The Affair of the Porcelain Dog (19 page)

"They've been washed with lye soap and carbolic," Lazarus said.

"Thank God for that."

The socks weren't that bad, and the shoes fit as if made for me. Lazarus allowed himself a small smile. The wheeled operating table stood against one wall. Next to it stood a smaller table with a pile of clean cloths and an autoclave. Lazarus took a cloth from a pile, unfolded it next to the autoclave, and began unpacking the clean surgical instruments onto it.

"St. Andrews thinks he's protecting me by keeping me in the dark," Lazarus said.

"That sounds familiar."

"But I know more than he thinks. And he has no idea what he's up against."

"And you do?" I asked.

The soft clinking of the instruments stopped. He considered me for a moment, his intelligent brown eyes searching and evaluating.

"Sinclair has connections to a cheap source of opium--opium, which he once supplied to Goddard, and which I suspect is being used to facilitate the exploitation of the children mentioned in that letter you showed me."

"Nate and Sinclair were close," I said. "If Sinclair had been involved with that business with the children, Nate wouldn't have stood for it."

"I'm talking about the opium," he said. "Do you know the name of the brothel owner?"

"Nate never said. I'm not even sure that he knew."

"I have my suspicions," he said.

I wondered how he had come by those suspicions. The instruments began clinking again. He pretended to rearrange them to hide his shaking fingers.

"He did say the man was a doctor," I continued. "Or he had been one in Afghanistan. Said he was as old as Father Christmas and had a reputation for performing unnecessary surgeries. I've been meaning to ask--"

The instruments clattered to the ground. Lazarus hissed a curse, then knelt down to pick them up. For several moments there was no sound, save for a soft clink-clink as he stood and carefully laid the instruments once more on the cloth.

"Show me the doll again," he said when he finished.

The sad little doll was at the bottom of a pocket in the tweed coat. I handed it to him across the table. He turned it over in his hands. I watched dread turn first to suspicion, and then to professional distance.

"This came from Afghanistan," he said, handing it back to me. "This pattern, these colors, I recognize them." He reached for the instruments again, then, sighing, laid his hands on the table. "I think I know who is importing those children, and who is behind the dissemination of the strongest strain of opium this city has seen since 1870. Of course, it would be suicide to proceed without being certain."

He exhaled heavily, then winced. A drop of red beaded below one nostril then ran down his face.

"Damn, blast, hell." He took a cloth from the pile and pressed it to his nose. A red blotch formed on the cloth, spreading until the cloth was more red than gray. Lazarus dropped it and quickly reached for another. "Oh, hell!" he swore again.

"Should I go?" I asked.

He shook his head, wincing again.

"Call the nurse?"

He waved an irritated hand.

"Because you're bleeding from two places that I can see, and it's starting to frighten me."

"You and St. Andrews, that big ninny," he said through the cloth. "The shoulder is just something that happens from time to time. As for the nose, that was your work. I'm not an invalid, Adler, I just need a moment."

I gave it to him.

The surgery had been the site of the most significant events in the saga of Lazarus and Adler. We'd met there, for starters. I'd admired the confidence with which he wielded his instruments despite the fact he couldn't meet my eyes. Later, he'd fumbled through what had to be his first solicitation. There had been a few stolen kisses in that room, though the one time he'd allowed anything more serious to happen on the premises, it transpired in the dispensary. It was also in the surgery, two years ago, where I saw Goddard for the first time. He had been touring the facility with a group of prospective donors, and though Lazarus and I had had a standing date for a year and a half, somehow that night it completely slipped my mind.

When I glanced up, the good doctor had his hemorrhage under control and was regarding me with the strangest expression. I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off.

"Ira, I wouldn't drag my worst enemy into this." He dabbed his face with the cloth, then discarded it, and the other, into a bin. "I hope you know that I include you when I say that."

"I'm your worst enemy?"

He smiled wryly.

"Far from it. In fact, I'd say that right now, you're one of the only people I can trust. I can trust you, can't I?"

"With what?" I asked.

"And therein lies the question."

He ran a hand through his freshly trimmed hair. There was quite a bit more gray than there had been a mere two years ago, and the light from the window accentuated it. "This has been a long time coming. It should be a relief, I suppose. Nine years is too long to carry something like this."

"Now you've completely lost me," I said.

If I was the only one Lazarus could trust, he must have been in a right spot indeed. But wasn't I in the very same spot?

"Yeah," I said. "You can trust me."

He gave a solemn nod.

"Then that will have to do."

Having never been outside of London, it was difficult for me to imagine any place not walled in by dark, teeming tenements and blanketed with a layer of yellow fog half the year. But as Lazarus spoke unblinkingly about the worst period of his life, an alien landscape took shape in my mind's eye. A country with a vast, unforgiving wasteland of treacherous mountains and desolate, rocky plains with hostile, turban-wearing denizens as cunning as they were difficult to subdue. The year was 1879; the place, Afghanistan. Lazarus, a newly commissioned army surgeon, hadn't been much older than I was now.

"My division had set up camp at the Sherpur Cantonment," Lazarus said. "A godforsaken sprawl of trenches dug into the rocky hills outside of Caboul. Between the barren plains and the blizzards that would come thundering down the mountains without warning, it was bleak, but at least it was away from the fighting. The peace, however, was not to last.

"On December fifteenth, rebel forces attacked, led by Mohammed Jan. I was certain that we were done for, but somehow we managed to hold them off until General Gough arrived with reinforcements on the twenty-third. By midday, the rebel forces had been crushed. It was then that Edward Acton came to my attention. I don't suppose you've heard of him."

I shook my head.

"He was the general's personal physician, and something of a legend. Acton had been the sole survivor of the massacre at Gandamak Pass during the first Afghan war. Sixteen thousand souls perished, all except for Acton, who rode hell for leather all the way to the garrison at Jalalabad, dodging bullets from long-range Jezail rifles the entire way."

Lazarus went on to describe the man's immaculate coat, the lamb's wool hat perched atop his long head, his pointed white beard, and the fat mustache, impeccably waxed and curled at the edges even on that fateful day. I thought how the besieged troops must have caught their breath when he and the general rode into the valley.

"After the uprising had been put down, we received orders to scour the area for surviving rebels. No prisoners were to be taken. Any Afghan found in possession of a weapon was to be summarily executed. Medical personnel were exempt from this duty, but Acton volunteered. He seemed to relish the idea, and always returned from the searches glowing with an unseemly radiance. It was then that I began to watch him out of the corner of my eye, for though I had no evidence to support my immediate distrust of the man, I knew that sooner or later my suspicions would be borne out.

"It happened the night before Christmas. The valley had been quiet, the weather bearable, though snow clouds had been hanging over the mountains for several days. I had been enjoying my first good night's sleep in weeks, when I was awakened by a cry. I lay there for a bit, wondering whether one of the men was having a nightmare, when it came again. The sound of suffering was unmistakable, and it was coming from outside the camp."

I wondered whether Lazarus allowed himself a second thought that night as he pulled on his boots and tucked his pistol into his pocket. I wondered whether he'd permitted himself to question the sanity of sprinting across the rubble-strewn plain, darting from bush to rock to crumbling shed, for the sake of someone he'd never met. Probably not--Lazarus took his physician's oath more seriously than he did his own life.

Eventually his investigation led him to the base of a far hill, his tent barely visible on the horizon. When the next cry came, there was no doubt as to where it originated: in an ancient fortress rising from the top of the hill.

"Bala Hissar," Lazarus said. "It was grand, once, Adler, at least until the rebels blew the armory to hell. When I arrived at the top, I was disappointed to find that fully half the complex had been reduced to ruins, though it would make it easier to continue my search undetected."

Following his instincts, and the low moans of several voices now, Lazarus picked his way across the wreckage. It was a windless night, and this saved him. Just as Lazarus was about to round the corner of the first unbroken section of building, his senses were overtaken by the aroma of a very expensive tobacco. He pressed himself to the wall. Inching along the smooth, cold stone, he peered around the corner. A lone guard stood near a wooden door, his rifle carelessly propped against the wall next to him. A cigarette burned in his fingers, gray smoke curling lazily upward.

"I'd no idea what I'd stumbled onto," Lazarus said, stopping mid-pace and looking up. "But I knew that if it had to be undertaken in the dead of night, far removed from the danger of scrutiny, it couldn't be right. I found a rock and hurled it toward a broken wall some distance away, to distract the guard. It took two more rocks, but eventually, the guard jogged off to investigate.

"The moon had been descending for some time, but enough of its light still shone through the slit windows of the fortress to provide a dim view of the corridor. I followed the sounds until I came to what appeared to be a battlefield hospital."

Inside a small chamber bathed in light, several Afghan men lay on pallets on the floor. Along one wall stood a table with stoppered bottles Lazarus took to be medicines, a lamp, and some sort of logbook. Acton stood on the other side of the room, his back to the door.

"He was standing over one of the men, taking notes," Lazarus said. "I'll never forget that." He met my eyes and held them. "The patient was writhing in pain and bleeding from every orifice. He was crying for mercy--one didn't need to understand Dari to understand that--and Acton was calmly taking notes."

"What did you do?" I asked.

He let out a long breath and turned back toward the window. The sun had gone behind a cloud, casting the alley behind the clinic in deep shadow. When Lazarus spoke again, his voice was heavy with regret.

"Nothing. I...was too busy trying to make sense of what I was seeing. We had a hospital in the cantonment, so there was no reason for another, especially one so far removed. Also, we'd had orders not to take prisoners. I'd treated the odd villager before the uprising, but at that time, there was no reason for an entire Afghan ward."

Unless it wasn't a hospital, I thought. Medicines needed to be tested, treatments proved. I'd known more than one London workhouse to make ends meet by providing subjects and facilities to enterprising chemists. Battlefield prisoners would be an ideal test population.

"A laboratory," I said. "They were subjecting the prisoners to some sort of experiment."

"Indeed," said Lazarus. "The patients were the men that Acton had apprehended during that day's search. The ones he was meant to have summarily executed."

"But what was he testing?" I asked.

Lazarus turned. He twisted the edges of his waistcoat nervously, and I could tell it was costing him to keep his voice steady.

"Acton developed several particularly nasty poisons while in Her Majesty's service, most notably a concoction based on the venom of specific Asian vipers. For military use, you understand."

He rubbed his shoulder absently. The bleeding had stopped, and the stain on his shirt had mellowed to a rust color. He began to pace then, his measured steps reflecting his methodical thought processes as he chose the words to describe the events that would alter the course of his life forever.

"I don't know how long I stood there before he turned around. Felt like ages. I'd been so careful to be quiet. Perhaps he heard my heart pounding.

"'The venom of certain elapids,' he said as he turned, 'has the most spectacular effect on the human body, wouldn't you agree, Doctor?' He was so calm," Lazarus marveled. "The prisoner was shuddering through his death throes, spattered with so much blood that it was impossible to tell where, specifically, it had come from, and Acton was waxing poetical about the virtues of hemotoxins over neurotoxins. I was horrified, of course, but I was also paralyzed with fear.

"'The bite of some species,' he went on, 'causes spontaneous bleeding from every orifice, sometimes even from wounds long healed. This particular venom takes three hours to produce noticeable effects, which makes it ideal for assassinations. The only problem is that snake venom is generally harmless when ingested. It can, however, be effectively delivered by means of an injection.'