Of course, there are other events, but everybody liked an ’orrible murder, didn’t they? And everywhere along the street men were pushing trolleys and piles of paper, or running fast holding tight to smaller bits of paper in a terrible urgency to explain to the world what had happened, why it had happened, what should have happened and sometimes why it hadn’t happened at all, when in fact it did happen after all – and, of course, to tell everyone about all the people who had been ’orribly murdered. It looked a bustling place to be, and now he had to find the Chronicle in all of this, hampered by the fact that he wasn’t very good at reading, especially big words like that.
In the end, a printer in a square hat pointed the way, while giving him a look that said, ‘Don’t you dare steal anything here.’ A bit of a slander to Dodger’s way of thinking, since toshing wasn’t stealing – surely everybody knew that? Well, they did if they were a tosher.
He tied Onan to a rail, confident that nobody would steal him because of the peculiar smell, and walked up the steps to the Morning Chronicle, where he was understandably stopped by one of those men whose job it is to stop the kind of people who need stopping. He looked as though he enjoyed his job, and he had a hat to prove it, and the face under the hat said, ‘Nothing here for the likes of you, boy, you have no business here and you can go and do your thieving somewhere else, you and your dreadful suit. Hah, looks like you’ve got it off a dead man!’
Dodger carefully did not change his expression, but stood up straight and said, ‘My business is with Mister Dickens! He gave me a mission!’ While the man stared at him, he pulled out of his pocket Charlie’s visiting card, and said, ‘And he gave me his card, and told me to meet him here; can you get that into your head, mister?’
The doorman looked daggers at him, but the name Dickens apparently had an effect here for some reason, because another man with a busy look came and stared at Dodger, stared again at the card, looked back at Dodger for one last stare, and said, ‘You might as well come in then, don’t steal anything.’
Dodger said, ‘Thank you, sir, I will try my very best not to.’
He was ushered into a crowded little room filled with desks and clerks, all looking busy with that same sense of frightful importance he had seen out in the street. The clerk at the nearest desk – who looked like the cove in charge of all the rest – watched him like a frog watches a snake, his hand very close to a bell.
Dodger sat down on a bench by the door and waited. Already the fog was rising – it always was by this time of day – and it was creeping in now through the open door. It was like an airborne river Thames, coiling and shimmering as if someone had emptied a bucket of snakes over the street. Mostly it was yellow; often it was black, especially if the brick yards were working. The nearest clerk got up, gave Dodger another scowl and very pointedly closed the door. Dodger gave him a happy smile, which obviously annoyed him; this was, after all, the point.
But there was nothing very much here to ‘find’, anyway. Just paper, just lots of paper and cabinets and mugs and the smell of tobacco and books with pieces of paper stuck inside them, where somebody wanted to keep his place. But what Dodger noticed were the spikes on every clerk’s desk. What was that all about? Each one was sticking right up in the air; there was a piece of wood at the bottom, but why put a spike twelve inches long sticking up where it could do somebody a terrible mischief?
Pointing at the nearest, he said to one of the clerks, in the tones of a simple lad who was only asking a question in the innocent pursuit of knowledge, ‘’Scuse me, mister, what’s this all about, then?’
The young man sneered at him. ‘Don’t you know anything? It just keeps the desk more tidy, that’s all. In newspapers, the spike is where you put something that you have finished with or don’t need any more.’
Dodger gave this information his attention and said, ‘Why don’t you just throw the stuff away, instead of cluttering up the place?’
The clerk gave him a withering look. ‘Are you stupid? Supposing it turns out later that it was important? Then all we’d have to do is find it on the spike.’
The other clerks looked up briefly while this was going on, and then they got back to doing whatever it was they did, but not before glaring at Dodger to make certain he knew that he was not very important here and that they were. He noticed, though, that their clothes weren’t much better than his shonky stuff, although there was no point in saying so.
And so Dodger resigned himself to waiting. Right up until the moment a man with a mask over half of his face barged past the doorman – who had apparently just gone for a piss in the alley as he was stumbling back, fumbling with the buttons on his trousers – and pushed into the room. The villain pointed a large knife at the head clerk and said, ‘Give me your money or I’ll gut yer like a clam. And nobody move!’
It was a large knife – a bread knife, with a serrated edge, perfectly OK in a house where someone wanted to carve up a loaf and probably, Dodger thought, not too bad either for carving up a person. But in the horrified silence he realized that the most frightened person in the room was the man with the knife, who was glaring at the clerks and taking no notice at all of Dodger.
Dodger thought: He is not sure what to do, but he is sure that he might have to stab one of these noodles who are staring at him and wetting their pants – and he pretty well knows that if he does that he will end up in Newgate prison, swinging from the gallows. These thoughts arrived in Dodger’s head like a railway train, and were followed in the guard’s van, as it were, with the recollection that he knew that voice and its accompanying smell of bad gin. And he knew that the man wasn’t a bad sort, not really, and he knew what had turned him to this kind of deed.
He did the only thing possible. In one movement he grabbed the spike from the desk and let the pointy bit just prick the man’s sweaty neck. Keeping his voice low and cheerful, he whispered to the wretched would-be thief, so quietly that the clerks wouldn’t hear, ‘Drop the knife right now and run for it; either that or you will be breathing through three nostrils. Look, it’s me, Dodger – you know Dodger.’ Then out loud he said, ‘We will have none of this around here, you bastard!’
He almost breathed the man’s relief, and certainly breathed an awful lot of gin fumes as he dragged him out of the place and into the fog. The clerks began to yell blue murder while Dodger shouted out loudly, ‘I’ll hold him, don’t you worry about that!’ He carried on walking the man out at speed, past the red-faced doorman and into the nearest alleyway, where he dragged the would-be thief – who, it could be said, was somewhat handicapped by his wooden leg which had a little metal piece on the end of it – along a few yards and pushed him into a dark corner.
The alley smelled like alleys everywhere: largely of desperation and impatience – and now also of Onan, who had vented his spleen and other things in protest, adding to the aromas of the alley a medal-winning stench. Blessedly, the fog made a kind of blanket over them. It stank, of course, but so did the man whose trousers were so lively that quite probably they could have gone for a walk all by themselves.