The Tiger in the Well, Page 33

  Daniel Goldberg winced. The doctor prodded deeper and said, "What's the matter? Drink the medicine."

  "It's the wrong kind of medicine."

  "It's the best. Scotch medicine. Here we are."

  There was a clink as something dropped into a metal bowl. Goldberg let out his breath in a low whistle.

  "Tell you what, I'll have a cigar instead," he said.

  "No cigars. You can't smoke medicine. Keep still."

  The doctor dabbed on something that stung.

  "Can I have this, mister?" said Tony, picking up the bloody, distorted bullet.

  "Help yourself," said the doctor. "No use to me. Wasn't much use to Mr Goldberg either."

  They were in a small surgery in Soho. The doctor was a friend and a socialist, and when Goldberg and the boys had banged on his door, he'd merely sighed before letting them in and setting to work.

  As he strapped a bandage around Goldberg's shoulder he said, "Of course, I'm a citizen as well as a medical man, you know."

  "What's that mean?"

  "It means I ought to tell the police when people come here with bullet-holes in them. What's going on, Goldberg?"

  Goldberg sipped the whisky and made a face. "White slavery, fraud, kidnapping. . . It's too complicated to explain now - I will when it's over. Now listen, boys. Liam and Bill and Bridie and the others - where will they be?"

  "Couldn't say, mister," said Con. "There's half a dozen kips they might be using."

  "Is he all right?" said Tony suspiciously, jerking his thumb at the doctor.

  "Are you all right?" said Goldberg.

  "I'm not even here," said the doctor, putting his instruments into a bowl of disinfectant. "I'm a hallucination, and I'm going back to bed. Don't put any strain on that arm. Let yourselves out, and throw the key back in through the broken fanlight."

  Con and Tony were shocked.

  "Hey, mister," said Tony. "Doctor, I mean. You shouldn't do tricks like that with yer key - it's as good as an open door. Me and Con here'll come back tomorrow and show ye how to make the place safe. There's all kinds of villains about."

  "Well, that's a fair offer," said the doctor. "And if anyone plants a bullet in you, young man, you know where to come to get it plucked out. Now be off with the lot of you - it's three in the morning."

  Outside in the street Goldberg said, "The kip. You were telling me where the others might be."

  "Oh, aye," said Con. "Ye see, mister, there's half a dozen different places they might have took her to. They'll move around, like. D'ye want to go and look?"

  "I've got something else to do, and straight away, what's more. You get back to Lambeth, the pair of you. When you find out where they've gone, get a message to me at 27, Dean Street, Soho."

  "27, Dean Street. Hey, mister - what's it all about, this hooley? Eh?"

  "It's about the Jews in the East End."

  "Is there going to be a fight?"

  "Probably. But--"

  Con slapped his thigh and crowed.

  "And won't the bloody sheenies get a pasting!" he said. "Begob, I'd love to -"

  He stopped. Goldberg was looking at him steadily, and Tony was mortified.

  "Ye crack-headed fool," he hissed, "can't ye see yer man's a Jew?"

  Con gaped. And then he blushed. It was a new sensation; the others couldn't see it in the rain and the murky lamplight, but he felt it most acutely.

  "Arrah," he moaned. "Man, I beg yer pardon. If I'd known ye was Jewish I'd . . . I'd . . . I'd bloody fight for them."

  "He'd still have rescued ye," said Tony to Goldberg. "I'll go bail for that."

  Con held out his hand, and Goldberg shook it.

  "I believe you," he said. "But don't you talk like that again, or I'll make you wish you hadn't. Here. . ." He fished three cigars out of his pocket. "Three left. That's one each. Remember - get that message to me, and if I'm not there, get someone to make a telephone call to--"

  "I can make telephone calls," said Tony. "What's the number?"

  "4214. You heard of Kid Mendel?"

  They nodded, wide-eyed.

  "Well, that's his number. There'll be a man on the line who'll take a message."

  "Where are ye going, mister?" said Con. "Is there a chance of a barney?"

  Goldberg looked down at the dripping little savage, and shook his head.

  "Another time. Go and find the kid."

  The boys lit their cigars, and Goldberg's, and strolled off philosophically. He turned to the east, through the narrow streets around Covent Garden, packed already with carts and wagons of produce for the morning market. Porters lifted boxes of oranges, sacks of nuts, crates of cabbages; the air was full of shouts and the trundle of heavy wheels, and the warm interior of the pubs steamed invitingly. In the early hours of the morning, this was the busiest part of London.

  But they were busy in Whitechapel too. The baker in Holywell Street would be building his fire; Parrish's thugs would be gathering in the darkness. Goldberg quickened his steps, and hoped he'd be in time.

  Sally heard the hum of the hydraulics and sat up. It wasn't quite dark; a little light came down the lift shaft, and she saw a faint shadow move on the floor, which told her the lift was coming.

  The first thing she'd done when they'd thrown her down there in the dark had been to feel her way round the walls. The room was empty; the table and chair she remembered from her previous visit had obviously been removed. There was nothing there but the lift shaft, the door to the stairs, and the door into the other room, both of which were locked.

  She felt her stocking. The paper was still there. She smoothed her cloak down over her lap and sat up as straight as she could.

  The lift reached the bottom, light spilling out of the iron grille. It sank into stillness with a whisper, and then the door clattered open. She watched as Michelet pushed the great chair out of the lift and on to the parquet floor.

  Ah Ling looked around.

  "This is the first time I have been down in my cellar," he remarked. "What is that noise?"

  Michelet cocked his head on one side. It was the sound Sally had heard before, the subterranean rushing of water, much clearer now, much closer and louder.

  "I could not say, sir," said Michelet.

  In the wavering light of the lamp he held, the valet's face was ghastly pale. The dressing-gown and the bandage over his eye made him look like some shrouded corpse, and Sally seemed to see for a moment a procession of figures like his, all the dead of Spitalfields, all the unknown silent ones from centuries past - under the ground as they were, too.

  She met the eyes of Ah Ling, Henry Lee, the Tzaddik.

  "I have had time to think," he said. "Of course I have been thinking of this moment for several years, but another hour or so's thought is never wasted. You are a very clever and resourceful woman, Miss Lockhart."

  "I wish there was a better witness than this man to hear you say that," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Because you have twice called me Miss Lockhart and not Mrs Parrish. I'd like to summon you as a witness against him in court."

  He smiled. "Oh, Parrish," he said. "He's disposable. We shall find a way to get rid of him."

  "You haven't found a way to get rid of me yet. Or is that what you came down here to do?"

  "No. As I said, I've had an hour or so to think in. How did you find out my address?"

  "From a girl who followed you from Moscow."

  "I see. And what were you intending to do in my bedroom an hour ago?"

  "Simply to find out if you were the man I thought you were."

  "And if you'd seen no scar, no bullet mark?"

  She was silent. And she realized how long she'd known, how long she'd kept it from herself.

  "Well," he said, "I want to ask you some questions, Miss Lockhart. To begin with--"

  "I've got some questions for you. Why are you persecuting the Jews?"

  "Someone has to."

  "What a stupid answer."

&nb
sp; "It was a stupid question."

  "It was a good question. Why are you doing it?"

  "Because they are there. Because they are an easy target. Because no one else objects if I do. I'm trying to recall what your maidservant character - Kemp, was it? - can have overheard. . ."

  "I've overheard enough to judge when you're telling me the truth."

  "You are in no position to judge anything."

  "I'm in the best position of all. I assume I'm about to die; there's nothing to be afraid of. I can see you very clearly now, Mr Lee, Ah Ling, Hendrik van Eeden, Mr Eliot, Mr Todd, however many names you have. You remember those last two? You used them when you killed Mr Bedwell the sailor and Mr Selby, my father's ex-partner. In no position to judge?" She found herself getting up - found herself on her feet almost without realizing she intended to stand. "By God, I was born to be your judge! So now you can listen to my judgement."

  She was facing him, balanced lightly, her short hair disordered, her cloak adrift from her shoulder. Michelet stood by, like a corpse holding a corpse-light, and Ah Ling sat stolidly with his eyes blazing black.

  "You've been buried inside my life like some filthy worm. You know everything about me. So you know about Frederick Garland my lover and Jim Taylor and Webster Garland my friends; you know about my daughter and my house and my servants, and you know about my business and my partner. . . You know everything I've done. So you'll know about Axel Bellmann, the man who killed Frederick. The man who made the Steam Gun. I was reminded of him just now - but only for a second. I was in his power then as I am in yours now, but really it was no contest, Ah Ling. You see, he was a genius, of a kind, and you're not. He had a vision - of a kind - and you haven't. He was serving something greater than he thought he was, even though it was evil. But you - you're just greedy. Your mind is coarse and your appetite is coarse and you haven't a shred of wit or imagination or grace in your entire soul. There are only two things that keep you going: one is making money and the other is hating me. So when I ask why you're persecuting the Jews, you don't have the strength or the boldness to say because I'm greedy or because I'm cruel, you just make some cheap little gibe. It was the same all those years ago, with your opium smuggling. Nothing behind it but greed. A little fat boy cramming sweets into his mouth, for ever and ever. . ."

  He opened his mouth to speak. But she took a step forward, ferocious now, and Michelet flinched and drew back, making the lamp flicker. Ah Ling's eyes were flaring, poisonous, corrosive - but Sally didn't care. She went on over him:

  "You see, another thing I've learnt, and I suppose I ought to be grateful to you, is what evil looks like. It doesn't look like a sinister fat man in a wheelchair - it doesn't look Chinese or Russian or exotic or foreign. Or strange. Those things aren't evil. You're not evil. You're too bloody picturesque to be evil, with your monkey and your schemes for training my daughter to do your bidding and wipe your fat mouth--"

  "How do you know that?" he cried.

  "Because I came down here one night and heard that man behind you trying to bargain with the secretary to let him train her!"

  "It's not true, monsieur!" Michelet cried.

  "It is true - and he knows it because he caught me on the stairs afterwards. I heard everything--"

  Michelet put the lamp on the floor and sprang at her like a furious dog. And because she saw him coming, and because for this one moment she was not afraid of anything, she didn't give an inch. She met his fists with her hands, her nails, her teeth; she clawed at his face, his hair, his arms - and the bandage came loose from his head, and he pulled away in terror, and she pushed him whimpering to the floor.

  "Michelet, put the lamp on that bracket," said Ah Ling, his voice heavy with contempt.

  Sally stooped and did it for him. The valet was clutching his head and moaning - but then Sally saw the handle of her pistol in his pocket. If he remembered that, he could kill her in a second. And she hadn't finished yet.

  She turned back to the man in the wheelchair.

  "I was telling you about evil," she said, "now that I know what it is. It's what makes a man get drunk and press a red-hot poker on his child's back. It's what makes men have to queue for hours at the dock gates for the chance of a job, when there are only a dozen jobs for a hundred men, so they fight each other to get them, and the foremen laugh and egg them on. That's evil. It's what takes an old couple who've got nothing left but each other and splits them up to go in the workhouse so they each die alone. It's what takes rent out of tenements and slums and refuses the responsibility of mending the drains, so that children have to wade knee-deep through filth to get into their houses. . . Don't interrupt. Don't open your mouth. Listen to me and learn. Evil. . . It's what makes a family starve - the family I heard about the other day, five of them, father and mother and three children all dead, with nothing in their little room, nothing, because they'd pawned every spoon and every blanket and every chair, and there was no work, and they starved to death. And I've never gone without a meal in my life. My city. The same city that I live in - this happens. That's evil. And you know what's at the heart of it all? Eh? The gnawing poison cancer destroying and eating and laying waste at the heart of it all? It's not only you, you poor pitiful man; it's me too. Me and ten thousand others. Because we have shares in the company that owns those buildings and doesn't repair the drains, and we make money out of the docks that prosper by denying men work, and because we've never looked. All this time, all the money we've made so cleverly by buying and selling and buying again - we never knew what it meant. Didn't know what a pound meant. Didn't know what a shilling meant.

  "Well, I know now. Thanks to Daniel Goldberg, and Miss Robbins of the Spitalfields Mission, and people like them, I know better. And thanks to you, too, you poor ignorant helpless man. I didn't know about the consequences of things, the way everything's joined up, till I saw that wound in your chest. All those poor opium addicts you killed, and my father, and all the Jews you've swindled, and me. . . We're all connected. Goldberg's right."

  She brushed the tears aside. They kept on flowing, irrelevantly.

  "And in the carriage, that night. . ." she said. "What were you intending to do? Kill me? Among other things?"

  His face was still.

  "Possibly," he said.

  "Then I should have killed you. I tried to, didn't I?"

  No answer.

  "Yes, I tried. And look what I did instead. Condemning you to this. . . No, I never intended this, Ah Ling. You didn't deserve this. But I did it. Just as I made that family starve and I put those men out of work and I drove that man mad with misery and despair so that he tortured his child with a red-hot poker. I did it, without knowing it. So I'm guilty, me and all the other shareholders and speculators and capitalists. You know where evil is? It's not just in you. It's in. . . Pretending not to know things when once you've seen them. Seeing something bad, and shutting your eyes, turning away. All right, I didn't know. But there's no excuse now I do. So I'm going to -"

  She stopped, the passion shaking her voice into silence, clutching her chest. And through the tears which flowed helplessly from her eyes, she saw him sitting there, bored.

  There was no mistaking it. He just couldn't understand her. And she saw how right she'd been: he was a coarse, brutal, limited man whose manners and graces and fine connoisseurship were no more than perfume sprinkled over garbage. She'd confessed to him. She'd opened herself to him, in acknowledgement of the hurt she'd done him. She'd offered him that - and he was bored.

  But what had she been going to say, anyway? I'm going to join Goldberg and work with him. . . She wasn't going to do anything of the sort. She was going to die. She felt cold. In a minute he'd tell Michelet to shoot her, and that would be that. Well, at least Harriet was safe. If Jim came back, if Margaret traced her, then she'd be looked after. If they didn't, then she couldn't imagine a kinder, safer place than the Katzes' household. Goldberg would make sure. . . Oh, if he was free still, if they hadn't caug
ht him. . .

  "By the way," said Ah Ling. "You will not have heard. Parrish has found your daughter."

  Was he joking? The flat heavy face was sly and triumphant.

  "Where - how do you know -"

  "Winterhalter spotted some men hanging about outside. Jews. They were looking for the child, because it was missing, and when the police questioned them, they admitted it was Parrish who'd taken her."

  "No!"

  "True. She is in Parrish's hands, and very soon she will be in mine."

  "I don't believe you -"

  "Well, let me convince you. She had been held illegally in the household of a man called Katz. Do you believe me now? You have got nothing left, Miss Lockhart. After all this time, I've won."

  She sank to the floor. There was a roaring in her ears - but it wasn't in her ears; and her arms and legs were shaking - but no, it wasn't her, it was the floor and the walls -

  And then the wheelchair began to move, rolling slowly towards her, although Michelet was still lying on the floor.

  Ah Ling's expression was wild with alarm. Sally, numb and astonished, scrambled out of the way just in time, as the heavy chair struck the wall and Ah Ling slumped forward.

  "Michelet!" he cried as he fell.

  But Michelet couldn't move. Couldn't even cry out; he was dumb with amazement, for the floor was not there under him any more: he stood waist-deep in swirling water.

  It had happened too quickly for him to do more than gasp. The bandage trailed over his shoulder; his wounded eye, bloody and inflamed, glared like that of the Cyclops as the shaking lamplight shone on him - and then he cried out in fear, and lost his footing on whatever was below, and in an instant was sucked under the water and away.

  Sally hadn't moved. She couldn't. The floor was cracking and splintering; huge fragments of stone and concrete were falling into this swirling, surging torrent which had suddenly thrust itself into the room. She was lying against the wall next to the wheelchair, and her cloak was caught under its wheel, holding her down as she struggled to get up. The floor had tilted back at first, making the chair roll towards the wall and tipping her with it, but now as she tore loose the buttons at the neck of her cloak and struggled up free of it, something far below gave way, and the water responded with a surge. The floor tipped sickeningly forward - towards the hole where Michelet had disappeared.