Barry led Doyle briskly through the maze of Covent Garden, where in the stalls of the vegetable and flower sellers the commerce of the New Year was off to a bustling beginning. Yawning flower girls smoked cheap cigarettes and leaned against each other to ward off the chill, awaiting turns to fill their peddler's trays. Costermongers combatively picked over the marketed yields of the farmers' winter gardens. Doyle's digestive juices were whipped to a boil by the marriage of aromas that souped the morning air: Arabian coffee beans, fresh breads leaving the oven, grilled sausages and hams, hot French pastries. His gastronomic longings lurched toward despair when he realized he'd left his purse and all his money in the bag that Larry had transported by now to God-knows- where. Appeals to Barry to pause for a restorative snack—at
Barry's expense—fell on deaf ears. By the repeated tipping of his hat, bobbing up and down as regularly as a mechanical dandy in a Dresden clock tower, Doyle deduced that Barry was passingly familiar with more than a few of the merchants' wives and an unusually high percentage of the female shop attendants. Where there's smoke, thought Doyle: Barry's gay-blade reputation must be authentic after all.
Their trail took them to a gymnasium in a Soho side street, a squat, filthy brick of a building, its walls a palimpsest of posters trumpeting the forgotten but once epic collisions of yesterday's fistic gladiators. A soot- obscured homily traced the arch of the Greek Revival entryway, extolling the virtue of exercise to the development of a sound moral character.
Inside the gym, on the far side of the squared circle, a boisterous knot of wrestlers, bare-fisted boxers, and physique enthusiasts knuckled around a cutthroat game of dice. Well-wrinkled cash and cheapjack gin bottles defined the area they'd set aside for the bones to settle after hitting the musty wall—a most unsavory scene that had seen more than one dawn pass by unnoticed. Barry instructed Doyle to wait some distance from the bunch—he was only too happy to comply—while he waded in to separate the object of their quest from the pack. He returned a minute later with a flat-faced hulking mass of hardened flesh, whose bulging bare arms were adorned with tattoos of mermaids and pirates engaged in a succession of suggestive pas de deux. The man's nose spread out horizontally to the width of his gaping mouth, the only useful organ for breathing he had left. His eyebrows were an omelet of scar tissue and scraggly hair, his eyes set as deep as pissholes in the snow. A well-traveled trail of tobacco juice trickled down his chin. The man's haircut was distressingly similar enough to the one Doyle now sported to suggest that Barry must be the man's barber, if not his confidant.
'I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Bodger Nuggins, former light-heavyweight champion of Her Majesty's colony of New South Wales and Oceania,' said Barry, bringing the two men together.
Doyle accepted the behemoth's two-handed handshake; it was flaccid, and the man's palm as soft and moist as a skittish soubrette's. The stink of gin wafted off him in clouds.
'Arthur Conan—' began Doyle.
Barry cleared his throat with emphatic vehemence, followed by a vigorous shaking of the head just behind and out of Bodger's field of sight.
'Maxwell Tree,' corrected Doyle with the first name that leapt to mind.
'Bodger Nuggins, former light-heavyweight champion of New South Wales and Oceania,' said the boxer redundantly, still holding Doyle's hand in both of his and moving it semi-circularly. 'Call me Bodger.'
'Thank you, Bodger.'
Bodger's eyes were slightly askew, the one on the right cheating in as if it secretly desired a better look at the incredible nose plateau prominent to the south.
'That's what folks who knows the Bodger calls him. Calls him Bodger. Rhymes with Dodger,' Bodger elaborated cooperatively.
'Yes. It does at that,' said Doyle, trying gently to liberate his hand.
'Cedric,' said Bodger mysteriously.
'Cedric who?'
'That's me Christian name. Me muther named me Cedric.'
'After ... ?' offered Doyle, trying to help him to his anecdote's destination in the hopes of effecting a release from Bodger's determined grasp.
'After I was bomed,' said Bodger, simian brow creased with the profundity of a Mandarin court astrologer.
'Tell the gentTman wot you told me, Bodger,' prompted Barry, and then whispered to Doyle: 'He's a coupl'a sheep short in the top paddock.'
Doyle nodded. Bodger's facial contortions redoubled. His eyebrows rode out the effort like a mechanical wave machine in a stormy melodrama.
'Wot you told me about Mr. Lansdown Dilks,' Barry
added.
'Ow, right! Bugger!' Thwap! Bodger punched himself in the nose. Judging by its pancaked state, it had to be a habitual response, whether an aid to jog the memory or stem corrective to the stubborn gears of what remained of his mind it was difficult to say. 'Lansdown Dilks! Balls! Bodger Nugs, wot a muffer!' And he punched himself a second time.
'Here, here—perfectly all right, go easy now, Bodger,' said Doyle. If the man was indeed a former champion, he didn't want a knockout self-administered before beginning his interrogation.
'Right,' said Bodger, finding a sudden forgiveness for himself.
'Did you know a Mr. Lansdown Dilks?' asked Doyle.
'Ahh. There's a story goes with this,' Bodger said, intimating that an imperishable drama loomed just around the comer. 'Let's see... .'
Being somewhat more familiar with his narrative technique, Barry slipped a pound note into Bodger's mitt.
'Right,' said Bodger, his pump primed. 'I come from Queensland, see. Down under. Brisbane, to be exactical. Across the deep and briny.'
'Yes,' said Doyle. 'I do follow you: You're from Australia.'
Bodger snapped his fingers, pointed at Doyle, and winked broadly, as if he'd just discovered they were brothers in the same secret lodge. 'Eggzac'ly!'
'We understand each other. Do go on, Bodger.'
'Right. Fisticuffs, that's my nut, see. Bloodsport. A man wants to strut his stuff among men, let 'im do it wit' his hands as naked as a newborn babe, that's what I say. Done all right by Bodger Nuggins, hadn't it? Champeen of New South Wales and Oceania, light heavyweight.'
By way of demonstrating his credentials, as boxers are compulsively wont to do, Bodger threw a punch at Doyle's midsection, pulling it an inch away from sending him to his knees in search of oxygen.
'Mind you,' Bodger went on, 'this Marquis of Queens-berry ponce, he'd like to put dresses on us bare knucklers, wouldn't he, have us dance about and slap each other with lit'le tea gloves.' Unable to resist an additional compulsion to editorialize, Bodger contemptuously hawked a plug of tired tobacco to the floor. 'The old ponce wants to watch lit'le girlies fight, why don't he go to St. Edna's Academy for Women and Ponces?'
'I'm sure I don't know,' said Doyle. 'Regarding Mr. Lansdown Dilks—'
'I'm gettin' 'ere,' said Bodger, flexing his muscles ominously. 'So the Bodger takes his leave from his old Homestead to have a go in the fight game on this side of the puddle. England. By boat it was. Uh ...'
'The pursuit of your boxing career brought you to London,' said Doyle.
'Promised the Bodger a bash at the heavyweight title, these blokes did, but first they wants Bodgkins to fight this other bouff head. You know, like a ...' He went blank. Frozen as if he'd spilled sand in his gears.
'A tune-up fight,' said Barry, after a respectful silence.
'Right,' said Bodger, thwacking himself in the face again and jolting his mental machinery free from its rut. 'Like a tune-up fight. Some drongo. Want to see what Bodger's made of 'fore they puts their precious title on the line. So the Bodger says to them, wot's fair is fair. Never let it be said Champeen Nuggins is a piker: Old Bodger puts on a show, he does, when some right gents lays out a few sponduliacks to catch my action.'
'So you had this tune-up fight,' said Doyle.
Bodger nodded and squiffed out another squirt of hot juice. 'First thing, they tells me the tune-up's not to take place in your stadium, your gamin' hall, or even in your ring, as such. What they do is, see, they takes me to this warehouse like, down by the ribber.'
'This was not a legally sanctioned bout,' said Doyle, feeling more and more like an interpreter for some idiot
