Doyle had been trying to interrupt. “But Benner,” he said now, “you forget that Darrow’s issued a kill Doyle order too. I can’t approach him.”
“Nobody’s after you, Brendan,” said Benner patiently. “For one thing, everybody thinks I killed you, and for another, they remember you as the chubby, healthy-looking guy who gave the speech on Coleridge. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re emaciated, and pale as a guy in a Fritz Eichenberg engraving, and there’s about a hundred new lines in your face—shall I go on? Okay—and now you’re definitely bald, and to top it all off, your goddamn ear seems to be gone. How’d you do that? And I noticed the other day you walk funny. Frankly you look twenty years older. Nobody’s going to look at you and think, Aha, Brendan Doyle. So don’t worry. You just go into that depilatory parlor and say something like, ‘Hi there, a friend of mine grows fur all over his body, let me talk to your boss.’ And then when you see Darrow you set up the deal. At that point you can admit you’re Doyle—he won’t dare hurt his only link with Mighty Joe Young.”
Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “It’s not bad, Benner. Complicated, but not bad.” Doyle was pretty sure he knew what Darrow was trying to do… and, incidentally, why the old man had a copy of Lord Robb’s Journal. It’s his cancer, he told himself. He can’t cure it, but as soon as he acquired time travel he also acquired access to a guy that can switch bodies. So he gets a copy of Lord Robb because it contains the only mention of the time, place and circumstances of Dog-Face Joe’s vigilante-style execution in 1811. Not a bad bit of knowledge to bargain with!
“Damn it, are you listening to me, Brendan?”
“Sorry. What?”
“Listen to me, this is important. Now today is Tuesday. How about if Saturday I meet you at—do you know Jonathen’s, in Exchange Alley up by the bank? Well, let’s meet there at about noon. By then I can have set up this letter business with my girl and the hairy man, and you can go see Darrow. Okay?”
“How am I supposed to survive until Saturday? You made me lose my job when you shot me.”
“Oh, sorry. Here.” Benner dug into his pocket and tossed five crumpled five-pound notes onto the table. “That hold you?”
“It ought to.” Doyle stuffed them into his own pocket, and then got to his feet. Benner held out his hand, but Doyle only smiled. “No, Benner. I’ll cooperate with you, but I won’t shake hands with a guy who’d try to kill an old friend just to get his own ass out of a sling.”
Benner closed his hand with a soft clap, and smiled. “Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Then maybe I’ll be ashamed. See you Saturday.”
“Right.” Doyle started to leave, then turned back to Benner. “This is a good cigar. Where’d you get it? I’ve been wondering what the cigars are like in 1810, and now I can afford them.”
“Sorry, Brendan. It’s an Upmann, vintage 1983. I stole a box of them from Darrow when I left.”
“Oh.” Doyle walked to the door and stepped outside onto the pavement. The moon was up, and the shadows of racing clouds swept along the street and the housefronts like furtive ghosts in a hurry to get to the river. An old man was hunching along over the gutter in the middle of the street, and as Doyle watched he stooped and picked up a tattered cigar butt.
Doyle walked up to him. “Here,” he said, holding out his own lit cigar. “Never mind that trash. Have an Upmann butt.”
The old man looked up at him wrathfully. “Up mah what?”
Too weary to explain, Doyle hurried away.
Wealthy enough now to indulge himself, Doyle took a room at the Hospitable Squires in Pancras Lane, for all the sources agreed that this was where William Ashbless stayed during the first couple of weeks after his arrival in London; and though he was surprised to learn that the landlord had never heard of Ashbless, nor ever rented a room to a tall, burly blond man, with or without a beard, the matter of Ashbless’ absence was a good deal less urgent to Doyle now that he was in on the deal with Benner.
He spent the next three days simply relaxing. His cough didn’t seem to be getting any worse—if anything, it was receding—and the fever he’d been living with for two weeks had evidently been purged from him by Kusiak’s spicy fish chowder and beer. For fear of Horrabin’s people, or Darrow’s, he didn’t stray far from his inn, but there was a narrow balcony outside his window from which, he discovered, he could climb up shingled eaves to the roof of the building; and on a flat surface between two chimney pots he found a chair, its wood whitened and split by decades of London weather. Here he sat in the long twilights, looking down across the descending terraces of Fish and Thames streets to the misted river, its boats tacking down the tide with an appearance of unhurried serenity; he would have tobacco and a tinderbox lying on the wide brick collar of the chimney pot at his left, and a bucket of cool beer on the roof below his right hand, and alternately puffing on his pipe and taking sips from his ceramic cup, he would look out across the almost Byzantine tangle of rooftops and towers and columns of smoke, all dominated by the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral way out across the city to his right, and he considered, with the comfortable detachment of one from whom a decision is not immediately required, simply not meeting Benner, and instead living out his life in this half-century that was to be characterized by Napoleon, Wellington, Goethe and Byron.
The three-day rest was marred by only one distasteful event. On Thursday morning as Doyle was returning home from a bookseller’s in Cheapside, a shockingly deformed old man hunched and flapped up to Doyle, seeming to propel himself as much by the swimming motions of his driftwood hands as by the use of his feet. The bald head that stuck out from the collection of ancient clothing like a mushroom growing on a compost heap had at one time suffered a tremendous injury, for the nose, the left eye and the left half of the jaw were gone, replaced by deeply guttered, knotted scar tissue. When the old wreck stopped in front of Doyle, Doyle had already dug into his pocket and produced a shilling.
But the creature was not begging. “You, sir,” the old man cackled, “look like a man who’d like to go home. And I think,” he winked his eye, “your home lies in a direction we couldn’t point our finger at, hey?”
Doyle looked around in a sudden panic, but didn’t see anyone who seemed to be confederates of this ruinous person. Perhaps he was just one of the ubiquitous street lunatics, whose line of gibberish chanced to have a seeming reference to Doyle’s situation. He probably meant Heaven or something. “What do you mean?” Doyle asked cautiously.
“Heh heh! Do you think maybe that Doctor Romany is the only one that knows where the gates of Anubis will open, and when? Think again, Ben! I know ‘em, and there’s one I could take you to today, Jay.” He giggled—an appalling sound, like marbles rolling down metal stairs. “It’s just across the river. Want to see?”