Several minutes later, Barker raised his head and looked over at me. “Bring the carriage,” he said weakly.
“Sir, aren’t you too ill to travel?”
“Do not argue or question,” he said brusquely. “What must be done will be done. Bring it ’round to the front door.”
“Yes, sir.”
I went downstairs, but before I went to get my coat, I knocked on Mac’s door. I needed reinforcements.
“He’s going out,” I told him, after he had hopped to the door.
“Out? He cannot possibly go out. He just woke up!”
“That is what I said. He insists. I’ve been ordered to get Juno and bring her ’round the front. Can you have a word with him?”
“I shall try.”
By the time I returned with the cab, Ho and Dr. Quong were helping Barker out the front door, holding him up at the elbows, despite Mac’s protests. They climbed in with him and we bowled off into the night.
Branching off Commercial Street a half hour later, I dropped Quong and Ho at the tearoom and at Barker’s orders took him on a long and leisurely circuit of Limehouse. He had both hands on the head of his stick and the tip was between his shoes, but he looked as if he had just enough strength to sit upright. I had the trap up and could see him nodding to passersby. What was he getting at, traveling so far from his sickbed? Didn’t he know how close he had come to dying?
I paraded my employer through the district. At Pekin Street, just across from the Inn of Double Happiness, he rapped on the trapdoor. I pulled over to the curb, or what would pass for one; Limehouse did not have such genteel modernities. He ran a lit vesta over the bowl of his pipe and took a puff. Like a flue, the smoke shot up in front of me. Barker got down from the cab and walked slowly to the wall, turned, and leaned against it.
“May I help you?” I asked.
“Stay there,” he said in a low voice.
He stood and smoked for a quarter hour, eyeing the opium den across the street and no doubt being eyed in return. After another five minutes, the door to the den down the steps opened, but no one came out. It was black as pitch under the dancing gas lamp. What a perfect spot for an execution, I thought. One bullet and all K’ing’s troubles would be over. Nothing happened, however. No one came out and Barker did nothing more remarkable than to take another match to his pipe in the shelter of a doorway as hyperborean winds whipped through Pekin Street. I would have expected a flying knife, at least. Barker knocked out his pipe and attempted to get back in the cab. It took him three tries.
“Home?” I asked pointedly.
For once I knew exactly what he was thinking. He wanted to go to Ho’s but knew he didn’t have the strength to travel up and down those stairs or through the long passage under the Thames. Reluctantly, he grunted his assent.
“Come on, girl,” I told Juno.
Soon, we were home, where Madame Dummolard and the nurse took charge of our employer, while I saw Juno bedded down for the night. On the way back, I got up my courage to ask Barker what he was doing, traipsing about the East End straight from his sickbed. That was the plan, but like most best-laid schemes, it went agley. The Guv was asleep when I got back. No doubt he had fallen asleep the moment his head hit his pillow.
What would cause a man who had just had his kidneys fail him to get out of bed and travel somewhere, and when he got there to merely smoke a pipeful of tobacco and leave? It was a message for someone, I knew, either for Mr. K’ing, since he had stopped across from the man’s place of business, or for the killer, if they were not one and the same. The message was that Cyrus Barker had not been put out of commission. Barker needed to show his strength by going to the Inn of Double Happiness. It was spitting in the eye of all those who thought him down for the count.
Well, we showed them, I thought, as I got ready for bed. He gave more than a few people food for thought tonight. They had counted him out, but they were wrong. Cyrus Barker was back.
20
The next morning, I found Barker in his big Georgian bed with the heavy damask curtains drawn back. He was leaning against a nest of cushions with newspapers from the last few days spread about and a pot of tea on a tray in front of him. I was glad to see he was not getting ready for work.
“Did Dr. Quong order you to bed, sir?” I asked.
“He did,” Barker said. “I might ignore one doctor, but when they collude, I am forced to obey. Look at this!” He pointed with scorn at a small vase containing a rose on his tray. Barker kept no roses in the greenhouse and it was February, so it must have been brought in from a hothouse somewhere.
“Very nice.”
“Nice,” he repeated, as if the word were poison in his mouth. “I presume you and Mac have reached an understanding with Madame Dummolard’s staff while I was-” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I cannot speak for Mac, sir, but I’ve been too busy or worried about you.”
“She is driving me mad.”
“Madame?”
“If she is not hovering about, her maid or nurse is. The fair sex will fuss over a fellow when he is ill, I suppose, but flowers are not a good sign. Next they shall voice concerns over the arrangement of the furnishings.”
I had a mental picture of a woman, any woman, telling Barker where to put the sofa and could not help smiling. The first thing to go, I speculated, would be the collection of antique weapons he kept on the red walls of his bedchamber. Madame could not do it, but I knew there was a certain widow he visited from time to time who might.
“What else have you been doing with yourself?” Barker asked. “Have you pressed your suit with that Petulengro girl?”
“I haven’t taken the opportunity of your sudden attack to go out spooning every night, sir, if that is what you are implying. Your health and your visitors have kept me occupied,” I said, ignoring his jibe.
“Something about the gypsy shop owner’s death still jars me. She is hiding something. I think you should buy her dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“I am not saying you should make a habit of taking suspects to dinner, but it seems the best way to get her to talk, short of buying up her entire stock piece by piece.”
“I see. You still count her a suspect then?”
“I do not imagine she killed the monks in the monastery in China, but I assume she is capable of shooting a gun in a tunnel. You have got to understand these matchstick girls, lad. They are rather hardened.”
“So, who are the suspects?”
“Ah, no. You’ll not be catching me out that way. You have been in charge for a few days. You tell me.”
I ran my hand across my face a couple of times to give myself time to think. “Well, Mr. K’ing, of course.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You don’t think so?”
“I did not say that, but you cannot just say he is a suspect. You must say why we must consider him.”
“Very well. He is the leader of a criminal organization in London. I don’t think anything of such a magnitude would happen in his district without his having a part in it.”
“Perhaps. Continue.”
“There’s that fellow on the blotter. The betel nut man.”
“Charlie Han.”
“Yes. He is a known criminal. Bainbridge seemed to think him dangerous and so far we have not been able to find a trace of him.”
“How would you proceed?”
“By finding out how long he has been in London?”
“Excellent. Who else?”
“Campbell-Ffinch. He has been in town the proper amount of time and is extremely anxious to get the book.”
“And?”
“Jimmy Woo, I suppose. He seems to know a lot of what is going on in the Asian quarter and he has been here for a long time.”
“We should check that.”
“What if all these murders are really not the work of one man? We’ve got different methods, different times, and even different countries. How do we know the killer of the monks in the monastery over a year ago is the same fellow who shot at us last week?”