Although it was far too hot in the open sun for black leather, Skinner betrayed no discomfort as he leaned his elbows on the front rail of the deck of the Nautilus. His white-face was impeccably smoothed over his features, his hat and glasses firmly seated upon his face. He bore no discernible expression, not unlike the stone-faced Indian captain who stood beside him. They watched the water pass around them
"How long have we been on the water this time?" Skinner asked. The question in and of itself wasn't unusual; he asked the same thing two or three times a week when they were in the field. Mostly, Nemo suspected, out of an ingrained desire to tease and annoy. This time, however, there was a different tone to his voice, a strange note that caused the Indian captain to give his fellow a questioning look.
"Three weeks or so. Why do you ask?"
Skinner only sighed in reply. It wasn't terribly enlightening.
"Is there something wrong?" It was as close to solicitous as Nemo ever got, and raised Skinner's eyebrows into what would have been his hairline if he'd bothered to have hair.
"Something..." he sighed again. "Do you ever get the feeling, sometimes, that we're getting a mite too old for this sort of thing?"
Nemo's lips twitched in his beard, one of the very few visible signs of amusement he ever gave. "Many times in the last twenty years."
Skinner chuckled. "Sorry, mate. Sometimes I forget you're a good decade or so older than the rest of us, at least." He thought back to their American members. "More than that, in some cases."
"And to answer your question, yes. I have, of late, been pondering my own retirement." Nemo's own thoughts turned inward, his face going distant. "I find I do not have the energy I once had, and the causes I once had great passion for now seem more like the follies of youth, great world-changing goals that perhaps are better left to the young. I find... more and more..." he trailed off, not entirely sure what he was meaning to say.
"You're getting jaded," Skinner said, and it was only half in jest. "You're starting to wonder if everything we're doing is actually doing any good. If all this running around in circles is really going to help anyone..." his hand flexed and clenched, almost as though he wanted to curl it around a bottle. "I didn't really think it would happen after seven years, but I guess... bloody hell, I don't even know what I'm trying to say anymore, but... I think we're all just tired."
Nemo didn't look at him, unsure. The invisible man had a very good point, incoherent as it was, and it hit closer to home than he would have liked. He thought about bringing the point up the next time the League met, if Skinner didn't. But at the same time he could hear all too well what each of them would say. Tom would suggest that they just needed a vacation, and then suggest some perfectly outlandish place where they would get into more trouble than they were escaping. Mina would most likely be the most sensible of the lot, and suggest simply some rest at home... except that Nemo was not entirely sure he had a home to go to anymore.
Besides, there was that other matter. At the current juncture Nemo had no more idea of what he wanted to do than he had when he first made the bargain, and keeping busy meant he didn't have to think about it. Or, given their dangerous lifestyle, quite possibly meant that the entire situation would be moot.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
He'd almost forgotten about the man whose observations had started his whole train of thought. "I was wondering... what the rest of the League would say to your proposal."
Skinner chuckled, glancing at the Captain out of the corner of his eye. "I wasn't aware that I had proposed anything." He turned his gaze back to the sea and hummed thoughtfully. "Tom has, as you mentioned before, the energy of youth. He'll want a vacation and then back to work like always. Mina... well, none of us know how old she is, do we, really?"
"She has not yet outlived a mortal span of life, if that's what you mean. There are birth records, and they are within this past century." Nemo did take his point, however. There was no telling how long the woman would live. She had not aged visibly in the seven, nearly eight years now that they had known her.
"So it's just the two of us, then." Skinner chuckled. "Not exactly what I'd've expected."
"And Henry," Nemo reminded him.
"Henry wore out his enthusiasm for the League two years ago, mate. Not that I can blame the man, after all. He's got two lifetimes' worth of aging in that scrawny body of his." Skinner frowned slightly. "Maybe he deserves the rest."
"We all do." Nemo sighed. "Unfortunately the world does not always permit us that rest."
Skinner turned and leaned his elbows and back on the rail, suddenly exhausted from staring out at all that emptiness, all that vast expanse of sea. "It's a hell of a job, mate... we get to run around and save the world from all sorts of dangers, and most people don't even know we exist. Or that they've ever been in danger at all... or at least they shouldn't, if we've done our job right. For most of us, retirement isn't exactly an option... I believe you're the only one out of the lot who's independently wealthy."
Nemo chuckled, a cold and empty sound. "Believe me, my friend, retirement is the least of my worries at the moment."
Skinner looked at him quizzically for a second but decided not to question the background of that very odd statement. "Anyway..." he started, and then seemed to forget what he was going to say. "So. ... er. Any plans?"
The Captain sighed, heavier and more forlorn than Skinner seemed to have expected from him... really, worse than he had expected from himself. "I have no idea what I would like to do next."
The invisible man stared at him. It was not an answer he heard from the Captain very often, and the sound of his voice shook his friend deeply. He didn't have an answer for the Captain, and eventually Nemo sighed again and turned back to watching the sea, gently shutting Skinner out of whatever dark thoughts he might be having. The invisible man watched him a little longer, than disappeared below decks. Some moods were better left to the solitary.
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Crystal decanters clinked gently against tumblers. The murmur of the engines and the distant roar of the ocean was obscured by the sound of the Victrola. The lamps, although dimmed, somehow seemed to penetrate every corner of the room with a soft and reassuring light. Everywhere there was the smooth texture of mahogany, or the smooth feel of a good cognac sliding down a much-abused throat.
"The trick is in the distillation..."
The French constable had turned vintner in his declining years, after a tragedy he wouldn't speak of. The other two, with their own misfortunes, knew better than to say anything. Instead they had been talking of food, of wine, and of old cases and friends long gone. It was interesting what the three had in common, being from similar times and similar backgrounds. Pitt and Abberline had never worked together, although they had crossed paths briefly on a later investigation of the Ripper murders. The Inspector Javert, although long retired, had his own stories to tell.
"Does it ever strike you, sometimes, that the world is going straight to hell in a handbasket?" Javert picked up the cognac and sipped a little, his accent thickening and blurring his words with the drink.
Abberline sighed. "Every time I am dragged back into service by some act of Parliament. Although this time it was that bastard Narraway's fault. And you too, indirectly," he gestured with his glass at Pitt, who looked startled.
"Excuse me?"
"If you hadn't discovered all that Whitechapel business, Narraway would never have known of it. And if he hadn't known of it he wouldn't have known to drag me out of my comfortable retirement to play nursemaid to a deranged and depraved magician."
Javert frowned. "What is this?"
Abberline sighed again. "You are familiar with the Ripper murders, correct? The brutal killings that terrorized the East End several ... good God, it must have been nearly twenty years ago..."
Pitt nodded with amusement, still young enough to know what twenty years meant. "Nearly that."
"At any rate..." Abberline frowned for a moment, clearly wondering about the propriety of his revealing so many secrets to a man of whom he knew very little. "Well, it can't matter now. Most of those involved are dead, and Pitt, you already know." He straightened a little in his chair, taking on the pose of a schoolteacher instructing a shamefully ignorant pupil. "What is less well known is this: There was an underlying order to the Ripper killings, a conspiracy to bend and twists the delusions of a madman to the ends of the English crown."
Javert's eyes were wide, scandalized and disbelieving. "The English church would condone such savage butchery?"
Abberline snorted. "More than condone, its immediate servants would have carried out the savage butchery, as you call it, had we not found a suitable candidate. In order to save face, you see."
Javert scowled. In his own way, the English policemen were rapidly discovering, he could be a particularly moral man. "What cause could be so great that it would require the mutilation of women? Whores, I grant you, but..."
"A scandal that could rock the faith the country has in their prince. The poor man had married a Catholic girl, you see, in a Catholic church. There were ... I believe there still are..." He looked at Pitt, who shrugged helplessly. "Er. Well, there were at the time still laws on the books stating that any prince who converted to the Catholic church was invalidated for the throne. The whores who died were the witnesses to the marriage. The girl herself was remanded to a mental institution for the criminally insane and her daughter was nearly run down by the coachman who was forced to witness it all."
Pitt shuddered, remembering the awful circumstances that had surrounded his discovery of the conspiracy. "What did happen to her? Tellman was never able to find out."
Abberline shrugged. "No one knows. It's generally assumed that she died in the squalor of the East End, or is living out some life of horrible drugery."
There was a long silence in the room, broken only by the warbling of the Victrola and the sound of glasses clinking thoughtfully against the table. No one had anything to follow up with that horrible tale of mutilation and conspiracy; no one really wanted to, either.
"Do you think..." Pitt said suddenly, startling both men. "Sorry. Do you think that you would have caught him, had there not been a conspiracy about? I mean, if you hadn't been ...." He groped around for a term to describe it. "Nudging him into the murders, do you think you would have been able to catch him?" His own patch, the Bow Street station at the time, was far from Spitalfields. He had been transferred there years after the Ripper murders.
Abberline sighed heavily. "I doubt it. Many of the leaps and bounds that Scotland Yard is making now in the areas of catching criminals weren't available to us then. And even so, all we really had to go on were witness reports. He left nothing of himself at the scenes of the crime... obviously, he said it was for magical purposes..."
"Here, do you really believe that man was working some sort of magic?" Javert interrupted. "That is the part that seems the most incredible to me. Have you ever seen him accomplish something that is so out of the ordinary as to call it magic?"
Pitt looked at the floor, and Abberline turned his head very carefully and very slowly to stare at the former French constable with a dark and annoyed gaze. "Myself? No. I have never seen his visions, or learned his secrets, or indeed heard anything to indicate that he has or could have performed any sort of feat we would call magical..."
"Well, then..."
"Except," Abberline raised his voice ever so slightly. Pitt winced. "That, in the twenty odd years I have known the man. In all that time... he has never appeared to age so much as a day. The way you see him now, sir, is the way he has appeared for the last score of years. Now tell me... what is a man who does not age, but some sort of worker of magic?"
Javert opened his mouth, shook his head, and took a drink of his cognac rather than risk further ire from the English policeman. "I have no quarrel with you, sir. If you say you have witnessed his lack of aging over the years with your own two eyes, I will believe you. But I still find it difficult to believe in this so-called League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I have yet to see anything out of the ordinary myself."
Pitt shook his head slightly, amused and utterly disarming with his chuckle and smile. "Wander about the corridors a little bit, Monsieur Javert. If you can located Mr. Rodney Skinner, ask him to show you what he really looks like without the white face and coat. You'll have your out of the ordinary. It's just a matter of looking in the right place."
"And not seeing, in Skinner's case," Abberline muttered, which brought a weightier laugh from Pitt.
"I don't understand..." Javert frowned, a little put out by what he saw as needless exclusionism. Abberline and Pitt exchanged glances.
"You will..." Abberline muttered. "Believe me, my new friend. You will."
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"I will not!"
"Oh, come on, Tellman. It's good clean fun..." Huck wiped sweat from his dripping brow with the already sodden towel, dropping it into a small basket on the floor and pulling another from the stack on the bench. "Well, good sweaty fun, anyway."
The two Americans were taking advantage of the brief lull and the facilities aboard the Nautilus to get some exercise. Having grown tired of chasing each other around the corridors and having abuse heaped upon them by the various other guests, they'd decided to hold impromptu games of football in one of the rooms that had been intended to be for hosting guests. Nemo had acquiesced to the request to convert it into a gymnasium largely out of a desire to keep them out of his hallways, but also recognizing the need for passengers and even crew to engage in some recreational physical activity.
"It's..." Tellman faltered. He couldn't very well say it was bloody undignified and have them rib him about being a 'stiff-ass Brit,' as he'd heard them call Abberline. But he most definitely didn't want to join in a game that looked to get his teeth bashed out or his shins bashed in. "It's indecent."
Tom snorted and kicked the ball across the room, bouncing it off the opposite wall and catching it neatly. Nemo, with not altogether remarkable foresight, had removed the glass and tiling from the wall and left only the sturdy marble. "Give it a rest already, okay? You sound like ... that crazy man... Sebastian."
Huck aimed a kick at his friend's shins, entirely too aware of his friend's propensity for tactlessness. Tellman's face went stone cold.
"I am nothing like that... that..."
"Monster?" Huck suggested cheerfully. "Psychopath? No one's suggesting you are. Right Tom?"
Tom grumbled.
The police inspector and the American agent exchanged glances, deciding that there would clearly need to be some sort of compromise before Tom Sawyer opened his mouth and planted his foot firmly in it. Again.
"I'll just watch," Tellman said after a second, settling down on the bench. "Besides, I've no idea how you Americans play rugby anyway."
Huck laughed. "Well, we call it football, for one thing. Come on, lazy." He pulled Tom to his feet. "You're not going to win any points by sitting around."
Tellman watched them race back and forth across the floor, slamming into each other with such force that he was actually quite surprised there weren't more broken bones or bloody noses involved. It seemed very like rugby, only without the brutish elegance that characterized the very British sport. The key seemed to be giving the largest person on either side a ball and standing back. Being as neither of the two Americans was noticeably bigger or stronger than the other, the game went back and forth with no clear winner in sight.
"So, what do you think Sebastian did, anyway?" Tom was speaking more to Huck than to the Englishman, but it was the Englishman who responded.
"Three weeks on the ship and you don't know?" Incredulity laced all through his voice. "Is it general policy of American agents not to know who they're going into the field with?"
Tom caught the football and glared at Tellman. "I try not to pry into the lives of psychopathic killers, if that's what you're asking."
Tellman addressed his next question to Huck. "Don't you know who Abberline is?"
Huck frowned thoughtfully. "I heard the name before, but honestly I think it was from something before my time. The ..."
"The Ripper murders."
Tom dropped the ball.
Tellman sighed. "Abberline was the second Inspector who took charge of the Ripper murders. When they stopped, he stopped investigating, but not because he's caught the culprit as everyone thought. It was because he'd known all along who the person was... he'd helped cover up the real murderers, and the murders stopped only because they'd run out of victims."
The two Americans blinked at him, astonished. Tom frowned. "I thought ...." He closed his eyes, clearly trying to remember something from very far back in his past. "I thought ... okay, never mind. But I remember everyone saying they never caught the killer. But... the Ripper killed prostitutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there still hundreds of prostitutes in London?"
Tellman sighed. "Unfortunately, yes. But it was never about prostitutes." He paused. "Well, it was. But the man who wielded the actual blade... Sebastian... was directed by someone who wanted him to kill those specific prostitutes."
Huck stared. "Does Sebastian actually know about all of this?"
"I don't think anyone knows what that madman believes, or thinks. Certainly I don't." Tellman shuddered. "I don't want to, either."
Tom actually quirked a smile at that. "Maybe that's one of the hazards of hanging around immortals."
Huck blinked. "Immortals?"
"Sebastian. Dorian. We've got a lot of them on the ship, at least it seems like it. Then again, could just be that we've never been around so many people who don't age before."
Tellman frowned. "Dorian? Mr. Gray? I thought..." he trailed off. Although he had, of course, read the brief that had accompanied Dorian's conditional release to the custody of the League, he wasn't sure how much of it he actually believed. An invisible man running around was one thing, but this...
Tom nodded. "The painter's dead, so we can't ask him how he did it, but somehow Dorian managed to commission a portrait from someone who painted more than just pictures. As long as that portrait exists, he can't die. He was part of the original League, till he turned us all in to the Fantom and tried to blow us out of the water." The American was smiling, but it was a smile that was full of teeth. Huck only winced and rubbed his stomach where the nearly fatal wound had been.
Clearly, they both still harbored ill sentiment towards the enigmatical Mr. Gray.
"How long have we been on the water this time?" Skinner asked. The question in and of itself wasn't unusual; he asked the same thing two or three times a week when they were in the field. Mostly, Nemo suspected, out of an ingrained desire to tease and annoy. This time, however, there was a different tone to his voice, a strange note that caused the Indian captain to give his fellow a questioning look.
"Three weeks or so. Why do you ask?"
Skinner only sighed in reply. It wasn't terribly enlightening.
"Is there something wrong?" It was as close to solicitous as Nemo ever got, and raised Skinner's eyebrows into what would have been his hairline if he'd bothered to have hair.
"Something..." he sighed again. "Do you ever get the feeling, sometimes, that we're getting a mite too old for this sort of thing?"
Nemo's lips twitched in his beard, one of the very few visible signs of amusement he ever gave. "Many times in the last twenty years."
Skinner chuckled. "Sorry, mate. Sometimes I forget you're a good decade or so older than the rest of us, at least." He thought back to their American members. "More than that, in some cases."
"And to answer your question, yes. I have, of late, been pondering my own retirement." Nemo's own thoughts turned inward, his face going distant. "I find I do not have the energy I once had, and the causes I once had great passion for now seem more like the follies of youth, great world-changing goals that perhaps are better left to the young. I find... more and more..." he trailed off, not entirely sure what he was meaning to say.
"You're getting jaded," Skinner said, and it was only half in jest. "You're starting to wonder if everything we're doing is actually doing any good. If all this running around in circles is really going to help anyone..." his hand flexed and clenched, almost as though he wanted to curl it around a bottle. "I didn't really think it would happen after seven years, but I guess... bloody hell, I don't even know what I'm trying to say anymore, but... I think we're all just tired."
Nemo didn't look at him, unsure. The invisible man had a very good point, incoherent as it was, and it hit closer to home than he would have liked. He thought about bringing the point up the next time the League met, if Skinner didn't. But at the same time he could hear all too well what each of them would say. Tom would suggest that they just needed a vacation, and then suggest some perfectly outlandish place where they would get into more trouble than they were escaping. Mina would most likely be the most sensible of the lot, and suggest simply some rest at home... except that Nemo was not entirely sure he had a home to go to anymore.
Besides, there was that other matter. At the current juncture Nemo had no more idea of what he wanted to do than he had when he first made the bargain, and keeping busy meant he didn't have to think about it. Or, given their dangerous lifestyle, quite possibly meant that the entire situation would be moot.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
He'd almost forgotten about the man whose observations had started his whole train of thought. "I was wondering... what the rest of the League would say to your proposal."
Skinner chuckled, glancing at the Captain out of the corner of his eye. "I wasn't aware that I had proposed anything." He turned his gaze back to the sea and hummed thoughtfully. "Tom has, as you mentioned before, the energy of youth. He'll want a vacation and then back to work like always. Mina... well, none of us know how old she is, do we, really?"
"She has not yet outlived a mortal span of life, if that's what you mean. There are birth records, and they are within this past century." Nemo did take his point, however. There was no telling how long the woman would live. She had not aged visibly in the seven, nearly eight years now that they had known her.
"So it's just the two of us, then." Skinner chuckled. "Not exactly what I'd've expected."
"And Henry," Nemo reminded him.
"Henry wore out his enthusiasm for the League two years ago, mate. Not that I can blame the man, after all. He's got two lifetimes' worth of aging in that scrawny body of his." Skinner frowned slightly. "Maybe he deserves the rest."
"We all do." Nemo sighed. "Unfortunately the world does not always permit us that rest."
Skinner turned and leaned his elbows and back on the rail, suddenly exhausted from staring out at all that emptiness, all that vast expanse of sea. "It's a hell of a job, mate... we get to run around and save the world from all sorts of dangers, and most people don't even know we exist. Or that they've ever been in danger at all... or at least they shouldn't, if we've done our job right. For most of us, retirement isn't exactly an option... I believe you're the only one out of the lot who's independently wealthy."
Nemo chuckled, a cold and empty sound. "Believe me, my friend, retirement is the least of my worries at the moment."
Skinner looked at him quizzically for a second but decided not to question the background of that very odd statement. "Anyway..." he started, and then seemed to forget what he was going to say. "So. ... er. Any plans?"
The Captain sighed, heavier and more forlorn than Skinner seemed to have expected from him... really, worse than he had expected from himself. "I have no idea what I would like to do next."
The invisible man stared at him. It was not an answer he heard from the Captain very often, and the sound of his voice shook his friend deeply. He didn't have an answer for the Captain, and eventually Nemo sighed again and turned back to watching the sea, gently shutting Skinner out of whatever dark thoughts he might be having. The invisible man watched him a little longer, than disappeared below decks. Some moods were better left to the solitary.
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Crystal decanters clinked gently against tumblers. The murmur of the engines and the distant roar of the ocean was obscured by the sound of the Victrola. The lamps, although dimmed, somehow seemed to penetrate every corner of the room with a soft and reassuring light. Everywhere there was the smooth texture of mahogany, or the smooth feel of a good cognac sliding down a much-abused throat.
"The trick is in the distillation..."
The French constable had turned vintner in his declining years, after a tragedy he wouldn't speak of. The other two, with their own misfortunes, knew better than to say anything. Instead they had been talking of food, of wine, and of old cases and friends long gone. It was interesting what the three had in common, being from similar times and similar backgrounds. Pitt and Abberline had never worked together, although they had crossed paths briefly on a later investigation of the Ripper murders. The Inspector Javert, although long retired, had his own stories to tell.
"Does it ever strike you, sometimes, that the world is going straight to hell in a handbasket?" Javert picked up the cognac and sipped a little, his accent thickening and blurring his words with the drink.
Abberline sighed. "Every time I am dragged back into service by some act of Parliament. Although this time it was that bastard Narraway's fault. And you too, indirectly," he gestured with his glass at Pitt, who looked startled.
"Excuse me?"
"If you hadn't discovered all that Whitechapel business, Narraway would never have known of it. And if he hadn't known of it he wouldn't have known to drag me out of my comfortable retirement to play nursemaid to a deranged and depraved magician."
Javert frowned. "What is this?"
Abberline sighed again. "You are familiar with the Ripper murders, correct? The brutal killings that terrorized the East End several ... good God, it must have been nearly twenty years ago..."
Pitt nodded with amusement, still young enough to know what twenty years meant. "Nearly that."
"At any rate..." Abberline frowned for a moment, clearly wondering about the propriety of his revealing so many secrets to a man of whom he knew very little. "Well, it can't matter now. Most of those involved are dead, and Pitt, you already know." He straightened a little in his chair, taking on the pose of a schoolteacher instructing a shamefully ignorant pupil. "What is less well known is this: There was an underlying order to the Ripper killings, a conspiracy to bend and twists the delusions of a madman to the ends of the English crown."
Javert's eyes were wide, scandalized and disbelieving. "The English church would condone such savage butchery?"
Abberline snorted. "More than condone, its immediate servants would have carried out the savage butchery, as you call it, had we not found a suitable candidate. In order to save face, you see."
Javert scowled. In his own way, the English policemen were rapidly discovering, he could be a particularly moral man. "What cause could be so great that it would require the mutilation of women? Whores, I grant you, but..."
"A scandal that could rock the faith the country has in their prince. The poor man had married a Catholic girl, you see, in a Catholic church. There were ... I believe there still are..." He looked at Pitt, who shrugged helplessly. "Er. Well, there were at the time still laws on the books stating that any prince who converted to the Catholic church was invalidated for the throne. The whores who died were the witnesses to the marriage. The girl herself was remanded to a mental institution for the criminally insane and her daughter was nearly run down by the coachman who was forced to witness it all."
Pitt shuddered, remembering the awful circumstances that had surrounded his discovery of the conspiracy. "What did happen to her? Tellman was never able to find out."
Abberline shrugged. "No one knows. It's generally assumed that she died in the squalor of the East End, or is living out some life of horrible drugery."
There was a long silence in the room, broken only by the warbling of the Victrola and the sound of glasses clinking thoughtfully against the table. No one had anything to follow up with that horrible tale of mutilation and conspiracy; no one really wanted to, either.
"Do you think..." Pitt said suddenly, startling both men. "Sorry. Do you think that you would have caught him, had there not been a conspiracy about? I mean, if you hadn't been ...." He groped around for a term to describe it. "Nudging him into the murders, do you think you would have been able to catch him?" His own patch, the Bow Street station at the time, was far from Spitalfields. He had been transferred there years after the Ripper murders.
Abberline sighed heavily. "I doubt it. Many of the leaps and bounds that Scotland Yard is making now in the areas of catching criminals weren't available to us then. And even so, all we really had to go on were witness reports. He left nothing of himself at the scenes of the crime... obviously, he said it was for magical purposes..."
"Here, do you really believe that man was working some sort of magic?" Javert interrupted. "That is the part that seems the most incredible to me. Have you ever seen him accomplish something that is so out of the ordinary as to call it magic?"
Pitt looked at the floor, and Abberline turned his head very carefully and very slowly to stare at the former French constable with a dark and annoyed gaze. "Myself? No. I have never seen his visions, or learned his secrets, or indeed heard anything to indicate that he has or could have performed any sort of feat we would call magical..."
"Well, then..."
"Except," Abberline raised his voice ever so slightly. Pitt winced. "That, in the twenty odd years I have known the man. In all that time... he has never appeared to age so much as a day. The way you see him now, sir, is the way he has appeared for the last score of years. Now tell me... what is a man who does not age, but some sort of worker of magic?"
Javert opened his mouth, shook his head, and took a drink of his cognac rather than risk further ire from the English policeman. "I have no quarrel with you, sir. If you say you have witnessed his lack of aging over the years with your own two eyes, I will believe you. But I still find it difficult to believe in this so-called League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I have yet to see anything out of the ordinary myself."
Pitt shook his head slightly, amused and utterly disarming with his chuckle and smile. "Wander about the corridors a little bit, Monsieur Javert. If you can located Mr. Rodney Skinner, ask him to show you what he really looks like without the white face and coat. You'll have your out of the ordinary. It's just a matter of looking in the right place."
"And not seeing, in Skinner's case," Abberline muttered, which brought a weightier laugh from Pitt.
"I don't understand..." Javert frowned, a little put out by what he saw as needless exclusionism. Abberline and Pitt exchanged glances.
"You will..." Abberline muttered. "Believe me, my new friend. You will."
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"I will not!"
"Oh, come on, Tellman. It's good clean fun..." Huck wiped sweat from his dripping brow with the already sodden towel, dropping it into a small basket on the floor and pulling another from the stack on the bench. "Well, good sweaty fun, anyway."
The two Americans were taking advantage of the brief lull and the facilities aboard the Nautilus to get some exercise. Having grown tired of chasing each other around the corridors and having abuse heaped upon them by the various other guests, they'd decided to hold impromptu games of football in one of the rooms that had been intended to be for hosting guests. Nemo had acquiesced to the request to convert it into a gymnasium largely out of a desire to keep them out of his hallways, but also recognizing the need for passengers and even crew to engage in some recreational physical activity.
"It's..." Tellman faltered. He couldn't very well say it was bloody undignified and have them rib him about being a 'stiff-ass Brit,' as he'd heard them call Abberline. But he most definitely didn't want to join in a game that looked to get his teeth bashed out or his shins bashed in. "It's indecent."
Tom snorted and kicked the ball across the room, bouncing it off the opposite wall and catching it neatly. Nemo, with not altogether remarkable foresight, had removed the glass and tiling from the wall and left only the sturdy marble. "Give it a rest already, okay? You sound like ... that crazy man... Sebastian."
Huck aimed a kick at his friend's shins, entirely too aware of his friend's propensity for tactlessness. Tellman's face went stone cold.
"I am nothing like that... that..."
"Monster?" Huck suggested cheerfully. "Psychopath? No one's suggesting you are. Right Tom?"
Tom grumbled.
The police inspector and the American agent exchanged glances, deciding that there would clearly need to be some sort of compromise before Tom Sawyer opened his mouth and planted his foot firmly in it. Again.
"I'll just watch," Tellman said after a second, settling down on the bench. "Besides, I've no idea how you Americans play rugby anyway."
Huck laughed. "Well, we call it football, for one thing. Come on, lazy." He pulled Tom to his feet. "You're not going to win any points by sitting around."
Tellman watched them race back and forth across the floor, slamming into each other with such force that he was actually quite surprised there weren't more broken bones or bloody noses involved. It seemed very like rugby, only without the brutish elegance that characterized the very British sport. The key seemed to be giving the largest person on either side a ball and standing back. Being as neither of the two Americans was noticeably bigger or stronger than the other, the game went back and forth with no clear winner in sight.
"So, what do you think Sebastian did, anyway?" Tom was speaking more to Huck than to the Englishman, but it was the Englishman who responded.
"Three weeks on the ship and you don't know?" Incredulity laced all through his voice. "Is it general policy of American agents not to know who they're going into the field with?"
Tom caught the football and glared at Tellman. "I try not to pry into the lives of psychopathic killers, if that's what you're asking."
Tellman addressed his next question to Huck. "Don't you know who Abberline is?"
Huck frowned thoughtfully. "I heard the name before, but honestly I think it was from something before my time. The ..."
"The Ripper murders."
Tom dropped the ball.
Tellman sighed. "Abberline was the second Inspector who took charge of the Ripper murders. When they stopped, he stopped investigating, but not because he's caught the culprit as everyone thought. It was because he'd known all along who the person was... he'd helped cover up the real murderers, and the murders stopped only because they'd run out of victims."
The two Americans blinked at him, astonished. Tom frowned. "I thought ...." He closed his eyes, clearly trying to remember something from very far back in his past. "I thought ... okay, never mind. But I remember everyone saying they never caught the killer. But... the Ripper killed prostitutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there still hundreds of prostitutes in London?"
Tellman sighed. "Unfortunately, yes. But it was never about prostitutes." He paused. "Well, it was. But the man who wielded the actual blade... Sebastian... was directed by someone who wanted him to kill those specific prostitutes."
Huck stared. "Does Sebastian actually know about all of this?"
"I don't think anyone knows what that madman believes, or thinks. Certainly I don't." Tellman shuddered. "I don't want to, either."
Tom actually quirked a smile at that. "Maybe that's one of the hazards of hanging around immortals."
Huck blinked. "Immortals?"
"Sebastian. Dorian. We've got a lot of them on the ship, at least it seems like it. Then again, could just be that we've never been around so many people who don't age before."
Tellman frowned. "Dorian? Mr. Gray? I thought..." he trailed off. Although he had, of course, read the brief that had accompanied Dorian's conditional release to the custody of the League, he wasn't sure how much of it he actually believed. An invisible man running around was one thing, but this...
Tom nodded. "The painter's dead, so we can't ask him how he did it, but somehow Dorian managed to commission a portrait from someone who painted more than just pictures. As long as that portrait exists, he can't die. He was part of the original League, till he turned us all in to the Fantom and tried to blow us out of the water." The American was smiling, but it was a smile that was full of teeth. Huck only winced and rubbed his stomach where the nearly fatal wound had been.
Clearly, they both still harbored ill sentiment towards the enigmatical Mr. Gray.