by Frank Tuttle
“Time to go back to work, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so. Don’t want the Hoobins to get the idea I’m entertaining comely young women on their time.”
“Oh, so now I’m comely and young, am I?”
I found myself smiling. “You are. The Velvet is keeping at least one of its lamps under a basket.”
Darla grinned a sly little grin. “Maybe I wasn’t always a bookkeeper, Markhat.” She leaned forward, took my hand. “Maybe I know more than you think about what goes on, behind those doors.”
And with that, she rose and sailed forth, brushing past the bemused Avalantes with an airy wave.
I counted out coins and followed.
Darla was gone, when I stepped squinting out into the street. Halbert was there, cab and all, looking hangdog. I clapped him on the back and told him he’d done the right thing and then he clattered off for one more church and one more round of priest baiting.
Chapter Ten
“Will that be all today, sir?” asked Halbert.
“It will.”
Halbert nodded and snapped his reigns. I leaned back into my comfy seat and let out a long and ragged sigh.
I’d tracked them down, one and all, and a more distasteful two day’s work I’d seldom seen. It’s not that I don’t like priests-nay nay, it’s that they don’t like me. I’d nearly had to break down the doors at Ellsback. Word about the pesky finder and his mysterious combs had gotten around as fast as Encorla’s fancy black carriage. Priests had fled the mainhold like ants from an overturned nest, the first afternoon I’d gone around. I’d been forced to resort to an early-morning visit and a half-day wait to finally catch a single black mask come skulking down an unlit hall.
And the black mask of Ellsback, in perfect unison with all his peers, sang a song of innocence and ignorance.
Evis and I had refined our plan somewhat, after reconvening at House Avalante for blood and sandwiches. Evis had clad a dozen or so of his day-walking staff in new grey coats and new grey hats and ordered them to hang around the various churches, following priests who entered or left as vagrant whims took them.
“An abundance of Markhats,” Evis had said, with a toothy grin. Then he’d surprised me by quoting scripture. “Guilt flees while innocence rests,” he said. “Let us see if priests fall prey to the same follies as lesser sinners.”
I’d just shrugged. Let the guilty wonder how the clever finder Markhat gets about so quickly. Even better, let them wonder how many grey-clad men Hisvin has working on the combs.
Halbert bellowed suddenly at a cabman, and I looked out long enough to see the Velvet’s red-flagged roof peek up above the rest.
I smiled, waved though I knew she could not see. The temptation to knock on the carriage roof and tell Halbert to stop at the Velvet was strong, but I resisted. No need for Evis to know more than he had to. Time enough for wooing when work was done.
I’d told Darla just that, more than once, in those three days. We’d managed to have lunch again, once. She’d chided me for failing to shower her with wine and roses. I’d responded with observations that spinster bookkeepers ought to be appreciative of good Pinford ham sandwiches and ice-chilled bottles of Bottits.
She’d laughed and tossed a pickle at me. And then we’d kissed, and kissed again, until the waiter at the Sidewalk Cafe had issued a discreet cough so he could refill our glasses.
We’d held hands, like school kids, and we’d walked in circles around the Velvet, waving at Hooga as we passed. He’d looked the other way when I picked a fireflower for Darla. She kissed me again, and showed me a hidden alcove where the Velvet’s gardeners hid to take naps.
About that, I will say no more.
I grinned at the memory and eased further back into the well-cushioned seats of Evis’s carriage.
At that moment, we rattled past the Velvet. I pushed the window-curtain open wide just to see if Darla was out on the street, or at the Sidewalk Cafe.
She was nowhere in sight. Sharp-eyed Hooga, still on his stoop, dipped his eyes as I passed. I thought of ogre-hash and Martha Hoobin and felt a small pang of guilt.
I let the curtain fall and sighed. Three days, done and gone. Three days of stalking and talking, but if I’d managed to terrify any Hands of the Holy, I’d also failed to see any evidence of such terror. My final four Cleansing priests had shown the same measure of disinterest before they’d heard Hisvin’s name, and similar levels of apprehension afterwards. All had denied ever seeing or Cleansing the combs. All had denied the combs bore the invisible but unmistakable mark of a Cleansing.
That lack of the elusive holy mark was proving worrisome. Evis had seemed so certain about the Cleansing-but what if Evis’s wand waver was simply wrong?
I scowled at passers-by, in fine old rich coot style, and mulled that over. If the combs had no link to the Church, then Martha Hoobin was dead, plain and simple.
I shoved the thought aside. “Can’t be wrong,” I muttered. Evis could afford the best wand-waving money could buy. If he said the combs had received a Church-style Cleansing, then they had done just that.
Priest or acolyte, sorcerer or sweeping man-someone wearing the black robes of the Church had arranged for a box or two of middling good trinkets to be wiped clean of their provenance, just so someone like Mama couldn’t fix their back-street Sight upon a comb and start mumbling things about cassocks and red masks.
Maybe an apprentice did a quick and dirty version of the Cleansing, omitting the much-vaunted holy affluence. Or maybe one of the Hands I’d just spoken to did so, in the unlikely prospect that someone like me came calling.
Evis and I were betting that the combs themselves were a casual acquisition. They’d been seized at an excommunication, bought at an estate sale or picked up for a few gold jerks in the shadows down at the docks. In any case, we were betting that our man knew little, if anything, about the combs and their history.
But he’d be wondering now, if we were right. Wondering and pacing and ruing the day he bought the awful things. Oh, he’d check my story, starting with my association with Encorla Hisvin. That confirmed, if he bothered, he’d learn that Gantish cargo barges sink all the bloody time, and that half of them are named “Embalo”, which is Gantish for “unsinkable”, and that tracing the mere existence of such a vessel might take weeks, if indeed it could be done at all.
I leaned back. Like all the best lies, mine was a careful blend of half-truth and outright misdirection. It would hold, for a short time.
Time enough for panic to take root and bloom. Time enough to let the name Encorla Hisvin rise up and crash down and squeeze them like a vise.
Evis and I were betting fear would be sufficient to scare the truth out of our mark, priest or not. After all, that was the best course, when piloting past a creature like Encorla Hisvin. He didn’t want the combs, specifically. Since all he wanted to know was where they came from, why not tell him?
Tell him where, and when, and by whom. Better to tell him, than to have him find out, because he might then discover other things-things about the warehouse on Gentry, for instance. Things about dead prostitutes, shallow graves and new moons. Things even Hisvin the Corpsemaster might not choose to ignore.
That was my master plan. Because it didn’t matter to us where the combs came from. All that mattered was who had them.
I pulled off my hat, smoothed down my hair and spent a moment hoping my own life never hung by such a thin and twisted thread.
By the time Halbert pulled the carriage to a gentle halt at my curb, Darla was gone. She’d left me a sandwich and a big red Crump Valley apple, and Mama was shoving them both at me before I was halfway to my door.
“Boy,” she said, eyeing Halbert, who doffed his hat to her as if she were a queen before setting the ponies to a trot. “Miss Tomas left you this. Where you been? She waited half the day.”
“Miss Tomas?” I asked, fumbling with my lock.
“Miss Darla, then.” She followed me
inside, put the sandwich and the apple down carefully on my desk. “Though you ought to call her Miss Tomas all polite-like. Manners wouldn’t hurt you none.”
I sidled around Mama, pulled off my shoes, hung up my hat and my coat.
“Look, Mama, it’s been a long day. I’m tired. Say what you want to say and get it over with. It’s bad manners to overstay one’s welcome.”
Mama pulled back a chair and sat. I didn’t like the way she was eyeing me. I could tell she was deciding what and how much of a thing to tell me, and what parts to leave out.
I picked up the sandwich. Mama cleared her throat.
“Ethel Hoobin says he’ll have the men you need, when you need them. I got a hex brewin’ next door. You tear it anywhere in town, and I’ll know it.”
I swallowed. “Good. What else?”
She glared. “I still don’t feel right about this, boy. I tell you, something ain’t right.”
“I won’t argue that.”
She sighed. “Miss Darla had news for you.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Said she found a man in the Park that remembered seeing Martha Hoobin.”
I put down Darla’s sandwich. It was good, better than anything Eddie ever made. But the way Mama refused to meet my eyes was putting me off my food.
“And?”
“Said the man remembered seein’ Martha with a man.” She looked up at me. “Tall, thin man. Don’t know no name. But he was there, with Martha. More than once.”
The Park. I’d been there. I’d asked. No one had seen.
But I’m not Darla, don’t have, won’t ever have, those big brown eyes.
“Who-” I began.
“She told me to tell you to talk to a man named Young Varney. Said she told him you’d be around askin’.” Mama shook her head. “Boy, I tell you plain I feel death, just outside your door, right this minute.”
“Mine?”
“Who else’s?” she spat back. “Ain’t there no other way you can do this?”
“No. No other way. Not now. And anyway, Mama, you said yourself your Sight is fuzzy these days. I still think you’re just putting your head too close to the hex-pot you’ve got brewing next door.”
“Maybe.” She sighed. “Anyways, I reckon it won’t do no good to ask you if you’ll take something I’ll give you, when you go out.”
“If I take it, will you go on home?”
“I’ll go,” she replied.
What the hell, I thought. When you’re mixing and mingling with vampires after dark, a clove of garlic discreetly tucked away in one’s breast pocket might not be a bad idea.
“Here,” she said, rising. She put her hand out on my desk, closed but palm-up, and opened it.
She held a tiny silver image of the Angel Malan, wings outspread, hands upraised and clasped to a fine-wrought silver chain.
“Miss Darla wanted you to have it. I ain’t gonna lie to you. I hexed it, and I hexed it hard.” She looked up at me, and I don’t know what she saw, but her pinprick eyes welled up with tears. “And I reckon it won’t do you a damned bit of good, you pig-headed young fool.”
She dropped the necklace, turned and raced stomp-stomping away.
I watched her go, open-mouthed, as my door banged shut and hers banged in swift reply.
“Thank you, Miss Darla.” I picked up the Angel Malan, let him swing before my eyes. “Guardian of soldiers, defender of the weary.” I remembered a line of Church, in old Father Molo’s voice. “He walks before you, in the dark,” he’d mumbled. Malan hadn’t been his patron. “Clears the way, makes wide the path.”
I slipped the necklace in my pocket, finished my sandwich and hurried to the Park.
I went by Darla’s, but she wasn’t home. So I told the cabbie to head for the Park, and he obliged, though with far less aplomb than Halbert.
Long shadows fell across us as we rode. I tried not to mull over Mama’s ramblings, but I found myself handling my Malan unconsciously and chided myself for it. Death comes to us all. Mama’s right about that. But I didn’t for a minute believe she knew the place, or the hour.
Still, I was taking precautions. My army knife was tucked in a belt-sheath under my jacket. My old Army-issue flash-papers were in the breast pocket. And as I was heading to talk to a man who sold birdseed to ladies of leisure, I felt I was adequately armed.
The Park was beginning to empty out. Couples streamed past, hand in hand. Some were flanked by hooting, scrambling children, their knees soiled green from a hard afternoon of tearing up the Regent’s turf. I dodged and wove and finally made out the stooped figure of a thin, white-haired man pushing a rickety two-wheeled cart, just cresting the next hill.
I huffed and puffed and caught up with him halfway down on the other side.
“Ho there,” I said. “Hold up.”
He turned and scowled and let go of his cart.
He was sixty or better, with a thick head of long white hair, skin the approximate color and texture of an oft-used saddle, and bright clean false teeth made for a much bigger mouth.
“Bit late for bird-seed.” His false teeth clattered and clicked when he spoke.
“I’m not wanting any,” I replied, and without missing a beat he turned, hefted his cart and was on his way.
“Two bags,” I shouted. “Two bags then.”
He stopped again. I caught up to him, saw him stifle the ghost of a snow-white grin.
I held out a pair of copper jerks.
“You the finder?”
“I’m the finder.”
He squinted at me, laughed, opened the top of his cart and pulled out two fist-sized paper bags stuffed full of broken corn swept from the loading ramp of one of the mills that line the Brown.
“Way she talked, I thought you was a good-lookin’ man. Reckon your lady-love needs spectacles?”
I took the bags. “Ha ha. I take it you are Mr. Varney?”
“I am.” He mopped his bald brow and put his elbows on his cart. “Your lady said you wanted to talk about that pretty little New People seamstress.”
“You knew her?”
“Naw, can’t say I did.” He paused long enough to nod at a lady who passed. “She bought some feed, ’bout once a week. Kept to herself mostly. Except when that thin fella started nosing around.”
I made myself breathe, made myself nod agreeably. The last thing I needed to do was scare the old man with the intensity of my stare.
“Been about a month, I reckon. He first started coming round, hauntin’ that bench, right over there,” he said, pointing to a stone bench set center in a white gravel circle not thirty feet away. “Cheap young crow. Bought a bag, never fed no birds ’til he saw her a comin’. He’d sit right there, all sour and glares, ’til she topped the hill. Oh, then he changed, right enough. Then he was all smiles and how-do-you-do’s.” Young Varney spat. “Crow-nosed prick.”
“You didn’t like him much,” I said, when he went silent. “Did she?”
He laughed. “Oh, she weren’t stupid. She’d speak to him, kind enough, at first. But it didn’t take long, ’til she’d figured Mister Fancy Pants out. Then she took to doing her readin’ on the other side of the Park, she did.” He shook his head. “Course, that didn’t stop Mister Fancy Pants.”
“He followed her?
Young Varney nodded. “He was a persistent fella, give him that. She even hid behind them oaks one day. But he always found her, no matter what. ’Til she just stopped comin’.”
I nodded. “He did too, didn’t he? Stopped coming.”
He scratched his head. “Yeah, I ain’t seen him since.”
I took a deep breath. “This is important. Did my lady friend tell you why I’m here?”
“She said that nice lady was gone, and that you think that fancy young man is the one what took her.”
“Someone took her,” I replied. “And yes, I think it was him.”
He shook his head. “Well, mister, I wish I could tell you more about him. I don’t
know his name. He was tall, thin and dark-headed. Can’t recall much else.”
“Was he young?”
Young Varney squinted, back across time, I suppose. “Younger than you. Twenty and five? These old eyes-hell, I wasn’t paying much attention to him, no how.”
“I understand.” Another pair of ladies passed, and Young Varney’s eyes moved with them, and I decided on a different tack. “Tell me about the young lady then. What can you recall about her?”
“Oh, she was a daisy. Soft-spoken, smiled all the time.” He cackled. “She had a accent. Drawled her words. Couldn’t understand her, at first. Kind of pretty, after I got the hang of it. And them clothes! Angel Bolo, she wore some duds. Ain’t none of these ladies dressed as fine as that young un’. No, sir.” He smiled. “I reckon you think I’m a sad old fool.”
I laughed. “Put the right dress in front of a man, and we’re all sad old fools. Go on.”
He mopped his head again and pondered. “Well, she always had a book with her. A book or a sewin’ case-that’s how I knowed she was a seamstress. Sometimes she’d read. Sometimes she’d sew.” His face darkened. “Until that there man showed up.”
“What then?”
“Well, she quit sewin’ then. Sometimes she’d read to him, out of her book. I couldn’t make no sense out of it. Reckon he could though. Lord, how they’d argue some days!”
“Argue? About what?”
“Oh, angels and heavens and whatnot,” said Young Varney. I decided then and there that not one, but two, men had been trailing around Miss Hoobin those days in the Park. “She’d be all patient and kind, and he’d get all red-faced and start waving them great long arms.” The old man lifted an eyebrow in disdain. “I knew then he didn’t have no sense. I don’t care what she read in that there book-any man with sense would just be smilin’ and noddin’, and that’s a damned bare fact.”
I felt cold. Angels and heaven and whatnot. Martha Hoobin had been reading Balptist verse to the same man who’d put Allie Sands under the cobbles.
