Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (22 page)

 
          
 
I went to town on the bedstead—a loose-jointed
wooden affair that wanted glue. Yanking the headboard loose from the side
rails, I listened with satisfaction as the mattress and rails bumped to the
floor, loud enough to alert anyone below that the visiting lunatic was doing
his work. Then I leaned on one of the posts of the headboard itself, smashing
the headboard sideways,
the
posts straining to tear
away from the cross-members. Dowels snapped, wood groaned, and after a little
bit of playing ram-it-against-the-floorboards, the whole thing went to smash,
leaving the turned post free in my hands. I hefted it; I would have liked it
shorter, but it would do the trick.

 
          
 
The doorknob rattled just then. They were
back, and quick, too. Either that or else maybe the landlady, noticing that the
lunatic had been doing his job too well, had come round to investigate. I slid
across to stand by the door, thinking that I wouldn't smash the landlady with my
club, but would simply push past her instead, and away down the stairs.
If it was a man, though . . .

 
          
 
Whoever it was was having a terrible time with
the lock. It seemed like an eternity of metallic clicking before the door swung
to. I
tensed,
the club over my shoulder. A man's face
poked in from the dark hallway, the rest of the head following. I closed my
eyes, stepped away from the wall, and pounded him one, slamming the club down
against the back of his head, and knowing straight out that it wasn't Willis
Pule at all, but someone perhaps even more deadly: it was Higgins, the academician-gone-to-seed,
still gripping a skeleton key in his right hand.

 
          
 
The blow left him half senseless, knocking him
onto his face on the floor. He lay writhing. I stepped across, thinking to give
him another one, a sort of cricket swing to the cranium, but he was already
down and I couldn't bring myself to do it—something I'm happy about today, but
which took all my civilized instincts at the time.

 
          
 
The door lay open before me, and I was out of
it quick, bolting for the stairs, throwing the post onto the floor of the
hallway, and wondering about Higgins sneaking around like that. He wasn't
expected; that was certain. He had seen them both go out, perhaps, and had
crept in, no doubt searching for the very notebooks that they were off
ransacking my room for. They weren't in league, then, but were probably deadly
enemies. The Pules would take good care of him if they found him on the floor
of their room.

 
          
 
I peered cautiously down the dark and empty
stairwell, and then leaped down the stairs three at a time toward the
second-floor landing, thinking to charge into the foyer at a run, knocking down
anyone between me and the door and maybe shouting something clever at the
landlady to regain some lost dignity. I fairly spun around the baluster and
onto the bottom flight of stairs, straight into the faces
of
the two Pules, who puffed along like engines, coming up,
she holding the
revolver under her shawl and he going along before, both of them with a deadly
resolve.

 
          
 
"Here now!" piped the son, clutching
my arm in the devil's own grip.

 
          
 
"Hold him!" she cried. ''We'll make
him sing!
Up the stairs.
Bucko!"

 
          
 
I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could,
my momentum lending it some mustard. He howled and slammed backward against the
railing, nearly knocking his mother down. He didn't let go of my arm, though,
but pulled me over with him, both of us flailing and rolling and me jerking
free and scrabbling back up toward the landing like an anxious crab, expecting
to be shot. I was on my feet and jumping up the stairs three at a time toward
the third floor, listening to the curses and slaps and yips behind me as Mrs.
Pule rallied her son.

 
          
 
There was no shot, despite the way being clear
for it and the range close, but I clucked and danced down the third-floor hall
anyway, trying to convince myself that she was loathe to fire the gun in public
and bring about the collapse of her plans. I should have thought of that an
hour ago, when she collared me at the window, but I didn't, and wasn't
convinced of it now.

 
          
 
I blasted past the room again, its door still
open and Hig-gins on his hands and knees on the floor, ruminating. The sight of
him brought the Pules up short as they
came
racing
along behind me, and for the moment they let me go in order to attend to him. I
headed straight toward a French window, grappled with the latch, pulled it
open, and looked out, not onto three stories of empty air, thank heaven, but
onto a little dormer balcony. There was a hooting from the open door of the
room, and a grunt, and then an outright shriek, as the Pules visited the sins
of Jack Owlesby onto the head of poor Higgins.

 
          
 
I closed the window behind me, although I
couldn't latch it. In a moment they'd be through it and upon me. Without a bit
of hesitation I hoisted myself over the railing, swinging myself down and in,
landing on my feet on an identical balcony below and immediately crumpling up,
my ankles ringing with the impact. I was up again, though, climbing across this
railing too, and clutching two handfuls of ivy tendrils with the nitwit idea of
clambering down through it to safety like an ape in a rain forest. I scrabbled
in the vines with my feet as the ivy tore loose in a rush, and I slid along
through it shouting, landing in a viney heap in a flower bed.

 
          
 
The window banged open upstairs, and I was on
my feet and running, trailing vines, wincing at the pain in my ankles, but
damned if I'd let any of it slow me down. I expected a shot, but none came—just
a litany of curses cried into the night and then cut off abruptly when a voice
from a window in a nearby house shouted, "Wot the hell!" and the
strollers down along the street to the pier began to point. Mrs. Pule,
blessedly, wasn't keen on calling attention to
herself
just then.

 
          
 
I ran straight toward the gap between the two
houses that would lead me to the seawall, not slowing down until I was there,
clambering over the now-damp stone and jumping to the shingle below, where I
found myself slogging through ankle-deep water, the tide having come up to lap
against the wall. I nearly slipped on the slick stones, and forced myself to
slow down. There was no sound of pursuit, nothing at all, and the wild sense of
abandon that had fueled my acrobatic leap from the top balcony drained away,
leaving me cold and shaking, my shoes filled with seawater.

 
          
 
I climbed back over the wall and tramped along
to the Crown and Apple, up the backstairs to find the door unlocked. I slipped
into my room, dead tired and even more deadly thirsty. In fifteen minutes I
strolled into the dining room in dry shoes, feeling tolerably proud of myself,
and there sat St. Ives and Hasbro, stabbing at cudets and vs-ith a bottle of
Burgundy
uncorked on the table. It did my heart
good, as they say.

 
          
 
"Not with a revolver, she didn't,'' said
St. Ives
. "
You were too far away for anyone to
have brought off" so close a shot. My guess is that it was a Winchester,
and that it was your man Bowker who fired it. Clearly they and the Pules are
working at cross-purposes, although both of them chase the same ends—which have
little to do, I'm convinced, with drawing ships to their doom. That's a
peripheral business—quick cash to finance more elaborate operations."

 
          
 
St. Ives emptied the borde into Hasbro's glass
and waved at the waiter, ordering a second bottle of wine and another pint for
me. I'm a beer man generally; red wine rips me up in the night. St. Ives
studied his plate for a moment and then said. “It's very largely a distraction,
too, the ship business, and a good one. Godall seems to think that the Crown is
on the verge of paying them what they ask.
in
return
for their solemn assurance that they'll abandon the machine where she lies.
Imagine that. Those were Parsons
s
words.
'Their solemn assurance."
The man's gone round the
bend.
Now that we've found the machine, though.
they'll
wait on the ransom. We've accomplished that much.
The Academy has the area cordoned off with ships and are going to try to haul
it up out of there.'

 
          
 
St. Ives drained his glass, then scowled into
the lees, swirling them in the bottom. "If I had half a chance . .
.," he said, not bothering to finish the sentence. I thought I knew what
he meant, though; he had harbored a grim distrust of the machine ever since
Lord Kelvin had set out to reverse the polarity of the earth with it. What were
they keeping it for, if not to
effect
some other grand
and improbable disaster in the name of science? I half believed St. Ives knew
what it was, too—that there was far more to the machine than he was letting on
and that only the principal players in the game fully understood. I was a pawn,
of course, and resolved to keeping to my station. I'm certain, though, that St.
Ives had contemplated on more than one occasion going into that machine works
up in Holborn and taking it out of there himself. But he hadn't, and
look
what had come of his hesitating. That's the way he saw
it—managing to blame himself from a fresh angle.

 
          
 
I tried to steer the subject away from the
business of the machine. "So what do they want?" I asked.

 
          
 
"The notebooks, for the
moment.
The damnable notebooks.
They think that
they're an ace away from immortality. Narbondo very nearly had it ten years
ago, back when he was stealing carp out of the aquarium and working with Willis
Pule. He was close—
close
enough so that in Norway
Higgins could revive him with the elixir and the apparatus. For my money
Narbondo was pumped up with carp elixir when he went into the pond; that's what
kept him alive, kept his entire cellular structure from crystallizing.
Higgins's idea, as I see it, is that he would revive the doctor, and the two of
them would search out the notebooks and then hammer out the fine points;
together they would bottle the Fountain of Youth. How much they know about the
machine I can't say.

 
          
 
"Higgins had been tracking them—the
notebooks—and he wrote to Mrs. Pule, who he suspected might know something of
their whereabouts, but his writing to her just set her off. She came around to
Godall's very cleverly, knowing that to reveal to us that the notebooks existed
and that Narbondo was alive would put us on the trail. She and the son merely
followed us down from
London
."

 
          
 
It made sense to me. Leave it to St. Ives to
put the pieces in order. "Why," I asked, "are they so keen on
killing me, that's what I want to know. I'm the lowly worm in the whole
business."

 
          
 
"You were available," said St. Ives.
"And you were persistent, snooping around their hotel like that. These are
remarkably bloodthirsty criminals. And the Pules, I'm afraid, are amateurs
alongside the doctor. Higgins didn't have any idea on earth what it was he was reviving,
not an inkling."

 
          
 
St. Ives pushed his plate away and ordered a
bit of custard. It was getting along toward
ten o'clock
, and the evening had wound itself down. The
beer was having its way with me, and I yawned and said that I would turn in,
and St. Ives nodded thoughtfully and said that he'd just stroll along over to
the icehouse in a bit and see what was up. I slumped. I wasn't built for it,
not right then, and yet it was me who had found out about the business up in
Norway
. I was pretty sure that I understood the
icehouse, and it didn't seem fair that I be left out. "It's early for
that, isn't it?" I asked.

 
          
 
St. Ives shrugged.
"Perhaps."

 
          
 
"I suggest a nap.
Just
a couple of hours to rest up.
Let's tackle them in the middle of the
night, while they sleep."