James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

That was after I had shaken his hand and introduced my self. “I’m Abner Benbow,” I said, thinking this up on the spot and almost saying “Admiral Benbow,” but stopping myself just in time. “I’m in the ice trade, up in Harrogate. They call me ‘Cool Abner Benbow,’” I said, “but they don’t call me a cold fish.” I inclined my head just a little, thinking that maybe this last touch was taking it too far. But he liked it, saying he had a “monicker” too.

“Call me Bob,” he said, “Country Bob Bowker. Call me anythin’ you please, but don’t call me too late for dinner.” And with that admonition he slammed me on the back with his open hand and nearly knocked me through the wall. He was convulsed with laughter, wheezing and looking apoplectic, as if he had just that moment made up the gag and was listening to himself recite it for the first time. I laughed too, very heartily, I thought, wiping pretended tears from my eyes.

“You’re a Yank,” I said. And that was clever, of course, because it rather implied that I didn’t already know who he was, despite his recent fame.

“That’s a fact. Wyoming man, born and bred. Took to the sea late and come over here two years ago just to see how the rest of the world got on. I was always a curious man. And I was all alone over there, runnin’ ferries out of Frisco over to Sarsleeto, and figured I wouldn’t be no more alone over here.”

No more than any common criminal, I thought, assuming straight off, and maybe unfairly, that there was more to Captain Bowker’s leaving America than he let on. I nodded, though, as if I thought all his nonsense very sage indeed.

“Been here long?” I asked, nonchalant.

He gave me a look. “Didn’t I just say two year?”

“I mean here, at the icehouse.”

“Ah!” he said, suddenly jolly again. “No. Just got on. If you’d of come day before yesterday you wouldn’t have found me. Old man who ran the place up and died, though. Pitched over like he was poisoned, right there where you’re a-standing now, up and pitched over, and there I was an hour later, looking in at the door with my hat in my hands. I knew a little about it, being mechanical and having lived by the sea, so I was a natural. They took me right on. What’s all that to you?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I said, realizing right off that I shouldn’t have said it twice; there was no room here to sound jumpy. But he had caught me by surprise with the question, and all I could think to say next, rather stupidly, was, “ Up and died?” thinking that the phrase was a curious one, as if he had done it on purpose, maybe got up out of a chair to do it.

You can see that I had got muddled up. This wasn’t going well. Somehow I had excited his suspicions by saying the most arbitrary and commonplace things. Captain Bowker was another lunatic, I remember thinking — the sort who, if you passed him on the street and said good-morning, would squint at you and ask what you meant by saying such a thing.

“Dropped right over dead on his face,” said Captain Bowker, looking at me just as seriously as a stone head.

Then he grinned and broke into laughter, slapping me on the back again. “Cigar?” he asked.

I waved it away. “Don’t smoke. You have one. I like the smell of tobacco, actually. Very comfortable.”

He nodded and said, “Drives off the ’monia fumes,” and then he gnawed off the end of a fat cigar, spitting out the debris with about twice the required force.

“So,” I said. “Mind if I look around?”

“Yep,” he said.

I started forward, but he stepped in front of me. “Yep,” he said again, talking past his cigar. “I do mind if you look around.” Then he burst into laughter again so that there was no way on earth that I could tell what he minded and what he didn’t mind.

He plucked the unlit cigar out of his mouth and said, “Maybe tomorrow, Jim. Little too much going on today. Too busy for it. I’m new and all, and can’t be showing in every Dick and Harry.” He managed, somehow, to get me turned around and propelled toward the door. “ You understand. You’re a businessman. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe, or the next day. That’s soon enough, ain’t it? You ain’t going nowhere. Come on back around, and you can have the run of the place. Bring a spyglass and a measure stick.”

And with that I was out in the fog again, wondering exactly how things had gone so bad. In the space of ten minutes I’d been Abner and Jim and Dick and Harry, but none of us had seen a thing. At least I hadn’t given myself away, though. Captain Bowker couldn’t have guessed who I really was. I could relate the incident to St. Ives and Hasbro without any shame, There was enough in the captain’s manner to underscore any suspicions that we might already have had of the man, and there was the business of his not wanting me to see the workings of the icehouse, innocent as such workings ought to be.

I lounged along toward the Apple — it wasn’t the weather for hurrying — and had got down past the market, maybe a hundred yards beyond The Hoisted Pint, when I heard the crack of what sounded like a firecracker from somewhere above and behind me. Immediately an old beggar with his shoes wound in rags, standing just in front of me, stiffened up straight, as if he’d been poked in the small of the back, and a wash of red blood spread out across his shirtfront where you could see it through his open coat.

Before I could twitch, he sat down in the weeds and then slumped over backward and stared at the sky, his mouth working as if he were trying to pray, but had forgot the words. He had been shot, of course — in the heart — by someone with a dead-on aim.

A woman screamed. There was the sound of a whistle. And without half knowing what I was about, I had the man’s wrist in my hand and was feeling for a pulse. It was worthless. Where the hell do you find a man’s pulse? I can’t even find my own half the time. I slammed my hand over the hole in his chest and leaned into it, trying to shut off the rush of blood and feeling absolutely futile and stupid until a doctor strode up carrying his black bag. He crouched beside me, squinted at the corpse, and shook his head softly to tell me that I was wasting my time.

Reeling just a little from the smell of already-drying blood, I stood up and stumbled over to sit on a bench, where I hunched forward and pretended for a bit to be searching for a lucky clover until my head cleared. I sat up straight, and there was a constable looming over me with the look in his eye of a man with a few pressing questions to ask. If I was a rotten actor in front of Captain Bowker, I had improved a bit in the score of minutes since, and it was a simple thing to convince the constable that I knew nothing of the dead man.

I avoided one issue, though: I seemed to be collecting dead men all of a sudden. First there was the tragedy up in Holborn, now a man drops dead at my feet, shot through the heart. Most of us go through our lives avoiding that sort of thing. Now I was getting more than my share of it. It was evidence of something, but not the sort of evidence that would do the constable any good, not yet anyway.

It wasn’t quite noon when I got back to the Crown and Apple and cleaned myself up, and when St. Ives and Hasbro found me I was putting away my second pint and not feeling any better at all. This last adventure had taken the sand out of me, and I couldn’t think in a straight enough line to put the pieces of the morning together in such a way that they would signify.

“You’re looking rotten,” said St. Ives with his customary honesty. He ordered a pint of bitter, and so did Hasbro, although St. Ives had lately been under a new regime and had taken to drinking nothing but cider during the day. They were following my lead in order to make it seem perfectly natural that I was swilling beer before lunch. St. Ives winked at Hasbro. “It’s the clean sea air. You’re missing the London fogs. Your lungs can’t stand the change. Send for Dorothy.” He said this last to Hasbro, who pretended to get up, but then sat back down when the two fresh pints hove into view.