Monk. He employed him, and could pay him or not, but he would not find his ivory without help, and they both knew that.
Monk weighed his answer carefully. The tension in the room prickled as they each watched the other, weighing, judging. Who had the strength of will to bend the other? Who could harness his vulnerability and disguise it as a weapon?
“I need to narrow down the kind of receiver who could handle a load like that,” Monk said levelly. “A man with the connections to sell it on.”
“Or a woman,” Louvain amended. “Some of the brothel-keepers are receivers as well. But be careful; just because they’re women doesn’t mean they wouldn’t slit your throat if you got in their way.” The vaguest smile crossed his face and then vanished. “You’re no use to me dead.”
If it happened it would anger him, but it would not lie on his conscience. There was a certain respect in him, a levelness in the gaze, a candor he would not have used with a lesser man.
Monk refused to be ruffled. He glanced around the office at the pictures on the walls. They were not of ships, as he had expected, but were wild landscapes of fierce and alien beauty, stark mountains towering above churning water, or barren as the volcanoes on the moon.
“Cape Horn,” Louvain said, following his look. “And Patagonia. I keep them to remind me who I am. Every man should see such places at least once, feel the violence and the enormity of them, hear the noise of wind and water that never stops, and stand on a plain like that, where the silence is never broken. It gives you a sense of proportion.” He hunched his shoulders and pushed his hands into his pockets, still staring, not at Monk but at the pictures. “It measures you against circumstance so you know what you have to do-and what it will mean to fail.”
Monk wondered for an instant if it was a warning, but when he looked at the intense concentration in Louvain’s face, he knew the man was speaking to himself.
“It’s a cruel beauty,” Louvain went on, his voice touched with awe. “There’s no mercy in it, but it’s also freedom, because it’s honest.” Then, as if suddenly remembering that Monk was a hired hand, not an equal or a friend, he stiffened and the emotion fled from his face. “Get my ivory back,” he ordered. “Time’s short. Don’t waste it coming here to tell me you’ve got nothing.”
Monk swallowed the retort that came to his lips. “Good night,” he answered, and before Louvain responded he turned and went out.
He hesitated in the street. The wind was knife-edged, and a sickle moon was rising across the water. Ice rimed over the cobbles, making them slippery, and his breath was a plume of vapor in the air. The thought of going home was sweet, like a burst of warmth inside him, but it was too soon to give up on the day. It was only a little after six, and he could put in at least another two or three hours. The thieves would already have gotten rid of the ivory by now, and the receiver would be looking to place it. He needed to find it before then.
He walked back along the street towards the public house on the corner, pushed the door open, and went in. The room was warm and noisy, full of shouts, laughter, and the clink of glasses. The floor was covered with dirty straw. People jolted each other to move closer to the bar and into the lantern’s yellow light; the barman’s face gleamed with sweat above the tankards topped with foam. It all smelled of ale; the steam from hot, weary bodies; wet clothes; mud and horse manure on boots.
Monk waited his turn, moving slowly closer to the front of the queue, all the time listening and watching. There were street women among the men, garish in red and pink dresses low on the shoulder, faces painted with false gaiety. Their voices forced the laughter, and their eyes were tired.
He listened to snatches of conversation, straining to link them together and make sense of them. He had worked many years in the city; he knew receivers of stolen goods by instinct. It was not in their appearance so much as in their manner. Some were hearty, some furtive; some talked a great deal, others were terse. Some offered magnificent prices and sang praise of their own generosity and how it would ruin them; others haggled over every halfpenny. But they all had a watchfulness about them; they did not miss a word or a gesture from anyone, and they could assess the monetary worth of anything in seconds.
There was also a defiance, a cautious caginess with which other people approached them, not as friends but always with a mind to business.
He saw several transactions-some with a discreet hand in and out of the pocket, a piece of jewelry or a trinket shown; some were merely words. If one of them had concerned Louvain’s ivory he would not have known, but only a fool buys something he has not seen, and fools do not survive long in such a trade.
He reached the front of the queue and bought his ale. Then he found a place to sit and drink it, next to a man with a scar down his cheek and an empty left sleeve of his jacket.
Monk took the opportunity to strike up conversation. Within half an hour he had refilled his own glass and the man’s, getting them each a pork pie at the same time. It was an expense that could go on Louvain’s bill.
“ ’Course we still get some like it,” the sailor said, taking up his tale where he had left it when Monk stood up. “But not like the old days. Real pirates, they were.” His watery eyes were bright with memory. “Me granpa were one o’ the first in the River P’lice; 1798 that were. In them days there was crime on the river you wouldn’t believe!” He nodded. “Not now, seein’ as ’ow it’s all tame an’ respectable, like. Near ’alf the men in the docks was thievin’ back then.” He held up his fingers. “Two men, they were, Arriott an’ Colquhoun, set up the P’lice. Got rid of ninety- eight out of every ’undred o’ thieves, they did, in jus’ one year!” He stared at Monk challengingly. “Think on it! Don’ it eat yer ’eart out, eh? They was real men.” He said it with a fierce, happy sense of pride.
“Were you in the River Police?” Monk enquired with interest.
The man laughed so hard he all but spilled his ale. “No! No, I in’t an oggler, bless yer. I bin ter sea most o’ me life, till I lorst me arm. But that were river pirates, an’ all! Comin’ back from the Indies, we were.” He leaned forward confidentially, his voice quieter and more urgent as memory flooded back. “Java way. Them China Seas is summink ’orrible in bad weather, an’ swarmin’ wi’ pirates.” He took a long swig of his ale and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Don’ trust nobody. Keep a watch on deck all hours, an’ keep yer gun loaded an’ yer powder dry. But we made it all the way ’ome, down the Indian Ocean.” He made a circular movement with his finger. “ ’round the Cape o’ Good ’Ope and up the Atlantic past the Skeleton Coast o’ Africa, across Biscay. . are yer followin’ me, like?”
“Yes, of course.”
“An’ ’ome ter Spit’ead,” he said triumphantly. “Five-masted schooner, we was, wi’ a good set o’ guns fore an’ aft. We passed Gravesend, tacked up Fiddler’s Reach, past the marshes on either side of us, safe as ’ouses. Gallion’s Reach right up ter Woolwich.” He sniffed lugubriously. “Could smell ’ome it were that close. ’Eave to for the night off Bugsby’s Marsh ter make the Isle o’ Dogs an’ the Pool the next day. Damn it if we weren’t boarded in the middle watch by ’alf a dozen river pirates an’ cut loose.” He banged his fist on the table. “Tide took us onter the mud banks an’ by dawn there weren’t a bleedin’ thing left o’ the cargo they could shift, the sons o’ bitches. On the watch raised the alarm, poor sod! Cost ’im ’is life. An’ we all come up on deck wi’ pistols an’ cutlasses, an’ it were a right battle. But yer can’t fight ’em bastards an’ the wind an’ the tide at once.”
Monk imagined it-the ship drifting, picking up speed with the current, the men fighting desperately on deck, trying to swing swords in the narrow spaces, seeking to shoot at moving, uncertain targets in the swaying lantern light, the violence, the fear, the pain.
“What happened?” He had no need to pretend interest.
“We killed three of ’em,” the man replied with satisfaction, licking his lips after the last mouthful of the pork pie. “Lost two o’ us, though. Wounded two more o’ them pretty bad, an’ put ’em over the side. They drowned.”
“Then what?”
“ ’Alf a dozen more of ’em, weren’t there!” he said bitterly. “I ’ad me arm gashed so bad I bled like a stuck pig. Got it all stitched up like, but went wi’ the gangrene. Took it off, they did. ’Ad ter, ter save me bleedin’ life!” He said it wryly, as if it were a long time ago and hardly mattered anymore, but Monk saw the pain in his eyes, and the memory of what he had been. He could feel not the physical agony of the knife, but the mental scream as he became less than whole, the mutilation that tore through him still.
Monk did not know how to respond. Should he acknowledge the pain he had seen, and attempt to convey some understanding of it, or was it better to behave as if he had not noticed?
“Are there still pirates on the river, even today?” he asked. It was an evasion, but it was the best he could do.
“Some,” the man answered, the brilliance of hurt fading from his eyes. “The ogglers is pretty good, but even
