The Tiger in the Well (40 page)

"Where— } How do you know— V^

"Winterhalter spotted some men hanging about outside. Jews. They were looking for the child, because it was missing, and when the police questioned them, they admitted it was Parrish who'd taken her."

"No!"

"True. She is in Parrish's hands, and very soon she will be in mine."

"I don't believe you—"

"Well, let me convince you. She had been held illegally in the household of a man called Katz. Do you believe me now.? You have got nothing left, Miss Lockhart. After all this time, I've won."

She sank to the floor. There was a roaring in her ears— but it wasn't in her ears; and her arms and legs were shaking—but, no, it wasn't she, it was the floor and the walls—

And then the wheelchair began to move, rolling slowly toward her, although Michelet was still lying on the floor.

Ah Ling's expression was wild with alarm. Sally, numb and astonished, scrambled out of the way just in time, as the heavy chair struck the wall and Ah Ling slumped forward.

"Michelet!" he cried as he fell.

But Michelet couldn't move. Couldn't even cry out; he was dumb with amazement, for the floor was not there under him anymore: he stood waist-deep in swirling water.

It had happened too quickly for him to do more than gasp. The bandage trailed over his shoulder; his wounded eye, bloody and inflamed, glared like that of a Cyclops as the shaking lamplight shone on him; and then he cried out in fear and lost his footing on whatever was below, and in an instant he was sucked under the water and away.

I

Sally hadn't moved. She couldn't. The floor was cracking and splintering; huge fragments of stone and concrete were falling into this swirling, surging torrent which had suddenly thrust itself into the room. She was lying against the wall next to the wheelchair, and her cloak was caught under its wheel, holding her down as she struggled to get up. The floor had tilted back at first, making the chair roll toward the wall and tipping her with it, but now as she tore loose the buttons at the neck of her cloak and struggled up free of it, something far below gave way, and the water responded with a surge. The floor tipped sickeningly forward—toward the hole where Michelet had disappeared.

And the wheelchair began to roll backward.

"The brake!" Ah Ling gasped. "The brake!"

Sally flung herself at the chair, trying to hold its weight back while she fumbled for the brake. It was so heavy . . . it rolled so smoothly; where was the handle, for God's sake.^* Here, under her hand—

She snapped it down and the chair stopped, inches from the edge.

Ah Ling was still slumped forward across his knees. Little by little she heaved him upright again. His face was dark with the effort to breathe, his eyes protruding, but as soon as he was upright he took a breath and looked around com-mandingly. Sally, breathless, leaned on the chair and looked as well.

The entire center of the room was gone. In its place was a pit with jagged edges, opening onto a dark, surging waste of water—the surface of a torrent that swirled from right to left, whirling, gushing, and splashing the whole room with mud and filth. It stank, and it gave off cold as a fire gives off heat.

As she clung to the chair and watched, another great chunk of masonry fell from the floor on the other side of the pit, and then another, and then there was no way across. The door to the stairs hung over nothing.

The walls were shuddering; the whole house must be

shaking. The oil lamp still burned in its bracket, where she'd placed it only minutes before, but it was shaking so much she feared it would go out altogether and leave them in the dark.

"Turn me around," said Ah Ling. "Release the brake a little at a time. Brace yourself first to take the weight."

The wooden floor was so slippery that it was hard for Sally to get a grip on it. But just within reach on the other side of the chair was the iron grille of the lift, and if she could reach it . . .

The lift! They could go up in that!

But even as she turned to measure the distance and work out how to get him there, a deep series of shocks, like subterranean bombs, shook the ground and the walls. Sally clung to the arm of the wheelchair for balance, and then found herself knocked off her feet and sent sprawling by a jet of water which hit her between the shoulder blades. She landed half on Ah Ling's lap and clutched his sleeve for safety. Something was drenching both of them—the spray filled the room—^and then as it cleared she saw that there was no safety at all, for the hydraulic pipes that powered the lift had sheared. Water was gushing out of them to add to the filthy torrent splashing from below. Already the level part of the floor was awash.

The lift shaft with its iron frame hung crazily above them, and the lift itself was immovably wedged under the twisted iron of the pipes; but it was hanging securely from the cable, and if she could haul him onto the floor ... It was level with his chest, though. How in the world was she ....'* Never mind. Get on and do it.

She scrambled up onto it herself, and then, sitting on the edge, reached forward and gripped the lapels of his coat. She heaved as hard as she could and lifted him perhaps an inch.

Her position was wrong; she had no leverage. She jumped out, dragged the chair closer, and lifted his arms over the edge of the chair (and they were each so heavy) so that she could put her arms around his chest from behind.

I

Her hands didn't meet. She tried to lift anyway, but the chair was in the way. She could hardly shift him at all.

"I'm going to have to pull you up with the rug," she said.

She dragged the sopping rug off his lap and fastened the right-hand end first to the stanchion at the corner to give herself more room to work with the other. Then she passed the rest of it under his arms, climbed up onto the floor of the lift, knelt at the edge, and pulled with all her might.

It worked. At first his body slumped forward against the edge of the floor, and she thought he'd slip down and into the water, but by hauling and shoving and bracing him while she rested to take a breath, she managed to get most of his upper body onto the floor, and then the rest was easier. Dripping, sodden, immense, like a huge, dead water slug, he lay at last on the edge of the lift floor, and Sally clung, exhausted, to the stanchion, waist-deep in water.

She hardly had the strength to pull herself up after him, but she managed to scramble up, and lay panting, frozen, trembling, on the floor beside him.

After a few seconds' rest she pushed herself up and made sure he could breathe, rolling him over onto his back and loosening the tie and shirt collar. He looked up at her. His expression was impossible to read; but so was hers.

"They must have heard upstairs," she whispered. She'd intended to speak normally, but there was no voice there.

"Look," he said.

His eyes indicated the staircase on the other side of the room. The door had vanished; the doorframe and a section of the wall had slid into the water, and the stairs themselves were visible. Lights were flickering down; shadows wavered; there were voices, shouts of alarm over the noise of the torrent.

But something deep had rotted, and the scouring of the Blackboume had weakened the very roots of the foundations; and the rescuers—Sally couldn't see, but she thought her footman Alfred was one, and the butler was another—

had no sooner reached the foot of the steps than the whole of that side of the cellar collapsed into the torrent with a rending, splitting roar. Lamps, doorway, stairs, arms, and heads—a confused and terrible slide, and they all vanished in the slimy, surging water . . .

And then the flickering lamp fell off its bracket as a great crack split the wall from side to side, and darkness fell over everything.

Bricks, beams, stones were falling all around; the frame of the lift shaft was groaning and buckling, and the lift itself shook as something huge and heavy crashed down onto its roof.

Sally clung to the stanchion and knelt by Ah Ling in the darkness.

Goldberg saw them before he reached the comer of Fashion Street: a little knot of men coming out of a court near St. Botolph's Church. There was no mistaking their manner, that look of furtive lust for blood which he'd seen in crowds in Russia and Germany, but never in London, never yet. They were carrying sticks. One of them was swinging a heavy belt.

They saw him and stopped. Even across the street and through the rain he could feel the pulse of their excitement.

"There's one! There's a Yid!" one of them yelled.

There were half a dozen of them, and for a moment Goldberg thought he'd have to take them on, stiff with pain as he was; but the leader growled something at the man who'd shouted, and with a final jeer they slouched off.

They were going in the same direction as he was, and moving quickly. Goldberg took a deep breath. His whole arm was throbbing abominably. Nothing to be done. Move.

He forced himself onward. Running, even if he hadn't already walked halfway across London, was out of the question. He wished he'd taken more of that damn whiskey.

Left into Commercial Street, right down North Street, left

up Brough Street. . . . Careful now. This led into Holywell Street. He went to the corner and looked around.

No, they weren't there yet. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it. Never mind who; they were all Jewish. Then to the next, and the next, and the next.

Windows flew up. Heads looked out—^angry, frightened, men's and women's, sleepy-eyed, ringleted, bald, bearded, young, old.

"Wake up!" Goldberg shouted to them all. He stood in the middle of the road as the sky lightened and the rain teemed down endlessly. He looked around at the faces in the windows and shouted again, "Wake up! Come and defend yourselves! Every man who can fight, come out now and help me! Wake up! Wake up!"

And peering through the rain in the thin dawn light, one after another of them recognized him.

"It's Goldberg—"

"It's Dan Goldberg! It's him—"

And again he shouted, so the whole street heard: "Wake up! Come and follow me! To Solomons's Bakery—come on!"

And he ran on, down Wilson's Place and Lower Heath Street and Keats Court and then through the little alley behind the Jews' Soup Kitchen at the end of Flower and Dean Street, and then to the houses by the synagogue in New Court; and very soon one man came out of his house, and then two more, armed with sticks, thrusting their arms into their coats, shivering as the chilly rain hit their sleep-warmed faces; and then there were a dozen, and then a dozen more, and then someone cried, "Look! There they are—by the bakery—"

And sure enough, there was a mob of men surging up from Brick Lane, shouting, yelling . . .

And then the first stone crashed through the air, and the first window shattered.

The lift shook; the cable groaned. Only the roof of the lift saved them from the weight of masonry which had fallen

down the shaft—and only the cable stopped the lift itself from plunging into the water.

There was nothing she could do. He lay on his back beside her, and the water was already lapping at the edge of the floor.

The Tiger in the Well

The air was thick with moisture: silver gray, fog yellow, ash white. Somewhere high above and inconceivably far away, over Venice, perhaps, or Mont Blanc, the sun was shining. Some of the sun's brightness filtered down through layer after layer of smoke and steam and dust and swagging, heavy mist, looped and festooned like curtains, through the trailing clouds that dragged their swollen bellies over rooftops and chimneys, in among the sodden bricks, the glistening tiles, the dripping eaves, the cluttered gutters.

After the long night, you could see from one end of Holywell Street to the other.

Behind Goldberg stood eighteen men and boys. They were small traders, craftsmen, scholars, one or two of them; the oldest was sixty-six, the youngest thirteen. Some of them had seen violence before. One walked with a limp from when a Cossack's horse had crushed his leg; another had a scar under his skullcap from a saber cut. The boys were used to scrapping in the street or the dingy schoolyard, but this was different; this was worse. There was poison in the air. The most nervous of them all was the one who had least need to be. He worked as a professional strong man, lifting dumbbells in a music hall, clad in a leopard skin, but he was the mildest of souls, and he'd never had a fight in his life. One of the scholars, a round-shouldered middle-aged man, could hardly see a thing, for he'd come out without his spectacles. He gripped his stick tight in his shaking hands and whis-

pered to his neighbor, "Point me in the right direction, Mr. Mandelbaum. Tell me when to strike. . . ."

Goldberg looked back at them. They were a feeble, timorous, uncertain bunch, but he was proud of them. Then he looked along the street at the enemy.

Forty.'' Fifty of them.'' Couldn't be sure. Big men with hard fists and muscles; tough, lean boys like the Lambeth gang, with hard, narrow faces, and here and there the glint of brass at their knuckles.

They were still, watching. The sound of the brick shattering a window a second or so before still hung in the air like a false note, an embarrassment. The stillness was entirely due, Goldberg realized, to the sudden appearance of his ragged, sleepy army. It was so unexpected that the mob had been shocked out of itself, and just for a second or so they weren't a crowd; they were individuals. He could see their faces.

So he had just a moment to act, before that craziness flowed back and made them into a hundred-handed, howling monster without a soul.

"Stay here," he said to his men, and then he walked along Holywell Street toward the mob, in the narrow, brick red canyon between the houses.

A crepitation of astonishment whispered through the gang by the bakery. One or two of them took a step forward, but they were human still, not yet monstrous, and to be human is to be curious: they only wanted to see better.

And Goldberg felt a moment of pure, clearheaded elation. It was a kind of religious glee: holy mischief. He was weak with loss of blood, he was exhausted, his arm throbbed with an abominable pain, and there was a crowd in front of him that the slightest miscalculation would send mad. He thought, h there anywhere else Vd rather beP Anything else Vd rather be doing now than this?