“I want you to look at these ch-ch-charts,” Henry said.
“There are better places to bring up a boy who will soon be an adolescent.”
Henry waited until Nialie had retreated to the kitchen. “I hope that he will attend the yeshiva in Crown Heights.”
“And what if he isn’t cut out to be a yeshiva bucher?”
“Look at these charts, please,” a tearful Henry pleaded, “and then tell me the earth is warming.”
Before flying out with Riley in the morning, Moses took Isaac to the Sir Igloo Inn Café for breakfast.
“Can I have bacon with my eggs?” Isaac asked.
“Don’t be a pain in the ass, please.”
“You mean it’s okay for you, but not for me.”
And then Riley was there, his eyes bloodshot. “If we don’t take off within ten minutes we could be weathered in here for days.”
“Isaac, why don’t we write to each other? Maybe you might even come to visit me during your summer holiday,” Moses said, immediately regretting the invitation, and then, turning to Riley, he added, “I’m coming, but I’ve got to say goodbye to Henry and Nialie first.”
Isaac went to join a group of boys at another table. They immediately closed ranks, making no room for him.
“See that old fart who just left here?” Isaac asked.
“So what?”
“He got my father pissed last night.”
“Like shit he did.”
The boys began to get up one by one.
“He used to fuck my aunt in London,” Isaac said.
“Big deal.”
Blocking their exit, Isaac flashed a hundred-dollar bill. “And he gave me this,” he said.
“Bullshit. You swiped it.”
“He gave it to me,” Isaac said, flushing.
“Then we’ll meet you here after school and everything’s on you.”
“I was just going to say that.”
FINDING MR. CORBEAU’S CAMP on King William Island did not turn out to be difficult. A runway of sorts had been cleared at Victory Point, some sixty-five miles from where the Erebus had last been seen. As the Otter lowered into it, Moses made out a snow house hard by the shore. No sooner did Riley slide to a stop than Moses flung open the cabin door, jumped on to the ice, and ran to the snow house. Dropping to his knees to crawl through the entry tunnel he got one of his feet tangled in a trip wire, flipping on a cassette.
There came a clap of thunder. The sound of a crackling fire and another thunder clap. Then a baritone voice, oozing self-importance:
“Moses, Moses, draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”
Bastard. Son of a bitch.
“But here I am not any more.”
Moses, who had made out the tracks of four dogsleds leading away from the snow house, should have known as much. However, he couldn’t have been that late. The snow house, heated by a Coleman camp stove, was still reasonably warm. A caribou skin was laid like a carpet on the floor and on it rested a bottle of Dom Perignon, a tin of beluga caviar, a loaf of black bread, two volumes of Solomon’s journals, and a note: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Five
One
Shortly after his arrival in London, Ephraim was accosted on Regent Street by a girl with sable skin. She was young and saucy, wearing a pork-pie hat with a jaunty red plume and a brown mantle and a heavily flounced crinoline skirt. On any other afternoon Ephraim would readily have accompanied the girl to her lodging house, risking the bully bound to be hidden there, but on his first day in London the ferment of the streets was sufficient for him. The din, the din. Rattling omnibuses, broughams and chaises, hackneys and saddlehorses. He saw ragged boys turn cartwheels, sweeping pedestrian crossings free of dung for elegant ladies, all rustling satins and silks. Grim men in bobbing black top hats seemed to be everywhere. As one of them emerged from a pub, his face flushed, he was confronted by an emaciated old beggar offering boxes of lucifer matches and small sticks of sealing wax in trembling hands.
Ephraim sought out a remote corner of Hyde Park, and satisfied that he was concealed by shrubbery, dug a deep hole with his trowel and buried the leather purse with his gold watch, his prayer shawl and phylacteries, and all of his money, save ten shillings. But he kept his candlesticks secure under his shirt, intending to dispose of them at a pawnbroker’s in Whitechapel or Spitalfields.
Ephraim lost his way briefly in the maze that made up the rookery behind the Strand, emerging hard by St. Paul’s, an unfamiliar stench leading him to the street-level maw of an open underground abattoir, its thickly caked walls sweating fat and blood. As he stopped to gaze, he was thrust aside by workers who were hurling protesting sheep into the pit so that they would break their legs before being set upon with knives by the slaughterers below, already ankle deep in slippery entrails and excrement. Close by other men, heedless of buzzing flies and scuttling sewer rats, were busy boiling fat, rendering glue and scraping tripe.
Mindful of dippers and ganefs, moving on smartly whenever he saw a peeler, Ephraim finally reached Whitechapel. Two sodden sailors lay in a pool of their own piss outside a gin mill. One of them had a purply eye swollen shut, the other a broken bloodied nose. And suddenly there were stalls, stalls everywhere.
The stalls of Petticoat Lane offered apples and oysters, cheap jewellery, boots, toys, whelks, herring and cutlery and firewood. Ephraim pressed on as far as the Earl of Effingham Theatre, joining the rambunctious mob inside. Jenny O’Hara, wrapped in gauze twinkly with sequins, her enormous rouged bubbies all but plopping free of her corset, settled on a swing and sang:
Hopping off her swing, approaching the front of the stage with mincing little steps, Jenny continued:
The sum Ephraim was offered for his candlesticks in the first pawnbroker’s shop he entered did not tempt him; he also declined the pittance proffered in the second jerryshop he visited. Unfortunately, coming out of yet another shop, he was nabbed by a peeler.
Shedding hot tears, Ephraim fell to the gutter, kicking his legs, hoping to attract the sympathy of passersby. He protested that he was an orphan, driven by hunger to pawning his beloved granny’s candlesticks, but his story wouldn’t wash. Ephraim spent his first night in London incarcerated in the gassy bowels of a rotting hulk on the lower Thames and within a week he was sentenced to six months in the notorious “Steel” (so-called after the Bastille) in Coldbath Fields.
On arrival, the lags sized him up and assumed that once Sergeant Walsh had wearied of him, he would be sequestered in the harem until things sorted themselves out and he found a protector. But the obdurate Ephraim refused to lower his trousers for Sergeant Walsh. As a consequence, he was obliged to ride the cockchafer every morning, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps that sank away from him at an infuriating fixed rate in stifling heat. When that failed to do the trick Sergeant Walsh sentenced him to a week of shot-drill on the square. For this exercise he joined other offenders in a row, the men posted three yards apart. On a shouted order from Sergeant Walsh each man picked up a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball, lugged it as far as his neighbour’s position and hurried back to his own place, where another cannon-ball left there by his other neighbour was waiting for him. The drill usually lasted an hour, sometimes longer, depending on how urgently Sergeant Walsh needed a beer. When Ephraim still resisted the sergeant’s advances, he earned himself some time on the crank. This required him to turn a sand-filled drum with a crank handle, the drum’s revolutions recorded by a clock mechanism. He was birched again and again. Then one morning Sergeant Walsh was found squatting in an outhouse, his throat slashed from ear to ear. Detectives descended on the Steel, questioning all the lags, putting everybody on short ration, flogging indiscriminately, but the culprit was never discovered. Ephraim, a prime suspect, was vouched for by Izzy Garber, who swore that the boy, troubled by a fever, had slept by his side all through the night.