Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (7 page)

 
          
 
"My name, actually, is Penrod," said
St. Ives. "Jules Penrod. You've apparently mistaken me for someone else. I
have one of the twelve common faces."

 
          
 
Beezer's companion burst into abrupt laughter
at the idea. Beezer, however, seemed impatient at the interruption. "Face
like yours is a pity," he said, nudging his companion in the abdomen with
his elbow.
"Suits a beggar, though.
I haven't got
a thing for you.
Pappy.
Go scrub yourself with a
sponge." And with that the two of them turned and made away, the second
man laughing again and Beezer gesturing.

 
          
 
"One moment, sir!" cried St. Ives,
pursuing the pair. "We've got a mutual friend."

 
          
 
Beezer turned and scowled, chewing his cigar
slowly and thoughtfully now. He stared carefully at St. Ives's unlikely visage
and shook his head. "No, we don't," he said, "unless it's the
devil. Any other friend of yours would've hung himself by now out of regret.
Why don't you disappear into the
night.
Pappy, before
I show you the shine on my boot?"

 
          
 
"You're right, as far as it goes,"
said St. Ives, grinning inwardly. "I'm a friend of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo,
in fact. He's sent me round with another communication." Beezer squinted
at him. The word another hadn't jarred him.

 
          
 
"Is that right?" he said.

 
          
 
St. Ives bowed, clapping a hand hastily onto
the top of his head to hold his wig on.

 
          
 
"Bugger off, will you,
Clyde
?" Beezer said to his friend.

 
          
 
"That drink ..." came the reply.

 
          
 
"Stow your drink. I'll see you tomorrow.
We'll drink two. Now get along.''

 
          
 
The man turned away regretfully, despondent
over the lost drink perhaps, and St. Ives waited to speak until he had crossed
Whitefriars and his footsteps faded. Then he nodded to the still-scowling
Beezer and set out on the sidewalk again, looking up and down the street as if
to discern anything suspicious or threatening. Beezer fell in beside him.
"It's about the money," said St. Ives.

 
          
 
"The money?"

 
          
 
"Narbondo fears that he promised you too
much of it."

 
          
 
"He's a filthy cheat!" cried Beezer,
eliminating any doubts that St. Ives might have had about Beezer's having
received Narbondo's message, mailed days past from Dover.

 
          
 
"He's discovered," continued St.
Ives, "that there are any of a number of journalists who will sell out the
people of
London
for half the sum.
Peabody
at the Herald, for instance, has agreed to
cooperate."

 
          
 
"The filthy scum-sucking cheat!"
Beezer shouted, waving a fist at St. Ives's nose. "
Peabody
!"

 
          
 
"Tut, tut," admonished St. Ives,
noting with a surge of anxious anticipation the darkened mouth of the alley
some thirty feet distant. "We haven't contracted with
Peabody
yet. It was merely a matter of feeling out
the temperature of the water, so to speak. You understand. You're a businessman
yourself in a way." St. Ives gestured broadly with his left hand as if to
signify that a man like Beezer could be expected to take the long view. With
his right he reached across and snatched the lapels of Beezer's coat, yanking
him sideways. Simultaneously he whipped his left hand around and slammed the star-tied
journalist square in the back, catapulting him into the ill-lit alley.

 
          
 
"Hey!" shouted Beezer, tripping
forward into the waiting arms of Jack Owlesby, who leaped in to pinion the
man's wrists. Hasbro, waving an enormous burlap bag, appeared from the shadows
and flung the bag like a gill net over Beezer's head, St. Ives yanking it down
across the man's back and pushing him forward off his feet. Hasbro snatched at
the drawrope, grasped Beezer's shoulders, and hissed through the canvas,
"Cry out and you're a dead man!"

 
          
 
The struggling Beezer collapsed like a sprung
balloon, having an antipathy, apparently, to being a dead man. Jack clambered
up onto the bed of a wagon, hauled open the lid of a steamer trunk, and, along
with St. Ives and Hasbro, yanked and shoved and grappled the feebly struggling
journalist into the wood and leather prison. He banged ineffectively a
half-dozen times at the sides of the trunk, mewling miserably, then fell silent
as the wagon rattled and bounced along the alley, exiting on Salisbury Court
and making away south toward the Thames.

 
          
 
A half hour later the wagon had doubled back
through Soho, St. Ives having set such a course toward Chingford that Beezer
couldn't begin to guess it out from within his trunk. Hasbro, always prepared,
had uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and each of the three men held a glass, lost
in his own thoughts about the warm April night and the dangers of their
mission. "Sorry to bring you in on this. Jack," said St. Ives. "There
might quite likely be the devil to pay before we're through. No telling what
sort of a row our man Beezer might set up."

 
          
 
"I'm not complaining," Jack said.

 
          
 
"It was Dorothy I was thinking about,
actually. We're only weeks finished with the pig incident, and I've hauled you
away again. There she sits in Kensington wondering what sort of nonsense I've
drummed up now. She's a stout woman, if you don't mistake my meaning."

 
          
 
Jack nodded, glancing sideways at St. Ives,
whose voice had gotten heavy with the sound of regret. St. Ives seemed always
to be on the edge of a precipice, standing with his back to it and pretending
he couldn't see that it was there, waiting for him to take an innocent step
backward. Work furiously— that had become the byword for St. Ives, and it was a
better thing, perhaps, than to go to pieces, except that there was something
overwound about St. Ives sometimes that made Jack wonder if it wouldn't be
better for him to try to see into the depths of that pit that stretched out
behind him, to let his eyes adjust to the darkness so that he might make out
the shadows down there.

 
          
 
But then Jack was settled in Kensington with
Dorothy, living out what must look to St. Ives like a sort of storybook
existence. The professor couldn't help but see that Dorothy and Alice had been
a lot alike, and Jack's happiness must have magnified St. Ives's sorrow. If
Dorothy knew, in fact, what sort of business they pursued this time, she
probably would have insisted on coming along. Jack thought of her fondly.
"Do you know . . .," he began, reminiscing, but the sound of Beezer
pummeling the sides of the trunk cut him off.

 
          
 
"Tell the hunchback!" shrieked a
muffled voice, "that I'll have him horsewhipped! He'll be sulking in
Newgate Prison again by the end of the week, by God! There's nothing about him
I don't know!"

 
          
 
St. Ives shrugged at Hasbro. Here, perhaps,
was a stroke of luck. If Beezer could be convinced that they actually were
agents of Narbondo, it would go no little way toward throwing the man off their
scent when the affair was over, especially if he went to the authorities with
his tale. Beezer hadn't, after all, committed any crime, nor did he contemplate
one—no crime, that is, beyond the crime against humanity, against human
decency. "Narbondo has authorized us to eliminate you if we see fit,"
said St. Ives, hunching over the trunk. "If you play along here you'll be
well paid; if you struggle, you'll find yourself counting fishes in the rocks
off Southend Pier." The journalist fell silent.

 
          
 
Early in the predawn morning the wagon rattled
into Chingford and made for the hills beyond, where
lay
the cottage of Sam Langley, son of St. Ives's longtime cook. The cottage was
dark, but a lamp burned through the slats in the locked shutters of a low
window in an unused silo fifty yards off. St. Ives reined in the
horses,
clambering out of the wagon at once, and with the
help of his two companions, hauled the steamer trunk off the tailgate and into
the unfastened door of the silo. Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hastened back out into
the
night,
and for a moment through the briefly open
door, St. Ives could see Sam Langley stepping off his kitchen porch, pulling on
a coat. The door shut, and St. Ives was alone in the feebly lit room with the
trunk and scattered pieces of furniture.

 
          
 
"I'm going to unlock the trunk . .
.," St. Ives began.

 
          
 
"You sons of . . .," Beezer started
to shout, but St. Ives rapped against the lid with his knuckles to silence him.

 
          
 
"I'm either going to unlock the trunk or
set it afire," said St. Ives with great deliberation. "The choice is
yours." The trunk was silent. "Once the trunk is unlocked, you can
quite easily extricate yourself. The bag isn't knotted. You've probably already
discovered that. My advice to you is to stay absolutely still for ten minutes.
Then you can thrash and shriek and stamp about until you collapse. No one will
hear you. You'll be happy to know that a sum of money will be advanced to your
account, and that you'll have a far easier time spending it if you're not shot
full of holes. Don't, then, get impatient. You've ridden out the night in the
trunk; you can stand ten minutes more." Beezer, it seemed, had seen
reason, for as St. Ives crouched out into the night, shook hands hastily with
Langley, leaped into the wagon, and took up the reins, nothing but silence
emanated from the stones of the silo.

 
          
 
TWO EVENINGS EARLIER, on the night that St.
Ives had waylaid Beezer the journalist, the comet had appeared in the eastern
sky, ghostly and round like the moon reflected on a frosty window—^just a
circular patch of faint luminous cloud. But now it seemed fearfully close, as
if it would drop out of the heavens toward the earth like a plumb bob toward a
melon. St. Ives's telescope, with its mirror of speculum metal, had been a gift
from Lord Rosse himself, and he peered into the eyepiece now, tracking the
flight of the comet for no other reason, really, than to while away the dawn
hours. He slept only fitfully these days, and his dreams weren't pleasant.

 
          
 
There was nothing to calculate; work of that
nature had been accomplished weeks past by astronomers whose knowledge of
astral mathematics was sufficient to satisfy both the
Royal
Academy
and Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives wouldn't
dispute their figures. That the comet would spin dangerously close to the earth
was the single point that all of them agreed upon. His desire in watching the
icy planetoid, beyond a simple fascination with the mystery and wonder of the
thing, was to have a look at the face of what might easily be his last great
nemesis, a vast leviathan swimming toward them through a dark sea. He wondered
if it was oblivion that was revealed by the turning earth.

 
          
 
Hasbro packed their bags in the manor. Their
train left Kirk Hammerton Station at six. Dr. Narbondo, St. Ives had to assume,
would discover that same morning that he had been foiled, that Beezer, somehow,
had failed him. The morning Times would rattle in on the
Dover
train, ignorant of pending doom. The doctor
would try to contact the nefarious Beezer, but Beezer wouldn't be found. He's
taken ill, they would say on Fleet Street, repeating the substance of the
letter St. Ives had sent off to Beezer's employers. Beezer, they'd assure
Narbondo, had been ordered south on holiday—to the coast of
Spain
. Narbondo's forehead would wrinkle with
suspicion, and the wrinkling would engender horrible curses and the gnashing of
teeth. St. Ives almost smiled. The doctor would know who had thwarted him.