Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

The man opened his coat with one hand to show a long knife in the other.

On his previous visit to this place, Trelawny had asked directions in Turkish from one of the immigrant residents; and though he had been born in Cornwall, his face and hands were indelibly tanned by years of Mediterranean sun, and the local residents had evidently concluded that he was some species of Arab.

Trelawny took an apparently inadvertent half step forward, his open hands raised in front of his shoulders as if to assure the men of his passivity — he was nearly seventy years old, and he let his lined face sag in an expression of senile dismay—

— And then his right arm straightened in an instantaneous blow that drove the heel of his hand into the thin man’s shoulder; the collarbone broke with an audible click and the man dropped to the pavement as if shot.

In the same motion, Trelawny dove forward in a fencer’s lunge and slammed his right fist into the shorter man’s belly; as the man doubled over, Trelawny recovered forward and gave him a slap across the ear that sent him spinning into the wall. Muffled laughter or coughing sounded from the people in the shadows around the combatants.

Swearing in Turkish just because of the reminder, Trelawny hurried to the door at the end of the alley and drew a knife of his own, and he slipped the blade between the door and the jamb to lift the inner bar.

When he had stepped into the low-ceilinged room beyond and pushed the door closed and latched behind him, a black-bearded man in an interior archway lowered a pistol. Daylight, reflected down through holes in several overhead ceilings and the roof, glittered on gold teeth as the man smiled.

“You come unseen?” he said, speaking English with a Turkish accent.

Trelawny was still holding the knife. “Yes, Abbas. Well, a couple of your hooligans out front are hurting, but I left Miss B. in the Seven Dials.”

“Ah. Blinded by the crossing sweeper who gives change and keeps only a ha’penny.”

“Blinded on the occasions when he gives back the payment entire,” said Trelawny, “and then uses his Lady Godiva broom, his Rapunzel broom.”

These references were clearly lost on the other man, but his smile widened. “I will not give back payment for the Greek boat, beyond doubt.”

It was clearly a hint. Trelawny nodded and with his left hand fetched a purse from his waistcoat pocket. He tossed it to Abbas, who caught it in a hand missing several fingers.

The Turk hefted it, then turned and spoke to someone behind him; a moment later Trelawny heard footsteps pounding away up wooden stairs, and he knew that a semaphore signal would be sent from the rooftop of this house, relayed by flags waved on other rooftops across the City, to a man on London Bridge, who would signal a crewman on a cargo boat now laboring up the Thames. The crewman would shortly be diving overboard and swimming to the docks by the Billingsgate fish market.

Abbas sat down on the damp boards of the floor and picked up a bottle. “You wait so long until perhaps it is too late.”

Trelawny sat down cross-legged near the door and stuck his knife upright in the floor beside him. The house smelled of mildew and olive oil and spinach cooking. “I wanted to be sure this was the right boat. I don’t kill innocent people.”

“Anymore.”

“Anymore,” Trelawny agreed.

“Betrayal, in the other hand,” said his companion as he twisted the cork from the bottle, “is good, eh? These in the boat are your — your allies long ago.” He took a deep gulp of the liquor and smiled as he held the bottle out toward Trelawny. “For them you killed … how many Turkish peoples on Euboea, in the Greeks’ revolution? Children and women too?”

Trelawny took a mouthful of the liquor — it was arrack, harsh and warming. “Many,” he said after he had swallowed it. “As many, probably, as you killed Greek women and children in the Morea. But I have renounced the gods I sought then, to whom I made that blood sacrifice. Now,” he said, waving in the direction of the river, “I hinder them.”

Remembering the man he had hit outside, he rubbed his own crooked collarbone, wondering if the stony knot in his throat next to it was bigger than it used to be. It did seem to be. Nevertheless, he thought uneasily, I do hinder them.

Abbas nodded several times cheerfully. “And we help, when you pay us. But why, old enemy, do you not work with the Carbonari? They would fight these old gods for nothing, for even paying you .”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Trelawny, rocking his knife free. He tucked it back into his sleeve and lithely straightened his legs and stood up. “Maybe I just don’t like Italians.”

Abbas tapped his own chest. “And you like Turks?”

“I suppose I don’t really like anybody. Do you mind if I vacate your premises by the back way? Your injured neighbors out front may have found reinforcements.”

“You leave peace in your wake, now, always. Yes, go away by the back.”

Trelawny nodded and stepped past the sitting man and, skirting a kitchen in which several robed women huddled over a smoking black stove, climbed through a glassless window in the hallway. He was now in a long unroofed space too narrow even to be called an alley — a gap where two crumbling buildings didn’t quite meet — and short boards were wedged everywhere between the walls like rungs of a three-dimensional ladder. Any number of destinations could be reached by climbing in one direction or another, even downward into ancient ruptured cellars, and Trelawny began pulling himself up toward the right, toward the shingle eaves and rain gutters that were in sunlight far overhead, knowing that he could get to a rooftop in Earl Street this way, and from there to a flight of lodging house stairs that would lead him down to the Earl Street pavement and the Seven Dials, where the diminutive Miss B. was undoubtedly waiting for him in front of the druggist’s shop where he had left her.

She would be angry. It wouldn’t matter much now, while the sun was up, but he wasn’t looking forward to the night, when she would be … bigger.

AT LOW TIDE there was a narrow sandy beach between the embankment wall and the river in the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, and a gang of ragged children had somehow found it and were wading out into the icy water and bending to sift the sand through their blackened fingers.

Standing on an iron balcony a hundred feet above, shaded from the bright winter sun by an overhanging roof, Dante Gabriel Rossetti puffed on a cigar and stoically watched several large sheets of paper, bobbing on the ripples out of reach of the scavenging children, as they were swept out of the sunlight and into the shadows under the bridge.

He was wearing baggy houndstooth check trousers and a buttoned-up waistcoat under a black wool coat, but the wind — which had carried the drawings so far out over the river to the west that they had only now disappeared from sight — seemed to be finding the gaps between all the buttons.

And in spite of the cold, the Thames here smelled like a cesspool, largely because the ancient Fleet Ditch, a subterranean channel now, flowed into the river beside Blackfriars Bridge. God only knew how those little street Arabs in the shallows below kept from being poisoned by the sewage — They must build up an immunity gradually, he thought, like Mithridates of Pontus who was said to have deliberately acquired a cumulative tolerance to all the poisons of his day.