Homunculus (28 page)

Of course he had. And here, it seemed certain, was a way by which to utterly destroy and disperse evidence that had fallen into the wrong hands. It was frightfully ingenious if it was so.

Pule bent back into the room. Idle speculation was getting him nowhere. One way or another, the box was worth nothing to him. It might, however, give Narbondo a few trying moments. And Narbondo’s box - Pule would have that. He tucked the coat around the still-whirring box and stepped out through the door, passing on the stairs his hurrying landlord who began to address him, then fell silent, staring at him in horror.

“Damn you!” cried Pule, pushing the man out of the way and drawing himself up as if to flail at him. Pule stood heaving with wrath, the man cowering against the banister, his countenance frozen. “What are you staring at, idiot!” shrieked Pule. “You soulless halfwit!” Pule choked. He couldn’t breathe. The man’s face seemed to be inflating like a balloon, the shocked look in his eyes testimony to Pule’s condition. Blood rushed in Pule’s ears. His heart smashed in his chest. His face burned.

With a snarl of released rage he kicked the man in the ribs, possessed by the desire to beat him senseless, to flail at him with the heavy box, to bash him through the tilted railing and watch him fall down the vortex between the spiraling stairs the thirty-odd feet to the distant floor below.

The man’s face loosened. He screamed, and the sound of it propelled Pule down the stairs in great leaping strides, hollering curses over his shoulder. An old man stepped out from a door onto a landing as if to detain Pule. He gasped and fled back inside, slamming the door behind him. A bolt rattled into place. At the ground floor Pule crashed through the street door, surprising two women who were just that moment stepping in. They shrieked in unison, one fainting, one leaping across toward a half-open closet as if to hide.

Pule gritted his teeth. His foes were falling before him. And they’d continue to fall. There’d be no stopping him. On the street he took to his heels, fleeing through the black night, neither running from anything nor toward anything, just running, holding the box beneath his arm, beset, it seemed to him, by no end of devils. He slowed, finally, gasping and sweating, outside a low tavern on Drury Lane. A group of men lounged in the gutter, tossing coins at a target chalked on the street. They paid him little heed. As he walked past, a coin rebounded off his heel.

“Hey, mate!” shouted an exasperated, accusing voice.

Pule turned on him. The man blanched, croaked out a halfmouthed curse, and fled into the open door of the tavern. His companions, themselves looking up, shouted, rose in a body, and followed the first man, the door of the tavern sailing shut with such force that rust from the hinges sprayed out into the lamplit road. The sound of scraping tables and benches could be heard from within, clunking against the door.

Pule turned slowly and resumed his journey, pondering darkly the revenge he’d have on them all - the well-placed anarchist bomb blowing to shreds the likes of such idlers along with the leering carp dealers of the world. He set a course for Pratlow Street.

FIFTEEN

TURMOIL ON PRATLOW STREET

S
hiloh the New Messiah leaned against the wall in a straight-backed oak chair, all of the joints of which were loose, the glue having dried to dust years before. He sat in silent meditation - hadn’t moved for half an hour. The curtain had been pulled back from the little shrine across the room, and in it, sitting beside the miniature portrait of Joanna Southcote, was the head of the lady herself in its aquarium.

The crosses we bear… thought Shiloh. He shook his head over it. The afternoon’s meeting in Kensington Gardens had been a disaster. It wouldn’t stand thinking about. It would have to be righted; there was no getting round it. One owed as much to one’s mother.

A brief chattering ensued from the glass box - three or four tentative clacks, then silence. The spark hadn’t entirely departed the head. There were elements of it left, apparently, that awakened at odd intervals like bubbles on the side of a glass, released suddenly for no apparent reason to sail surfaceward and burst. It would be the greatest miracle of all, he thought to himself, if during one of her sojourns into consciousness she would speak - give him a sign of some sort. Utter a telling phrase. Refer, perhaps, to the drawing nigh of the dirigible. But there was nothing, alas, save the random click-clacking of dry molars.

In an hour the moon would be down. Darkness would serve him well. The hunchback, he knew, was engaged at the house on Wardour Street, and would be until morning or until his filthy habits burst his pea-sized heart.

There was a chance, of course, that Narbondo had removed the box from his cabinet - an action that would make its recovery infinitely more complicated. But even so, there were the bones of his mother to consider - bones that he’d foolishly abandoned to the hunchback and his base experimentation. Shiloh remembered the confused hands and shuddered. He’d take the bones and the shroud out in a Gladstone bag. The shroud could be enshrined in its own glass case, not unlike the shroud of Turin. Enthusiasts were eager for the sort of circumstantial evidence inherent in such relics.

There had been the case of the woman on the Normandy coast who possessed a felt cap into which was indelibly stained the image of the Bambino of Aracoeli. A shrine had been built for it in the little village of Combray, and fully ten thousand people a year paraded through to view it - or, for two francs, to touch it. A drunken sailor from Toulouse had snatched it from its perch and clapped it onto his head, which promptly burst into flame, reducing the sailor and the cap simultaneously to ash. Not surprisingly, the urn of mixed ashes drew half again as many pilgrims yearly at double the price. The evangelist, laughing to himself, contemplated the fact that thus even the most vile sinners are put to work for the church. They rot in hell, of course, despite their works.

He arose, closed the curtain, and found the street. Outside, pasty and silent, stood an obedient convert, who in a moment trotted away up Buckeridge Street to summon the brougham. Shiloh was impatient. Eternity lay before him, just a few short days away, and he was itching to get at it. And he was itching, at the same time, to hasten Narbondo’s decline into the pit. He grinned to think of the cursing and gnashing of teeth that would ensue on the morrow when the hunchback dragged himself home, worn and degraded, wondering at his own sanity, perhaps injured from some ill-advised acrobatics, to find that he’d been relieved of the bones and the box in a single evening, that his smug posing hadn’t been worth a penny toot. The brougham swung round the distant corner, stopped before the tavern, and waited, as Shiloh climbed in beside the man in the turban.

“Wipe your disgusting face!” shouted the evangelist, watching in horror as the man smeared at his blood-caked lips. The old man shuddered involuntarily, looked straight ahead, and sank into himself as the brougham clattered along into Soho, bound for Pratlow Street.

“I
don’t intend to sue them,” said St. Ives heatedly, “I intend to beat them senseless. What would a lawsuit avail us? What, for God’s sake, would we claim?”

“It bears contemplation, sir, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Breaking into a man’s house is ill advised, regardless of its location or the motivation of the burglar. The law, I’m afraid, sir, is adamant on that point. Your own argument is solid. What
would
we claim, sir, if we were apprehended as common thieves?”

St. Ives strode on without speaking. They’d taken a cab to Charing Cross Road - far enough away, thought St. Ives, so that not even the most scrupulous detective would connect them to any ill doings on Pratlow Street - supposing, that is, that the authorities were concerned with what was happening on Pratlow Street, which they almost certainly weren’t.

He wished heartily that either Godall or the Captain had been in that evening, but neither had - off on some mutual business, no doubt. Scouring Limehouse, perhaps, for the absconded Bill Kraken. St. Ives would have to act without them. This wasn’t their affair anyway, this aerator business. It was his - his and Keeble’s, who would be imposed upon to build another if St. Ives failed. He could hardly, though, drag the toymaker into it. It had been St. Ives’ own idiotic fault that the silo door had been left unbolted, that Pule had been allowed to escape them twice, first at the manor, then later on the train. They must strike while the proverbial iron was still hot. Peculiar events were fast sliding toward possibly dangerous conclusions. Narbondo and Pule sailed in the current of some sort of hellish, swiftly moving stream, which would carry the villains out of reach if St. Ives weren’t brisk.

“Toynbee and Koontz would accomplish little,” he said to Hasbro, repealing his disinclination to carry the issue to the authorities.

“There aren’t a sharper pair of investigators in the Yard,” insisted Hasbro. “Koontz is a legend - feared in the London underworld. It’s the peculiar look in his eye, if you ask me, that throws the fear into them. That and the cut of his suit. If he can’t come it across this Pule, then no one can. He was involved in the Isadora Persano affair, do you recall - the business with the worm and the inside-out pouch of tobacco. His aunt is a fast friend of my sister. We could look him up tonight, I don’t doubt. Lay the case before him.”

The dim corner of Old Compton Street loomed ahead of them, the sorry buildings disguised by darkness, the pavements in utter shadow. St. Ives slowed his pace and asked himself for the first time exactly what it was he intended to do. And the more he thought on it, the more he recalled the faith he held in the remarkable Hasbro, a faith which his headstrong determination to retrieve the aerating device and deal with Pule had momentarily effaced. Hasbro, in fact, was not altogether wrong. If this man Koontz could be prevailed upon to take the case…

He stopped altogether and stepped back into the darkness of an overhanging gable that shadowed a ruined front stoop. This is decidedly unwise, thought St. Ives. The least he should do was wait for Godall and the Captain. The aerator box was their affair in a roundabout way. What was it Godall had said three nights ago in the rain? “The collective spirit,” or some such thing. There was truth in that. No good would come from them each hacking out his own path, only to go blundering into one another in some secret, foliage-obscured crossroad.

“Hasbro,” whispered St. Ives, the very atmosphere of the dilapidated neighborhood dampening his voice.

“Sir?”

“You’re quite right, of course. This man Koontz - can we find him?”

“He’s said to have an almost legendary passion for crustaceans, sir, and might conceivably be engaged even now in a late supper in the environs of Regent Street, at a club with the unlikely appellation of Bistro Shrimp-o-Dandy. He’s infamous, I’m afraid, for keeping cooks and waiters up until dawn.”

“We’ll have a look in, then, at this Shrimp-o-Dandy. I’ve seen reason, Hasbro.”

But at that moment, St. Ives saw something more - the running shadow of a man that slipped in and out of darkness across the street, crossing toward the laboratory of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.

St. Ives and Hasbro stepped as one into a dim corner, the Shrimp-o-Dandy forgotten, and crept along up the pavement toward where the mysterious figure had vanished into a doorway. Neither of them spoke. There was no use pointing out that something was afoot, or that they were duty-bound to follow. They’d gone out that evening on the trail of mystery, and here it was, wearing a placard. There was nothing to do but investigate.

B
ill Kraken, trembling with fear and animated by determination. found himself alone within the dark confines of the cabinet of Dr. Narbondo. Odd noises assailed him - the languid splashing of lazy carp in the tank on the floor, the sound of his own labored breathing, and the tremendous pounding of his heart which might, it seemed, burst like a piece of ripe fruit before he found what it was he sought. And at random intervals came the brief clatter of what sounded like a handful of ivory dominoes being dropped into a sack.