Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (3 page)

 
          
 
"I've reached the limits of my patience,
Hasbro," said St. Ives to the man beside him. "I'm convinced we're
watching an empty ship. Our man has given us the slip, and I'd sooner have a look
at the inside of a glass of ale than another look at that damned steamer."

 
          
 
"Patience is its own reward, sir,"
replied St. Ives's manservant.

 
          
 
St. Ives gave him a look. "My patience
must be thinner than yours." He pulled a pouch from the pocket of his
greatcoat, extracting a bent bulldog pipe and a quantity of tobacco. "Do
you suppose Kraken has given up?" He pressed curly black tobacco into the
pipe bowl with his thumb and struck a match, the flame hissing and sputtering
in the misty evening air.

 
          
 
"Not Kraken, sir, if I'm any judge. If
our man went ashore along the docks, then Kraken followed him. A disguise
wouldn't answer, not with that hump. And it's an even bet that Narbondo
wouldn't be away to
London
, not this late in the evening. For my money he's in a public house and
Kraken's in the street outside. If he made away north, then Jack's got him, and
the outcome is the same. The best ..."

 
          
 
"Hark!"

 
          
 
Silence fell, interrupted only by the sighing
of wavelets splashing against the stones of the jetty and by the hushed clatter
of distant activity along the docks. The two men stood barely breathing, smoke
from St. Ives's pipe rising invisibly into the fog. "There!"
whispered St. Ives, holding up his left hand.

 
          
 
Softly, too rhythmically to be mistaken for
the natural cadence of the
ocean,
came the muted
dipping of oars and the creak of shafts in oarlocks. St. Ives stepped gingerly
across to an adjacent rock and clambered down into a little crab-infested
grotto. He could just discern, through a sort of triangular window, the thin
gray line where the sky met the sea. And there, pulling into
view,
was a long rowboat in which sat two men, one plying the oars and the other
crouched on a thwart and wrapped in a dark blanket. A frazzle of black hair
drooped in moist curls around his shoulders.

 
          
 
"It's him," whispered Hasbro into
St. Ives's ear.

 
          
 
"That it is. And up to no good at all.
He's bound for Hargreaves's, or I'm a fool. We were right about this one. That
eruption in Narvik was no eruption at all. It was a detonation. And now the
task is unspeakably complicated. I'm half inclined to let the monster have a go
at it, Hasbro. I'm altogether weary of this world. Why not let him blow it to
smithereens?"

 
          
 
St. Ives stood up tiredly, the rowboat having
disappeared into the fog. He found that he was shocked by what he had said —not
only because Narbondo was very nearly capable of doing just that, but also
because St. Ives had meant it. He didn't care. He put one foot in front of the
other these days out of what?—duty?
revenge
?

 
          
 
"There's the matter of the ale
glass," said Hasbro wisely, grasping St. Ives by the elbow. "That and
a kidney pie, unless I'm mistaken, would answer most questions on the subject
of futility. We'll fetch in Bill Kraken and Jack on the way. We've time enough
to stroll round to Hargreaves's after supper."

 
          
 
St. Ives squinted at Hasbro. "Of course
we do," he said. "I might send you lads out tonight alone, though. I
need about ten hours' sleep to bring me around. These damned dreams ... In the
morning I'll wrestle with these demons again."

 
          
 
"There's the ticket, sir," said the
stalwart Hasbro, and through the gathering gloom the two men picked their way
from rock to rock toward the warm lights of
Dover
.

 
          
 
"I can't imagine I've ever been this
hungry before," said Jack Owlesby, spearing up a pair of rashers from a
passing platter. His features were set in a hearty smile, as if he were making
a strong effort to efface having revealed himself too thoroughly the night
before.
"Any more eggs?"

 
          
 
"Heaps," said Bill Kraken through a
mouthful of cold toast, and he reached for another platter at his elbow.
"Full of the right sorts of humors,
sir,
is eggs.
It's the unctuous secretions of the yolk that fetches the home stake, if you
follow me.
Loaded up with all manners of fluids."

 
          
 
Owlesby paused, a forkful of egg halfway to
his mouth. He gave Kraken a look that seemed to suggest he was unhappy with
talk of fluids and secretions.

 
          
 
"Sorry, lad.
There's no stopping me when I'm swept off by the scientific. I've forgot that
you ain't partial to the talk of fluids over breakfast. Not that it matters a
bit about fluids or any of the rest of it, what with that comet sailing in to
smash us to flinders ..."

 
          
 
St. Ives coughed, seeming to choke, his fit drowning
the last few words of
Kraken' s
observation. '' Lower
your voice, man!''

 
          
 
"Sorry, Professor.
I don't think sometimes. You know me. This coffee tastes like rat poison,
don't
it? And not high-toned rat poison either, but
something mixed up by your man with the hump."

 
          
 
"I haven't tasted it," said St.
Ives, raising his cup. He peered into the depths of the dark stuff and was
reminded instantly of the murky water in the night-shrouded tide pool he'd
slipped into on his way back from the tip of the jetty last night. He didn't
need to taste the coffee; the thin mineral-spirits smell of it was enough.
"Any of the tablets?" he asked Hasbro.

 
          
 
"I brought several of each, sir. It
doesn't pay to go abroad without them. One would think that the art of brewing
coffee would have traveled the few miles from the Normandy coast to the British
Isles, sir, but we all know it hasn't." He reached into the pocket of his
coat and pulled out a little vial of jellybean-like pills.
"Mocha
Java, sir?"

 
          
 
"If you would," said St. Ives.
" 'All
ye men drink Java,' as the saying goes."

 
          
 
Hasbro dropped one into the upheld cup, and in
an instant the room was filled with the astonishing heavy aroma of real coffee,
the chemical smell of the pallid facsimile in the rest of their cups retreating
before it. St. Ives seemed to reel with the smell of it, as if for the moment
he was revitalized.

 
          
 
"By God!" whispered Kraken.
"What else have you got there?"

 
          
 
"A tolerable Wiener Melange, sir, and a
Brazilian brew that I can vouch for. There's an espresso too, but it's untried
as yet."

 
          
 
"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 untU 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 cdl 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 fmd
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.