The Black Hawk

by Joanna Bourne

  “Getting bit by snakes and skewered by the outraged local inhabitants.”

  “It’s the English way.” Pax refolded his arms. “Those two don’t look like they’re leaving anytime soon, do they?”

  The black man placed another enigmatic metal instrument on the counter. A theodolite. Everybody took a look at it.

  “Not soon,” he said.

  Pax shifted an inch, edging out of the path of a persistent drip coming down from the roof. “Speaking professionally, if I wanted to kill Justine—just a simple death—I’d shoot her in the shop.”

  “Speaking professionally, that would be a wise choice.” He kept his voice level. Rage had been simmering away inside him for a good long while. He’d keep it there, boiling away in his gut, till he needed it. “They waited till she came to me. They must have known she’d come.”

  “Then they know her. They can predict what she’ll do.”

  “A small, elite group. The man who did the stabbing was watching her and waiting. Probably from . . .” He looked up and behind him, got rain in his eyes. “One of these windows.”

  “I’ll bring the boys. We’ll start asking questions, up and down the street.”

  “The pub over there has a front table with a view of the shop.” In the last two years, he’d sat there sometimes, pursuing a lengthy acquaintance with a glass of gin, knowing Justine would walk by and he’d get to see her. There could not be anything in the world more pitiable than a man afraid to face a woman. Unless the woman was Justine DuMotier. “Ask in the shops if anyone’s been looking in that direction. But it’ll turn out to be a room upstairs.”

  “One of those.” Pax glanced across houses, assessing likelihoods. They’d avoided ambushes in the war years, knowing where shots were likely to come from. Sometimes, they’d been the men doing the shooting.

  That was the dark secret of the assassin’s trade. It’s not that hard. A stab in the alley. The pull of a trigger. People were so damn fragile—ten breaths or two minutes bleeding separated life and death.

  Justine had turned out to be hard to kill. A nasty surprise for somebody.

  Pax said, “Looks like they’re winding up.”

  The pair in Justine’s shop finally agreed that the first mechanical device, whatever it was, suited their purpose. The black man set it carefully in a box, left the room to go into the back of the shop, and came out with brown paper. There was more talking, all round, while he wrapped the box. Everybody nodded and shook hands. Then the two men left the shop and walked down Exeter Street in close conversation.

  He said, “And we have the place to ourselves.”

  They crossed the street. Pax, beside him, watched the right hand. He watched the left. He didn’t feel eyes on him right at the moment. But then, he’d been wrong about that on some notable occasions in the past.

  At the door he pulled his hat off and shook the rain off. He set it back on his head so he’d have both hands free.

  The bell jangled as they walked in. The black man, Mr. Thompson, looked up from a book, open flat on the counter. His eyes slid across Pax. He saw Hawker and knew him.

  Twenty-five

  THOMPSON WAS WELL OVER SIX FEET TALL AND WORE the intensely black skin and long, sharp features of East Africa. He dressed plain as a Quaker, in black, his shirt and cravat startlingly white. His face stayed impassive, but his eyes snapped to alert. He called, without turning, “Mr. Chetri.”

  Someone moved in the room in back. A chair scraped. Footsteps padded softly. The other clerk came in from the back, polite and attentive. His eyes fixed on Adrian and narrowed.

  This was Chetri, no other name known for him. Like Thompson, Chetri had worked for the French in the East and around the Mediterranean. He was north Indian, gray-haired, fine-featured, square in body, quick of movement.

  For a long moment both men found Adrian Hawkhurst absorbing. Two critical examinations plucked over him, head to foot. Assessing.

  He’d seen these two any number of times from a distance. Studied them through the window glass. Quite the little nest of retired French agents here on Exeter Street.

  “Something has happened to Mademoiselle Justine.” Thompson spoke fluent English, with the cadence of the African language of his birth underneath and a French accent overlying it all. “Tell us.”

  Behind him, Pax threw the bolt on the front door and turned the sign to Closed. He could be heard, walking down the shop, pulling the shades down over the windows.

  Chetri came to the counter and held the edge, tight fingered. “You have news of Mademoiselle?”

  Thompson said, “There has been no message. I opened the shop myself, yesterday and today. This has never occurred.”

  “Always, she sends word if she will be away.”

  Time to say it. “She was hurt, but she’s alive. She was in an accident.” He watched the faces, eyes, hands, the muscles around the mouth, knowing Pax was doing the same, making the same assessments he was.

  Shock. Worry. Their eyes turned to consult back and forth. Natural to do that. It rang true. He read relief in the way shoulder muscles relaxed and breath leaked out. In fingers loosening. They’d expected to hear Justine was dead.

  An emphatic foreign phrase from Chetri. That was a string of syllables to save in mind and ask an expert about when he had a chance.

  Thompson stepped closer. “How is she hurt? Where have they taken her?”

  “She’s safe.”

  “But she did not send for us.” Thompson said, “She is badly hurt, then.”

  “Safe.” He could give that reassurance. “She’s out of danger. She’s asleep now, but she was awake and talking a little. We had the best surgeon in London working on her.”

  Chetri pressed fingertips hard to the wood of the counter, making tense brown pyramids of his hands. Holding still. “She is at Meeks Street? It must be, or we would have news. I will close the shop at once and return with you. I will see her.”

  Nobody was getting close to Justine. “Maybe in a few days.”

  “I am not merely an employee of Mademoiselle. We are friends. My wife and daughter will be honored to care for her. They have some skill in nursing. I must—”

  Thompson interrupted. “You won’t be allowed in. Look at him. He won’t let any of us near her. Not even Nalina.”

  “Who knows a hundred herbs of healing. These British will kill Mademoiselle with their ignorance. I will go to her.”

  “And be turned away. Why should they trust you? Or me? Or Nalina?”

  “Pah.” Chetri shook his head impatiently. “We are hers. Does he think she is a fool to keep enemies this close?”

  “He thinks no one can be trusted. Would you wish him to be gullible?” When Chetri said nothing, Thompson said, “If she cannot defend herself, he must.” He turned. “Ask your questions.”

  Pax had been walking around the shop, poking into things, opening up the wooden medical boxes and peering in at the bottles and muslin bags inside. He looked over. “When did you last see her?”

  Tuesday, it turned out. Mr. Chetri came from behind the counter to stand at the head of the long table and put his hand on the back of one of the wide wooden chairs. “Here,” he said. Mademoiselle had taken breakfast here that morning. A roll and coffee, as always, while they prepared the shop for opening.

  Thompson said, “The bakery boy brings the newspaper as well as bread. I make coffee for her myself, in the manner of my homeland.”

  “The coffee is not important.” Chetri made a chopping motion. “It was not yet seven. This is what happened. Mademoiselle tosses the newspaper down and leaves the shop, hurrying as if devils pursued her.” What devils, he could not say. One did not demand of Mademoiselle Justine where she is going or why.

  She had returned three hours later. Perhaps four hours—before noon—and still hurrying.

  It was raining heavily by that time and Mademoiselle was soaking wet. There was one client in the shop. The foolish young man from Oxford who wished t
o collect little bugs in the Hindu Kush. He would be shot by tribesmen almost at once, unfortunately. One preferred repeat customers. But Mademoiselle said nothing to him. She went upstairs—

  “She took newspapers with her,” Thompson interrupted. “She took last week’s newspapers from the back room and carried them upstairs with her.”

  “Why?” From Pax.

  “She did not tell us.” Thompson was patient. “And we did not ask. Let me finish saying what I have to say.”

  The right-hand wall of Justine’s shop was hung with lethal instrumentation, a collection of fifty or so. Spears for poking holes at some distance. Sabers for cutting from horseback. Knives for doing it close up. Bloodthirsty woman, Justine.

  Pax picked down a kris knife to examine. Pretty, but impractical. “Go on.”

  Chetri said, “In twenty minutes she descended to the shop. She was worried.”

  “Not worried,” Thompson contradicted. “Angry. Very angry.”

  A nod. “She cleaned and loaded her gun. The little Gribeau-val she carries. She sat here,” Chetri patted the chair back, “and did so. She put her knife into the sheath inside her cloak, as if she would need to use it. She gave us no instruction, except to say we should close the shop.”

  “I am ashamed,” Thompson said. “She loaded her gun, took a knife, and left in the rain. I did not offer her my escort. I knew she was going into danger, and I did not go with her.”

  “She would have refused,” Chetri said. “You would only have annoyed her.”

  “Yes. But I did not offer. I did not ask.”

  Whatever ambush Justine walked into, she wouldn’t have dragged them in with her. “Did you know where she was going?”

  The black man said nothing.

  “We must show him,” Chetri said. Then, “This is the time. This is what she spoke of.”

  Thompson did not hesitate or show uncertainty. He simply thought for a while before he spoke. “You are right.”

  Abruptly he left. He strode toward the counter and around the end of it, to the door that led to the back. In his plain black suit, he walked as if he wore robes that spread out around him.

  Chetri lowered his voice. “She was enraged when she walked into the shop yesterday. Furious. As soon as we were alone in the shop, she went to the shelves in the back room . . .”

  Noiselessly, Thompson returned. He carried a plain wood case and laid it upon the table. “He is wondering why you babble secrets to him, Mr. Chetri.” He gave the other man no chance to reply. “We are not fools. We would not speak like this to anyone else.”

  “We follow Mademoiselle’s orders.”

  “Three years ago she told me—told Chetri as well—that if anything happened to her, we were to go to Number Seven in Meeks Street and seek out the dark-haired, dark-skinned son of a bitch who ran the place.”

  “You forgive us,” Chetri said. “We only repeat what she said.”

  “When she said, ‘dark-skinned,’ she looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Perhaps not so dark.’ She said, ‘He is called Black Hawk, but he moves like a cat.’ ”

  Chetri spoke up. “I went—we both went—to spy upon the house in Meeks Street. To look at you. We had heard of you, of course, Sir Adrian.”

  With a small click, Thompson turned the box. It was yew wood, without carving or inlay, thinner than a gun case, but with the same utilitarian design. “I was to give you this, if anything happened. She said I was to trust you.”

  Thompson’s face had become grave, closed, and immovable as obsidian. He released the simple hook that clasped the lid. “That day, she opened this box. This is why she armed herself and went into the rain, to whatever fate awaited her there.”

  The box was empty. The gray velvet lining showed three identical imprints where three knives had rested, parallel, point left. He didn’t have to pull his own knife to know it would fit right into place.

  That was one mystery solved. Knives were sticking into Frenchmen across London. This is where they came from.

  Somewhere, somehow, Justine had got hold of three of his knives.

  Twenty-six

  SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  1802

  La Pomme d’Or, Paris

  HAWKER HUNG IN THE NIGHT, BALANCING AGAINST the side of the building, just touching the windowsill. He heard Owl inside her room, being busy, making the little rustles a woman makes, getting ready for bed. When he was sure there was nobody with her, he scratched at the shutters.

  She came to let him in, wearing a peignoir the color of peaches over her night shift.

  For five years they’d been lovers, and he never got tired of the sight of her. Her hair was loose down her shoulders in honey-dark rivers. Her feet were pink and bare on the floorboards. She looked cross.

  He crouched on the window ledge. “I keep expecting to find you in some pretty apartment on the Rue St. Denis.” He knew every fingerhold on the shutter and the open casement. A good thing. He was clumsy tonight. “But it’s the same pokey old attic.”

  “It is a very safe attic, mon vieux. There is nowhere in Paris so well-guarded as an expensive brothel.”

  “Yet here I am, getting in without let or hindrance.”

  “You, of course, are the exception to many rules. It is a pity you will break your neck one of these days, showing off. It will be mourned by all the women of Europe. A more sensible man would simply—”

  “Walk in the front door. I know. That takes all the fun out of it.” Even if he wanted to tell the world he was in Paris, he wasn’t dressed to stroll into a place like the Pomme d’Or. They’d looked at him twice even in the livery stable where he’d left his horse.

  He stumbled when his feet found the floor. His legs were giving way now that they knew he was at the end of the road. “Am I welcome?”

  “If you were not welcome, I would not have opened the window. Or perhaps I would have opened the window and then pushed you to a sudden death on the stones of the courtyard. In either case, you would receive the hint.” He could smell the clean bright smell of her. Lavender. “You may give that extremely dusty coat to me, if you please. You have been rolling in the dust. Fighting?”

  “Falling off a damned horse.”

  “I will be tactful and not point out how maladroit you are.” She took the cuff of his left sleeve and began to ease it downward. He didn’t wear a tight fashionable coat. It came right off. She made one of those disapproving French shrugs. “You are hurt. Why did you fall off a damned horse? And where?”

  “Careful. That’s sore. I fell off . . . somewhere.” He honestly didn’t remember. He’d been moving for ten days straight, eating in the saddle, sleeping rolled in a blanket in the bushes. “I think it was yesterday. I was going downhill.”

  “You have no affinity for horses. That is strange in an Englishman.”

  Two floors downstairs, somebody tinkled away at a piano. Skillful about it, for all he knew. They had one of the best pianists in France working in La Pomme d’Or. It went along with the best food and the best paintings on the wall. The best women.

  Justine wasn’t one of the women. The French Police Secrète hadn’t made her a whore, though they might have tried it. She was Owl, who confounded them all and went her own way. So far as he knew, the only man she slept with was him.

  He never told her he didn’t go to other women. For five years it had been only her. Nobody else. Nobody, not even when it was months that went by without seeing her. He wouldn’t have admitted that under torture.

  She slipped his coat down over his shoulders and down his arms. Unbuttoned his waistcoat. His senses filled up with swirls of the apricot color she wore and the sweep of her hair. Everything about her flowed like water.

  He’d have let her hurt his ribs, just for the pleasure of feeling her hands on him. But she didn’t hurt when she undressed him. She was neat and quick, getting his shirt untucked, pulling it off over his head.

  His shirt joined his coat and waistcoat on the floor. She ran
her fingers lightly over his chest, up and down his ribs. “You look as if you have been laid upon the road to be trampled by an advancing army. You have many bruises, for one thing. They are very ugly.”

  “You, on the other hand, are luminous as daybreak. Exquisite as . . .”

  “Sit,” she said. “On the bed. And be silent. I do not wish you to collapse facedown on the floor and become even more inconvenient to me. You have burned yourself away to nothing at all.”

  Pain jabbed in his side when he sank down. Linen sheets on the bed and one light blanket. Everything was orderly, simple, well arranged. Everything said “Owl.”

  He sighed out a deep breath. “It was a long ride.”

  “So you fall from the horse because you are exhausted. I am all out of patience with you.” Her hands were light on his shoulders. “If you are determined to kill yourself, ask me to do it. I would earn great praise in certain quarters if I brought you down. Have you broken any bones? There is a surgeon downstairs in the parlor tonight, only half drunk. I can bring him to you.”

  “There are two hundred and six bones in the human body and not one of them is broken. Remarkable, isn’t it?” Who’d told him how many bones a man had? Doyle maybe. Or Pax. They carried that kind of useless information in their heads.

  Her breasts, small, perfect, and kissable, rose and fell, about six inches from his mouth. He wanted to start, right there, and taste his way across her body. He wanted to put his head down onto her breasts and fall asleep. “Feels like I’ve been beaten with rods. Very Turkish.”

  “One may expect you to explore such novelties. You are very stupid to fall off horses, but I do not suppose you will change.”

  “For you, my sweet—”

  “Oh, be silent. Your boots demonstrate all the reasons women should not entertain men in their rooms. I will remove them so you do not suffer doing it. I am a marvel of sensitivity every time I am with you. I astound myself sometimes.”

  He must have closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was at his feet, taking his boot in her hands. The sight of her, kneeling between his legs with her hair spread out over the edible, edible silk on her shoulders . . . He couldn’t have found words anywhere on earth, in any language.