Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Have you informed the authorities of your suspicion?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, but it seems that they are following procedure without much effect. This wicked manservant must be found before it is too late.’

‘But where can he be?’ I demanded.

‘I think that I might know the answer to that,’ claimed Marx.

The young lady looked as astonished as I felt.

‘What?’ I began.

‘Just say that my contacts among the revolutionary émigrés in Little Italy have borne much strange fruit. Now,’ he said to Miss Cardew, ‘you go home. I feel sure that we will have news of this Pasero fellow this very evening.’

My friend saw the young lady out and then came back into his study.

‘Now Marx,’ I reproved him. ‘What are you up to?’

He merely pulled out a slip of paper from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to me. Daubed with red printer’s ink on the heading were indecipherable Chinese characters and, in black copperplate below, an address in Limehouse.

We took a hansom with a good horse down to the Docks that night. A skull-like moon hung low above the river, casting a jaundiced shimmer on the dark and filthy waters below. Gaslight grew thinner, the streets more narrow, as we came closer to our appointed address. We passed gloomy brick-fields, their kilns emitting a sickly light in the dripping mist. The public houses were just closing, befuddled men and women clustered in disorderly groups around the doorways. There were shrieks of awful laughter, loud oaths and raucous outbursts of brawling and disorder.

We rattled over rough-paven streets. The roads were clogged with muck and grime. The stench of putrescence hung in the air, a wraith of dreadful contagion. Most of the windows were dark, but here and there fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some dreary lamplight like magic-lantern shows of penury and degradation. Here dwelled the sordid secrets of the Great City.

‘My God, Engels!’ Marx exclaimed. ‘Such squalor!’

I was somewhat surprised that he should be so shocked at the appalling poverty we witnessed that night. But then it always amazed me that, despite my friend’s prowess in commentary and observations of conditions, his lucid approach to theoretical social analysis, he could, for the most part, be strangely inattentive and unmindful of the actual destitution that surrounds us. His detachment of thought, however, did not impair a particular attentiveness of his, no doubt born out of his many years of exile, intrigue and subterfuge, and he confided to me that he had noticed another carriage on the same trail as ours and consequently it was likely that we were once more being followed.

The hansom drew up with a start at the top of a dark lane, nearly at the waterside. The black masts of ships rose over the squatting rooftops of the low hovels. We got out and made our way towards the quayside along a slimy pavement and found a shabby house with a flickering oil lamp above the door that illuminated the same Oriental characters that were printed on the slip of paper that Marx had shown me earlier that day.

We knocked and were greeted by a sallow Chinaman who showed us into a long room, heavy with the sickly odour of opium, and edged with low wooden berths, like the forecast of an emigrant ship. The low flare of gaslights glowed feebly, their scant illumination diffused by the miasma of the foul-smelling drug. A group of Malays were hunched around a stove, clattering ivory tokens on a small table. Our attendant offered each of us a pipe. Hastily we demurred and proceeded to search amongst the stupefied occupants of the bunks on either side of us.

We were watched with suspicion by the more sober patrons of that den. Harsh oaths were uttered as we moved through the room; one of the Malays looked up from the game in our direction and hissed something to his fellows in their alien tongue. I began to feel a concern for our safety, though Marx seemed quite oblivious to any danger, driven as always by his relentless curiosity.

‘I’ve always wanted to see what one of these places looks like,’ he commented with a quite inappropriate jocularity.

Through the gloom we could make out contorted figures reclining in strange twisted poses; some muttered to themselves, others appeared to be in a trance, but all were possessed by a mental servitude to that merciless narcotic. In the corner a man lifted himself up from his bed and reddened eyes blinked against the vaporous light. He looked with a docile astonishment upon us, as if not sure if what he was seeing was real or a phantasm of his contorted imagination. He then gave a rasping and mirthless laugh. It was Pasero.

‘Ah!’ he called out to us. ‘Comrades! Citizen Marx, now you may prove the accuracy of your aphorism as to the anaesthetising effect of religion.’ He relit his pipe and taking a ghastly inhalation, held the glowing red bowl towards my friend. ‘Here is to oblivion, comrade.’

Marx pushed the foul object away.

‘Oblivion from guilt?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what you seek here?’

Pasero coughed and shook his head.

‘From sorrow,’ he croaked, mournfully.

‘Elizabeth Cardew, the fiancée of Lord Beckworth, seems convinced that you had some hold over your late master and believes that you were responsible for his death. What do you have to say to that?’ demanded my colleague.

‘That bitch!’ hissed Pasero. ‘It was her fault. It was she that drove him to his death.’

‘Explain yourself, man!’ Marx exclaimed. ‘And why you absented yourself from Beckworth’s household just after he had met his terrible fate.’

‘Because no one would understand. Do you think you could understand?’

This enigmatic query was, of course, a direct provocation to the great mind of my friend. He stroked his beard, thoughtfully.

‘Go on,’ he insisted.

Pasero sat up on the edge of the bunk and rubbed at his sore eyes. He sighed and shook his head, as if trying to rouse his dulled mind into some sort of coherence.

‘I was a young man when I joined Garibaldi’s Red Shirts,’ he began. ‘I hardly knew myself back then. But I was drawn, I know now, to the dear love of comrades. We were a band of brothers and, through danger and action, some of us could find comfort in each other, and secretly believed in that Ancient Greek ideal: that we were an army of lovers. Ah, the Thousand! A true company of men. After Aspromonte I came here in exile, lost and alone in a cold city. I tried to involve myself in the political movements like so many other émigrés, but these dull meetings with their endless arguments and empty resolutions were nothing compared to the solidarity I had known with the Thousand. Then, one night, at a Chartist gathering in Bloomsbury I met with Beckworth. He was kind and generous. Although we were from entirely different worlds we were drawn to each other and we soon discovered the desire that held us in common. We shared another curse, as you would call it, like that of the first Lord Beckworth who was a king’s favourite. I strove to make Beckworth see it was a blessing also.’

‘You mean the abominable sin of sodomy!’ I gasped.

Pasero groaned.

‘Really,’ Marx chided me. ‘We are trying to understand the social circumstances of this case.’

‘Understand gross and unnatural vices?’ I retorted.

‘My dear Engels,’ my colleague went on, ‘I would have thought that you, as the author of The Origin of the Family, might have a more scientific curiosity concerning this problem.’

‘And encompass human perversion as part of my thesis?’ I demanded.

‘If you have both quite finished!’ Pasero declared boldly, his voice suddenly becoming clear and emphatic. ‘I am a man of action, I have little time for your analysis. You theoreticians, you have no idea what real rebellion is! We were revolutionaries of the heart, ours was the sedation of desire.’