The Anubis Gates (13 page)

“I think that is probably him,” said Doctor Romany with controlled excitement. “Thank Anubis! I was afraid he might have drowned in the creek. Billingsgate, you say—very well, I want your people to scour the entire area from St. Paul’s and Blackfriar’s Bridge east to the rookery above London Dock, and from the river north to Christ’s Hospital, London Wall and Long Alley. The man who brings him to me alive will live the rest of his life in sunny luxury;” Romany did turn around now, and swept the entire company with his cold gaze, “but if anyone should kill him, his lot will be”—he seemed to search for an appropriate image—”such that he’d bitterly envy old Dungy.”

From the crowd came mutters to the effect that there were worse things than setting tables and doing idiot dances for a living, but the men around the table, several of whom had sat there when Dungy was their chief, frowned doubtfully, as though wondering whether capturing this man would be worth the risk.

“Our international affairs,” Romany went on, “are proceeding smoothly, and there should be a couple of fairly dramatic results in about a month if all continues going well.” He allowed himself a brief smile. “If I didn’t know it would be discounted as wild hyperbole, I’d observe that this at present underground parliament may, before winter sets in, be the Parliament that governs this island.”

Suddenly a burst of lunatic laughter erupted out of one flock of the shadow-huddling derelicts, and a thing that was evidently a very old man hopped with insect-like nimbleness into the light. His face had long ago suffered some tremendous injury, so that one eye, his nose and half of his jaw were gone, and his tattered clothes were so baggy and flapping that there hardly seemed to be any body inside them. “Not much left,” he gasped, trying to control the laughter that pummelled him, “not much left of me, hee hee, but enough to tell you, you—smug fool!—what your high-perbolee is worth, Murph!” A loud belch nearly knocked him down, and set the crowd laughing.

Doctor Romany stared angrily at this ruinous intruder. “Can’t you put this wretch out of his misery, Horrabin?” he asked quietly.

“You can’t because you didn’t!” cackled the ancient man.

“With your permission, sir,” said Horrabin, “I’ll just have him carried out. He’s been around forever, and the Surrey-side beggars call him their Luck. He rarely speaks, and when he does there’s no more meaning to it than a parrot’s chatter.”

“Well, do it then,” said Romany irritably.

Horrabin nodded, and one of the men who’d been laughing strode over to the Luck of Surrey-side and picked him up, and was visibly startled at how light the old man was.

As he was being briskly carried away, the old man turned and winked his one eye at Doctor Romany. “Look for me later under different circumstances,” he stage-whispered, and then was again seized with the crazy laughter, which diminished into weird echoes as his bearer hurried down one of the tunnels.

“Interesting sort of dinner guest you cater to,” said Doctor Romany, still angry, as he pulled his spring-shoes back on.

The clown shrugged—a weird effect with his already toweringly padded shoulders. “Nobody is ever turned away from Horrabin’s hall,” he said. “Some are never permitted to leave, or they leave by the river, but everybody’s welcome. You’re leaving already, before dinner?”

“Yes, and by the stairs, if it’s all right with you. I’ve got a lot of things to do—I’ve got to contact the police and offer them a big reward for this man, too. And I’ve never cared for … the kind of pork you serve.” The expression on the clown’s face could have been a warning look; Romany smiled, then climbed back down to the floor, wincing a little when his odd shoes came in contact with the flagstones. Dungy hurried up with his cloak, which Romany unfolded and put on. Just before striding away down one of the tunnels, he turned to the congregation and let his gaze roll across the uncharacteristically quiet company—he even took in the airborne beggar lords—and every eye was on him. “Find me that American,” he said quietly. “Forget about Dog-Face Joe for now—fetch me the American, alive.”

The low sun was silhouetting the dome of St. Paul’s behind Doyle as he trudged back down Thames Street toward Billingsgate. The pint of beer he’d bought ten minutes before had rid him of most of the bad taste in his mouth and some of his appalling embarrassment.

Though not as crowded as it had been this morning, the street was still amply populated—children were kicking a ball around, an occasional carriage rattled past, and pedestrians had to step around a wagon from which workmen were unloading barrels. Doyle was watching the passersby.

After a few minutes he saw a man walking toward him, whistling, and before he went past Doyle asked him, a little wearily, for this would be the fourth person he’d approached, “Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me where Horrabin’s Punch show is playing tonight?”

The man looked Doyle up and down and shook his head wonderingly. “That bad, is it? Well, mate, I’ve never seen it play at night, but any beggar ought to be able to take you to him. ‘Course there’s never but a couple of beggars around on Sunday evenings, but I believe I saw one or two down by Billingsgate.”

“Thanks.”

The vermin Horrabin runs,
he thought as he walked on, a little faster now.
On the other hand, up to a pound a day if you’re willing to make some sacrifices. What kind of sacrifices, I wonder?
He thought about his interview with the editor of the Morning Post, and then forced himself not to.

An old man was sitting by a wall at the corner of St.-Mary-at-Hill, and as Doyle drew up to him he saw the placard hung on his chest: ONCE A DILIGENT TAILOR, it read, I AM NOW DISQUALIFIED FOR THAT TRADE BY BLINDNESS, AND I MUST SELL PEPPERMINTS TO SUPPORT MY WIFE AND AILING CHILD. CHRISTIAN, BE GENEROUS. He held a tray of dirty-looking lozenges, and when Doyle paused over him the old man pushed the tray forward, so that if Doyle had not stopped he couldn’t have helped spilling them.

The old man looked a little disappointed that Doyle hadn’t, and glancing around Doyle guessed why; there were a number of well dressed people out strolling in the early evening, and they’d doubtless have been moved by pity to see the old man’s candies spilled on the pavement. “Would ye purchase some fine minties from a poor blind man?” he whined, rolling his eyes imploringly at the sky.

“No, thank you,” said Doyle. “I need to find Horrabin. Horrabin,” he repeated when the beggar cocked his head with a look of earnest inquiry. “I think he’s some kind of beggar master.”

“I’ve got minties to sell, sir,” the beggar pointed out. “I couldn’t turn my attention from them to trying to remember folks without a penny to pay for my time.”

Doyle pressed his lips together, but dropped a penny into the old man’s hand. Night was coming on, and he desperately needed a place to sleep.

“Horrabin?” said the beggar more quietly. “Aye, I know him. And this being a Sunday evening, he’ll be in parliament.”

“Parliament? What do you mean?”

“I could take you there and show you, sir, but it’d mean losing at least a shilling’s worth of minties sales.”

“A shilling?” Doyle said despairingly. “All I’ve got is ten pennies!”

The beggar’s hand darted out, palm up. “You can owe me the tuppence, sir.”

Doyle hesitated. “Will he be able to give me food and a bed?”

“Oh, aye, no one is ever turned away from Horrabin’s hall.”

The trembling palm was still extended, and Doyle sighed, dug in his pocket and carefully laid his sixpence and four pennies in the old man’s hand. “Uh… lead the way.”

The old man swept the coins and peppermints into a pocket and stuffed the tray under his coat, then picked up a stick from the pavement behind him and poled himself up. “Come on, then,” he said, and strode away briskly west, the way Doyle had just come, swinging his stick in an almost perfunctory way in front of him. Doyle had to take long steps to keep up.

Dizzy with hunger, for he’d lost his soup and mashed potatoes lunch at the Morning Post office, Doyle was blinking against the sunset glare and concentrating on keeping up with the beggar, and so despite being vaguely aware of a loud rattling nearby he didn’t notice the person pacing him until a well-remembered hand clutched his pant leg. He was off balance, and went down painfully onto his hands and knees on the cobblestones.

He turned his head angrily and found himself looking up into the bearded face of Skate Benjamin. The legless man’s cart had come to a halt by colliding hard with Doyle’s ankle. “Damn it,” Doyle gasped, “let go. I’m not begging and I need to follow that—”

“Not with Horrabin, man,” said Skate, an earnest urgency in his low whisper. “You’re not bad enough to thrive with that crew. Come with—”

The old beggar had turned around and was hastening back, staring so directly at Skate that Doyle belatedly realized that his blindness was a fraud. “What are you interferin’ for, Benjamin?” the old man hissed. “Captain Jack needs to go recruiting these days?”

“Give it over, Bugs,” said Skate. “He ain’t your sort. But here’s your finder’s fee anyway, courtesy of Copenhagen Jack.” He fished two sixpences out of his waistcoat pocket and tossed them. Bugs snatched them both out of the air with one hand.

“Very well,” he said, dumping them in with his minties. “On a basis like that you can interfere any time.” He cackled and set off back toward Billingsgate, beginning to tap his cane ahead of him when he was a hundred feet away. Doyle stood up, gingerly trying his weight on his ankle.

“Before he disappears,” Doyle said, “you’d better tell me whether this Copenhagen Jack of yours can give me food and abed.”

“Yes, and a more wholesome sort of each than you’d have got from Horrabin. God, you are a helpless one, aren’t you? This way, come along.”

The dining room of the beggars’ house in Pye Street was longer than it was wide, with eight big windows, each a checkerboard of squares of warped glass leaded together, set at intervals in the long street-side wall. A street lamp out front threw a few trickles of light that were caught in the whirlpool patterns of the little panes, but the room’s illumination came from bright oil lamps dangling on chains from the ceiling, and the two candles on each of the eight long tables. The narrow east end of the hall was raised four feet above the floor level and accessible by four steps in the middle of its width; a railing ran to the wall from either side of the steps, giving the room the look of a ship’s deck, with the raised area as the forecastle.

The beggars who were assembled at the long wooden tables presented a parody of contemporary dress: there were the formal frockcoats and white gloves, mended but impeccably clean, of the Decayed Gentlemen, the beggars who evoked pity by claiming, sometimes truthfully, to be wellborn aristocrats brought to ruin by financial reverses or alcohol; the blue shirt and trousers, rope belt and black tarpaulin hat, bearing the name of some vessel in faded gold letters, of the Shipwrecked Mariners, who even here spiced their speech with nautical terms learned from dance shows and penny ballads; and there were the turbans and earrings and sandals of Distressed Hindoos; and blackened faces of miners supposedly disabled in subterranean explosions; and of course the anonymous tattered rags of the general practitioner beggars. Doyle noticed as he took a place at the end of one of the benches that there were even several dressed like himself as costermongers.

The most impressive figure of all, though, was the tall man with sandy hair and moustache who had been lounging in a high-backed chair on the raised deck, and now stood up and leaned on the railing, looking out across the company. He was extravagantly—not quite ludicrously—attired in a green satin frockcoat, with clusters of airy lace bursting out at wrist and throat, tight white satin knee breeches and white silk stockings, and little shoes that, if shorn of their gold buckles, would have looked like ballet pumps. The babble of conversation had ceased when he got to his feet.

“That’s Copenhagen Jack himself,” proudly whispered Skate, who had positioned his cart on the floor beside Doyle, “captain of the Pye Street beggars.”

Doyle nodded absently, his attention suddenly caught by the roasting turkey smell on the warm air.

“Good evening, friends,” said the captain. He was twirling a long-stemmed wine glass in one hand. “Evening, captain,” chorused the company. Still looking across the dining hall, he held the glass out to the side, and a boy in a red coat and high boots hurried up and splashed some red wine into it from a decanter. The captain tasted it and then nodded. “A dry Medoc with the roast beef,” he announced as the boy scampered away, “and with the fowl we’ll probably exhaust the sauternes that arrived last week.”

The company applauded, Doyle as energetically as any of them.

“Reports, disciplines and the consideration of new members will be conducted after supper.” This announcement too seemed agreeable to the beggars, and as soon as the captain sat down at his own elevated table a door swung open from the kitchen, and nine men issued from it, each carrying a whole roasted turkey on a platter. Each table got one, and the man at the head was given a long knife and fork to carve with. Doyle happened to be sitting at the head of his table, and he managed to summon up enough Christmas and Thanksgiving skill to do an adequate job. When he’d slapped some onto all the plates presented to him, including the one Skate held up from below the table edge, he forked some onto his own and set to it with vigor, washing it down with liberal sips of the chilled sauternes that a small army of kitchen boys kept pouring into any glass less than half full. The turkey was followed by roast beef, charred and chewy at the ends and blood-rare in the middle, and an apparently endless supply of hot rolls and butter, and bottles and bottles of what Doyle had to admit was a wonderfully dry and full-bodied Bordeaux. Dessert was hot plum pudding and a cream sherry.

When the dishes had been cleared away and the diners were sitting back, many of them, to Doyle’s envy, stuffing clay pipes and dextrously lighting them from the candles on the tables, Copenhagen Jack dragged his tall chair to the front of the raised section and clapped his hands for attention. “Business,” he said. “Where’s Fairchild?”