After an hour had passed, Barry joined them and laid out a peasant’s supper of bread, apples, cheese, salted cabbage, and red wine. Sparks ate alone at the table, making notations and working with his maps. Doyle sat with Barry in the galley.
“How did you get out?” asked Doyle.
“Coppers let me go. ’Alf an hour after you went off.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Tried to follow me, didn’t they? Hoped I’d lead ’em straight to you.”
“And you eluded them.”
“Only in a trice.”
Doyle nodded and took a bite of apple, trying not to appear overanxious. “How did you know to meet us where you did?”
“Telegram. Waitin’ for me at the train yard,” said Barry, with a nod toward Sparks, indicating the telegram’s sender.
That followed logically; Sparks must have sent the wire when he was out this morning, Doyle thought. He finished his wine and poured another cup. The hum and rattle of the tracks and the wine’s warming properties applied an agreeably stabilizing remedy to his apprehensions.
“Barry, have you ever seen Alexander Sparks?” asked Doyle, keeping his voice low but not unduly confidential.
Barry cocked an eyebrow, glancing at him sideways. “Odd question.”
“Why is it odd?”
“That’s the maestro’s middle name, idn’t it?” said Barry, nodding toward Sparks. “Jonathan Alexander Sparks. That’s my understanding.”
Confident their voices wouldn’t carry over the racket of the train, Doyle casually turned his back to Sparks, placing himself directly between him and Barry. Doyle felt a trickle of cold sweat slide down his back.
“You mean to say,” said Doyle, “that you’ve never heard Jack mention a brother by the name of Alexander?”
“Don’t mean much if he ’adn’t. Doesn’t gab about hisself. Don’t gab much to me in any case.” Barry bit into a plug of chewing tobacco. “Larry’s the talker. He could jaw the shine off a mirror and sell you the frame. Beggin’ your pardon. I just remembered Larry’s expectin’ his supper.”
Barry tipped his cap, wrapped the remainders of the meal in a bundle for Larry, and went back to the engine. Doyle stood alone in the galley, staring across the car at Sparks. His worst fears ran riot through his mind, trampling the shards of security to which he had been struggling to cling. When Sparks glanced up at him, Doyle responded with a false, overquick smile and raised his glass in anemic bonhomie, feeling every bit as exposed and remorseful as a redhanded pickpocket. Sparks turned back to his work without any notable reaction.
Doyle was stricken; what was he to do now? Hadn’t his treacherous thoughts been writ as plain on his face as a sandwich-board advert? Every step he took seemed to be precisely the wrong one, ferrying him deeper into still and murky waters. He made a small, efficient dumb show of yawning and picking up his bag.
“Think I’ll turn in,” said Doyle.
“Fine,” answered Sparks.
“Long day. Long, long day.”
Sparks did not respond. Doyle’s feet felt rooted to the floor.
“Berths in the back then,” he said with a smile, pointing congenially toward the rear of the car. Why was he making these ridiculous and obvious statements?
“Right,” said Sparks, without looking up.
“Rhythm of the train. Comforting. Ought to help us sleep, that. Rocking motion. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.” Doyle could scarcely believe the words were leaving his mouth; he was chattering like some demented nanny.
Sparks took a lingering look at him. “Are you feeling all right, old boy?”
Doyle’s antic smile lit up like a fun house. “Me? Tip-top. Never better!”
Sparks winced slightly. “Better leave off the wine then.”
“Right. Off to dreamland!” Doyle couldn’t stop grinning to save his life.
Sparks nodded and went back to his studies. Doyle finally convinced his legs to move and walked back to the berths. “Off to dreamland”? What had gotten into him?
Doyle stood before the banks debating which would be the safer to accommodate his doubts and fears for the night. This took some time. When Sparks glanced back at him again, Doyle smiled and waved, then climbed into the lower bunk and pulled the curtains shut, sequestering himself in the cubicle.
Staring at the bunk above, Doyle clutched his bag to his chest and held the revolver tightly in his hand. Scenarios of doom hovered in his mind like enraged hummingbirds. If he comes after me, thought Doyle. I won’t go down without a fight. Maybe I should just fire a few preemptive bullets into the upper bunk while he’s asleep, give the emergency-stop cord a rip, and slip away into the wilderness.
Doyle peered discreetly out the crack in the curtains; he could see Sparks’s back, hunched over his work, reading, writing, looking through a magnifying glass. Even his posture suggested a hitherto unnoticed mania: cramped, nervy, and obsessive. How readily apparent the man’s madness seemed to him; how could it have escaped his attention until now? Distractions, yes, there had been no shortage of them, not to mention that the man’s unquestioned genius put up such an impenetrable screen it was nearly impossible to detect where invention ceased and true character began. But still Doyle chided himself; for all his observational acuity the signs of Sparks’s instability had been there all along: the moody silences, the disguises, the veiled grandiosity—arhanta indeed!—his fixation with secrecy and global conspiracies, the folderol that passed for his criminal filing system—maybe those cards held nothing but random scribblings; lunatics typically create entire worlds animated by nothing but private, delusional significance. And there was no lingering question about the man’s talent and capacity for violence. He would be spending the night in a space no larger than a good-sized steamer trunk with one of the most dangerous men alive.
Time passed in this fashion. Sleep was out of the question; rest itself was tenuous. Doyle hardly dared utter a sound or move a muscle; Better let Sparks think I’m asleep, passive and unsuspecting. His body was plagued by a painful oversensitivity: his mouth grew dry and cottony; his legs felt like stilts. Every blink of his eyes produced a clap as loud as castanets.
He heard stirring in the car. He longed to know what time it was, but reaching for his watch seemed far too complicated a procedure to initiate. Slowly shifting his weight, Doyle reached over and parted the curtains; Sparks was no longer at the table. He was out of sight altogether, but only half the car was visible from Doyle’s limited vantage. There was a sound at the door to the engine, also out of view; the latch being thrown, the door was now locked. Sparks moved back into Doyle’s range of vision, then out again. A repeated click of metal on metal. Closing the curtains on the car windows; those were the rings as they slid along the rods. Then Sparks moved from one wall fixture to the next, rolling down the wicks on the oil lamps; the room darkened. Door locked, curtains closed, lights down low. Either he’s turning in, thought Doyle—but why would he lock the door against Barry and Larry? And on a moving train!—or he’s setting the stage to make his fatal attack.
Doyle brought the revolver to the edge of the curtain and braced himself, but Sparks made no move to the rear; he was still walking around the cabin. Pacing restlessly. He clasped and unclasped his hands several times, ran his fingers through his hair, stopped and stood with a hand pressed hard to his forehead, then resumed pacing again. He’s trying to decide whether to kill me or not, Doyle couldn’t help thinking. Then, with one sweep of his arm, Sparks cleared the maps off the table, took a small leather case from the inner pocket of his jacket, set it down on the table, and opened it. Doyle saw a glint of light on metal; he strained to make out the case’s contents, but Sparks still moved between him and the table, and the light in the room was too dim for details.
Sparks wheeled and looked suddenly back at the sleeping berths; Doyle resisted the impulse to snatch shut the curtains the fraction they were open. I’m in total darkness, Doyle said to himself, he can’t pos
sibly see me. Doyle didn’t move, his hand frozen in air, lightly touching the curtains. Sparks looked long and hard and then turned back, apparently satisfied he wasn’t observed. Sparks’s hands moved to the objects on the table. Doyle heard the clink of metal on glass. What did he have in that packet?
Sparks took off his coat and began a complicated sequence of actions completely screened from Doyle’s view. When Sparks turned back, in profile now, vividly outlined by the lamp on the wall behind him, Doyle saw a syringe in his hand. Sparks tested the plunger; the needle emitted a fine spray into the air.
Good God, thought Doyle, he means to kill me by way of lethal injection. Doyle’s finger tightened on the trigger, ready to gun down Sparks where he stood. But Sparks did not turn toward the berths. He set down the syringe, unbuttoned the left sleeve of his shirt, and rolled it over his elbow. He fixed a length of slender twine around his bicep and pulled it taut with his teeth. Flexing and releasing his left arm, he tapped at a vein in the hollow of his forearm, swabbed the area with antiseptic, picked up the syringe from the table, and without hesitation squidged it into his arm. He paused, inhaled evenly once, twice, then pushed smoothly forward on the plunger, emptying its contents into his bloodstream. He extracted the empty needle, set it down, and released the rope from his arm. Sparks staggered slightly as the needle’s message was swiftly delivered. He moaned once, softly, a lurid sound, full of hideous appetite gnawing on satisfaction. His body shook with illicit excitement as he surrendered to the seductive intruder.
A morphine derivative? thought Doyle, judging from the drug’s visible effects. Maybe cocaine? He gladly embraced his analyzing as a welcome refuge from the horror of what he was watching.
Sparks closed his eyes and weaved unsteadily, the intoxication swimming toward its heady peak. The moment of his rapture seemed hideously extended. When it passed, Sparks meticulously gathered up the contents of the packet and relaced them. Doyle saw three small vials of liquid set alongside the needle before the case disappeared into Sparks’s coat. The cleanup completed, Sparks slumped down into a chair and moaned again, involuntarily. This time the pure expression of sensual ecstasy was tempered by a tone of invidious guilt and abject self-disgust.
Despite his recent suspicions, Doyle was nearly overcome by a Hippocratic impulse to compassionately rush to his aid, but common sense froze him in his tracks. A secret enslavement to narcotics hardly decreased the chance that Sparks was out of his mind; it made the possibility that much more likely. There was no denying Sparks’s shame in the behavior; the man kept it from his closest confederates. As great a hazard as he might pose to anyone else, it was clear Jack Sparks provided just as real a danger to himself.
Sparks rose to his feet again and moved from sight. More sounds. Clasps being thrown. A pizzicato plucking of strings. Sparks stepped back into view, holding a violin to his neck. He tested the bow across the bridge, turning the pegs, checking for tune. Then he leaned against the back of a chair and began to play. A black dissonant thrumming issued from the instrument, but there was a cold and brutal sense to it, not melody precisely, it bore no evidence of song, this order of notes could never have been set to paper; it seemed rather the direct expression of a terrible wound, sharp, torn and ragged, flushed with pain. Doyle knew this was the sound of Sparks’s secret heart, and the burden it placed on the listener’s mind was nearly as harsh as the one it sprang from and so eloquently described. Before long it reached an unresolvable impasse. There was no crescendo, no climax; it simply had to stop. Sparks lowered his head, slumped down onto the arm of the chair, and his arms hung limply at his sides. Doyle’s breath shuddered in his chest; a sob wanted to escape.
Sparks slowly raised the violin again and began to play a second piece. This one possessed both coherent rhythm and harmony: a low, sweet threnody, laced with grief, a trickle from a dammed-up sea of unshed tears. It sent into the air a vibration of almost unbearable emotional resonance. Doyle could not see Sparks’s face in the shadows, only the graceful belly of the instrument and the shape of the man’s arm drawing the bow. He was grateful for the relative discretion of the sight. He knew that, however they had met their end and at whosoever’s hand, he was listening to Sparks mourn for his dead.
The piece ended. Sparks did not move for many minutes; then, with considerable effort, he roused himself from the somnolent embrace of the narcotic, returned the instrument to its case, and walked slowly toward the back. His step was faltering and uncertain; thrown off balance by the movement of the car, he was more than once forced to support himself against the walls. He stopped in front of the berths. Doyle drew back from the curtain, but through the gap he could see Sparks’s thighs swaying. Sparks lifted a foot onto Doyle’s berth and hoisted himself, hesitating halfway up, trying to recenter his balance; Doyle could see the buckles shining dully on his boots. With a guttural grunt, Sparks pulled himself the remainder of the way and landed heavily on the thin ticking of the upper bunk. His body shifted once and did not move again. He was lying on his back. Doyle listened to the rhythm of Sparks’s breathing as it flattened, growing shallow and strained.
Doyle lifted the pistol, his heart beating wildly. I could fire now, he thought. Put the gun to the mattress, empty the chambers, and kill him. He placed the barrel gently against the bed above and cocked the hammer. He worried about the sound, but there was no audible change in the respiration above; Sparks was, in every sense of the phrase, lost to the world. Doyle lost track of how long he lay there, pistol in hand, on the thin edge of that fateful decision. Something in him prevented his pulling the trigger. He couldn’t name the reason. He knew it had to do with the music he’d heard, but he fell into sleep while trying to discover why.
The gun was still in Doyle’s hand when he woke, but the hammer had been eased to rest. Dirty gray light seeped through the curtains on the outer window. He reached over to part them and looked outside.
The train was still clipping along at a considerable pace. They had driven into the leading edge of a storm during the night. The sky was deeply overcast. A fresh mantle of snow frosted the flat, featureless land; more of the stuff gently fell in puffy clusters the size of dandelions.
Doyle rubbed the film from his eyes. He was hungry, sore, drained by the emotional exertions of the long night before. He looked at his watch: seven-thirty. He could smell shag tobacco and strong, brewing black tea, but it took the unexpected sound of laughter to rouse him from his bunk to the front of the car.
“Gin!” he heard Larry say.
“Blast you for a sod!” said Sparks.
More laughter. Larry and Sparks were playing cards at the table, a tea service laid out beside them. Sparks was smoking a long-stemmed pipe.
“How-do-you-do and look at this fine news,” said Larry, picking over the cards as Sparks laid down his hand. “These stray members of the royal family you’ve clutched to your bosom will cost you a queen’s ransom.”
“Don’t torment me, you devil—ah, Doyle!” said Sparks cheerfully. “We were just debating about whether to wake you; got a fresh pot here, care for a cuppa souchong?”
“Please,” said Doyle, requiring no further invitation to join them and help himself immediately to the offered plate of biscuits and hard-boiled eggs.
Sparks poured the tea as Larry totaled up his cards and added the resulting figure to a long, snaking column on a well-traveled pad of paper.
“That’s the game then, guv. More’s the pity,” said Larry. “My stars and stripes, you’re in a pretty fix now, I can tell you, break out the violins.”
“What’s our running total then?”
“Roundin’ off the figure—and I can gladly do you that small favor, can’t I?—you look to owe me…five thousand, six thousand forty quid.”
Doyle nearly choked on his tea. “Lord…”
“We’ve been at the same game for five years,” explained Sparks. “The man’s simply unbeatable.”
“Tide’s bound to turn your way eventual, g
uv,” said Larry, reshuffling the cards with alarming adroitness. “Every dog has his day.”
“That’s what he’d like me to believe.”
“Wot else is it but ’ope of eventual good fortune wot keeps bringing you back to the table? Man’s gotta have ’ope to live.”
“I’m convinced he cheats, Doyle,” said Sparks. “I just haven’t discovered his methods.”
“I keep tellin’ him there’s no substitute for the favor of old Dame Luck,” said Larry, with a theatrical wink at Doyle.
“They haven’t found an adequate one for money yet, either,” said Sparks good-naturedly, rising from the table.
“A man’s got a right to lay somethin’ aside for his idle retirin’ years, don’t he? He wants a bit of leisure and layin’ about when the stems and pies give out, as we all knows they must in the end.” Larry offered the deck for Doyle to cut and smiled cheesily. “Care for a game, guv?”
“Doyle, I’ll not say a word regarding the decision you’re about to make other than this: It’s a good deal easier to resist the first step on the road to ruin than any of the thousand that inevitably follow.”
“I’ll decline, thanks all the same, Larry,” said Doyle.
“Cheers, Doc,” said Larry happily, fanning out a handful of aces before pocketing the cards. “It’s plain to see you learned something in that fancy college besides where to find a man’s ticker.”
“I’m a firm believer that if one must entertain a vice, better not to take on more than one at a time,” said Doyle, with a casual look at Sparks.
“And what might your one solitary vice be, Doyle?” asked Sparks jauntily, leaning against the galley, arms folded, puffing on his pipe.
“Belief in a man’s innate goodness.”
“Ho-ho!” said Larry. “That’s not a vice so much as a guaranteed noose round yer neck.”