Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  She hugged Pamela to her, enveloping her in scent and warmth, and Pamela felt a sense of relief. If anyone could track Jamie down and return him home whole, it was this woman. She had the sort of contacts the CIA might envy.

  Yevgena stood back then and surveyed Casey from the very top of his head to the tips of his toes. To Pamela’s surprise, her husband blushed under the scrutiny. She raised her eyebrows, giving him a slight smile. She had rarely seen him flustered by a woman but he most certainly was by this one.

  Yevgena smiled, a slow seductive thing, and then gave Casey her hand. He bowed over it and kissed the back of it, for one didn’t shake hands with such a woman.

  “So you are my girl’s husband?”

  “Aye, I am that,” Casey said, the color still high in his face.

  “Well,” Yevgena said, a mischievous look in her eyes, “she’s lucky I’m not a few decades younger or I might try to steal you from her.”

  “I’m flattered by the notion,” Casey said, rising from her hand and stepping back as one did in the presence of royalty.

  “Please sit down, both of you. There are things of which we need to speak.”

  They sat opposite her on a double seat covered in ruched velvet, the wall above their heads fitted with an ingeniously built china cabinet. Pamela saw Casey take in the construction of the vardo with his artisan’s eye. The interior was done in highly polished walnut and had clearly been the work of a master craftsman.

  “This will be one of the Welsh wagons, no?” Casey asked, peering at a joint in the couch they sat upon.

  “Yes,” Yevgena said, obviously pleasantly surprised by his knowledge. “How did you know?”

  “I saw the wee gilded dragons on the crown boards outside. I know that’s a Welsh builder’s mark.”

  “You have the hands of an artist yourself,” she said. “The understanding of wood and stone is in your blood, yes?”

  “Aye, ‘tis,” Casey replied and Pamela heard the pleasure in his voice at being so quickly understood.

  “Vodka?” Yevgena asked, already uncapping a frosty bottle that sat on the table between them and pouring it into three small glasses. When a Russian asked you to drink, it was only a formality. There really was no question about it, so neither of them bothered to demur.

  Casey drank his down in one swallow as a Russian would expect. Pamela sipped at hers and then put it back on the table. The smell of it was strong, which seemed odd as vodka usually was utterly without scent, unless it was infused with fruit or spices.

  “So you were right, Pamela. Jemmy is in Russia. Frankly, I had hoped that you were wrong about that.”

  Jamie had once described Yevgena’s voice as akin to honeyed vodka poured through crimson velvet, gorgeous in the moment, but likely to leave a blistering head in its wake. She was a dangerous woman and as much as Jamie loved her, he never made the mistake of underestimating her or her motivations. But in this situation Pamela trusted her entirely for she knew how much this woman loved Jamie—as much as if he were her own son.

  “Getting him out won’t be easy. To be honest, I do not even know if it is possible. The last place I can track him to is Lubyanka.”

  Pamela thought she might be sick right there, for Lubyanka was such a chamber of horrors that rumors of its particular terrors had reached far into the outside world. Though she had no idea what the prison looked like, a huge stone edifice streaked with blood and echoing with screams reared up all too vividly in her mind’s eye. To survive such a place would require—she tore the thought off before it could root itself in her head.

  Yevgena watched the play of emotion as it flashed over her face.

  “I did not say it’s entirely impossible, child, only that there are roadblocks, and information from within the Soviet Union is at times very hard to come by. It is a little like trying to find one snowflake in a snowball. It is clear to me that someone does not want him found.”

  “Do you have any idea who?”

  Yevgena gave a wry smile. “There are any number of suspects, a wearying variety to be honest. Not to mention the Soviet border is the most closely guarded boundary in the world. Even information has a hard time getting past the Border Guard undetected, so the process is slow to say the least, and any plans we might make must be laid as carefully as though they were being set over a minefield, because in essence they are just that.”

  “But you can find him?” she asked, her throat so dry it hurt to speak. Casey took her hand and squeezed it.

  “There are Romany people everywhere, and we know how to keep our ears to the ground. I will find him, but it will take time and patience. Now,” she clapped her hands, “Johnny tells me you have agreed to dance for us tonight.”

  “I didn’t bring clothes for dancing,” Pamela protested.

  “Ah, that is no problem,” Yevgena said and stood. “Come, darlink girl, let us have music and dancing to help our worries.”

  Casey stood also and bowed over Yevgena’s hand once again, kissing it. “It was an honor to meet ye at last.”

  He left the vardo, giving Pamela a quirk of his brow, whether in question or amusement at her having to dance she wasn’t sure, but she felt that he was enjoying himself a wee bit too much.

  Once the door closed behind him, Yevgena took an outfit out of a tiny built-in closet and laid it out on the bed. Then she turned and opened a drawer, withdrawing an envelope from it and handing it over to Pamela.

  “This is for you. Inside you will find a key to a house in Paris, along with other information you will need. It’s all I can give you to keep you ahead of the others in this game.”

  Pamela took the envelope, feeling the shifting weight of the key and the crinkle of several sheets of paper.

  “It is Jamie’s house now, but once it was the home I shared with his grandfather. I knew Philip through him and I have to tell you, Pamela, this is a man to fear. I want you to understand and take precautions accordingly. He is like a snake idling in the grass—you understand—ready to strike just when you are lulled into complacency. He hates Jamie, he hated his father and he hated his grandfather who was, of course, his own brother. And he hates all those whom Jamie loves.”

  “I know, but it’s not him that I’m most worried about.” She told Yevgena then about the return of the Reverend and what she believed the two men were attempting to do to Jamie’s companies. Yevgena listened, the violet shadows that clustered near to the candlelight hiding her expression.

  Yevgena had taken out a brush and a box of cosmetics while Pamela spoke. She tilted Pamela’s head back.

  “Close your eyes, darlink,” she said. “The Reverend is not as circumspect as he would like to believe, my girl. He is observed at all times.”

  At the woman’s words, Pamela let out a little of the breath she had been holding. It was soothing to have someone brush on color, light as feathers, across her eyelids and cheekbones. Yevgena was humming to herself, soft and low, and Pamela felt the tension begin to leak from her body. It felt as though she weren’t herself for a moment, and she realized just how long and how deep the worry over Jamie had become.

  “You miss him still—Jamie’s grandfather?”

  “Yes,” Yevgena said frankly, “he is the hole in my universe, the piece of my soul that is always missing. I loved him in such a way that it is hard to say to you what he was in my life, what he still is despite his very long absence. You understand this, I know.”

  Yevgena poured a golden oil into one hand, rubbing it then between her palms and releasing the scent onto the air. It smelled of the desert and of rain after long sun. She rubbed it through Pamela’s hair in long strokes and Pamela succumbed to the pleasure of it, feeling slightly drowsy.

  “There, darlink girl, you are ready for the dance.”

  She met Yevgena’s eyes in the mirror. The wo
man’s face was lit in chiascuro, the light of the candles leaving her half in the darkness. The fire-lit side glowed golden, her bones startlingly sharp beneath the surface of her skin. The dark side hid her age, yielding echoes of the beauty she once had been.

  “I have been long enough with the Rom that I understand a candle is not wax, it is all flame. I have learned to live in the now and not yearn for what is past and what may or may not be to come. He is still with me. He is always in the now for me and he is always flame.”

  Yevgena took Pamela’s chin in her hand and their reflections flickered back at them in the mirror. Beauty present and past, two ages of woman caught in the shadowy glass.

  “We will find him, darlink, we just need time. You have played for time before. You can do it again, no?”

  In a land where half the population felt dispossessed, the Pavee were at the bottom. It was part fiction, part mythology and part fact that had put them there. Though they weren’t related to the Rom except by lifestyle, they were tarred with the same brush with which the world had always painted gypsies. Casey had heard warnings about them, about the cons and rooks at which they were supposedly expert, but he had always supposed that there were as many con artists who had permanent addresses as there were on wheels.

  At times, he thought he could understand such a life: the need to keep moving, to be able to stretch out to new boundaries each day, and to be limited only by the length of the road and the limits of the land. Such a life would free one from certain constraints, though it also imposed new ones: poverty, prejudice, and a lack of any sort of permanence beyond love. Then again, what sort of permanence did life guarantee anyway? And if you had been born to a life of perpetual movement and changing horizons, would you not feel strangled by the lack of such things?

  It was then that the music began, distracting him from his thoughts and the particularly potent brew that had been placed in his hand earlier. The drum started slow, like smoke, curling out one beat, a long pause, another beat and the men around him went silent, waiting. The thrum, the anticipation was a tangible vibration upon the air.

  A man began to dance, slow formal steps in a call and response with the drum. He realized it was the gypsy to whom he had held the knife, the man his wife called Johnny. He was almost unrecognizable without the grin, and it was impossible to look away from him. He wondered what else the man had tried to teach Pamela beyond dancing. Plenty, he had no doubt.

  The dance was a story told through the body and Johnny was master of every muscle within his slender frame. He stopped sharply within the pool of light cast by the fire. A brief flourish of his hand and a violin began on a long note, anticipation and ancient longing in its throat. Then a woman’s voice began to flow along that aching violin note, rough and smoky, rising to a ululation that told of such pain and endless wandering without destination that each word struck him to his core even without understanding the meaning.

  The air drew taut, suspended, and then he saw her. Barefoot, clad in a red dress sashed with a purple scarf fringed with tiny golden bells. Her eyes were enormous in her face, ringed thickly as they were with kohl, her lips red as blood and full of carnal promise. Her hair fell in a torrent down her back, the sides pulled back and fastened with scarlet flowers. Pamela, but not anyone who looked remotely like Pamela, for he could not find his wife in this woman’s face. It both disturbed and excited him. She was something Other, she was every temptress throughout Time: Lilith, Salome, Bathsheba and Delilah. And she was something else beyond that, something powerful that held every eye and kept every breath bated.

  Casey watched as the man took his wife in his arms, both of them falling naturally into the formal arc of arms and legs that the dance required. In the firelight her hair shone like a banner of torn silk, her body a perfect fit to the man who was no longer grinning but looking down into her face with the fire that the dance compelled.

  They parted immediately, the violin arcing over the drum now, their hands describing individual arabesques upon the air. It was a dance of the dark, of fire that only lit to the edge of shadow, of original sin and man’s need of woman. Touching, parting, eyes meeting, the air around them crackling with heat. Advance, retreat, allure, seduce, all the push-pull of the physical courtship.

  In his arms again she leaned back, rejecting his advances, arcing over until her hair spilled onto the ground, her back a supple bow of demure regret. And then he pulled her back insistently, one beat at a time, and she raised her arms above her head so that the man could slide his hands along them in a caress that was as old as time. She brought her hands down and touched his face, bending his forehead to her own, then whirled away. The man followed and the dance moved faster and faster until they were a whirl of flesh and fire and flashes of gold and long white leg, hip to hip, cheek to cheek, and Casey saw why they had been such a draw. Half the country would have gathered to see such a passionate display. She was like a mirage rising sinuously from a hot plain, seen from a distance, drawing a man through a desert to find her.

  Watching Pamela dance in such a way made him feel odd, as though there was something of her that was foreign to him, a place he had never traveled and did not know the customs nor rituals that would bring him inside her enchanted borders.

  Near the end of the dance, the man handed Pamela into Casey’s arms in a fluid movement and then danced back to the fire, stamping and tossing his head like a stallion. Though Casey could not imagine trying to match the steps, still he knew how to hold a woman, how to hold this one in particular. When a man knew a woman in this way it was natural to slide into a dance—a soft, slow dance beyond the boundary of the firelight.

  He looked down into her eyes, which were dark, the pupils dilated so it felt he could fall into them. She was a stranger entirely, as if she was neither his wife nor the mother of his son but a vessel through which something ancient was being channelled with the aids of fire and drink and the wild, wild music that seemed to go on forever.

  She coiled like smoke around his senses until he felt drunk on her, intoxicated by her strangeness, by the night, the music and the madness that seemed to have infected the very molecules of the air. And so he followed when she took his hand and cast a look over her shoulder, hair coiled there, framing the kohled eyes and cherry-bitten lips.

  He heard someone call after them, a few sentences in a strange tongue, and the bawdy laughter that followed.

  He had not noticed the caravan before, painted a deep blue and standing off by itself beyond the circle of the encampment. Gilded under the full moon and traced with the shadows of the trees that it sheltered under, it sat empty, waiting for them, he understood, following his wife as though in a dream, drifting soft over the landscape and hardly feeling his own movements. The night was held still in the moon’s embrace, each blade of grass frosted with a lambent silver glow.

  There were lanterns flickering, lighting the stairs into the caravan. He followed her up them and into the snug interior.

  A small stove pulsed with heat and the caravan was warm, though he wasn’t sure he would have noticed had it been frigid as an ice floe, for his blood was that hot.

  “What did she say?” he asked, for the words had been Romany, and though he could not understand the exact meaning, the gist would have been clear in any language.

  “She said,” she fixed him with the kohl-lined eyes, “that it is a good night for making a baby, for the moon is full and the tides higher than they have been in a hundred years.”

  Her dress dropped to the floor and he lifted her onto the bed, quirking an eyebrow at her as he climbed up beside her into a nest of quilts and pillows. “Well then, ye gypsy temptress, I suppose we’d best do as we’re bid.”

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Paris Ghosts

  Paris was a city of myth. Celtic myth and Roman myth, ancient gods and goddesses and traces here and there, caught in the per
iphery of one’s vision, of old Roman walls and underfoot, buried in the sediment of human history, entire cities, crypts of bones where lay poets and generals, lovers and liars, saints and thieves. It was a city of sacred geometry and a long tradition of the occult, still evidenced by bookshops devoted to that one subject. It was a city of rebellion, of street fighters, of a population of both kings and parigots.

  It was a city of ghosts, for one could well imagine Victor Hugo sitting down in that grey shawl, ink pot to hand, and writing the first lines of Notre-Dame de Paris, or Balzac fueled by litres of caffeine writing against time and ruin, Baudelaire penning verse that would scandalize a nation, and Colette with her suits and pearls, writing of the flesh in a way no woman had dared before.

  If one could crack open the city’s layers, one would find history leaved layer upon layer, both golden with promise and fortune and crimson with blood and rebellion. One would find a city forever haunted by its own past.

  It seemed inevitable to Pamela, once there in the environs of the greatest grande dame of cities, that Jamie, whose past was as much a labyrinth of twisting lanes, dark in the shadows of a tilting architecture, would keep his deepest secrets here. For Paris, like the best of courtesans, knew how to keep a secret safe.

  The house was in the 3rd arrondissemont, in the old and once venerable Marais quarter of the city. Marais translated literally as ‘swamp’, and a swamp it had indeed been, but the quartier had been occupied in one way or another since the Romans were in residence. It had reached its peak in the Golden Age of the 17th and 18th centuries, when it had been home to members of the Ancien Regime as well as a royal stomping ground for Henri IV. After the Revolution the area had gone into serious decline, with many of its old homes razed to the ground. More recently it had become home to a flock of artisans whose skilled hands produced some of the world’s most highly prized gold and silver work, enamels, leathers, hats, violins, lutes, jewels, saddles, dyed silks and painted feathers. The artisan workshops that had been plunked down into the courtyards of ancient hotels, were called, in a most poetically French manner, ‘pustules’ while those wedged between the hotels particuliers were called ‘parasites’.