As a precaution he’d halted in the relative safety of Aldgate to review the treasure map. Now he stepped down from the cab, stretched his legs—he’d been sitting on the hard bench seat for three hours—and marched determinedly into the darkness and stink. He carefully avoided eye contact with the youths loitering on the street corners, the hookers sending come-hither looks from the sidewalk by an alley. There was a curious familiarity to the street life. Fashions and architecture aside, it could have been the wrong side of the tracks in half a dozen cities back home. The shape of the past left an eerie imprint on the present, and one slum was much like another.
The Bond made his way through the warren of crooked alleyways and rubbish-strewn backyards. Nobody was rash enough to try and mug him. Beggars and whores were thin on the ground at this time of night. The few who were still working were plying their trade on better-travelled byways. He passed a few red-lit doorways, the classier ones guarded by toughs with stout sticks, and every street seemed to have a pub or two—identifiable by the drunks passed out in the gutter outside—before it gradually came to him that he’d lost locational awareness.
The narrow streets were twisty and unadorned by signage. In the mist it was hard to tell whether he’d passed three alleyways or four, or whether the last one had simply been the gaping maw of a derelict building. He could wander in this maze for hours, or until some enterprising shitlord assembled a gang of jackals to take down the disoriented lion. He frowned. It looked like he was going to have to recruit a native guide.
The cabbie whose ride he’d borrowed had carried a purse full of change. It was mostly copper, but there were some silver coins as well. The Bond didn’t know much about the weird-ass money here—some strange shit to do with pennies and shillings, tarnished copper coins with a weird number of edges, he couldn’t even figure how many groats made change for a tangerine let alone how many guineas there were in a florin—but a taxi fare was a taxi fare. If the cabbie had been out all day, then the purse was probably most of a day’s takings, which gave him a handle on what four silver crowns, a few shillings and sixpenny bits, and a bunch of coppers translated to in terms of wages.
So the Bond stopped at the next pub he came to and went inside.
For a Whitechapel dive bar it was reasonably well lit and clean: a couple of soot-stained gas mantles were lit, there was sawdust on the floorboards, and there were stools for the drinkers to sit on and trestles for them to prop their pints and their heads on. It wasn’t very busy, which struck the Bond as odd. The clientele was exclusively male, and apparently preoccupied with drinking themselves into oblivion.
The Bond approached the bar and produced a small silver coin, a sixpence. “I’m looking for—” he began.
The bartender slapped a tin mug full of villainously dark beer on the counter in front of him, grabbed the coin, and bit it. “Aye,” he said, “that’s good for two more, like. Unless ye be wanting change?”
“Keep it.” The Bond raised the mug, took an injudicious swig, and choked it down: spitting might cause offense. It definitely tasted as if something had died in it. “I’m looking for a guide.”
“Oh aye, out for a night on the tiles are we, sir?” The barman managed to sound disapproving, conspiratorial, and lascivious in the same sentence.
“Not exactly.” The Bond gave him a hard stare. “I’m looking for a club that’s around here, a gentleman’s club called the Piers Gaveston Fellowship—they have a reading room—”
It wasn’t clear exactly who moved first. The Bond was always alert, and unconscious reflexes set his arms in motion before the other guy did more than tense. He’d barely begun to raise the cosh from under the bar when the Bond grabbed his wrist with his left hand, and twisted. The barman cursed as he dropped the stick, then whimpered faintly as he saw what the Bond held in his other hand.
“How about we calm down?” said the Bond, smiling: “You wouldn’t want my finger to slip, would you?”
The bartender stared down the muzzle of the Glock 18 and swallowed. “We din’t want none of that kind in ’ere,” he said. “No trouble, like.” He swallowed again. “Folks is just jumpy.”
“I didn’t say I was a member of the club,” said the Bond, smiling fixedly: “I just want somebody to show me where it is.”
“Eh, let’s not be hasty, like? I can mebbe find you someone, for some ready? Don’t want no trouble ’ere.” His gaze drifted sideways. The Bond sidestepped abruptly and allowed the would-be white knight to see the pistol. Inebriated courage gave way to sudden sobriety. “Alf,” implored the barman, “Alf! Don’t—” Alf was already backing away, his hands raised and a rictus of fear on his face.
“’E’s the Ripper,” Alf moaned, “’e’s Leather Apron ’isself come to butcher us all!”
The Bond’s smile froze over. “Don’t be stupid, the Ripper doesn’t shoot people.” He raised his pistol and thumbed the selector to single-shot. “Go stand by the bar.”
“Noooo—” The other denizens of the bar were either slithering towards the door or sitting very still in whatever shadows they could find.
If vinegar doesn’t work, try honey … “Who wants to earn a silver crown?” asked the Bond. A shiny coin appeared between the fingers of his left hand.
“’E wants someone to take ’im to the molly-lord’s club ’ouse!”
One of the lowlifes struggled to his feet. “I kin do’t,” he slurred. At first the Bond thought he was drunk, but then he noticed one side of his face sagging, the same side as his limp.
“A crown when you get me there,” the Bond promised. Expression hardening, he added, “Don’t
