Dance with Death Read online

  “Why have you not become a Russian citizen, Mr. Hercules?” my employer asked. “Or have you?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be able to leave the country freely. I’d never see my relatives again. No, sir. I’m still as American as blackstrap molasses and hush puppies.”

  I wondered if the imperial family had more luck interpreting what this man said than we did. I also wondered if there were such a thing in the Reading Room of the British Museum or the holdings of the London Library as an American English dictionary.

  “Is my citizenship significant, Mr. Barker?” he asked.

  “I’m merely collecting facts,” the Guv replied. “I shall interpret them later.”

  “An actual assassin,” I said to no one in particular. “The Hashishin, an ancient sect of killers in … where? Arabia? Turkey?” I’d have to look it up later.

  Our visitor put out a hand.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to the Guv.

  “Mr. Hercules, I assure you, you have no idea what I am thinking.”

  The American looked at me in alarm. I knew as well as anyone that Barker can be thorny with the best of them.

  “There are no such things as assassins,” Hercules replied.

  “On the contrary,” Barker said, crossing his arms and leaning back in his seat. “Anytime an out-of-work soldier of fortune with marksmanship skills meets a wealthy man with an obstacle in his path, there is an assassin.”

  “But not a professional one, who hires himself out for pay.”

  “Mr. Hercules, the fact that you know what one is and how he operates is at least a small proof.”

  “Does that mean you’ll accept the case?” our guest asked, sliding to the front of his seat.

  Barker shook his head. “No. However, I shall look into the matter. It is the most I can promise.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” the American replied. “Thank you for seeing me. We are staying at Kensington Palace.”

  He jumped to his feet, bowed to Barker, then awkwardly shook my hand. He clapped the top hat onto his head and was gone.

  I waited for the Guv to say something. Hercules was one of the most unusual visitors we’d ever had in our chambers. Of course, my partner said nothing. I don’t know why I expected he would after all these years. I had no more idea what he was thinking than Jim Hercules.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “He seems an affable fellow,” I said, when he was gone.

  “Newspapers,” the Guv said, ignoring my assessment. “Bring the newspapers.”

  Sometimes in our profession, the strangest on earth, I have thought more than once, one has no idea how to begin an enquiry case. At other times one does. Jenkins has a small table by his desk heaped with newspapers, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, News of the World, The Courier, and The Pall Mall Gazette. Sometimes The Times’ afternoon edition. The Guv purchases them in Northumberland Avenue, or rather, he has me purchase them for him and keeps them for a week, so that one had thirty newspapers from which to draw information. I say thirty and not thirty-five because we do not go to the offices on Sunday, and if we did Cyrus Barker would not be so pagan as to read a newspaper on the Sabbath.

  I brought them in two stacks and put one on each corner of the Guv’s desk. Then we tucked in, like tenants at dinner in a boardinghouse. I had read all this information before but it did not have the immediacy it did now.

  The tsarevich; no, wait. He is the tsarevich, to use the proper term. The first is any son of the tsar, but the second is the heir. However, I have trouble pronouncing and even spelling it, so I shall call him the tsarevich.

  The tsarevich was in town to attend the wedding of Queen Victoria’s second son, George, to Princess Mary of Teck. From what I read, Mary had been engaged to Prince Albert Victor, George’s brother, but he had died abruptly of influenza a few years ago, though there were rumors it was something worse. George and Mary had been thrown together during the funeral and an unexpected attraction sparked between the two of them. It was just in time. Really, what was one to do with a leftover princess? It was embarrassing. This settled matters all around and I’m certain Her Majesty was delighted with a wedding in the family, the first in a generation. She wasn’t alone. Half the nation looked forward to it.

  Not all citizens were as eager. A group calling itself the Socialist League had begun protesting the rising cost of the wedding. It must be admitted that the royal family does not do things by halves, but one cannot please everyone, even if one is empress of nearly half the world.

  “What is the Socialist League, Thomas?” Barker asked. “Do you know?”

  In fact, I did, but it still felt novel to be asked. At times it seems as if my employer knows everything, but since our partnership, he’d lowered his guard ever so slightly, to allow me to participate more.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “It is a group of politically radical men and women who feel a strong need to alter the norms in our society, including the monarchy, the class system, the aristocracy, and the Church. As I recall, some began as former followers of the late Mr. Karl Marx. I believe its leader is now William Morris.”

  Barker looked at me as if I thought he should know who that was, which I did. One brow rose above his dark spectacles.

  “I suppose,” I continued, “were one to create a list of people who might wish the tsarevich harm, one might put the Socialists at the top of the list of people to question.”

  “They have not threatened Nicholas, merely the Prince of Wales,” the Guv said, drumming his fingers on the table.

  “True, but many members of the Socialist League are Russian exiles. I’m certain there is no love lost between them and the tsar. Most escaped imprisonment or were purged.”

  “Add them to the list,” he said.

  I had not started a list, so I reached for my notebook and began one. Cyrus Barker allowed me to participate in conversations, but we both knew which one of us was running things, not to mention paying for them.

  “Who else?” I asked.

  “The Okhrana, the Russian secret police. I know whom they are secret from, but I wonder, lad, whom they are secret for. I have heard they are corrupt and violent. In the previous generations they were Cossacks.”

  “How did you come by that information?” I asked.

  “It is helpful to know the various police forces around the world, as well as their reputation,” he replied.

  I wrote Study international police forces on a separate page.

  “There are the various uncles Mr. Hercules spoke of,” he continued. “The Russian grand dukes. I wonder how many of them have come with the imperial entourage. Not that they need to be here, of course. They could merely bribe the Okhrana, to arrange an accident or conceal themselves among the Socialist League members. That is just the sort of tactic the secret police would use.”

  “That’s three,” I said. “The Socialist League, the grand dukes, and the Okhrana. Anyone else?”

  We sat for a minute, thinking furiously.

  “Who is this Morris fellow you mentioned?” he asked.

  “He’s a poet and painter,” I explained, wondering how he didn’t know. “He’s very successful. I believe he is designing textiles at the moment. Fabrics, wallpapers, that sort of thing.”

  Barker sat back and crossed his muscular arms. “Why should a successful poet start a league dedicated to altering society?”

  “Well, sir,” I answered, “I assume it started with feeding the homeless and clothing the naked.”

  The Guv laughed, a rare occurrence in our chambers. He slapped his desk so hard I feared for the glass atop it.

  “Touché, lad. You have delivered a good deal of information in the last ten minutes. Well done. Now, could you explain to me how you come by it?”

  I coughed. I had been dreading this question for years, my conservative Baptist employer asking me if I were a Socialist. To a degree, I was.

  “Well, sir, some of my friends are politically radica
l, but then they tend to be an artsy and intellectual crowd. It is practically expected of them.”

  He frowned and I feared storm clouds would form. Then I realized my mistake. It wasn’t my politics. He disapproved of slang terms.

  “Artistic,” I corrected. “Anyway, the Socialists tend to discuss everything under the sun and hold the most utopian views, as if the world would fix itself if only governments would listen to them. They—we—are young and a trifle idealistic. I’m sure even you must have been idealistic once.”

  He looked at me in that blank but somehow menacing way of his. Suddenly I wasn’t as sure as I thought I was.

  “How familiar are you with the Socialist League?” he asked.

  “I told you all I know,” I admitted. “I’m not especially political.”

  “Who might know more?”

  I considered the matter. “My friend Israel Zangwill, I suppose. He is a member. In fact, name any East End organization these days and he is a member.”

  “That’s the teacher from the Jews’ Free School, isn’t it?”

  “Well, he was for a time. Then he became a reporter for The Jewish Chronicle. Now he’s a novelist. He sheds his skin every few years.”

  “Do you think he’ll see us on short notice?”

  “Yes, he seems to stay in one spot these days, far more so than when he was a reporter. He is generally home writing during the day, sir. It’s at night that he goes to coffeehouses and Socialist meetings.”

  Cyrus Barker likes to be about in the mornings. Sitting in offices is lollygagging. There are things to accomplish and one cannot accomplish them if one is lazing about in chairs. We clapped bowlers on our heads and removed sticks from the stand. Barker told Jenkins we would be out while I stepped into Whitehall Street and whistled for a cab.

  Yes, Israel had been a teacher and then a reporter for a time, then he became a popular novelist. I tried not to be jealous, since he was my best friend, but I only nearly succeeded. He was being hailed as the Jewish Dickens on the strength of his book Children of the Ghetto, a novel that was not only interesting to those unfamiliar with the private Jewish community, but also allowed him to air his political convictions in a way that was not too political. He was invited to speak at dinners and for public events. He had become the darling of the Jewish community.

  His second book was even more interesting. It was called The Big Bow Mystery. The victim in the novel was a man found dead in his bed in a locked room. No one could work out how he was killed. Israel claimed to me that even he did not know. It was written and printed in installments, and whenever such-and-such wrote to him demanding to know if someone was the killer, he’d cross that suspect’s name off the list. That was brass, not to mention talent, writing a book chapter by chapter with no idea who the murderer was. Or did he? I wondered.

  The Big Bow Mystery was written in such a way that one was not in the detective’s thoughts, which was genius because in the end the killer was the detective himself, being the last on Israel’s list of suspects. That intrigued me, you see, because I wondered if he actually did know who the culprit would be, and had planned accordingly. The letters from the public may have been merely a publicity stunt. I thought it possible he knew who he wanted the killer to be from the outset.

  Israel, from the very first, was terrified of my employer. My friend is a small, bony fellow, with long, aesthetic hands, thick spectacles, and very little chin. Barker is large and imposing. Perhaps very large and very imposing. I’d grown used to it, but my friend, having met him infrequently, had not. He called the Guv a golem, a magical giant built of clay. He called him a dybbuk, a Jewish demon. Zangwill could never understand how I would willingly work for such a man and always urged me to find “proper employment,” by which he meant anything that did not involve the danger and trials of working for the singular monolith that is Cyrus Barker, Private Enquiry Agent.

  He now lived in a good Georgian house in Bethnal Green, which had some nice streets tucked in behind the warrens and the workmen’s housing. He rented all three floors, one bachelor knocking about in what could house many families, as this semi-Socialist has told him on a few occasions.

  As I said, I was jealous. He made money at writing, and I did not. My single publication, a volume of poetry entitled Poems for Nobody, had lived up to its name. I never thought I was in competition with my best friend, but apparently I was, though I would not trade lives with him, a poor bachelor alone in his house. But an article in a magazine would be welcoming.

  “Here we are, then,” I said when we arrived at his door in Old Ford Road overlooking Victoria Park. “Perhaps you should wait in the hall while I speak to him. You tend to make him nervous.”

  “He is a timorous young man, as I recall,” the Guv said.

  “He has his moments.”

  A manservant answered the door. There hadn’t been one before. I gave him my card and we stepped inside. I was led into Israel’s writing room, a large, airy chamber with a good-sized desk and a small owner.

  “Thomas!” he cried, standing, a pleased look on his face. “Thank the Lord of all Creation. I couldn’t gather two sentences today with a net. Do you want to have a spot of lunch and go buy some books?”

  “Sorry, Israel,” I answered, cocking my head toward the door. “This is not a social call. I’m afraid ‘Mr. Groban’ is in the hall.”

  My friend started as if given an electric charge. He stood behind one edge of his desk, hands and carpet slippers spread, looking for a way to escape. Groban was the detective and murderer in his book, but Barker had no knowledge of it and would not have read it if he did. Any book published after 1700 held little interest for him.

  “I never realized that there was only the one exit in this room,” he said. “Why is he here? What does he want?”

  “Answers,” I replied. “You are something of an expert in the field that currently interests him.”

  “Me?” he exclaimed. “What, pray tell, is that?”

  The door opened and my employer crossed the threshold. The manservant had taken his hat and stick. Barker bowed.

  “Mr. Zangwill,” he began. His voice boomed in the oversize room. “It is good to see you again. Mr. Llewelyn informs me that you have enjoyed some success at novel writing. You have my congratulations.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he replied. It was more of a squeak, the kind one emits when one is a thirteen-year-old boy and one’s voice is changing. “How may I help you?”

  Barker looked meaningfully at the chairs in front of the desk and our host waved us to them, if a bit reluctantly.

  “We have been asked to look into a matter we cannot currently discuss, but in which you may be of service,” the Guv said as he settled into his seat and placed his bowler on his knee. “It concerns the Socialist League.”

  “The League?” Zangwill repeated, glancing at me. “What about it?”

  “Some of the members have been making threats about the royal wedding,” Barker said. “Placards, wheat-paste posters plastered to walls, and the like. I shall not ask if you are a member. That is not my concern. I wish to know if you believe they might go beyond protesting to actual violence.”

  “It’s odd that you should ask about that, sir,” Israel responded. “Last night I considered resigning. The club has become politicized. The membership has become a mixed bag, many of the foreign members not long in this country. We still print the magazine Commonweal, but the mood has definitely become more somber at our meetings. Morris has stopped coming and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the late founder, is trying to keep peace between the factions in order to preserve her father’s name. The meetings have become acrimonious. We all agreed to protest the wedding politically, but I’ve heard some mutterings there about a revolution.”

  “Is William Morris still the leader?” I asked.

  “Not officially,” Israel answered. “Oh, he still pays for everything, but he is no longer technically in charge.”

  “The placar
ds around London seem like his style,” I remarked. “Not his artistic style. Let me call it his method.”

  Zangwill shrugged. “They are, I admit. You should understand that just because someone identifies themselves as Socialist does not necessarily mean they are ready to blow up the House of Lords. We have the same philosophies for the most part, only different ideas about how we should express them.”

  “How many members of the Socialist League are there?” Barker growled at my friend. I could feel it in the floorboards underfoot. In his nervousness, my friend began fidgeting with his pen.

  “That is a good question, Mr. Barker. Officially, membership is around five thousand, but that is grossly exaggerated, and includes Britain as a whole. The last annual meeting had about three hundred and twenty men. Excuse me. Men and women, I should say. Socialist, Communist, and anarchist.”

  “Anarchist women?” I asked.

  “They exist.”

  “Of this membership, Mr. Zangwill, how many would you say were anarchists?” the Guv asked.

  Israel set down his pen, as if suddenly aware he was holding it.

  “I would say, Mr. Barker, that there are currently one hundred and fifty avowed anarchists in and around London. That is a conservative number. You must understand that most would not know a pistol from a pineapple, but they might be willing to give money to fund a political activity that they would not participate in themselves for various reasons.”

  Barker and I took that number in. It was far higher than either of us had anticipated.

  “Are these numbers mostly foreign born or domestic?” I asked.

  “Foreign, for the most part,” Israel answered. “Russians, Poles, Germans, French.”

  “Jews?” Barker asked.

  “Oh, most of us are Jews, sir. Remember the pogroms. You would be surprised how easily having the door of your home kicked in, your grandparents beaten, your wife and daughter savaged, and your children slapped about for sport will make an anarchist of you. I am East End born, but even I am traumatized from the stories I have heard by survivors of the Russian pogroms. The women are silent and the men impotent. They are angry, and the anger will not go away. It may never go away.”