To Kingdom Come Read Online Free

on my face and smelled the heavenly aroma of fresh coffee. My attentive waiter refilled my porcelain cup with coffee and cream from matching silver pots before I could ask.
    I was just beginning a second roll when a beautiful woman began wending her way toward me among the tables. She had lips the color of poppies, and a vibrant cobalt blue dress hugged her every curve. I leaned forward, longing to know what intimate secret she wished to reveal to me.
    She came closer and bent toward me as I looked up into her pellucid blue eyes, drinking in her beauty. She took my chin lightly in her gloved hand and brought her impossibly red lips to my ear.
    “Eh, Thomas! Wake up, you idiot! Your coffee ees getting cold!”
    Someone’s boot was on my hip, shaking me awake, and none too gently, either. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes, my dream in tatters.Etienne Dummolard’s face is difficult to take on any morning, let alone in comparison to the beauty in my dream. He is built along the lines of a bear. His purple nose resembles a turnip freshly pulled from a field, and his hair looks as if a miniature haystack had been set down upon his head.
    “What are you doing here?” I mumbled, sitting up.
    “Nobody was at home for breakfast, so I brought it here. Coffee and fresh croissants and jam. Monsieur Mac has sent along a fresh suit of clothes for each of you.”
    Losing the girl was a disappointment, but I sat at the clerk’s desk and contented myself with the coffee and rolls. It was better fare than I had anticipated under the circumstances. The boulevard breezes of my dream, I reasoned, had been due to the missing glass in our waiting room windows.
    “While you are enjoying your meal,” Etienne said, “I shall step around and see this amazing sight, this Scotland Yard all en déshabillé .”
    “I’ll go with you,” I said, rising.
    “If you insult my croissants by standing, I shall kick the legs from under you. Sit and digest,” he ordered.
    I nodded and poured a second cup of coffee from the pot he had brought. It’s not a bad thing to be forced to eat fresh pastry prepared by a master chef. After he left, however, I committed the sacrilege of chewing the last of my roll while crossing to the office.
    Inside, Barker was seated at his desk, for all the world like any other day were it not that the office was in shambles. He was engrossed in conversation with a workman over the telephone set at his desk. The Times was spread out under his elbows.
    I was standing in the doorway, remarking to myself that it was seven o’clock by the extremely loud tolling of Big Ben just down the street, when I was struck a glancing blow on the shoulder. I almost thought it was another explosion, and it was. It was Jenkins.
    Our clerk leapt into the room, taking in the windows, the overturned pedestal, the dust-covered books. His eyes were the size of billiard balls. It was the first time I’d ever seen him fully awake. Neither Barker nor I had thought to send word to him that we’d been bombed. He’d known for less than a minute.
    “Wha’—what’s happened here?” he demanded. “And what are you two gents doing here at this hour on a Saturday?”
    “A small matter of an explosion at Scotland Yard last evening,” Barker explained. “We thought it necessary to spend the night.”
    “Cor! It’ll take days to clean this place up. Look at all this winder glass. It’s everywhere!”
    “It gets worse,” I told him. “The Sun was also damaged, I’m afraid.”
    Our clerk looked stricken. The Rising Sun was Jenkins’s port of call, when not at work. I can only compare it to telling a man from the Exchange that the Market has plunged. He went white.
    “Oh, s’truth, not the Sun!” He rushed past me and out the door. I heard his footsteps echoing down the court.
    “The news is worse this morning,” Barker said, handing me The Times. “Aside from the dozens hurt in Whitehall, fourteen men were injured at the Junior Carlton Club.