Dodger

had given it just a little bit of oil and a little tinkering, Dodger was in at the enemy’s throat. He grinned, but there was no fun in the grin; it was more like a knife.
    The building was mostly in shadows and Dodger just loved shadows. He was pleased to see that there were carpets – not really a sensible choice if you were running an embassy and might like to know if there were some unwelcome people walking about, because marble floors were much to be recommended, as Dodger well knew; sometimes if you stepped on them in the night time they could ring like a bell. Whenever he’d found them, he had always got down and very carefully slid himself over them, so that no sound could be heard.
    Now he listened at doors, he stood behind curtains, and he made sure not to go too near the kitchens, as you never knew when a servant might be up. And all the time he stole. He stole in the same methodical way that Solomon made beautiful small objects, and he smiled when he thought that, because now Dodger was making small beautiful things disappear. He stole jewellery, when he found it, and he opened every lock and riffled through the contents of every drawer, in every boudoir. On two occasions he robbed rooms in which he could just make out people sleeping. He didn’t care; it was as if nothing could stop him, or maybe it was as if the Lady had made him invisible. He worked fast and methodically and everything was wrapped up in its own little velvet bag, within the main bundle, so that nothing would ever go ‘
clink
’ just at the wrong moment because if there was a clink then the clink was where you spent your days until they hanged you. It was a little joke among thieves.
    At one point, in the middle of the building, in a large desk which took one hell of a long time to yield its secrets to his busy fingers and their little friends, he found ledgers and a series of little books. They had a complicated look about them, and manuscripts and scrolls with red wax on them, which always looked expensive. He recognized the crest on some of the documents, he surely did.
    As he stood in this busy, important room, he thought, I wish I could do something, so that they would know. And then knew what he would do. I’ll let them know who it had been, he told himself, because, well, I could have brought the place down in flames. After all, all those oil lamps around? All those curtains? All those stairs and all those people sleeping up there? He was so angry but, in the warm darkness of the room, what he was not – whatever else he had been – was a murderer. I shall make them pay in my own way, he decided, and at that moment all of them were saved from a fiery death, if they only had known it, and were only living because Dodger, silent in this sleeping world, allowed them to.
    Put like that, it made him feel a little better. Padding away silently, he thought, I’ve always said I wasn’t a hero, and I ain’t, but if I’ve ever been a hero, then as sure as Sunday I’m a hero now, because I’ve stopped an embassy full of people being burned alive.
    And so at last, not long before the first crack of dawn, he was down and outside and into the mews by the side of the embassy. He knew there would be ostlers and grooms hanging about here any minute soon but nevertheless, moving even more stealthily, he found the coach house, and yes, there was a coach there with a foreign crest painted on the side. Dodger carefully knelt down beside it and felt around near the wheels. Close to one wheel it seemed that a length of metal had been thrown up on one occasion and got stuck, scraping on the rim of the wheel. Dodger tried to pull it free, but without any success until a very useful little crowbar caused it to spring out, and Dodger caught it in the air whereupon he straightened up, went to the coat of arms on the coach and scratched, as deeply as he could inscribe them, the words:
MR PUNCH
.
    Then, with his face dark and his purpose iron-clad, he walked from loose box to loose box, driving the occupants into an adjacent mews and carefully shutting the gate behind them, because everybody knew that horses were so stupid that if there was a fire they would rush into their stables because that’s where they thought they would be safe, a habit that showed you why horses didn’t rule the world. They wandered about aimlessly while Dodger struck up a light and dropped it into a large bale of hay and then walked in earnest down the nearest