“He sure did.” The beers arrived and Benner took a hearty swig. “He told us all to keep our eyes peeled for a man who’ll have five o’clock shadow all over himself and ask for an all-body treatment. Darrow told us to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun, tie him up, and carry him upstairs, and not to hurt him at all beyond the tranquilizer bullet, which damn well better not hit him in the face or throat. And get this, Brendan: I asked him, boss, what does this guy look like? I mean, aside from having whiskers all over himself. You know what Darrow told me? He said, I don’t know, and even if I did know, the description would only be good for a week or so. Now—are those the words and actions of a sane man?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Doyle slowly, eyebrows raised, reflecting that he now knew far more about Darrow’s plans than Benner did. “How does all this bear on your plan to get us home?”
“Well—say, do you still have your mobile hook? Good—Darrow knows the times and locations of all the gaps. And they’re pretty frequent around now, the 1814 one isn’t the closest. So we’ll bargain with him, get him to tell us the location of the next one, and we’ll go and be standing in its field when it comes to an end, and snap! Back we’ll be in that empty lot in modern London.”
Doyle took a long puff on the—he had to admit—excellent cigar, and chased it with a sip of beer. “And what are we selling?”
“Hm? Oh, didn’t I say? I’ve found his hairy man. Yesterday he came in, just like the old man said he would. Short, chubby red-haired guy with sure enough five o’clock shadow all over him. When I started edging toward the trank gun he got spooked and ran out, but,” Benner smiled proudly, “I followed him to where he lives. So this morning I was listening in on Darrow’s room—trying to find out if he was in a mood to be approached with an offer of you give me my hook and tell me where’s a gap and I’ll tell you where your hairy man lives, and by God, I hear Darrow telling Clitheroe to tell all the boys Benner is to be shot on sight! Seems he doesn’t trust me. So after emptying one of the cash boxes, I split, and went and talked to the hairy man myself. Had lunch with him just a few hours ago.”
“You did?” Doyle thought he’d rather have lunch with Jack the Ripper than Dog-Face Joe.
“Yeah. Not a bad guy, really—wild-eyed, and talks about immortality and Egyptian gods all the time, but damned well educated. I told him Darrow did have the power to cure his hyperpilosity, but had some questions for him. I hinted that the old man intended to torture him—which, for all I know, he may—and that he’d need a middleman, a mouthpiece, to deal with Darrow through. I said I’d been one of Darrow’s boys, but had quit when I heard about the atrocities he planned to commit upon this poor son of a bitch. See? But I still had the problem of the shoot Benner on sight order Darrow had given his men.” Benner grinned. “So you become my partner. You talk to Darrow, negotiate the deal, and then you share the payoff—a trip home. I figure you’ll say something like this.” Benner sat back and cocked an eyebrow at Doyle. “We’ll tell old King Kong not to come see you, Darrow, until he gets a letter from us. And we’ll give that letter to a friend—I know just the girl for it—with instructions to mail it only if she sees us disappear through one of the gaps. So you give us a hook and the location of a gap, and if our girl sees our empty clothes fall—and you see, she might be a hundred yards away in a treetop or window, so you can’t hope to find her—then your hairy man will get the go see Darrow message.”
Doyle had been trying to interrupt. “But Benner,” he said now, “you forget that Darrow’s issued a kill Doyle order too. I can’t approach him.”
“Nobody’s after you, Brendan,” said Benner patiently. “For one thing, everybody thinks I killed you, and for another, they remember you as the chubby, healthy-looking guy who gave the speech on Coleridge. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re emaciated, and pale as a guy in a Fritz Eichenberg engraving, and there’s about a hundred new lines in your face—shall I go on? Okay—and now you’re definitely bald, and to top it all off, your goddamn ear seems to be gone. How’d you do that? And I noticed the other day you walk funny. Frankly you look twenty years older. Nobody’s going to look at you and think, Aha, Brendan Doyle. So don’t worry. You just go into that depilatory parlor and say something like, ‘Hi there, a friend of mine grows fur all over his body, let me talk to your boss.’ And then when you see Darrow you set up the deal. At that point you can admit you’re Doyle—he won’t dare hurt his only link with Mighty Joe Young.”
Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “It’s not bad, Benner. Complicated, but not bad.” Doyle was pretty sure he knew what Darrow was trying to do… and, incidentally, why the old man had a copy of Lord Robb’s Journal. It’s his cancer, he told himself. He can’t cure it, but as soon as he acquired time travel he also acquired access to a guy that can switch bodies. So he gets a copy of Lord Robb because it contains the only mention of the time, place and circumstances of Dog-Face Joe’s vigilante-style execution in 1811. Not a bad bit of knowledge to bargain with!
“Damn it, are you listening to me, Brendan?”
“Sorry. What?”
“Listen to me, this is important. Now today is Tuesday. How about if Saturday I meet you at—do you know Jonathen’s, in Exchange Alley up by the bank? Well, let’s meet there at about noon. By then I can have set up this letter business with my girl and the hairy man, and you can go see Darrow. Okay?”
“How am I supposed to survive until Saturday? You made me lose my job when you shot me.”
“Oh, sorry. Here.” Benner dug into his pocket and tossed five crumpled five-pound notes onto the table. “That hold you?”
“It ought to.” Doyle stuffed them into his own pocket, and then got to his feet. Benner held out his hand, but Doyle only smiled. “No, Benner. I’ll cooperate with you, but I won’t shake hands with a guy who’d try to kill an old friend just to get his own ass out of a sling.”
Benner closed his hand with a soft clap, and smiled. “Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Then maybe I’ll be ashamed. See you Saturday.”
“Right.” Doyle started to leave, then turned back to Benner. “This is a good cigar. Where’d you get it? I’ve been wondering what the cigars are like in 1810, and now I can afford them.”
“Sorry, Brendan. It’s an Upmann, vintage 1983. I stole a box of them from Darrow when I left.”
“Oh.” Doyle walked to the door and stepped outside onto the pavement. The moon was up, and the shadows of racing clouds swept along the street and the housefronts like furtive ghosts in a hurry to get to the river. An old man was hunching along over the gutter in the middle of the street, and as Doyle watched he stooped and picked up a tattered cigar butt.
Doyle walked up to him. “Here,” he said, holding out his own lit cigar. “Never mind that trash. Have an Upmann butt.”
The old man looked up at him wrathfully. “Up mah what?”
Too weary to explain, Doyle hurried away.
* * *
Wealthy enough now to indulge himself, Doyle took a room at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane, for all the sources agreed that this was where William Ashbless stayed during the first couple of weeks after his arrival in London; and though he was surprised to learn that the landlord had never heard of Ashbless, nor ever rented a room to a tall, burly blond man, with or without a beard, the matter of Ashbless’ absence was a good deal less urgent to Doyle now that he was in on the deal with Benner.
He spent the next three days simply relaxing. His cough didn’t seem to be getting any worse—if anything, it was receding—and the fever he’d been living with for two weeks had evidently been purged from him by Kusiak’s spicy fish chowder and beer. For fear of Horrabin’s people, or Darrow’s, he didn’t stray far from his inn, but there was a narrow balcony outside his window from which, he discovered, he could climb up shingled eaves to the roof of the building; and on a flat surface between two chimney pots he found a chair, its wood whitened and split by decades of London weather. Here he sat in the long twilights, looking down across the descending terraces of Fish and Thames streets to the misted river, its boats tacking down the tide with an appearance of unhurried serenity; he would have tobacco and a tinderbox lying on the wide brick collar of the chimney pot at his left, and a bucket of cool beer on the roof below his right hand, and alternately puffing on his pipe and taking sips from his ceramic cup, he would look out across the almost Byzantine tangle of rooftops and towers and columns of smoke, all dominated by the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral way out across the city to his right, and he considered, with the comfortable detachment of one from whom a decision is not immediately required, simply not meeting Benner, and instead living out his life in this half-century that was to be characterized by Napoleon, Wellington, Goethe and Byron.
The three-day rest was marred by only one distasteful event. On Thursday morning as Doyle was returning
