Running my hand through the book again, I noticed the back cover was thicker than the front. I had come across some examples of binding from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which church relics were kept in a sort of cupboard inside the leather. It could be a crucifix or perhaps a tooth. Old Stemmes told me he once found a human toe, though I presume he was inebriated and had dropped a piece of sausage there. Now, the book I held in my hands at the moment was not from another century, but I suspected it might share the same design, and I carefully peeled back the compartment, where there was a sealed letter.
Closing my stall an hour and a half early, I hurried to the far side of the square and hailed a cab to Dover Street. It was a long drive between two parts of the city; unlike New York, which ends abruptly when it pleases, London stretches out obnoxiously in every direction. I entered a tall and narrow building awkwardly combining the grammar of French and Greek architecture into a monstrosity of pillars, arches, gables, and friezes; this was one of the new “private” hotels where an inhabitant was not bothered by being forced to pass through any of the public rooms. There was also no elevator, and climbing the four steep flights took the wind out of me for the second time that day. After four pulls of the bell Davenport appeared, weary from interrupted sleep. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.
“You have brought breakfast, I assume, Fergins,” he said in a croak, turning his back and leading me in. “The other day when I went down to the dining room, there were two American girls—at separate ends of the room—with their elbows on the tables. I found it amusing, but I could hardly enjoy my food listening to all the English ladies grind their teeth over it.”
His rooms were in the usual disarray, piles of newspapers, magazines, and only a few books scattered here and there. Shelves were mostly empty. Davenport almost never kept a book, unless he was especially amused or repulsed by it. There were some etchings and landscapes on the wall, but most had been turned around so that the plain brown backs of the frames faced out; these the bookaneer felt were gaudy or in some other ways lacking in style. He would usually change hotels every time he returned from a mission away, or every four or five weeks if he remained in London, but he had stayed put here for two months despite complaining about it. I stopped to lean against the wall of his sitting room, trying to smile through my panting. “I might, I just might have a lead—well, I have something I trust you’ll find intriguing, anyway.” I put my hand to my coat. “But first, my dear Davenport, how are you? You are not unwell, I hope?”
“Wait a minute.”
He washed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. The forty-four-year-old face still appeared boyish from a distance but a closer inspection revealed weathered skin, creased faintly like well-worn cotton.
He hated pleasantries, but my question was real. I had been worried about the bookaneer, about the states of lethargy and dark moods of solitude I would find him in.
“Unwell and as well as ever. Have you come all that way to ask me that?”
“No. It’s Whiskey Bill.”
He shrugged. “He retired, or whatever you might call stopping something nobody else cares if you do.”
I removed the volume of blank pages from my coat and explained how it had come to be at my stall, and how I found the letter hidden in the leather cupboard inside the back cover. My narrative did not get a rise out of him and he waved the letter away when I held it out. “Don’t you even want to see it, my dear Davenport?”
“Read it to me.”
“The letter is marked P. D. on the front. I suppose you agree it must be meant for you, and that we are quite justified in unsealing it.”
He was just as uninterested in the ethics of the matter.
I opened the letter, making certain to show that I had not previously tampered with it. I gave an involuntary laugh.
“What do you howl about, Fergins?”
“It is for you.” I tried not to be melodramatic in my reading, but the anticipation and the strong wording probably lent a theatrical edge to my voice.
Friday, 17th October 1890. My dear Pen. I write to you with days remaining to me before I die. You must see me, sooner, not later. Your life depends on what I have to tell you.
I gasped. “It is signed ‘Whiskey Bill.’”
But when I looked up from the extraordinary letter I found Davenport fully absorbed in watching the oblong circles of his cigar smoke dissipate into the stale air of his room. I was about to say something to try to break his trancelike state when he responded.
“If he says he is dying, that settles the question. Whiskey Bill is not dying, and if he were, he would not tell anyone about it until it was too late to enjoy.”