The Duke of Olympia Meets His Match
Page 12
“Oh, but you must join us for the orchestra. Mustn’t he, Stewart?” Mrs. Morrison turned to her husband.
“If he likes,” said Morrison, offering Olympia a shrug of commiseration.
“Our dear Ruby will be heartbroken if you don’t. Your observations on the music are always so—so—”
“Apt,” said Ruby. Her eyebrows arched in an especially energetic way this evening, an expression that could only be described as anticipation. “But His Grace looks so exhausted, Mama. Perhaps he would like to retire instead?”
“Yes, I would. Very much indeed.” He patted his stomach. “A trifle dyspeptic, you know. The curse of old age. Isn’t it, Mrs. Morrison?”
For the first time in six days, she looked displeased with him. “Why, I’m sure I don’t know.”
He bowed swiftly, before Mrs. Morrison could fall back into love with him, and extracted himself from the party. But when he turned and looked at the gap on the opposite side of the table, which Penelope had filled just a minute ago, he saw only her empty plate and a peach pit.
He searched the length of the table, the mingling figures near the entrance.
“Has Mrs. Schuyler left already?” he asked Miss Crawley, who sat complacently in her wheeled chair and sucked on an orange.
“WENT OFF A MOMENT AGO WITH MY HARRIS! THICK AS THIEVES! NEVER MIND LEAVING ME BEHIND TO FEND FOR MYSELF!”
“The villains. I don’t suppose you know where they went?”
“ON DECK, I HOPE! SERVE ’EM RIGHT IF THEY GO OVERBOARD!”
At that instant, the Majestic made a lurch to starboard, nearly jolting Miss Crawley from her seat. Olympia caught himself on his chair and levered away to stride down the long length of the table to the grand doors at the opposite end.
“THAT’S RIGHT! OFF YOU GO! NEVER MIND ME!”
He could pretend not to hear. There were stewards aplenty to push Miss Crawley to the safety of her room. What was more, they were paid to perform the service, whereas Olympia would likely receive nothing but shrillness and abuse for his act of chivalry.
But a man is not steeped since birth in the sauce of British civilization without its having some sort of effect on his natural instincts. Whatever his training as an intelligence agent, whatever his boiling urgency regarding Penelope herself, he could no more refuse a plea from an elderly female invalid than he could refuse to maintain a pulse.
On the other hand, the tables were so damned long.
“Very well, Miss Crawley,” he said, and he placed one hand on the table, called his once-agile limbs to duty, and launched himself over the white tablecloth, between a silver candelabrum and a pyramid of fruit. “I am at your service.”
“YOUR NECKTIE IS LOOSE, YOU BARBAROUS GREEK!”
He straightened the offending article and swung around to grasp the handles of the chair. “Where is your cabin, Miss Crawley?”
“STATEROOM TWENTY-TWO! THE SALOON DECK!”
He knew that already, of course. He knew exactly where the Crawley stateroom lay, and Miss Harris’s adjoining cabin. They were just around the corner, in fact.
He pulled her free from the table. “Hang on.”
“YOU CRAZY OLD FOOL!” screeched Miss Crawley, not without delight, as they drove down the main saloon in the manner of a rugby wedge and burst through the well-dressed crowd lingering around the entrance. Heads swiveled toward them, frozen in expressions of appalled alarm, but not one of those faces contained a pair of inquisitive dark eyes and a chin that was entirely too sharp for comfort.
“I’m going to kill her,” he muttered.
“WHAT’S THAT? YOU’RE GOING TO KILL ME?”
“Now there’s an idea.”
Outside the main saloon, the corridors lay empty. He propelled the chair around the corner of the main staircase, toward the staterooms. The wheels creaked under the abuse, but not enough to drown out Miss Crawley’s indignant observations on his parentage, nationality, and overall manner of birth, breeding, and education. He pulled up before the door to Stateroom 22 and held out his hand.
“Your key, Miss Crawley?”
“HA! NOT LIKELY! NEVER TRUST A GREEK IN MY BEDROOM!”
“Quite sensible.” He bowed and turned away to walk briskly back to the main staircase. Just as he turned the corner, he glanced back to see Miss Crawley catapulting herself backward, chair and all, through the door of her cabin: a picture of vivid American capability.
But Olympia had no time to admire Miss Crawley’s spirit. He bounded up the stairs like a young soldier, hardly noticing the effort, passing a steward as he reached the landing on the final deck. “My good man! Did you see a pair of ladies pass by, in the past several minutes? Heading for the promenade?”
“Why, no, sir. Too dirty a night for that, I’m afraid. But there are two ladies presently occupying the library.” The steward pointed a clean white arm at the library doors, a few yards away.
The library. Of course. Olympia wheeled about and threw open the door.
At what instant the puzzle clicked into place, he never quite remembered. Perhaps, if Penelope hadn’t been facing away from the door, forcing his attention to fall first on the face of Miss Harris, he wouldn’t have guessed.
And if Miss Harris hadn’t happened to be standing next to one of the electric lamps, which cast a harsh shadow across her cheek and jaw—if Miss Harris hadn’t already removed her hat and her bottle-thick spectacles, and bent her face in fierce conversation with Penelope—the startling familiarity of her features might not have struck his eyes with the force of a revelation.
He found himself starting forward almost before he knew what he was doing, shouting at Penelope to get down and take cover, drawing the small pistol from his inside pocket and aiming the barrel directly between the plain bombazine rib cage of the shocked Miss Harris.
***
Penelope picked herself up from the sofa cushion. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
The Duke of Olympia did not waver so much as an eyelash. He stood a pair of yards away like an avenging silver-topped titan in dinner dress, legs braced, arms raised, sleek black jacket gleaming in the electric light. The lethal little pistol in his hand remained sharp and steady, pointed into the heart of the person with whom, an instant ago, Penelope had been sharing a most satisfactory tête-à-tête.
“I am saving your life, Mrs. Schuyler, since you have the goodness to ask,” the duke announced.
“Nonsense. You’re interrupting a private conversation.”
“Am I? How terribly inconvenient for the both of you. But were you aware, Mrs. Schuyler, that the person with whom you were conversing so amicably is, in fact, none other than our good friend”—he reached around his opponent’s neck for the straggling ash-brown chignon and gave it a good yank, so that it fell away in his hand, together with the rest of the wig—“Mr. Robert—”
“Langley? Yes, of course. Why do you think I asked him to meet with me?”
“Look here,” said Langley, rubbing his scalp, “we’re wasting time!”
“You knew?” Olympia looked rather dashed. “How long?”
“Since dessert. Well, I had always suspected something. It was his voice, you see. Miss Harris’s voice, I mean. No Hellenic graduate would be allowed out of the gates with a voice like that, even at night, so I knew she wasn’t whom she claimed. But until I noticed those hands slicing the pear at dinner tonight—”
Langley brought his gloved palms in front of his face. “My hands?”
“Yes, Mr. Langley. There are certain features that even the most studied tricks cannot disguise.”
Olympia’s pistol remained pointed at Langley’s heart. “But if you knew who he was, why are you here with him? Why the devil didn’t you find me first?”
“Because my business with Mr. Langley has nothing to do with you.”
&
nbsp; “Hasn’t it, by God! He means to take those papers off you. He might have killed you right here! My God! He’s been sniffing at you for months, while pretending to sniff after Miss Morrison.” The duke’s eyes narrowed. “Now why would he be doing that?”
“I think I can explain,” Langley said modestly.
“Yes, I think you’d better!”
Penelope put her hands on her hips. “Will you please put down that damned pistol! There’s no need whatsoever for violent measures. I’ve already ascertained that Mr. Langley isn’t the enemy.”
“Yes,” Langley said eagerly. “She’s already offered to hand over the papers—”
“You’ve what?”
“Offered to hand over the papers,” Penelope said, quite calm, despite the steady lurching of the ship beneath her feet. The air inside the library was warm and heavy with dread; the books thumped in their shelves at every pitch. “After all, he needs them in order to determine the true nature of the threat.”
“What threat?”
“Oh, sir.” Penelope shook her head. “Six days on board the Majestic, and you’ve concentrated so much of your formidable mind on the problem of the papers in my possession, you haven’t begun to see the larger picture.”
A shadow passed over the duke’s face, or perhaps it was a hardening of the muscles under his skin. He motioned the pistol in Langley’s direction. “You. Sit down in that armchair behind you—yes, that’s the one, steady now—and start from the beginning.”
“But there isn’t time!”
“I said”—almost a whisper—“sit.”
Langley sat, without the slightest pretense of femininity. His black skirts hung loosely about his spread legs. “In the first place, the American government does not remotely appreciate the summary way in which you’ve dispatched a rogue agent of known subversive tendency into our midst.”
Olympia shrugged. “Merely returning an old favor.”
“Regardless.” Langley straightened his back, gathering what meager dignity he could manage in a black bombazine dress, false bosom, and matted head. “We’ve naturally had Dingleby under the closest observation, especially as regards her association with that public nuisance de Sauveterre.”
“Oh, I quite agree with you there. The wretched mischief-making socialist.”
“That will be quite enough,” Penelope said indignantly. “Margot is a very dear friend of mine.” The closest she really had to a dear friend, anyway.
Langley nodded. “Which is exactly why I was assigned to investigate you. I’d managed to convince Dingleby I was a sincere follower of the cause and offered myself up as her acolyte, so we were able to keep track of her comings and goings pretty well. But she didn’t trust me at the highest level, the planning level; all I knew was that she was thick with de Sauveterre. So we had to find another way in.”
“And I was that person?”
“We considered a number of her other friends and associates, but none of them was suitable. Not discreet enough. You were the only one who might actually get something out of her. The only one she might actually trust. Of course, we knew it wouldn’t do, my trying to approach you directly. No one would possibly believe I had fallen in love with you. Least of all Dingleby.”
“How flattering.”
“But Ruby! Who could help falling in love with her? I told Dingleby I was in it for the money, that we would use the dowry to pay for our plans, and she thought it was a terrific idea. And naturally a man’s best hope, in my position, is to ingratiate himself with the girl’s chaperone. Which I believe I did pretty well.”
“Oh, yes. You had me perfectly fooled. No one could have been more besotted.”
“Well, the sweet darling gave me everything I needed. So trusting and forthcoming, and what’s more, she has a trick of knowing everyone else’s business, so I was right at the nexus of it all. I just couldn’t get her to give me the papers themselves.”
“How disappointing for you.”
“Yes, well, I’m getting ahead of myself. A few weeks ago, Dingleby told me she was plotting something big, a major strike on French soil, to trump even the Tsar’s assassination—”
“Propaganda of the deed,” murmured Olympia. “Damned anarchists.”
“—and that she would be taking passage to Europe to accomplish it, with the expert help of a French national to assist her in her scheme.” Langley looked at Penelope.
“I assure you, I had nothing to do with these plans. I am quite, quite shocked to learn that I’ve been made an innocent party to such a deed. Whatever it may be.” She looked down modestly at her dress.
“And appalled at the perfidy of Madame de Sauveterre, I suppose?” growled Olympia.
“That too, of course. So naturally, once we recognized our respective roles in this affair, I offered the papers to Mr. Langley for his inspection.”
“To Langley? You offered the papers to the American?”
“Because he’s the one who seems to know what’s going on, that’s why. Although I’d like to point out that if he’d made his objectives clear from the beginning, we might have avoided a great deal of trouble. Mr. Langley,” she said, turning to the American in question, “what do you propose we do next? Can I be of any assistance?”
“Just the papers, Mrs. Schuyler.” He smiled in relief. “Just the papers, if you please.”
“Look here,” said Olympia. “We are not giving Mr. Langley any papers, Mrs. Schuyler. My God. One doesn’t simply take a man at his word in this business, simply because he’s young and good-looking and puts on a fine performance.”
“Why not? You’ve taken me at my word, and I’m neither young nor good-looking.”
“You are extremely attractive, Mrs. Schuyler, as you well know—”
“But not young.”
“Not young? Then what the devil does that make me?”
“As ancient as the hills, I’m afraid, and I can’t imagine why I find you so thrilling, except that—”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Mr. Langley said, a little bewildered, “but the situation remains extremely urgent, and I’d like to—”
“Urgent?” said Olympia. “Why urgent?”
“Because, sir. While our original plans called for me to hand over Dingleby to the authorities in England, together with the papers that would incriminate her—”
“Oh, I see. That way she becomes our problem, not yours.”
“Exactly. But since boarding the Majestic, I have come to believe that she doesn’t intend to wait until she reaches the Eiffel Tower at all—”
“The Eiffel Tower?”
“Yes. You know, that awful skeleton the Frogs put up a few years ago, for the great Exposition.”
“I know the tower, for God’s sake. What is it, then? She means to blow it up?”
“That’s what we thought, in the beginning. But it seems she had another object in mind all along.”
“Another object? What? Out with it, man!”
Langley coughed, making his bosom jiggle beneath the bombazine. “The ship itself.”
At that moment, the floor below them, which had been pitching back and forth like a child’s rocking chair, tilted backward with such unexpected force that all three of them lurched with it. Langley had to grip the arms of the chair to keep from falling out, and Olympia grasped a stumbling Penelope around the waist. She moved to break free, but he said Wait, and sure enough, a few seconds later, the floor changed direction and they were falling, hurtling down the opposite side of the wave, until they reached the bottom and began the climb again, a little less steeply, and the room returned to a more recognizable angle.
“I’ll be damned,” said Olympia, as if nothing had happened. “And how the devil did you come across this information, Mr. Langley? Where, may I ask, is the redoubtable Dingleby hiding herself this . . .”
He whispered, “My God, I am an idiot.”
Then he whipped around and ran from the room.
***
He shouldn’t have been surprised that the cabin was empty. Miss Dingleby was nothing if not efficient. The wheeled invalid’s chair sat in the corner; the wig and spectacles were tucked inside her capacious steamer trunk, along with the other accoutrements of her disguise: padding, greasepaint, glue. He muttered oaths to himself as he went, inspecting the lining and the false bottom, finding nothing, not a clue, not a single damned sign of what, exactly, she meant to do.
And a whole colossal steamship in which to do it.
“Olympia?”
He turned. Penelope stood in the doorway, cheeks pink and eyes bright with exercise. Her chest moved quickly, as if she’d been running. “Go back to the library, do you understand me? No. Not the library. Go to your cabin and lock the door. I’ll find you when—”
“It’s too late!” she gasped. “She’s on the promenade deck, going after a lifeboat. Robert’s trying to catch her, but—”
Olympia was already off, pushing past Penelope on his way back to the main staircase. By God, he was too old for this, too old to be running up and down stairs, pistol in hand, as if he were still twenty-five years old and desperate to rediscover some purpose in life, some reason for rising out of bed in the morning when you knew that God could simply snap His immortal fingers and take away whatever it was you loved most. By the time he reached the final flight, his strength was beginning to give out, but he pushed on regardless. He had no choice.
“Port or starboard?” he called out, knowing that Penelope was right behind him, bless her, curse her.
“Port!”
He wheeled to the left and burst through the door to the promenade deck, into a blast of frigid wind that robbed his breath. Shouts rang out from above, on his right side, near the lifeboats hanging on their divots above the awning, and he ran down the deck to the open air, where a stairway led from the promenade deck to awning deck, forbidden to passengers except in case of emergency.