The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 16 LOOK UPON MY WORKS AND TREMBLE

“What is this drab and dreary place, Arthur?”

“Arkadia. Spelled with a k, not a c. Note the sign.”

The hackney had traveled north for close to an hour, taking them to the ragged edge of the metropolis, a place where rows of brick houses abruptly transitioned into green fields. Up ahead, like a smudge of soot upon the landscape, stood a huge factory with rows of tall chimneys vomiting smoke.

They stepped down from the hackney and walked through an archway of wrought iron. The top of the arch spelled out a name in black iron letters: ARKADIA.

“Arkadia,” Wilde read aloud, and sniffed. “Obviously meant to be ironic. That name conjures a land of rustic simplicity and beauty. Yet all I see is a dark satanic mill with chimneys billowing brimstone and huddled before it a ghastly monotony of identical brick terraces.”

“It is a planned village. A model of sanitary and modern living. Arkwright has built a place for his workers to live, complete with a church and town hall.”

“Planned dreariness more like it. Why can the English not build villages modeled after those in Tuscany? Are Italian bricks somehow more expensive to make?”

Like the strands of a web, all streets led to the factory and were long and wide. The two friends set off walking at a good clip and it did not take long for Conan Doyle to concede Wilde’s point: the houses were indeed drab and anonymous. But compared to the filthy, dilapidated hovels many Londoners lived in, they were palaces.

The two friends had almost reached the factory gates when they heard a familiar sound from behind: wisshhhhthump… wishhhhhhhthump.… wishhhhhhhthump…

They turned to find a steam car bearing down on them. The top-hatted driver did not slow down, but instead squeezed the rubber bulb of a horn and honked impatiently. The two friends had barely time to throw themselves clear as the steam car whistled past and disappeared through the factory gates.

“That’s him now!” Conan Doyle grumbled. “Bounder near ran us over!”

Although the steam car was nowhere in sight when they passed through the gates, a figure in a stovepipe hat was. Standing upon a plinth was a bronze statue of a tall thin man with muttonchop whiskers, a cigar clamped in his jaws, and his trademark tall headgear. A brass plaque beneath it bore the inscription: OZYMANDIUS ARKWRIGHT, BENEFACTOR.

“Ozymandius, indeed?” Wilde snickered and began to recite in a chest-thumping voice the sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!”

“Yes, very amusing, Oscar. I know the poem, too.”

“One moment,” Wilde said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t you think there’s something a little odd about this statue?”

“Odd in what way?”

“The left arm looks a bit off. And the statue is not properly centered.”

A moment’s closer inspection revealed two cutoff brass stubs in the concrete plinth.

“This statue originally had a companion,” Wilde surmised. “A second figure that has since been removed. I would speculate that the pose has been amended. The arm was once draped about the shoulder of its neighbor, but has been cut off and the pose rather crudely changed.”

“Yes, you’re right, Oscar,” Conan Doyle agreed. “How odd. How very odd.”

After being left in a small waiting room for the best part of an hour, the two colleagues were then conducted into an even smaller waiting room. After an additional wait of twenty minutes, a balding secretary entered.

“Lord forbid,” Wilde muttered. “No doubt he’s come to shift us to a closet and from there into a biscuit tin.”

Instead, the secretary, muttering apologies for the wait, conducted them into a long, low-ceilinged room, brightly lit by strings of electric bulbs. Men in shirts and waistcoats wearing accountants’ visors with elastic garters holding up their sleeves stood at rows of drafting tables, working with pencils, protractors, compasses. Ozymandius Arkwright stood gazing over the shoulder of one of the draftsmen, and Conan Doyle noticed that the man’s hand trembled visibly as he drew.

When Arkwright finally noticed the two friends, he fixed them with a suspicious glare, his muttonchop whiskers bristling as he clenched a jaw so square it could have been machined from a billet of steel.

“What the bloody hell do you two want?” he bellowed in a broad, Yorkshire accent.

Conan Doyle removed his hat and spoke in a firm, but diplomatic tone. “Mister Arkwright, I am Arthur Conan Doyle and this is my friend, Oscar Wilde.”

There were few names in British society of equal fame, but it was obvious the master engineer was completely clueless. “Who? Never bloody heard of you. State your business and then kindly bugger off!”

“It’s about the fog, sir,” Wilde put in — rashly, it turned out.

At the mention of the word fog the large Yorkshire engineer grew apoplectic.

“Oh, I’ve seen you bloody London types before! Are you come here to dun me about the smoke my factories release? Ignorance, gentlemen. Mindless piffle! London sits on marshland through which a great river runs. There have been London fogs since Roman times. The puny efforts of man have no effect whatsoever upon the climate.”

Rather inadvisably, Wilde chose to argue the point. “But surely it must have some effect. When I smoke in my carriage it fogs the air dreadfully and my wife upbraids me. Of course, I simply must smoke as it is vital to the creative process, and yet still she complains.”

“Your analogy is baseless,” Arkwright sneered. “The interior of a carriage is a tiny space. By comparison the atmosphere is as vast and limitless as the oceans. Besides, do you know what that smoke represents?”

“Black lung?” Conan Doyle ventured; the man’s rudeness had got his dander up. “Respiratory distress, inflammation of the bronchioles, emphysema—”

“Work, sir! Work. Employment. Commerce. The creation of wealth for all. Food on the table for my workers. Employment for colliers. For coal merchants. Warmth for the hearths of millions. Baked bread to feed hungry bellies. A bloody small price to pay for an occasional smudge of soot on a fine gentleman’s starched collar.”

Conan Doyle let the Yorkshireman rant on until he, at last, paused for breath. “I’m afraid my friend misspoke. We have not come to discuss fog, but to discuss the Fog Committee.”

For a moment, a look of fear flashed across Ozymandius’s face before a fierce light burned hot in the gray eyes, a muscle quivered in the implacable jaw.

“Enough!” he barked, silencing Conan Doyle with a look. For the first time, he seemed aware of his draftsmen and a roomful of eavesdropping ears. He nodded toward a door at the end of the room. “Not here,” he said and added curtly, “Follow.”

They struggled to keep up with the industrialist, who walked with a distance-devouring stride, along first one corridor and through a door, followed by a second and then a third. With each doorway they passed through, the din of machinery grew steadily louder. Arkwright paused at a final door and flung it open. They stepped into a factory where the air vibrated with a percussive cacophony of pounding steam hammers, shrieking saws, and the roar of mighty steam engines turning enormous wheels, the brassy arms of their giant connecting rods pulverizing the air with each dizzy revolution. Dwarfed by the machines, men in overalls beetled about the factory floor, wrenching on giant beam engines, their faces runneling sweat, while women and children hunched over belt-driven machines with spinning wire brushes they used to polish shiny brass cogwheels. Once finished, they dropped the parts into baskets at their feet. When the growing pile threatened to overflow onto the floor, the baskets were hefted by other workers, loaded onto iron wheeled carts, and dragged away.

“Say what you have to say and be bloody quick about it,” the industrialist snarled, as he strode quickly across the factory floor. “I’m a busy man who earned his fortune through hard graft. Not a gentleman who idles his day away over cups of tea and the day’s newspapers. Time is money and I have none to fritter.”

“The other night, you almost ran over our carriage on Piccadilly. Soon after, we encountered a strange man, more monster than man. That same night, Tarquin Hogg was assassinated.”

At Conan Doyle’s words, Ozymandius stopped short and glared at the two friends. “Who are you two? Who sent you to my door?”

But instead of answering, Conan Doyle drew out the shiny cogwheel from his pocket and held it up for Arkwright to see. At the sight of the cogwheel, the engineer’s eyes widened, his jaw clenched. He looked ready to burst into a fit of histrionics, but instead his shoulders slumped and he growled, “Follow me.”

They left the noise of the factory, weaved through a maze of offices, and finally stepped into a large and gloomy space lined with bookcases bowing beneath collapsing piles of engineering texts — Arkwright’s private office. As they entered the room, the engineer crossed to his enormous desk and tossed a cloth over something he obviously did not want them to see. Conan Doyle hoped Wilde had also seen it, but the glimpse was so brief and the object so bizarre and out of keeping with the rest of the engineer’s business, later on he could not be certain of what he had truly seen.

One large window, dimmed by years of soot, looked out over a grimy rooftop to a row of smokestacks billowing clouds of carbon black. The walls of the office were hung with photographs of past triumphs: giant locomotives, iron bridges, steamships, colossal beam engines. The Yorkshireman gruffly gestured for them to take a seat in the two chairs set before his hulking desk while he paced the room, a man in perpetual motion. After the third circuit, he paused long enough to take a cigar from a wooden box. Seeming to remember his manners, he grudgingly thrust the box at his guests. After each took a turn with the cutter, the three men shared a quiet moment as they puffed their cigars into life.

A large framed photograph hung on the wall behind his desk: two gentlemen in matching stovepipe hats posing before a giant steam locomotive. The men had their arms draped about each other’s shoulders, a celebratory cigar clamped in their jaws. Ozymandius was the taller of the two, and shared a familial similarity with the shorter man — no doubt a brother. The photograph had been taken many years back, for both sported finely trimmed black beards devoid of a trace of gray.

Conan Doyle said nothing for several seconds. He took out the gearwheel and placed it upon Arkwright’s desk and asked, “Is it something of your manufacture? I was told by an expert that only an engineer of considerable talent could fashion such a piece.”

Arkwright stood looking down at the shiny metal gear, his jaw clenching. Finally, he could resist no longer and snatched it up, scrutinizing the object closely. He asked in an accusatory voice, “Where did you get this?”

“I found it in the house of Tarquin Hogg. It was part of a mechanical heart that had been implanted in the assassin’s chest. Someone is reanimating executed prisoners using these infernal devices and programming them to murder key figures in the government.”

“Whaaaaat?” The engineer exclaimed, his eyes widening. But then he shrugged it off and muttered, “Highly bloody fanciful!” and tossed the heavy metal gear back to Conan Doyle.

“So the piece is not of your manufacture?”

“I did not make it. It is not one of mine. Now good day to you gentlemen.”

“What about your brother?” Wilde spoke up for the first time. “The chap in the photo with you. Your partnership is obviously dissolved, as evidenced by the statue you had amended. Could your brother not have fashioned it?”

“My brother, sir, is dead.”

“Dead?” Conan Doyle echoed.

The industrialist seemed to go into a trance, his glassy stare fixed on something from long ago in the past. “An accident. Ten years ago. We made weapons back then: machine guns, cannons, bombs. My brother had an idea for a revolutionary new weapon: a steam torpedo. But no ordinary torpedo — a guided torpedo. A device possessed of a degree of autonomy. It was meant to be a war-winner — an unstoppable weapon that would seek out and destroy enemy ships from a great distance. We thought we had perfected it, but…” His voice shriveled and he shook his head scornfully. The engineer turned his back on them and stared fixedly at the framed portrait on the wall. “It worked flawlessly in tests. But on the day of the demonstration, in front of the queen, the admiralty, and all the bloody world, it went terribly wrong. The torpedo missed the target, ran ashore, and crashed into the reviewing stand.” He shook his head at the painful memory. “Dozens were killed… including my brother’s wife and son.”

“Your brother was also killed in the blast?” Wilde asked.

Arkwright hesitated a long moment before answering, “My brother, Solomon, also died that day.”

Conan Doyle pondered a bit and then calmly asked, “Do you mean he literally died, or that he died to you?”

The engineer drew a breath; his mouth opened, ready to answer, but then he caught himself and the iron returned to his voice. “Who are you to question me? Who the bloody hell are you two?”

“People interested in thwarting an assassination plot which I believe you are somehow involved with… however tangentially.”

The engineer’s nostrils flared; his lips compressed to a thin line. When he spoke, his voice shook with anger. “Get out. Bloody well get out of my factory.” He stalked around the desk and Conan Doyle’s heart quickened as it seemed Arkwright was about to physically attack them.

But instead he stooped over and bellowed in their faces. “GET OUT!”

“The grandly named Ozymandias need not fear assassination,” Wilde said. “The man is likely to succumb to a fit of dyspepsia at any moment.”

The two were once again in the hired hackney trundling back toward London. Conan Doyle toyed with the shiny gear in his hands. “Did you happen to see the object on his desk? When we entered the room, he hurriedly threw a cloth over it, but I managed to catch a glimpse. Did you?”

Wilde shook his head. “I saw the cloth and the rough outline of something beneath it. What was beneath it?”

“I cannot be certain, but it looked to me like a mechanical arm.”

Wilde furrowed his brow. “You mean, a mechanical human arm?”

“Yes, a skeletal armature made of shiny metal. It looked as though it articulated in precisely the same manner a human arm would.” He raised his own arm and flexed it to demonstrate. “The shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, and the fingers, down to the individual phalanges — all articulated.”

“Quite a departure for Mister Arkwright, who seems to specialize in all things enormous and loud: giant steam engines, locomotives, ships. Perhaps he is pursuing a new field of endeavor.”

“Having recently seen what I believe to be a mechanical heart, I find it an unsettling coincidence.”

“There’s that word again: coincidence.”

“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. He paused to remove his pocket watch and held it up to the light to check the time. Although it was scarcely three, the skies were darkening ominously.

The two fell silent. Contemplative.

Ahead, the road dipped in a long, downhill sweep of cobblestones. On the distant skyline hung the brooding silhouette of London. Monochrome. Colorless. A city formed of soot and shadow wrapped in a tattered gray shroud of clouds. From this elevated perspective, they looked out over housetops and chimney pots, factory chimneys, steamships churning the Thames and fiery locomotives chasing along steely rails, all of them releasing black plumes that rose into the hazy skies and were soon drawn up into carbonaceous clouds so bloated with soot and smoke they dragged their furry bellies across the church spires, unable to rise any higher.

“Good Lord, Arthur,” Wilde breathed as the two friends observed the dark spectacle, “what are we doing to the world?”

And then, as sooty drops lashed the cab windows, the city melted and ran, one darkness bleeding into another, a charcoal sketch left out in the rain.