Thames.

“Say!” cried the lad with the barrow. For a moment he looked as if he were going to leap in after them. “That were a good hat, weren’t it?” he asked innocently, marveling, perhaps, at the apparent wealth of a man who would throw such a hat into the river. “And they was prime squid too.” He shook his head and sloshed along in Pule’s wake.

Some hundred yards down the embankment, the cries and odors of Billingsgate market having receded behind him. Pule noticed a sleeping figure, hunched out of the wind beneath a little stony outcropping that had been, before it crumbled, a decorative granite buttress on an ancient bit of river wall. It wasn’t the reclining figure that caught his eye so much as the half-exposed object that protruded from a pillowcase which the sleeper cradled in his arms.

Pule slowed and squinted at it. He looked at the man’s face. It appeared to be Bill Kraken. And the box? It was a Keeble box. He’d seen Narbondo’s sketches. There wasn’t any question about it: the grinning face of the clothed hippo that peered out from the folds of the pillowcase, the dancing apes carved into the exposed lid. What rare piece of serendipity was this, he asked himself. Could this be heavenly repayment for his recent ill-use?

He studied the sleeping Kraken. He was unacquainted with the man, literally speaking, but perhaps knew enough about him to turn the happenstance of their meeting to profit. He addressed the costerlad: “Run along down the way,” he said, “and buy me a bottle of brandy, heated, will you? And two glasses.” He gave the boy three shillings. “There’s another for you if you come back.” He realized as he watched the boy run off that he hadn’t had to offer him a bribe to return. He’d have come back after his barrow sure enough. Perhaps he could cheat him of it somehow. Pule turned his attention to Kraken, who snored volubly and held onto his prize.

The sun peeked over the treetops below London Bridge, casting its rays full into Kraken’s face. He recoiled in the glare of it, blinking and squinting, then seemed to realize what it was he clutched to his chest, and clutched it all the more tightly, as if it were a beast of some sort that might leap from his arms and run. In an instant he pushed it away, hoping, it seemed, that it would run, then yanked it to him again. He stopped his odd tug of war, however, when he noted Pule, bent over the barrow of carp.

“Good morning to you,” said Pule pleasantly, one eye cocked for the approach of the lad with his brandy. Kraken sat in silence. “Cold enough this morning.”

“That it is,” said Kraken suspiciously.

“Bit of hot brandy would be the ticket.”

Kraken swallowed hard. He ran a dry tongue over his lips and regarded Pule. “Have a bit of fish there, have you?”

“That’s it. Fish. Carp, actually.”

“Carp is it? They say carp is…What do they say? Immortal. That’s it.”

“Do they?” asked Pule, feigning deep interest.

“Science does. They’ve studied ’em. In China mainly. Live forever and grow as big as the pool they’re kept in. That’s a fact. Read up your Bible — it’s all there. Loads of talk about the leviathan — the devil’s own fish. Shows up as a serpent here, a crocodile there — they can’t keep him straight. But he’s a carp, sure enough, with his tail in his own mouth. And soon — weeks they say — he’s going to let loose and come up out of the sea like one of them monsoons. I’m a man of science and the spirit both, but I don’t trust to neither one entirely. There’s no affidavit you can sign. That’s my thinking.”

Pule was momentarily awash. He nodded vehement agreement. “Spirit, is it?” he asked, seeing that the brandy bottle approached at a run from up the embankment. The brandy was delivered, Pule was relieved of another shilling, and the boy pushed the barrow twenty yards farther along and waited.

“Glass of Old Pope?” asked Pule, pouring half a tumbler full for Kraken before he had an answer.

“I am dry, thank you. And I haven’t had breakfast yet. What did you say you were?” Kraken sipped at the brandy. Then, as if in rushing relief, he drained half of it, gasping and coughing.

“I’m a naturalist.”

“Are you?”

“That’s right. I’m an associate of the noted Professor Langdon St. Ives.”

Kraken gasped again, without the help of the brandy, then his face dropped into a melancholy scowl of self- pity. Pule poured another dollop into his glass. Kraken drank. The brandy seemed to run the morning chill away. Kraken suddenly thought of the box, which lay on his lap like a coiled serpent. Why had he taken it? What use had he for it? He didn’t at all want it. He’d sunk very low. That was certainly the truth. Another glass wouldn’t sink him any lower. He wiped a tear from his eye and let go a heaving sigh.

“Interested in the scientific arts, you say?” said Pule.

Kraken nodded morosely, gazing into his empty glass. Pule filled it.

“Of what branch of the sciences are you an aficionado?”

Kraken shook his head, unable to utter a response. Pule loomed in at him, proffering the bottle, stretching his countenance into an expression both pitying and interested. “You seem,” said Pule, “if you’ll excuse my meddling in your affairs, to be a student of the turnings of the human heart, which, if I’m correct, is as often broken as it is whole.” And Pule heaved a sigh, as if he too saw the sad end of things.

Kraken nodded a rubbery head. The brandy rallied him a bit. “You’re a philo-sopher, sir,” he said. “Have you read Ashbless?”

“I read little else,” Pule lied, “unless, of course, it’s scientific arcana. One is forever learning from reading the philosophers. It’s nothing more nor less than a study of the human soul. And we’re living, I fear, in a world too negligent of that part of man’s anatomy.”

“There’s truth in that,” cried Kraken, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Some of us have souls the rag man wouldn’t touch. Not with a toasting fork.” And with that, Kraken began to cry aloud.

Pule placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t any idea where the conversation was leading, but was reasonably certain that he couldn’t just relieve Kraken of the box and walk away. He’d have to trust to the fates, who if not positively smiling upon him, were at least grinning in his direction. He poured Kraken another two inches of brandy, wondering if he hadn’t ought to have bought two bottles when he had the chance. The effects of the warm liquor, however, seemed to have been somehow cumulative, for Kraken suddenly slumped heavily against the stones of the low wall that fronted the embankment, and it occurred to Pule that it might he possible simply to wait until Kraken was blind drunk and then walk away with his box. “Do you…” asked Kraken, “do you suppose there’s a bit of hope?”

“Surely,” said Pule, to be safe. Kraken appeared to be satisfied. “You’ve a great burden.”

“That’s a fact,” muttered Kraken

“I can help you. Trust me. This talk about toasting forks is unhealthy, doubly so: I won’t believe it of you on the one hand, and it denies the very root of salvation on the other. There is no better time than this to round the bend, to draw a course for home.”

“Do you think so, guv’nor? Would they have me?” Kraken drained his glass.

“What have you done that’s so awful? Stolen your master’s goods? Checked the missus?”

Kraken heaved another sigh and looked inadvertently at the box.

“What can that be,” Pule asked, “but a toy for a child? Stride back in and lay it at the feet of your employer. Brass it out. Admit your guilt.”

“Oh no,” lamented Kraken. “It’s a bit more than a toy. It’s the gallows, is what it is for Bill Kraken. It’s the gibbet. This here ain’t no toy.”

“Come, come. What can it be that’s so valuable as that? The world loves a man who confesses his sins.”

“Then they hang him.” Kraken lapsed into silence.

Pule, unspeakably irritated but grinning broadly, filled his glass and cast the empty bottle end over end into the river. “Come now,” he said, “tell us what it is you’ve gotten off with there and I’ll see if I can’t make it right.”

“Can you, guv’nor?” asked the befuddled Kraken, suddenly animated.

“I’m the nephew of the Lord Mayor.”

“Ah,” said Kraken, considering this. “The Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor hisself. It’s a precious great emerald, is what it is. Poor Jacky’s inheritance in a lump. And I’ve gone and pinched it. It’s drink that did it, and that’s the

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