"There are a dozen publishers on Russell Street within hailing distance of the museum," said Sparks energetically. ''Did you by any chance submit your manuscript to the firm of Rathborne and Sons?"
"Rathborne? Lady Nicholson's maiden name—yes, yes I believe I did," said Doyle. "By God, do you suppose—"
Doyle was distracted by a small, boxy contraption he had never seen the like of before weighing down a corner of the map. As he idly reached to examine it, Sparks snatched the box away, dropped it into his pocket, and began vigorously rolling up the map.
"Then that's where we will begin," said Sparks. "In the meantime, Larry will move us to other lodgings. I'm afraid you may not find our subsequent housing as congenial as the Melwyn, but it's prudent we spend no more than one night in a single place."
"I could do with a shave first," he said ruefully, watching Larry carry their bags out of the room.
"Plenty of time for that later. Come along, Doyle, the race is to the swift," said Sparks, and he was out the door as well.
Doyle grabbed the last cake from the platter and hurried after him.
Halfway down the backstairs, they encountered Barry running up to meet them—at least Doyle's blistered eyes thought it was Barry: Yes, there was the scar.
"Found a bloke you should have a bash at," said Barry, with uncharacteristic urgency.
"Be more specific," said Sparks, continuing down.
"Aussie bloke. Boxer. Claims he had the acquaintance of Mr. Lansdown Dilks. After he was hanged."
"Excellent," said Sparks as they exited the hotel. "Doyle, go with Barry. Turn the screws: Find out if the man can enlighten us regarding the estimable Mr. Dilks. We'll meet at noon, Hatchard's Bookshop, Picadilly. Good luck to you!" Sparks jumped aboard a small hansom with Larry at the reins, gave a single sharp wave, a salute really, and they pulled away.
This wasn't how the game was supposed to be played, grumbled Doyle, left to his own devices at six in the morning before a proper breakfast. Doyle looked at Barry, who seemed entirely unfazed by Sparks's sudden departure.
"This way," said Barry, with a tip of the hat, and he started walking.
Doyle stuffed the rest of the cake in his mouth and set off after him. The first light of day peeked over the eastern horizon.
Barry led Doyle briskly through the maze of Covent Garden, where in the stalls of the vegetable and flower sellers the commerce of the New Year was off to a bustling beginning. Yawning flower girls smoked cheap cigarettes and leaned against each other to ward off the chill, awaiting turns to fill their peddler's trays. Costermongers combatively picked over the marketed yields of the farmers' winter gardens. Doyle's digestive juices were whipped to a boil by the marriage of aromas that souped the morning air: Arabian coffee beans, fresh breads leaving the oven, grilled sausages and hams, hot French pastries. His gastronomic longings lurched toward despair when he realized he'd left his purse and all his money in the bag that Larry had transported by now to God-knows-where. Appeals to Barry to pause for a restorative snack—at
Barry's expense—fell on deaf ears. By the repeated tipping of his hat, bobbing up and down as regularly as a mechanical dandy in a Dresden clock tower, Doyle deduced that Barry was passingly familiar with more than a few of the merchants' wives and an unusually high percentage of the female shop attendants. Where there's smoke, thought Doyle: Barry's gay-blade reputation must be authentic after all.
Their trail took them to a gymnasium in a Soho side street, a squat, filthy brick of a building, its walls a palimpsest of posters trumpeting the forgotten but once epic collisions of yesterday's fistic gladiators. A soot-obscured homily traced the arch of the Greek Revival entryway, extolling the virtue of exercise to the development of a sound moral character.
Inside the gym, on the far side of the squared circle, a boisterous knot of wrestlers, bare-fisted boxers, and physique enthusiasts knuckled around a cutthroat game of dice. Well-wrinkled cash and cheapjack gin bottles defined the area they'd set aside for the bones to settle after hitting the musty wall—a most unsavory scene that had seen more than one dawn pass by unnoticed. Barry instructed Doyle to wait some distance from the bunch—he was only too happy to comply—while he waded in to separate the object of their quest from the pack. He returned a minute later with a flat-faced hulking mass of hardened flesh, whose bulging bare arms were adorned with tattoos of mermaids and pirates engaged in a succession of suggestive pas de deux. The man's nose spread out horizontally to the width of his gaping mouth, the only useful organ for breathing he had left. His eyebrows were an omelet of scar tissue and scraggly hair, his eyes set as deep as pissholes in the snow. A well-traveled trail of tobacco juice trickled down his chin. The man's haircut was distressingly similar enough to the one Doyle now sported to suggest that Barry must be the man's barber, if not his confidant.
"I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Bodger Nuggins, former light-heavyweight champion of Her Majesty's colony of New South Wales and Oceania," said Barry, bringing the two men together.
Doyle accepted the behemoth's two-handed handshake; it was flaccid, and the man's palm as soft and moist as a skittish soubrette's. The stink of gin wafted off him in clouds.
"Arthur Conan—" began Doyle.
Barry cleared his throat with emphatic vehemence, followed by a vigorous shaking of the head just behind and out of Bodger's field of sight.
"Maxwell Tree," corrected Doyle with the first name that leapt to mind.
"Bodger Nuggins, former light-heavyweight champion of New South Wales and Oceania," said the boxer redundantly, still holding Doyle's hand in both of his and moving it semi-circularly. "Call me Bodger."
"Thank you, Bodger."
Bodger's eyes were slightly askew, the one on the right cheating in as if it secretly desired a better look at the incredible nose plateau prominent to the south.
"That's what folks who knows the Bodger calls him. Calls him Bodger. Rhymes with Dodger," Bodger elaborated cooperatively.
"Yes. It does at that," said Doyle, trying gently to liberate his hand.
"Cedric," said Bodger mysteriously.
"Cedric who?"
"That's me Christian name. Me muther named me Cedric."
"After ... ?" offered Doyle, trying to help him to his anecdote's destination in the hopes of effecting a release from Bodger's determined grasp.
"After I was bomed," said Bodger, simian brow creased with the profundity of a Mandarin court astrologer.
"Tell the gentTman wot you told me, Bodger," prompted Barry, and then whispered to Doyle: "He's a coupl'a sheep short in the top paddock."
Doyle nodded. Bodger's facial contortions redoubled. His eyebrows rode out the effort like a mechanical wave machine in a stormy melodrama.
"Wot you told me about Mr. Lansdown Dilks," Barry
added.
"Ow, right! Bugger!" Thwap! Bodger punched himself in the nose. Judging by its pancaked state, it had to be a habitual response, whether an aid to jog the memory or stem corrective to the stubborn gears of what remained of his mind it was difficult to say. "Lansdown Dilks! Balls! Bodger Nugs, wot a muffer!" And he punched himself a second time.
"Here, here—perfectly all right, go easy now, Bodger," said Doyle. If the man was indeed a former champion, he didn't want a knockout self-administered before beginning his interrogation.
"Right," said Bodger, finding a sudden forgiveness for himself.
"Did you know a Mr. Lansdown Dilks?" asked Doyle.
"Ahh. There's a story goes with this," Bodger said, intimating that an imperishable drama loomed just around the comer. "Let's see... ."