Onyx City (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 3) (7 page)

The leeches are a constant nuisance and I am forced to smear lime on any exposed skin to ward them off. One can smell the bad air here, even in the mountains which are not high enough to afford a clean lungful. I miss the cooling sea breeze of the coast and am forever fearful of sickness. I dose myself with quinine to avoid jungle fever and drink only tea—never cold water—to avoid cholera. The border of Laos lies not far away where Henri Mouhot—the Frenchman I met in Bangkok some years ago—died raving from a fever in some squalid village, and I am terribly afraid that I too might never return from my journey. Should I fall to the same sickness, there are no good doctors nor western medicine up here in these mountains and I would die the death of many an explorer, burning up and deluded, never to return to Bangkok and see my Sarah or little Michael again.

As I sit here looking down onto the plain below, it feels like I am on the edge of one world peering down into another which lies dark and shrouded, filled with unknown dangers and delights. But such is the lot of the explorer; to delve into the unknown and take both wonder and terror in equal measure.

Lazarus stopped reading. He knew he had to continue, but could not tonight. It was late and he was dog tired. Besides, the entry he had just read presented enough information for him to digest for one night. He looked up at Alfred, his mentor, his guardian, but never his father.

“Well, my boy,” Alfred said with a smile that was not untouched by sadness. “You have found your true name at last.”

Lazarus looked down at the cracked leather of the journal’s cover. Michael. He didn’t feel like a Michael. But then, who did he feel like?

Chapter Seven

In which two friends are found in unlikely circumstances

“Now then, lads,” said Tappy, “Form a line and when I calls you forward, empty out your pockets and knapsacks onto the table. I don’t want to hear any complaints. If you ain’t a thief then you ain’t got nothing to hide. Lively, now!”

There was a good deal of grumbling as the entire workforce lined up before the table where the manager sat, looking like a bulldog chewing a wasp. An announcement had just been made concerning a certain number of tools that had been pilfered from the workshop. Everybody was a suspect and this spot check at the end of their shift would cost them all time from their homes and families.

Lazarus sidled up behind old Kovalev. There was much peering over shoulders as each man emptied out his coat and trousers and plonked his meager belongings down for inspection. Kovalev’s turn came and he dutifully showed the manager that he was not the thief. As he was putting away his things Lazarus stepped up and took out his battered old pocket watch, his penknife, his tobacco tin, a pencil, a small comb and his copy of the Commonweal.

The manager instantly saw this last item and picked it up with a sneer which he then extended to Lazarus. He tossed the publication back down on the table. “Off with you, leftist,” he said.

Lazarus caught Kovalev eyeing the paper as he stuffed it back into his jacket pocket. “Just some light reading somebody recommended,” Lazarus told him.

Kovalev’s only reply was a slow nod.

The identity of the thief was never revealed, but items stopped disappearing from the workshop. The following day Kovalev approached Lazarus during one of their tea breaks. He had purposely set himself apart from the rest of the group as they smoked their cigarettes and pipes and enjoyed one of the last warm days of the year before autumn fully set in.

“So, what do our friends in the Socialist League have to say about us dockers?” the Russian said in a low voice.

“Oh, the Commonweal?” Lazarus replied. “I’m not really in with them, you know.”

“Who are you in with then?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet. Just trying to hear all sides and develop an informed opinion.”

“You seem remarkably wise for a dock worker, I hope you don’t mind my saying. Why are you here and not in some job more suited to your education?”

“I am afraid I am something of a charlatan. I have no formal education. I grew up in Stepney and my father taught me to read and write. All else I learned on my own. I joined the military and after I got wounded in the Soudan I had to make do back home without a penny to my name.”

“Much like myself,” said Kovalev. “I come from Smolensk. Literate, but not highly educated. Education speaks nothing for a foreigner here anyway. I could have been a clerk or a banker in my own country. Here I am barely trusted to carry a crate without dropping it.”

“My countryman’s distrust of the foreigner is despicable,” Lazarus agreed.

“As are our respective countries’ abandonment of the soldiers who protect the lazy bourgeoisies. To fight for one’s country, only to face starvation and unemployment upon return is disgusting. And even the jobs that are available are little more than slavery. Dangerous and poorly paid. There was a boy here last month who lost his leg when it was crushed by a derrick with a faulty knot. And all he got for his agony was a dismissal. Now he is a cripple on the street. The rest of us, we brave the dangers and the long days for our fivepence an hour because we must.”

“And we’re the lucky ones,” Lazarus said. “I pass the call-on crowd every day. Most of them would sell their mother for an hour’s work.”

“Aye, and the work dries up as soon as a vessel is delayed by a storm. There’s no stability.”

“Surely there must be some way for us to get organized,” said Lazarus, “like the tailors or the gasworkers.”

“Trouble is that no one union is large enough to stand up to the masters. There’s a general laborers union over at Tilbury Docks led by Ben Tillett, and there’s the Amalgamated Stevedore’s Protection League, but if there’s to be strike action then the unions have to talk to one another. But anarchists disagree with Social Democrats. Jew disagrees with fellow Jew and goy alike. They call themselves union-this and united-that but who is to unite all these unions?”

The whistle blew for them all to get back to work.

“Listen, you seem like a sharp fellow,” said Kovalev. “If you’re really interested in all this strike talk then I can introduce you to a few fellows in a club I’m a member of.”

“Really? That would be very welcoming of you.”

“What about your friend?” He indicated Mr. Clumps with apprehension. The mechanical was hanging around, waiting for Lazarus to rejoin the workers. “Has he got a mind of his own?”

“Don’t be fooled by him,” Lazarus said. “He’s a simple fellow but has a good heart and more brains than he lets on. He’s kosher.”

“Phossy jaw, wasn’t it? That’s what I heard at least. Thought that only happened to matchstick girls.”

“He worked in the navy factories putting together distress flares.”

“Another example of the government’s disregard for the welfare of those upon whose backs they stand. He’s welcome to come along as well.”

The club was on Berner Street in Whitechapel, and went by ‘The Working Men’s Educational Society’. It was a small building, but that did not deter people from massing around its doorway that Friday afternoon in a great squeeze to find seats. Most were Jews, and the gathering of such a large number of the heathen sparked off an anti-alien outburst from somebody across the street. “Bloody Lipskis!”

Lazarus frowned and turned to Kovalev. “I’ve been out of London for the past few years,” he said. “I’m unfamiliar with current slang.”

“Just a tarred brush they paint us all with,” Kovalev answered. “Israel Lipski lived over on Batty Street, just a block from here. He murdered a girl six months pregnant by pouring nitric acid down her throat. He was hanged last year. His trial was a circus and only increased the hatred of the English for London’s Jews.”

By the time they got into the club, there were no places left on the long benches that faced the stage. Some kind soul offered up his seat to Kovalev. Lazarus and Mr. Clumps hovered behind him until somebody complained that Mr. Clumps’s massive frame was blocking their view of the stage. The mechanical lumbered off and stood by the wall.

Lazarus examined the press of people. They were well-dressed for the most part, working class certainly, but clean and respectable as if they were all wearing their Sunday best. There were nearly equal parts men and women. Some were selling copies of the
Arbeter Fraynd
; the club’s Yiddish paper which meant ‘Worker’s Friend’. Most knew Kovalev and spoke to him in Russian, German, Yiddish and English. In fact, the number of languages being spoken in the room was astonishing.

“Are all these people members?” Lazarus asked Kovalev.

“No,” the old man replied. “Most are just curious public like yourselves who come along to hear the speakers. I’ll introduce you to my comrades afterwards.”

The main speaker was a man named Yoshka Briedis who spoke on the subject of white slavery in the city of London. He began by outlining the hardships faced by the laboring class, in particular by the immigrant who must flee pogroms and persecutions in his homeland, only to find himself a slave to the ‘thieving class’ here in the wealthiest city in the world. He brought to light the awful reality of the sweatshops where tailors stitched clothing for fourteen hours a day; dulling their eyesight, clogging up their lungs with stuffy air and cloth fibers, denied even the shortest of breaks so that their targets were met. Wives must bring them tea and bread and drop it down their throats while they continued to work. He spoke of the match girl's strike of July, of their exposure to the terrible white phosphorus that rotted their jaws. The speaker even touched on the poor women who were so desperate that they must sell their bodies on the street and face murder at the hands of the demented individual who stalked Whitechapel by night.

“Are we living in a city with people or in a forest with wild animals?” Mr. Briedis exclaimed. “That in the very heart of so-called civilization one either starves for want of bread or is murdered in the pursuit of it! We all know the concept of private property can only lead to economic enslavement!” There was a cheer from the crowd at this, which seemed to spur Briedis on to hammer home the anarchist message. “Property is a falsehood! Everything belongs to everyone! And no society ever changed without bloodshed, for no government is willing to give up its power without a fight. The class war is not only necessary, but inevitable!”

The speaker appeared to have finished and the room broke into rapturous applause. Lazarus could see the harsh logic borne of desperation by these people even if the final result unnerved him. If there was any group of revolutionists in London that would have Whitehall’s drawers in a knot, then it was these chaps.

Afterwards, they adjourned to the refreshment room where hot tea was served and the club members struck up La Marseillaise. They were in high spirits. Kovalev was in his element; doing the rounds of the room, shaking hands and introducing his guests. Mr. Clump’s mask and tale of horrible disfigurement had them all enthralled.

“And yet, no matter how horrible the conditions are in the factories, people will still bear them for they have no other choice,” said one.

“Because the lowly London worker has it worse than the Africans in the old slavery days,” said a youngish man whom they had not been introduced to. “At least their masters had to feed them to keep them working. Here people drop dead from hunger and there is always some other poor bugger willing to step into his predecessor’s shoes.”

“Well, I’m not defending the London masters,” said Kovalev, “but I think that’s an unfair comparison. Here there is no lash or branding.”

“Not in the physical sense,” said the young man. “But metaphorically this society lashes us all with unsafe working conditions, brands us with class definitions, and keeps us all in bondage through hunger. My name is Levitski, by the way.”

Lazarus took his extended hand and introduced himself and Mr. Clumps.

“You both look to be in rather fine condition for dock workers,” Levitski commented. He had a thin, mousy face and nasal tone that Lazarus did not like. “Most dockers are like Comrade Kovalev here; stooped, broken and bow-legged.”

“Give them a couple of decades,” Kovalev muttered bitterly, “and they won’t look so different from me.”

“We are both new to the trade,” Lazarus explained. “Mr. Clumps was in the navy factories, as you know, and I was in the military.”

“Really? A military man? Most interesting.”

“But getting back to the question of feeding the country’s workforce,” said the other man, “have you read that article in the Evening Post? About the future of the English workforce should this country go the way of the Americas?”

“Steam cabs and all that?” said Kovalev. “Can’t see it happening, myself. At least not in my lifetime. The Americans are leagues ahead of us, technologically speaking.”

“Only because they struck veins of that blasted mechanite stuff,” said Levitski. “Its discovery didn’t spell the end for just cab horses. Do you think they would have passed that emancipation act if they still relied on slavery for their industry? The mechanite furnace rendered the Negro obsolete.”

“I disagree,” said Kovalev. “The United States was pushing for emancipation long before mechanite was struck. That was how the war started in the first place, although few remember it now. Who knows how things might have turned out had the mineral never been discovered? Besides, are you telling us that the replacement of human slavery with a mechanized workforce is a bad thing?”

“Not at all, but imagine what such an industrial revolution might mean for a country that has no slaves.”

“Oh, England has slaves, all right,” said another man. “Weren’t you listening to the speech in there? You’re looking at us!”

“Exactly,” Levitski continued. “And what happens to us when England starts building her own mechanicals to work in her factories, to till her fields and to mine her resources? We’ll all go the way of the Negroes; jobless, landless and penniless. Emancipation means nothing if there is nothing to do but starve.”

“But you’re forgetting one important thing,” said Lazarus. Levitski blinked at him expectantly. “To build mechanicals, one needs mechanite. And both the United and Confederate States have an embargo on mechanite against all nations.”

“And how long will this embargo last should the European powers start picking sides? Neutrality has gone on for nigh on thirty years but that’s no insurance that Britain won’t throw its support behind the Confederacy tomorrow. Then it will only be a matter of time before mechanicals will be replacing us in the factories, taking over the docks and walking shoulder to shoulder with us in the streets. I say, more tea, Comrade Clumps?”

They left the club with Kovalev. It was still early and the shadows had only just begun to lengthen. “Why did you not introduce us to Mr. Levitski earlier?” Lazarus asked their host.

“Because not all of my comrades are worth your time. Levitski is an untrustworthy fellow. He talks big but contributes little. The others put up with him, but I don’t like the man.”