Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (13 page)

 
          
 
A minute passed, neither of us noticing the
parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was
up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand.
I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I
found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green
tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved
again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves
wouldn't muck up the brew. The proprietor read tea leaves, though, as well as
palms and scone crumbs, and wasn't at all interested in the invention, although
I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic
matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We
chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down,
thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.

 
          
 
There at the side of the street, half a block
up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a
curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the
curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman,
but it wasn't; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion
was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate
collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the
trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around
him—the cab, the buildings along
Rupert Street
, me—signified something to him. His glance
shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering,
"What is that?"

 
          
 
He was looking up the street at the time, so I
looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. "Beg your
pardon," I said.

 
          
 
"That there."

 
          
 
He peered down the street now, so I did too.

 
          
 
"There."

 
          
 
Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of
casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a
cigar.

 
          
 
"Him?"
I
asked.

 
          
 
He gave me such a look that I thought I'd
landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.

 
          
 
"That.
In your
hand."

 
          
 
The elephant.
He
blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. "I like that," he
said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face,
too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness,
somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on
earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.

 
          
 
I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth,
and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I'll
admit, that he'd give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back
into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard
from him no more. I knocked once on the door. ''Go away," he said.

 
          
 
So I did. He wanted the creature more than I
wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of
him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That's the sort of thing I
told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn't want
to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a
madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into
Godall's shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing
just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.

 
          
 
I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro
leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway
turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn't the fellow in the truck;
she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally
greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though,
and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost
unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that
had come up to
Soho
wearing a cleverly altered melon for a
head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.

 
          
 
She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she
had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty
reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling
that I'd been cut, although you'd suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn't
count for much—any more than having one's rubber elephant stolen by a madman
counts for anything.

 
          
 
"A man like that ought to be brought to
justice," she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised
his eyebrows at me.

 
          
 
"This is Mr. Owlesby," he said to
the woman. "You can speak freely in front of him."

 
          
 
She paid me no attention at all, as if to say
that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no
one would stop her. I sat down.

 
          
 
"Brought to justice," she said.

 
          
 
"Justice," said St.
Ives,
"was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back.
He died in
Scandinavia
. He fell into a lake where he without a
doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I ... I saw him tumble into
the lake myself. He didn't crawl out."

 
          
 
"He did crawl out."

 
          
 
"Impossible," said St. Ives—and it
was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr.
Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives
knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to
fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the
comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting
from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the
divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out
of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore
Alice
's vegetable garden, but the effort had cost
him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn
this last into a metaphor of the great man's life over the last couple of
years, but I won't. I promised to leave tragedy alone.

 
          
 
"Look here," the woman said, handing
across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years,
in someone's pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and
torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and
the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the
point, as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to
Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most
disinterested way imaginable.

 
          
 
She handed over a second letter, this one
fresh from last week's post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been
dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside,
including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were
written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and
smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the
man who had written the first missive. It didn't take an expert to see that.
There was a flourish in the 7"s, and the uppercase A, of which there were
two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather
than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental
air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly
distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however,
was different. ''H. Frost," it read, with a scattering of initials
afterward that I don't recall.

 
          
 
The text of this second letter was interesting.
It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would
pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at
Edinburgh
University
, a chemist, and had heard rumors that
papers belonging to our madwoman's father were lost in the vicinity of the
North Downs
some forty years ago. He seemed to think
that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved
a certain notoriety that he'd never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so,
in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, "H.
Frost."

 
          
 
St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall
and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his
suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the
letters at all. "The doctor is dead, madam," was what he said
finally.

 
          
 
She shook her head. "Those letters were
written with the same hand; anyone can see that."

 
          
 
“In fact," said St. Ives, "the more
elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of
eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it's the subtleties that are
difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor's hand, I don't know.
It's an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn't concern me. My suggestion is
to ignore it utterly. Don't respond. Do nothing at all."

 
          
 
"He ought to be brought to justice is
what I'm saying."

 
          
 
"He's dead," said St. Ives finally.
And then, after a moment of silence, he said, "And if this mystery were
worth anything to me at all, then I'd have to know a great deal more about the
particulars, wouldn't I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you
have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were
lost in the
North
Downs
forty years
ago?"

 
          
 
Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a
good deal that she wasn't saying. Bringing people to justice wasn't her only
concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment,
pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her
mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing
anything at all. "My father's name was John Kenyon. He was . . . misguided
when he was young," she said. "And then he was misused when he was
older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he
developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I
misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with
transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding.
He went over to
Rome
..."

 
          
 
"Moved to the Continent?" asked St.
Ives.

 
          
 
"No, he became a papist. He repented of
all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a
nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn't have it. His
manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I'm certain he
didn't, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have
been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and
tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling
him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing what he intended to do.

 
          
 
"But my father was a weak man, a worm. He
saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to
London
and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I
remember, and
penitent,
and I married and moved away
within the year and didn't see him again until he was an old man and dying. My
mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself
that killed her—and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the
notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those
years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by
the
Royal
Academy
. A man named Piper, who had a chair at
Oxford
, wanted the formulae for himself, and had
got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But
there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my
father said, so that he might rest in peace.