The Humbug Murders (29 page)

I RETURNED TO
the Royal Quarter alone. It was much changed by day, a desolate range of warehouses and tenements. But I could feel eyes on me. Shapes scurried behind shuttered windows. Whispers reached from darkened alleys. The stench of desperation whipped towards me on the cold breeze: gin, sweat, foul and diseased breath, unwashed clothing and flesh . . . Beneath it all lay need and want, those ever-present demons.

Clearing his throat, Fagin stepped from a storefront and presented himself with a ridiculous flourish. “Good sir, kind sir, my heart fills at the sight of you—and that tasty bauble you wear.”

I peered down at the gleaming ruby ring perched upon my ring finger.

“Well, I must see what I can do to help you, mustn't I?” He groveled before me, touching my waistcoat like a fool until I smacked my cane on the cobbles and instantly arrested his attention.

“The Doll House,” I said. “And be quick about it.”

“Forthwith, my dear!” he cried, spinning and leading me through the maze of buildings to where I had glimpsed Shen and the Nellie look-alike. “Most haste! Without hesitation!”

I raced up the icy steps to the whorehouse as the grasshopper-like Fagin took them two or three at time, then burst into the warm but empty receiving hall before him.

“Fine treasures, sir.
Fine
,” he promised and clapped his hands. Footfalls came from the corridor and the stairs as I looked about. Lining the hall's lush oak paneling were magnificent classical oil paintings of the biblical women of sin: Eve, Jezebel, Bathsheba, Tamar. Each had been mounted in her own gold-leaf frame, their bosoms bare.

Then the women appeared. A handful of prostitutes wearing elaborate costumes, makeups, and wigs lined up in the foyer, a parade of bare legs and full bosoms. Once I perused their ranks, I understood why this place was called the Doll House. I took in the living dolls before me: a busty Boudica, a jaunty Joan of Arc, a practically bare Eve and her equally revealed twin, a Lady Godiva, a dark-skinned Cleopatra, a smirking Marie Antoinette, a haughty Catherine the Great, even a forgiving Mary Magdalene and a sly Lavinia Edwards, a famous actress . . . who was clearly a man!

“Tell us what you desire,” said the Cleopatra with a melodious laugh, breaking from her sisters to stroke my arm. She might have been a succubus for her deep yellow and red exotic robes, her dark haunting emerald eyes, and her rich mocha skin. She was the most striking creature I had ever seen. She promised me delights both cruel and kind, and assured me that any fantasy I might dream up could be made true in this place.

“Maybe another time,” I said. “I have something particular in mind.”

Cleopatra sighed. She exchanged looks with Fagin and nodded to the steps.

My hand slid smoothly along the banister as I was ushered up the wide staircase. A bronze gargoyle was perched at the top, grimacing. Fagin led me to a room with blood-red walls he called the Long Gallery. The familiar floral aroma of Indian tobacco whirled through the air and found my nostrils. From front to back the room was filled with laughing men sporting elaborate muttonchops, polished boots, and a surplus of swagger. These were not men one would expect to see at this end of town. Gentlemen gambled, drank, and conducted whatever business could not be dared anywhere else. Garlands of holly, mistletoe, and fresh evergreens laced the Long Gallery, hung high under the ceiling with deep-red ribbons.
So, the birth of Christ is celebrated even in the depths of Hell. . . .

Business was surprisingly brisk for the middle of a work-afternoon. Every man here wore a ring like mine—except for those like Fagin and other servants who circulated, distributing liquors and exotic delicacies such as raw but seasoned fish in a bed of curry. I stepped out of the way of a serving wench adorned by a pearl necklace and nothing else, and bumped into a warm squealing mass that rewarded me with peals of giggles.

Peering down, I saw an odd little man cradled in a huge leather chair that enveloped both him and the half-dozen women pressed all about him. His clothing was ostentatious: a zebra-striped suit, crimson cravat with tiny white stars, glasses with little round lens tinted black as night. He patted bottoms with white silk gloves and tipped his stovepipe hat back in order to welcome kisses from his harem of admirers. Beaming a wide, greasy grin, he yanked off his gloves the better to feel the flesh of his admirers, and I saw that unlike all the other visitors, he wore no ring. He murmured something in a language not at all familiar to me, his voice deep, guttural. I turned away, wishing to see no more.

“A little shy, perhaps, my dear?” Fagin asked. “This ain't the place for lily-white hands, sir!”

“It's thorough repugnance that you mistake for shyness, Fagin. No matter—I'm here for Annie Piper,” I said.

“But of course you are, sir, of course you are. Why, ain't no girl fairer than 'er. Fine gentleman like you, you likes 'em well-traveled, eh? Been all over the world, have you? Just like our Annie? Ah, a fair one is she. Speaks more languages than I can count, that naughty little ginger. Speaks them at just the right moment, if you understand me there, both of us being men of the world and such. You like girls with foreign tongues to flick, my dear?”

I recalled what Dodger had said of “The Lady,” that she spoke with an accent that was “passing strange.” Interesting.

“Get her for me,” I insisted.

“Now there's the ever so slight chink in our agreement, Mr. Scrooge. Not entirely feasible, see? Seein' as how she has become the personal favorite of Mr. Smithson himself, you see . . . I just couldn't take you to 'er, no, don't make me! I'd be ruined, I'd starve, you'd find me lying in a gutter on Christmas morning!”

I swallowed hard as I slipped a small bribe into his grubby mitt. “I just want to talk to the woman. Surely your Mr. Smithson wouldn't object to that.”

“Well . . . if you're sure?”

“It's why I'm here. The only reason, I assure you.”

Fagin pocketed the gold and backed into a doorway framed by a crimson curtain. It parted as he disappeared within it, offering only the slightest glimpse of the corridor beyond. A golden corridor, marked with rooms stamped with elegantly drawn numbers.

Someone brushed against me and I tensed, then found myself staring into the face of Nellie Pearl!

No, not Miss Pearl. Her doppelganger. The one with the scar who had been escorting that devil Shen the other night.

“I'm one of the most popular dolls,” she promised with sensuous, half-closed eyes. She brushed up against me, performing a sultry dance with very distinctive, sinuous moves. I considered pressing her for what she might know about the Chinaman, then thought better of it. I didn't want to see her end up on one of those slabs where the poor wretches whose bodies were fished from the Thames were displayed.

I dismissed her as politely as I could manage, but her gaze flickered to her modest cleavage and she assured me that I wouldn't soon forget her.

Someone tapped my shoulder from behind.

A lumbering brute stood before me, his hands stuffed in the pockets of a black velveteen coat. His filthy trousers were stuffed into grey stockings that had been pulled up over powerful calves. He stared at me, his face expressionless and his eyes deep and dark. In a rough, raspy voice he mumbled, “You're for Miss Piper, yeah? This way, sir.”

He led me through the crimson veil and down the golden corridor. Muffled gasps, moans, and cries of pleasure or pain, I knew not which, burst from behind the doors bracing me. At the end of the corridor, he yanked open a door to a red bedroom where a couple writhed and ground together.

“Out!” he commanded, surging into the room and yanking the screeching woman from her paid companion. She was yet
another
Nellie! “Finish him elsewhere, ye slag!”

The man peered in shock at my guide, then skittered away, gathering up his clothes and racing bare-arsed from the room, inches behind the girl.

A four-poster bed rose in the center of the chamber, and to the side, a small table with a lamp and a pair of seats. He gestured at one and I sat, noticing an adjoining door at my side. An escape route, perhaps? My uneasiness was growing by the second.

“Hear you've been asking questions,” he said, his face still stony. “Lookin' for an audience with our good Mr. Smithson hisself. Well, I'm here to tell you—rejoice! Your long difficult journey is at an end.”

“You mean to say . . . you're Smithson?”

“I go by many names,” said the man with his raspy voice, the pungent fumes of beer heavy on his breath. “You like to think of me as Smithson, well, then, that's right, that's fine, that's fair as fair can be. Mind you, and count yourself privileged as I usually don't reveal this unless I'm about to slit a man's throat, my real name's Bill Sikes.”

A rat raced by, hugging the floorboard. His hand shot out with surprising speed and he caught the vermin, his meaty fingers curled about its bloated belly. “Day in, day out, it's the rats this, the rats that. They frighten the girlies. They disgust the fine gentlemen. Myself, I quite appreciate the rats, sir. They teach us things, they do: How to hunt them. Lay traps for them . . .” The vermin squealed as the man's fingers closed even tighter and brittle bones crackled. It fell limp. “Lots of good things, they teach us how to do.”

His meaning was clear. I was the rat and he the trapper. The limp dead thing had not even hit the floor when I ran, much good it did me. He was on me before I could open the door beside me. His huge hands slammed me face-first into the door. My head burst into a storm of fireworks, my thoughts suddenly a mass of confusion. He yanked the cane from my fingers, tossed it back against the table. His hands gripping me by the hair, he drove my skull into the heavy door a second time, and pain exploded with a frightful heat as something trickled down from my forehead. Hot and wet.

Then he hurled me back with a grunt. I stumbled until the edge of the bed struck my legs and I collapsed onto it, arms flung wide. A scratching came at the door, and he ignored me for a moment. He opened it and a white dog bounded into the room. The animal leaped to the bed and licked at the blood on my forehead. A great black splotch enveloped its right eye.

“Now you see that? That's Bull's-eye,” Sikes said as he slowly closed the door again and stalked towards me. “You ask Fagin and he'd tell you, that's my dog. He ain't, though. No. Fagin . . .
he's
my dog. Now, you beat my dog, sir. I don't rightly mind, seeing as how he had it comin' and all. But Fagin was right to object, you askin' questions about Smithson as you were doing. Even when you were warned, you did it anyway. It's bad manners, sir. And bad manners must be punished, mustn't they? Worse, you asked about Annie. Kept askin' and askin', that's what you did. Why would that be? Even when you heard she was Smithson's woman, mine, if you take me as him—”

“You're not Smithson,” I said, sitting up even as the world spun and swam about me. “You're the sweeper, aren't you? The one who disposes of messes? I could elevate you. I have money—”

“They all say that,” Sikes said wearily. “And, ‘You don't have to do this!' That's my favorite, it is. Because of course I do. It's my employment, and it's fun, yeah!” His fist clocked me square in the face, and stars burst into my vision; I felt the blood flood from my nose.

My hands groped blindly for anything I might use to protect myself as I swung my legs off the high bed and crumpled to my knees, another wave of vertigo seizing me. Sikes' footfalls echoed and crashed like thunder as he surged at me.

“I'm not sure you properly grasp your situation, sir.” His hand shot out with blinding speed and fastened on my throat. I tried to wrench my way loose, I beat at him, but he squeezed even tighter. “See this now? This is how I grasp!” With one hand around my throat, he brought the other to my face, wiped the blood from under my nose with his thumb, and made a circle of my own blood upon my forehead.

“There,” he said. “A Bull's-eye. Now I know where to aim.”

He raised me up until my feet were kicking, then he whirled me about and slammed me against the wall. Then he pummeled my forehead, and my skull cracked against the wall again and again until—

Nothing.

Darkness had me. Death, I might have thought, if not for the ringing in my ears and the commotion I heard all about me. How long had I been unconscious? And why wasn't I dead?

My eyes opened sluggishly and my mouth was slack, my breathing harsh and uneven, my throat swollen, irritated. The skin about my neck burned, and I reached up, loosened my tie, opened the top buttons. I lay on the floor of the wretched room where Bill Sikes had been about the mundane task of throttling me while bashing my brains in, and I gasped for breath like a transplanted fish.

Just as I forced myself to calm, a nearby explosion made the walls shake and a sudden thunder of running footsteps surged from the hall. Screams and shouts.

“What're you lookin' at? I'm Bill Sikes.
Nobody
looks at me!” the madman was shouting from a distance, his hideous dog barking from even farther off. Gasping, struggling to command my aching arms, I crawled until I heard rapid footsteps and saw two untidy shoes and stockings stomp across the floorboards to where I was, on all fours, blood dripping from my split lips.

“We must get out!” cried a woman's voice, and I raised my head to see, through the bursting stars on the inside of my skull, a shock of scruffy red hair framing a milky white face.

“The name's Nancy,” she said. “There. Now I ain't no stranger no more, you can trust me. Come on!”

Another explosion, and we clung to each other as the house shuddered and something brilliant lit outside the curtained window, its glass crackling from the force of some unseen blow.