Automatic Woman Part 10

"What's so funny?"

The translator was wiping tears from his eyes. It took him a moment to gain enough composure to speak.

"It's funny, because Mongols f.u.c.k their horses!"

My face went red.

"Oy, are you taking a p.i.s.s!?"

The translator said something and the table's laughter renewed. I was not amused. Not in the slightest. I was reaching for one of the ashtrays, heavy f.u.c.k-all bludgeoning types, when a man tapped my shoulder.

"Don't listen to these frauds. That's the third time I've heard that Mongol story today."

I turned to find a bearded and disheveled Irishman.

"You mind if I have a look?"

"Go to it, man."

The Irishman s.n.a.t.c.hed the rubbings out of Rasputin's grasp and gave them a good look. The Russian rumbled but made no move to retrieve the doc.u.ments.

"Come on with me, mate. Leave these buffoons to their carousing." I got up and left the Russian drinking party. The Irishman wasn't done with them.

"Mark my words, Grigori. You keep on with your stories you're going to come to a horrible, b.l.o.o.d.y end!"

The Russian answered with a finger gesture. I'm not sure what it meant, but I could guess.

"Where did you get these?" The Irishman asked.

"Long story. The short version is... cogs."

"Someone wrote these on machine cogs?"

"Yeah."

"That makes no sense."

"Tell me what you know, mate. Maybe I can make sense of it."

The Irishman shook his head.

"I don't think you can. This is Sumerian cuneiform."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I'm a writer. I research this sort of thing." He presented a hand. "Abraham Stoker. My friends call me Bram." I shook his hand.

"Jacob Fellows."

"Good to know. This isn't just regular cuneiform, mate. This is some pretty common stuff."

"Common Sumerian?"

"Sure, pal. Look, this one says, 'If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.'"

"Eye for an eye?"

"Right. And this one says, 'If a slave denies ownership of his master, the master shall gain the right to cut off the slave's ear.' These are laws. Specifically, these are the laws of King Hammurabi of Babylonia."

"I'm not familiar."

"You should be. King Hammurabi was the sixth king of Babylon and one of the first true rulers of man. He presented the first written laws of man, two-hundred and eighty two statutes covering crime, marriage, contracts, ownership. You could say he was the father of civilization. You mind stepping out with me?"

"Pardon?"

"I don't like the prospect of curious ears."

I followed Stoker out of the h.e.l.lfax, and thankfully so. The stench of dishonest Russian was too much to bear and I was tempted to get my five pounds back by force.

We absconded to a cafe across the street and sat for a kettle of Royal Blend.

"You mind handing those back."

I slid Stoker the etchings. He gave them a bit more scrutiny.

"You've got two laws of two-hundred eighty two. At least, two-eighty-two are a.s.sumed. The original carvings are numbered, but sixty-six through ninety-nine are missing."

"What does it mean? Why etch it into metal work?"

"Why not? Cuneiform was an etched writing used primarily in stone, clay, and wood. If the Babylonians had a better mastery of metalwork, I'm sure they would have etched their words on disks."

I sipped my tea. Stoker sipped his. Something wasn't right about the situation, about my chance meeting with an informative stranger.

"Why would a modern engineer take the time to etch these in his cogs?" I asked.

"I can think of two reasons. One, he was a mad man and the etchings bore some irrational meaning, personal to him but unfathomable to the sane world. Such is the nature of insanity in that it is deeply personal, and intensely lonesome."

"You sound like a man who speaks from experience."

"I've made a study of the insane for one of my books. I once met a man who eats spiders. He would bait them by catching flies and leaving them on thewindow sill. When I asked him why he ate spiders, he told me that he had yet to figure out how to catch rats, but when he did, he would drink their blood. There was a logic that made sense to him: flies, spiders, rats. But it was a personal, subjective logic, not meant for the world outside his mind."

Stoker took another sip of his tea.

"But I'm moving away from the topic at hand. The second explanation is that the maker of these cogs attached some kind of greater meaning to his machinery and was leaving a note to the world. Do you believe in G.o.d, Mr. Fellows?"

I leaned forward in my chair. The Irishman regarded me with intense unblinking eyes.

"Yes," I said.

"And you know the relationship between the Christian G.o.d and the Babylonians? You know about the Tower of Babel?"

"Just Sunday school stuff. Big tower, big crash, something of that sort."

"The ancient precursors to the Babylonians, the Shinar, spoke a language understood by all mankind. Their words were the language of the universe. They were not burdened with mis-communications and the chaos of misunderstanding. It was impossible for them to misunderstand, such was the clarity of their words. The Shinar were ordered, industrious, mechanical. They learned fast, built fast, and they gathered the secrets of the earth and disseminated the knowledge among their people like bees in a hive. It was the Shinar who decided to build a tower. A tower to speak with G.o.d, with their creator."

"How'd a people so knowledgeable get it in their heads that G.o.d lived in the clouds?" I asked.

"That very question baffled biblical scholars for centuries. Of course, we live in an advanced society. A society of Boschon cards and difference computation machines. We're devising a new universal language based in numbers. But I digress. Not all towers are meant to reach G.o.d by proximity. Have you ever heard of radio waves?"

"No."

"A Serbian in America, Nicola Tesla, has built a tower of metal in the hills of Colorado. His tower fires invisible energy that can transmit words to other towers of similar make, like a telegraph with no wires. Words can cover kilometers in fractions of a second. Tesla claims that with enough power he can talk to men on the other side of the Earth. For hundreds of years, we thought of towers as just objects of physical stature, but now we know better. Maybe it is Tesla who is shortsighted. Maybe with enough energy he can speak to other worlds, other universes, to G.o.d himself. Maybe this was the nature of the Shinar's tower."

I sipped my tea. "So you suppose the Shinar figured out these radios waves?"

"I don't know. We'll never know. G.o.d smote them. He deemed them too advanced, to arrogant in their attempt to connect with him. He took away their words, their language, the very strength of their society. They became the Babblers, the men who could not talk.

"Unable to understand each other, their fine-tuned order turned to chaos, to fighting, to destruction and violence. They destroyed their beautiful tower, their cosmopolitan city, all their riches and advances and wondrous things. They became again like the animals that hoot and point and scream and gnash their teeth. Every man was foreign to every man. And following the tradition of foreign nations they fought and fought and fought. For years the Shinar waged war upon themselves. The survivors eventually left and became wanderers of the earth. Tribes of families. The Babbling tribes of man. Humanity entered their third Dark Age.

"The Babblers wondered for untold hundreds of years, living no better than the apes and jackals of the world. Some of the Babblers came west and embraced the trees and became my Gaelicforefathers. Some traveled north and became the fierce animal Norse, never truly tamed. Others traveled south and embraced the rich Nile flood lands, where they prayed to new G.o.ds. One group, the focus of my story, wandered in circles around the ashes of Shinar, never venturing far from the land of their fathers, though the earth consumed all traces of what had once been. The leader of one of these circling tribes, a man named Ka-Igi, found himself separated from his tribesmen in the confusion of a sandstorm, a storm that lasted forty days and forty nights. Ka-Igi, lost and alone, took shelter in a mountain cave. The walls of this cave were smooth and carved and not like the caves of animals. In his shelter Ka-Igi found thin sheets of material not rock nor metal nor wood. The sheets held symbols and even though Ka-Igi and his people had no written words, had no knowledge of reading, even though he was a Babbler, Ka-Igi could read the sheets. They were written in the universal language of the Shinar. The tablets had survived the great destruction and the ages of darkness. When the storm cleared, Ka-Igi found his people. He collected them up and showed them his tablets and they were amazed, for they could read them as well as he.

"Ka-Igi now knew the history of his people, for it was revealed in the tablets. He knew that their society had once been wondrous and powerful. The tablets revealed to him many secrets.

"Ka-Igi gathered his sons, strong robust Babblers. He gave them each a sheet, each a treasure of knowledge, and set them to gather again the men and women of the world, to share their knowledge and convince all of mankind to return their home country.

"And so his sons went off.

"To the west, Ka-Igi's first son, Ka-Gal, met with the Gaelics and gave them the names of all the stars and the means to build astrological calendars of stone, so they might know their place in the universe.

"To the north, Ka-Igi's second eldest son, Ka-Orun, traveled and met with the Norse. He taught them the tides and the use of iron and the construction of mighty ships so they might become masters of the sea.

"To the south, Ka-Igi's third eldest son, Ka-Ra, traveled and met with the men of the Nile. He taught them the mysteries of the triangle and masonry so they could erect the Pyramids, shadow images of the great and mighty buildings of Shinar.

"To the far East, Ka-Igi sent his youngest son, Ka-Wu. Though the smallest and weakest, Ka-Wu traveled the farthest. He walked through what we now know of as Arabia and India and China. He met with many wandering Babblers and taught them the value of chemistry, so that they could glean spices from the plants and salts from the Earth.

"For himself, Ka-Igi kept the most important tablets. On them were written the laws of man, the rules that separate humankind from animal kind. With these laws he brought order to his people, and to the Babbling tribes nearby. With rules and order he built the great city-state Larsa, which later became Babylon, the Babbler's kingdom. Ka-Igi thrived and prospered, but his sons never returned to him, and the kingdom of the world was never reunited. Each of his sons became a king in his own right, and once in power man never bows to a greater authority. Ka-Igi's tablets were pa.s.sed on to his daughters, who married and prospered and aided in the rule of their land.

"It was the sixth grandson of Ka-Igi's sixth granddaughter, a young king named Hammurabi, who gave the laws to his people, and had them copied and recorded, so that all may know and all may prosper. It's these rules that make man great, that allowed man to master the earth and the animals and hold themselves strongest of the world.

"Maybe your engineer was telling us he'd found a wonder, something to match the Shinar's. Something to draw the attention of G.o.d himself."

"That's some story, Irishman."

"I know. I'm a story teller by trade, though I can't take credit for the details. All I've told you I was told by friends at Oxford."

Oxford. Of course. Stoker winked at me and took a long drink of his cooling tea. I played along.

"Good friends?"

"Good enough. They want to know if you're still a bishop?"

"I'm not sure. The game has changed. Tell Darwin that Barnes has hostages."

Stoker set his cup down and jutted a finger at me.

"First, you'll do well not to mention either of those names in public! Second, the game hasn't changed, you're just not used to playing it. My benefactor and yours, our friend in Oxford, has an incredibly high regard for life. As we speak he is concocting a plan to save your prost.i.tute and friends. You're not part of that plan."

"Then what's my part?"

"You have two goals, call them a loyalty test, though it goes further than that. Goal number one, you are to return to your former employer tomorrow night at seven o'clock. You are to inform him that Mr. Nouveau is being held at this location."

Stoker produced a folded piece of paper and laid it on the table.

"You are to give him no information other than what is on that paper. If you do, we will find out and your deal with us is no longer valid."

"Where is Nouveau?"

"You don't need to know that. a.s.sume what the paper says is true."

"The second condition?"

"As we speak two men are delivering a new bed to your flat. When you arrive you will find a pair of boots under the bed that are identical to ones you are wearing right now. The right heel of your new boots has a false bottom. Inside the false bottom, you'll find a coin. Retrieve it and drop it into the third floor fountain on your way out of the Bow Street Firm. Do not touch or handle the coin prior to dropping it in the fountain. Are we clear?"

"You guarantee the safety of my friends?"

Stoker stood up and straightened his suit.

"Ours is a world without certainty, a world victimized by chaos. Believe me when I say my benefactor is working to right that chaos and usher us into a new age of enlightenment. The tasks he accomplishes today will be talked about, even worshipped, a thousand years from now. Try to see the bigger picture, mate?"

This was not the last time I'd meet with Abraham Stoker, though I wish it had been.

Nine.

Jolly Fellows and the Case of the Missing Porter I'll admit a bit of confusion at this point. I'd sworn loyalty and service to both warring armies, to Darwin and Barnes, though my loyalty for each was conscripted. I was under orders from both and sincerely wanted neither to succeed in his endeavor. Jacob Fellows is no man's stringed puppet. But time was ticking clear and ready. As much faith as Darwin had in me completing his task, I was just as certain that Lord Barnes would catch me in the ruse, either giving false information or spiking his fountain with Lord knows what. We're talking about a bloke who told me how much cash I had to my name within ten pound. But if I didn't finish Darwin's task, I risked stoking the ire of a man who either knew me well enough to predict I would show up at the h.e.l.lfax or send someone deft enough to follow me and blend without my trained eye picking him up. It was b.o.l.l.o.c.ks either way. I remember dad, the minutiae, the small details.

If Darwin hadn't rattled me with the strange Irishman, if the h.e.l.lfax had turned a dud, the next logical step in the investigation would be to move toward Nouveau. Darwin had claimed the man was in hiding, as was his family and close contacts. Smart move that; people are terrible at hiding and always reach out to family, even weird silky Frenchmen. The odd detail was the porter. A last minute kidnap for the poor brothel servant I'd sent at all those days prior. The minutiae, the detail, the porter.

I returned to the Piece Work, back to the fancy rental women with their dyed hair and dyed feathers and lipstick colored and smeared like old blood.

The desk clerk recognized me immediately. I must have made an impression on my last visit. His hands vanished under the counter and tripped what I a.s.sume was a hidden buzzer because the lobby was suddenly occupied by two thuggish gentlemen. They were decked out in matching black trousers and white collared shirts. The collars were purely decorative seeing that neither man had a neck.

"You're not welcome here, Mr. Ja.r.s.e," the clerk said.