“Where?”
“I know where,” Terremant told them as they reached for their coats and Spear instructed the rampsman, Will Brooking, who had come through from the other bar, to look after the boy, get his clothes dry, then make certain he got back to the Professor, put him in a hansom.
As they hurried out to the waiting hansom, Ember asked Spear if he knew who Daniel Carbonardo was.
“I know him alright.”
“You know his trade?”
“I do, God help us.”
Spear was not a religious man, but Ember noticed that he crossed himself as he climbed into the hansom. “Amen,” he said as they moved off, the cabbie urging his horse forward.
4
The Professor Reminisces
LONDON: JANUARY 16–17, 1900
SPEAR SENT THEIR CABBIE in search of a second hansom when the
y arrived in Hoxton, stopping near the church of St. John the Baptist and walking through to Carbonardo’s nice little villa. There were three ways in or out of Hawthornes: the front door; the area steps behind the railings to the kitchen door; and through the gate in the garden wall at the rear of the property and across the lawn, past flower beds and a giant oak tree, to the back door, which led into a small utility and cold room behind the kitchen. To the right of the back door there was a wash house where, on Monday mornings, Tabitha could be found stoking the little fire below the “copper” and stirring the week’s wash with wooden pincers and the like in the soapy, scummy, steaming water, the walls rivering with condensation, the air heavy with the scent of the green washing soap.
As was his right, Spear took charge, sending Ember and Lee Chow around to the back. “Into the garden,” he ordered. “Walk right up to the house and show yourselves. He’s in there, upstairs at the moment unless he’s got a wife. Show yourselves but don’t precipitate anything.” If nothing else, Spear used caution with men like Carbonardo, or anyone else with a deadly reputation.
“No wifee,” Lee Chow said confidently. “Daniel ’ive a’one except when he get woman in.”
“What did he say?” Spear asked Ember, cocking his head to one side and frowning.
“He says Carbonardo has no wife; and that he lives alone, apart from when he has a pusher in.”
Lee Chow had known about the rear of the house and gave the impression of having worked with Carbonardo; he knew Hoxton and the area and Carbonardo’s standing as a man to whom life was cheap.
The rain had stopped, leaving a cold, glistening slick on the roads and pavements, the gutters running, and a clean smell in the air, the storm having passed violently on, moving north.
As they travelled in from Poplar, Albert Spear had showered Terremant with questions:
“What’s all this about the Prof using boys? Shadows, you called them?”
“He’s been seriously incommoded.” Terremant shifted on the bench seat, embarrassed by his words, uncertain for a moment whether he had used them correctly.