A Christmas Odyssey (11 page)

“Happy Christmas,” Henry replied to a passerby.

After another hundred yards they found a tavern serving hot food that had a good fire in the hearth. Henry paid for them all, including provisions to take back to Bessie and Lucien. They ate in silence, relishing the luxury too much to disturb the pleasure of it with conversation.

They started back again and were soon in the narrow alleys. It was dim, as if it were always dusk on these midwinter days. There was no reality of Christmas here, perhaps not even any belief in its meaning.

They delivered the pies and ale, which were received with gratitude, expressed with few words
and ravenous pleasure. They decided that Bessie would stay with Lucien to look after him while he healed. Henry, Crow, and Squeaky would continue to search for proof of who had been killed, and whether Lucien was involved or not, and if so, in what way.

It was decided that Crow would go back to Mr. Ash and see if he could persuade him to tell whatever else he knew.

“There has to be more,” Henry said. “He is involved in it somehow, because he feels too intensely to simply be an observer.”

Crow agreed. “What about you?” he asked.

Henry bit his lip. “I shall endeavor to learn something of this Niccolo—who he is, and above all if anyone has seen him in the last two days.” He looked at Squeaky. “You are the best suited among us to learn more about Sadie, particularly if she is still alive, and if not, who else, apart from Lucien, would have wanted to kill her.”

Squeaky considered that a very dubious compliment, but this was not the time to argue with what was clearly the truth. Henry himself would be totally useless at such a task.

They agreed to meet back at daybreak the following morning, at the latest.

The others were already waiting when Squeaky returned, carrying a jug of hot chocolate he had purchased with some money he had “liberated” from a less-deserving owner. He shared it, measuring carefully, then sat down on the floor to enjoy his portion.

Henry turned to Crow, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

Crow warmed his hands on his mug.

Henry had bought some pies. Squeaky refrained from asking what was in them; he preferred to imagine. He also did not ask what they had cost. Both were things he very much preferred not knowing.

The candles were getting low. One had already guttered and gone out. Lucien and Bessie were probably asleep. They had already checked on them, Crow with some concern.

“How ill is Ash?” Henry asked. “Could he have killed them?” His face was in shadow, so Squeaky could not read his expression, but he heard the strain in his voice. Rathbone must have seen things here that his quiet life on Primrose Hill had not prepared him even to imagine. And of course there was always the smell. Few middle-class people had experienced the smells of the gutter,
the sewage, the decaying bodies of rats, the rot of old wood.

It brought back memories to Squeaky that he had worked very hard to forget.

Before the security of Portpool Lane there had been other places, ones that smelled like this, of stale wine, vomit, unwashed bodies, blood, and sweat. Above all he could remember the fear. It might be the sudden eruption of temper into a blow against the head, or the knife in the stomach of deliberate revenge. He never looked at his own body because he did not want to see the scars. Some had been from women, and that was better forgotten too. Perhaps he had deserved those, or at least some of them.

Hate was behind him now. Some people even trusted him, and that was like a delicate, precious flame in the darkness. He would kill to keep that, and the moment he did, of course, it would be gone, probably forever. Damn caring what people thought. It was against all the laws of survival. And yet it still beguiled him and drew him in.

It seemed that Crow was going to answer Henry’s question about Ash. He was sitting with his back against the wall, his enormously long legs straight out in front of him. There was a hole
in the sole of his left boot. His face was more deeply lined than Squeaky had ever seen it before. He looked more like forty-five than thirty-five. Squeaky recognized it as not just weariness but a kind of pain that darkened the energy of spirit and the hope that lit him. If that went out, it would be a darkness Squeaky would never find his way out of.

Henry was watching him, waiting.

“He isn’t going to live much longer,” Crow said quietly. “His body’s rotting. He stands so still because he can’t feel his hands or feet. If he moves he’s likely to lose his balance. He pretends to carry the stick for an affectation, but actually he’d fall without it. I don’t think he killed Niccolo or Sadie, but he knows who did. In fact, I think he was there. He knows something else, but I can’t get him to tell me.”

“At a price,” Squeaky told him. “Don’t give all your help away. I know you’re a doctor, an’ all that, but doctors charge.”

An indescribable expression crossed Crow’s face. For a moment Squeaky was afraid he would not be able to pretend that he had not seen it. He realized with a jolt that in spite of the years he had seen him coming and going, watched him patch up
the injuries of all manner of people, he really knew Crow very little: not the man underneath the black coat, the flashing smile, and the bizarre humor. Now he had trespassed, to a place Crow did not want to let him into.

“I have nothing to give him,” Crow said, without looking at either Squeaky or Henry. “His pain is beyond anyone’s reach. He is closed in with it until it kills him.”

Squeaky shuddered. Perhaps in a way that was true of all of them, a final aloneness. He disgusted himself by feeling sorry for the man in his absurd costume.

Henry leaned forward. “Is it who killed them that he will not tell you?” he asked Crow. “Or something else?”

Crow thought for a moment. “I think it is something else,” he said finally.

“The reason they were killed?” Henry suggested.

Squeaky stared at Crow, then at Henry, then back at Crow again.

“It’s something about Sadie,” Crow answered. “Something secret, that he nurses inside him, because he knows and we don’t. We are making a profound mistake about her. Something we believe
is totally wrong. I’m trying to work out what it could be, and I can’t.”

“Do you think Lucien killed her?” Henry asked. Squeaky knew from the tightness in his voice that if Crow said “yes,” he would accept it.

Crow looked at Henry as if Squeaky were not even there.

“No,” he answered. “Because he had no reason to. She gave him the physical pleasure that he craves, and she was very skilled, by all accounts, at making men feel admired, important—even that she loved them, in her own way. I can’t see how he would have deliberately sacrificed that.”

“That’s more or less what I learned too,” Henry agreed. “Pleasure, admiration, a kind of emotional power are his weaknesses, but not violence. It seems the same was true of Niccolo, from what I could find out.”

“Jealousy?” Squeaky put in. “Most men get violent if the women they think of as theirs pay too much attention to someone else. I’ve seen it over and over. You don’t have to be in love. It’s to do with possession, with being top. If someone can take your woman away from you, it’s a sign that you’re weak. You could love anybody at all, so your love is meaningless.” He forced memories away
from him, things he had done in the past to make sure no one imagined him vulnerable, the fear he had instilled to keep himself safe. He could still too easily see their pale faces in his mind.

Henry and Crow were both looking at him.

Squeaky felt as if the ugliness in his mind were visible in his face, and they could read it. They would be revolted. He was revolted himself. He felt naked in the most painful and degraded way. His skin must be burning.

“They said she was beautiful,” he began defensively. “Beauty can have funny effects on men. Lucien said it himself. Long black hair like silk, and sea-blue eyes. Sort of mouth you never forget. Comes into your dreams, whether you want it to or not.”

“If that is the sort of woman she was, she may have had other enemies,” Henry pointed out. “I know you are playing devil’s advocate, Squeaky, which we need, but you must grant that that is also true.”

“I know the devil too well to make jokes about him,” Squeaky said grimly. “Or to plead anything for him either.”

“I mean that you are making the opposite argument, so that we see our case in the full light,
from all sides,” Henry explained. “I was asking about Niccolo, but I learned a lot more about Sadie from the answers. She was very beautiful, and funny at times—although people who are drunk, or in love, are more easily amused than the rest of us.”

He shook his head. “Even so, she seems to have been extraordinarily vivid in her personality, never a bore, which to some is the ultimate sin. But she was dependent on the cocaine, and without it she was very frightened.” He stopped, his face in the shadow. “I think she may have had an illness, perhaps something like tuberculosis. What do you think, Crow?”

“I think you’re probably right,” Crow said softly. “Some of her vitality, some of her wild gulping at life was fear. I’ve seen it before. Do everything now, in case there’s no tomorrow.” He stopped abruptly.

Henry looked at him, then touched him very gently on the arm for just a moment before letting his hand fall.

Crow took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

“Is that right?” Squeaky asked. “Would she have died anyway? And you reckon she knew that?”

“I don’t know whether she knew it,” Crow replied.

“You’re a doctor—you know!” Squeaky accused.

“I’m not a doctor.” Crow looked at the ground.

Squeaky drew in his breath to ask him why not, then knew it would be intrusive, even cruel. You did not ask people questions like that. Crow was his friend, and friends do not trespass into pain, still less into failure.

“But it sounds like it,” Crow went on. “The fever, bright eyes, pale skin with a flush on the cheeks, the frantic energy and the tiredness, the … the knowledge inside her that she has not long—the need to do everything now.”

“You sound very sure,” Henry said gently.

“I’ve seen lots of it,” Crow replied, his voice cracking. He took a breath as if about to say something further, then let it out again without speaking.

Squeaky looked at Henry.

“No one can help that.” Henry turned to Crow.

Crow smiled, his eyes filled with pain. “I used to think I could, when I was young, and stupid. My mother had it. That’s why I wanted to be a doctor. I used to think I could cure her. But she died anyway.”

“We all fail at something,” Henry told him very quickly. “One way or another. Things that don’t work out as we had hoped, people we love who don’t love us, dreams that crumble. Time catches up with us, and we realize what we haven’t done, what chances for kindness, for courage we have wasted, and too many of them won’t come again. We see glimpses of what we could have been, and weren’t.”

Squeaky was stunned. What was this life Henry was talking about? It was surely not the life he had had himself, inventing and making things, having a son who was the best lawyer in London, a nice house, people who trusted and admired him. What failure had he ever known?

Henry’s attention was on Crow. “But you have helped many,” he said with growing conviction in his voice. “More important, you have helped some whom possibly no one else would help. Don’t let yourself be crippled because it wasn’t everyone. Nobody succeeds all the time.” He smiled bleakly. “Think how insufferably arrogant we would become if we did. There would be no need for God.”

Squeaky smiled. “Is He going to pick up the bits we drop, then?”

“I don’t know,” Henry replied. “But I don’t mean to drop Lucien if I can help it. There’s always a chance.”

“You’re a dreamer,” Squeaky told him. “This isn’t your world.”

“Hell is everybody’s world, at one time or another, Squeaky,” Henry answered.

Squeaky blasphemed softly under his breath. “You’ve been here for days and you still don’t have the least idea! Lucien’s here because he wants to be!” He forced the words out between his teeth. He did not want to hurt this gentle man. He liked him, dammit! But somebody had to save him from himself.

Crow was staring at Squeaky.

“And you don’t need to look like that either!” Squeaky snapped at him. “He came here for pleasure, no matter what it cost, or who paid it. He wanted to live in a world where everybody flattered him and told him how handsome and clever he was. He wanted to believe the lies—so he did. He didn’t give a damn about anyone else, and now nobody gives a damn about him.” He looked at Henry. “He’s here because he chose it. And you can’t change that.”

“Of course I can’t,” Henry admitted. “But if he chooses to leave, perhaps I can help him believe that he can do it.”

“It’s too late,” Squeaky said brutally, not because he wished to hurt, but because he couldn’t bear the hope and despair that would follow. It had to end now.

“It’s never too late,” Henry said stubbornly. “Well, maybe it is sometimes, but not yet. There’s still something to fight for. You are free to go, of course, but I would rather you stayed with us, because we need your help, and your experience.”

Squeaky wanted to swear, but no words in all his wide vocabulary were adequate to suit his feelings.

“Well, I’ve got to stay, haven’t I!” he said roughly. “You haven’t got enough sense to find your way out of a wet paper bag!”

“Thank you,” Henry said gravely.

“I’ve been thinking.” Crow measured his words. “I’ve heard a lot about Sadie, because I asked about her. At least some of it has to be lies, but I can’t tell which is which. Sorting out the truth might be our next course of action.” He looked hopefully at Henry, then at Squeaky.

“So what did you hear?” Squeaky asked. “She’s
a damn good whore, with T.B., and any other disease she might have picked up along the way. She had long, black hair and blue eyes.”

“She was tall and slender, with extraordinary grace,” Crow added. “And very disturbing eyes, actually, according to those who were not in love with her. One was green and one hazel.”