I jumped out and was soon walking down Commercial Street, that great aorta of London trade. Three months before, this area on the east side of the City was unknown to me, but now I knew it as well as the Elephant amp; Castle. If I had taken anything away with me from our last case, other than several torn ligaments and injured joints, it was my friendship with Israel and Ira. A quick cut up Bell Lane, and a few odd turnings, and I was in Spitalfields. The two of them lived in a boardinghouse for Jewish teachers and scholars. I’d visited enough times that I had become a nuisance to open the door to, and so had been given leave to enter as if I were a boarder. I slipped in, climbed the stairwell to the first floor, and rapped loudly on a door. A voice bade me enter, and I stepped inside.
Israel looked up from his studies. If someone had told me a year before that my two closest friends would be Jews, I would have laughed, having never even met one before, but so they had become. Israel is all head on a stalk of a body, with more nose and less chin than he knows what to do with. At the moment, his nose was propping up a pair of half-moon spectacles, for he had been preparing lessons for his third-form class.
“Thomas!” he cried. “What brings you to Whitechapel?”
“I was wondering if you were interested in sponsoring Ira Moskowitz in the club.”
Israel gave me a shrewd look. “You deem him worthy?”
“I deem him unlikely to ever be asked to join any other club,” I said.
“You are right there. But I’m just a humble teacher, not a famous detective’s assistant. The fourpence nomination fee might break me. Besides, I sponsored you. It’s your turn now.”
“Very well, I’ll pay. In fact, I’ll pay for everything.”
“You’ve ended a case?”
“No. Begun one. I’ll explain when we’re there.”
We quickly liberated Ira from his studies at the yeshiva, and spirited him away to our little club. Ira was mystified at his abduction, and more so when we turned in to St. Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill Street, unchanged for two hundred and fifty years. We opened the door of the Barbados, not a private club at all, really, but the most ancient coffeehouse on the street, and bowled him into the dark interior.
The proprietor came forward and bowed. “Good afternoon, Mr. Zangwill, Mr. Llewelyn. Have you brought a guest?”
“We’d like to sponsor this fellow for membership,” I said.
The owner looked Ira over doubtfully from head to toe. He does not have a prepossessing exterior. He is stout and pale with wiry hair that flies in every direction, and he wears spectacles. The proprietor bowed again and went to get the membership book, but he shot me a look, which said I was no longer in his good graces.
We sat down in a booth in the common room and caught up on recent history. When the proprietor returned, I plunked down the membership dues, fourpence, the cost of two cups of coffee when the street was built. St. Michael’s Alley was the heart of the West Indies trade, bringing coffee, tobacco, cane sugar, cotton, and cocoa back to Europe, hence the club’s name, Barbados. Ira was presented with a clay pipe, which he signed with a quill pen, and added his name at the tail of the subscription book. The owner brought Israel and me our own pipes, and we all lit up.
“Three black apollos,” I ordered. “Some beef chops from the grill at your convenience and a barrister’s torte for our friend.”
“Hear, hear,” Zangwill agreed.
“This is marvelous,” Ira said. “And you say they’ll keep this pipe forever?”
“Yes. Upon your death, which we all know shall be a hundred years from now, they shall break it in twain and hang it in a place of honor.”
Our coffee arrived, and soon the proprietor set down our freshly grilled chops. Ira’s eyes lit up at the sight of food. The poor scholar rarely got enough to eat, and his landlady’s inedible cooking was legendary in Whitechapel. A chop and a nice dessert would suit Ira to the ground.
“Gentlemen,” I said, looking at my friends, “there’s a reason I convened this meeting today, beyond initiating Ira in the mysteries of the Barbados. I’ll be gone for a while, close to a month, I think. It’s a case, of course. It is dangerous, but Barker sounds confident that we’ll succeed. That’s about all I’m allowed to say.”
“We understand, Thomas. We’ll say a prayer for you,” Zangwill said.
“Thank you,” I said.
After our meal and a final pipe, we surrendered our clay churchwardens to the proprietor and watched him settle them in racks overhead. We hesitated to leave, or at least I did. I didn’t know when I’d be back here again, enjoying a pipe and cup and the company of my best friends. In fact, the odds were in favor of my not returning at all. Out in Cornhill Street, I hailed a cab, and solemnly shook hands with each of them.
“We’ll see you in a month, then,” Zangwill said.
Ira reached for my hand, then stopped. “Wait! Thomas, lend me a shilling!”
I shrugged my shoulders, and pulled the coin from my trouser pocket. “Here you are. What’s this all about?”
“Now you’re sure to come back alive,” he said. “People don’t die when someone owes them money. I would never be so lucky as to have someone to whom I owed money pass away!”
“Listen to him, Thomas,” Israel said. “There is wisdom there.”
Twenty minutes later, when I was reaching the step of Barker’s domicile, there was a clatter behind me, and his cab pulled up to the curb. He nodded and we went in together. Mac appeared from his little sanctum sanctorum off the lobby and took our hats and sticks.
“Mac,” our employer said, “Thomas and I shall be away for about a month, and I want the house to remain open while we’re gone.”
“Very good, sir,” Jacob Maccabee responded. He took our leaving in stride, though I knew it would alter his schedule even more than our own. There was packing to be done and arrangements to be made. Mac is a very capable fellow and an excellent servant. I have nothing against him beyond the fact that he despises me. I think he is jealous that I get to go out and have desperate adventures with Barker, while he stays home and polishes the silver.
“The garden must still be tended, and there is no need to shut the house up for just a few weeks. Besides, it would upset Harm’s schedule.”
I saw Mac’s lip curl slightly. The dog was the bane of his existence. Harm shed a pound of hair daily, chewed up the cushions, and spent half the afternoon by the back door, deciding whether he wanted in or out. The thought that he would be forced to stay alone in the house merely to look after this little oriental demon must have made Mac’s blood boil.
“Couldn’t he stay with her, sir?”
Had I been a dog myself, my ears would have perked up. I knew whom Mac was speaking of. Harm had received a savage kick during a little contretemps in our garden during our first case together, and had been taken away and nursed by a heavily veiled woman all in black. I had handed the dog into her lap in a mysterious black brougham. It turned out that she came and tended Harm regularly once a week, at six in the morning, before I got up. I was very curious about her. What did she look like behind the veil? Was she young or old? What was her position? I had tried to question Mac about her, and got nothing out of him.
“No,” Barker said with finality. “Were it November, I might have considered it, but it is June. I cannot deprive Harm of his afternoons sunning in the garden. It would put him quite out of sorts.”
I had to cough to smother a laugh. Barker doted on Harm, or Bodhidharma, to use his full name. He fancied the dog something between an English gentleman and a Chinese prince. Mac, on the other hand, generally used the term “mangy cur” when describing the dog, though not in our employer’s presence, of course. I looked over at Harm, who wagged his plumed tail. I could swear the little rascal knew we were talking about him.