The Difference Engine

Oliphant allowed himself to be led through the doorway, and up a narrow, perilously steep flight of stairs. They emerged in a barren hallway, illuminated by a second carbide-lantern. Great spreading continents of niter marred the bare plaster walls. The burnt smell was stronger here.

Through another doorway, into yet brighter glare, and Fraser's dour face looking up from where he knelt beside a sprawled body. Fraser seemed about to speak; Oliphant silenced him with a gesture.

Here, then, was the source of the reek. Upon an old-fashioned coaching-case stood a compact modern Primus stove of the sort intended for camp, its brass fuel-canister gleaming bright as a mirror. Upon its ring rested a pa

He turned his attention to the corpse. The man had been a giant; in the small room, it was necessary to step over his outspread limbs. Oliphant bent to study the contorted features, the death-dulled eyes. He straightened, facing Fraser. "And what do you make of this?"

"He was warming ti

"This poison," Oliphant said, taking his cigar-case and sterling cutter from his coat, "what do you suppose it was?" He extracted a cheroot, clipped and pierced it.

"Something potent," Fraser said, "by the look of him."

"Yes," Oliphant agreed. "Big chap."

"Sir," Betteredge said, "you'd best see this." He displayed a very long knife, sheathed in sweat-stained leather. A sort of harness dangled from the sheath. The weapon's handle was of dull horn, its hilt of brass. Betteredge drew the thing from its sheath. It was something on the order of a sailor's dirk, though single-edged, with a peculiar reverse curve at the tip.

"What is that bit of brass along the top?" Oliphant asked.

"To parry another man's blade," Fraser said. "Soft stuff. Catches the edge. American business."

"Maker's mark?"

"No, sir," Betteredge said. "Hand-forged by a smith, from the look of it."

"Show him the pistol," Fraser said.

Betteredge sheathed the knife, set it atop the coaching-case. He produced a heavy revolver from beneath his coat. "Franco-Mexican," he said, sounding remarkably like a salesman, "Ballester-Molina; cocks itself automatically, after the first shot."

Oliphant raised an eyebrow. "Military issue?" The pistol was somewhat crude in appearance.

"Cheap stuff," Fraser said, with a glance for Oliphant. "For the American war trade, evidently. The Metropolitans have been confiscating them from sailors. Too many of them about."

"Sailors?"

"Confederates, Yanks, Texians… "

"Texians," Oliphant said, and tasted the end of his unlit cheroot. "I take it we agree in assuming our friend here is of that nationality?"

"He'd a sort of nest, in the garret, reached by a trapdoor." Betteredge was wrapping the pistol back into its oilcloth.

"Terribly cold, I imagine?"

"Well, he'd blankets, sir."

"The tin."

"Sir?"

"The tin that contained the man's last meal, Betteredge."

"No, sir. No tin."

"Tidy," Oliphant said to Fraser. "She waited for the poison to do its work, then returned, removing the evidence."

"The surgeon will have our evidence out for us, never you fear," Fraser said.

Oliphant was overtaken by an abrupt nausea—at Eraser's ma

What a foul house this was, in a foul street, harboring the foulest sort of business. A wave of loathing overtook him, a fierce hopeless detestation of the secret world, its midnight journeys, labyrinthine lies, its legions of the damned, the lost.

His hands were trembling as he struck a lucifer to light his cheroot.

"Sir, the responsibility—" Betteredge was at his elbow.

"My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane hasn't given me such a good leaf as usual," Oliphant said, frowning at the tip of his cheroot. "One must be very careful how one chooses one's cigars."

"We've been over the place top-to-bottom, Mr. Oliphant. If she was living here, there's no trace of her."

"Really? And to whom does that handsome chiffonier downstairs belong? Who waters the cacti? Does one water cacti? Perhaps they reminded our Texian friend of his homeland… " He puffed resolutely on his cheroot and descended the stairs, with Betteredge on his heels like an anxious young setter.

A prim-looking sort from Criminal Anthropometry was lost in thought in front of the piano, as though trying to recall a tune. Of the various articles carried in this gentleman's black case, Oliphant knew, the least unpleasant were the calibrated linen tapes employed in taking Bertillon measurements of the skull.

"Sir," Betteredge said, when the anthropometrist had moved upstairs, "if you feel I was responsible, sir… For losing her, I mean—"

"I believe, Betteredge, that I dispatched you earlier to a matinee, at the Garrick, to report on the acrobatic ladies of Manhattan, did I not?"

"Yes, sir… "

"You saw the Manhattan troupe, then?"

"Yes, sir."

"But—do let me suppose—you saw her there, as well?"

"Yes, sir! And Mackerel and his two as well!"

Oliphant removed his spectacles and polished them.

"The acrobats, Betteredge? To attract such an audience they must have been quite remarkable."

"Lord, sir, they batter one another with brickbats! The women run about in their dirty bare feet, and, well, scarves, sir, bits of gauze, no proper garments to speak of… "

"And you enjoyed yourself, Betteredge?"

"Quite honestly, sir, no. Like a panto in Bedlam, it was. And I'd the job of it, with the Pinkers there… "

"Mackerel" was their name for the senior Pinkerton agent, a side-whiskered Philadelphian who most frequently presented himself as Beaufort Kingsley DeHaven, though sometimes as Beaumont Alexander Stokes. He was Mackerel by virtue of his seemingly invariable choice of breakfast, as reported by Betteredge and the other watchers.

Mackerel and two subordinates had been regular London fixtures for some eighteen months now, and Oliphant found them remarkably interesting, and a solid pretext for his own Government funding. The Pinkerton organization, while ostensibly a private firm, served as the central intelligence-gathering organ of the embattled United States. With networks in place throughout the Confederate States, as well as in the Republics of Texas and California, the Pinkertons were often privy to information of considerable strategic importance.

With the arrival in London of Mackerel and his cohorts, certain voices in Special Branch had argued for the various classic modes of coercion. Oliphant had quickly moved to quash this suggestion, arguing that the Americans would be of inestimably greater value if they were allowed to operate freely—under, he made it clear, the constant surveillance of both the Special Branch and his own Special Bureau of the Foreign Office. In practice, of course, the Special Bureau utterly lacked the manpower for any such undertaking, which had resulted in Special Branch assigning Betteredge to the task, along with a steady rota of nondescript Londoners, all of them experienced watchers, personally vetted by Oliphant. Betteredge reported directly to Oliphant, who assessed the raw material before passing it on to Special Branch. Oliphant found the arrangement thoroughly agreeable; Special Branch had so far refrained from comment.

The movements of the Pinkertons had gradually revealed minor but hitherto unsuspected sub-strata of clandestine activity. The resultant information constituted a rather mixed bag, but this was all the more to Oliphant's liking. The Pinkertons, he had happily declared to Betteredge, would provide the equivalent of geological core-samples. The Pinkertons would plumb the depths, and Britain would reap the benefits.