Old Bardo Hardwicke had conceded to Beckett’s demands, had displaced his usual customers, and turned his beloved restaurant into a trap for a degenerate criminal, all while glaring furiously beneath his heavy white brows. He had the weathered, sour look, the thin, hunched shoulders and the bony, clutching hands of a man more than a hundred years passed his prime who was simply too irritated with the world to permit himself a graceful exit from it. Bardo Hardwicke would never give Trowth the satisfaction that he had left it willingly.
The old man had agreed to Beckett’s demands, because the coroner had threatened to simply shut his restaurant down, permanently, as he was able to do under the expanded powers that Stitch had acquired for him. Hardwicke had agreed that one night of bad business was better than unemployment, but he hadn’t been happy about it-though, in Beckett’s defense, it did not seem that Bardo Hardwicke had ever been especially happy about anything during his long and, presumably, very miserable life.
Beckett arrived early, and chose a table in the middle of the room, with his back to the door, relying on his men to warn him if someone came in. He sat alone at his small table, not far from Bardo himself, who sat against the far wall and glowered at Beckett. Beckett glowered back. For two hours, well-past the agreed upon meeting time, these two men glowered at each other. If furious glares could produce actual friction, the angry sparks generated by such a glowering contest would have easily burnt Hardwicke’s to the ground, and probably caused significant damage to all of Lantern Hill. In fact, despite the generally-accepted insubstantiality of ferocious gazes, a few of the gendarmes in the restaurant that night privately harbored suspicions that, had the evening gone on just a little longer, something actually might have caught fire.
In the end, the wave of eleven o’clock bells washed over Hardwicke’s, and Beckett accepted as true what he had privately suspected all along: Anonymous John wasn’t coming. He’d either spotted the trap and stayed away, or else he’d intended some other plan that Beckett had successfully foiled. In any case, the evening had turned out to be a dud.
Hardwicke escorted Beckett to the door-as pleased as he’d ever been-and Beckett’s men escorted him for fifteen blocks back to Queen’s Riot Close. Two more gendarmes were stationed by Beckett’s door, in case Anonymous John or his men had decided to attack him personally. Elijah Beckett nodded curtly to them, then decided that he had no desire to sleep.
“Going for a walk, boy,” he told them. “Stay here, I won’t be long.”
The driving rain of the last few days had mercifully dwindled to a faint spritzing, leaving Trowth’s cobbled streets slick and glimmering beneath its blue streetlights. Beckett walked towards the river, following the robust stream in the gutter that carried scraps of paper and horse and dog excrement along with it. The water ran downhill along Eiger street, where the shops’ wooden signs clattered in the chilly wind, and finally across Front Street, where it burbled gently into the Stark. The night was quiet, and Beckett was struck by how empty the teeming city could seem, like an abandoned temple, or a skull hollowed out by time and neglect, black windows like empty eyes, staring lifelessly into empty streets.
Beckett tasted the sharp, metallic twinge that was his craving for veneine, and a dull throbbing in the bridge of his nose that he’d come to associate with a need for more djang. He resolved to ignore both of these, until he had stared sufficiently into the black waters of the Stark. He would not, he decided, use the drugs at any insistence except his own, regardless of what his body clamored for. He leaned on the granite balustrade that protected the edge of Front Street from the river, and put his addiction and decay from his mind.
While he watched, the old coroner became conscious of a man shuffling down the street towards him. Beckett pretended he could not see the stranger, though he doubted the stranger believed him. The man wore a heavy, brown wool coat against the rain, and he had tangled, matted hair beneath a floppy hat. His shoulders were hunched, and he dragged one leg as though it had been injured and never healed properly. He was precisely the sort of malformed beggar that most of Trowth’s citizens were accustomed to ignoring-a twisted, bedraggled shape that fit so perfectly into Trowth’s crooked corners as to be practically invisible.
The man shuffled to a spot along the railing an arm’s reach from Beckett, and he, too, stared out at the water. Close-up, Beckett could see that he was very ugly, with a face that resembled the product of a man attempting to carve a gargoyle from a potato, and then giving up halfway through. For all his lumpen ugliness, though, there were no signs of sores or disease, nothing weeping or bleeding or oozing, as any such signs might attract undue attention.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Beckett asked, after a few moments, still not looking.
The man said nothing, at first, then gradually reached up to touch his bulbous nose. He pinched at it, and it came away from his face with a faint sucking sound. The ugly man pulled at his cheekbones then, and they came away as well, followed by two marbles where his eyes and been, and lips that looked like fat leeches. He pulled of his hat and a wig of tangled hair, and stood up straight, discarding his hunched shoulders along with his old coat.
What remained was a man in a dark suit, or something that might, for a distance, be mistaken for a man. He had no face at all, just smooth flesh from scalp to chin: pale, clammy skin like a corpse’s, stretched taught over the smooth expanse where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been. How he could see, or hear, or speak was a mystery; what had happened to cause such a particular deformity was likewise unknown. Not so his identity.
“Anonymous John,” said Beckett.
“The very same,” said John, leaning back on the balustrade. His jaw did not move when he spoke, and his voice had a strange vibrato, as though it were produced by a phonograph. “I am pleased to finally meet you.”
“Are you?” Beckett asked. “You might have shown up when you promised, then. Saved me a long evening.”
“Yes, that was inconsiderate of me,” John agreed. “Or, who knows? Perhaps I was testing you, to see if you’d really arrest me if I showed up. Of course you would have, not considering at all that I might have made extensive plans to be enacted in my absence, simultaneously acquitting me of wrongdoing and ensuring that troubles would still plague the city while I was in prison.”
“For a while.” Beckett shrugged. “Your men would run out of orders, eventually. With you gone, the organization would fall apart.”
“Assuming you could hold me, which you can’t.” Anonymous John chuckled. “Or, perhaps you could? Life is full of surprises. Hah, that’s what I like about you, Detective-Inspector Beckett. You don’t care about plans or consequences. I’ve spent a lot of time watching your coroners, you know. I have compiled profiles on all of your men. You were the only one that ever really concerned me.”
“Why is that?” Beckett asked, as he slowly let his right hand drift towards his revolver.
“Because you’re a killer. You’ve decided what’s right, and you know exactly what you’re willing to do in order to get it. Which is: anything. Anything in the name of what’s right. You’re probably thinking about killing me, right now. Of course, it’d be rude to shoot a man in the middle of a conversation, but you don’t care about that, do you?”