The Lazarus Prophecy (33 page)

The death of the prison reformer and philanthropist Edith Cecil was reported in the papers yesterday. She was attacked and mauled to death on Hampstead Heath by a pack of wild dogs. It was her custom to enjoy a constitutional in the clean air of the Heath's high pastures.

I never knew it was so hazardous a locale. It was a very unfortunate way for a woman so noble and good to meet her demise. I wonder how the next high-born victim of the killer will likely die. Perhaps a lion or a tiger will escape from its secure berth at the zoological gardens intent on a genteel dinner.

Caul cannot be their man. They would not suggest something as frivolous as a fist-fight with the butcher responsible now for the deaths of nine unfortunates. He would be bound in irons, tried before an Old Bailey judge and dispatched without regret or hesitation to the gallows. He'd surely be for the jump.

And there is the purse. It is out of all proportion to the actuality of the match. Yesterday one of Anderson's men called and gave me the keys to an address in Hercules Road in Lambeth. It was done very precisely by one of those new typewriting machines on a card tied to the key ring. I walked over Westminster Bridge to get to the spot, the heave of the river beneath my feet turgid and stinking and the lamps lit as a cheery riposte to the general dank demeanor of the day.

My destination was built into one of the railway arches under the lines that terminate at Waterloo Station. I opened a double-mortised and sturdily padlocked iron door and within discovered a chamber with a curved roof and no furnishing beyond a
full-size boxing ring. Lamps had been rigged above the ring and supplied, I saw from the arrangement of pipes, with gas. The solder on the pipe joins glimmered in the light from the open doorway behind me. The work was very recently done.

This is the venue for the bout they wish me to contest. There is to be no master of ceremonies, no referee, no seconds, no time-keeper and not a solitary spectator present. I stood there thinking the scene both curious and sobering. I was intrigued by the mysterious purpose of the whole enterprise. At a time of public uneasiness and palpable distrust, it struck me on the part of its architects wholly as folly.

There was a six-minute clock on the wall. These contraptions have a face segmented into six sections, five being marked in white and the sixth in red. A single hand circulates. When after five minutes it reaches the red section, a bell sounds to signal the end of the round. After a minute's rest it sounds again to signal the start of the next session. It wasn't wound; the hand was idle. It would be for me or Edmund Caul to wind it.

There were buckets and stools in opposing corners of the ring and a tap protruding from the wall to my left above a grid released clean water when I turned it on. Trouble has been gone to. Thought and effort and money have gone into this. They have thought of everything but the single crucial detail of a sensible purpose for it all.

The place impended. That was what it did. It possessed the atmosphere of something significant shortly to happen. A train trundled on one of the tracks laid over the stone arch above me and through suffocating masonry I heard the faint sigh of its engine's whistle. And I had the first inkling that my match with Caul might not be folly at all but important in some deadly way I had neither the knowledge nor capacity to grasp.

After my visit to the archway I walked back across the bridge. The steamboats are a mighty sight with their puffing funnels and churning circular paddles but the stink of the water they float on is so fetid it doesn't do to linger for a moment longer than necessary in a crossing on foot. I walked to the Strand and queued at a coffee stall and
drank the bitter brew pondering that I might have been looking for Caul in the wrong places.

A man who wears a cologne of his own devising might be said to be refined. The same is true of a man who wears bespoke suits. But any callous thug can affect gentlemanly pretensions. What if this gambler doesn't frequent the casinos and card schools as often as he does the cock or fighting dog pit? What if blood and mutilation are attractive aspects of the way he likes to place his wagers?

Steam rose from the stall's boiling water urn. Customers sipped their rejuvenating beverages from the stall's little tin cups. The sky brooded above, rain threatening and most of the coffee drinkers clad in ulsters or waterproof capes. There was the murmur of conversation, subdued and guarded as has become characteristic of London since the killer they're calling the Ripper began his spree.

The rumours are rife. It's the Queen's surgeon. It's Victoria's simpleton grandson, Prince Albert Victor. It's a soldier gone mad campaigning in Afghanistan or a Tory Peer driven insane by syphilis.

But overwhelmingly it's a foreigner and more than likely it's a foreign Jew. He'll be a Pole or a Russian. He's certain to be a German or a Greek. He's an abortionist from Paris, you mark my words. He's a Sicilian pork butcher runs a shop in Clerkenwell Road and worships every Sunday at the Catholic church there. He's a rich stockbroker who strikes with impunity, protected by his cabal of masonic friends. Except that he's none of these because he's a demon in human guise wearing the refinement of a gentleman's clothes.

If they knew the true number and identity of the victims I think there would be more on the streets than Vigilance Committee members armed with swordsticks and revolvers. The police would be seen as powerless to protect the populace. The mob would rise and London would become ungovernable.

There's a dog fight every Friday night staged at a dive in Bethnal Green. I know because a fellow from Limerick who breeds bull mastiffs told me about it when the two
of us were working together on Limehouse Docks. That was before the killings and the work drying up for foreigners like me and him on account of them.

I've one pound ten shillings of the money left I won when I beat the Boilerhouse. Today is Thursday. I'm going to go to Bethnal Green tomorrow and see if I can't sniff out a well-dressed fellow wearing on him a whiff of lavender water and camphor oil.

It's the low places he frequents. I reckon he takes his entertainment puerile and cruel. Flea circuses and bear-baiting are the style of the man. He's like a little boy with a stick poking curious at an ailing creature. That's my intuition. He's a man-child who takes an infant delight in inflicting pain. He'd rather a performance of Punch and Judy than a play by Oscar Wilde.

But he's physically strong. I do well to remember that. And if his mind is immature, his body is young and vigorous. A man comfortable in the villainous dens and hide-outs of this great ill-lit city is either a complete fool or a man confident he can handle himself and whatever human obstacles come his way. He'll be handy, will Edmund Caul. I'm not a betting man myself, but I'd bet on that.

I've a hunch he was at the fight I fought against the Boilerhouse in Whitechapel last month. It was the sort of event would attract him. His might have been among the faces, scarlet with heat under their hats behind the smoke of their cigars in the crowd. He might even have risen to his feet applauding cued by that cute drivel about me being the Irish champion fresh off a Dublin boat.

If he was there, he'd know what I'm capable of. But I've become quite certain in my mind that the knowing and seeing wouldn't for a moment put him off. It would have the opposite effect entirely. His vanity would compel him to take the challenge. He'd look forward with relish to doing me a painful mischief between the ropes.

That could of course be me deluding myself. There's a lot of wishful thinking encouraged by the prospect of earning 20,000 pounds just by cuffing a novice fighter around the ring. But if Caul is the fellow I think he is he never backs off or forgives a slight and would never in all eternity learn the Christian lesson of turning the other cheek.

I'm anticipating someone proud and spiteful who takes things personally. I'd be disappointed now if he was any other way. The severity of the beating I plan to give him might otherwise play afterwards on my conscience.

October 22
^nd
1888

I was on the point of finding him when he found me. He was there at Bethnal Green. The dog fights are staged deep underground in the basement of a derelict brickworks there. It's a vast subterranean room supported by iron pillars placed every few feet, the floor cobbled, the light sparingly supplied by candle tallow and the odd strung oil lamp.

The howl of the bull terriers and mastiffs awaiting their moment in their cages is chorused by the howls of men drunk on savagery and money staked and liquor sold there from a tapped barrel and served in cups of waxed paper fashioned to hold only a single fortifying shot.

The dogs go at it literally in a pit. It's circular and about eight feet deep and the same in diameter and I think is a filled-in well. Water encourages cholera and if you don't want it around you're wisest dispensing with it altogether. That's what they must have done when bricks were still shaped and fired there. They filled their poisonous well. Now the East End has found a practical use for it as it does for most things.

There was straw to soak up the blood on the floor of the pit but not so much of it that the beasts couldn't find with their paws the purchase to rip and tear at one another. The smell of canine piss soured air thick with the smoke of cheroots and clay pipes. Greenish stains clung to the cobbles where chewing tobacco had been spat. The crowd pressing around the action was an insalubrious rabble: patched, frayed, holed, loud and dirty. Closer to the press and the smell of unwashed bodies clung, sweetish and corrupt.

I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned and it was him. He wore a bowler at a rakish tip and his white teeth shaped a grin under a trimmed moustache. He was my height and every inch of him warily alert under his coat and brocade waistcoat. You know some men are agile and fast. It was in the posture of him and the easy way he held his
Malacca cane. The amusement around his mouth failed to soften eyes that looked black in the feeble light.

He said, ‘Ain't you the pugilist feller from over the water?'

‘I'm not the Irish champion. That was a lie.'

‘The noble art,' he said. ‘The noble artiste.'

‘You were there?'

‘I won thirty guineas that evening. The odds on you were long. Too long, I thought, when I saw you test the tension of the ropes before you changed. That's when I placed my bet.'

‘D'you box yourself, Sir?'

He grinned again. ‘I've natural advantages in a fight. I was born quick and strong. Sweat and effort ain't my style, Irishman.'

‘Easily said.'

He had half turned away from me, dismissive, bored already. He turned back and smiled the least pleasant smile I have ever seen in my life. He said. ‘You wouldn't care to put me to the test.'

‘On the contrary,' I said, ‘I'd be more than happy to teach you a lesson in humility, Sir.'

He tilted his head. I couldn't read what he was thinking at all. There was life in those black eyes but a curious blankness too. He said, ‘A hundred guineas you won't last three rounds with me.'

‘I don't have a hundred guineas.'

‘I'll take collateral.'

‘I have no property or means.'

‘Your immortal soul will suffice, Mr. Barry,' he said, in a way that sounded like he was not jesting darkly but entirely serious.

‘I'm not interested in your money, Sir.'

‘What do you want?'

‘Should I best you, you'll grant me a request?'

‘You don't look a prosperous man. You should fight for the prize. But it's an academic choice.'

‘Meaning I haven't a hope in hell?'

He grinned at that, properly amused. ‘You beat me,' he said, ‘I'll grant you your request. You have my word on it.'

October 31
^st
1888

I was summoned by messenger to a meeting at Whitehall. The walk from the Devil's Acre was a short one in distance but in character was swapping wretched drabness for austere grandeur. The transformation was accomplished in a few streets. I went from windowless hovels and the wretched poor to pillared porticos flanked by guardsmen in gleaming uniform. It is an aspect of London I think will continue to surprise me as long as I reside here.

I was passed in Parliament Square by a column of mounted militia with their sabres drawn and shouldered, reining their mounts one-handed, the sword blades wickedly curved and sharp in the pewter light of an autumn morning and the steady clop of a hundred horses ominous, like rumbling thunder.

Anderson was there. So too was Father Jeffries and a man to whom I wasn't introduced I took from livery and manner to be a senior civil servant. This business is more and more curious. The building we were in suggested a conspiracy with which Lord Salisbury's government is complicit. It also suggested confidentiality.

‘The match is made,' I told them. ‘I posited the wager as you gentlemen requested.'

Jeffries said, ‘When does it take place?'

‘Since the venue was of my choosing, he was insistent on the date and time. We contest the bout at 9 o'clock at night on the 9th of November.'

Jeffries and Anderson exchanged a glance. The former said, ‘The ninth is not ideal.'

‘Worried you can't make it, Father? You're not coming. No one is. This is entirely a private affair.'

Anderson said, ‘Do you need anything, training expenses, funds for blood or iron tonics or special foods?'

I was able to train without charge at a gymnasium in Leadenhall in exchange for giving the city gents among its clientele one or two professional pointers. I said, ‘A few shillings wouldn't go begging, Sir.'

‘I'll see to it the funds are drawn.'

I smiled at Anderson and then at Jeffries, wondering who he really was. There were clergymen in London diocese with that surname. There were four of them but none of them was him. I'd done a bit of investigating. He was a man of the cloth. He had the piety and that hope for a divine conclusion to mortal life that puts a light in their eyes. But he wasn't who he was claiming to be.