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

it over the city where we’re playing. A billboard in the sky.”

“It’s not a real airplane. It’s a stage prop.”

“We rent a real one that looks like ours. With an aviator to fly it.”

“That would cost a fortune.”

“We’ll save a fortune in billboard passes. Why give free tickets to shopkeepers who put our ads in their windows when we have a billboard in the sky?”

Buchanan took a deep breath. A billboard in the sky was a bold idea. If the publicist could make hay with it, it might actually save them.

“I know a pilot.”

“Wire him!” said Barrett.

“Her.”

“Oh, one of your ladies?”

“No, it’s not like that. She’s happily married, she has children, and I know her father.”

“Ugly, too, I presume?”

“Driver! Stop. Head for Chelsea.”

Isaac Bell was on his way to Waterloo Station to take the boat train to Southampton Docks. Acting on sudden instinct, he ordered the cabby to make a detour.

“Ain’t you got to get to your ship, guv?”

“I’ll be quick, and triple your fare when you get me to the station on time.”

Wayne Barlowe was working in his loft, putting finishing touches on the whale.

“What happened to your face?”

“Slipped in the bath.”

“Did you find Emily?”

“She loved your sketch,” said Bell, and told him about Jack Spelvin. “Did you ever see Spelvin perform at Wilton’s?”

“No.”

“You’d remember his face if you had?”

“Of course.”

“I gave her your sketch. Could you make me another?”

As happened on their last meeting, Barlowe’s hands flew without hesitation.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Alive—barely. She seems to have landed in some sort of safe berth at the Salvation Army. How long she’ll stay there will depend on whether she goes back to the laudanum.”

The sketch was in Bell’s hands in moments, a near replica of the first. He asked, “Could you draw another of him when he’s older? The way he’d look today, if he’s still alive.”

“Are you assuming that Spelvin was not an innocent actor?”

Bell said, “I have to consider every possibility. Including if Emily was not hallucinating, Spelvin was not innocent.”

Barlowe hesitated. “I have to consider twenty years of variables, twenty years of events, that changed him. Drink, tobacco, illness, accident, grief.”

“Joy,” said Bell. “If it is he, I doubt he feels grief.”

“I’m asking you, is he Jack the Ripper?”

“Draw him like he is the Ripper,” Bell said brusquely. “I want to see what he might look like now. Start with what people saw when he was young—bounding like a hare, handsome, angelic—and imagine he’s been lucky, no illness, no accidents, few disappointments.”

Barlowe picked up his pencil reluctantly. He worked for a few minutes and handed Bell a sketch of a pleasant-looking, somewhat elegant man in his forties. The face lacked the eye-catching qualities of Jack Spelvin in his youth.

Barlowe said, “It’s too general, Bell. Do you see what I mean? He could be anyone.”

“You are too modest,” said Isaac Bell. “Far too modest.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are an artist.”

Barlowe had captured the face of a chameleon.

Twenty-three years after the so-called Jack Spelvin mesmerized Emily, this man in his forties could indeed be anyone—almost invisible in one instant, bland in another, and striking in the next. A girl might not even notice him until he was ready to be noticed. She might see him as innocuous. Or harmless. Or intriguing. Or dazzling.

He would choose.

29

The Cutthroat dipped an artist’s brush in a vial of spirit gum. He painted the adhesive on the lace backing of a gray mustache made of human hair. Then he dipped the brush again and coated the skin above his upper lip, exhaling through his nostrils to dispel the nauseating odor of alcohol and pine resin. To make the glue dry faster, he fanned it with an old souvenir program stolen the night that Mansfield’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened its ill-fated London run at the Lyceum.

He had carried it everywhere in his vagabond life and cherished the illustrations of scenes from the play. An ordinary paper program the theater gave away would have disintegrated years ago, but the souvenir was printed on strong silk. Though mottled from the oil on his fingertips, and drips of spirit gum, the colors had never faded. Every page transported him back to a haunting night of melodrama, mastery, and death.

He tapped the brush handle to his lip. When it stuck to the spirit gum and lifted the skin, it was ready. He pressed the mustache to his lip and held it firmly. The coupling of gum to gum felt warm for a few moments and then it was on good and tight. He tested the mustache in the mirror with a gentle, fatherly smile. It flexed naturally.

He grayed his hair, dabbing in pressed powder with a densely bristled goat-hair makeup brush. Old-fashioned gold wire-rimmed spectacles aged him further, while their tinted glass shielded the fire in his eyes. He worked a wedding ring on his finger; few married men wore a wedding ring, and the girls took it as a sign of extreme fidelity. His detachable shirt cuffs—instead of up-to-date sewn-on cotton—were as behind the times as his specs and made of stiff celluloid that protected his wrists from their fingernails.

Before he stepped out into the night, he gazed upon the program cover.

Richard Mansfield in

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

A Souvenir of the Lyceum Theatre

Lessee and Manager, Mr. Henry Irving

August 8, 1888

The Cutthroat felt his heartbeat quicken. He had scrounged pennies for the cheapest seat in the back of the Lyceum. The play was a culmination of an obsession that had deepened nightly since he first feasted on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella and the lightning bolt of recognition that the story struck. It was an entirely new way to regard what every man knew in the darkest part of his heart. Everyone knew that good and evil resided in every man. Everyone knew he had to resist evil. Until Jekyll and Hyde promised what everyone wanted: the means to have both.

There had