The elegant hand, as familiar to Oliphant as it was to Fraser, was Lady Ada Byron’s.
“The two of us alone have seen that,” Fraser said.
Oliphant folded the paper in quarters before putting it away in his cigar-case. “And what exactly was it, Fraser, that was hidden in the skull?”
“I’ll escort you back through the line, sir.”
Reporters surged forward as Fraser and Oliphant emerged from the barricades. Fraser took Oliphant’s arm and led him into a cluster of helmeted Metropolitans, some of whom he greeted casually by name. “To answer your question, Mr. Oliphant,” Fraser said, the policemen walling off the shouting crowd behind blue serge and brass buttons, “I don’t know. But we have it.”
“You do? By whose authority?”
“None but my own lights,” Fraser said. “Harris here, he found it in the cab, before Anthropometry arrived.” Fraser very nearly smiled. “The boys on the force aren’t too keen on Anthropometry. Bloody-minded amateurs, aye, Harris?”
“Aye, sir,” said a Metropolitan with blond side-whiskers, “they are that.”
“Where is it, then?” Oliphant asked.
“Here, sir.” Harris produced a cheap black satchel. “Just as we found it, in this.”
“Mr. Oliphant, sir, I think you’d best take that straight away,” Fraser said.
“Indeed, Fraser, I agree. Tell the Special Branch chap in the fancy gurney that I won’t be needing him. Thank you, Harris. Good evening.” The policemen parted smoothly. Oliphant, satchel in hand, strode smartly out through the throng who jostled for a better view of the soldiers and the canvas screens.
“Pardon, guv, but couldyer spare a copper?”
Oliphant looked down into the squinting brown eyes of little Boots, every inch the crippled jockey. He was neither. Oliphant threw him a penny. Boots caught it adroitly, then edged forward on his cut-down crutch. He stank of damp fustian and smoked mackerel. “Trouble, guv. Becky’ll tell yer.” Boots wheeled about on his crutch and hobbled determinedly away, muttering as he went, a beggar intent upon finding a better pitch.
He was one of Oliphant’s two most talented watchers.
The other, Becky Dean, kept pace beside Oliphant as he neared the corner of Chancery Lane. She was gotten up as a rather successful tart, brass-heeled and brazen.
“Where has Betteredge got to?” Oliphant asked, as if talking to himself.
“Taken,” Becky Dean said. “Not three hours ago.”
“Taken by whom?”
“Two men in a hack. They’d been following you. Betteredge got on to them, then set us to watching the watchers.”
“I knew nothing of this.”
“Day before yesterday, he came to us.”
“And who were these men?”
“One’s a greasy little ponce of a private detective. Velasco his name is. The other was Government by the look of him.”
“He was taken in broad daylight? By force?”
“You know well enough how it’s done,” Becky Dean said.
In the soothing reek of his tobacconist’s quiet stock-room, at the corner of Chancery Lane and Carey Street, Oliphant held the corner of the blue flimsy above the concise jet of a bronze cigar-lighter in the shape of a turbaned Turk.
He watched the paper reduce itself to delicate pinkish ash.
The satchel had contained a Ballester-Molina automatic revolver, a silvered-brass pocket-flask filled with some sickly, sweet-scented decoction, and a wooden case. This last was plainly the object in question, encrusted as it was with raw white plaster. It held a very large number of Engine-cards in the Napoleon gauge, cut from a novel material, milky and very smooth to the touch.
“The parcel,” he said to Mr. Beadon, the tobacconist, “is to be held for me alone.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“My man Bligh to be the sole exception.”
“As you wish, sir.”
“If any inquiry at all should be made, Beadon, please send a boy ‘round to advise Bligh.”
“Our pleasure, sir.”
“Thank you, Beadon. Could you possibly give me forty pounds cash, against my account?”
“Forty, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Yes I could, sir. With pleasure, Mr. Oliphant.” Mr. Beadon took a ring of keys from his coat and went to unlock an admirably modern-looking safe.
“And a dozen prime habanas. And Beadon?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I think it might be a very good idea if you were to keep the parcel in your safe there.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I believe that the Lambs is nearby, Beadon, the dining-club?”
“Yes, sir. Holborn, sir. A short walk.”
The year’s first snow began to fall, as he made his way up Chancery Lane, a dry gritty stuff that seemed unlikely to adhere to the paving.
Boots and Becky Dean were nowhere to be seen, which could reliably be taken to mean that they were about their customarily invisible business.
You know well enough how it’s done.
And didn’t he? How many had been made to vanish, vanish utterly, in London alone? How could one sit among friends at pleasant little dinners, sipping Moselle, listening to kind and careless talk, yet carry in one’s mind the burden of such knowledge?
He’d meant Collins to be the last, absolutely the last; now Betteredge had gone, and at the hands of another agency.
In the beginning, it had made so horribly elegant a sort of sense.
In the beginning, it had been his idea.
The Eye. He sensed it now—yes, surely, its all-seeing gaze full upon him as he nodded to the tasseled doorman and entered the marbled vestibule of the Lambs, Andrew Wakefield’s dining club.
Brass letter-boxes, a telegraph-booth, an excess of French-polished veneer, all thoroughly modern. He glanced back, through glass doors, to the street. Opposite the Lambs, beyond twin streams of snow-dusted traffic, he glimpsed a solitary figure in a tall derby hat.
A page directed him to the grill-room, which was done in dark oak, with an enormous fireplace topped with a mantel of carved Italian stone. “Laurence Oliphant,” he told the tightly jacketed head-waiter, “for Mr. Andrew Wakefield.”
A look of unease crossed the man’s face. “I’m sorry, sir, but he isn’t—”
“Thank you,” Oliphant said, “but I believe I see Mr. Wakefield.”
With the head-waiter at his heels, Oliphant marched between the tables, diners turning as he passed.
“Andrew,” he said, arriving at Wakefield’s table, “how very fortunate to find you here.”
Wakefield was dining alone. He seemed to experience a temporary difficulty in swallowing.
“Mr. Wakefield, sir,” the head-waiter began.
“My friend will be joining me,” Wakefield said. “Sit down, please. We’re attracting attention.”
“Thank you.” Oliphant took a seat.
“Will you be dining, sir?” the head-waiter asked.
“No, thank you.”
When they were alone, Wakefield sighed loudly. “Damn it all, Oliphant, but didn’t I make my terms clear?”
“What exactly is it, Andrew, of which you’ve become so frightened?”
“It should be fairly obvious.”
“Should it?”
“Lord Galton’s in league with your bloody Mr. Egremont. He’s the great patron of Criminal Anthropometry. Always has been. Their virtual founder. He’s Charles Darwin’s cousin, Oliphant, and he wields great influence in the House of Lords.”
“Yes, and in the Royal Society, and in the Geographical as well. I’m thoroughly familiar with Lord Galton, Andrew. He espouses the systematic breeding of the human species.”
Wakefield put down his knife and fork. “Criminal Anthropometry have effectively taken over the Bureau. For all intents and purposes, the Central Statistics Bureau is now under Egremont’s control.”
Oliphant watched as Wakefield’s upper teeth began to wo
rry at his lower-lip.
“I’ve just come from Fleet Street,” Oliphant said. “The level of violence in this society”—and he drew the Ballester-Molina from within his coat—“or rather, I should say, the level of unacknowledged violence, has become remarkable, don’t you think, Andrew?” He placed the revolver on the linen between them. “Take this pistol as an example. All too readily obtainable, I’m told. It is of Franco-Mexican manufacture, though the invention of Spaniards. Certain of its internal parts, I am informed, springs and whatnot, are actually British, available on the open market. It becomes rather difficult, then, to say where a weapon like this comes from. Emblematic of something in our current situation, don’t you think?”
Wakefield had gone quite white.
“But I seem to have upset you, Andrew. I’m sorry.”
“They’ll erase us,” Wakefield said. “We’ll cease to exist. There’ll be nothing left, nothing to prove either of us ever lived. Not a check-stub, not a mortgage in a City bank, nothing whatever.”
“Exactly what I’m on about, Andrew.”
“Don’t take that moral tone with me, sir,” Wakefield said. “Your lot began it, Oliphant—the disappearances, the files gone missing, the names expunged, numbers lost, histories edited to suit specific ends.… No, don’t take that tone with me.”
Oliphant could think of nothing to say. He rose, leaving the pistol on the table-cloth, and left the grill-room without looking back.
“Pardon me,” he said, in the marbled vestibule, to a burgundy-jacketed bellman who was sifting cigar-ends from a sand-filled marble urn, “but could you please direct me to the office of the club steward?”
“You bet,” the bellman said, or some similar bit of American dialect, and led Oliphant smartly away, down a corridor lined with mirrors and rubber-plants.
Fifty-five minutes later, having toured the club’s premises at some length, having been shown a photographic album of the Lambs’ annual “gambols,” having applied for membership, and having paid a not inconsiderable initiation fee, nonrefundable, via his own number in the National Credit, Oliphant shook hands with the pomaded steward, gave the man a pound-note, and requested that he be let out by the club’s most obscure trade-entrance.
This proved to be a scullery-door which opened on exactly the sort of dank and narrow passage he had hoped for.
Within a quarter-of-an-hour, he stood at the public bar of a crowded house in Bedford Road, reviewing the text of the telegram that one Sybil Gerard had once dispatched to Mr. Charles Egremont, M.P., of Belgravia.
“Lost both me boys o’ sickness in the Crimea, squire, an’ innit allus the tele-gram comes—innit?”
Oliphant folded the sheet of foolscap into his cigar-case. He watched his dim reflection in the polished zinc of the bar. He looked at his empty tumbler. He looked up at the woman, a raddled harridan in rags gone a color that had no name, her cheeks roseate with gin-blossoms under a patina of grime.
“No,” he said, “that tragedy is not mine.”
“Me Roger it was,” she said, “ ‘n’ Tommy-lad too. An’ not a rag come ‘ome, squire—not a bloody rag.…”
He handed her a coin. She thanked him, mumbling, and retreated.
He seemed to have thoroughly slipped the traces for the moment. He was entirely alone. It was time to find a cab.
In the dim, high hollow of the great station a thousand voices seemed to mingle, the constituent elements of language reduced to the aural equivalent of fog, homogeneous and impenetrable.
Oliphant went about his business below at a measured and deliberate pace, purchasing a first-class railway ticket to Dover, reserved, for the ten o’clock evening-express. The ticket-clerk seated Oliphant’s National Credit plate in the machine and cranked hard on the lever.
“There you are, sir. Reserved in your name.”
Thanking the clerk, Oliphant made his way to a second wicket, where he again produced his plate. “I wish to book a cabinette on the morning mail-boat to Ostend.” Apparently as an afterthought, as he was putting the boat-tickets and his National Credit plate into his note-case, he requested a second-class ticket on the midnight boat to Calais.
“Would that be this evening, sir?”
“Yes.”
“That would be the Bessemer, sir. On National Credit, sir?”
Oliphant paid for the ticket to Calais with pound-notes from Mr. Beadon’s safe.
Ten till nine, by his father’s gold hunter.
At nine o’clock he boarded a departing train at the last possible moment, paying the first-class fare to Dover directly to the conductor.
The swinging-saloon ship Bessemer, her twin turtle-decks awash with Dover spray, steamed for Calais sharp on the midnight. Oliphant, having visited the purser with his second-class ticket and his pound-notes, was seated in a brocade armchair in the saloon cabin, sipping mediocre brandy and taking the measure of his fellow passengers. They were, he was pleased to note, a thoroughly unremarkable lot.
He disliked swinging-saloons, finding the Engine-controlled movements of the cabin, intended to compensate for the vessel’s pitch and roll, somehow more unsettling than the ordinary motion of a ship at sea. In addition, the cabin itself was effectively windowless. Swung on gimbals in a central well, the cabin was mounted so deeply in the hull that its windows, such as they were, were located high up along the walls, well above one’s line of sight. All in all, as a remedy for mal-de-mer, Oliphant thought it excessive. The public, however, were apparently fascinated by the novel employment of a small Engine, somewhat on the order of a gunnery Engine, whose sole task consisted of maintaining as near a level footing in the cabin as was deemed possible. This was accomplished via something the press referred to, in clacker’s argot, as “back-feed.” Still, with twin paddles fore and aft, the Bessemer customarily performed the distance of twenty-one miles between Dover and Calais in an hour and thirty minutes.
He would rather have been above-decks, now, facing into the wind; able then, perhaps, to imagine himself steaming toward some grander, more accessible goal. But the promenade of a swinging-saloon offered no bulwark, only an iron railing, and the Channel wind was damp and cold. And he had, he reminded himself, only the one goal now, and it, in all likelihood, a fool’s errand.
Still: Sybil Gerard. He had decided, upon reading the telegram to Egremont, against having her number spun. He had expected it might attract unwanted attention; with Criminal Anthropometry holding sway at Central Statistics, of course, he had been proven correct. And he rather suspected that Sybil Gerard’s file might no longer exist.
Walter Gerard of Manchester, sworn enemy of progress, agitator for the rights of man. Hanged. And if Walter Gerard had had a daughter, what might have become of her? And if she had been ruined, as she claimed to have been, by Charles Egremont?
Oliphant’s back began to ache. Beneath the chair’s stiff brocade, Jacquard-woven with repeated images of the Bessemer, the horsehair stuffing held a chill.
But if nothing else, he reminded himself, he at least had temporarily escaped the soft black pit of Dr. McNeile’s patent Swiss bath-tub.
Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped.
And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye.
The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one.
Monsieur Lucien Arslau’s apartments were in Passy. At noon, Oliphant presented his card to the concierge, who conveyed it via pneumatic tube to Monsieur Arslau’s establishment. Almost immediately, the whistle attached to a nickeled speaking-tube peeped twice; the concierge bent his ear to the funnel; Oliphant made out faint tones of shouted French.
The concierge showed Oliphant to the lift.
He was admitted, on the fifth floor, by a liveried manservant wearing an ornate Corsican stiletto through a pleated sash of gros de Naples. The young man managed to bow without taking his eyes from Oliphant. Monsieur Arslau regretted, the servant said, that he was unable at the moment to receive Monsieur Oliphant; in the meantime,
would Monsieur Oliphant care for any sort of refreshment?
Oliphant declared that he would very much appreciate an opportunity to bathe. He would also find a pot of coffee most agreeable.
He was led through a broad drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu, buhl cabinets, bronzes, statuettes, and porcelain, where the lizard-eyed Emperor and his dainty Empress, the former Miss Howard, gazed from twin portraits in oil. And then through a morning-room hung with proof-engravings. A graceful curve of stairway mounted from an octagonal anteroom.
Some two hours later, having bathed in a marble-rimmed tub of gratifying solidity, having taken strong French coffee and lunched upon cutlets à la Maintenon, and wearing borrowed linen with far more starch than he cared for, he was ushered into the study of Monsieur Arslau.
“Mr. Oliphant, sir,” Arslau said, in his excellent English, “it is a great pleasure. I regret not having been able to see you earlier, but …” He gestured toward a broad mahogany desk littered with files and papers. From behind a closed door came the steady clatter of a telegraph. On one wall hung a framed engraving of the Great Napoleon, its mighty gear-towers rising behind a grid-work of plate-glass and iron.
“Not at all, Lucien. I’m grateful to have had the time to take advantage of your hospitality. Your chef has an extraordinary way with mutton; a sublimated meat that could scarcely have grown on any mundane sheep.”
Arslau smiled. Nearly Oliphant’s height, broader in the shoulders, he was some forty years of age and wore his greying beard in the Imperial fashion. His cravat was embroidered with small golden bees. “I’ve had your letter, of course.” He returned to his desk and settled himself in a high-backed chair upholstered in dark-green leather. Oliphant took a seat in an armchair opposite.