Feliks read it several times: there was something about the prose style of The Times that made it extremely difficult to comprehend. It seemed at least to mean that as people left the palace their footmen were sent running to fetch their carriages, which would be parked somewhere else.

There must be a way, he thought, that I can contrive to be in or on the Walden carriage when it returns to the palace to pick them up.

One major difficulty remained. He had no gun.

He could have got one easily enough in Geneva, but then to have carried it across international frontiers would have been risky: he might have been refused entry into England if his baggage had been searched.

It was surely just as easy to get a gun in London, but he did not know how, and he was most reluctant to make open inquiries. He had observed gun shops in the West End of London and noted that all the customers who went in and out looked thoroughly upper-class: Feliks would not get served in there even if he had the money to buy their beautifully made precision firearms. He had spent time in low-class pubs, where guns were surely bought and sold among criminals, but he had not seen it happen, which was hardly surprising. His only hope was the anarchists. He had got into conversation with those of them whom he thought “serious,” but they never talked of weapons, doubtless because of Feliks’s presence. The trouble was that he had not been around long enough to be trusted. There were always police spies in anarchist groups, and while this did not prevent the anarchists from welcoming newcomers, it made them wary.

Now the time for surreptitious investigation had run out. He would have to ask directly how guns were to be obtained. It would require careful handling. And immediately afterward he would have to sever his ties with Jubilee Street and move to another part of London, to avoid the risk of being traced.

He considered the young Jewish tearaways of Jubilee Street. They were angry and violent boys. Unlike their parents, they refused to work like slaves in the sweatshops of the East End, sewing the suits that the aristocracy ordered from Savile Row tailors. Unlike their parents, they paid no attention to the conservative sermonizing of the rabbis. But as yet they had not decided whether the solutions to their problems lay in politics or in crime.

His best prospect, he decided, was Nathan Sabelinsky. A man of about twenty, he had rather Slavic good looks, and wore very high stiff collars and a yellow waistcoat. Feliks had seen him around the spielers off the Commercial Road: he must have had money to spend on gambling as well as on clothes.

He looked around the library. The other occupants were an old man asleep, a woman in a heavy coat reading Das Kapital in German and making notes, and a Lithuanian Jew bent over a Russian newspaper, reading with the aid of a magnifying glass. Feliks left the room and went downstairs. There was no sign of Nathan or any of his friends. It was a little early for him: if he worked at all, Feliks thought, he worked at night.

Feliks went back to Dunstan Houses. He packed his razor, his clean underwear and his spare shirt in his cardboard suitcase. He told Milly, Rudolf Rocker’s wife: “I’ve found a room. I’ll come back this evening to say thank you to Rudolf.” He strapped the suitcase to the backseat of the bicycle and rode west to central London, then north to Camden Town. Here he found a street of high, once-grand houses which had been built for pretentious middle-class families who had now moved to the suburbs at the ends of the new railway lines. In one of them Feliks rented a dingy room from an Irishwoman called Bridget. He paid her ten shillings in advance of two weeks’ rent.

By midday he was back in Stepney, outside Nathan’s home in Sidney Street. It was a small row house of the two-rooms-up-and-two-down type. The front door was wide open. Feliks walked in.

The noise and the smell hit him like a blow. There, in a room about twelve feet square, some fifteen or twenty people were working at tailoring. Men were using machines, women were sewing by hand and children were pressing finished garments. Steam rose from the ironing boards to mingle with the smell of sweat. The machines clattered, the irons hissed and the workers jabbered incessantly in Yiddish. Pieces of cloth cut already for stitching were piled on every available patch of floor space. Nobody looked up at Feliks: they were all working furiously fast.

He spoke to the nearest person, a girl with a baby at her breast. She was hand-sewing buttons onto the sleeve of a jacket. “Is Nathan here?” he said.

“Upstairs,” she said without pausing at her work.

Feliks went out of the room and up the narrow staircase. Each of the two small bedrooms had four beds. Most of them were occupied, presumably by people who worked at night. He found Nathan in the back room, sitting on the edge of a bed, buttoning his shirt.

Nathan saw him and said: “Feliks, wie gehts?”

“I need to talk to you,” Feliks said in Yiddish.

“So talk.”

“Come outside.”

Nathan put on his coat and they went out into Sidney Street. They stood in the sunshine, close to the open window of the sweat-shop, their conversation masked by the noise from inside.

“My father’s trade,” said Nathan. “He’ll pay a girl fivepence for machining a pair of trousers-an hour’s work for her. He’ll pay another threepence to the girls who cut, press and sew on buttons. Then he will take the trousers to a West End tailor and get paid ninepence. Profit, one penny-enough to buy one slice of bread. If he asks the West End tailor for tenpence he’ll be thrown out of the shop, and the work will be given to one of the dozens of Jewish tailors out in the street with their machines under their arms. I won’t live like that.”

“Is this why you’re an anarchist?”

“Those people make the most beautiful clothes in the world-but did you see how they are dressed?”

“And how will things be changed-by violence?”

“I think so.”

“I was sure you would feel this way. Nathan, I need a gun.”

Nathan laughed nervously. “What for?”

“Why do anarchists usually want guns?”

“You tell me, Feliks.”

“To steal from thieves, to oppress tyrants and to kill murderers.”

“Which are you going to do?”

“I’ll tell you-if you really want to know…”

Nathan thought for a moment, then said: “Go to the Frying Pan pub on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street. See Garfield the Dwarf.”

“Thank you!” said Feliks, unable to keep the note of triumph out of his voice. “How much will I have to pay?”

“Five shillings for a pinfire.”

“I’d rather have something more reliable.”

“Good guns are expensive.”

“I’ll just have to haggle.” Feliks shook Nathan’s hand. “Thank you.”

Nathan watched him climb on his bicycle. “Maybe you’ll tell me about it, afterward.”

Feliks smiled. “You’ll read about it in the papers.” He waved a hand and rode off.

He cycled along Whitechapel Road and Whitechapel High Street, then turned right into Osborn Street. Immediately, the character of the streets changed. This was the most run-down part of London he had yet seen. The streets were narrow and very dirty, the air smoky and noisome, the people mostly wretched. The gutters were choked with filth. But despite all that the place was as busy as a beehive. Men ran up and down with handcarts, crowds gathered around street stalls, prostitutes worked every corner and the workshops of carpenters and bootmakers spilled out onto the pavements.

Feliks left his bicycle outside the door of the Frying Pan: if it was taken he would just have to steal another one. To enter the pub he had to step over what looked like a dead cat. Inside was a single room, low and bare, with a bar at the far end. Older men and women sat on benches around the walls, while younger people stood in the middle of the room. Feliks went to the bar and asked for a glass of ale and a cold sausage.