the market, the wooden rambling barn packed with shouting vendors and so thick with fish that it seemed impossible that the oceans hadn’t been stripped clean.
A woman strung with codfish pushed past, smearing Pule with bloody slime. Directly after came a fat man leering up out of Oyster Street with a basket full of gray shells, shouting so vociferously in Pule’s face that for a moment the world seemed to him nothing but a great nose, an open mouth, and a shower of spittle. Pule shrank back in disgust. Fish vendors pushed in on him from all sides. Octopi the size of bumboats seemed to be hovering over him, grasping at him with warty tentacles. Baskets of eels appeared, pushed along on a cart, wriggling out over the sides of their prison only to be ignominiously shoved back in and buried beneath a ballast of cabbage leaves.
Pule gagged. It was close as a tanyard. He’d faint if he didn’t have air. “Carp! Carp! Carp!” came a sudden cry. “Who’ll have these ha-a-an-some carp! All alive! Alive O! Prime carp! Carp o’ the gods!” Pule steered toward the voice, groping for his purse. He wouldn’t haggle. This was no time for haggling. He’d have his carp and away. He stumbled, slipped on the carcass of a fish trod to slime by a hundred shoes. In front of him was a plank piled with enormous reddish shrimp, like impossible bugs, their eyes staring on stalks from out of brittle carapaces, huge feelers waving like antennae. Pule rocked against a wagon of squid, nearly upsetting it. “’Ere now!” came a cry, and he was shoved along. There were the carp — seven of them, submerged in a trough of water.
“Fresh as any daisy!” cried the vendor, noting Pule’s evident interest.
“How much?”
“Two pounds buys the lot.”
Pule produced the money and waved it blindly at the man, who snatched it away and winked at a seller of dried herring beside him. “Want them all, then?”
“I gave you enough, didn’t I?”
“No,” said the vendor, “you were a pound shy. What’re you up to? Precious sort of fellow, aren’t you, trying to cheat a poor carp man like me.”
Pule looked up at him, astonished, far too tired and frightened to argue. The man dangled a single pound note from his fingers. Pule gave him a look and got another look in return. “How many for a pound?” he whispered.
“What’s that?”
“For a pound? What do I get for a pound?”
“One bleeding fish, is what. We had an agreement. Me mate here heard it from your very face, and an unnatural sort of pocky face it is, if I says so myself.” And with that he leered across at the herring dealer, who nodded widely and finally.
Pule dug out another pound. “I want the trough too,” he said weakly.
“That’ll cost you another, carbuncle,” said the carp vendor. Pule nodded, his fear and embarrassment metamorphosing into anger. “Here, you!” he cried, gesturing to a costerlad who sat in an empty barrow. “Five shillings to transport this tub of carp out to Soho.”
The boy leaped up and grappled with the heavy trough, spilling water. Pule cuffed him on the side of the head.
“Here’s a brave one!” shouted the carp man, pocketing the most recent pound note. “Look at moony beat this here lad!” And he burst into laughter, reached across the trough, and jerked Pule’s cap off, dipping it full of squid from a passing basket. He shoved the cap back onto the head of the fleeing and humiliated Pule, who, with the barrow at his heels, burst out into the chilly morning sunlight and pitched the cap, squids and all, into the 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
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 on to 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?”
