The Anubis Gates

He glanced at Jacky and saw that the young man was staring at him with surprise and, for the first time, something like respect. “My God, Doyle, you’ve read Lepovre?”

“Oh yes,” said Doyle airily. “He disappeared, uh, last year, didn’t he?”

Jacky looked grim. “That’s the official story. Actually he was killed. I knew him, you see.”

“Did you really?” It occurred to Doyle that, if he ever got back to 1983, this story might make a good footnote in the Ashbless biography. “How was he killed?”

The young man drained his brandy again and recklessly poured himself a lot more. “Maybe some day I’ll know you well enough to tell you.”

Still determined to get something publishable out of the boy, Doyle asked, “Did you know his fiancee, Elizabeth Tichy?”

Jacky looked startled. “If you’re from America, how do you know all this?”

Doyle opened his mouth to voice a plausible reply, couldn’t think of one, and had to make do with, “Some day, Jacky, I may know you well enough to say.”

Jacky raised his eyebrows, as if considering taking offense; then he smiled. “As I said, Doyle, there’s certainly more to you than meets the eye. Yes, I knew Beth Tichy—quite well. I knew her years before she met Lepovre. I still keep in touch.”

“Evidently I was nearly correct in saying that you two were old pals,” said Copenhagen Jack. “Doyle, you come with me. Old Stikeleather has got me halfway through Dallas’ Aubrey, but the way he reads he’ll be at least another year finishing it. Let’s see if you can read a little more quickly.”

* * *

The low-ceilinged kitchen of The Beggar in the Bush was crowded, but most of the people were hanging over the table where a card game was going on, and Fairchild, nursing his cup of gin in a dark corner, had room to lean back and put his feet up against the bricks of the wall. Long ago he’d learned not to gamble, for he could never understand the rules, and regardless of what sort of cards he was dealt, somehow people always took his money away and told him he’d lost.

He had taken only one of the shillings from the drainpipe in the alley off Fleet Street, for he had figured out a plan: he would join Horrabin’s beggar army and keep the shillings just for special things like meat and gin and beer and—he gulped some gin when he thought of it—a girl every now and then.

His gin gone, he decided not to have another, for if he missed signing up with the stilted clown tonight he’d have to spend some of his money on mere lodging, and that wasn’t part of his plan. He stood up and made his way through the shouting and laughing press to the front door of the place and stepped outside.

The flickering lamplight seemed to fall with reluctance across the overhanging housefronts of Buckeridge Street, laying only the faintest of dry brush touches on the black fabric of the night—here an open window high in one wall was underlit, though the room beyond was in darkness; there the mouth of an alley with another lamp somewhere along it was discernible only by a line of yellowly glistening wet cobblestones, like a procession of toads only momentarily motionless in their slow crossing of the street; and ragged roofs and patches of scaling walls were occasionally visible when the vagrant breeze blew the lamp flame high.

Fairchild groped his way across the street to the opposite corner, and as he hunched along toward the next street he could hear snoring from behind the boards nailed up over the unglassed windows of Mother Dowling’s boarding house. He sneered at the oblivious sleepers who, as he knew from experience, had each paid three pennies to share a bed with two or three other people and a room with a dozen more. Paying money to be packed like bats in an old house, he thought, smug in the knowledge that he had other plans.

A moment later, though, he was uneasily wondering just what sort of sleeping arrangements Horrabin might provide. That clown was scary; he might have everybody sleep in coffins or something. The thought made Fairchild halt, gaping and crossing himself. Then he remembered that it was getting late, and whatever he intended to do he’d better do soon. At least Horrabin’s is free, he thought, moving forward again. Everybody’s welcome at Horrabin’s.

The sewer parliament would have adjourned by this time, so instead of turning right on Maynard toward Bainbridge Street he followed the wall that brushed his left shoulder, around the corner to face the north, where on the far side of Ivy Lane stood the dark warehouse-like structure known in the neighborhood as the Horrabin Hotel, or Rat’s Castle.

Now he was worrying that they might not take him in. After all, he was not smart. He reassured himself with the reflection that he was a good beggar, at least, and that’s what was important here. It also occurred to him that Horrabin might be interested to learn that Copenhagen Jack’s newest deaf-mute was a fake, and could be tricked into talking.