The Lazarus Prophecy (34 page)

He cleared his throat. Again, he said, ‘The ninth isn't ideal.'

I remembered his remark then about my being the seventh son of a seventh son. It seemed strange for a priest to be a believer in numerology, but everything about this business was strange. I said, ‘The odds will favour me on the night, gentlemen. I'll do all I can to see to it that they do. I'm not an amateur at this enterprise. I go into the game fully prepared.'

‘Just so,' Anderson said, taking a cigar from a leather case and rolling it between his fingers. The papers use a file photograph of him when they quote him on the Whitechapel killer. It is recent I think, but this Ripper business has aged him since he sat for it.

Lord Salisbury's man had said not a word since we sat down in the leather chairs of that opulent room. He had confined himself to writing notes in a ledger.

Anderson lit his cigar with a strike of a Lucifer on the sandpaper strip of its box. He puffed and exhaled and through a wreath of smoke said, ‘Have you made a will, Mr. Barry?'

I laughed. I said, ‘It won't come to that.'

There was a silence. I spoke into it. I said, ‘How's Inspector Aberline doing on the ground with his Whitechapel investigation?'

All three of them went pale. Salisbury's man paused with his pen poised over his notes, freshly dipped ink about to drop from its nib and spoil the page. He leant forward
to prevent the spill and as he did so a letter protruded from his coat pocket. Embossed in red wax on the flap I glimpsed the crossed keys and tiara of the Vatican seal. Then he sat back and the missive was obscured from view again.

‘Aberline's an honest man out of his depth,' Anderson said eventually.

We all are
, I was tempted to say. Instead I kept my counsel.

Anderson cleared his throat with a cough and examined the tip of his smoke. The tobacco wasn't the cheap stuff. It was rich and heady and rolled I assumed in Havana. He said, ‘Before you leave, will you take coffee with us, Mr. Barry?'

‘I will,' I said. ‘I haven't yet breakfasted, gentlemen. I've probably room for a biscuit on the side.'

It was almost eleven in the morning when I left them. Whitehall by then was its usual trundling procession of carts and wagons and Hansoms and omnibuses. It was raining steadily and gloomy enough for the drivers of some of the passenger vehicles to have lit their lamps. The painted hoardings on their flanks made pallid claims for Wills Cigarettes and Beecham's Pills and various brands of waterproof. London's weather had proven to me that no fabric yet invented is truly waterproof. I walked wary of splashes from cart wheels as rain and horseshit mashed by wheel rims brought brownish puddles welling to the gutters.

Every police officer in the City of Westminster seemed to be on duty, their expressions stern and vigilant behind their mutton chop whiskers and moustaches. There were armed soldiers acting as impromptu sentries outside several government offices.

There were bullets in the breeches of their guns. A ceremonial rifle has an altogether different look from one loaded and ready to fire. Perhaps there has been intelligence about an anarchist or Fenian bomb plot. I think though all this is just a consequence of troublesome times.

I was on my way to the gymnasium by now at Leadenhall. I had packed my kit bag in preparation as soon as the Whitehall summons had come. In my pocket was
twenty pounds drawn for training expenses while we drank the excellent brew of coffee Anderson had offered and ate the slices of buttery shortbread served on the side.

My belly felt warm and full and I had already determined how I would spend at least some of the extravagant sum they had given me. They'd been lavish I suspected in the hope I could somehow purchase fortitude.

November 8
^th
1888

I am at once better and worse prepared for this challenge than I have been for any I have confronted in my life. My conditioning was good when I took on the Boilerhouse what seems a lifetime ago at the beginning of October. It's improved since then through hard training and wholesome eating to the point where I feel stronger and fitter than I ever have. I'm sharp, my stamina is good and most of the old speed has returned to my reflexes.

Yet I cannot shake the trepidation. I'd go further and say it's grown in me by the day since the match was made in that gloomy cellar where dogs maul and die for money to the east. It's a feeling close to dread I've endured these last few days and I'm not a man familiar with the sensations of fear or even very much of pessimism.

Partially it is the feeling of being manipulated by forces I know little about. There's government involvement in this scheme and I cannot work out why. The machinery of the state is at work in something most serious-minded people would dismiss as mere sport. There's no contradiction in being pampered and exploited if you know the reason for your use. Otherwise it's an uneasy mix to live with.

There was that letter with its Vatican seal of which I caught but a glimpse. England is a fiercely Protestant country. Jeffries is as authentic a man of the cloth as any that's ever been ordained, that's my conviction. But he isn't who he claims. And the British Government and the Church of Rome are not natural allies.

Sometimes I speculate that Caul will stand me up. I'll be stood in the ring raised under that railway arch in Hercules Road with the clock rudely timing rounds we'll never fight as he revels elsewhere oblivious in the pleasures of some squalid place of
entertainment. Perhaps he'll be viewing the bearded lady or a tattooed pigmy in a tent at the fair on Wandsworth Common. Maybe he'll be taking his pleasures among the ladies in the velvet plush of a Chelsea bordello.

Except that he won't. He'll be as good as his word because though he is underhand and capricious and I suspect a prodigious teller of lies, his word is never lightly given. He will turn up confident of winning his wager, accepting the forfeit and swaggering off in possession of his prize. I sense anyway he's seen sights far more grotesque than the bearded lady. And I suspect his interest in women doesn't extend to pleasuring them.

The man who taught me this trade was Blackrock born and did become the Irish champion. He told me the most important lesson was nothing to do with the feint or the jab or where you place your feet to deliver a telling blow. He said the most crucial detail of all was to know your opponent.

That didn't matter with a crude banger like the Boilerhouse. He was only ever going to do one thing and was only ever capable of doing it one way. Edmund Caul is a far more complex and dangerous proposition, my intuition tells me. Yet I know nothing about the fellow at all really that would help me in this confrontation. There are moments when the prospect makes me feel as vulnerable and helpless as an abandoned child.

This morning I had cause in my preparations to venture to Wapping. No one ever really sleeps at the place that was my destination so I set out early. There were uncommonly few people about even for the hour and those I saw had a tense and furtive look about them.

A girl slopped milk from one of the two pails she carried in her hurry to get where she was going. A coal merchant cursed the nag tethered to his wagon as he loaded the heavy hessian sacks. A policeman put me in the spotlight of his torch and affected a look of shrewd appraisal before passing on and consigning me back to the gloom.

Wapping smelled of tar and hemp rope and in drifts from the great wharves and warehouses of exotic cargoes brought aboard ships from every corner of the globe. After doing my business there I joined the leather-footed trudge of men walking towards a day's labour unloading on the quays.

Eventually, between buildings, the river itself opened up to me, the sunrise an umber smudge behind the masts and rigging of the great flotilla of merchant ships creaking at anchor on the tide. Their lines and shrouds formed an intricate pattern of impossible complexity and reflected the confusion in my mind about tomorrow night's business. Try as I might, I can make no mortal sense of it.

I bought a cup of coffee and a pastry for a ha'penny from a quayside stall. The pastry tasted not of butter, like a Whitehall biscuit, but slightly of fish oil. It was fresh and sweet though and an antidote to the bitter drink I sipped.

I looked down at the lapping water and breathed in its familiar stink convinced of only one certainty, and it was this: in slightly more than 36 hours my fate would change in some fundamental way forever. Win or lose, I would emerge from my confrontation with Edmund Caul a different man from the one I had so far been in my eventful life. The manner and nature of the change were not apparent to me. The future was obscure, like a route to a destination masked by a concealing fog. But after the following night, I was convinced nothing would ever be the same for me again.

November 10
^th
1888

He arrived on time, bright and exuberant, whistling some ditty voguish this year among the singers in the music halls. He was wearing an ulster and his spats were flecked with some recent stain I supposed from the detritus in the street. It looked to the casual eye like smears of rust.

Not that my eye was casual, but that's the way I tried to keep my demeanor. It was instantly unsettling to occupy a confined space with him. There was some restless, feral quality that made it so. I would compare it to standing close to the lion or tiger enclosure at the zoo. But it was worse than that, because, in a sense, we shared the same
cage. There wasn't the reassurance of steel bars separating me from the threat he exuded.

He seemed bigger than he had in the dog pit basement in Bethnal Green. His shoulders looked broader and more powerful and I was more aware of the span of him, the rangy reach of his arms. There were hectic patches of crimson on his sallow face I thought put there by the prospect of violence or the excitement of the wager. There was a hard glitter in his eyes when he smirked at me. His appetite was un-sated. He hungered visibly for the fray. And he had a preening confidence the sick presentiment in the pit of my stomach told me was entirely justified.

Stripped down he was as perfect a physical specimen as a statue of an athlete from antiquity carved from marble or fashioned from alabaster. The muscles were cleanly formed and perfectly symmetrical under his skin. The effect was spoiled by the odd reddish colouring of his flesh generally. And coarse hair bristled on his broad back and shoulder-blades in unsightly clumps. He grinned like a man with a fever before the bell sounded and we closed and when he raised his hands to clench them into fists I saw there was blood blackened and congealed under his fingernails.

I barely survived the first session. It cost me a broken nose and two teeth. His blows were crude flails through the air but he was as quick as a cobra and quite inhumanly strong. We closed with the seconds counting down so I could gather breath and clear my head for a moment and the skin of his torso between my forearms felt rough and scaly like the hide of some primitive beast.

He was toying with me. His tongue lolled hotly on my shoulder in the clinch and he chuckled and his breath was a sulfurous stink. ‘You're hell-bound', he murmured, easily pushing me off and stiffening me with a brutal right before the tolling rescue of the bell.

I stuck to my strategy. I put the metal bottle in my corner to my lips and tipped back my head and swallowed. I screwed the lid back on and toweled the blood from my nostrils and fair bounced across the canvas for the second round. I formed my damaged
features into a look of relish and licked my lips and winked at him and he frowned and circled me before resuming his attack.

The second wasn't the one-sided pummeling the first had been. I'd learned something in those opening five minutes about the style of him. You couldn't stay outside, where his speed and power could find their damaging range. You had to get close-in. That meant enduring the loathsome heat and touch of him. But it gave me a chance to counter with a combination to the body.

They were my first telling punches of the fight. And they were my last. They had no physical effect on him at all and I knew that I hadn't a hope of hurting him. They were a show of defiance only, that rattled tattoo of shots, a show to invite a flicker of doubt or suspicion into the mind of a habitual schemer.

He clubbed me viciously under the heart in response and I felt the searing agony of ribs popped and all the breath escaped me with a blackening sigh. My body begged me to take the knee and gain the respite of a count but I couldn't show weakness or pain. To do so would signal the end of me. Destroyed inside, I acknowledged the quality of the blow with a casual nod at my opponent.

I slipped a right and left and looked to dodge inside and his head dipped with a viper's suddenness and I felt the raw shock of flesh sheared between his teeth from off my chest. He'd bitten me. I groped at the spot but couldn't call the foul without a referee and he took the chance to hit me with a shuddering hook to the temple. I was fighting by now from memory. I felt dead on my feet but needed to stay upright and affected a jaunty trot back to my corner when the mercy of the bell finally rescued me again.

Blood trickled hotly down me. I looked and saw only a purpling gouge where my left nipple had been. I was as certain that he hadn't spat it out as I was that he'd bitten it off. My dulled senses couldn't really make much sense of the mutilation.

He watched me while I smacked my lips and tipped my drink once more. A sort of dark fury contorted his features and in the lamplight and seclusion he looked on his stool just for a moment like a squatting gargoyle. A train wearied overhead on clanking lines. The five minutes I had left to survive to win the bet might as well have been five
years. I was utterly spent. The broken ribs made breathing agony. I sneaked another look at Caul. He was staring at the bottle in my grip. I grinned and winked at him like someone raising a carefree toast in the winner's enclosure at the races.