The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (49 page)

“Then I’m your man to test it!” cried the enthusiastic Kraken, and he held out his hand for the little pill. “There’s money in these,” he said, plopping it into his full cup and watching the result as if mystified. “Millions of pounds.”

“Art for art’s sake,” said St. Ives, dipping the end of a white kerchief into his cup and studying the stained corner of it in the sunlight shining through the casement. He nodded, satisfied, then tasted the coffee, nodding again. Over the previous year, since the episode in the Seven Dials, he had worked on nothing but these tiny white pills, all of his scientific instincts and skills given over to the business of coffee. It was a frivolous expenditure of energy and intellect, but until last week he could see nothing in the wide world that was any more compelling.

He bent over his plate and addressed Bill Kraken, although his words, clearly, were intended for the assembled company. “We mustn’t, Bill, give in to fears about this…this…heavenly visitation, to lapse into metaphysical language. I woke up fresh this morning. A new man. And the solution, I discovered, was in front of my face. I had been given it by the very villain we pursue. Our only real enemy now is time, gentlemen, time and the excesses of our own fears.”

St. Ives paused to have another go at the coffee, then stared into his cup for a moment before resuming his speech. “The single greatest catastrophe now would be for the news to leak to the general public. The man in the street would dissolve into chaos if he knew what confronted him. He couldn’t face the idea of the earth smashed to atoms. It would be too much for him. We can’t afford to underestimate his susceptibility to panic, his capacity for running amok and tearing his hair whenever it would pay him in dividends not to.”

St. Ives stroked his chin, staring at the debris on his plate. He bent forward, and in a low voice he said, “I’m certain that science will save us this time, gentlemen, if it doesn’t kill us first. The thing will be close, though, and if the public gets wind of the threat from this comet, great damage will come of it.” He smiled into the befuddled faces of his three companions. Kraken wiped a dribble of egg from the edge of his mouth. Jack pursed his lips.

“I’ll need to know about Hargreaves,” continued St. Ives, “and you’ll want to know what I’m blathering about. But this isn’t the place. Let’s adjourn to the street, shall we?” And with that the men arose, Kraken tossing off the last of his coffee. Then, seeing that Jack was leaving half a cup, he drank Jack’s off too and mumbled something about waste and starvation as he followed the rest of them toward the hotel door.

***

Dr. Ignacio Narbondo grinned over his tea. He watched the back of Hargreaves’s head as it nodded above a great sheet of paper covered with lines, numbers, and notations. Why oxygen allowed itself to flow in and out of Hargreaves’s lungs Narbondo couldn’t at all say; the man seemed to be animated by a living hatred, an indiscriminate loathing for the most innocent things. He gladly built bombs for idiotic anarchist deviltry, not out of any particular regard for causes, but simply to create mayhem, to blow things to bits. If he could have built a device sufficiently large to obliterate the Dover cliffs and the sun rising beyond them, there would have been no satisfying him until it was done. He loathed tea. He loathed eggs. He loathed brandy. He loathed the daylight, and he loathed the nighttime. He loathed the very art of constructing infernal devices.

Narbondo looked round him at the barren room, the lumpy pallet on the ground where Hargreaves allowed himself a few hours’ miserable sleep, as often as not to lurch awake at night, a shriek half uttered in his throat, as if he had peered into a mirror and seen the face of a beetle staring back. Narbondo whistled merrily all of a sudden, watching Hargreaves stiffen, loathing the melody that had broken in upon the discordant mumblings of his brain.

Hargreaves turned, his bearded face set in a rictus of twisted rage, his dark eyes blank as eclipsed moons. He breathed heavily. Narbondo waited with raised eyebrows, as if surprised at the man’s reaction. “Damn a man that whistles,” said Hargreaves slowly, running the back of his hand across his mouth. He looked at his hand, expecting to find heaven knew what, and turned slowly back to his bench top. Narbondo grinned and poured himself another cup of tea. All in all it was a glorious day. Hargreaves had agreed to help him destroy the earth without so much as a second thought. He had agreed with uncharacteristic relish, as if it was the first really useful task he had undertaken in years. Why he didn’t just slit his own throat and be done with life for good and all was one of the great mysteries.

He wouldn’t have been half so agreeable if he knew that Narbondo had no intention of destroying anything, that his motivation was greed—greed and revenge. His threat to cast the earth forcibly into the path of the approaching comet wouldn’t be taken lightly. There were those in the Royal Academy who knew he could do it, who supposed, no doubt, that he might quite likely do it. They were as shortsighted as Hargreaves and every bit as useful. Narbondo had worked devilishly hard over the years at making himself feared, loathed, and, ultimately, respected.

The surprising internal eruption of Mount Hjarstaad would throw the fear into them. They’d be quaking over their breakfasts at that very moment, the lot of them wondering and gaping. Beards would be wagging. Dark suspicions would be mouthed. Where was Narbondo? Had he been seen in London? Not for months. He had threatened this very thing, hadn’t he?—an eruption above the Arctic Circle, just to demonstrate the seriousness of his intent, the degree to which he held the fate of the world in his hands.

Very soon—within days—the comet would pass close enough to the earth to provide a spectacular display for the masses—foolish creatures. The iron core of the thing might easily be pulled so solidly by the earth’s magnetic field that the comet would hurtle groundward, slamming the poor old earth into atoms and all the gaping multitudes with it. What if, Narbondo had suggested, what if a man were to give the earth a push, to propel it even closer to the approaching star and so turn a long shot into a dead cert, as a blade of the turf might put it? And with that, the art of extortion had been elevated to a new plane.

Well, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo was that man. Could he do it? Narbondo grinned. His advertisement of two weeks past had drawn a sneer from the Royal Academy, but Mount Hjarstaad would wipe the sneers from their faces. They would wax grave. Their grins would set like plaster of Paris. What had the poet said about that sort of thing? “Gravity was a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.” That was it. Gravity would answer for a day or two, but when it faded into futility they would pay, and pay well. Narbondo set in to whistle again, this time out of the innocence of good cheer, but the effect on Hargreaves was so immediately consumptive and maddening that Narbondo gave it off abruptly. There was no use baiting the man into ruination before the job was done.

He thought suddenly of Langdon St. Ives. St. Ives was nearly unavoidable. For the fiftieth time Narbondo regretted killing the woman on that rainy London morning one year past. He hadn’t meant to. He had meant to bargain with her life. It was desperation had made him sloppy and wild. It seemed to him that he could count his mistakes on the fingers of one hand. When he made them, though, they weren’t subtle mistakes. The best he could hope for was that St. Ives had sensed the desperation in him, that St. Ives lived day-to-day with the knowledge that if he had only eased up, if he hadn’t pushed Narbondo so closely, hadn’t forced his hand, the woman might be alive today, and the two of them, St. Ives and her, living blissfully together, pottering in the turnip garden. Narbondo watched the back of Hargreaves’s head. If it was a just world, then St. Ives would blame himself. He was precisely the man for such a job as that—a martyr of the suffering type.

The very thought of St. Ives made him scowl, though. Narbondo had been careful, but somehow the Dover air seemed to whisper “St. Ives” to him at every turning. He pushed his suspicions out of his mind, reached for his coat, and stepped silently from the room, carrying his teacup with him. On the morning street outside he smiled grimly at the orange sun that burned through the evaporating fog, then he threw the dregs of his tea, cup and all, over a vine-draped stone wall and strode away east up Archcliffe Road, composing in his mind a letter to the Royal Academy.

***

“Damn me!” mumbled Bill Kraken through the fingers mashed against his mouth. He wiped away furiously at the tea leaves and tea that ran down his neck and collar. The cup that had hit him on the ear had fallen and broken on the stones of the garden. He peered up over the wall at Narbondo’s diminishing figure and added this last unintended insult to the list of villainies he had suffered over the years at Narbondo’s hands.

He would have his turn yet. Why St. Ives hadn’t given him leave merely to beat the stuffing out of this devil Hargreaves Kraken couldn’t at all fathom. The man was a monster; there was no gainsaying it. They could easily set off one of his own devices—hoist him on his own filthy petard, so to speak. His remains would be found amid the wreckage of infernal machines, built with his own hands. The world would have owed Bill Kraken a debt.

But Narbondo, St. Ives had insisted, would have found another willing accomplice. Hargreaves was only a pawn, and pawns could be dealt with easily enough when the time came. St. Ives couldn’t afford to tip his hand, nor would he settle for anything less than fair play and lawful justice. That was the crux of it. St. Ives had developed a passion for keeping the blinders on his motivations. He would be driven by law and reason and not fuddle things up with the odd emotion. Sometimes the man was scarcely human.

Kraken crouched out from behind the wall and slipped away in Narbondo’s wake, keeping to the other side of the road when the hunchback entered a stationer’s, then circling round to the back when Narbondo went in at the post office door. Kraken stepped through a dark, arched rear entry, a ready lie on his lips in case he was confronted. He found himself in a small deserted room, where he slid behind a convenient heap of crates, peeping through slats at an enormously fat, stooped man who lumbered in and tossed Narbondo’s letter into a wooden bin before lumbering back out. Kraken snatched up the letter, tucked it into his coat, and in a moment was back in the sunlight, prying at the sealing wax with his index finger. Ten minutes later he was at the front door of the post office, grinning into the wide face of the postman and mailing Narbondo’s missive for the second time that morning.

***

“Surely it’s a bluff,” said Jack Owlesby, scowling at Langdon St. Ives. The four of them sat on lawn chairs in the Gardens, listening with half an ear to the lackluster tootings of a tired orchestra. “What would it profit him to alert the
Times
? There’d be mayhem. If it’s extortion he’s up to, this won’t further his aim by an inch.”

“The threat of it might,” replied St. Ives. “If his promise to pitch the earth into the path of the comet weren’t taken seriously, the mere suggestion that the public be apprised of the magnetic affinity of the comet and the earth might be. Extortion on top of extortion. The one is pale alongside the other one. I grant you that. But there could be a panic if an ably stated message were to reach the right sort of journalist—or the wrong sort, rather.” St. Ives paused and shook his head, as if such panic wasn’t to be contemplated. “What was the name of that scoundrel who leaked the news of the threatened epidemic four years ago?”

“Beezer, sir,” said Hasbro. “He’s still in the employ of the
Times
,
and, we must suppose, no less likely to be in communication with the doctor today than he was then. He would be your man, sir, if you wanted to wave the bloody shirt.”

“I rather believe,” said St. Ives, grimacing at the raucous climax of an unidentifiable bit of orchestration, “that we should pay this man Beezer a visit. We can’t do a thing sitting around Dover. Narbondo has agreed to wait four days for a reply from the Academy. There’s no reason to believe that he won’t keep his word—he’s got nothing to gain by haste. The comet, after all, is ten days off. We’ve got to suppose that he means just what he claims. Evil begets idiocy, gentlemen, and there is no earthly way to tell how far down the path into degeneration our doctor has trod. The next train to London, Hasbro?”

“Two-forty-five, sir.”

“We’ll be aboard her.”

London and Harrogate

The Bayswater Club, owned by the Royal Academy of Sciences, sat across from Kensington Gardens, commanding a view of trimmed lawns and roses and cleverly pruned trees. St. Ives peered out the window on the second floor of the club, satisfied with what he saw. The sun loomed like an immense orange just below the zenith, and the radiant heat glancing through the geminate windows of the club felt almost alive. The April weather was so altogether pleasant that it came near to making up for the fearful lunch that would at any moment arrive to stare at St. Ives from a china plate. He had attempted a bit of cheerful banter with the stony-faced waiter, ordering dirt cutlets and beer as a joke, but the man hadn’t seen the humor in it. What he
had
seen had been evident on his face.

St. Ives sighed and wished heartily that he was taking the sun along with the multitudes in the park, but the thought that a week hence there mightn’t be any park at all—or any multitudes, either—sobered him, and he drained the bottom half of a glass of claret. He regarded the man seated across from him. Parsons, the ancient secretary of the Royal Academy, spooned up broth with an enthusiasm that left St. Ives tired. Floating on the surface of the broth were what appeared to be twisted little bugs, but must have been some sort of Oriental mushroom, sprinkled on by a chef with a sense of humor. Parsons chased them with his spoon.

“So you’ve nothing at all to fear,” said Parsons, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. He grimaced at St. Ives in a satisfied way, like a proud doggy who had fetched in the slippers without tearing holes in them. “The greatest minds in the scientific world are at work on the problem. The comet will sail past us with no commotion whatsoever. It’s a matter of electromagnetic forces, really. The comet might easily be drawn to the earth, as you say, with disastrous consequences. Unless, let’s imagine, if we can push ourselves so far, the earth’s magnetic field were to be forcibly suspended.”