'An old injury he sustained in the South China Sea,' I answered. For all I knew, it was correct.
'The South China Sea! And he sits there, so completely still, staring at you. I felt like a mouse in front of a cobra. I thought he was reading our minds.'
'He does have that effect on people.'
The strudel arrived, and the poor scholar tucked in. It felt good to buy him lunch. I supposed he ate well only on feast days. I sipped my coffee and lit up the cigar.
'Cyrus Barker. I've seen his advertisements in The Times. He must be doing well for himself.'
'Quite well. He has a big office hard by Scotland Yard, and a home in Newington with an oriental garden. And a Jewish butler.'
'A Jewish butler!' Moskowitz thumped the table and laughed. 'I love it! Leave it to Sir Moses to hire the best!'
I handed him the cigar. He held it in his hands like a holy relic. I watched as he drew it slowly under his nose, then brought it to his lips and lit it with a vesta. The Jewish scholar closed his eyes and drew in the smoke.
'Paradise,' he said.
'Let's get back to Louis Pokrzywa, if you don't mind. He certainly had a lot of charities.'
'He did that. He often tried to talk us into helping with this or that one. Not to give money, of course, but time. He was very free with our time. Much of the responsibility fell on my shoulders or Israel'sЧ that is, the Mr. Zangwill I was telling you about. But we explained to him that we didn't have his gifts. We needed time to study or to prepare lessons. Oh, the face he made! He looked like Jesus after he'd just been kissed byЕ John? Jude? I forget the fellow's name. I'm not up on Christianity.'
'Judas,' I told him.
'The very man. Anyway, he'd get the long face and mope, and tell us he'd volunteered our help, and how the children would be so disappointed, and well, of course, we'd break down and give him all our study time. Then I'd be vexed by the next Friday when I did poorly on an exam and he received a first.'
'Had he done that lately?'
Moskowitz thought. 'No, come to think of it, he hadn't. Perhaps he saw that we were beginning to avoid him.'
'Was there any change in his behavior over the past month or so?'
'Your employer asked a question similar to that. This is a marvelous cigar, by the way. I don't know. I thought he seemed a bit moreЕ reluctant to talk about where he was going. It was always, 'I'm going out, Ira. I shall be late getting back.' Perhaps he had realized that I didn't give a damn what charity he was going to that night.'
'Anything else?'
'I wouldn't want to make something of nothing. He seemed a littleЕ distracted. When I first met him, his journal was very important to him. I thought he believed that future generations would be reading his collected journals and gaining great insight. Lately, he seemed to lose interest. I doubt he wrote in it more than once a week.'
'Fascinating,' I said. We'd been gone close to an hour now. 'Was there ever anything to suggest that he might be going somewhere or seeing someone clandestinely?'
'Clandestinely? Louis? Doubtful. Why would he do anything clandestine? A scandal might harm his big plans for the future.'
'Why, indeed? We should get back. My associate is expecting me.' I pulled the large wallet from my jacket pocket and paid the bill. Moskowitz's eyes opened when he saw the size and thickness of the wallet.
'Business must be good,' he commented. We walked back, still smoking our cigars.
'Oh, yes, the Barker Agency is the top agency in London,' I said. Actually, I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good.
'I didn't realize that being a detective was so lucrative.'
'We in the business prefer to be called 'private enquiry agents.'†'
'My apologies, Mr. Private Enquiry Agent.'
'Apologies accepted.'
As we came down the street, Racket's cab came toward us, with Barker inside. I shook hands with Ira Moskowitz and hopped aboard, leaving him awestruck at our extravagance. I looked over at Barker, who had a contented look on his face, like a cat that had gotten into the clotted cream. Obviously, his search of the rooms had yielded something.
'Ho's?' I asked.
'Certainly.'
Barker sucked the last of his noodles up under that huge brush of a mustache and set the bowl down on the rugged table in front of him. I sat and watched him between half-closed lids. Now he would take a last sip of tea and wipe his mouth before reaching for the pouch he'd been dying to open all morning.
I waited until he'd gotten his traveling pipe stoked. 'I presume you discovered something.'
Barker shook his head. 'You first.'
I was to be the opening act, and he the grand finale. I gave him word for word an account of our meal conversation, or as close to one as I could. I'd never had to recount an entire conversation before. I was hoping I hadn't made any mistakes, or left any big questions unasked. Barker sat in stony silence as I gave him my narrative, the only animation being the smoke coming from the bowl of his pipe and the corner of his mouth. As I finished, I was on pins and needles, as they say, hoping for a good word. He puffed on for a moment or two. I wondered if he'd fallen asleep.
'Well done, Mr. Llewelyn,' he pronounced, finally. I let out my breath all at once. 'Sending the waiter for cigars to prolong the interview was a nice touch.'
'Thank you, sir. Had you any reason to suspect that he'd have so many opinions?'
'I did,' Barker responded. 'First of all, people are always reticent about discussing a fellow's faults after his funeral. It's speaking ill of the dead. But, if you get one fellow alone, you might get your blade in him and pry him open like a razor clam. I chose Mr. Moskowitz because he was Pokrzywa's roommate and would have spoken to him most often, but also because he was messy. Have you ever noticed that a messy person is often the most talkative? I fancy if the situation had been reversed, and you were speaking to Mr. Pokrzywa about the late Mr. Moskowitz, it would have been a lesson in frustration.'
I took a sip of the flavorless tea in front of me and glanced about. The room seemed its usual mix of clandestine conspirators. Not only had I become a 'regular,' but I was now involved in one of those secret conversations that Ho's was famous for, or rather, infamous. Who knows, perhaps some fellow in the room was here for the first time, noticing the small, diffident chap talking to the stone gargoyle in the smoky spectacles.
'So how did you get on with Mr. Pokrzywa's bookcase?' I asked. 'Did you make them an offer for the books?'
'I did. They are carefully considering the offer. Louis Pokrzywa was a particularly intelligent and well- ordered man, until recent months. Something set him on his ear. As you said, his personal journal dwindled off after several years of daily entries. The entries were very instructive. Louis really did want to be a prime minister like Disraeli. He hoped to rise to a position in Parliament and convince the government to sponsor a return of the Jews to Palestine. He wanted no restriction against the Jews ever again. In fact, he agreed with Disraeli, who wrote in his political novel, Sybil, that the Jews were not genetically inferior, as the eugenicists insist, but actually superior.'
'How so?' I asked.
'It's been years since I've read Disraeli's work, but let me see if I can put it plainly. Let's take a nation of people, the Irish, for example. Now, conquer their homeland, and disperse them across every inhabited continent. Scatter them among hundreds of different indigenous peoples. Let them be despised and persecuted, and even periodically slaughtered. Do so for almost two thousand years. Do you suppose, at the end of that time, you would find the average Irishman just as you find him today, with his rusty hair, his brogue, his love of life and good ale,
