Whitechapel Gods (3 page)

“She may have ducked off too early,” Oliver thought aloud. “Do you see a way around to the next alley?”

“Didn’t notice one,” said Tommy. “Unless you’re game to see where this door goes.”

Oliver retreated from the street into the alley’s darkness. He found Tommy leaning easily on the door frame, arms crossed. The man’s shoulders stuck out like knife-points under his coat. His iron hand glinted in the half-light as he tapped his fingers on the door.

Oliver looked past him. The alley ended at the rear wall of another apartment, which provided no entrance but a blackened window. The manhole they’d come up through led to such a maze that he balked at the time required to navigate it, especially if Missy was in trouble.

“Can you do it
quietly
?” Oliver asked.

Tommy grinned toothily and put a finger to his lips. Oliver gave him a nod.

The big man placed his iron hand flat against the door at the approximate height where a locking bolt would sit, then leaned in with his shoulder and hip. One sharp push later, the bolt clattered to the floor on the inside and the door swung open on squealing hinges.

Oliver grimaced. Tommy just shrugged.

From the slip of light bleeding into the room, Oliver surmised it to be a storage room or pantry, of sufficient size to service the whole building. He set a cautious foot upon the floor within and tested it with increasing weight. The boards did not squeak. He entered and pattered swiftly across. Tommy followed, placing each step with great deliberation to avoid clanking, with moderate success.

Oliver felt his way to a door, then scuffed his foot to guide Tommy over to him. In absolute silence Oliver tried the latch, only to find it locked.

In the dark, no less.
He knelt, drew a set of lock picks from his vest pocket and set to work.
Probably did duck for a peck, damnable woman.

In thirty heartbeats the lock ticked. Oliver replaced his lock picks and tried the latch. This time it opened smoothly.

Oliver pulled the door open an inch and peeked through. Beyond stood a spiral staircase with a thick oak banister that circled up to the higher floors. A candle flashed upon the stairs: a watchman.

Oliver slid back from the door. He heard the watchman take a few hesitant steps down to the main floor.

Oliver shrank back against a shelf, wrapping himself in shadow and the scent of cabbage. A few more steps sounded from beyond. Oliver heard the door handle jiggle.

The door shrieked again as it swung open. A candle poked into the room, followed by an extended hand holding a billy. Oliver realised with horror that he could clearly see the shine of his own boots in the candlelight.

A pointy nose appeared, followed by a set of shrewd eyes flicking their gaze about the edges of the candlelight. Oliver balled his fists and tensed for a quick leap.

The eyes turned his way. Just as they began to widen, and the billy to rise, a monstrous shadow a full head taller than the watchman materialised behind him.

Tommy popped the man sharply across the back of his head. Oliver darted forth and caught the man as he collapsed. Burning wax splattered across his hand as he wrested the candle away. The billy clattered to the floor.

They set him down comfortably, then wasted no time crossing into the hall beyond. They found a series of dormant pumps and machines in the room across the hall. Oliver led Tommy through to a door on the far wall. The bolt slid clear easily and the door opened in silence.

They found themselves on a narrow side street devoid of residents and streetlights. Directly across, a lamplight flickered in the window of a countinghouse. Through the diagonal crosshatch of the glass, Oliver could see a familiar statuesque figure.

He dashed across the street and silently pulled the door open. He stepped through and Missy nearly put a knife through his eye.

Oliver clamped his fingers on Missy’s wrist before she could finish her thrust. “For Jesus’ sake! Michelle, it’s us!”

She wrenched her hand away. “Well, had you announced yourselves like gentlemen, I might have been more accommodating, but that is a fair amount to expect from you.”

Tommy followed through the doorway, chuckling. “No claim to be gentlemen, miss.”

Missy’s petite upturned nose wrinkled. “You did at one time claim to be part of a
team,
did you not?” She shook the knife at them. “Was it your intention to leave me to my frail, feminine self or were you simply dawdling?”

“We were in the
next
alley, Michelle,” Oliver said, hands still raised in defence, “where you were
supposed
to bring in the fox.”

She folded up the knife and shoved it into her handbag. “And I suppose it would have been far too much trouble to cover two alleys.”

“There should have been no need,” Oliver said. He noted ominous blots of colour around Missy’s fingernails. “Are you all right?”

Missy wiped her hands off on her skirt, leaving dark smears behind. “All right? There’s a plumb joke.”

Oliver’s chest tightened as he spotted a clock hanging on the wall behind her.

“
You
wanted his documents,” Missy continued, “and he was lecherous enough to divulge their location. Do not begrudge a girl a little initiative.”

Oliver saw something dark pass over Missy’s eyes, saw her jaw tighten. Tommy let out a low, buzzing whistle that knotted up Oliver’s insides.

Dare I?
“What is it, Tom?”

“A stinking pile of shit trouble, Chief.”

With clenched teeth, Oliver turned his head. The little office held two desks of black mahogany and a tidy bookshelf of ledgers and records below the wall clock. Their target lay sprawled in a sea of scattered papers against the far wall. Dark stains peppered his coat across the chest and stomach, and he was perfectly still.

Oliver shut his eyes and rubbed them, trying to erase what he’d just seen.

“Thoroughly done” was Tommy’s comment. Oliver opened his eyes again to see Missy fold her arms tight against her abdomen and stick her nose in the air.

“He overstepped the bounds of propriety,” she said.

Oliver stood aghast, looking back and forth between Missy and the dead man. Missy stared coolly at the corpse, eyes sunken and dark.

Oliver shook his finger at her. “I’ve gone five years without
this,
Michelle. This was all you could think to—” He stopped himself, swallowing his reprimand for a more appropriate time.

“We’ll have words,” he warned.

Missy scowled at him. “I hardly think words are our most pressing concern, Mr. Sumner.”

“Right.” Oliver snatched the dead man’s hat and hung it over the face of the wall clock. If Grandfather Clock had been looking through it, his gold cloaks would already be on the way. He shared an earnest look with Tom, then spoke to Missy.

“Where are his documents?”

Missy gestured stiffly at a small steel safe in the corner.

“Tom.”

The big man raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Oliver pointed to the safe. “We can’t make less of a spectacle than we have, I think.”

Tom shrugged, then bent down and hammered the safe door in with a quick blow of his iron knuckles. He pried it out and tossed it on a desk.

Oliver reached in and retrieved a sheaf of papers bound with string. He flipped through it.

“This is it,” he said. “Back we go.”

They slipped across the street and back through the machine room in the apartment, Oliver in the lead and Tommy in the rear. The hall and stair beyond were vacant. Oliver led the way across, feeling ahead of him in what was almost complete darkness. Through vague touches, the pantry door revealed itself. Oliver grasped the handle and lifted the door slightly before opening it, which served to dull the noise to a whimper. He waved the others forward and entered the room.

He saw a flash of movement in the shadows and ducked low. Boxes and tins from the shelf behind rained down on him as the watchman’s next blow swept high. A warm body came in close against him, and he tilted his shoulder and ploughed into it. He caught his foot on a tin and stumbled, but not before propelling his assailant away. He lost track of the other man in the crash of more falling tins.

Oliver scrambled back to his feet and tried to raise his hand in front of his face. Something moved in front of him, hidden by the darkness. He heard a few clanks, then a few wet crunches.

Tommy’s voice drifted out of the dark. “Let’s get on.”

Suddenly thankful for the dark, Oliver led the way to the door and out into the alley. Missy was next out the door, stepping down from the stoop, the picture of poise and ladyship. Tommy shambled after, wiping his iron hand with a white handkerchief. Oliver picked up a pry bar from where he’d hidden it and levered the sewer hole open. Instead of escaping, Missy produced a cloth sack from beneath her skirt and handed it to Tommy, who accepted it without comment.

Oliver stepped onto the first rung of the ladder within the manhole. The stench of sewage and grease floated up to greet him.

Missy peeled off her tweed short coat and stuffed it in the bag.

Oliver waited a moment to be acknowledged, but Missy remained oblivious. She added her hat to the bag, then began on her skirt.

“Surely you can do that once we get to safety.”

“I will not,” said Missy, jaw and neck tight as cords, “allow my good clothing to traverse your vile sewer exit unprotected.”

“Aldgate has
telephones
,” Oliver stressed. “If anyone in the building heard us, they’ll be bringing the cloaks right down on us.”

Missy made no reply. She stepped out of the grey tweed skirt and added it to the sack. Beneath she wore a smaller skirt of worn and stained wool, a match in quality to the poorer attire Oliver and Tommy wore.

“Be a dear and carry that for me, would you?” she asked. Tommy shrugged and nodded.

Still not gracing Oliver with a look, Missy proceeded to the manhole, shouldered him aside, and swiftly lowered herself in.

Tommy stepped up. “You’re in for it now, mate,” he said, shooting Oliver a wink. He tucked the bag under his arm and slipped down into the underground.

“You’ve no idea.”

These papers are probably the only thing that will keep Bailey from shooting me.

Instead of capturing their fox, they’d left him stiff and cold, and been spotted on top of it. Oliver had not presided over so botched an operation since the Uprising. He clutched the papers tight in his hands and forced that particular set of memories into the dark.

He placed his feet on the ladder and started his descent. As he pulled the manhole cover back into place, he heard the clear report of approaching feet running in perfect time.

He dropped the cover down, and his world became dark and silence and stink.

The whole of Her garden will grow from a single iron nail, which I will plant between the cobbles in a back alley of Pelham Street. There, a man lies dying of consumption. His will be but the first of the souls She will need, for Her fires grow hungrier by the day. To make great things, much heat is needed; and for much heat, much coal.

—II. ix

The prisoner struggled. Bergen yanked on the chains and the man toppled to his face.

“That was unpleasant,” Bergen said. “Do not make me do it again.”

Muffled curses escaped from the canvas bag covering the prisoner’s head. Bergen delivered a kick to the man’s ribs. The prisoner groaned and rolled onto his side.

“Behave yourself,” Bergen said. “Now, on your feet.”

The prisoner fought to get onto his knees and wobbled to his feet. The man’s arms had been tied together behind his back with piano wire, which had sliced his skin in a few places. Five chains led up under the canvas hood, attaching in some unseen way to the prisoner’s head. Bergen gave them a light tug.

“Walk.”

The prisoner obeyed.

Bergen led the man through corridors of warped wooden floorboards and ragged plaster walls. At uneven intervals, oil lamps hung from hooks in the ceiling, yellowing everything with their sickly light. They passed through dozens of intersections of identical corridors and through several wooden doors, some hanging off their hinges and splattered with castoff plaster.

Bergen frowned at the sloppy workmanship.
Probably done by some urchins, hired for a pittance and then cast off the tower to die in the streets.

Only by long habit did he know which corridors to follow and which doors to open. A wrong turn would place him in the path of a trip wire–triggered rifle or a door that opened onto a wall of protruding poisoned needles. It was a place to rattle a dead man’s bones.

Was it duty that kept him coming back to this tomb? Or was he so callous now that he could no longer find fault with its madness?

He found the door he sought. Rather than reaching for the knob, he probed the topmost hinge with a single finger until he found the trigger buried in the oak door frame. With a click, the latch sounded, and the door swung open from the hinged side. A complex series of pulleys and gears, all fabricated of wood, slid the door aside just enough for a man to step through.

The room beyond was as black as night, lit only by a few candles in the far corner. A quaking voice floated out. “Tick, tick, tick, tick…”

“I know you heard me,” Bergen said. “I have the thief.”

“Ah, by all means, bring him in.”

Bergen roughly shoved the prisoner ahead. Bergen stepped in after him, turning to the corner farthest from the candles.

“Bringing your barking iron in here?” said the voice.

Bergen laid a casual hand on the heavy Gasser revolver hanging at his hip. “This is my fist and my voice,” he said. “Would I ask you to set aside such things?”

The corner cackled like a nervous schoolboy.

“Cautious. Heh. A good sign, that. Take note, my little grubbers. Take note.”

The corner shuffled, and John Scared slunk silently into the candles’ light. The sixteen-year-old mute that John called “Pennyedge” emerged as well, stepping into the light from a different corner. The boy stood loose, long-limbed, and long-fingered, waiting as always to execute Scared’s merest whim.

In his customary black long coat and top hat of beaver fur, John Scared seemed little more than a pock-scarred face and two knobbly hands. Grinning toothily, John grasped the small table that held the candles and moved it closer to the room’s centre.

John beckoned into the dark. “Come out, come out, my grubbers. Don’t you want to see your uncle at work?”

Two wide-eyed, emaciated children shuffled out of the dark, dressed in naught but rags and grime. Their eyes flittered fearfully over Bergen’s person, and they shuffled away towards Pennyedge, giving the groaning prisoner a wide berth. They settled themselves behind Penny’s legs, peering around. The mute kept his arms crossed, the fingers of his right hand fiddling with his sleeve. His eyes never left Bergen’s.

Do you think I cannot see that knife, boy? Do you think you can get to me before I can draw?
Bergen deliberately broke eye contact.

“Let’s get him comfortable,” John prompted.

Bergen hauled the prisoner to his feet by the collar of his vest and shoved him roughly into the oak chair.

“Tell me,” said John, placing the table to the right of the chair. The candlelight lit his chalky skin in dancing colours. “He was one of three?”

“One of them fell from the tower. The other was taken by the Boiler Men. Hobbyhorse found this one wandering lost in the bottom of Aldgate. He is one of them; I am certain.”

John’s eyebrows squirmed. “The Boiler Men? Tick, tick. Foul news. He’ll have to be retrieved.” He locked iron rings around the prisoner’s legs and another around his neck. “I’ll get Boxer to handle it. Close the door, if you would.”

Bergen reached back and tugged a small cord that hung from the door’s pulley system. A catch released and the door slid back into place with a quiet sound. Pennyedge’s unfaltering stare began to grate on his nerves. It was a constant reminder that he was an outsider, an employee, rather than a member of the family. If any of John’s wretches could shoot half as well as he could, Pennyedge would have slit his throat long ago.

The room seemed to grow hotter the instant the door closed. There was a smell as well, an organic rot that Bergen was wary of trying to identify.

John loosened the drawstring of the bag covering the prisoner’s head. He gestured to the two small children, flashing his yellowed and blackened teeth. “Step up, little pups. Don’t be afraid.”

They cautiously moved around to stand in front of Pennyedge, but went no closer.

Satisfied, John turned back and with a grand flourish whipped the bag off the prisoner’s head.

“Gott in Himmel!”
Bergen swore. The two children screamed and fled back into the darkened corner. Pennyedge did not react.

“My hunchback is quite a craftsman, isn’t he?” John said. He reached up with his gnarled hands and caressed the iron bands that encircled the prisoner’s head, held there by thick nails punched into his skull. The chains dangled from rivets in his jaw and cheeks.

“Not even much blood, considering,” John said. “Marvelous work. Don’t you think so, grubbers?”

The two children gasped unseen in the corner. Pennyedge simply nodded and returned his gaze to Bergen.

“How dare you do this to children?” Bergen growled.

John’s eyes twinkled. “You’d prefer I left them to starve or be hauled off by the Chimney gangs, then? Besides, I’ve done much, much worse. And so have you, I might add.”

Bergen’s hand twitched towards his gun. Duty was all that kept him from putting a bullet through the man’s forehead.

He spat on the floorboards. “I do only what is necessary, Scared. You are an abomination.”

“Quite. And I wouldn’t trust your sanity,
mein freund
, if you held any other opinion.” John reached up and unscrewed the lock holding the man’s jaw shut tight. “Now let’s hear what this one has to say, eh?”

The man spat up blood and bile as soon as he could open his mouth. He said nothing. John examined him for some long moments, looking for a weakness.

Bergen had seen this before. John was exceptional at reading a man’s faults. Bergen, on the other hand, was exceptional at hiding such faults. Perhaps that was why John hadn’t killed him yet—he hadn’t
solved
him as he might a chess problem or a mathematical equation.

John leaned back on his heels. “Penny, my boy, cut a piece of the fellow’s ear off, would you? The gauze is under the chair.”

Bergen crossed his arms. “Must I witness this?”

John perked up. “The great hunter squeamish? The German Terror of Africa unmanned?”

“I was not the one burgled today,” Bergen said levelly.

John’s eyes narrowed. “Shrewd. Heh. I like that too.”

Pennyedge had retrieved the roll of gauze. He tore off a small slip of it, then held the prisoner’s head still with one hand and drew his knife with the other. John shuffled over to Bergen. Bergen’s nose wrinkled at the onion stench of the man.

“Our little secret is in the hands of the man who fell,” John said.

“Or in the hands of the Boiler Men.”

John shook a finger. “No, no. If that was the case, we’d already be dead, don’t you think?”

“It is your secret, Scared.”

“Ah, but I would, of course, with much hesitation and under great duress, tell them it was your idea.”

Bergen shrugged. The prisoner screamed through clenched teeth as Penny did his work.

“So it needs to be retrieved.”

“Smart. Heh.”

Bergen rubbed his fingers through his chin stubble and tried to ignore the prisoner’s moaning. “I want Mulls and Hobbyhorse.”

“Mulls is a brute. He’s yours.” John turned briefly and assessed the prisoner. The man’s face was awash with blood and sweat, eyes clenched and teeth locked together. Pennyedge stood behind the man, pressing the bloodstained gauze against the man’s ear.

“Another bit, if you would, my boy,” John said. “He’s not quite ready.”

He turned back to Bergen as Penny bent to his task. John waved one yellow-nailed finger in Bergen’s face. “Hobby will go with Boxer. You get Penny.”

Bergen glanced over at the boy’s face. It hung slack and expressionless even as he sawed away with his knife. Bergen was about to protest that the boy was too young, but thought better of it.
He may have already killed more men than I have.

“I cannot use him,” Bergen said. “He cannot be made a scout on account of his silence, and he’s not nearly a good enough shot.”

John knitted his fingers together. “You’ll find his talents more than make up for his little deficiency, I think.”

John’s smile grew wider and wider.

Bergen nodded slowly, realising.
Penny is along to murder me if I try to go to the baron.

John smiled, his message understood. “Lots of beasties to hunt in the downstreets, too. Like your old grounds, eh?”

“Africa is a land of beauty,” Bergen said. “Your Whitechapel is a
Hö

¨ lle auf Welt
.”

“It’s not
my
Whitechapel,” John said, then added with a twinkle, “Yet.”

It’s the queen’s Whitechapel, you traitor.
Bergen buried the thought, hoping John hadn’t read it on his face.

He indicated Penny, who stood impassive, holding fresh gauze over the ruins of the prisoner’s ear. “The child will need arms. Have him meet me in the warehouse when you are done with him.”

“It won’t be long” was the reply. John returned his attention to the two children still huddled down in the shadows of a far corner.

“Come forth, come forth, my beautiful, innocent little sons,” he said, beckoning with his skeletal hands. “This will be your trade someday. Best learn.”

Bergen’s stomach turned. He yanked the cord that rolled the door to the side and strode out.

Bergen walked into the workshop to find Mulls shouting and bashing his fist on a table.

“What do you mean it’s not done, you rotter?”

The shop master, Ferdinand von Herder, leaned comfortably back on his stool and sighed deeply, as one might when dealing with an unruly child.

“Good sir,” he began, his voice ancient and tired, “the weapon is not ready. Nor will it become ready until our mutual patron furnishes me with more nickel and copper.”

“Is there a problem?” Bergen asked.

Mulls whirled about, coming up straight when he saw who had just spoken. He was one of Scared’s children, raised in the filth of the streets and badly ravaged by the clacks, but loyal and capable, if not amiable. His already primitive features had become a mess of stray wires and misshapen bits of iron, and his thick limbs bulged in some places into unnatural angles.

Von Herder cocked his ear and turned his sightless eyes in the direction of the door.

“Herr Keuper, is it? Welcome. Mr. Mulligan seems to think he should be the bearer of our only functional steam rifle.”

“Wouldn’t be a problem if he’d bloody made two of them like he s’posed to,” Mulls complained.

“You will carry a flasher,” Bergen ordered. “And an air rifle loaded with steel rounds.”

“Fine.” Mulls snatched an air rifle and a belt of ammunition from the weapon racks lining the wall and headed for the stairs leading back to the maze. He mumbled under his breath, as if the others couldn’t hear him, “Stupid hun, hogging all the good stuff to yourself.”

Bergen and von Herder waited for his muttering to fade with distance. Two teenage assistants in the back of the room disturbed the silence, having hardly slowed their pace at all during the argument. When von Herder spoke, he did so in German.

“Unpleasant men are not hard to find in this country, don’t you think, Herr Keuper?”

Bergen shrugged, though he knew von Herder couldn’t see it. “Herr Scared attracts only the worst. The
Englisch
are mostly a jovial people.”

The old mechanic blinked his milk-white eyes and scuffed his fist over the scraggly whiskers on his cheeks. “Strange for you to be praising the
Englisch,
I think. Your partnership with Nicholas Ellingsly was legend in the penny magazines—always rivals for the bigger game.”

“The
Englisch
consider such contests the height of sportsmanship, Herr von Herder.”

“A silly people, to confuse friends with opponents.”

Bergen scanned the tables and racks in the rear of the workshop. “Is it ready?”

“Of course! How unprofessional of me to waste time on blather.” Von Herder swiveled slightly on his stool and called for his two assistants to bring up the steam rifle. As one they dipped behind the far table and rose again straining and grunting. They carried the weapon up and set it on von Herder’s table with tremendous strain.

“Thank you, my lads,” von Herder said. He ran his hands over the length of the rifle with an almost loving touch. His eyes slowly fell closed.

Bergen surveyed the weapon from barrel to boiler: fully five feet in length, with a barrel the breadth of a man’s fist, a coal furnace and boiler in the place of a breech, and a padded stock that allowed the butt end of the weapon to rest atop the shoulder. It had been polished precisely, and shimmered like a mirror in some places.