After group sing, there was much hugging and babbling in a number of languages alien to my ear, but the universal thematic of the room was brotherhood, as accelerated by the effects of vodka. Everyone glowed in the pink of either revolutionary fervor or rotting capillaries. When the bottle came to me, I took a swig, finding it to be liquid fire, more appropriate for battle than society, but who was I to disagree with the masses. I hugged, I kissed, I shook hands, I raised fists, I shouted, I carried on essentially like a bad imitation of a drunken bear. However, there was no penalty for overacting on these boards.

In time, after the minutes had been discussed and accepted in several different tongues and certain policy issues debated rather too fiercely (suggesting that the participants loved debate over revolution) and the next picnic/mass action planned, postponed, and ultimately canceled, the meeting atomized, and various cliques and factions withdrew to their own counsel, and all the lone wolves too anarchistic to join were free to mosey about. I fit that category, in shabby clothes with a derby pulled low, and it was via this process that I was able to make a secret examination of the building in public, without rousing suspicion. They were too busy contemplating dreams of Thermidor and who would run the Midlands Electrification Program to pay attention to any particular individual. To their imaginations, it was the mass, not the man, that mattered. I would soon set them straight on that matter.

At any rate, the building was what one might expect of such a place, the second-floor meeting hall rather like the vaulted cathedral of the religion, all sorts of ancillary rooms off or below it, including a printing shop at the rear to crank out the necessary broadsides, a crude kitchen for brewing soup by the gallon, a reading room that collected the latest in revolutionary news from all over the world, a cellar that seemed like cellars anywhere, even under the Houses of Parliament. All in all, quite banal.

That is, unless one knew where to look.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jeb’s Memoir

Indeed, where was he? The party finished with a vague invitation to drop in on Professor Dare “sometime,” and it was back to the murder grind. The monster missed his weekly assignment, and then he missed his second. Was he planning some extra-special extravaganza? Had he gone on the slack? Was he bored? It was hop-picking time, so maybe he’d gone to the country to earn a few quid filling sacks for our brewers. If rich, perhaps he was even now luxuriating at Cap d’Antibes, eating snails and other Frenchy things, his knife forgotten for a bit.

Whatever the reason, O’Connor could see the consequences playing out in newsstand sales, upon which we depended for our circulation of 125,000, “Largest Circulation of Any Evening Newspaper in the Kingdom.” I tried my best, and the rings push was of some help, but after the ludicrousness of the Polly and Annie inquests, the multiplicity of absurd clues, such civic vanities as a vigilante committee forming to offer the reward that Warren had so far refused to authorize (as if this fellow were part of a network of criminals and could be ratted out like a common cracksman or swindler), and many heated speeches against the Jews for this, that, and the other thing, some other detective blowhards who opined that the High Rips or the Green Gaters were the culprits, and finally some high copper muckety-muck’s much promulgated idea of a husky Russky, it seemed both pointless and hopeless. I wrote a nicely vicious piece on the inefficiencies of the police, which attracted very little attention, Harry Dam reheated shabby notions of Jewish ceremony, which until now required only Christian babes for blood with which to make matzos, but henceforth he claimed that the blood of whores was some part of some ritual in the cabala that I suppose was to make Baron Rothschild the richest man in the world again twice over. As far as progress in the investigation, practical steps to deal with the issue, shrewd analysis of the evidence, none of that. Nothing was happening.

An idle mind is indeed the devil’s plaything, so we entered full scoundrel time, and who but I would enter history as the biggest of all scoundrels. That is, at the urging of the damned Harry Dam.

I was transforming some Pitman into typing, some nonsense that would go on page 4 under an advertisement for Du Barry’s Revelenta, the flatulence and heartburn cure, when a lad approached and said, “Sir, Mr. O’Connor needs to see you.”

“Eh?”

“Now, sir. I gather it’s urgent.”

“All right, then.” I rose, put on the old brown, and followed the boy across the room and down a hall, where he knocked, and we heard a gruff Irish rasp respond, “Come in, then.”

O’Connor put no store in majesty. I imagined the office of the editor of the Times to be a bookish chamber with a fireplace, a stag on the wall, and a globe, where cigars and port were often enjoyed. That of the Star was half a compass in another direction. Shabby is as shabby does, or perhaps the word would be “utilitarian,” for it was simply a larger room with a desk, a table, and a few books. On the desk were several spikes, and on each spike were dozens of galleys of the stories that would comprise that afternoon’s Star. At the table, I could see mock-ups of the front page, with nothing so dynamic as FIEND across the front, but rather, the usual gabble of unimpressive notices, such as 13 DIE IN AFGHAN SLAUGHTER (theirs or ours, I wondered), REWARD FOR WHITECHAPEL MURDERER DOUBLED, BISHOP PLEADS FOR CALM, and WHITECHAPEL LIGHTING BILL TURNED DOWN.

O’Connor sat at the desk, and next to him, almost invisible because he was backlit against a window that occluded his details, another man. They had been chatting warmly, I judged from the postures, the odor of cigars (one, still lit, sat in an ashtray and leaked a trail of vapor into the atmosphere), and the fact that before each was a glass.

“Sit,” O’Connor commanded, “and possibly a spot of the old Irish?” His glass had a dram’s worth of amber fluid left inside, whether a normal routine or the product of emergency, I didn’t yet know.

“I’m a teetote, sir,” I said. “My drunken father, this day sleeping under Dublin soil, drank more than enough for not only my own life but the lifetimes of any sons I might have.”

“Suit yourself. Have you met Harry? You two fellows ever cross each other in the newsroom? Though Harry is no newsroom rat, I know.”

“Hiya, pal,” said Harry, rising, putting out a big American hand. It must have been his straw boater’s hat on O’Connor’s desk, for only an American would wear a boating hat where there were no boats to be found. He had a big, raw-boned face and a winning smile under a droopy red mustache, which displayed spadelike, rather gigantic teeth. He was wearing an Eton rowing blazer edged in white, a white shirt, a deep blue cross-hatched waistcoat, a tie of color (red), trousers of white with dark blue stripes, and white shoes and socks. Was there a regatta? Was he going picnicking with a lady on the Thames, or perhaps coxswaining a boat in the big tilt against Balliol’s eight? I put it all on loathsome American crudity; as a people, they seem to lack any sense of tradition and are utterly incapable of reading the cues and learning from what they see. They’re entirely bent on results or, rather, money. What they like they take and make their own, regardless.

“Nice coat,” he said as we shook. “Can I get the name of your tailor?”