Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01)

by Jonathan Green

  A spear of cast iron rose above the skyline some miles to the south-west.

  The sudden crash from the room behind him, as the gendarmes smashed open the door of the garret, shook him into action once more.

  It didn’t matter that he felt fit to drop. It didn’t even matter that he had already been shot. What was the expression? You can rest when you’re dead.

  Ulysses eased himself out across the sloping roof, fighting to maintain his balance as the soles of his shoes slipped on the steep tiles. Using the dormer window to aid him, Ulysses scrambled up the roof to its crest, gasping a sharp intake of breath as his exertions tugged at his right shoulder.

  “You’re getting too old for this,” he muttered under his breath. Here, at the apex of the roof, thankfully the verdigrised copper tiles flattened out, forming a narrow rat-run across the top of the rundown tenement.

  Keeping his eye on the path ahead of him, hearing the appalled shouts of the gendarmes coming from within the garret, and praying that his vertigo wouldn’t choose this moment to take charge again, Ulysses jogged along the ridgeline of the roof.

  The enraged voices of the French policemen became more distinct as one of them leaned out of the window. Ulysses didn’t pause. Any hesitation now could be fatal. He picked up the pace again.

  “There he is!”

  Ulysses started to run, his heels ringing from the discoloured copper. He was far too used to daring rooftops pursuits, but he wasn’t usually the one being pursued. Only a few yards ahead of him, the roof ended abruptly. And beyond that, on the other side of a yawning six-foot-wide void, another building and another rooftop ridge.

  Ulysses put on an extra burst of speed as he sprinted for the edge, kicking off at the last possible moment, arms windmilling as he hurtled through the air. He crashed down on top of the adjoining roof, feet slipping from underneath him momentarily, then somehow managed to get his half-falling, half-stumbling legs under control again and jogged on, gasping with the pulsing pain that every step brought with it.

  Ulysses was suddenly thankful for the town planners, whose efforts – or perhaps the lack of them – had resulted in the tenements here being crammed together so tightly. He wasn’t certain he could have cleared a wider gap, given his current condition.

  But then, if he had been able to clear the gap, so could the policemen whose footsteps he could hear coming after him. He only hoped they weren’t armed, or if they were that their haphazard pursuit of him would keep them from turning their guns on him too soon.

  He looked around himself; to the left, the roof sloped down and dropped to the street below. To his right, it formed one side of an enclosed courtyard. Ulysses didn’t fancy either option as an escape route, but the footprint of the building that he could now see from above gave him an idea.

  A little further along, the roof turned sharply right; the brickwork of a chimney stack reared up behind the ridge. Leaping across the right angle, Ulysses slid and scrambled down the slope beyond and was only arrested by the obstacle formed by the sturdy brickwork.

  The crack of a pistol confirmed his worst fears as brick chips flew from the stack just above his head.

  Ulysses pulled himself around and behind the chimney, his gaze falling on the shadowy gulf that yawned between this building and the next. Clinging tightly to the brickwork, Ulysses tensed as he felt the vertigo threaten to overcome him again.

  He took a deep breath and waited for the insufferable giddiness to pass. Every second he remained here was another second closer to capture. But if he were to continue in this vein it would very likely be the end of him.

  Ulysses heard a break in the tapping footfalls and then a loud crash, followed by another. Two men had followed him across the gulf. He opened his eye. His sense of balance restored, it was time to move again.

  He left his hiding place and set off at a run.

  There was a shout from a gendarme. The policemen were still atop the roof ridge, but Ulysses was relying on the fact that their precarious position would have put a stop to their pistol-toting antics – for the time being, at least.

  At the next corner a flagpole hung out over the road. But before that there was a sturdy aerial, bolted to the roof and projecting straight up.

  Putting everything he had into his desperate run, Ulysses made it up the slope of the roof to the aerial ahead of the policeman, grabbed hold with both hands, and swung himself around the pole as the sprinting gendarme caught up with him.

  Ulysses’ feet caught the policeman in the ribs, causing him to lose his balance and slip from his precarious position on the roof ridge. Both gendarmes cried in alarm as the man hit the tiles and slid down the roof, feet kicking futilely, and his comrade broke off pursuit to go to his aid.

  Ulysses hurried on.

  He was nearing the edge of the roof again, and caught a glimpse of the cramped cul-de-sac beyond. It might be narrow, but it was still several yards to the far side of the street, and Ulysses didn’t think he’d be able to make a jump like that. His own desperate flight faltered as he looked for alternatives.

  There was still the flagpole to his left, and he could now see the frontages of the buildings beyond. The next tenement along sported balconies right across its façade, as did the houses in front of him, on the opposite side of the street. He could use the pole to swing over to one of those and put some more distance between him and the policemen. He didn’t know where he’d be able to go from there, but he was sure to be able to lose them once he had ducked indoors.

  “Stop!” came a scream from behind him, accompanied by the crack and spang of a bullet ricocheting from a roof tile.

  Ulysses risked a glance back over his shoulder. The gendarme he had almost booted off the roof was back on his feet and pounding towards Ulysses, incandescent rage turning his face the colour of the Moulin Rouge windmill. He held a smoking gun in his hand.

  There was nothing else for it.

  Ulysses sprinted for the end of the ridge. Reaching it he didn’t slow his desperate flight for a second, long strides carrying him, half-falling and half-running, down the slope of the roof.

  With every iota of strength left in him, Ulysses hurled himself across the street. Arms and legs flailing, his leap of desperation became a wailing, floundering fall, and he dropped towards the cobbled street six storeys below.

  And then the wrought ironwork of a jutting balcony was rising to meet him. The first flew past his eye like a cruel jest, but he crashed onto the one below.

  He hurtled through the closed French doors beyond, entering the room in a shower of glass splinters and broken wooden staves, rolled to a halt, feeling the softness of the carpet under him as well as the stabbing points of broken glass sticking into him.

  He lay there for a moment, lungs heaving, thigh muscles on fire, ankles throbbing. His face stung; he assumed it had been cut in a dozen places by the whickering glass shards.

  He heard the echoing crack of a pistol again and the muffled impact of the bullet burying itself in the carpeted floor beside him.

  Ulysses rolled onto his hands and knees, dragging himself upright with the aid of a porcelain-bedecked sideboard. And then he was barrelling through the door out of the dusty, mote-shot drawing room and into the room beyond.

  Slamming the door shut behind him, he heard the report of two more pistol shots and felt the impacts of the rounds embedding themselves in the door frame.

  Panting, Ulysses exited the apartment as quickly as he could.

  Reaching the landing in the stairwell that ran the entire height of the tenement building, he glanced up and down over the edge of the railed balustrade. He could not see or hear any sign of another living soul, and so gave himself a moment to catch his breath and work out what to do next.

  In all likelihood, Paris’s finest would soon be entering the apartment building from street level in their determination to capture the suspected murderer.

  Ulysses set off up the stairs, using the balustrade to help pull
himself up.

  He might be beyond exhaustion, and he suspected that there was still a bullet lodged somewhere in his shoulder, but, perversely, he hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. But then again, a small part of his mind wondered, perhaps that was euphoria brought on by blood loss.

  Following the turn of the stairs he came to another landing, barely pausing for breath as he commenced his climb of the next flight. At the top of the second flight he came to a featureless door which opened, at a kick, and led him out onto the roof of the apartment block. Back in the open air, he could hear shrill whistles from a street away, over the honking of distant car horns and even the occasional shout of “Stop! Murder!”

  Ulysses immediately threw himself back into hiding beside the rooftop exit. Peering around the edge of the flimsy structure, he could see the two policemen who had pursued him this far retreating across the roof of the building opposite as they struggled to find a way off the tenement.

  The roof Ulysses now found himself on was flat, as were those of the buildings adjoining it. Following a course that led him as far away from the direction he had come as possible, Ulysses set off again, navigating the roofscape with care as he advanced even further into this neglected region of Paris.

  It was clear even from the roof that he was in one of the more lugubrious areas of the city. He had visited Paris years ago, before commencing the Paris-to-Dakar rally, but on that occasion he had only taken in the tourist sights – the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and the Paris Opera.

  But looking about him now, orienting himself by the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur and the red windmill of the Moulin Rouge, he guessed that he was somewhere within the artists’ quarter of Montmartre. Perhaps even somewhere within the vicinity of the Rue Morgue.

  The whistles and shouts were getting louder. The police must have entered the adjacent street.

  Scrambling over a low wall that delineated the border between one building and the next, Ulysses picked up the pace again. Alone among the forests of aerials, without armed police directly at his back, he was able to take time to think and plot a course by which he could lose himself in the labyrinthine slums without ever having to set foot on the ground. Fire escapes led to rooftop terraces, rusted iron bridges spanned six-storey chasms, and wall-mounted ladders gave access to yet more balconies and other rooftop ridges.

  The whistles began to recede, the voices becoming scattered, as the police were forced to split up to continue their search for the fugitive. And gradually Ulysses left one street after another behind him, without ever having to descend to ground level.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was fleeing for his life from the Parisian police, Ulysses might have actually enjoyed himself. There was barely a cloud in the sky, the late spring sun raising a heat-haze from the warm copper roofs. The weather could almost have been described as balmy.

  Gasping for breath, Ulysses took a moment to wipe away the sweat that had collected in the hollow behind his eye-patch.

  And that was when he saw it.

  It was emerging from the fourth floor window of a building at the end of the shadowed cul-de-sac. Eight feet tall, with arms like great sides of beef covered in thick black hair, it swung from the open window with startling grace and agility, launching itself towards a fire escape another floor up, and reaching it with ease. From there the beast swung itself up onto the roof.

  The massive ape landed not ten feet from him, its sledgehammer fists sending clouds of dust rising.

  Ulysses froze.

  The beast snorted, and its beady black stare fell on the exhausted, injured man, the atmosphere thickening between them. Ulysses’ heart thumped against the cage of his ribs, the bullet wound pulsing in unkind sympathy.

  He had seen gorillas before at London Zoo, but he had never seen a silverback so big. And he had never seen one with thick steel electrodes sticking out of its skull like a crown of thorns – or arms bound with cables, its forearms sheathed in metal vambraces, and its knuckles riveted with steel pins. Its flesh was scored by myriad, crude scars where it had been stitched together around the electrical and mechanical implants. Each of its major joints bore a heavy industrial screw to strengthen it.

  Its fists crushing the concrete, the giant ape craned its head forward, lips curling back to expose a mouth crammed with what looked like enamel chisels.

  Ulysses met the beast’s furious stare with his one remaining eye, his hands automatically going for his sword-stick and his gun, although he had neither with him, and hadn’t since being taken captive in Castle Falkenstein. Slowly, instinctively, Ulysses began to back away from the augmented monster. He had battled ape-men, dinosaurs, sea monsters, hybrid vivisects, mutated giant insects, werewolves, vampires, and even Nazis in his time – but he had never faced off against anything quite like this before.

  A guttural growl rose from within the brute’s huge barrel chest as it slowly knuckled towards Ulysses.

  Ulysses caught sight of something else as the beast advanced. Bolted to the back of its neck was a box of blinking lights that looked like a transmitter of some kind. Red LEDs winked on and off as the beast moved towards him. The transmitter was connected to the electrodes sunk into the beast’s skull via bundles of twisted cabling.

  Ulysses came to an abrupt halt as he stumbled against the edge of a steepled skylight.

  Rising up on its hindquarters, the gorilla pounded its chest with its massive, augmented fists, giving an animal bellow that rang out over the rooftops of Paris. It seemed to Ulysses as if the roar silenced the other sounds of the city for a moment, as if the city was holding its breath in anticipation.

  This was it; Ulysses’ time was up. He was a dead man unless he did something fast.

  He looked around, desperately searching for anything he could improvise as a weapon.

  He caught sight of the porcelain bowl out of the corner of his eye: a broken toilet, discarded with all manner of other detritus atop the tenement building.

  Grabbing hold of the ceramic cistern cover with both hands, he swung it like a cricket bat as the gorilla came for him.

  The porcelain connected with the brute’s forearm, and shattered. Ulysses threw his arms across his face to protect himself from the ceramic shrapnel.

  The ape howled as a piece of the broken cistern lid cut into the meat of a bulging bicep and another sliced across its back, connecting with the transmitter bolted between its shoulder blades.

  The beast retaliated with a swipe of its arm that lifted Ulysses off his feet and sent him hurtling through the air to come down hard on the slope of another raised roof light. Cracks crazed the glass at his impact. Ulysses lay stunned, his back and shoulders aching, the air forced from his lungs by the ape’s assault.

  He was unaware of the primate abruptly breaking off its attack and bounding away across the rooftops of the Rue Morgue.

  But he was aware of the sharp crick-crack of the roof light under him. Blinking hard as he forced himself to come to his senses, his head reeling, wanting nothing more than to give in to the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness, Ulysses tried to sit up.

  The movement was accompanied by another crystal-sharp crack. He stopped and tried shifting his weight to the left.

  Crack!

  Ulysses froze, not daring to move a muscle, seeing the ape bounding away across the rooftop and into the distance. And then, with one final splintering snap, the roof light gave way under him and he was falling once more, with no way of saving himself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Les Miserables

  “MADAME SANDRINE,” REYNARD said, casting his eyes to the floor, a touch of colour at his cheeks. “I did not mean to intrude.”

  Sandrine gasped, feeling her heart swell and flutter like a butterfly within her breast, pulling her gown close about her shoulders.

  “You are not intruding,” she replied, tilting her head to peer up at him coyly, feeling the blood rushing to her cheeks.

  “That is well, then,” the bu
rly gardener replied. He stood with his hands behind his back, his muscular arms tensed. She marvelled at the swell of his biceps beneath his shirt sleeves. She caught a glimpse of the curls of dark hair covering his taut chest, the firm pectorals visible under the sweat-stained linen.

  Reynard said nothing more but remained within the doorway, at the threshold to her chamber.

  “Did you want something?” Sandrine asked, taking a cautious step towards him, letting her hand fall from the gown. The chiffon parted to reveal the bodice of her tightly-laced whalebone corset, her bosom rising as she caught her breath again.

  “Yes, I... I only wanted to tell you that...”

  “Go on,” Sandrine said. “There’s no need to be shy. You don’t need to feel embarrassed.”

  “It’s the rose, ma’am.”

  The butterflies danced from her stomach to her heart. “The white rose I planted in memory of my late husband’s passing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A sudden doubt seized her mind, setting the butterflies into a fluttering frenzy. She turned to the window, gazing through it to the carefully tended gardens below. “Is everything alright? Nothing’s happened to the white rose, has it?”

  “No, ma’am, it’s fine.”

  “Then what?”

  Slowly he brought his right hand around from behind his back. “It’s come into bloom, milady.”

  He was holding a stem of thorns topped by the curled ivory petals of a luxurious bloom.

  “Oh, Reynard,” Sandrine gasped, hurrying from the window to the young man. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Like you, milady,” the gardener said, offering her the rose.

  “Reynard,” she chided, a smile on her lips, her neck flushed crimson. As she took the cut stem from him, her fingertips caressed his rough, callused hands. Sandrine’s entire being thrilled at the contact.