A Conspiracy of Paper (47 page)

“Wild sent me,” he told me at last. Then he vomited, making no effort to avoid soiling himself.

I felt no surprise to learn that Wild was behind it, but I still needed to understand Wild’s interest in my inquiry. “Why?” I continued. “What did Wild tell you to do?”

“To watch you, ’e said.” He was gasping for breath as he spoke. “To let ’im know if anyone bothered you.”

It was not an answer I had anticipated. “What? Are you telling me that Wild sent you to tell him if I was attacked?”

Arnold attempted to move farther away from me. He crawled toward the corner. “Aye, I swear it. ’E wanted to know if you was bothered. And ’e wanted to see who it was what showed up to see you. He said I should see if I recognized ’em, and if not, to let ’im know what they looked like. But ’e said not to let you see me, and so when you did, I got scared and run off.”

“Who did he expect to show up?” I barked.

“I don’t know. ’E didn’t say.”

“Who killed Michael Balfour and Samuel Lienzo?”

I thought a direct approach worked best for a man in Arnold’s state. At first he only groaned and said “Oh, Christ,” again, but I moved toward his hand, and he came around. “It was Rochester,” he said at last. “Martin Rochester done it.”

I fought the swell of frustration. “And who is Martin Rochester?”

He looked up at me with an equal mixture of supplication and incredulousness. “Rochester is Rochester. What kind of question is that?”

“Does he have another name?”

He shook his head. “Not what I know.”

“I find it hard to believe that this man broke into Michael Balfour’s home and staged a false hanging himself. Who helped him?”

I knew he didn’t want to tell me, and he stared at me in such a way as to implore that I did not force him, but my look told him I cared nothing for him and I would as soon kill him myself as wait for Rochester to do it in revenge. “ ’E’s got ’is boys. Bertie Fenn, who I reckon you know about what with your killing ’im and all. Then ’e’s got three more—Kit Mann, Fat Billy, who ain’t fat, so don’t let the name fool you, and a third cove whose name I don’t know, but ’e’s got red hair. I keep my distance from all of ’em, except as what I see ’em once in a while, but I don’t have no truck with them, and I ain’t got nothin’ to do with these killings.”

“Where can I find these men?”

Arnold let out a string of public houses, taverns, and gin houses where they might be, but because he didn’t know the men well, he said he was only guessing.

I looked down at him—broken, beaten, and miserable. It was the second time I had left him so. I suppose, I thought to myself, he deserves no better. He is Wild’s man, and he plays his part in this villainy, yet I could not but feel some sympathy for a man so totally shattered.

I threw a few shillings on the floor before him and bade him come see me if he ever wished to serve a better master than Wild. I had no expectation that he would abandon the Thief-Taker General, and he never did do so, but I believed that by making the offer I would appear a greater man than I was.

I
FOUND THE MEN
before nightfall in a disreputable tavern near Covent Garden Market. They sat together, drinking and shouting incomprehensibly at one another in a language that was half impenetrable country accent and half drunken slur. I suppose I must have been fatigued, for I let them see me first. I had gone around the back to look at the various tables, when I heard a commotion of chairs overturning and saw three men running toward the door. I had looked at them when I first walked in and thought them only drinking men of the lower orders. Only once they had seen me and scrambled to their feet did I know them. I recognized one of them quite clearly, for he was the man who had denounced me outside the masquerade in the Haymarket.

Two of them got away, but one was slow, and I managed to tackle him, though I felt my age when I did so, for the old wound in my leg sent a pain shooting up to my hip. Nevertheless, I had a grip on the fellow, whose head knocked hard upon the dirt floor as I threw him down.

I had been in enough of these places to expect a crowd to gather around me, which it did, but to believe myself immune from interference—and indeed I was. I thus felt free to go about my business. Having banged his head sufficiently to obtain his full attention, I thought it time to begin. “What’s your name?”

“Billy, sir,” he gasped in the pathetic way of a begging street urchin. Indeed, he looked young, perhaps not more than seventeen, but his youthful appearance might have been owing to his extremely light and small form.

“Fat Billy?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Fat Billy,” I said, “you will answer my questions or your new nickname is going to be ‘Breathing Billy,’ and I assure you your new name will be every bit as ironic as the old.” My threat only confounded him, so I placed a hand hard over his throat and squeezed just a little—not enough to prevent him from speaking, but enough that he would understand my meaning. “What is Martin Rochester’s real name?”

“I don’t know, sir, I swear,” he rasped. His eyes bugged, and he looked to me like a fish, but I knew not if he feared me or the consequence of answering my question.

“What does he look like?” I tightened the pressure just a little.

“We never seen ’im. We get messages from ’im. Kit does. And ’e sends us money, but we ain’t never seen ’im. Maybe Kit ’as. I don’t know. We ain’t supposed to talk about ’im at all.”

I eased my grip a bit. “Did you kill Michael Balfour?”

He said nothing. He only stared up at me, terrified. A thin stream of blood trickled from his nose. I suppose my more delicate readers may grow weary of these descriptions of violence, but I know they will understand that these means were unavoidable in dealing with this species of man. Thus, let us suffice to say that there were cracking noises and a bit of screaming as well, and Fat Billy then felt comfortable telling me that, yes, he had indeed taken Michael Balfour’s life with the help of his three friends. They arranged to get the servants drunk and, with the potential witnesses off drinking or pursuing other pleasures, they had dragged Balfour into the stable, where they forced him into a noose and hanged him. The servants, I could only guess, feared the discovery of the unwitting role they had played and chose to remain silent.

What I wished more than anything else, as I sat atop him with my hand upon his throat, was to ask him if he had played any role in the murder of my father. Fenn was dead, but how did I know that Fat Billy had not participated? I tightened my grasp even as I thought on the question, but I knew I had not the time to indulge that particular revenge. Fat Billy’s friends might return, perhaps with help, and there was much I needed to know before they did.

“Did you steal anything?” I demanded.

“Nothing!” he exclaimed indignantly, as though outraged that I would ask so insulting a question. He would drag a man from his home and hang him, but he would not steal from him.

“You were not to search for anything. Stock issues?”

He tried to shake his head under my grasp. “We didn’t have nothing to do with those.”

He appeared to know about them, however. “Who was supposed to take the stock?”

He tried to shake his head again. “I wasn’t supposed to ’ear about it. Don’t want trouble.”

“Fat Billy, it occurs to me that you are in trouble right now.”

He must have agreed, because he gave me the name. Had Fat Billy delayed but an instant, he could have withheld his information, for just as our conversation ended, his two friends reappeared at the door, pistols in hand. There was some screaming of women, and men too, and a great deal of running for the door, which struck me as illogical, for the men with the guns were at the door. I grabbed Fat Billy and hoisted up his limp body to use him as a shield. I did not know if his friends would hesitate to shoot him, but I believed that even his slight frame would slow the lead.

I followed the momentum of the crowd, which forced the men away from the door, and angled my way around as well, until there was an instant when there was no one between me and Fat Billy and, ten feet away, the two other ruffians, pistols loaded and ready to fire. With a mighty thrust that sent pain shooting up my leg, I hurled Billy into them, knocking them off balance, but not down. I then took my chance while I had it and ran out of the tavern, where I managed to lose the villains in the crowd that had gathered outside to bemoan and delight in the carnage.

I
HAD NO DIFFICULTY
breaking into the house—I’d pillaged so many houses in my past that to do so now, on the side of justice rather than theft, gave me nothing but delight. This house was something larger than any I’d forced my way into before; there were four floors, and many rooms that my quarry might sleep in, so I had to maneuver my way about, avoiding servants who moved through the halls like shadowy figures, brandishing candles that seemed designed to hunt me out.

The first bedroom I slipped into was clearly not his. It was already occupied, and when I saw the silhouette of the old woman in the dark, heard her muttering in her sleep, I made my way out and tried another. I looked in four more rooms before I found another sleeping closet, this one empty, but I recognized a coat hung on a hook by the door. I sat down to wait, hoping that he was not out carousing all night, that he had not decided to travel from London. I was ready, and the sooner he returned, the sooner I would feel some measure of justice.

I had in my pocket the half-minute hourglass that the Tudesco beggar had given me. It had occurred to me to take it along just before I had departed my uncle’s house. I liked the idea that the Tudesco’s gift might serve me in some way, and I supposed if I ever saw him again, and could tell him how I had put his hourglass to use, he should be most pleased.

I turned it over time and again as I waited in the dark in his room. The chair I sat in was shockingly hard and uncomfortable, and my leg and hip ached prodigiously, but I suffered it all, for I knew that now I was close to understanding everything. After Fat Billy had spoken of the stolen stocks and told me who removed them of old Balfour’s property, I had felt only the joy of success. It took some time for the real import of this information to occur to me. Before I had known for certain that there were counterfeit stocks; now I knew for certain that old Balfour had been killed for them. I may not have understood the motives of all the players in my drama, but I was not sure I any longer needed to. Balfour and my father had been killed because they wished to tell the world of the false stocks. All I required now was the true name of Rochester.

Each minute in the blackness of his closet dragged on interminably, but the confidence that I knew what I was doing, that I no longer wandered aimlessly, gave me a resilient kind of patience. I turned over my hourglass. I watched the sands trickle out and I turned it again.

It was not too late, almost eleven, before he came in. I heard the creaking of the stairs and hissing of his feet as he lazily dragged them upward. There were a few words muttered I know not whether to a servant or himself and then the slow, clumsy turning of the doorknob. He held out a candle in one hand and lit a lamp that rested on a table by the door. Now a soft, orange glow filled the room, and when he turned around, Balfour saw me in his chair, pistol pointed directly at him.

“Lock the door and step forward,” I said calmly.

He opened his mouth to speak, to express some outrage or another, but in the dim light of his candle he saw at once that he dare not. I had a practiced expression for him—cold, hard, merciless. He locked the door and turned to me.

“I have wondered sometimes, Balfour, that if a man were a blockhead, let us say the greatest blockhead who ever lived, would he know of his own idiocy, or would he be too much a fool even to sense that he was deficient? I believe you can answer that question for me.”

A pistol raised upon him and a murderous look in my eye had silenced him, but he could not bear my insult. “Weaver, I cannot claim to guess what you think you are doing, but I suggest you take these outrages no further.”

The hourglass sat on a table by my chair. Not taking my eyes off Balfour, I turned it over with my left hand. “You have half a minute,” I said coolly, “to give me the true name of Martin Rochester, or I shall shoot you. You know me too well, I think, to wonder even for an instant if I mean what I say.”

I had anticipated he would not be a strong man, but I had not expected that his weakness would prove so very complete. He collapsed to his knees as though his feet and shins had simply disappeared. He opened his mouth to beg for mercy, but said nothing.

I would show him no mercy. He would receive no sign from me that his panic would grant him any leniency. The hourglass ran down. I pulled back the hammer on my pistol and prepared my eyes for the powder’s burst into flame.

He gagged, trying to speak through his terror. I suppose that somewhere, on some level I ignored, I sympathized with him. I think we all have had dreams in which something terrible has happened and we try to scream, but we can produce no sound. Balfour acted out this terror. He heaved, like a man attempting to expel a piece of bone from his throat, and at last he opened his mouth wide and released a mighty bellow with all the force of his lungs. “I don’t know!”

His cry seemed to harness all of the power of his previous attempts to speak. We both sat in silence for some time, shocked at the force of his scream and with the silence that followed. Perhaps it was because he had gotten these first words out, and perhaps it was because his thirty seconds had expired and he was not dead yet. I could hardly even guess why, but his tongue at last loosened. “I don’t know who he is,” he said in a quiet voice. “I swear it. No one does.”

“But you stole your father’s South Sea issues for him.” It was not a question.

His head hung loose, like the limp skull of a skeleton I had seen once at Bartholomew Fair. “How did you know?” he asked quietly.

“Who else could have?” I preferred to make him believe that I had reasoned it out rather than explain that I had beaten the information out of a young weakling. “If they were missing from the estate, someone had to have taken them. Who was in a better position than you? After all, unless the issues were transferred to another owner, they were of no value, and they couldn’t be transferred, could they? They were counterfeit, so no one would want them other than those who would wish to destroy them—that is, Rochester or the South Sea Company. I simply presumed that it was Rochester’s hand behind their theft. He then used his man inside the Company to alter the records so as to make it appear that your father had sold his holdings long before his death.”