Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (12 page)

 
          
 
He carried a stick, and his profile betrayed
an aquiline nose and a noble sort of demeanor—you could see it in his walk—
that made him out to be something more than a gentleman: royalty, you'd think,
except that his hat and coat had seen some wear, and his trousers were splashed
with mud from the street.

 
          
 
The baker shouted. Of course it was the man
he'd seen loitering in the alley directly before the blast. And two constables
had the man pinned and labeled before he had a chance to run for it. He
wouldn't have run for it anyway, of course, for it was Godall, as you've no
doubt deduced by now.

 
          
 
I was possessed by the notion that I ought to
go to his defense, tell the constables that they'd collared the wrong man. I
didn't, though, having learned a lesson from that earlier unthinking dash of
mine into what the newspapers, in their silly way, sometimes call "the
devouring elephant," meaning the fire, and still limping from it, too.
They would arrest me along with Godall, is what they would do, as an
accomplice. My word is nothing to the constabulary. And I was certain that they
wouldn't keep him two minutes anyway, once they knew who he was.

 
          
 
The rain fell harder, if that were possible,
and the flames died away almost as fast as they'd risen, and the fire brigade,
when it clanged up, had nothing at all to do but wait. The smoke boiled away,
too, on the instant. Just like that. You would have thought there'd be a fresh
billow, what with the sudden rain and all, but there wasn't; it was simply
gone, leaving some whitish smoke tumbling up out of the embers of the dwindling
fire.

 
          
 
It struck me as funny at the time, the fire
and blast so quick and fierce, and then the smoke just dying like that. It's a
consequence of hanging about with men like St. Ives and Godall, I guess, that
you jump to conclusions about things; you want everything to be a mystery. No,
that's not quite it: you suspect everything of being a mystery; what you want
is a different story, which is to say, no story at all. There was a story in
this, though. It took about thirty seconds of thought to conclude that it had
been an incendiary bomb and a lot of chemical smoke, which had fairly quickly
used itself up. The explosion had to have been manufactured.

 
          
 
My biscuits, it turned out—the tin I'd dropped
in the road
—had been trampled,
and I left for
Jermyn Street
empty-handed. It's a good walk in the
rain—by that I mean a long one—but it gave me time to think about two things:
whether the tragedy that afternoon had anything to do with Lord Kelvin's
machine (the presence of Godall rather argued that it had) and what I would
tell Dorothy about it all. Dorothy, if you don't already know, is my wife, and
at the moment she was a wife who wouldn't be keen on my getting caught up in
another of St. Ives's adventures when the last one hadn't quite got cold yet. I
had the unsettling notion that "caught up" was just the right verb,
even if a little on the passive side; this had all the earmarks of that sort of
thing.

 
          
 
St. Ives wasn't in
Harrogate
, at his laboratory. He was in London paying
a visit to my father-in-law—Mr. William Keeble of Jermyn Street, the toy maker
and inventor—consulting him on the building of an apparatus that doesn't
concern us here, and is too wild and unlikely for me to mention without
throwing a cloud of suspicion and doubt over the whole story. But it was
fortuitous, St. Ives's being in London, because if he hadn't been I would have
had to send a message up to Harrogate, and he would have come quick enough,
maybe to find nothing at all and have wasted a trip.

 
          
 
As it was, I ran him down that night in an
oyster bar near
Leicester Square
. The rain had given off, but the clouds
hadn't, and it felt like snow. St. Ives sat reading a Standard ihdii wasn't
long off the presses. News of the explosion, however, didn't appear on the
front page, which was fairly bursting with an extravagant story of another sort
altogether. And here my own story digresses for a bit.

 
          
 
I wish I could quote it to you, this second
story, but I haven't got it anymore; so I'll tell it to you straight out,
although I warn you that I can't do it justice, and that you wouldn't half
believe me if I could. Any good library, though, can afford you a copy of a
London
newspaper from the day in question, if
you're the sort of Thomas in the popular phrase. And note that I haven't tried
to sandbag you with the notion that I'd seen this second tragedy as well as the
explosion up in Holborn: what I'm telling you now is neither art nor
journalism, but a sort of lager and lime mix-up of both, and maybe nearer the
truth for that.

 
          
 
IT WAS WHAT the Standard referred to as an
"imbroglio," although that, I'm afraid, is a small word, and this was
no small matter. A lorry had very nearly overturned on
White-friars Street
. It had been running along south, heavily
laden, toward the Embankment, its load covered in canvas, several layers, and
lashed down against the wind and possible rain. Some few witnesses claimed that
there was a man beneath the canvas, too, peering out at the day, although no
one saw him so clearly as to identify him beyond their generally agreeing that
he ran to tall and thin, and was hatless and nearly bald.

 
          
 
The lorry, angling round across
Tudor Street
and onto Carmelite, caught a bit of stone
curb with its wheel. There was a shifting of cargo and a horrible shout from
the half-hidden man on board, and the wagon, as if it were a great fish on the
end of a played-out line, shuddered almost to a stop, the horses stumbling and
their shoes throwing sparks on the pavement. A terrible mechanical howling set
in, as if an engine had just that minute been started up.

 
          
 
The driver—an enormous man with a beard—cursed
and slammed at the reins and whipped the poor beasts nearest him as if to take
the hide off their flanks. They tried to drive on, too —desperately, to hear
the witnesses tell of it—but the lorry, or rather the cargo, seemed to compel
the horses back, and for the space of a long minute it looked as if time had
stopped dead, except for the suddenly falling rain and the cursing and the
flailing of the driver. Then there was the snap of a stay chain coming loose
and the lorry lurched forward, the chain swinging round into the spokes, and
there was such a groaning and screeching and banging that it seemed sure the
wagon would go to pieces on the road and the horses plummet down Carmelite and
into the river.

 
          
 
It wasn't the lorry, though, that was tearing
itself apart. The air suddenly was full of flying debris, shooting out of the
buildings along the street: nails and screws pried themselves out of door
casings and clapboards; an iron pot flew from an open window as if it had been
thrown; door knockers clanked and clattered and hammered in the hands of a
dozen anxious ghosts and then tore away from their doorfronts with a screech of
overstrained steel. Even the two iron hitching posts in front of the Temple Inn
lurched out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stone fragments, and all of
it shot away in the direction of that impossible lorry, a sort of horizontal
hailstorm of hardware clanging and banging against the mysterious cargo and
clamping tight to it as if glued there.

 
          
 
A man on the street, the paper said, was
struck down by one of the posts, and wasn't expected to recover his
senses,
and two or three others had to be attended to by the
surgeon, who removed "shrapnel and all manner of iron debris."
Shopwindows were shattered by stuff inside flying out through them, and the
wagon itself, as if possessed, rocked up and down on its hounds like a spring
pole.

 
          
 
During the melee there sounded an awful
screaming and scrabbling from under the canvas, where the unfortunate passenger
(fortunate, actually, that he was padded by several folds of heavy canvas)
fought to clamber farther around behind the cargo. His cries attested to his
partial failure to accomplish this feat, and if the strange business had gone
on a moment longer he would have been beaten dead, and half a dozen houses
along Tudor and Carmelite dismantled nail by nail and left in a heap.

 
          
 
The howling noise stopped, though, just like
that. The horses jerked forward and away, hauling the lorry with its broken
stay chain and spokes, and disappearing around onto the Embankment as the rush
of iron debris fell straight to the roadway in a shower, clanking along in the
wake of the wagon until it all tired out and lay still.

 
          
 
The street
lay
deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute
and a half. Rain began to pour down (I've already described it; it was the same
rain that saved the baker's shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean,
no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it
was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal
Academy—a machine works—had been broken into and a complicated piece of
machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited ... It was thought at
first (by anyone who wasn't certifiable) that this business of the flying iron
might be connected to the theft of the machine.

 
          
 
The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman
from the
Royal
Academy
—the secretary, Mr. Parsons—denied it flat
out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by
nightfall. There wasn't any connection, he said.
Couldn't be.
And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door
knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn't hold with flying door
knockers.

 
          
 
Tell that to the man laid out by the iron
post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made
the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the
oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives's gentleman's gentleman.

 
          
 
But this is where art leans in and covers the
page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would
be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. "All in good
time" has ever been the way of art.

 
          
 
AND ANYWAY IT wasn't
Until
the first of the ships went down in the
Dover
Strait
that any of us was certain—absolutely
certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives
from the scientific. I wasn't certain of anything yet.

 
          
 
I was sitting on one of Godall's sofas, I
remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take
up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one
of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had
walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the
odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable
about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once,
their business having nothing to do with me—or with this story except in a
peripheral way.

 
          
 
My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been
teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an
India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that
very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears
would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting
gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least
like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It
was funny to look at, though.

 
          
 
I remember wondering what it would have been
like if Keeble himself had built
it,
and thinking that
I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I
listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a
clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully,
entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up
Rupert Street
toward Brewer.