City of Light (City of Mystery) (23 page)

But this was an
irony to be contemplated later, in leisure, with a glass of fine port.  For
now, as the four men made their way down hall after hall, turning so frequently
that Tom would have been unable to find his way out on a bet, he focused on
settling his mind.  Releasing the innumerable impressions and changes of the
last seventy-two hours and bringing his thoughts fully into the present. Tom’s
faltering French had allowed him to understand more of Rubois and Carle’s
conversation than they probably intended, and he knew that Rubois was not entirely
convinced that Tom and Trevor deserved to view both bodies.  The British still
had something to prove.  If he could manage to deduce something that their own
coroner did not, perhaps Rubois would open even more to them, be willing to
share his own research and theories.

 Tom wished his
French was more fluid but he knew the true test of his powers of translation
would come when he stood before the corpses.  In death, he considered, we all
pass over into some countryless land.  We begin to speak a new language that
only a handful of the living can decipher.  Tom noted that Trevor was clinching
his jaw as he walked.  His discomfort with the dead, so odd in light of his
chosen profession, was well known but rarely commented upon by his
underlings.  

Rubois was unsure
they should be here. Trevor didn’t wish to be.  It would fall to Tom and Tom
alone to ask and answer the question:  What are these particular bodies trying
to tell us?

1:35  PM

Davy sat and watched
Mickey Cooper shovel in two bowls of stew, several slices of bread, and gulp
the beer like water.  During this luncheon – which, in the boy’s hungry haste, had
lasted no more than ten minutes – Davy had been able to gather a few more
particulars.  It seemed that Charles Hammond had regularly gone back and forth
between England and France, during the six months Mickey had been in his
employ.  Mickey claimed not to know the reason for the travel beyond the vague
explanation of “business” and Davy believed him.  

It seemed that
Hammond normally kept somewhere between five and eight boys in his employ at
any given time, all recruited by the aforementioned Henry Newlove from the post
and telegraph offices.  Henry not only served as Hammond’s procurer of new
talent, but had also been an instructor in the sort of skills Hammond had
declared the boys must know if they were to succeed in their new profession. 
He had tutored them in diction – Davy suspected Mickey had been somewhat of a
disappointment to Newlove in this particular arena – as well as dancing, proper
table manners, and undoubtedly other, darker arts as well, the specifics of
which Davy did not inquire and Mickey did not offer. Newlove obviously served
as Hammond’s second in command and normally ran the brothel during the man’s frequent
absences.  But no one had seen Henry in weeks.  

Thus, with Newlove
missing and Hammond on the run, the boys had been left on their own.  No
clients had appeared since the dark day of Charlie Swinscow’s arrest, a boarded
up door and warnings from Scotland Yard hardly serving as invitation to an
evening of forbidden frolic.  So the boys had constructed their climbing web of
ropes and continued to come and go via the back of the house, living off the
message delivery wages and, Davy suspected, a fair bit of theft.

But here was the
surprising part.  If you discounted this last bit of trouble which began with
Charlie’s arrest, Mickey claimed the boys had been quite content with their lot
at 229 Cleveland Street.  Most of them had come to London from mill towns and farms,
where grueling physical labor was the norm and the requirements of the postal
service, which demanded long hours in exchange for paltry pay, had not been a
great improvement.  A profession which required only an hour a two of effort each
day was a welcome novelty and even their living conditions were a decided
improvement from what they’d left.   

In fact, Mickey’s
main complaint seemed to be not what Hammond -  whom he continued to refer to
as “the master,” with it grating more on Davy’s nerves each time he said the
word -  had expected them to do with the gentlemen who came calling, but rather
the preferential treatment afforded the boy-girls.  Apparently they received
not only better clothes and more exacting training, but they progressed on to
more glamorous settings where they made the acquaintance of even wealthier
men.   

When Davy tried, as
best he could, to ascertain if there was anything unusual about the physiology
of the boy-girls, his questions were greeted with a frown and more shakes of
the head.  Through Mickey’s rambling attempts at explanation, made all the more
difficult to follow because of the mouthfuls of lamb stew, Davy could only
gather that the boy-girls tended to be younger than the others, twelve or
thirteen, still with smooth faces and slender frames. 

“Pretty, I guess
you’d say,” Mickey concluded thoughtfully, and took another deep drag of his
beer. “Though Tommy’d sure try to punch me if he heard it put out there like that.”

Davy sat back to
mull this over.  So most of the boy-girls were young enough to retain a
genderless quality, not yet in puberty and semi-starved besides.  Mickey casually
but pointedly, tilted his empty mug in all directions and Davy signaled the
barmaid for a fresh ale.  The gesture earned him a grateful, gap-toothed smile
from the lad, and Davy decided to try a new tack.

“The clothes in that
drawer were expensive.  How could Tommy afford them?”

“But the master
bought them for him, didn’t he, Sir?”

Having Mickey
constantly refer to him as “Sir” was also disconcerting for Davy, almost as
distressing as hearing Hammond deemed “the master.” “Sir” was the proper form
of address for a detective, or even a copper, especially from a boy the age of
Mickey, but the word still made a dull clink each time it hit his ear.  Davy
was almost always in the presence of Trevor, almost always the one saying “Sir”
rather than responding to it.  Now each time Mickey addressed him as such, it
only served as a reminder that Trevor was far away.

“Why did Hammond use
his own money to supply clothes for the boy-girls and not the rest of you?”

Mickey looked at him
archly, a grown man’s expression settling across a boy’s freckled face. “The
rest of us just wore our clothes at home, of course, for socials in the
parlor.   But the boy-girls would go out, wouldn’t they, to places where people
would know.”

“Know that they were
boy-girls?”

A full stomach had
restored Mickey’s confidence and he gave Davy a look of open exasperation.
“Course not, Sir, that’s the point.  The posh people thought they was girls, of
course, so when Tommy was at the playhouse or the proper pubs he had to look
like a girl and he had to have the right things, didn’t he, else the posh people
would know him for a poser. The master used to say our costumes had to be good
enough for the dark but Tommy’s had to be good enough for the light.”

Speaking of light,
it was finally beginning to dawn for Davy.  “My God,” he said.  “You mean these
men would take twelve year old boys out to the theater or to restaurants and
pass them off as women?  Is that why Hammond taught you to dance?”

Mickey
nodded.       

“And this happened
more than once? With more than one boy?”

Another nod.

“For the love of
God, why would they do such a thing?”

Mickey wiped his
bowl with a crust of bread and considered the question.  “Spose it’s cause they
could, Sir.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Paris

1:35 PM

Since boyhood, Ian
had taken nibs of charcoal, scraps of paper, and hidden from his schoolfellows
to sketch.  Faces were his favorite, and he seemed to have been born with a
certain ability to capture them.  He had been gifted even before James had
taken him under his wing and shown him a bit of technique.  Before James had
given him his half-dried pots of paint and those tired brushes whose bristles
had gone unruly with too much use. 

Ian had been
accustomed to psychological torment in his youth, mostly come in the form of
insults and slurs from the other children in town. They had sometimes thrown
lumps of coal at him and, in return,   charcoal had been his own weapon of
revenge.  His portraits were almost always the product of anger, firm strong
lines of black across the white page, the ugliness of the person’s spirit
evident in their face.  James had looked at these sketches and seen both the raw
talent and the emotion behind it, which was even rawer. “The world isn’t merely
savage,” James had told him, his hand on his shoulder, his face full of
understanding. “It’s savage, yes son, yes indeed.  But not merely.” 

James taught Ian to
see the subtlety in human faces. They would walk, the worldly man and the
younger man, through the parks of London and they would find a bench on a
well-traveled sidewalk. They would observe the people strolling past and then
James would nudge him and say “That one,” and they would both begin to sketch.  London
streamed by them, one face at a time, and James had taught Ian to draw fast,
without revision or judgment, saying that sometimes our truest read on a human
face is our first. 

After so many years
of being observed himself, and not often kindly, Ian had reveled in the role of
being the observer.  James held a high standard, so a compliment from him was
much to be cherished, and one day he had picked up one of Ian’s castoff
sketches, which he had allowed to fall to the pavement beneath his feet.  It
was a portrait of a baby in a pram, no more than a dozen hasty lines seized before
the child had been rolled from view, but James had smiled at it and said “You
have an eye.”

An eye.  James Whistler
had said he had an eye.  He may as well have anointed his head with oil.  

The tubes of paints were
now dried beyond rescue, the brushes all tossed into a rubbish bin.  If James strolled
past Ian in this moment, crouched like this by the edge of the street, he
likely wouldn’t know him.  It had been painful to Ian to realize that any
interest he had ever held for James was fleeting.  Artists look deeply but they
do not look for long.  Once they have captured something, they let it go. 
Their eye flitters to a new subject, a different face, and there is a cold
detachment at the core of any creative impulse.  Ian came to understand this in
time.  The sting of James’s betrayal had gradually faded and Ian was now able
to see his brief friendship with the man for what it was: the greatest gift of
his lifetime.

As he had predicted
last night in the bar, the work required on the tower was not especially
taxing.  Ian had been assigned to one of the tile-layers, told to go along
behind the man on hand and knee, scraping any splattered dots of mortar from
the tiles. The pattern was a black and white herringbone, hypnotic when viewed from
close range, and the morning had sped by quickly.  When the church bell struck
one, they had all been released for an hour, herded into the wailing elevator
which carried them back down to the street. The other sewer rats had scattered,
no doubt half of them off to spend their morning wages on lunchtime beer and
thus unlikely to return for the afternoon’s labors.   The managers were trying
to be kind when they decided to grant a partial day’s pay to each man as he
left the tower.  The coins pressed into the grimy palms had undoubtedly been
intended to insure that each worker could buy himself a proper lunch.  That he would
at least face the afternoon with enough food in his belly to keep him from
getting light-headed and prone to a fall.  They were engineers, logical men. 
They did not understand that when one gives a coin to a sewer rat, what one has
most likely purchased is his absence.

Ian had used his own
money on bread and cheese from the street vendor on the corner and then,
walking slowly back toward the tower with at least thirty minutes of leisure
still his own, he had paused to observe each sidewalk artist that he passed. 
They were all focused on the tower and Ian wondered how many bad paintings of
the damn thing there would be before the Exposition was over.  He imagined one
hanging over every bar in Europe and in half the middle class homes as well. 
The Parisian artists favored pastels over oils and he picked up abandoned
slivers of chalk as he wandering among them, arriving back at the base of the
tower with a dozen colors collected in his pocket.  He stooped, heedless of his
already aching back, and set to work on a blank piece of sidewalk. 

He did not draw the
tower. Certainly not.  He turned his hand instead to the face of Henry.  Not
the regrettable Henry of late, but rather his brother at the age of two or
three, back when the boy had the face of a cherub.  His mother had worked in
the mills and she had given him Henry to watch. “Take care of your brother,”
she had said, a directive tossed out casually from a woman who was tragically ill-suited
to her parental role, but an order that Ian had taken to heart.  He and his
best friend Charles – his only friend, if the truth be told – had dragged the
child with them as they climbed the riverbanks, throwing stones into the canal,
chasing squirrels with branches.  Henry had no choice but to grow up quickly,
to become a small echo of his older brother and their resemblance was
impossible to ignore.