'What does this say?' asked Doyle, holding up the card for Sparks to see.
'Jimmy Malone. Born Dublin, 1855. No education. Fifth son of five: father a miner, mother a char. Wanted in Ireland for assault and highway robbery. Served local apprenticeship with brothers in a roving gang, the Rosties and Fins, County Cork. Emigrated to Britain 1876. First arrest London; assault, January 1878. Served two years, six months Newgate. Came out a hardened criminal, began work as a free-lance stickup. Favors the spiked cudgel. Suspect in at least one unsolved murder. Last-known residence: East End, Adler Street off Greenfield Road. Five- eight, twelve stone, green eyes, thinning sandy hair, favors a wispy goatee. Vices: gambling, drinking, and prostitutes—in other words, the lot. Also known as Jimmy Muldoon or Jimmy the Hook—'
'I get the idea,' said Doyle, carefully replacing the card in the file.
'That Jimmy,' chuckled Larry, shaking his head. 'What a silly prawn.'
'Ever worry you'll wake up one day and find you've forgotten the key to translating all this?'
'Should anything untoward happen to me, the decoding formula is in a safe-deposit at Lloyd's of London, along with instructions to deliver the archives to the police,' said Sparks, pouring a beaker of smoking substance into a larger container. 'Not that they'll ever make good use of it.'
'Are you at all concerned someone might break in here and steal it nonetheless?'
'Open that door,' said Sparks, hands full, nodding toward the opposite door.
'What do you mean?'
'Just open it.'
'This one here?'
'That's right,' said Sparks. 'Give it a go.'
Doyle shrugged, grabbed the knob, and pulled. In the instant before he slammed the door, Doyle was overwhelmed by an impression of a pair of crazed, red-rimmed eyes, a slathering tongue, and huge canine teeth leaping for his throat.
'Good Christ!' said Doyle, his back pressed against the door, trying to hold back whatever beast from hell lurked on the other side. To add to his aggravation, Larry and Sparks were having a good laugh at his expense.
'If you could see your face,' said Larry, holding his sides and whooping with delight.
'What the devil was that?' demanded Doyle.
'The answer to your question,' said Sparks. He put two fingers in his mouth and gave two piercing whistles. 'You can open the door now.'
'I don't think.'
'Go on, man, I've given the signal, I assure you, he's perfectly harmless.'
Doyle hesitantly moved away from the door, cracked it open, and concealed himself behind it as a colossal mass of dappled black-and-white canine muscle squeezed through the gap. The dog had a head as big as a melon, floppy ears, and a long, solid snout. Around its neck was a studded leather collar. It paused in the doorway and looked to Sparks for instruction.
'Good boy, Zeus,' said Sparks. 'Say hello to Dr. Doyle.'
Zeus obediently sniffed Doyle out in his hiding place around the corner of the door, sat down before him, his head well above the level of Doyle's waist, looked up at him with impossibly alert and intelligent eyes, and offered a hand in greeting.
'Go on, Doc,' urged Larry, 'he'll get testy if you refuse the hand of friendship.'
Doyle took and shook the dog's extended paw. Thus satisfied, Zeus lowered his paw and looked back at Sparks.
'Now that you've been properly introduced, why don't you give Doyle a kiss, Zeus.'
'That really won't be necessary, Jack—'
But Zeus had already reared up on his hind legs, perfectly balanced, and looked Doyle straight in the eye. He leaned forward with his paws on Doyle's shoulders and pinned him
gently to the wall. Then, tail wagging, out came his tongue for an affectionate lashing of Doyle's cheeks and ears.
'Good boykins, Zeus,' said Doyle uncertainly. 'There's a good bowser-boy. Good doggie. Good doggiekins.'
'Wouldn't talk to him like that, Doc,' cautioned Larry. 'Complete sentences, proper grammar; otherwise he'll fink you're patronizin' him.'
'Can't have that, can we?' said Doyle. 'That's quite enough now, Zeus.'
With uncanny comprehension, Zeus lowered himself, resumed his place at Doyle's feet, and looked back at Sparks.
'As you can imagine, with Zeus in constant attendance, any concern one might have about the inviolability of the fiat is completely unfounded,' said Sparks, ending his experiment with a flourish. He poured the resulting contents down a funnel into three vials and set them to cool in a rack.
He was a handsome and impressive animal for all that, thought Doyle, reaching down to give Zeus a scratch behind the ears.
'Remarkable creature, the dog,' said Sparks. 'No other animal on earth so willingly gives up his freedom to serve man, a devotion unapproached by the hypocritical custodians of our so-called human faiths.'
'Helps if you feed them,' said Doyle.
'We feed our vicars and our bishops, too. I've never known one to give his life to save another.'
Doyle nodded. Looking around, he was struck by the room's lack of amenities. There wasn't even another place to sit besides the stool at the bench. 'Is this your home, Jack?'
Sparks wiped his hands on a towel and began to peel off the applied features of his false identity, setting a brace of white eyebrows down on the table. 'I do on occasion sleep here and, as you've surmised, use it as a base of operations. The considered answer is, I regard myself a citizen of the vorld; consequently I'm at home wherever I find myself, therefore I have no home, per se. I have had none since my brother reduced the one place I ever called home to ashes. Is -at a satisfactory answer?'
'Quite.'
'Good.' Sparks removed the cleric's collar, unfastened his plain coat, and extracted from underneath it the stitched padding that had shaped his ample stomach. 'If you're at all curious about where this company of characters issue forth. follow me.'
Doyle stepped after Sparks as he moved into the room where Zeus had been quartered. The walls in this cramped chamber were lined with racks supporting an array of costumes imaginative enough to keep the Follies in business for a year. A makeup table ringed with lights sported every conceivable paint pot and brush of the cosmetic arts. A jury of featureless wooden heads wearing a rainbow of wigs and facial hair presided over one corner. There were stacks of hat-boxes, drawers of cataloged accessories, wallets with platoons of forged identities, and an armory' of padding to form any desired body shape. A sewing machine, bolts of fabric, and a tailor's dummy—bearing a half-completed brass-buttoned tunic of an officer in the Royal Fusiliers—suggested this vast wardrobe originated from strictly local labor. Sparks could enter this room and emerge as virtually any other man, or woman, for that matter, in the city of London.
'You've made all this yourself?' asked Doyle.
'Not all my seasons in the theatrical trade were spent in wanton dissipation,' said Sparks, hanging up his parson's jacket. 'Excuse me a moment, would you, Doyle, while I become myself again.'
Doyle walked back to the other room, where Larry was feeding Zeus a pocketful of soup bones, which he crunched and cracked delightedly.
'Amazing,' said Doyle.
'Be honored if I was you, guv. First time I've ever known his nibs to bring an outsider here. Strictly off-limits, it is, and for good reason.'
'Forgive my ignorance, Larry, but is Jack well known in London?'
Larry took a thoughtful pull of his cigarette. 'To answer, there's three sorts of folk wot fall under different classifizations. There's folks wot never hear of Jack and never had no call to—your majority of Londontowners, decent sorts going 'bout their business who don't know nowt about that hidden underbelly called the world of crime. Second lot's a most fortunate few who's experienced firsthand the benefit of Mr. Jack working on their behalf—a limited number, seeing as how his efforts been spent in secret gov'ment service but has on occasion been known to spill over into the so-called private sector. Then there's a third category of your garden-variety crook, bandit,
