Becoming Holmes (17 page)

Sherlock, of course, is on foot. His disguise, the calculated look of danger in his appearance and attitude, is part of what will protect him, and he is well aware of it.

He is searching for inhabitants who may know Grimsby or Crew.

This nightly adventure isn’t something new to Sherlock. Though Sigerson Bell doesn’t always know it, Holmes has taken to walking the streets of London at night alone over the past year or so, learning all of it – its rookeries, its wealthy areas, its nooks and crannies, all the strange people who
move about in it after the sun goes down. It is part of his training, so he works at it with unwavering attention. He must be willing to risk his life when he gets older, so he might as well begin now. He has learned to spot criminal elements at a glance. Sometimes when he walks, he thinks of Dickens. He has heard it said that the novelist used to do exactly this – walk the streets for hours at night, sometimes taking in twenty miles or more at a time. It was as if, like Sherlock, he were on a mission, a need to reveal the truth about this glorious and inglorious city, this good and evil place.

Holmes makes his way south toward the river. Grimsby was thrown into the Thames, and the boy doubts that it would make sense to a court that someone could be murdered and then carried more than a few hundred yards to the water, let alone several miles. At least, it wouldn’t be believable that an assassination would have happened that way. It had to have been planned. And good planning by Malefactor or Crew would entail disposing of their target as quickly as possible. It needed to be fast and clean.

In minutes he can smell the river. Though he is still a good distance off and in little streets with pungent sewage running down the narrow foot pavements, he can smell that fishy, metallic odor that rises from the mighty Thames.

The Tower of London, looking ominous, is south and to his right, and the sprawling London docks are just ahead to his left. He is entering the center of London’s criminal world, an area where the police seldom venture, where they get in and get out, and only when they must.

The buildings along here are ancient – stone and brick
– all of them looking black or gray, built up close to the road, forming veritable walls that make the streets look like frightening tunnels. The rancid yellow fog is heavy. People come in and out of it, appearing suddenly right near the boy. At times he can barely see anything – sounds and smells predominate. He hears babies crying from the open windows, sees children with almost green-colored skin walking past in rags as if half asleep. Ladies of the night, appearing nothing like ladies and more like sea hags, smile toothless grins at him. But he knows not to look directly at anyone. He moves quickly, as Dickens did, noting everything but dwelling on nothing. He is well aware of what he is looking for.

Not long before he reaches the docks, he finds it. On a tight corner in a little gray courtyard outside a grimy coffee house or sandwich shop (it is hard to tell which it is, and hard to imagine anyone frequenting it since no food seems evident), a group of men huddle on the foot pavement. No one comes near them. No one dares. Every one of them looks like the illustrations of Bill Sikes, the bad man from
Oliver Twist
who murdered his sweet Nancy with his bare hands. They are dressed in layers of clothing despite the warm, misty night. They wear big boots and heavy coats, filthy rags around their throats, dirty hats, from felt caps to toppers. Sherlock nears. His heart begins to pound.
I must speak to them. I must summon the courage. That is the only way. It will be all right in the end. I must have my fists ready, my Bellitsu, act older. I can do it
.

“Bottom of the evening to you, blokes,” he says, keeping his voice in the lower registers it sometimes occupies these
days. He tips his hat and comes to a halt. His accent is working-class Irish.

The men had been murmuring. They grow silent.

“And whot if it is, you Mick?” says the biggest one.

“I is looking for a chap.”

For now, the men appear impressed enough that he is speaking to them, so they don’t make a move to hurt him. They seem to think they recognize a fellow blackguard.

“Well, we ain’t in the business of finding ’im,” says another one.

“Unless,” says a third, “you can makes it worth our worthwhiles.”

They all laugh.

“And if you can’t,” adds the big one, “then we mays ’ave to find you a place in St. Saviour’s Cemetery.”

Sherlock knows that they aren’t interested in his clothing. When you walk through this area at night, you mustn’t wear anything that anyone would want. You could be beaten and stripped bare. His clothes are so grimy and soot-stained that they aren’t any better than what these men are wearing. But what they think he might have inside his attire is likely of interest. The boy needs to be ready for that.

“Spare any coins?” laughs one of them as they begin to try to surround him. Sherlock shifts so his back is to the building. Bell taught him to do that in the early days of his self-defense instructions. It is a cardinal rule.

“If you have more than one gentleman to deal with,” the old man had sputtered, dressed in his bizarre fighting outfit (which included his hideous sparring tights), the sweat
pouring off his bandanna-draped forehead like it was coming out a breaking dam, “always keep everyone of them in front of you. The same thing in an establishment of any sort – find a chair with its back to the wall.”

The big one seems to notice Sherlock’s subtle defensive maneuver. He is likely a street fighter of some skill. He doesn’t say anything, but the boy can tell by his expression that he glimpsed the move and is impressed.

“I ain’t carrying anything you lot would like, except me fists,” says Holmes.

“Is that so?” grins a little one, advancing on him.

“ ’Old your ’orses,” says the big one, “let’s ’ear ’im gab. There ain’t many who would talk to us on their lonesome. Let’s give ’im a chance.”

Sherlock stares right back at the little one, who seems to be emboldened by being in a group.

“I can defend meself, friends. I don’t cares that much ’ow long I live, so much as I live an interesting life to me last breath. If one of you … for example, you, sir,” he speaks right at the little one, never moving his gray eyes from him, “was to attack me, I would be satisfied with just cutting off your nose, I would, and perhaps with shoving it in your gob before you all accosted me. That would give me satisfaction and take me to me maker with a smile upon me face.”

Sherlock puts his hand into his deep trousers pocket to grip his horsewhip, shoving part of it forward in the material to make it look like the business end of a knife. The light goes out in the little one’s eyes. He even takes a step backward. The others stop coming forward too. The big one actually smiles.

“Who might you be looking for? We knows every bloke worth knowing.”

“A fellow named Malefactor.”

There is absolute silence. In fact, even in the dim gaslight in the fog, Sherlock can see a look of fear flicker across the big one’s face. Then he swallows so hard that his Adam’s apple is evident moving in his throat. Sherlock expects someone to say something soon. But no one utters a word. It shocks the boy. He knew that Malefactor’s influence had been great on the streets in the old days and that it had grown of late, but he never dreamed that it would stop the very voices of East End criminals.
Already
, he thinks.

The silence continues. Finally, Sherlock speaks.

“What about a man named Crew?”

“You best be moving on,” says the big one, in a voice that actually trembles.

Holmes doesn’t need a written invitation. He backs away, keeping his face toward them until he is at the end of the street. When he turns, he moves as fast as he can go without running. But when he gets two blocks away, closer to the river, a face suddenly appears in front of his out of the fog. The man had rounded a corner and almost bumped into him.

It is the big thug. His chest is heaving as if he has been running.

“That ain’t a question you asks on the streets. Who is you?”

“Anonymous,” says Sherlock Holmes, and he employs
the big word without his low-Irish accent. In fact, he pronounces it carefully and clearly.

“I knows what that means,” says the thug, “and I knows you ain’t that. You IS someone. But if you ’ave a beef with that man you mentioned back there, that power, then you ’ad best give it up. His lieutenant, a devil not much bigger than a midget, went by the name of Grimsby, was murdered round ’ere just short days ago. It weren’t done the way it should ’ave been done. There were something not right about it, a killing more vicious than even we would do. Word is that man you mentioned, ’e ’ad it done.”

“Malefactor?”

The man won’t respond.

“By the hand of Crew?” asks Sherlock. “Do the streets say it was Crew?”

“All I can say of a man by that name is that I ’ave seen ’im. Big ’un, extra fat on him, blonde ’air and blue eyes, narrow brush mustache, never says nothing, and very queer. But I don’t really know nothing ’bout ’im, don’t know where ’e lives or what ’e does, ’cept ’e is connected to that there other man you mentioned. And as for the murder, the streets is silent about things such as that. I could tell you were different back there, but whoever you is, copper or villain or worse, I would leave this be.”

“Tell me more.”

But the man vanishes into the fog. Sherlock pursues him in a mad rush, barely able to see. As he does, he thinks about what else the man might be able to tell him if he asked the right question. Heart pounding, chest heaving, catching
up, losing the man, and spotting him ahead now and then as he runs away down the little streets and around corners, the right query comes to the boy.

Suddenly, the man completely disappears. And it isn’t because he has turned another corner, entered an establishment, or taken to his heels with greater effectiveness. He simply was standing in a spot on the road and then vanished.

Sherlock rushes up to the place and sees a circular, heavy-iron grating about three feet in radius in the foot pavement right next to a building. One has to look closely to see it. The man obviously pulled it back, went down into it, and then returned it to its place from beneath. Holmes looks around and then does the same.

When he dangles his legs into the underground, his feet reach rungs. Down a ladder he goes and finds himself in a tall, circular passageway tiled with brick. The smell is horrible. Big pipes run along the floor. He knows that he is very close to the river now, in the sewers, the magnificent new conduits built by the queen’s brilliant engineer Joseph Bazalgette. There are more than a thousand miles of them passing under London to move the city’s excrement into the water far downstream, instead of having it dumped in the streets to run into the Thames near where the populace lives, giving them cholera and a host of other diseases. Sherlock remembers Bell muttering about this, saying that it should have been done centuries ago.

Though impressed by his surroundings, the boy has no time to admire the engineering. He hears voices ahead, and scuffling, as if more than one person were moving at a brisk
pace up there. Sherlock begins to run. For a while, the big rats out ahead of him try to get away. They scurry through the sewers as if they know them, up and down its short iron staircases, around corners, avoiding pipes, crouched over through the tighter parts of the system. But eventually, they stop.

Sherlock halts too, and then carefully approaches.

It is the same men he had encountered on the street. They seem at home down here, as if this were a common place for them to meet. They have obviously decided that whoever is following them can be faced now, deep in the tunnels. There are seven of them against Sherlock Holmes. They don’t seem to be worried about his knife anymore.

The big one steps forward.

“You is trying our patience. I told you clear – we cannot talk about the man you seek. No one can. You must leave or we will ’urt you. You must leave now!”

The others advance on Holmes. Two in particular seem to truly want at him.

But Sherlock has had enough of this. It is time to act. He pivots in perfect Bellitsu motion, executing an Oriental move that the apothecary has made him practice hundreds of times and that these thugs have never seen on London streets, marshals the power in his legs and hip by twisting, and drives the sole of his boot into the chest of the first man. Not a little fellow, he is nevertheless driven back by the blow as if he were shot from a cannon. He flies six feet backward and smacks into the wall, his spine hitting first and then the base of his skull. He is instantly semi-conscious and slides down the wall into a partially sitting position. Sherlock
knows that the second man will go for his weapon to neutralize it first. (“Always imagine what your opponent is about to do!” Bell had often screamed at him in the midst of their battles.) The boy seizes the man by the arm that darts at his trousers’ pocket. He pulls him close, and in an instant has that arm in a “bar,” forcing it in two different directions, about to snap it in half. The man cries out in pain and asks for mercy.

“Stand back!” Sherlock shouts at the others, “or I will break it!”

The other men stop. The big one can’t resist a grin.

“What else do you wants? Ask us for something simple, and we will tell you. There are things we can’t speak of, because we fear that man you mentioned more than we will ever fear you. But if there is something we can tell you that will release my accomplice ’ere and satisfy you, then we will try.”

Sherlock knows what to ask. It was what came to him while pursuing this fellow up on the streets. He had plucked it from his memory.

“There was a man, an operative in the Brixton Gang, arrested a few years ago in Rotherhithe, nominally for robbing the Crystal Palace and for the attempted murder of Monsieur Mercure. He squealed on his fellow gang members to the Force and before the magistrates. For that, for putting his brothers away for a very long time, causing even the execution of one of the gang’s two leaders, the evil and most murderous of their lot, one Charon, whom the police were desperate to destroy, this man was allowed to go free after
two years. He has been at liberty for some months now. I know of that gang and its members.” Sherlock taps his finger to the side of his temple. “I know them by name and appearance. I was instrumental in bringing them to justice. I heard, through sources, of the freeing of one of their number, but I do not know who that was,
which
one, or
where
he is. He is plainly a man of few scruples, one who can be bought, and one whose exact whereabouts are protected by the police. But the streets know things. You may not have all the information I need, but I am guessing you know something. If you can tell me anything about this turncoat, it may lead me in the direction I need to go. You would be telling me nothing directly about Malefactor or Crew. The Brixton Gang was as well connected as any in the criminal world. It is my theory that this man, this squealer, knows something of Crew and his location. And he may be the only one of your like who would actually tell me. I must speak with him.”