She tugged it loose, pulled the length away, and dropped it.
He saw what he should have seen a while back. “You’ve made a bed.”
“For us.”
Thirty-three
THE BLACK EMPTINESS WAS NOT GONE FROM HAWKER’S eyes, not entirely, but it had receded. He no longer despaired.
If he were not so focused upon the horrible duty he must do, he would see that Pax’s situation was not hopeless. Pax had many friends in the British Service, Hawker not the least of them. Hawker would make the most formidable and wily of allies. There were ways and ways of fighting the masters of the great spy organizations for the life of an agent.
Later, they would discuss strategies. Right now, he needed her.
“It will not be a comfortable bed, mon vieux. But it will suffice.” A plain gilt brooch, suitable to a maidservant, held her fichu in place. She loosed it and laid it upon the table.
“Why are we doing this?” He was slow upon the buttons of his waistcoat, not taking his eyes off her. “Remind me.”
Because you are in such pain it tears at my heart—you who do not allow yourself to be hurt by the world. You, who are so armored by your sarcasm and your wit. Because you are my friend. I could turn aside from a mere lover, but not from you. “It is one last time.”
“It’s always been one last time. Every time. We lead dangerous lives.”
He was a man of deft and dexterous hands, yet he was awkward with the simple task of removing his waistcoat. The button of his collar also eluded him.
“We will not play games, you and I. Let me.” She slipped the button of his collar free.
“They can see in through the window, if anyone comes by.”
“We are hidden well enough by the back of this bench. I will blow the lantern out in a moment. Then I will seduce you for a while.”
“Unnecessary.” He laughed a little. “Why, Owl? Why’d you change your mind?”
This was the Hawker she knew, asking such questions. Awake and alive behind his eyes. Tough, cynical, unsentimental. The lover who was hard stone and hungry fire.
“We are friends.”
“I don’t need to bounce the mattress with my friends. Neither do you.”
She told him a little more. “I am afraid.”
Hawker’s knives dropped to the table beside her gun, convenient in case there was need of them. He began to unstrap the sheaths. “Afraid of what?”
“I am overwhelmed by a knowledge of mortality tonight. We dance upon the edge of the abyss, and tonight, I cannot stop myself from looking down.”
“Damn. You’re being philosophical. That’s a mistake.”
They were both thinking of the agent Paxton, in the dark, alone, running through the streets of Paris. If worse came to worst, all his strength and skill would not save him from death.
She said, “I am a fool to lie with you. It is disaster upon disaster if we are caught. This morning, I was resolved to set you aside and be wise. It seems I am not that wise.”
Hawker disentangled himself from the last knife harness. He pulled his shirt over his head. He wore a silver chain around his neck with a medal of Saint Christopher upon it. A gift from Séverine. She had received the twin to it.
His bare chest made cogent arguments up and down her nerves. It always did. But tonight, when she looked upon him, she knew that even Hawker could die. This perfect machinery of his body, this warm muscle and bone that contained him, was not invulnerable.
“I will not be prudent,” she whispered. “Death comes to us all. I will not go to meet it with small, cautious steps.”
“You’re not going to die.” Hawker leaned over and blew out the lantern. “You stop thinking that. There is just a myriad of things it doesn’t do any good to let into your head. That’s the first of them.”
“I cannot help it. I have seen your Paxton fall so quickly, so completely.” The darkness was not absolute. She could see his outline. See the shape of his features. In some ways, it was easier to talk when she could not see him clearly. “I feel disaster flapping over us like a great bird. If Napoleon dies at the hands of an Englishman, we will be at war in a week. You and I will meet on opposite sides of a battlefield one day. It is not impossible we will be forced to—”
“Hey.” He took her hand and lifted it. Turned it. Kissed the palm. “Not tonight. Forget that for tonight.”
Such thin skin lay at the cup of the hand. The little touch there, and she was struck with heat between her legs. She glowed there. Ached there.
He kissed her palm again and closed her hand over it and held her hand in both of his. “Take that. Put it away and save it for later.”
He was dim and colorless. Speaking to him was like speaking to the night itself.
“I am too fond of you,” she said.
“The complaint of women from one side of Europe to another. Come to bed, love.” She knew that in the dark he gave an Adrian smile. A Hawker smile. Challenge. Madness. A promise of earthly delights. An elegant depravity.
She left her shoes behind on the floor, untied her garters as she walked and let her stockings drop, pulled her skirt up, and crawled beside him.
“Lie down. I want to . . . Ah. That’s good.” His lips sucked three, four, five kisses at her throat. “Did I ever tell you your skin cools off when you sleep? You’re like silk. Cool when you touch it.”
“You may compare me to silk all night long.”
He threaded her hair back from her forehead, bit by bit, then kissed there too. He was in no hurry. Hawker was never in a hurry, not even when she buzzed and twitched with wanting him.
She found the texture of his lips. “You are unbearable enticement and temptation.”
“I try. In my modest way, I try.” He played with one strand of her hair, tugging it so slightly she could barely feel the tiny pulse. Waiting for her. He had the cunning of a mathematics text and the patience of a tree growing.
Desire for him clenched inside her. Grabbed her breath. Streaked in lines of heat between her legs. Folded around her like lightning. Overcame her.
She muttered, “We are stupid, stupid, stupid . . .” She rolled and straddled him. He pulled her dress aside so it would not be between them. She kissed his mouth altogether thoroughly.
She heard him say, “I have to have you,” in a voice naked as clear glass.
His need made him clumsy, so she pushed his hand aside and undid the buttons of his trousers herself, fumbling her way from button to button. It took her a while to get them all loose. He didn’t seem to mind.
Thirty-four
IN THE NIGHT, THE VAST GARDEN AT THE HEART OF the Palais Royale was empty. The shops under the arcades were closed. The last patrons of the opera had eaten their toast and paté at a restaurant and wandered home. On the upper floor, behind closed doors, men gambled and whored, but only a shadow of sound spilled into the night.
The man who still thought of himself as Thomas Paxton stood alone in the middle of the garden, looking up. The moon rode over Paris. Over London too, and Bonn, and the cities of the New World. Lots of world out there. Dozens of places he could hide.
He stretched his arm full length and measured the angle of moon above the horizon against the width of his hand, a rough sextant. Two and a half hours to moonset, which made this about three in morning. Hawker would be staying in the café till morning, giving him a good long head start.
It was August, but the nights had been chilly lately. There was no warmth in moonlight.
He’d have been outside tonight anyway. The meteor showers in the constellation Perseus were at their peak. Only happened once a year.
There. That was one. A streak of white on the sky. He held his breath to the end of it. It seemed worthwhile to tilt his head back and tell the sky, “The abyss of endless time swallows it all.” Marcus Aurelius said that.
In the morning, he’d take Hawk with him when he went to Carruthers.
He didn’t have a decision to make. If you we
re Service and you blotted your copybook, you reported to the Head of Section for judgment. He was Service. He’d made his choice a good long time ago.
Thirty-five
SHE WOKE. LIGHT CAME THROUGH THE WINDOWS OF the café. What woke her, though, was the scritch of broom on pavement and the clatter of pails. The sweepers were out, raking up the fallen leaves, making the Palais Royale fit for another day.
Happiness rested in the small of her stomach, like coals in a hand warmer. I have been unwise again. With Hawker.
It felt very good. When she woke up after having been with him, she felt clean. She felt as if he had touched every part of her and burned it clean with fire.
Sometime in the night Hawker had raised himself to sitting and eased her head into his lap. She had slept so deeply she had not noticed. Or if she woke momentarily, it was with the knowledge she was safe and she let herself slip into sleep again.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. They had not undressed altogether last night, but Hawker was half naked. She had kissed his chest again and again, following the lines of his muscles.
He slept sitting up, his head leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. His right arm was lax at his side. His left arm lay across her and held her.
He had a face like those carved on ancient Greek coins, with straight nose and strong, full lips. His skin was dark with sun, brown even on his chest. In Milan he had passed himself off as a fisherman and worked on the boats, wearing few unnecessary clothes. His beard had grown diligently in the night, as it did. This was not the first time she had awakened beside him.
He could not be of English blood, not with that face. Pole, Gypsy, Lascar, Jew, Greek, Italian, or some joining of nations. He disappeared into a crowd in the Milanese market like a sparrow into a flock of sparrows. His mother had been a whore, he said. His father might be anyone. Hawker might be half French and his father a man from Marseille or Nîmes.
“I’m awake.” He did not open his eyes.
“I know that.” She followed that lie with a truth, just to keep him guessing. “I was admiring you.” She told him the truth fairly often. Not from principle or calculation, just for the simplicity of it.
With that he smiled down at her. “I’m like a porcupine.” He stroked the stubble. It was a wholly masculine gesture, that. Men never really stopped being proud of the ability to grow a beard.
She took his forearm and used it to pull herself up to sitting. Then she held his hand in her lap. She could have read his palm, if she’d been a Gypsy.
The thought of Gypsies and fortune-telling had come to her in the night and stayed with her, past waking. She must talk to him about that, later. “What time do you think it is?”
“Before six.”
Footsteps shuffled. Voices gradually filled the arcade outside. She could not make out the words, but the tone was comfortable, unexcited, discussing small, ordinary things. Men and boys and some women too were on their way to work in the cafés and shops of the Palais Royale. The creak and clank of a pushcart was fruits and vegetables being delivered to the cafés and restaurants. Outside, at the door of the café, came a faint thump. That would be the earliest newspapers of the day, dropped at the door.
She had slept solidly for two hours, but it left her only a little rested. Her brain was full of the smell and taste of Hawker until she had very little room to think. She wished they could make love again, now, in the daylight.
I have tried and tried to make myself a woman who is not ruled by her emotions. I have failed, somewhat.
“The owners of this café will arrive soon. They must clean or restock or squeeze lemons or some such thing. I will admit I have not the least idea what one does in a café when the doors are closed.”
“Water the wine. Cut the bread thin. Chop up cats for the paté.”
He’d taken his hand from hers to hold her forearm, so they were linked, arm to arm. She had seen this on old vases taken out from under the earth in Italy. It was the way antique warriors greeted comrades.
She said, “We do not eat paté of cats in Paris, whatever may be the custom of London.”
“London. Cat-eating capital of Europe.”
It was natural as sunlight to wake up and talk to Hawker this way. She was warm through her whole body because their hands were wrapped upon one another’s arms. Neither of them wanted to be the first to let go.
It was always left to the woman to be wise. She opened her hand and drew away from him. She untangled her knees from the complexity of skirts and squirmed herself off the benches. They were separate now.
She said, “I must find water and wash and become civilized.”
“Me too.” His eyes had become like the points of knives. “I have an unpleasant interview to get through.”
He had spent some of the night while she slept, planning. He would not turn Paxton over to his superiors without a fight.
Hawker rose and angled his way across the room, around the end of the counter, and into the storage room behind. With each step, under her eye, he transformed into a man surrounded by an aura of cold. Adrian the spy. The Black Hawk.
“The owners of this café,” she raised her voice, “will hope to find me gone, without trace, when they arrive later this morning. No one wishes to see the Police Secrète cluttering their place of business.”
He replied from the storeroom, “Try being a thief. Now, that’s a profession that makes you unwelcome.”
She located her stockings, which had gone their stocking way along the floor last night. Her garters had accompanied them, companionably, and could also be found. She sat to draw them on.
Metallic clatter came and the sound of water pouring from the cistern and trickling into a pan.
“I have had a thought.” She said this loudly, so Hawker could hear. “It is clever, but it confuses the issue. You must tell me what you think of it.”
A soft tap from the storeroom. “Let me shave first. I can’t think when I’m doing this.” A pause followed, for the space it would take a man to finish a stroke, shaving. “I put the kettle to heat. Ten minutes and you can wash.”
“While you shave yourself in cold water. I am touched.”
There are great heroisms in the world. Hawker had saved her life once or twice, performing them. There are also small heroic acts that pass unnoticed. He was full of such attentions.
She had loosened the this and that of her clothing last night, to be comfortable. To be . . . accessible. But what she wore, she could button and tie and lace herself into, unaided. She returned herself to order. She toed into her shoes, and she was dressed and ready. The morning had most thoroughly arrived.
Yesterday’s newspapers lay in a rough pile on the counter. She took one back to the table and spread it out where she had left her gun and her kit for reloading. She always carried what she needed to reload. So many problems cannot be solved with a single bullet. She opened the little box with its powder and brushes, set her gun on the newspaper, and began.
Hawker came out a few minutes later, wiping his face with a towel, and sat on the bench next to where she worked. He’d brought a whetstone with him, which he had found somewhere, and picked up one of her knives and began refining the edge. “Have I ever talked to you about your knives?”
“Frequently.”
“It’s all in the angle. You feather out the edge every so often, because there is nothing more dangerous than a dull knife. Armies have been brought down by dull knives.”
“That is unlikely.”
“Absolute truth.” He did not test her knife with his thumb. That was for those who wished to go about with little cuts across their thumb. He lifted the edge of newspaper and sliced that, separating an illustration of bust improvers from a column of news. “Tell me this clever thought you’ve had.”
“We have words. La dame. La tour. Le fou . . .”
He nodded. He was attending to the knife, raising a rhythmic, slow grinding as he perfected the edge of the blade. O
ne would say he was absorbed in that unless one saw his eyes. They were thinking of other things. Whirring with calculation. “Tell me.”
“Tarot.”
The single word, and his head snapped up. He stared at her, not seeing. “Nom d’un nom.”
“The card of the queen is called ‘the lady.’ La dame. The card of the tower. La tour. The card of le fou—the fool. I do not say we are wrong about chess. But that is another possibility.”
“Tarot cards. Gypsies. Gypsies come to the Palais Royale.”
“Sometimes. Mostly they are chased away again. But sometimes they bribe the gendarmes and are left in peace for a day or two to tell fortunes up and down the cafés. I did not see any yesterday.”
He set her knife down on the newspaper. He was perfectly still, going over this in his mind. He shook his head slowly. “They don’t mix in politics. Or assassination. Doesn’t make sense.”
“It does not. And yet I must explore this. I have friends among the Rom, but they come and go. I will have to track them down in the poor quartiers to the east of Paris.”
“I’ll ask around the Palais Royale. See when and where the Gypsies have been.”
“It will take days. We do not have days.” She rapped her gun impatiently upon the news sheet. Grains of black powder peppered the schedule of the First Consul’s activities for the day.
Egyptian artifacts restored to the Louvre . . . La Dame du Nil. The Lady of the Nile, brought from England . . . incomparable artwork . . . gift to the people of France . . . celebration of peace.
It was a pity peace did not really come from gifts of pretty statues.
Hawker said, “What I need is Paxton. He’s the one who knows the Rom. They take to him like a long-lost cousin, which he’s not, with his coloring. If I had him here—”
She said, “You do.”
A man stood at the window, looking in. Monsieur Paxton, who should not be here. Who should be miles away by now. “He did not have the sense to leave. Truly, I have no fear for the secrets of France if the British Service is composed of such—”
The Black Hawk Page 22
