The Hangman's Revolution (5 page)

Farley smiled at Riley, the first display of friendly teeth since the Rams had arrived. The conservatively clad tattooist seemed out of place in such rambunctious company. A scrivener among pugilists.

“Here’s the bad news, Riley. Once you take the ink, then your life is forfeit to the Rams. You may lease it back at the king’s pleasure for a half share of your worldly goods past and present.”

“Past worldly goods? How’s that to be collected without a time machine?”

Farley looked up from his notebook. “King Otto can hardly be blamed if you once had a fortune then lost it. Fifty percent is due nonetheless.”

The High Rammity swigged once more from his parasol flask, then spat into the aisle. “Magnanimous as I am, I waive the past. Present fortunes only.”

Riley bowed. “You are too kind.”

Otto sat bolt upright. “Sauce? You are giving me sauce? P’raps my terms is too lenient, then? You could be catching a bullet before the magic show. Sixty percent if you insist on lip, O Great Savano.”

Catching a bullet, thought Riley. How clever of King Otto to refer to the most anticipated trick in my repertoire: the bullet catch.

Fifty percent, sixty. It made no difference. Riley was to be a slave at Malarkey’s pleasure, and he knew it.

“So, to continue,” said Farley, “sixty percent of whatever the Orient brings in. If she brings in nothing, then we sell her lock, stock, and we plump the coffers with the proceeds. If the Great Savano makes a go of it, then we seed the crowd with dippers and do a side trade in the three w’s.”

The three w’s: wallets, watches, and nose wipers.

Disaster.

Even if the Orient did well, the pickpockets would drive Johnny Punter away. Riley knew well how this tale played. He would end up working for the rest of his life to pay off some dreamed-up debt while his half brother moved away from him in the world. Best to cut loose before the Rams sniffed out the diverse buried boxes in which Garrick’s blood-tainted sovereigns were stashed. He would change his professional moniker and go on the circuit, maybe tart up an old wagon and tour the county fairs.

“You is mine, lad,” Otto was saying. “You are my soldier. And I will have my due as sure as old Horatio is on his column in Trafalgar Square. And when this place has been squeezed, I will put you to work for me in the Hidey-Hole, pulling rats from hats.”

Oh no, thought Riley. Not me. I’ve been to the future and back. I’ve learned a dodge or two. The Great Savano does not enter into servitude for men in powdered wigs.

“As Your Majesty commands,” he said, bowing low once more. “But allow me the opportunity to negotiate.”

Inhumane stopped mouth breathing long enough to comment.
“
‘Negotiate,’ ’e says. Negotiate. We is Rams, lad. Negotiating ain’t a condition which…the other side…of the…Rams we be…”

It was hopeless; the sentence had gotten away from him, and so Inhumane fell silent, working it out on his fingers, chewing on the phrases.

“I agree with my brother in sentiment if not delivery,” said Otto. “No negotiations. It’s a question of rules. Rules is like hearts. Once you break them, they stay broke.” He waved his parasol in Farley’s direction. “Get that, did ye? It was a good one.”

The tattooist dipped his nib in an ink bottle, which was perched birdlike in his breast pocket.

“All preserved for future kings,” he said, moving his pen across the page in quick scratches.

“Good.” Malarkey returned his attention to the stage. “So, negotiating? There will be none.”

“Hear my proposal, King Otto,” said Riley. “It’s for the benefit of the enterprise. Our joint enterprise.”

In truth, Riley had less interest in negotiation than Malarkey did. He knew it was fruitless, but appearing to have an interest in a wrangle for terms made it seem as though he had accepted the proposition in general. It was classic misdirection.

Otto stretched his legs and hooked his pirate boots over the stage lip.

“I’m entertained,” he said. “I admit it. And so long as I am entertained then I am inclined to listen. So proceed, Riley boy, but take a care to be entertaining.”

Riley bowed once more. “As you wish, Your High Rammity,” he said, the calmness of his tone belying internal turmoil. Tonight’s performance was forfeit; he would use the illusions already set up to spirit himself away from the stage into the bowels of the Orient, where Garrick’s treasure was hidden.

Riley walked briskly to the wings and selected one chair from three—the plain wooden model with the secret hinges and elastic cord threaded through the hollow legs and back.

Riley, who was now every inch the Great Savano, tilted the chair onto a single hind leg, spinning it under his hand, reeling in the audience’s gaze.

“A theater is not really about walls or dressing rooms or even a stage,” he said, his voice slightly singsong, mesmerizing. “It’s about seats.” The chair spun faster and faster, its legs blurring together. “Seats love their work. They relish the fat, rich posteriors that will descend from on high.”

Inhumane frowned, an expression that settled with a certain familiarity onto his features. “This seat is relishing my posterior?”

Riley spun the chair over his head, then brought it crashing down so that it collapsed into segments and splinters. “But when the seats are empty, they simply fall to pieces.”

Smashing an old chair, even with such deft manipulation, was not such a great achievement, so no one applauded.

“But when those seats are full…”

Riley lowered himself slowly into a seating position until it seemed certain that he would fall.

“When those seats are full…”

Riley dipped even lower, but then…but then the broken chair began to jitter and fuss, dancing to some unheard music, knitting itself together until, in a rush, it surged upward into wholeness just as Riley descended to meet it.

The chair, magically restored, took Riley’s weight with a puff of sawdust.

“When those seats are full, they are money machines,” Riley told his audience. Then, on cue, he opened his mouth and rolled out his tongue, revealing the sovereign that lay thereon.

Riley made to snatch it, but then his tongue slid sharpish back inside his mouth, and his teeth clacked shut.

“Gold!” he said, as though nothing lay on his tongue. “You saw it! Bright and shiny gold. He has it. We wants it. So how do we get it?”

Pooley stood on his chair. “Bash ’is bleedin’ teeth in, and cut ’is bleedin’ tongue out.”

These blunt verbals broke the Great Savano’s spell somewhat, but Riley recovered well.

“Yes, my stunted friend. We could
cut his bleedin’ tongue
out, but then this is the only gold coin Johnny Punter will ever donate to the Rams’ coffers.”

Malarkey was listening now. Riley was twice as sharp as the average street cove, which made him four times brighter than the glocky duds sitting beside him today.

“Tell me then, my clever boy. How does we get that sov, and others like it?”

“That is the question. A sovereign for a sovereign. We get the sov by making Johnny Punter want to give it to us.”

Riley snapped his fingers together, and a flurry of butterflies fluttered from their tips, spiraling in a tight cone up into the penny seats. The audience’s mouths dropped open, as did Riley’s own, and out rolled the gold-bearing tongue. He whiplashed his own tongue like a jump rope, and the sov leaped into his hand.

“Presto,” said Riley, neatly palming the coin from one hand to another, then flicking it through the air. The sovereign spun end over end to land with the soft fat plop of pure gold on flesh in Malarkey’s waiting hand.

“Your cut, King Otto,” says the magician, all smarmy and professional, finishing the bit with a bow so low, he was eyeballing his own anklebones.

Malarkey closed his fingers around the coin in case the Great Savano would magic it away somehow.

“You puts on a good show, little Ramlet,” he said. “But—”

Riley cut him off smoothly, taking back control.

The person in control of the room is in control of the illusion,
Garrick had told him.
He decides whether or not magic comes into the world. You must be that person.

“But my show is not finished,” Riley said, projecting to the gods. “And I am improvising to tailor my illusions to Your Majesty. The Great Savano has another point to make, and in a most entertaining fashion.”

Malarkey winced. His hair told him something was wrong. Beneath the wig, Otto’s famed raven tresses yearned to be free and itched at the roots like they always did when things was a little off-color. Malarkey’s
hair-sight
had saved his life on more than one occasion—but Oh Lord, couldn’t that junior Ram chappie do the magic act like a topper?—so one more trick, then down to business.

I never gets to go to real theater anymore. It’s all knife acts and then screaming.

So he said, “Sharpish, Ramlet. And I better not sniff a whiff of underhand or it’s coming out of yer hide.”

Riley bowed again, but it seemed to King Otto that all this bowing and scraping was perhaps not as respect-laden as it might be. Another point to dwell on later.

After
the trick.

“So we have our customer for the present,” said Riley, bowing slightly. “But what will happen to Johnny Punter if we follow friend Farley’s counsel and fill the theater with Family?”

Family
. A cozy name for the criminal so-called fraternity.

Riley pulled a handkerchief from inside a wide pocket in his cape and shook it out until it unfurled to the size of a tablecloth.

“That was folded, is all,” muttered Inhumane, eager to prove himself a smarty-pants. Then as often happened, his words ran away too fast for his stumbling mouth to keep pace. “Folded is all, and then with the shaking wot…under his…cloak. Wot’s a magician’s cloak called now? So, anyways, it gets big, and now youse is all like, oh ’eck, and…”

Malarkey poked his brother with his drinks parasol. “I know, brother. Now think yer words inside yer head and let the pup perform.”

Riley worked the handkerchief. It was as Inhumane had guessed: simply folded, but not
simply
folded; the pattern of folds was as precise and complicated as an origami dragon, designed to conceal two wires shaped to cover his head and shoulders. Once the wires were perpendicular and the frame assembled, Riley draped the cloth neatly over himself. It assumed his shape and covered him completely. Riley stumbled stiff-legged this way and that, his arms stretched out before him, his eyes peeping through the gauze.

“See?” said Riley. “I am surrounded, confused, and blinded. I am being dipped, poked, jostled, and fleeced. Never again shall I cast my shadow across the Orient Theatre’s lobby. I shall away from here and take my gold with me.”

This bit of patter was to give him a chance to depress the trapdoor latch with his toe.

“Never shall I return here with my hard-earned chink, thinks old Johnny to himself. For I am a-dripping in nervous sweat and leered at by dodgy-looking coves with black teeth and murder in their beady eyes. And this is what happens to Johnny Punter when he hears Family members sniffing at his collar.”

Riley found the latch and pressed it. Now all that he needed to do was make a neat jump to the basement to demonstrate how Johnny Punter would disappear—and to actually disappear.

He wrapped the magician’s cloak around himself for the jump, pulling the folds tight to speed his passage through the tight wooden frame, when all of a sudden, and to the great surprise of all present, the usually serene Anton Farley seemed to take issue with his performance.

“No! No!” Farley said, jumping to his feet. “Enough of this tomfoolery. Back away from the trapdoor, or whatever you have there, boy. Come down here with these fools.”

Silence.

Stunned silence.

Was Farley issuing commands? Had he just referred to his fellow Rams as
fools
? And didn’t he sound more like a spoon-in-the-mouth toff now than a shiv-in-the-sock Ram?

Riddle upon mystery.

In situations like this, Malarkey, due to rank, would be deferred to for first reaction.

“Farley? Is it a brain fever that has seized you? Fools, you say? Fools, is it?”

Farley pulled a pistol of the revolver variety from his ink-sack, waving it casually as though it were an everyday item.

“Fools, cretins, idiots. Take yer pick.” The tattooist slapped his own forehead. “Listen to me.
Yer
pick. Take
your
pick. I have been undercover for so long…you have no idea. Sometimes I don’t know what day of the week it is.”

Pooley was sneaking a knife from his boot, so Farley shot him in the heart, barely pausing to draw a bead.

“No loss, that one,” said Farley. “No wailing outside Highgate for him.”

The gunshot echoed to the rafter, fading with each balcony until it became a whisper of its former self, and Pooley was dead where he sat, life leaving him with the wisp of smoke that drifted from the hole in his chest.

“A revolver,” said Malarkey, conversational in his surprise. “I never knew you were in possession of a revolver. American, is it?”

Inhumane began to sob, fat tears collecting in his deep eye sockets before spilling down his cheeks. “I don’t understand.”

For once, the giant imbecile was not alone in his state of mind. Only one person understood what was going on here, and he was the one with the bullets. Malarkey was struck to petrification, not on account of fear but from sheer disbelief. Otto Malarkey had been a war baby, born on the outskirts of the Balaclava battleground during the Crimean War. Gunfire and cannon shot were his lullaby. So it was not the thunderclap of Farley’s revolver that rooted Malarkey to his seat, it was the shock that the tattooist would first call him a fool and then shoot one of his soldiers.

“Farley, man, what are you doing?”

“What am
I
doing?” said Farley. “You’re dressed like Elton John in the court of Louis XV, and you’re asking me what I’m doing? You’ve got a powdered wig on, Otto.”