TARN & BECK

TARN

&

BECK

THE

CURSED COIN

Roger Nickleby

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

events, and places either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

TARN AND BECK: THE CURSED COIN

Copyright © 2016 by Roger Nickleby

Cover image: Highwayman Background © petrafler/ Fotolia

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

used or reproduced without written permission

from the author, except in cases of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First edition: 2016

Dedicated to

The ones who inspired me

To write about this

Adventuresome duo.

And to those that I hope to inspire

In turn to dream about

Such adventures and excitement.

Many thanks.

Chapter 1:

Son of a Rat-Catcher

In a large Dickensian office, a company of clerks sat around at roll-top desks, rows and columns of them like the pages inside the ledgers they wrote in. They calculated various figures and formulae with large registers and other devices, keys clicking and clacking inside the machinery with the totals popping up behind a glass screen.

Of course, they could have figured out all of the numbers themselves, but it was faster to rely upon the mechanics of these machines. Any slip-up, of course, was blamed upon the clerk and not the machine, and so they had to be precise and careful.

They wrote reports and stamped documents, sending off various paperwork through messengers and office-boys for processing and recording. There was talk of installing some contraption of pneumatic tubes for faster delivery of this paperwork to other departments of the company, but it was decided that such a system was more bother than it was worth.

Just outside the office in the hallway, a short, hapless city kid posing as an urbane man in his late twenties, Beck, returned from his break. He brushed the crumbs off of his vest and waistcoat, adjusted his tie and the kerchief in his pocket, and smoothed down his slick black hair that he oiled in the morning.

He wiped his glasses again, mentally going over a problem he had been dealing with before he left, and entered the office. He should have noticed that the office seemed unusually quiet and productive even by the strict standards imposed upon them by their bosses. That should have alerted him something was wrong, but he was still distracted and preoccupied.

It was important to the firm that his work should continue unabated, never mind the small interruptions and breaks that were necessary for a simple human being like him. He wasn’t a bleeding calculator.

Meticulous and studious described most of the clerks at the Lavonya banking and insurance firm for good reason. The firm’s reputation depended on their work and the clerks wished to appear as assiduous as possible for better promotion and compensation.

Smug might have also been the word that Beck would have used for some of them. But he attempted to keep his opinions to himself and hold his head down to his work, even as difficult as that sometimes was.

Beck walked down an aisle between desks, ready to get back to his job. Most of the clerks didn’t look up at him, preoccupied. However, Greg, a tall, snobby clerk smirked as Beck sat down at his own desk, which was unoccupied with its roll-top closed.

Beck unrolled the top, and quickly closed the top again. He glared at the others sitting around him, wondering who was the culprit. Most of them appeared to be hard at work as if they didn’t know or notice what was going on. However, several of them started squeaking like rats or mice. Beck fumed to himself.

Beck rolled open the top again and stared down at a dead rat lying on top of his desktop and paperwork. Greg looked up from his work and seemed to notice the rat.

“Oh, look, a rat. Always a problem, aren't they?” Greg said.

Beck got up from his desk, pretending to ignore Greg for now, and headed toward the supply closet where the night cleaners stored their equipment. However, he had to pass by Greg’s desk on the way.

“Rats get you everywhere.” Greg remarked as if to thin air while Beck passed by him.

Beck paused and shook his head, not looking back at Greg. “You all are nothing more than children at heart. The school bullies who refuse to grow up.” Beck said.

Beck continued on as Greg glared at him. “How dare you insult us like that.”

Beck opened up the supply closet door, fetching a pail, gloves, and a bag. “This is something that should have been left behind at the schoolyard ages ago.” He said, slamming the closet door shut before heading back to his desk.

Beck slipped the gloves on, unrolled the desktop cover again, and snatched up the rat, disposing of it into the bag.

“Did the rat die of natural causes?” One of the clerks asked.

Beck began sorting through the documents that had been left on his desk, tossing the papers that appeared to have been befouled by the rat’s presence into the pail and ignored their comments.

“Or was it a trap or poison?” Another clerk asked.

Greg sat at his desk, smirking at Beck. “I bet a rat-catcher like you could tell.”

Beck turned around and faced the clerks. “All right, go ahead and laugh. But if it weren't for rat-catchers like my father still working down below, rats would be overrunning this place.”

Beck frowned to himself, grim and serious. “Although how could you tell with the rats already running this place?”

The clerks stared at Beck, shocked as Greg got up from his desk and confronted Beck. “Now see here! If that is a dig at the firm, then you really have gone too far.”

Greg kept poking Beck in the chest for emphasis. “This firm just happens to be the best, most respected business in this city, this country.”

Beck looked down at Greg’s finger poking him like he wanted to bite it off.

“It's trusted everywhere currency is spent.” Greg stopped poking Beck and crossed his arm, glaring at Beck. “Do you still want to work here?”

Beck looked up at Greg, angry. “My father happened to be a boxer as well. Would you care to sample a move of his?”

Greg ducked one of Beck's swings, but received another punch.

Shortly thereafter, Beck sat in a short wooden chair facing the office supervisor, seated behind his desk in a red velvet upholstered chair. “I’m sorry I let my temper get the best of me like that.” Beck said.

The supervisor acted magnanimous. “I understand your frustration. A mistake was made, and details of your background were publically revealed.”

Beck looked down. “I don’t blame the Lavonya firm for that.”

He certainly did not advertise his upbringing or that he had occasionally assisted his father in fulfilling his duties. But the Lavonya firm had heavily researched his credentials and past when they hired him for this job.

The firm mainly dealt with the assets of the Fernando Corporation, one of the most important companies in the country of Bonniver and based here in the city of Silvo. Fernando had factories, mercantile fleets, and a wide network of other subsidiaries, including Lavonya, which handled Fernando Corp.’s payrolls, investments, stock, insurance, tax payments, loans, mortgages and more.

The security of these finance and business affairs had to be ensured, so naturally all of the employees came under scrutiny. Beck hadn’t expected anything less.

But he had not expected to be so exposed as a rat-catcher’s son to all of his colleagues when he had taken care to conceal his background for most of his life. As a child, Beck had quickly realized the sort of humiliation and degradation he would face if his father’s employment was known.

So he had disguised and hid it as often as he could. He had asked his father never to pick him up at school, and instead walked to and from school by himself. He had never invited any friends or fellow students over to his home, a small flat.

He had always taken care of his appearance and made sure there was no evidence of the work he occasionally did alongside his father. Sometimes this had forced him to scrub off the sewer stench and rat blood as hard as he possibly could.

However, even that wasn’t enough at times. A student might have recognized him if their parents hired him and his father to clean out a cellar. Or they might have spotted him chasing down a rat in an alleyway.

So Beck always had to live with the risk and likelihood of exposure. He undertook numerous prevention methods to cover up this prospect over the years, but sometimes he would have to deal with the aftermath.

Though these problems had been difficult to handle when he was a child, at times now it seemed easier when he was young, or at least the difficulties had faded away in his memory. He had grown up in a poor neighborhood where the risk of being found out was lessened, and the teasing too, by the fact that few there could afford the services of a talented rat-catcher like his father.

The man had worked in more upscale locales, making it less likely that the neighborhood children would find out. And other children’s parents also had to take on demeaning jobs to make ends meet. If anyone had ever found out, they usually made only a few half-hearted remarks that Beck could deal with.

The worst bully could always be thrown off by the fact that Beck’s father was also known as the best pugilist, or boxer, in the area and had trained his son as well. But after Beck’s father had vanished and Beck moved on to university with a scholarship, the risk seemed to be higher and his efforts at prevention increased.

He had felt like he could not afford to lose any of the opportunities that he had gained by advancing so far. He had worked and studied too hard and too much to be exposed and sent packing back to the slum he came from.

He desired a better life for himself, away from the rats and sewers. And so he subsumed himself into this new lifestyle and existence, pretending to be someone that he was not in an attempt to blend in with his fellow students and then his fellow colleagues.

He developed poor eyesight and started wearing glasses, which made him look more fastidious with his hair neatly combed and slicked back from a clean-shaven face. But even so, Beck had been discovered and now he couldn’t get away from the rats.

This wasn’t the first time Beck had received a dead rat at Lavonya. The one in his lunch-pail had been especially gross.

He had heard a suspicious rattle of sorts inside the pail and realized it certainly wasn’t anything he had packed. He shook the pail again and felt the rat flopping around inside. It was rigid, almost fleshy and solid with a little clicking noise as its claws hit the pail walls.

He had recognized it by sound and feel alone before he even checked, as he could hardly forget what a dead rat corpse felt and sounded like. Especially when he used to carry a burlap bag with about a dozen rat corpses knocking around inside.

Even though he had tried very hard to forget and gloss over this side of his past, to move on to something better, he still felt like he was just the son of a rat-catcher at times. He was still recognizable to those who had known his father well and had hired him, and by extension his son, to clean out a cellar.

His father was a good man, a good rat-catcher, and a good boxer, before he vanished and left his son alone. But Beck still felt embarrassed that this was all he was known for, what his father had done, and that he had not yet achieved or done anything to overcome this shame. He wanted to be different.

A note of discord briefly subverted Supervisor’s sympathy. “Beck, you are a reasonable, intelligent young man, once you’ve recovered your senses. You don’t deserve this treatment.”

“I appreciate the sentiment.” Beck said somewhat sarcastically.

The supervisor settled back to business. “However, I cannot tolerate any disturbance in the workplace. A violent outburst like the one you just displayed—Beck, surely you can understand my dilemma here.”

“What about the person who slipped that rat into my desk? And the paperwork they ruined?” Beck asked.

“We will find the culprit responsible and punish them severely. Especially if the financial losses from befouling those papers are really as great as you suggest.” The supervisor firmly said.

“That would dampen their festivities.” Beck moodily muttered.

“However, I can’t let you work here anymore.” The supervisor insisted.

Soon Beck clutched a box full of his belongings and office supplies under one arm as he walked down a cobblestone road lined with sooty storefronts and houses optimistically named Willow Street. Factory smokestacks and the rest of the city of Silvo overlooked one of the poorest neighborhoods.

He passed by urchins playing, downtrodden and weary, much like him when he was a child. Trying to survive, grow up, and enjoy life as much as they were able to in this terrible place.

He entered a pub next door and greeted Cecily, a pragmatic, anxious woman in her forties who had helped raise him after his father left. She poured Beck a cup of coffee from behind a counter.

“So what are you going to do now?” Cecily asked, looking up at Beck.

He sat on a stool on the other side of the counter, staring out the sooty window at the city. “I don’t know. All of my life, I’ve tried to get out of the shadows of these smokestacks. Climb out of the sewers my father worked in. But I’ve never really succeeded.”

Cecily carried the cup over to Beck. “You did a pretty good job before you mucked things up.”

Beck looked up at Cecily, raising an eyebrow as if asking if she was joking.

“It’s true. You managed to work at Lavonya. That’s prestigious.”

Beck accepted the cup and drank. “A dead-end, menial job. I wasn’t paid enough and got passed over for promotion in favor of better-connected individuals.”

Beck slammed the cup down on the counter, spilling a little. “Sorry about that.”

Cecily shrugged and started wiping down the counter as Beck looked out the window again. “Well, win some, lose some, I guess.” Cecily said. “You could try to get some work around here. I might call in a favor.”