desk, as well as a new chandelier. We looked quite the modern professional agency. The only thing that was the worse for wear was the assistant Barker had brought in with him.
“The vase!” I cried, crossing over to the pedestal. Barker and I inspected it together, turning it around in our hands. There was nothing but the faintest gray-white seams where the breaks had been.
“One almost can’t tell,” I said. “A visitor won’t even notice the mend.”
“Yes, thank you for your suggestion, lad. I would have hated to lose this.”
I was hoping to hear about the history of the vase and how he acquired it, but he was as reticent as ever. He’d spied his smoking cabinet, and in a moment he was reacquainting himself with his meerschaums.
“Had them polished and cleaned and the stems reground while you was gone, sir,” Jenkins said proudly. “Tobacconist says they are as good as new.”
“They are, indeed,” Barker said, stuffing tobacco into the bowl of the pipe, which had been carved into his own image. He lit it, and placed the vesta in the empty ashtray on his desk.
“You’ll never guess what they clean them white pipes with, sir,” Jenkins said to me. “Raw spirits. The hard stuff.”
“Take it from me, Jenkins,” I said, remembering all the drinking I had endured over the past month. “It is the only proper use for the stuff. Speaking of spirits, how is the Rising Sun?”
“Never better, Mr. L. I shall stand you a pint at the earliest opportunity.”
“Thank you,” I said, thinking to myself that it might be a good while before I was thirsty for ale again.
Barker was sitting in his green swivel chair, still examining the vase in front of him. I took up the ledger and retrieved the check from my pocket.
“Good lord.”
“Thomas, you know how I feel about swearing.”
“Sorry, sir. It is this check. It does not even begin to cover the expenses we’ve incurred in this case!”
“I expected as much. Normally, Le Caron spends half our time together complaining of how little he gets paid to risk his neck. I did not take this case for remuneration. Sometimes other factors come into consideration, such as duty.”
He was silent for a moment, staring at the round vase in front of him as if it were a crystal ball in which he saw a portent. Perhaps, I thought, there was some flaw in the repairs.
“Is something wrong, sir?”
He shook off the mood. “Nothing, lad. You must forgive a Scotsman’s brooding. I was just thinking that the world is very like this vase. It seems exactly as it was before, but there are hairline cracks all through it, and I know that it shall never completely be as it was before.”
Our thoughts were interrupted by the comforting toll of Big Ben in our ears.
“Peckish?” he asked.
Over the meal, I disappointed the waiter at Ho’s by setting down my near empty bowl of shark’s head soup before he had the opportunity to rip it out of my hand. Ho’s hadn’t changed. The room was still as dark and smoky and the clientele still half mad. Ho deigned to leave the kitchen and come to our table.
“You are fatter than ever,” he complained to my employer by way of greeting.
“I was on a case,” Barker responded, not nettled in the least.
“You ate garbage, I think.”
“Yes, but only because I couldn’t take you with me.”
“What happened to him?” Ho asked, jerking a thumb in my direction. Things were actually improving. Ho rarely acknowledged my existence.
“Stick fight,” my employer stated. Ho grunted, possibly in approval, then waddled off into the gloom beyond the reach of the penny candle on our table.
We tucked into an assortment of battered vegetables and meats, accompanied by a ginger sauce and wheat dumplings. I’d like to think my use of chopsticks had improved since I first came here months before. More probably, I’d progressed to the level of the average Chinese four-year-old.
“Try these mushrooms, lad,” Barker suggested. “They must have come in aboard ship. England had nothing to do with them.”
For once, Barker was caught unaware. We were so engrossed in Ho’s bowl of wonders that we hadn’t noticed the arrival of a new customer. Seamus O’Muircheartaigh appeared at our table and slid into the seat beside me. He crossed his legs and set his walking stick across them.
“Cyrus,” he greeted.
“Seamus,” my employer replied. Stiffly he set his bowl down on the table in front of him, the mushroom he’d just put into it untasted.
“Welcome back.”
“As you are aware, I’ve been here a few days, actually,” Barker responded.
“Yes, your timing was impeccable, as always.”
“I hope we have not inconvenienced you too much, Seamus.”
“You haven’t. I cannot say the same for your assistant.” The Irishman turned his deep-set eyes in my direction. He looked at me as if I were a black beetle he’d found on his plate.
“What is your name, sir?” he asked coolly.
“Thomas Llewelyn.”
“You are responsible for the death of someone I cared very deeply for.”
“Perhaps not,” Barker stated. “It is likely the bomb had simply reached its proper time to detonate.”
“Possibly,” O’Muircheartaigh acknowledged, “but you will not deny that it was the two of you that chased her onto the bridge.”
Barker snorted. “I will not apologize for saving the life of the Prince of Wales.”
O’Muircheartaigh shook his head sadly. “A Scotsman and a Welshman helping the English government. Do you think they gave the slightest thought about you?”
“That is our concern, not yours.”
The Irishman gave a little tap to his cane, and the small circlet of metal at the tip swung open on a hinge. I was looking into the barrel of a gun, which had been cunningly built into O’Muircheartaigh’s stick.
Barker had his gun out instantly, but a cleaver bit into the wood of the table in front of us. We all looked up.
“Take it outside, gentlemen,” Ho’s voice came from the shadows. “You know the rules.”
“This is not your concern, Ho,” the Irishman warned. The room fell silent.
“Need I remind you that you are in Blue Dragon Triad territory, Mr. O’Muircheartaigh. Mr. K’ing will no like if this boy is killed without his authority.”
O’Muircheartaigh sighed, as if he were a child caught in some petty naughtiness, and he latched the cover on his walking stick again.
“Rice and tea, Mr. Ho,” he said. “Would you gentlemen care to dine with me?”
“I fear we have a prior engagement,” Barker said icily. He stood slowly, and I noticed his hand was still in his pocket.
“Good day, gentlemen,” O’Muircheartaigh said.
The last I saw, the waiter was setting his rice and tea carefully on the table, as one sets down a plate of meat in the tiger cage at the zoo in Regent’s Park.
I was breathing heavily in the musty air of the tunnel, and I stumbled up the stairs twice at the other end. Barker kicked the door open, allowing air and light to flood in, and sat me down roughly on the ledge among the naphtha lamps Ho provides for his visitors.
“You’re in bad shape, Thomas,” he said. “I think it best if you take off the rest of the day.”
30
