He’d best be found. And I’m fairly certain that none of us are man enough to see this thing through alone. It’s collective spirit that will defeat them in the end.”
“Of course, of course.” St. Ives’ pipe went dead. There was truth in Godall’s statement. He could, he supposed, return to London in a few days. A week, say. Five days at most. Three. But fixing a date rather kicked the daylights out of his cakes and tea. “If anything develops,” St. Ives heard himself saying, “send for me straightaway and I’ll be on the next train. If I don’t hear from you before, I’ll see you next Thursday evening at the shop. These meetings should become a bit more regular, at least until after the appearance of Birdlip.”
“Agreed,” said Godall, who thrust out his hand, then hunched out into the slackening rain, striding away toward Soho, the words “Good luck” sailing back over his shoulder on the breeze. St. Ives set out down Regent, hunkering into his coat, wondering how it was that Godall seemed so damned efficient, how he wore so well his mantle of intrigue and mystery.
The lights of the Captain’s shop glowed far behind them now through the rain, and just visible in the dimly lit room was the Captain himself, unmoving. The Captain’s mind was empty, the dust beaten out of it by this sudden enormity. What would he say to her? To Jack? If he found Kraken…he didn’t know what he would do. It was his own damned fault, waving the box around with Kraken supposedly unconscious in an adjacent room. Suddenly he stiffened. It wasn’t just the box, after all, that had been waved around. He checked his pocket watch. Quarter past two. Three o’clock would tell the tale.
The hands crept round, the Captain regarding, then casting away, plan after plan. At five until three, he listened for the knock at the door. He paced from room to room, dimming lights, watching through windows. No one came. The streets were silent but for the patter of rain. Perhaps she’d forgotten, was asleep. Four o’clock passed, five. At ten next morning, when a customer rapped at the mysteriously locked door of the shop, he awakened Captain Powers, who leaped up with a shout from a dream involving dark London alleys and stooped criminals. He couldn’t face the day alone; it was time to take Godall completely into his confidence.
EIGHT
At the Oceanarium
At the same time that St. Ives was reading Owlesby’s manuscript to the horrified members of the Trismegistus Club at Captain Powers’ shop, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo and Willis Pule were driving along Bayswater Road toward Craven Hill. The sky was a confusion of whirling clouds, and there was no moon to brighten the road, which was still dry despite little flurries of raindrops that swept along now and then, causing the two men to yank the collars of their coats tighter around their necks. The dome of the oceanarium lay like the shadow of a humped beast through the oaks, the broad branches of which shaded the road and adjacent park into utter obscurity.
The hunchback reined the horse in some twenty yards from the darkened building, keeping well back into black forest shadows. Nothing stirred but the sighing wind and the occasional patter of drops. The stone block of the oceanarium was gray with age and stained brown in long vertical streaks from the rusting iron sashes of banks of windows. Vines crept up along the wall, trimmed around windows and just beginning to leaf out in the late April spring. No lights shone from within, but the two men knew that somewhere a groundskeeper kept watch, poking around, perhaps, with a lit candle. Pule hoped the man was asleep, and his dog with him. He crept along the edge of the building, below the windows, listening and watching and trying each window in turn, ready to cut and run at the least sound.
He grasped the stile of a broad double casement and pulled, the window creaking suddenly open in a little spray of rust chips. Pule hauled himself up, scrabbling for a toe-hold against the stones and scraping the skin from his palms against the rough sill. He fell back onto the ground, cursing under his breath the night, the windows, the invisible watchman and his dog, and especially Doctor Narbondo, comfortably seated on the dogcart, ready to flee at the sound of trouble. Pule knew, though, that he’d be loathe to leave without the carp, that Joanna Southcote would become nothing but a decomposed heap of dust and bone without the fish — that her doddering son wouldn’t be half so anxious to part with his bag of half crowns if their attempt were a failure.
Pule struggled once again at the window — physical strength had never been his forte. He loathed it, in fact. It was beneath him. All of this intrigue was beneath him. Soon, though, when certain things were in his possession…He found himself teetering across the sill, flailing his legs to keep from tumbling back into the night. He tipped head foremost, finally, into the building. His coat caught on the hinge of the casement, yanking him sideways. Debris clattered from his pocket onto the stone floor, and he cursed as he saw dimly his half candle roll under the iron legs of an aquarium. Moments later he was on his hands and knees on the damp floor groping for it.
The air was heavy with the musty smell of aquaria and water weeds and the salt that crusted glass lids from the fine spray of aerating bubbles. Pule could hear the echoing drip of leaking tanks and the swish of bubbles on the otherwise still surface water. Thank God his matches hadn’t fallen into any puddles. He crouched behind a vast, rectangular stone monolith that supported a bank of dark aquaria, and he struck a match against the rough granite in a hiss of igniting sulphur. He lit the piece of candle, shoving it securely into a brass candlestick.
He peered out into the dark room, satisfied that he was alone, then rose and stepped across toward the opposite wall.
He’d strolled about that same room a half-dozen times in the last month, familiarizing himself with the islands of aquaria, with the position and nature of closets of nets and siphons and buckets and the great rubber bladders that fed air into the tanks. He found a broad, square net and a step stool, and hauled them both back to the center of the room. He waved his candle at a long, low tank, squinting through the glare off the glass, and watching the silver bulk of the great carp that lay barely moving among the rocks and weed.
Pule stepped to the top of the stool. He pulled the glass top from the tank, then climbed down and laid it carefully onto the floor. In a moment he was up again, dipping his net into the aquarium. He’d have to be quick. If the carp were given half a chance, they’d sail to the far end of the tank and hover there, and he’d have to move the stool to get at them. That wouldn’t do. He carefully yanked out clumps of weed, dropping them with a wet splat to the floor. There was no use tangling his net in them. It was a carp he wanted, not a mess of greenery. Through the dim water he could see one resting on the gravel, a mottled koi some foot and a half in length. That would suffice. Pule eased the net into the water, wiggled it to unfurl the corners, and with a sudden lunge, swept it down and over the tail of the sleeping fish, yanking it out of the water before it had a chance to awaken. He groped for its head, trying to hook a finger under a gill. Water splashed out of the aquarium, drowning the front of his coat.
The carp thrashed suddenly sideways, jerking away from Pule’s hand. He lunged at it and cradled the fish in his arms, feeling the step stool canting over as he did so, aware, suddenly, of a light being trimmed behind him and of the barking of a dog.
“Here now!” came a startled voice as Pule and the fish toppled over sideways into a mess of sodden waterweeds. Trailing anacharis and ambulia, Pule wrenched at his fish, slamming it against the stone monolith as he rolled against it. The dog growled and snatched at his pantleg. Pule yelled obscenities, ululating madly at the dog and his master, hoping that the watchman — an old man with a game leg — wouldn’t be quick to engage an obviously lunatic fish thief. More than that, he hoped that Narbondo would hear the ruckus and get his filthy cart under the window.
He kicked at the dog, clamped now to his pantleg, and managed only to drag it along behind him. Its master limped in, crouched and waving his arms, grappling after the dog as if worried only that Pule might make away with it as well as with the carp. Pule turned, thrusting the fish through the window — there was no way he’d clamber out holding it — and felt it snatched from his grasp. A spray and wind-driven rain stung his eyes as he boosted himself through, easily now, with the dog yammering behind him and the window sill some two feet lower now that he was inside the building rather than outside.
The distance to the ground, however, was greater than he’d calculated, and he found himself, after a wild, thrashing tumble, twisted in the mud between the stones of the building and the wheel of the dogcart. Narbondo cursed wildly, Pule cursed him back, and the watchman clutched his little dog, staring inertly at the two from beyond the open window. The hunchback whipped up the horses as Pule grabbed the sideboard and attempted to hoist himself in, kicking furiously to keep up with the horse and falling in a heap into the bed, face first into the
