Dodger (25 page)

Solomon loomed up then like a whale and patted his arm, saying, ‘Time to go, young man. There is such a thing as being
too
clean.’

No sooner had they got dried off and back in their cubicles than Solomon said, ‘We should sit here for a little while for a drink; it doesn’t do to go out immediately after a bracing massage, you could catch a fever. After that, my boy, I intend to introduce you to Savile Row, where all the top men go for their clothing. We haven’t got much time, but last night I sent a boy over to my friend Izzy, who will see you right. His place is no shonky shop, and I am certain that he will give a good deal to an old friend who incidentally carried him to safety when the Cossacks shot him.’ He added, ‘He had better. Running, I carried him for more than a mile before we lost them in the snow and none of the three of us had boots on, having been woken up at night. After that we went our separate ways, but I will always remember young Karl – I believe I have mentioned him to you
before
? – saying to me that all men are equal but they are downtrodden, though sometimes they do their own treading. Now I come think of it, he said a lot of other things too. Worst haircut I have ever seen on a young man, and wild eyes too – reminded me of a hungry wolf.’

Dodger wasn’t listening. ‘Savile Row is in the West End!’ he said, like a man talking about the ends of the earth. He went on, ‘Do I really need toffs’ clothing? Mister Disraeli and his friends, well, they know what I am, don’t they?’

‘Mmm, oh, and what are you mmm exactly, my friend? Their subordinate? Their employee? Or, I would suggest, their equal? That’s what young Karl would certainly have said, and probably still does. Unless he’s no longer alive.’ Dodger gave Solomon a strange look and Solomon hastened to clarify: ‘Mmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless – people being who they are – don’t want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.’

Intrigued, Dodger said, ‘Am I downtrodden?’

‘You? Not so you would notice, my boy, and neither do you tread on anybody else, which is a happy situation to be in, but if I was you I shouldn’t think too much more about politics, it can only make you ill. As a matter of fact I certainly believe that some, if not all, of the people that you will meet tonight will be considerably richer than you, but from what I have heard of the lady in whose house we will be dining, I have reason to assume that they will not think this means they are that much better than you. Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do,
and
what they leave behind.’ Solomon drained his coffee cup and said, ‘Since it’s a long way, and my feet hurt, we will take a growler, and behave like the gentlemen we are.’

‘But that’s a lot of money!’

‘So? I should walk all that way in this rain? What are you, Dodger? You are a king of infinite space – provided that said space is underground. You are a man who picks up money for a living, and because you have a wonderful eye for it I think it makes something of an everlasting child of you. Life is fun with no responsibilities, but now you are taking on responsibilities. You have money, Dodger, as that shiny new bank book proves. And you hope to have a young lady, mmm yes? This is good for a man because responsibilities are the anvil on which a man is forged.’

Just as soon as they were outside the baths Solomon had to rescue an elderly lady who had simply patted Onan. He helped her brush herself down, then, when both her dress and Sol’s handkerchief were cleaner, he hailed a growler, which stopped without the driver having meant to, his horse’s hooves leaving sparks on the cobbles.

Once they were safe on the cushions inside, with the London rain and all its stickiness falling outside the windows, Solomon sat back and said, ‘I have never really understood why these gentlemen seem so hostile to their clientele. You would have thought that driving a growler was a job for somebody who liked people, wouldn’t you?’

It was pouring down now and the sky was the colour of a bruised plum. It was not a good day to be a tosher, but the night might be, when with any luck Dodger could be back after dinner where he belonged, underground . . . With Solomon’s recent
lecture
in mind, he amended it in his thoughts to ‘the place where he sometimes chose to be’.

He felt he would need to be there because he was once again feeling not entirely sure about himself. He was still Dodger, of course, but what kind of Dodger? Because he was most definitely not the Dodger that he had been a week ago. And he thought, If people change like this, how can you be sure about what you get and what you lose? I mean, these days, well, getting into a growler . . . easily done, I’m the kind of lad who goes around in growlers, not the lad with the arse hanging out of his trousers who used to run up behind them and try to hold on. Now I actually pay; would I still recognize the boy?

It looked as if the weather was shaping up to be a storm akin to the one on the night when he had met Simplicity for the first time. In front of them, the coachman himself was out in all elements and weathers, which may have had something to do with the growling, and surely only the horse could be doing the navigating in this downpour. There was nothing in the world but rain, it seemed, and now, surely against all the rules of nature, some of it was even falling upwards, since there was no room anywhere else.

At this point Dodger heard, only very slightly, the sound he had for days been subconsciously listening for – it was the squeal of metal in pain. And it was ahead of them. He dived towards the little sliding plate that enabled the inmates of a growler to speak to the coachman, if ever he wanted to listen to them, and water splashed on his face as he yelled, ‘If you overtake the coach in front of us – that one with the squeaky wheel – I will give you a crown!’

There was no answer – and how could you hear one in these
crowded
streets of vapour and flying water? – but nevertheless the speed of the growler suddenly changed, just as a puzzled Solomon said, ‘I am not at all sure we have a spare crown on us!’

Dodger wasn’t listening; a growler had a lot of places where somebody with quick wits could grasp and pull their way to the roof of the thing, in this case much to the extreme annoyance of the driver, who swore like the devil and shouted out above the noise of the storm that he would be mogadored if a poxy upstart was going to climb all over his vehicle. Above the noise of the storm and the cursing, Dodger leaned down and said, ‘You must have heard of the man who brought down Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber? Well, cully, that was me, yes, Dodger. Now, you want to talk about it or shall I get angry?’ Dodger worked his way down so that he could hang on while talking to the man, and said, ‘The person who owns the coach ahead of us is wanted for attempted murder, assault and battery. Probably also kidnapping a young lady and responsible for the death of a baby!’

With water pouring off him in every direction, the captain of the growler growled, ‘The hell you say!’

‘The hell I do indeed, sir!’ said Dodger. ‘And if I find that person before the peelers do, it will be the worse for him, and incidentally of course there will be a reward in all of this for you.’

The coachman, trying to keep the horse under control with lightning flashing around them, gave Dodger a sideways look in which was mingled anger, intrigue and uncertain disbelief. ‘Oh, so he’s got more to fear from you than the peelers, does he? They have damn big sticks, as I very well know!’ He opened a mouth in which there appeared to be just one solitary tooth, adding, ‘We certainly know when they want to get their point across, those bastards.’ He spat, increasing the storm by the equivalent of about
three
raindrops, and gave Dodger a pitying look, then growled with another toothless grin, ‘Well, how will you be worse than the peelers, my little lad, do tell me?’

‘Me? Because the peelers have rules. I don’t firkytoodle around! And unlike the peelers, when it comes to bashing, I don’t have to stop!’

The growler, though,
had
come to a stop. A dead stop, and its driver cursed under his breath. ‘Piccadilly Circus, guv, all fouled up ’cos of the rain. To tell you the truth, I can’t tell which of these buggers is the one you’re after, chief, ’cos people are cutting in like Christmas dinner. I don’t know why they’re always messing about with the roads, but I reckon it’s the four-horsers that are causing this lot – they shouldn’t be allowed in the city! People are walking around in the road too like they own it, ain’t they got no sense?’

It was true; there were people dodging between stationary vehicles, and Piccadilly Circus was a pattern of umbrellas spinning through the growing host of rain-soaked vehicles, none of which could move until the others did. Now the horses were beginning to panic, and yet other coaches, cabs and one or two brewer’s drays were piling in. Then somewhere in the damp, jostling, frantic cauldron of frightened horses and bewildered pedestrians, someone must’ve stuck part of his umbrella up a horse’s nose, causing what previous centuries would have called a hey-ho-rumbelow, but what the growler captain called it could not be put on paper because it would have immediately caught fire.

After that, there was nothing else for it. As the growler coachman said, ‘If they want to get everybody out of there, they need to drag out one or two coaches and dismantle the whole damn mess.’ With that, the sun came out, bright and shining in the clear
blue
sky, which made it even worse, because every human or horse who wasn’t already steaming began to steam.

Even Dodger could see they had lost their quarry with very little chance of finding it now. No point. Solomon was looking at him from the vehicle’s window, holding up his huge pocket watch and pointedly showing him what the time was. Dodger groaned inwardly. If he gave in, then maybe, just maybe, when this seething fiasco was eventually unravelled – and hopefully before any more fights started – he might be in the right place to hear the dreadful screeching wheel scream again. If he couldn’t find out what he wanted from Mister Sharp Bob, of course. But right now it was Solomon who looked as if he was likely to be the one doing the screaming.

Dodger looked back at the coachman, shrugged, and said, ‘How much, mister?’

To Dodger’s surprise, the man gave him a sly grin, waved his hands in the air to demonstrate that the progress of horse-drawn transport in this vicinity was a bucket of sheep droppings, and then said, ‘You really the geezer who brought down Sweeney Todd? You look like a liar to me, but then so does everybody else. Ho-hum, never mind, just give me your signature on this little page I have here, making a suitable mention of the fact that it was indeed you what done it, and we’ll call it quits, how about that? ’Cos I think it’d be worth some money one day.’

Well, thought Dodger, this was Charlie’s fog again; if the truth wasn’t what you wanted it to be, you turned it into a different version of the truth. But the man was waiting patiently, with a pencil and a notebook. Taking them up and sweating, Dodger very carefully scribed, one letter at a time:
It woz me wot took dahn Sweeni Tod. Dodjer and that iz troo
.

As soon as he had handed it to the coachman, he was dragged to the kerb by Solomon, who was frantically trying to open an umbrella – a black and treacherous thing that reminded Dodger of a long-dead, but nevertheless large, bird of prey and could take your eye out, if you let it. Dodger pointed out that right now, at least, it wasn’t necessary – except, of course, for protection from the horses all around them, which were doing what horses regularly do and doing it slightly more because they were in a state of panic.

They headed on foot to Savile Row. The side streets were more busy with pedestrians than usual because of the tangle that they had thankfully left behind them. They arrived, wet and warm – which can sometimes, as in this case, be worse than wet and cold because it includes sticky and horsy – at the shining, polished door of Davies & Son, at 38 Savile Row, leaving Onan at a lamppost and on this occasion with a bone brought along for the purpose, in the company of which he was oblivious to the world.

Once inside, Dodger tried not to be awed at the world of schmutter. After all, he knew there were swells that had much finer clothes than he ever wore, but seeing such a lot of it in one place would have been overwhelming if he let it be so. As it was, he tried to look like somebody who barely glances at this sort of thing because he sees it every day – although aware that the cleaned-up but still quite
fragrant
shonky suit might be a clue that this was not entirely the case. But after all, a tailor is a tailor and all the rest of it is just shine.

Eventually, they were handed into the care of Izzy, small and skinny but nevertheless possessed of some inner nervous energy that would in other circumstances have turned a mill. He appeared like an arrow between Dodger and Solomon and the
front
-of-house man who opened the door for them, talking all the time so fast that the best you could do was understand that Izzy would take care of everything, had anything, and everything was in hand and if everybody left it to Izzy, everything would not just be all right but also extremely acceptable in every possible way, and at a price that would amaze and yet satisfy all parties – if, and this was important, Izzy was allowed to get on with the job, thank you all so very much. He fussed Solomon and Dodger into one of the fitting rooms, never at any time ceasing to worry, fret and apologize to nobody in particular about nothing very much.