The Anubis Gates (17 page)

“Tomorrow night’s dinner you all are unless you bring him to me!” shrilled Horrabin, froth flying from his vermillioned lips as he did a woodpecker tap dance of fury on the north sidewalk.

One of his beggars hurried forward but had misjudged the velocity of a Chaplin Company coach and went down under the hooves, and one of the front wheels had cut across his middle before the driver was able to wrench the horses and vehicle to a halt. By now all traffic had come to a stop in this section of the Strand, and drivers were shouting at each other and, in a few cases, lashing at one another with their whips.

Horrabin stepped off the curb and began poling his way through the confusion toward the opposite side of the street.

Doyle emerged from between two buildings and clattered down an ancient set of wooden stairs to a sort of boardwalk that ran along the top of the glistening riverbank. He hurried down to the end of one of the piers and crouched behind a high wooden box, and his breathing gradually slowed to the point where he could close his mouth. The river air was cold, and he was glad Copenhagen Jack didn’t insist that his beggars appear half-clad in cold weather—though it was an effective touch. He pulled his jacket and shirt away from his collar-bone—the knife cut was still bleeding pretty freely, though it wasn’t deep.

I wonder who the hell that was,
he thought.
It couldn’t have been one of Doctor Romany’s people, or Horrabin’s, for Jacky told me they definitely want me alive. Maybe it was some rival of theirs… or even just a solo lunatic hobo-killer, some prototype Jack the Ripper.
Doyle gingerly touched the long cut. Thank God, he thought, that Horrabin’s man arrived when he did.

He rubbed his chest and then inhaled experimentally, filling his lungs. Though his breastbone stung, and he was doubtlessly developing the major bruise of his life—so far—there was no grating sensation; the vicious old man’s cane had probably not broken anything. He exhaled and leaned wearily against the box, letting his feet dangle over the water.

The yellow dots of lanterns on passing boats, and their reflections, stippled the blackness of the river like a Monet painting, and the lights of Lambeth were a glowing chain on the close horizon. The moon, a faint orange crescent, seemed to be balanced on the railing of Blackfriars Bridge half a mile east. Behind and above him to his right were the lights of the Adelphi Terrace, looking like some fantastic pleasure ship viewed from water level, and he could hear faint music from there when the breeze slackened.

He could feel another coughing fit building up in his throat and chest, but fear gave him the strength to suppress it when he heard a slow, heavy knocking coming his way along the boardwalk behind him.

Jacky was glad the water was flowing fast enough in the subterranean canal to make the rudder useless in downstream travel, for if it was swung very far to port it would hit her in the head; and if the people in the boat had been exerting any more control over the craft than just using barge poles to push it away from the walls whenever the current swung it too close, they’d have felt the drag of their secret passenger. The water swirling around her neck was becoming even colder as they approached the river, and it was all she could do to keep her teeth from chattering. She was careful to keep her head out of the water, for she had a small flintlock pistol wrapped up in her turban, and she wanted to keep the flashpan dry. The torches at bow and stern of the boat flickered in the sulphury breeze, sometimes casting only a dim red glow and at others flaring up to illuminate starkly every stone of the arched ceiling passing by close overhead.

Five minutes ago she had been dry and warm, cooking a panful of sausages over the fire in the kitchen of Horrabin’s Rat’s Castle on Maynard Street. She’d been dressed in her Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar outfit, with a turban, sandals, and a robe made from a chintz bedspread, with walnut stain on her face and hands and a false beard supplementing her customary false moustache, for she’d seen the exiled Fairchild at the Rat’s Castle, and didn’t want to be recognized as one of Copenhagen Jack’s people. Doctor Romany had arrived a half hour earlier, and had perched in one of Horrabin’s swings, taken his weird shoes off and absorbed himself with a stack of shipping reports.

Then one of Horrabin’s beggars, a sturdy red-faced old fellow, had burst in, out of breath from running but gasping out a message almost before he was in the room. “Doctor Romany… hurry … the Strand, and moving south toward the river… a man’s been shot… “

“Who? Who’s been shot?” Romany hopped down from the swing without putting his spring-shoes back on, and his old face twisted with agony; quickly he climbed back into the swing and pulled the shoes on. “Who, damn you?” he rasped.

“I don’t know… Simmons saw it and… sent me to fetch you. He said it’s the man you’ve… offered a reward for.”

Romany had his shoes on and laced by this time, and he had again jumped down from the swing, and was bobbing agilely now on the powerful springs. “Which one? But it must be Dog-Face Joe. They’d never dare to shoot the American. Well, where is he? The Strand, you say?”

“Yes, sir. And moving south, by the Adelphi. It’d be quickest, yer Honor, to take a boat down the underground canal straight to the Adelphi Arches. All the waterways are running strong, what with the rains… “

“Lead the way—and hurry. I knew old Joe for years, and if they haven’t outright killed him he’ll get away from them.”

When the two men hurried down the cellar stairs Ahmed the Hindoo Beggar was only a few paces behind, the sausages forgotten. This sounds like it, Jacky had thought, her heart pounding as she forced herself to hang back far enough so they wouldn’t see or hear her following.
God, let him be still alive; and let me get close enough to put a pistol ball through his brain. And if I could somehow have a moment to whisper to him first, explain who I am and why I’m going to kill him… and then at last,
she had thought longingly,
I could go home.

When they had reached the old stone dock in the under basement there came a moment when two beggars were untying the boat and lighting the torches, and Doctor Romany was staring impatiently down the dark tunnel, and Jacky had been able to pad across the stone floor and slip noiselessly into the cold black water. The boat, which the two men dragged and bumped alongside the dock for Doctor Romany to get into, had rings along the outside of the gunwale so that a tarpaulin could be lashed over it, and Jacky looped two fingers through one of them and let herself be towed along when the boat was poled out into the strong current.

“Ha ha?” came the high, birdy voice of the clown. “Now where’s my old pal Dumb Tom?” There was a slow knocking of wood on wood as Horrabin moved back and forth on the boardwalk. The only other sounds were the fitful breeze in the rigging of the fishing boats moored nearby, and the lapping of the water around the pier pilings.

Doyle, sitting behind the box at the end of the pier, didn’t even breathe, and he wondered how long he could hold out before leaping to his feet and shouting,
Get it over with, here I am, as you very well know!
For there was a teasing note in the clown’s voice, as if it did know.

He heard more slow thumping as the clown moved this way and that. My God, Doyle thought, if that thing starts stumping down this pier toward me I’ll be into the water and swimming for Lambeth before he’s three steps out. Then he imagined the clown following him into the black water, imagined seeing over his shoulder that grinning painted face moving at him with impossible speed as he tried to swim with his stiffening shoulder. His heartbeat seemed to be shaking him apart, like the impacts of a wrecking ball on an old building.

“Horrabin!” came a cry from away to Doyle’s right. “Where is he?”

Doyle realized with horror that it was Doctor Romany’s voice.

The clown giggled, a sound like a hundred manic crickets, and then called, “Right here.” The knocking of the stilts moved out onto the pier. With an explosive shriek that appalled even himself, Doyle dove off the pier end, barely getting a breath before plunging into the cold water. He thrashed to the surface and began swimming frantically. “What was that?” Romany’s voice carried clearly across the water. “What’s going on?”

Horrabin had ladder-walked to the end of the pier. “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.” He whistled, a shriller and more complicated whistle than the one he’d summoned the beggars with in the Strand, and then he waited, looking up and down the river shore.

As soon as the boat had emerged from the tunnel, and just before it passed through the Adelphi Arches and out into the river, Jacky unhooked her numbing fingers and let the craft recede away from her.
Just in time,
she had told herself, for a moment later one of the beggars had stepped back and grabbed the tiller and the other had lifted a pair of oars from the bottom of the boat and begun fitting the thole pins into the oarlocks. Doctor Romany had shouted a question, and she’d heard a faint answer, but she’d been swimming half underwater and hadn’t caught any of the words. Then there had come a scream, short but so loud that nobody within a mile could have missed it. Faintly she’d heard Horrabin’s voice say, afterward, “He’s in the river. I’ll show you where.”

She heard the first clattering stroke of the oars just as she reached the bank and pulled herself out of the water.

Doyle, forty feet out now, calmed down a little and began to dog paddle silently.
If anything,
he thought,
any boat or swimmer comes near me, I’ll surface dive and go as far as I can under water, and then try to let my head emerge slow and breathe quietly. Hell, with any luck I should be able to elude them … And, with a good deal more luck, get back to shore somewhere before my strength gives out.
The current was carrying him to his left, away from Doctor Romany.

He heard a new sound—oarlocks clacking rhythmically behind him to his right.

Horrabin smiled, for a dim glow had appeared under the second pier to his left, and as it moved out from under the overhang it could be seen to be a shotgun pattern of dozens of tiny lights whirling across the face of the dark water. The clown pointed out toward where he’d last heard Doyle splashing, and the cluster of tiny lights scudded out into the river as quick as the wind-blown petals of some luminous flower.

“Follow the lights, Doctor Romany!” Horrabin called merrily.

What lights?
Doyle wondered.
The nearest lights are across the river. Sure, Doctor Romany, follow them while I drift east.

He quietly treaded water with his legs and right arm, giving his left shoulder a rest. Staying afloat was no problem; he had discovered that by taking turns with his dog paddle, floating on his back and slowly treading water he was able to keep his face out of water with no strenuous use of any one set of muscles. The current was taking him toward Blackfriars Bridge, and he was cautiously confident that he’d be able to climb up on one of the pilings and, once his pursuers had decided he’d drowned, make a segmented swim from piling to piling to the shore.

Suddenly he learned what lights Horrabin had meant, for what seemed to be a couple of dozen little floating candles were skimming across the surface straight toward him. He yanked his head under water and, with just a kick-splash to mark where he’d been, swam away under water in a direction at right angles to the course the lights had been taking.

His tenuous confidence was gone. This reeked of sorcery—hadn’t Jacky said Doctor Romany was a magician? Evidently Horrabin was too—and he felt like a man who, limbering up for a fistfight, sees his opponent snap the loaded cylinder closed on a revolver.

He frog-kicked along as far as he could and still expect to surface without gasping, and then he let his head float up and break the surface of the water. Slowly he lifted a hand and pushed the soaked flap of hair away from his eyes.

For a moment he just hung stunned in the water, for the lights had followed him and now surrounded him, and staring at the nearest couple he saw that they were eggshell halves, equipped with tiny torches, straw masts and folded paper sails, and—and it didn’t even occur to him to ascribe it to fever delirium—a tiny man, no bigger than his little finger, crouched in each one, twisting the toy mast deftly in the breeze to hold his diminutive craft in position.

Doyle screamed and flung his arm around in an arc to capsize them, then without waiting to see the effect drew a sobbing breath and dived again.

When his lungs were heaving at his clenched shut throat and he thought he must be about to crack his head against the stones of the bridge pilings, Doyle again let himself bob to the surface. The tiny eggshell mariners were again grouped in a ring around him when he surfaced. They didn’t approach nearer than two arm’s lengths, and in spite of the kalunk… kalunk… kalunk of Doctor Romany’s boat drawing ever closer he paused, thrashing weakly in the water, to get his breath back. Something slapped the water, hard, an inch from his left cheek, and the spray stung his eye. A moment later he heard the boom of a gunshot roll across the water from the shore. It was instantly followed by a shot from Romany’s boat, but because the boat was moving the shot was badly aimed and kicked up spray among the lighted eggshells, sending one spinning through the air.

God, I’m being shot at from all sides,
Doyle thought despairingly as he once more filled his lungs and pushed himself under.
They don’t even want me alive anymore.

Horrabin had glanced down to his left when a gunshot went off down there among the fishing boats, then his head snapped back up when there was a shot from Doctor Romany’s boat. The clown saw the tiny light spring up from the surface and go out when it came down again, and he realized the gypsy chief was shooting at the man in the water.

Horrabin quickly cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “I thought you wanted him alive!”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Romany’s voice echoed across the water. “Isn’t this Dog-Face Joe?”