‘Sure, and it’s a fine night fir it, sor.’ The cabbie grinned knowingly in his mirror as he bled steam into the cylinder and accelerated away from the roadside. His passenger nodded, thoughtfully, but made no attempt to reply.
Hogarth Villas was a broad-fronted stretch of town houses, fronted with iron rails and a gaudy display of lanterns. It stretched for half a block along the high street, between shuttered shop fronts that slept while the villas’ residents worked (and vice versa). One of the larger and better-known licensed brothels at the south end of Manhattan island, it was anything but quiet at this time of night. ‘Rudolf’ paid off the cabbie with a generous tip, then approached the open vestibule and the two sturdy gentlemen who stood to either side of the glass inner door. ‘Name’s Rudolf,’ he said quietly. ‘Ma’am Bishop is expecting me.’
‘Aye, sir, if you’d just step this way, please.’ The shorter of the two, built like a battleship and with a face bearing the unmistakable spoor of smallpox, opened the door for him and stepped inside. The carpet was red, the lights electric-bright, shining from the gilt-framed mirrors. In the next room, someone was playing a saucy nautical air on the piano; girlish voices chattered and laughed with the gruff undertone of the clientele. This was by no means a lower-class dive. The doorman led ‘Rudolf’ along the hallway then through a side door into understairs quarters, where the carpet was replaced by bare teak floorboards and the expensive silk wallpaper by simple sky-blue paint. The building creaked and chattered around them, sounds of partying and other sport carrying through the lath and plaster. They climbed a narrow spiral staircase before arriving on a landing fronted by three doors. The bouncer rapped on one of them. ‘Here’s where I leave you,’ he said, as it began to swing open, and he headed back toward the front of the building.
‘Come in, Erasmus.’
Erasmus – Rudolf no more – set his shoulders determinedly and stepped forward. No avoiding it now, he told himself, feeling a curious sinking feeling as he met the opening door and the presence behind it.
‘Ma’am.’ Most of the girls downstairs bared their shoulders and wore their fishtail skirts slit in front to reveal their knees, in an exaggerated burlesque of the latest mode from Nouveau Paris. The woman in the doorway was no girl, and she wore a black crêpe mourning dress. After all, she was in mourning. With black hair turning to steel gray at the temples, blue eyes and a face lined with worries, she might have been a well-preserved sixty or a hard-done-by thirty. The truth, like much else about her, lay in between.
‘Come in. Sit down. Would you care for a sip of brandy?’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’ The room was furnished with a couple of overstuffed and slightly threadbare chairs, surplus to requirements downstairs: a bed in the corner (too narrow by far to suit the purposes of the house) and a writing desk completed the room. The window opened onto a tiny enclosed square, barely six feet from the side of the next building.
Erasmus waited while his hostess carefully filled two glasses from a brandy decanter sitting atop the bureau, next to a conveniently burning candle – the better to dispose of the desk’s contents, should they be interrupted – and handed one to him. Then she sat down. ‘How did it go?’ she asked tensely.
He took a cautious sip from his glass. ‘I made the delivery. And the pickup. I have no reason to believe I was under surveillance and every reason not to.’
‘Not that, silly.’ She was fairly humming with impatience. ‘What word from the palace?’
‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘They seem to be most obsessed with matters of diplomatic significance.’ His smile slipped. ‘Like the way the French have pulled the wool over their eyes lately. There’s a witch hunt brewing in the Foreign Service, and an arms race in the Ministry of War. The grand strategy of encirclement has not only crumbled, it appears to have backfired. The situation does not sound good, Margaret.’
‘A war would suit their purposes.’ She nodded to herself, her gaze unfocused. ‘A distraction always serves the rascals in charge.’ She glanced at the side door to the room. ‘And the . . . device? Did you give it to our source?’
‘I gave it to him and showed him how to use it. All he knows is that it is a very small camera. And he needs to return it to us to have the, ah, film developed. Or downloaded, as Miss Beckstein’s representative calls it.’
Margaret, Lady Bishop, frowned. ‘I wish I trusted these alien allies of yours, Erasmus. I wish I understood their motives.’
‘What’s to understand?’ Erasmus shrugged. ‘Listen, I’d be dead if not for them and the alibi they supplied. Their gold is pure and their words –’ It was his turn to frown. ‘I don’t know about the aliens, but I trust Miriam. Miss Beckstein is a bit like you, milady. There’s a sincerity to her that I find more than a little refreshing, although she can be alarmingly open at times. There are strange knots in her thinking – she looks at everything a little oddly. Still, if she doesn’t trust her companions, the manner of her mistrust tells me a lot. They’re in it for money, pure and simple, Margaret. There’s no motive purer than the pig in search of the truffle, is there? And these pigs are very canny indeed, hence the bounteous treasury they’ve opened to us. They’re our pigs, at least until it comes time to pay the butcher’s bill. As Miss Beckstein says, money talks – bullshit walks.’
She nodded. ‘The mint, the national debt, and the ability to debase the currency, has always been the criminal-in-chief’s best weapon, Erasmus. He could buy out the bourgeoisie from under our banner in a split second, did he but recognize their importance. It’s time we recognized that, and acted accordingly.’
‘Well.’ Erasmus took a sip of brandy. It was fine stuff, liquid fire that warmed his old bag of bones from the inside out. ‘Judging from what your “intimate source” told me, even if he recognized its importance he probably wouldn’t act on it until it was too late. Indecisive doesn’t begin to describe this one, milady. Stranded in a well-stocked kitchen John Frederick could starve himself to death between two cookbooks. He looks solid with the machinery of state behind him, but if he’s forced to make tough choices he’ll dither and haver until he’s half past hanging.’
‘Well, that’s his look out,’ she said tartly. ‘Was there anything we can use?’
‘Yes. If you don’t mind risking the source – at least, this week. It’s so big that it will leak sooner rather than later; the French have exploded a corpuscular petard. Caught the navy napping, too; they weren’t supposed to have that high a command of the new physics. The flash was visible from Blackpool, apparently, and the toadstool cloud from Lancaster.’
‘Oh.’ Her eyes widened. ‘And with wars, and rumors of wars – ’
‘Yes, milady. I think something is going to have to happen, sooner or later. The situation in Persia if nothing else is a source of friction, and the temptation to send a message to the court of the Sun King – I wouldn’t place money on it starting this year, but I can’t see him lasting out the decade without strife. John Frederick wants to leave his mark on the history books, lest his son is followed rapidly by a nephew or cousin in the line of succession.’
‘Then let’s start making plans, shall we?’ She smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. ‘If the leviathan is determined to drink the blood of the people, there’s going to be plenty to spare for the ticks.’
Erasmus shivered. ‘Indeed, milady.’
‘Well then.’ She put her glass down. ‘Which brings me to another matter I have in mind. I think it’s past time you arranged for me to meet this Miss Beckstein, who you say is so like me. I have many questions for her; I’m sure we can trade more than toys once we understand each other better.’
SPOOK SUMMIT
Twelve weeks earlier:
Mike Fleming was on his way home from his office at the DEA, completely exhausted.
Sometimes, when he was extremely tired, he’d lose his sense of smell. It was as if the part of his brain that dealt with scents and stinks and stuff gave up trying to make sense of th
e world and went to sleep without him. At other times it would come back extra strong, and any passing scent might dredge up a slew of distracting memories. It was a weird kind of borderline synesthesia, and it reminded him uncomfortably of a time a couple of years ago when he’d been on assignment in some scummy mosquito-ridden swamp down in Florida. The hippie asshole he was staking out had made the tail, and instead of doing the usual number with a MAC-10 or running, had spiked his drink with acid. He’d spent a quarter of an hour in the bathroom of his hotel room staring at the amazing colors in the handle of his toothbrush, marveling at the texture of his spearmint dental gel, until he’d thrown up. And now he was so tired it was all coming back to him in unwelcome hallucinatory detail.
Mike worked in Cambridge, but he lived out in the sticks. The T only took him part of the way, and as he stumbled onto the platform he realized fuzzily that he was far too tired to drive. Did I really just pull a fifty-hour shift in the office? he wondered. Or am I imagining an extra day? Whatever the facts, he was beyond tired. He was at the point where his eyelids were closing on him, randomly trying to fool him into falling asleep on his feet. So he phoned for a cab, nearly zoning out against a concrete pillar just inside the station lobby while he waited. The cab was stuffy and hot and smelled of anonymous cheap sex and furtive medicinal transactions. It was probably his imagination, but he could almost feel the driver watching him in the mirror, the itchy, prickly touch of the guy’s eyeballs on his face. It was a relief to get out and slowly climb the steps to his apartment. ‘Hello, strange place,’ he muttered to himself as he unlocked the door. ‘When was I last here?’
Mike knew he was tired, but it was only when he misentered the code to switch off his intruder alarm twice in a row that he got a visceral sense of how totally out of it he was. Whoa, hold on! He leaned against the wall and yawned, forced himself to focus, and deliberately held off from fumbling at the manically bleeping control panel until he’d blinked back the fuzz enough to see the numbers. Two days? he wondered vaguely as he slouched upstairs, the door banging shut behind him. Yeah, two days. A night and most of a day with the SOC team picking over the bones of the buried fortress, then a night and most of the next morning debriefing the paranoid defector in a safe house. Then more meetings all afternoon, trying to get it through Tony Vecchio’s head that yes, the source was crazy – in fact, the source was bug-fuck crazy with brass knobs on – but he was an interesting crazy, whose every lead had turned over a stone with something nasty scuttling for cover from underneath it, and even the crazy bits were internally consistent.
Mike stumbled past the coat rail and shed his jacket and tie, then fumbled with his shoelaces for a minute. While he was busy unraveling the sacred mysteries of knot theory, Oscar slid out of the living room door, stretched stiffly and cast him a where-have-you-been glare. ‘I’ll get to you in a minute,’ Mike mumbled. He was used to working irregular hours; Helen the cleaner had instructions to keep the cat fed and watered when he wasn’t about, though she drew the line at the litter tray. It turned out that unlacing the shoes took the last of his energy. He meant to check Oscar’s food and water, but instead he staggered into the bedroom and collapsed on the unmade bed. Sleep came slamming down like a guillotine blade.
A couple of hours later, Oscar dragged Mike back to semiwakefulness. ‘Aagh.’ Mike opened his eyes. ‘Damn. What time is it?’ The elderly tom lowered his head and butted his shoulder for attention, purring quietly. I was dreaming, wasn’t I? Mike remembered. Something about being in a fancy restaurant with – her. That ex-girlfriend, the journalist. Miriam. She’d dumped him when he’d explained about The Job. It’d been back during one of his self-hating patches, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have been that brutal with the truth, but experience had taught him – ‘Damn.’ Oscar purred louder and leaned against his stomach. Why was I naked from the waist down? What the hell is my subconscious trying to tell me?
It was only about six o’clock in the evening, far too early to turn over and go back to sleep if he wanted to be ready for the office tomorrow. Mike shook his head, trying to dislodge the cobwebs. Then he sat up, gently pushed Oscar out of the way, and began to undress. After ten minutes in the shower with the heat turned right up he felt almost human, although the taste in his mouth and the stubble itching on his jaw felt like curious reminders of a forgotten binge. Virtual bar-hopping, all the after-effects with none of the fun. He shook his head disgustedly, toweled himself dry, dragged on sweat pants and tee, then took stock.
The flat was remarkably tidy, considering how little time he’d had to spend on chores in the past week – thank Helen for that. She’d left him a note on the kitchen table, scribbled in her big, childish handwriting: MILK STAIL, BOUT MORE. He smiled at that. Oscar’s bowls were half-full, so he ignored the cat’s special pleading and went through into what had been a cramped storeroom when he moved in. Now it was an even more cramped gym, or as much of one as there was space for in the bachelor apartment. He flipped the radio on as he climbed wearily onto the exercise bike: Maybe I should have held the shower? he wondered as he turned the friction up a notch and began pedaling.
Fifteen minutes on the bike then a round of push-ups and he began to feel a bit looser. It was almost time to start on the punch bag, but as he came up on fifty sit-ups the phone in the living room rang. Swearing, he abandoned the exercise and made a dash for the handset before the answering machine could cut in. ‘Yes?’ he demanded.
‘Mike Fleming? Can you quote your badge number?’
‘I – who is this?’ he demanded, shivering slightly as the sweat began to evaporate.
‘Mike Fleming. Badge number. This is an unsecured line.’ The man at the other end of the phone sounded impatient.
‘Okay.’ More fallout from work. Head office, maybe? Mike paused for a moment, then recited his number. ‘Now, what’s this about?’
‘Can you confirm that you were in a meeting with Tony Vecchio and Pete Garfinkle this afternoon?’
‘I –’ Mike’s head spun. ‘Look, I’m not supposed to discuss this on an open line. If you want to talk about it at the office then you need to schedule an appointment – ’
‘Listen, Fleming. I’m not cleared for the content of the meeting. Question is, were you in it? Think before you answer, because if you answer wrong you’re in deep shit.’
‘I – yes.’ Mike found himself staring at the wall opposite. ‘Now. Who exactly am I talking to?’ The CLID display on his phone just said NUMBER WITHHELD. Which was pretty remarkable, on the face of it, because this wasn’t an ordinary caller-ID box. And this wasn’t an ordinary caller: his line was ex-directory, for starters.
‘A minibus will pick you up in fifteen minutes, Fleming. Pack for overnight.’ The line went dead, leaving him staring at the phone as if it had just grown fangs.
‘What the hell?’ Oscar walked past his ankle, leaning heavily. ‘Shit.’ He tapped the hook then dialed the office. ‘Tony Vecchio’s line, please, it’s Mike Fleming. Oh – okay. He’s in a meeting? Can you – yeah, is Pete Garfinkle in? What, he’s in a meeting too? Okay, I’ll try later. No, no message.’ He put the phone down and frowned. ‘Fifteen minutes?’
*
Once upon a time, when he was younger, Mike had believed all the myths.
He’d believed that one syringe full of heroin was enough to turn a fine, upstanding family man into a slavering junkie. He’d believed that marijuana caused lung cancer, dementia, and short-term memory loss, that freebase cocaine – crack – could trigger fits of unpredictable rage, and that the gangs of organized criminals who had a lock on the distribution and sale of illegal narcotics in the United States were about the greatest internal threat that the country faced.
Also, when he was even younger, he’d believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
Now . . . he still believed in the gangs. Ten years of stalking grade-A scumbags and seeing just what they did to the people around them left precious little room for illusions about hi
s fellow humanity. Some dealers were just ethically impaired entrepreneurs working in a shady, high-risk field, attracted by the potential for high profits. But you had to have a ruthless streak to take that level of risk, or be oblivious to the suffering around you, and the dangers of the field seemed to repel sane people after a while. The whole business of illegal drugs was a magnet for seekers of the only real drug, the one that was addictive at first exposure, the one that drove people mad and kept them coming back for more until it killed them: easy money. The promise of quick cash money drew scumbags like flies to a fresh dog turd. Anyone who was in the area inevitably started to smell of shit sooner or later, even if they’d started out clean. Even the cops, and they were supposed to be the good guys.
Ten years ago when he was a fresh-faced graduate with a degree in police science – and still believed in the tooth fairy, so to speak – he’d have arrested his own parents without a second thought if he’d seen them smoking a joint, because it was the right thing to do. But these days, Mike had learned that sometimes it made sense to turn a blind eye to human failings. About six years in, he’d gone through the not-unusual burnout period that afflicted most officers, sooner or later, if they had any imagination or empathy for their fellow citizens. Afterward, he’d clawed his way back to a precarious moral sense, an idea of what was wrong with the world that gave him something to work toward. And now there was only one type of drug addict that he could get worked up over – the kind of enemy that he wanted to lay his hands on so bad he could taste it. He wanted the money addicts; the ones who needed it so bad they’d kill, maim, and wreck numberless other lives to get their fix.
Which was why, a decade after joining up, he was still a dedicated DEA Special Agent – rather than a burned-out GS-12 desk jockey with his third nervous breakdown and his second divorce ahead of him, freewheeling past road marks on the long run down to retirement and the end of days.
The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) Page 5
