The Cutthroat by Clive Cussler (popular books to read txt) 📗

Browning before they shot him. As practiced as he was at clearing his holster and firing fast, the odds were abysmal. Even if he managed to shoot them both, the kukri knife would take his head off.

“I am opening my coat slowly,” he said, “to hand you my automatic, butt first.”

He did. Abbington-Westlake took it and swung it like a club. The heavy barrel raked Bell’s forehead and smashed his hat to the floor. Head ringing from the blow, Bell heard the spymaster say, “I’m informed he carries a derringer in his hat.”

They fished it out.

“Take his arms.”

Isaac Bell stepped back and played his last card. “Do you know what makes a fighting man?”

The man with the knife answered with cold certainty, “It takes fatal wounds to stop him.”

“Then you’ll forgive me.” Bell dove to his left. For the barest fraction of a second, he caught all three off guard. He hit the floor rolling, tucked his knees, and got his fingers inside his boot and around his throwing knife. The gunmen were recovering, tracking him with their pistols, and the shadow was raising the kukri for a killing blow.

A gun went off, thunderous in the small room, the slug throwing splinters from the floor into Bell’s face. He hurled his blade underhand. A flicker of steel and light disappeared in the shadow’s throat.

Bell saw a gun sight-line up with his head. He was moving forward, reaching. The kukri fell from the shadow’s hand. Bell caught it and slashed with all his might.

A hand grasping a pistol fell to the floor.

The other gunman gaped, horrified, and when Bell lunged at him, he whirled out the door. Still moving, Bell whipped around with the knife drawn back to slash.

Abbington-Westlake screamed, backpedaled as the blade whistled through the air, and dropped Bell’s Browning. Bell snatched it off the floor and sprang to his feet, breathing hard.

“This is your mess. Clean it up, stay out of my way, and we are even.”

“Even?” Abbington-Westlake gestured at his fallen men, one squeezing his tweed sleeve to his bloody stump, the other clutching his throat. “How are we even?”

Isaac Bell picked up his derringer and his hat.

“You still have two hands, don’t you?”

26

Isaac Bell stalked into the British Lock Museum with the thief-catcher strongbox under his arm. “I found this with a note attached that said return to Lost & Found care of keeper Roberts.”

What happened to your face?”

“Slipped shaving.”

Nigel Roberts closed both arms around the heavy chest and lugged it to its spot beside the German chastity belt. “I’d have lent it to you.”

“I would not have you lose your job and your home on my account.”

“It’s the Ripper’s account.”

“I thank you for all your help. Maybe I can pay you back. Abbington-Westlake has a theory that the Ripper was sending messages to, quote, ‘besmirch the Freemasons.’ What do you think?”

Nigel Roberts’s eyes glittered. “I’ll look into it. But I will tell you right off, it would be far more complicated than the spy supposes. And much, much more interesting.”

“I hope I haven’t sent you down a rabbit hole.”

“I like rabbit holes.”

Maybe it wasn’t as lunatic as it sounded, and Bell had a strong feeling that the old cop would devote the rest of his life to investigating the Freemason angle. No doubt that if there were such an angle, Nigel Roberts was the man to nail it down.

Bell extended his hand. “I’ve got to catch the boat train.”

“Are you convinced the killer who murdered your Anna is Jack the Ripper?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s a man in his forties. I’m pretty sure he never stopped killing. I am pretty sure he is carving a message into these poor girls’ bodies that says who he is. But the only fact I know for sure is that until I decipher his message, he’s still on the loose.”

Bell stopped at the Jermyn Street office on his way out of London.

“What happened to your face?” Joel Wallace asked.

“Ran into a door. I want you to see what you can turn up on Jack Spelvin.”

“Who?”

“The Wilton’s Music Hall callboy Emily remembered.”

“Oh, yeah. But I thought she was confused.”

“Just in case I’m the one confused, I’d like you to find out where Mr. Jack Spelvin was acting in 1889, ’ninety, and the first half of ’ninety-one. And where did he go from there?”

“Tall order, Mr. Bell.”

“Do you have any friends in the music halls?”

“Couple of chorus gals, of course, but, uh—”

“Start with them.”

Joel Wallace shrugged dubiously. “Before their time.”

Bell said, “Maybe their mothers remember him.”

27

Aboard the Jekyll & Hyde Special highballing to Toledo and Detroit, Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan were ensconced in their private cars, Buchanan closeted with the company treasurer, Barrett entertaining a clutch of newspaper reporters with a bottomless whiskey bottle and a font of theater stories.

“Mr. Barrett?” asked an attractive woman representing a Chicago paper. “You alternate the roles of Jekyll and Hyde, seemingly at random. Do you ever forget which role you are playing?”

The big baritone voice lowered conspiratorially: “Well, I’ll tell you. When in doubt, I glance into the wings and steal a look at Mr. Buchanan. If he’s made up like Hyde, I know I’m Jekyll.”

The reporters laughed, and scribbled.

The company publicist, standing guard, beamed.

The Boys, as he called Barrett and Buchanan, had always been geniuses at booming a tour, but for Jekyll and Hyde they were outdoing themselves, and the bookings more than made up for the expense of freeloading journalists. On this leg of the tour, they had even attracted a wire-service writer, whose nationally published articles would boost ticket sales in Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Denver, all the way to San Francisco.

Barrett took a sip from his teacup, having apologized for not joining the drinkers with a solemn, “Duty calls at eight-thirty.” A second sip, and he added, “If Mr. Buchanan looks like Jekyll, I am almost certainly