The Affair of the Porcelain Dog (2 page)

The word "dollyshop" might conjure images of china-faced pretties with real hair for a little girl to comb, and blue eyes that open and close. This shop belonged to a grubby matron who doled out ha'penny loans against objects that were hardly worth that. Crates of rust-scabbed metal were stacked as tall as a man along the back wall. The other walls were lined with ill-fitted shelves, bowing under haphazard loads of mildew-encrusted boots, stiff and stained rags, salt-encrusted horse collars, and what appeared to be bones. In the center of the room, piles of rubbish sat where they'd been dropped, layers of dust testifying to how long they'd been there. An attempt had been made to organize some of it into bins, but the bins were already overflowing with towers of detritus threatening to topple at the slightest breath. The dog could have been anywhere in that mess.

Tugging at my waistcoat, I picked up a fireplace poker with a missing handle and began prodding the chaos, listening for the telltale
clink!
of metal against porcelain. Forty sweaty minutes later, I was bored as hell and my eyes burned from the dust. I was tempted to declare the mission a failure and take the carriage back to York Street for whisky and a sympathetic fuck. But if we didn't put paid to the blackmailer, it would be the end of both whisky and fucking for a good long time. Sighing, I fixed my eyes on a stack of bedding gradually being devoured by mildew and raised the poker.

It was then I heard the footsteps.

I mightn't have noticed them at all, had they not been the only footsteps that I'd heard since I'd arrived. Quick and sure, with the weight of a man and the confidence of someone who could afford a stout pair of boots, the footsteps stopped directly before the door.

Fuck me, had I remembered to lock it?

I flew back to the front of the room, dodging perilous mountains of rubbish, and flattened myself against the doorjamb. The footsteps didn't have the righteous clip-clop of a Whitechapel bobby. But what were the chances someone else would decide to burgle, on the same night as I, this down-at-heel junk shop? I swiped a damp clump of curls from my forehead, chafing against the overcoat. A prickling sensation crawled over my nether regions--the itch that had come to plague me over the past few weeks was making its presence known. Just in case I'd forgotten. Resisting the urge to claw at myself with my free hand, I felt instead for the sharpened length of pipe I used to carry on my belt during my Whitechapel years.

It was, of course, in my trunk back at York Street, sod it all!

From somewhere near my right hip came the grind of metal against metal. Slowly, the door creaked open, spilling a stream of gaslight across the dusty floor. My muscles tensed with the urge to flee. I'd not courted physical confrontation since Goddard had taken me into his home two years before. I hadn't missed it. A single, shiny boot breached the doorway before stopping, suspended as though testing the air.

I swung the poker with all my might.

"What in blazes?" the other man exclaimed as the poker swept his cap back onto Dorset Street and smashed into the doorjamb with a force that left my left side ringing.

While I was still picking splinters from my teeth, the man sprang up next to a box of unraveling straw bonnets, straightening his jacket and smoothing his neat mustache with indignant little grunts. He squinted in my general direction, his expression registering confusion and then irritation.

"Adler?" he sputtered. "What the deuce are you doing here?"

"Lazarus?"

Only Timothy Lazarus would respond to such an attack with euphemism--and with a perfectly executed defensive roll. Disgusted, I kicked the door shut and slammed the bolt home.

Lazarus, too, had dressed for Whitechapel. A once-white workman's shirt hung from his muscular shoulders and bagged around his toned middle. Charity-box trousers rode low on his slim hips. Only the fastidious cleanliness of both clothing and man betrayed Lazarus's middle-class origins. One might have dismissed his attention to hygiene as a consequence of his work as a physician in the most pestilent, lice-ridden corner of London. However, having known the man in the most intimate way possible, I can assure you his enthusiasm for soap went straight to the core.

"Ira Adler," he said. "I suppose it was to be expected."

"You can't mean that you knew I'd be here," I scoffed.

He spat into his palm, smoothed back a section of dark hair that had been disturbed by my assault, then met my eyes.

"St. Andrews asked me to retrieve something for him. Considering Goddard's uncanny record of predicting what St. Andrews might consider important, and snatching it from under his nose, it stands to reason I'd meet one of Goddard's errand boys tonight. I suppose I should consider myself lucky it wasn't someone with better aim. Now, shall we find the dog together, or are you going to subject me to another tiresome display of violence?"

How the devil?

No matter. The statue was Goddard's, and I'd be buggered if I'd let it end up with Lazarus.

"Dog?" I asked innocently.

Lazarus sighed again. "A black porcelain statue, terrifically ugly, and somehow to do with the letter you're rubbing like a talisman between your thumb and forefinger. At least I hope that's what you're doing."

I yanked my hand out of my trouser pocket, sending a shower of coins across the floor. The itch had doubled its strength; my entire genital region was crawling. As I straightened my waistband in an attempt to regain a bit of dignity, the blackmail letter fluttered gently to my feet. Lazarus snatched it out of the dust before I could protest.

"'I know what you are,'" he read, flicking a bit of fluff from the corner. "Hmm. It seems the blackmailer expended his store of clever synonyms for 'sodomite' in his previous letters."

"How do you know what the other letters said?" I demanded.

Lazarus held out the paper as if it were a soiled handkerchief. In the gaslight glowing through the dust-smeared window, the lavender ink looked like blood.

"Because, Adler, we've been getting them, too."

"You've--"

"Now, where do you think it could be, hmm?" he asked, as if we were somehow working together. Then he took my poker.

"It's not in here," I said, as he made a tentative jab at a stack of books that looked as if they'd been burnt. "I looked."

"Shh."

He carefully stepped over the books. After surveying the rubbish for a moment, he knelt down over a tray of bent nails. He spent so much time picking over them at one point I thought he'd found the bloody thing.

"So...it wasn't St. Andrews sending the letters?" I asked, relieved, when he moved on to a bucket of wooden bucket handles.

"Adler, be quiet."

It wasn't impossible. For whatever reason, St. Andrews had cast Goddard as the villain in the solipsistic drama that was his life. For reasons of his own, Goddard reveled in that fact. That my own nemesis had ended up sharing rooms with Goddard's could only have been some sort of divine joke.

"St. Andrews would cut off his left testicle before turning anything over to the police," Lazarus said. He sighed, tucking the poker under his arm. "Though admittedly, either option would result in a lot less trouble for everyone than his misguided pursuit of crime where half the time there is none. Actually, my first thought had been to blame you for the letters. But then I remembered that you're illiterate."

"Am not," I said.

"Oh, really?"

"But it wasn't me."

"No."

I followed him around the perimeter of the room, watching as he continued to jab and lift and tease. He eventually worked his way to the far side, where a narrow door was half-hidden amid boxes of metal scraps..

"Even if I hadn't already deduced your innocence, Adler, your presence here proves it. Aha," he said, producing his own set of picklocks, "now I think we might be getting somewhere."

The door opened onto a small room lined on two sides with floor-to-ceiling shelves. A small curtained window looking out onto Miller's Court was on the bare opposite wall. Behind the curtain, the single gas lamp Her Majesty had provided to illuminate the vast courtyard glowed anemically. Lazarus laid a hand on my elbow as I stepped past him to let in a bit of light.

"Not so fast," he said, withdrawing a long metal pipe from his waistband.

I stepped back in surprise.

"It's not what you think," he said. He flicked a little switch on the pipe. One end lit up and filled the room with a bright glow. "Just a little something I've been working on. There's a dry cell battery inside, and an incandescent bulb. Blast!" he cried as the light winked out.

He shook it tentatively before giving it a solid smack with his palm. The light blinked on, but died just as quickly.

"I think you should keep working," I said as he pushed past me. Obviously embarrassed, he pulled the curtain back an inch.

Gaslight brought the walls alive with the eerie light of a thousand porcelain eyes. The place was crawling with statues, each more loathsome than the last. A matched pair of warhorses with lions' heads pranced near my shoulder. A spiky-backed sea monster reclined nearby, and next to it, a serene-faced woman stood with her foot on a dragon's neck.

"I say," Lazarus said, "it appears we've stepped into the devil's own curio cabinet."

"Imagine anyone actually paying money for something like this," I said, waggling a gilded harpy in his face. He ignored me.

"Blast and blunder," he said. "How is one meant to distinguish any one of these monstrosities from the others?"

I stashed the harpy between a dragon and a fierce-looking bull. As Lazarus examined the statues on his side of the room, I continued scanning the shelves on mine in a halfhearted manner. Each of the horrible things had been endowed with a curl of lip or roll of eye making it look simultaneously of this earth and not. If Goddard was thinking to display his precious porcelain dog anywhere in our house, he had another thought coming.

"Ira," Lazarus said with suspicious joviality, "isn't there a hot toddy and a pair of beaded slippers waiting for you back at York Street?"

"How did you know about my beaded slippers?" I demanded.

"Just a guess."

Lazarus was examining the middle shelves with more than casual interest. He cleared his throat, eyes darting around nervously--a sure sign he'd found something.

"What I mean to say," Lazarus said, leaning closer to the shelves, "is surely you've better things to do on a Wednesday night. We both want the dog for the same reason--to render our blackmailer toothless. If you think about it, it doesn't matter who actually finds it. Now," he said, looking over his shoulder with a patronizing smile, "why don't you go home and leave this to the professionals?"

"What, like you? Just how many locks have you picked in your life, Doctor?"

I pushed my way over to where he was standing. He had found something, but wasn't going to leave with it.

His shoulders tensed as I came up behind him. "Because surely if St. Andrews considered you a professional like himself," I continued, placing my hands on his waist as I examined the shelves over his shoulder, "he'd have told you why you were looking for a porcelain cur, instead of just sending you out. Like an errand boy."

I whispered this last part into his delicate ear, smiling as it went red. Slippers and buttered rum, indeed! And then I saw it: a black, grimacing dog with bulging eyes, razor teeth and the mane of a lion; it could be nothing else. It was sitting on its haunches on a block carved with the illegible scrawl of some or other savages. But even seated, it was exactly half as tall as Lazarus's forearm was long. I reached for it.

And my midsection exploded in pain.

"Thank you, Adler," Lazarus smirked, rubbing his elbow as I went down. "I was wondering which of these repugnant things it actually was." He plucked the statue from the shelf.

"The elbow strike is a lady's move," I gurgled.

"But it worked," he said.

I'd been training with Goddard's Oriental Fighting Society a little over a year. Lazarus clearly had been working on something similar, only his performance left no doubt he was the one the instructor called on to demonstrate techniques, rather than the reprobate whose appalling lack of talent made the demonstration necessary. Stepping over me, Lazarus paused as if contemplating stomping my face for good measure. He'd have been well within his rights, I suppose. We'd not parted on the best of terms.

Dr. Lazarus and I had met at the Stepney Street Clinic. We'd started chatting while he stitched me up after a meeting with a sadistic, albeit well-paying client. As far as clients went, Lazarus himself turned out to be far from sadistic. Sometimes he'd even buy me a meal before disappearing guiltily into the night. How was I to have known that our paid assignations had, to him, signified something more?

Though one might argue he'd brought it on himself by maintaining unrealistic expectations, one wouldn't be far from wrong in saying I'd been a bit of a shit.

I grabbed his leg and pulled until he tumbled over me like a load of bricks, pulling me on top of him.

"Give me that dog, Tim."

With astonishingly little effort, he flipped me onto my back and pinned my wrists to the floor with his knees, while clutching the dog to his chest. I got my leg under me and pushed off from the floor, sending Lazarus into the wall with a foundation-shaking thud. A statue crashed to the floor behind me, and the air was suffused with sweet powder.