Homunculus (18 page)

Kraken gasped again, without the help of the brandy, then his face dropped into a melancholy scowl of self-pity. Pule poured another dollop into his glass. Kraken drank. The brandy seemed to run the morning chill away. Kraken suddenly thought of the box, which lay on his lap like a coiled serpent. Why had he taken it? What use had he for it? He didn’t at all want it. He’d sunk very low. That was certainly the truth. Another glass wouldn’t sink him any lower. He wiped a tear from his eye and let go a heaving sigh.

“Interested in the scientific arts, you say?” said Pule.

Kraken nodded morosely, gazing into his empty glass. Pule filled it.

“Of what branch of the sciences are you an aficionado?”

Kraken shook his head, unable to utter a response. Pule loomed in at him, proffering the bottle, stretching his countenance into an expression both pitying and interested. “You seem,” said Pule, “if you’ll excuse my meddling in your affairs, to be a student of the turnings of the human heart, which, if I’m correct, is as often broken as it is whole.” And Pule heaved a sigh, as if he too saw the sad end of things.

Kraken nodded a rubbery head. The brandy rallied him a bit. “You’re a philosopher, sir,” he said. “Have you read Ashbless?”

“I read little else,” Pule lied, “unless, of course, it’s scientific arcana. One is forever learning from reading the philosophers. It’s nothing more nor less than a study of the human soul. And we’re living, I fear, in a world too negligent of that part of man’s anatomy.”

“There’s truth in that,” cried Kraken, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Some of us have souls the rag man wouldn’t touch. Not with a toasting fork.” And with that, Kraken began to cry aloud.

Pule placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t any idea where the conversation was leading, but was reasonably certain that he couldn’t just relieve Kraken of the box and walk away. He’d have to trust to the fates, who if not positively smiling upon him, were at least grinning in his direction. He poured Kraken another two inches of brandy, wondering if he hadn’t ought to have bought two bottles when he had the chance. The effects of the warm liquor, however, seemed to have been somehow cumulative, for Kraken suddenly slumped heavily against the stones of the low wall that fronted the embankment, and it occurred to Pule that it might be possible simply to wait until Kraken was blind drunk and then walk away with his box. “Do you…” asked Kraken, “do you suppose there’s a bit of hope?”

“Surely,” said Pule, to be safe. Kraken appeared to be satisfied. “You’ve a great burden.”

“That’s a fact,” muttered Kraken.

“I can help you. Trust me. This talk about toasting forks is unhealthy, doubly so: I won’t believe it of you on the one hand, and it denies the very root of salvation on the other. There is no better time than this to round the bend, to draw a course for home.”

“Do you think so, guv’nor? Would they have me?” Kraken drained his glass.

“What have you done that’s so awful? Stolen your master’s goods? Checked the missus?”

Kraken heaved another sigh and looked inadvertently at the box.

“What can that be,” Pule asked, “but a toy for a child? Stride back in and lay it at the feet of your employer. Brass it out. Admit your guilt.”

“Oh no,” lamented Kraken. “It’s a bit more than a toy. It’s the gallows, is what it is for Bill Kraken. It’s the gibbet. This here ain’t no toy.”

“Come, come. What can it be that’s so valuable as that? The world loves a man who confesses his sins.”

“Then they hang him.” Kraken lapsed into silence.

Pule, unspeakably irritated but grinning broadly, filled his glass and cast the empty bottle end over end into the river. “Come now,” he said, “tell us what it is you’ve got off with there and I’ll see if I can’t make it right.”

“Can you, guv’nor?” asked the befuddled Kraken, suddenly animated.

“I’m the nephew of the Lord Mayor.”

“Ah,” said Kraken, considering this. “The Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor hisself. It’s a precious great emerald, is what it is. Poor Jacky’s inheritance in a lump. And I’ve gone and pinched it. It’s drink that did it, and that’s the truth. Drink and this bonk on the conk.” And with that he fingered the freshly healed cut along his forehead.

Pule’s mind wrenched and clanked like a broken engine. The emerald. If Narbondo got hold of it, Pule could whistle for a share. Damn the homunculus. Damn the rotten Joanna Southcote and her doddering son. The emerald was worth more than all the hunchback’s scientific maundering. And it would be worth twice as much to see Owlesby deprived of it. Dorothy Keeble would regret snubbing him. He’d lure Kraken into an alley and bash him to pieces. But the lad with the barrow. There he stood, waiting stupidly. He would send the lad ahead with the carp. Narbondo had paid for them, after all. Give him his due.

“I think I see a way out of this entanglement,” said Pule.

“Eh?”

“I say, come along with me and I’ll put this right. Straightaway. You’ll be back in tune in no time. And for the love of God, don’t let go the box there. There’s villains in this city would murder you over it soon as tip their hat to you. Look sharp now.”

“There’s truth in that,” said Kraken half to himself, stumbling along behind Pule, who advanced toward the boy with the barrow.

“Look here, lad,” said Pule. “Haul these carp to two-sixty-six Pratlow Street, off Old Compton, and be quick as you can about it without sloshing the things onto the road. There’ll be a half crown for you there from Mr. Narbondo if the fish are breathing when you get there. Tell him Mr. Pule says he can eat these, with Mr. Pule’s regards for salt. Now go along with you.” And away the lad went innocently about his task. Pule shook with anticipation, following along the embankment toward Blackfriars. He’d have to act before Kraken sobered up. He played in his mind scenes of Kraken’s demise, of the telling blow, the glinting knife, the gasp of drunken surprise.

“What the devil do you here!” came a startling cry from behind him. Pule leaped. A wagon rattled up, and in it sat Ignacio Narbondo in a fury. Pule’s stomach felt suddenly empty. “It’s coming on ten o’clock! Does it take you half a morning to buy a stinking carp? That damned skeleton is dropping to dust before us and you’re out taking the sun. Shiloh the bloody messiah has us by the nub!” He paused in his tirade and looked Pule up and down. “Where’s my carp?”

“I sent them ahead with a boy. You’ll get your stinking carp.”

“And they
will
be stinking at this rate. What’s this?” He squinted at Kraken. “It’s Bill Kraken, by God! Old Bill Kraken. Diggin’ up any corpses, Bill?”

Kraken looked from Pule to Narbondo, then back at Pule, suspicions revolving in his sodden mind.

“By God!” said Narbondo under his breath, noting the box for the first time. He turned on Pule. “So that’s your game, is it? Going to slip it to an old rummy like Bill and make away with the box. Leave the poor doctor to fend for himself.” He shook his head as if out of sympathy with the idea. “And after all I’ve taught you.”

“That’s a lie,” said Pule hotly. “I was leading him back to Pratlow Street. The woman on the slab would profit from…
reorganizing
.” Pule winked hugely at Narbondo, inwardly fuming, berating himself for taking so monumentally long about the business.

Narbondo frowned at Pule’s punning, but his humor seemed instantly to improve. “I can see that he’s a man of parts,” he said, then burst into momentary laughter, cut off as suddenly as it began. “What’s in the Keeble box? Does he know?”

“The emerald,” said Pule. There was no reason to dissemble here. He’d either have the emerald or he wouldn’t. No, that wasn’t so. He’d
have
the emerald, period. Even if he had to feed Narbondo to the carp. He’d wait it out. This simply hadn’t been the right moment. One can’t get greedy with the fates. One has simply to wait.

Kraken looked sick, whether over his mounting suspicions or over the excess of warm brandy it was impossible to say, but it could be seen at a glance that he was no longer the docile, repentant Kraken who moments before had been following Pule like an obedient dog. A look of resolve flickered across his face. He stepped back a pace and started to speak. But the sight of a suddenly appearing revolver in the hand of the hunchback silenced him. The look of resolve collapsed.

“Into the wagon with you, Bill,” said the doctor, gesturing with the pistol. Kraken attempted to climb in and stumbled against the side. “Help the sod, numbskull!” roared Narbondo at Pule. “Heave him in and let’s be gone. We’ve got a day’s work ahead. In you go, Bill!” And Pule, hauling on Kraken’s legs, tumbled him into the wagon as Kraken clutched the box, doubly certain now of his own damnation. Pule climbed in beside him and took the pistol from Narbondo. The wagon rattled away up the road, passing some half mile down the costerlad wheeling his barrow.

“There’s the carp!” cried Pule, pointing.

But Narbondo drove past without slackening his pace. “They’ll come along right enough,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ll just get poor Bill home safe while we’re at it. No detours now. Not with the box riding along beside us!” And with that he whipped up the horses, careening around onto the Victoria Embankment and away.

TEN

TROUBLE AT HARROGATE

L
angdon St. Ives marveled at the sunny skies over Harrogate. The clouds that shaded London were invisible beyond the horizon, and the pall that overhung Leeds could only dimly be seen, blown away west and south by chill winds off green Scottish hillsides. The weather was brisk - sunny and brisk - and it fitted St. Ives to a tee.

He’d collected the oxygenator from Keeble at King’s Cross Station, the toymaker fearful that he’d been followed, perhaps by his nemesis in the chimney pipe hat - the man Kraken had referred to as Billy Deener. But no such villain showed himself. Nothing at all suspicious occurred until the train was an hour north of London. And that little business, thought St. Ives with a certain amount of satisfaction, he’d dealt with handily enough.

He poured another cup of tea and sank his teeth into a scone. A hammering at a closet door behind him and the muffled grunts of someone apparently locked inside gave him no pause. Hasbro walked in just then, nodding to St. Ives. “Shall I just clear these away, sir?”

“By all means.”

“He’s still thumping, sir.”

“And the other one?”

“Quiet, sir, these last two hours.”

St. Ives nodded, satisfied, but saddened in spite of himself. “Dead, do you suppose?”

“From his countenance - as well as I can perceive it through the peephole - I would answer in the affirmative. Dead as a herring, I’d say, sir, to quote the populace.”

St. Ives arose, walked into his laboratory, and peered in through a door fixed with a porthole window. On the floor of a tiny room beyond lay a man who appeared to have been dead for a week. On a plate beside him was a quantity of fruit. A pitcher of water stood on a window sill behind. His moldery clothes fit loosely, as if he’d worn the same suit for a month or two of a starvation diet, and his face was the face of a ghoul. The long, open scar of a bullet wound mutilated his cheek, and through it showed three yellowed teeth.

“Didn’t touch the food?”

“Not a bite, sir.”

“And dead in a day’s time. Very interesting. We’ll bury him on the grounds, poor sod. This is a sad business, Hasbro, a sad business. But he was a dead man before we starved him. I could see that when they sat down behind me on the express. They had the odor of death and dust on them. What they were up to I can’t say, or even whether they belong to Narbondo or to the old man. Filthy pity, really. Let’s have a look at the other.”

Back into the library they went, where Hasbro stacked a cup and plate onto a tea tray, dusting with a little horsehair brush the table crumbs onto a tray. St. Ives peered in at the second prisoner. The blood pudding they’d left in the closet was gone, the plate, apparently, licked clean. The prisoner thumped morosely at the door, as if the pounding were something he were doing out of necessity but had no real interest in.

“What does a zombie care about lodgings?” asked St. Ives over his shoulder. “A closet or a hillside, it must be immaterial.”