David Liss - A Spectacle Of Corruption

“Look, Weaver, you may have lost all fear of my dogs, but though they do not tear you apart at this moment, rest assured that they will not hesitate to do so if I give the command or if you hurt me. Nevertheless, this show of strength is hardly necessary. One word out my mouth would have you dead and ripped to pieces. That I haven’t spoken this word should tell you I want you alive and healthy. Surely you must know after Wild’s performance at your trial that we will not go after you. You’ve nothing to fear from him or from me.”

“There wasn’t a hundred and fifty pounds to be had at my trial.”

“He has no interest in pursuing that bounty and neither do I,” he said. “I give you my word.”

I was reluctant to take the word of a man who made a good deal of his income through perjury, but I felt I had little choice, so I set aside my weapons. “Apologies,” I muttered. “But I’m sure you understand the need.”

“Of course. I’d have done the same.” Mendes lit two lamps and called over his dogs. If they felt any guilt at having betrayed their master, they showed none of it. Neither did Mendes show any resentment to the animals for their gullibility. He pulled from his pocket some dried beef, which surely paled in comparison to their earlier fare, but they made no complaint.

It was odd for me to see this man, large and ugly, with hands that appeared strong enough to crush these dogs’ skulls if he chose, engaged in such a warm display toward mere beasts. But I had long since learned that people are not the uniform creatures the novelists would have us believe but, rather, a series of contradictory impulses. Mendes might love these beasts with all his heart and still coolly unload a pistol into the skull of a man whose only crime was to be disliked by Jonathan Wild. And Mendes alone would see the consistency in such behavior.

“Some port?” he asked.

“Thank you.” I only briefly considered the possibility that he might poison the drink. But poison did not seem Mendes’s way. Seeing me ripped to pieces by his dogs was more in his line, and as he had not done this I could assume the drink to be safe.

He moved to hand me my pewter cup, but it slipped from his hand. As it landed on the wooden floor with a light tap, I understood that it was empty- and I understood that it had been a distraction.

Mendes now stood over me with a blade to my throat- a long knife of remarkable sharpness. He pushed with the sharp blade, and I backed up, feeling it cut into my skin. He pressed forward, however, and soon I was against the wall.

“Guard,” he said quietly. I did not understand his meaning until I realized it was a command to his dogs. They approached and stood at my feet, legs wide apart. They looked at me and growled but did nothing more, awaiting Mendes’s command.

The blade moved just a quarter inch, and I felt the skin on my neck slide. Not deeply, but enough that there should be blood. “I thought to let the insult go,” Mendes said. I felt his breath on my face, hot and pungent. “I understood that you believed you needed to put a gun to me, that you could take no chances until you were certain. I am not unaware of all of that, and so I thought to forget the matter. But I cannot forget it, Weaver. You put a gun to me and you threatened me, and now there must be retribution.”

“What sort of retribution do you envision?” I asked. I spoke slowly to keep the skin from moving too much against the blade.

“An apology,” he said.

“I apologized before,” I observed.

“Before you apologized to be courteous. Now you must apologize out of fear.” He stared hard into my eyes, refusing to turn away. “Are you afraid?”

Of course I was afraid. I knew Mendes to be unpredictable and violent, two qualities I did not desire from a man holding a knife to my throat. On the other hand, there was such challenge in his voice that I could not capitulate- not like he wished me to.

“I’m uneasy,” I said.

“Uneasy is not enough. I want to hear that you are afraid.”

“I’m concerned.”

He blinked. “How concerned?”

“Quite.”

He let out a breath. “And sorry?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Very sorry to have had to hold a pistol to you.”

He took away the blade and backed off. “I suppose that will have to do. You with your irrational pride- we’d have been here all day.” He turned away- to show his confidence, I suppose- and found a rag, which he tossed to me, presumably for the purpose of dabbing up the blood on my neck.

“Now,” he said, as he picked up the fallen pewter cup, “shall we take that port?”

Soon we sat in chairs across from each other, faces red from the fire, chatting as though we were old friends.

“I told Wild you would never come to meet him,” Mendes said, his scarred face erupting into a satisfied grin, “but he insisted the advertisement, assuming you saw it, would have the desired effect. And now it seems he was correct, for in truth he only wanted to pass some information along to you, and in your current state you are a difficult man to seek out.”

I could not regret that it was so. In the past, Wild’s efforts to seek me out had involved sending his men to attack me and drag me to his house against my will. “And what information would that be?”

Mendes leaned back in his chair, as satisfied as a country squire who had just finished his evening fowl. “The name of the man who has brought all this trouble down on your head.”

“Dennis Dogmill,” I said flatly, in hopes of seeing him perhaps a bit less puffed up.

He leaned forward, unable to hide his disappointment. “You are cleverer than Wild would have believed.”

“Wild thinks no one clever but himself, so I cannot bristle at his underestimating me. Nevertheless, I wish you would tell me what you know.”

He shrugged. “Not very much, I’m afraid. We learned that you had been meddling around with the porters at Wapping. Dogmill has been wrestling with the labor combinations for months, even while he sets them against one another. This fellow Yate was causing him no small amount of grief, and it’s easier to kill a porter than it is a rat.”

“That much I know. Why would he choose to blame me for the crime?”

“Wild had hoped,” Mendes said, “that you would tell us that.”

I felt the sad tug of disappointment. Nevertheless, that Wild had known to blame Dennis Dogmill for my woes suggested to me that he might have more information as well. “I wish I could. I believe that is the very key to all of this.”

Mendes gazed at me skeptically. “Come, Weaver. The truth.”

“Why should I not speak the truth?”

“There have been some suggestions in the paper that your loyalties are not to His present Majesty.”

I laughed aloud. “The Whigs are merely trying to turn an embarrassment into political capital. It was one of their judges who so blatantly condemned me against the evidence. You are not so foolish as to believe what you read in the political papers, I hope.”

“I don’t believe it, but I wonder about it. You have not involved yourself in some Jacobite plot, have you, Weaver?”

“Of course not. Do you really think me mad enough to indulge in treason? Why should I want to see any James the Third on the throne?”

“I admit it seemed to me unlikely, but these are strange times and there are plots everywhere.”

“I cannot speak for that. Until recently, I could have hardly told you the difference between a Tory and a Whig- or a Tory and a Jacobite, for that matter. I am far more interested in saving my skin than restoring a dethroned monarch- and I should be loath to see a change in a government that has treated our race so kindly.”