A mob of kids danced and hooted as the ogres tossed. The ogres were hamming it up, throwing their loads underhanded, overhanded, eyes closed, from behind. The kids rewarded particularly impressive displays by throwing the ogres fat, red apples, and the ogres thanked them by pelting them with the soggy cores.
All in all, I wasn’t sure the fires had been such a bad thing after all.
Four out of every five of the new buildings around me were residential. Some housed bakeries or bathhouses or pubs or smoke shops or eateries. I didn’t figure I’d get any help from those-no, what I was looking for was an elderly woman with a broom, or an old-timer idling on a bench in the poplar-dappled shade.
I was having no luck finding either, until a door opened right at my left elbow and out popped a well-dressed, elderly gent with a child in hand on each side.
“Bugger,” announced the man.
“Bugger,” cried both children, with the inerrant instincts of the very young concerning curse words. “Bugger bugger bugger!”
The man’s face went crimson, and he nodded apologetically to me.
“Me and my mouth,” he said. “Daughter’s gonna choke me for sure.”
I laughed and stopped walking. Both kids danced and continued to employ their new word for my benefit.
“Obviously not the first time they’ve heard it,” I said. “And it certainly won’t be the last. If that’s the worst thing they encounter today, I’d say you’ve done a fine job of babysitting.”
“Isobell sure as…sure as the world won’t see it that way,” said the man.
I shrugged. “Name's Markhat,” I said, before he could get away. “Say, you don’t happen to remember this place when it was called Cawling, do you?”
The man grinned. “I knowed it! I knowed I knew you from somewhere. You’re Emma Bowling’s boy, ain’t you?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, not me,” I said. “Do you remember a Marris Sellway?”
“Sellways?”
“Sellway. Marris. Had a daughter, Doris? Lived upstairs in old Number Six?”
He pondered that, while both kids yelled and jumped and jerked in his hands.
“I don’t recollect no Sellways,” he said, squinting back through the years. “I lived two streets over, near to the old ironworks. On Ester. Febin is my name. Now, there might have been a Sellways up Northend way…”
Behind me, a cab rolled up, and the children started shrieking their prized new word at the top of their lungs. A woman in the cab began to shout back. The old man blanched, and I bade him farewell and beat a hasty retreat.
That’s finding, nine times out of ten. And you never run into the right person first, either. If I was more knowledgeable about Angels and their duties, I might know who to blame that on, but I hadn’t been under the shadow of a Church dome since the War.
So I walked. I ambled. I whistled. I idled. I bantered with bakers, gabbed with garbage men, hobnobbed with haberdashers, gossiped with maids. I learned quite a lot about Regency Avenue, and what a lovely, wonderful, peaceful place it was, but damned near nothing about bad old pre-War Cawling Street.
At lunch, I found a place that made a better ham sandwich than Eddie’s, even if it was twice the price. The barman there, a scowling old grump who’d probably been in a bad mood for longer than most of his patrons had been alive, had lived on Cawling before the fires, but aside from cussing about having his lot stolen by the City, he had nothing else at all to say.
I kept walking, kept talking. By midday I’d covered maybe half of the north side of the street. By the time the shadows were beginning to get long and the buildings on the south side blotted out the sun, I was nearly to the end of the south side, with nothing but sore feet and an afternoon of useless anecdotes to show for my efforts.
I shrugged. My client was, if Granny Knot was to be believed, as dead as the Regent’s sense of philanthropy. I didn’t figure another day or two would make much difference to a dead man.
A stray wind set the skinny poplar trees to swaying, and in the shade a chill rode up my spine. I saw a patch of lingering sun across the street and made for it, just as the doors to one of the three fancy coffeehouses I’d found opened and a small crowd of a half-dozen men piled out.
You stay in my business long, you develop a sense for trouble. And even if you don’t, when six stalwart strangers pull up their sleeves and crack their manly knuckles in near unison while the tallest and widest of them fixes you in a glare and says, “Hey, you,” you know you’ve just landed in the proverbial wrong place at the unfortunate wrong time.
I stopped and raised my hands.
“Whoa there, gentlemen,” I said. “My name is Markhat. I’m a finder. Licensed.”
They weren’t having any. They rushed me, covering the dozen steps between us at a run.
There are a couple of things you can do when you find yourself unarmed and outnumbered six to one. You can stand your ground and put up your fists and laugh in their bullying faces, or you can follow me in a spirited retreat and hope your pursuers just enjoyed a very heavy meal and are wearing high-heel shoes three sizes too small.
They hadn’t, and they weren’t, and I was never much of a sprinter.
I went down, tackled and flailing, right in front of a dressmaker’s shop window. I caught a brief glimpse of a lady’s upraised hand and look of horror, and then numerous beefy fists fell hard about me and the last thing I recall is hoping I didn’t spoil her day out shopping.
“Boy.”
I tried to cover my ears and roll over.
“Boy.”
Someone dashed water in face, and I came to, sputtering and mopping my face.
It did open my eyes though. At least my right eye. My left one was swollen nearly shut, and that taste in my mouth was blood.
“See what you done to him? I ought to hex the lot of you!”
I groaned and tried to remember things. That was Mama’s voice, but how had she gotten mixed up in this?
My right eye cleared enough to let me see.
I was seated in an office. Mama stood beside me, shaking a tiny stuffed owl at a burly, red-faced man seated behind a massive, oak desk. The man looked worried. The two men flanking him, who stood at perfect Army attention, looked worried as well.
Mama snarled and gave them all one last good shake of her owl before turning back to me.
“You hear me, boy? You back at your senses yet?”
I tried to nod an affirmative, but that just made the room spin.
“All they done was rough him up some, Missus Hog,” said the big man behind the desk. He wrung his hands while he spoke, and his knuckles were white. “They didn’t break no bones.”
Big man he might be, but his tone and demeanor toward Mama was anything but tough.
“Yeah, they were gentle as lambs,” I managed. I looked the big man straight in the eye and spat old blood on his fancy Kempish rug. “I just hope nobody got bruised when they ganged up on me.”
I swear the big man blanched.
“Mister Markhat,” he said. He rose and came around the desk and put his hands behind his back. “They thought you was nosing around, maybe looking for a place to rob. They didn’t know who you were.”
“Hell they didn’t.” I spit again, out of pure spite. “I told them who I was. Told them that I was a finder. Right before they dived in swinging.”
Mama puffed up, and I thought the man-who was a good head taller than even I am-was going to break out in tears.
“Mama,” I said as I worked my jaw and probed the top of my head for fractures, “tell me what’s going on.”
Mama snarled. I swear she snarled, and her general lack of teeth did nothing to reduce the ferocity of it.
“This here big pile of stupid set his bully-boys on ye.” Mama’s Hog eyes were cold and merciless. “Once they’d done beat you half to death, one of ’em found that finder’s card you carries. They brung it to Mister Smart Britches here, and he knowed of a finder named Markhat what was a friend o’ mine, so he fetched me here to see if’n you was you.”