Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “But warriors are the true sword of an empire,” she said.

  He started slightly at the words, and the very faint emphasis she’d laid on them. Then she turned and walked into the dining area, as a steward came through the lounge tapping a rubber hammer on a xylophone-style device he held in the crook of one arm, giving off a pleasant little tune that signaled the beginning of dinner service.

  A waiter bowed and escorted Luz to her table; they were assigned by cabin. She scanned the menu; another thing that had gone away unmourned with the last century was women pretending they didn’t get hungry or need to eat, and she was sharp-set after a hasty boiled-egg breakfast and nothing but a big pretzel from a pushcart for lunch.

  Most of the dishes were a Harvey House version of the sort of sub-French cuisine you got at Delmonico’s or the better hotels, with American specialties like terrapin or Virginia ham for patriotism’s sake; only to be expected, since the Harvey company now had the contract to supervise dining for the whole of American National Railways and its airborne offshoot. She saw some south-of-the-border items—or at least ones with Spanish names—in a special section of the menu. They were fashionable, and a good many veterans of the Intervention had acquired a taste for the real thing as an escape from that oxymoronic vileness known as “Army food,” which was even blander than what Anglos normally ate. There were a fair number of war brides, too, bringing their skills and tastes north with them into their new families.

  Invasions go in both directions, sometimes.

  She looked up at the waiter, who was standing with deferential calm. He was a stocky man in early middle age with a pepper-and-salt mustache, the white jacket of the service staff emphasizing his dark-olive skin, high cheekbones, rather narrow black eyes, and square—almost roundish—face. She wasn’t surprised. The long struggle in Mexico and the long boom in the United States had also pushed and pulled a great many workers north of the now fairly theoretical border, the more so as the flood of immigrants from Europe had been cut off in 1914. The Poles and Rumanians, Magyars and Jews who’d once come in endless shiploads to shovel coal and work the looms were busy slaughtering each other in Flanders and Galicia and the Pripet Marshes, millions of native-born farm boys and laborers were being swept into uniform, and in the meantime the construction gangs, mines, factories, and harvest crews needed willing hands. So did jobs like this.

  “¡Bien, Maestro Tomas!” she said, reading the name embroidered on his breast pocket.

  She pulled on her upper-class Mexico City accent like a familiar pair of gloves, fruit of years spent there as a girl while her father designed dams and bridges and tramways, and then for the Chamber after the Intervention. Languages fascinated Luz and had always come easily to her, and so had the little subtle tricks of their varieties, even before she’d needed them for professional reasons or studied them formally. The unfortunate Elisa had lived most of her life in the Mexican capital and nearby Puebla, being the granddaughter of an Irish deserter in the war of 1848 who’d prospered greatly in its aftermath. Luz continued:

  “¿Alguno de estos platillos valen la pena, o mejor pido de los platillos norteños?”

  The steward hid a delighted smile as she asked whether the Mexican dishes were worth ordering or whether she’d better stick to steak and pommes frites, and gave her a quick but respectful second look. She obviously had a great deal less indio in her background than he did, but she could easily be criollo of a highborn raza pura variety. Which was exactly what her mother had been, of course, just from a different part of the old Spanish dominions.

  “No, Señorita Carmody,” he said; he’d probably studied the passenger list too.

  Her mind’s ear instantly tagged him as from northwest of the capital; the Bajío, and at a guess probably Querétaro. And born in a village about the time Porfirio Díaz took power.

  “Carmody de Soto-Dominguez,” she corrected with her eyes on the menu, as if absently.

  An unmarried woman used both parents’ surnames in the Iberian world; the Irish-Spanish mixture implied was precisely the fact of the matter, which made it an ideal cover. He nodded and continued, with a little scorn for the tender taste buds of the northerners under the professional courtesy of a waiter:

  “Estos gringos, les damos una salsita y gritan por agua . . . el humo les sale por las orejas.”

  She smiled and nodded with a conspirator’s chuckle. Acting a role aside, it was rather funny. She’d heard that anguished howl for water quite literally, though bread was actually more effective, since the heat of the peppers cooked out into the oils. And metaphorically she’d seen that smoke pouring out of shell-like pink ears more than once.

  He leaned forward a little and murmured conspiratorially himself: “Pero le puedo traer de nuestros frijoles con chorizo y salsa chipotle; con una carne asada y guacamole y crema acida. Nos dan bien de comer en la cocina, Señorita.”

  Saliva ran into her mouth at the thought of the authentic carne asada he was offering her, and the cook would be working for love rather than duty. You could eat well in New York in any number of styles since most of the population were immigrants from everywhere on Earth or their children, but for weeks she’d been dining with people of deepest Anglo-Saxon dye, colleagues and good friends but ones who thought béchamel sauce was hot stuff and a hint of garlic on a steak was a daring transgression risking stomach problems. And the whole exchange would help establish her cover—it was never too soon to get into character. If her opponent-target was tapped into the grapevine, so much the better.

  “Yes, please, and I am most grateful, Maestro Tomas,” she said, continuing in Spanish.

  “It shall be done, Doña Elisa,” he said, promoting her respectfully; that was how he’d have addressed the daughter of his patrón back in the old country.

  Not-Really-Hans, she noticed, had ordered lobster Newburg at a table not too far away and his ears were virtually pricking up like a wolf listening for a threat or prey.

  I’d have thought he was a red-meat man, she thought. Just shows that you shouldn’t make too many assumptions.

  * * *

  • • •

  Come back to bed, meine Süsse,” Hans, or rather Hauptmann Horst von Dückler said two days later.

  She’d been right, and even the Hans was fictitious; he was the third son of a baron with an ancestral Schloss near Breslau, too.

  “Sweetie yourself,” Luz chuckled, also in German, feeling pleasantly relaxed as she fished the bottle out of her cabin suitcase.

  She was trying to drop just a tinge of what an Irish-Mexican accent would sound like into her aristocratic but slightly Bavarian-flavored German; his own upper-class standard Hochdeutsch had a distinct eastern tinge now and then, with hard r-sounds.

  Then she raised a brow as he flipped back the sheet to indicate quite specifically what he had in mind.

  “It’s true what they say about you Prussian Junkers, then.”

  “I’m Catholic, and Silesian niederer Adel, actually, but what do they say?”

  “That you’re men of iron,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder out of the corners of her eyes and standing hipshot as she turned to pour two small glasses of tequila.

  Men liked this view of double curves, especially when you didn’t have any clothes on, which was understandable—she did herself. And it was pleasant to be admired so by someone you also found attractive once you’d gotten over being shy. She’d lost the last of that when her parents died and her prayers went unanswered into an empty universe. Though she was ready enough to pretend for appearance’s sake, since you had to be careful of the world even when the world was being an imbecile. Oddly enough, on a mission pretending to be someone else she could sometimes be less governed by pretense than she was as herself.

  Which means we’re always playing a role; being a spy has just made me more conscious of that.

  She certainly
wouldn’t have adopted this strategy for putting him off-guard if it had been the Westphalian Hog or the Herr Doktor. Horst had a body like a Norse god, all lean clear muscle and ridged belly and tight backside and long shapely legs, shoulders broad and strong without being bull-massive, and almost translucently pale skin smooth except for a moderate dusting of golden hair and a few scars, from bullets and what was probably shrapnel on his left flank. He even smelled nice, a hard clean musk. And he had all the stamina in the world. Men were dismayingly prone to what she privately thought of as Bumblebee Disease, stinging once and dying, or at least falling limply asleep and snoring, but Horst was among the exceptions.

  Of course, he is a mortal enemy and I may well have to kill him . . . but that’s work, not personal. Not for me, at least.

  She sighed inaudibly as he preened a little under her regard and turned her eyes back to the bottle of honey-colored liquid; the drawback was that he was vain about it, and like most males inclined to attribute magical powers to certain organs rather than what he did with them. In fact on balance she was rather sorry for his eventual wife. All that potential, and after the play of feint and gradual revelation . . . and then he was actually rather boring, carnally speaking. He seemed to have taken his conception of the bedroom arts from an infantry drill manual, and assumed that a female would naturally fall into worship of his own awesomeness. He’d been surprised and a little disconcerted at a woman who wanted to do more than . . .

  Throw back her knees and think of Germany while he plunges ahead, Luz thought. Which was great fun for a while—those scratches on his back are perfectly genuine—but I doubt it’s ever occurred to him to do anything else!

  “The iron is better demonstrated than talked about,” he hinted.

  “Patience, Süsser,” she said.

  And it would require the patience of a saint to keep tiptoeing around his fragile self-regard for years, and that’s depressingly typical of his half of the human race. Why is it that men seem to think that if you’re intimate with them you should be a cross between a worshipping acolyte and a doting mother who’s constantly shoring up their feelings? And marriage gives them a license from the government to expect you to do all the emotional work for the rest of your life; it’s exhausting just to contemplate! Maybe after the war—which hasn’t officially started yet, and which I probably won’t survive—I should just find some nice like-minded California girl . . .

  Bryn Mawr had been educational in that respect, too: gnōthi seauton, the old Greeks had said, and it meant to know yourself. She had a vague mental image of someone willowy and blond; more importantly, someone quick-witted, with a ready laugh and fond of long walks beside the sea, books and music and gardening and cuddling on hilltops on warm starry nights, or in front of a fire on chilly rainy ones.

  . . . and settle down to a Boston marriage with whoever-she-turns-out-to-be.

  There was her parents’ place in Santa Barbara, which she could love again now that the memories had stopped hurting so much, and that land north of town she’d inherited as well, near Los Olivos. Very pretty amid the golden hills and live oaks, and her parents had long intended it for their retirement; these days with an automobile you could be in town quickly, and catch a fast electric train to L.A. or San Francisco . . .

  She’d qualify for a veteran’s settlement loan, officer grade. Even better, Black Chamber veterans got it off the books, without paperwork or questions.

  Aloud she continued:

  “Sure, and it’s flattering that the sight of me has you rising to the occasion once more, so to speak, but another drink won’t be amiss. We’ve a little while before we reach Amsterdam and have to get back to work for the cause . . . well, our respective causes and countries.”

  “What is that stuff?” he asked. “It makes schnapps seem like milk.”

  “Tequila. It’s made from agave juice,” she said.

  He made a face. “Pulque? Isn’t that a drink for peasants?”

  “Tequila is made by roasting the heart of the agave azul, and it’s like any drink—quality varies from liquid sandpaper to liquid gold! This is the genuine article, añejo in the barrel, from Don Eladio Sauza’s hacienda, which is where my comrades stole it. We sold most of it for the cause, but a few bottles went astray.”

  In fact Don Eladio gratefully sent her and another Black Chamber operative named James Cheine each a crate of his best every Christmas, since they’d saved his family’s life and property from a revolucionario plot. That had been three years ago and a bit, when open guerilla raids were still common even near American garrisons—not all the big landowners had favored the Intervention but most had, and you needed to protect your supporters if you wanted to keep any. Some bits of his stock-in-trade had disappeared in the fighting before the jaws of the countertrap snapped shut with the gratifying finality of pistols to the backs of necks, which made it plausible for her cover identity to have some of the expensive liquor.

  “Now, treat it with respect this time,” she said, turning back to him and smiling, letting her glass touch her lips and enjoying the sharp agave bite mellowed with hints of citrus and walnut. “Don’t toss it back like schnapps, you only do that with white tequila. Sip!”

  He grinned back at her and reached for it. “A beautiful naked woman comes to me with fine drink in both hands! The gates of Valhalla have opened for Wotan’s warrior!”

  “But this time the Valkyrie is doing the riding—”

  Their laughter covered the click of the lock, but she was already turning when the door opened. Then she froze and let a long breath flow from between her lips, controlling the sudden leap of heart and flush of blood and the impulse to gasp. The red-haired English soldier came through with a revolver in his hand, a man-killing brute of a .445 Webley, with the turbaned Indian close behind. He had a rumāl in one big brown hand, a cotton bandana done up Thugee-style with a coin knotted into one corner, and held between thumb and forefinger ready to toss, which meant he knew how to use it.

  “Deal with the Fenian slut, Narayan,” the Englishman snapped, jerking his head toward her without unlocking his eyes from Horst’s. “We need the Hun alive. Quickly, don’t let her scream.”

  The Indian came toward her smoothly, brown eyes like pebbles in his impassive face; she recognized the look, a cold killer who knew his business. She’d been inside that face, often enough. This Narayan outweighed her by fifty pounds and the look of his shoulders and neck said he’d be much stronger, and almost certainly he’d been to the dance before and knew all about dirty fighting. With guns that wouldn’t matter at all, with knives only a bit, but she was literally naked and in her bare feet with no weapon available but two glasses of liquor. Quick thought flowed into decision, and that into words; she needed to make him see her as someone to be punished, not an opponent to be fought or target to be killed as emotionlessly as a farm wife snapped a chicken’s neck.

  “Haan, aao, kadamaboj banchhut!”

  That about exhausted her Hindi, but she knew from the episode with the Ghadar conspirators that for his people sister-fucker was very, very provocative. Especially from a woman, and an angry man reverted to his reflexes . . . and men operating on reflex always underestimated women, since most had never in their lives faced physical risk from one after their last spanking from their mothers. With her that had been the last mistake several men ever made, and it was working again. The dark eyes flared with anger, and his mouth tightened; he grabbed for her with his left hand, obviously intending to hold her still while he hit. His instinct now was to hurt rather than simply kill.

  A snap of her wrists sent both shot glasses of eighty-proof tequila into his eyes. He snarled a curse but with commendable spirit ignored the stinging pain. No amount of willpower could stop it from blurring his vision to a smear, though, or throwing his concentration off for an instant as his attack turned into a blundering lurch. She spun aside and grabbed for his r
eaching left arm with both hands, striking for the wrist.

  Uncle Teddy had been fascinated by certain aspects of Japanese culture for many years, especially their martial arts; he’d had an instructor in them at the White House in his first administration, shaking the floors with the throws and falls. He’d brought more over later for the American armed forces, and the Black Chamber had gotten some of the best. It had certainly been more practical for her than boxing, though not more than the savate she’d picked up in Paris.

  Kote mawashi simply meant clamping your fingers into the inside of the wrist, pressing on the back of the hand with both thumbs, and using the leverage to twist the arm sharply against the natural direction of the joints; you couldn’t use raw power to pull out of that lock, not without tearing your own tendons loose. You could just whip your right fist back and punch in the face of the man—or woman—holding your arm locked, which Narayan tried.

  Luz wasn’t there, or rather her face wasn’t where the Indian’s knuckles headed. She was already throwing herself back, pivoting on her right heel and drawing the man forward. Her own head just missed the sink as she leaned—this was crowded—and her left leg came up, curled back to her chest. Then she drove the heel up at almost ninety degrees, directly into the Hindu’s armpit with all the strength of the long muscles of thigh and hip—ballet practice helped with this, too.

  The meaty thud of impact shocked back through her pelvis and into the leg, driving her down a bit into a one-legged crouch. Narayan came up on tiptoe, breath wheezing out of the wide O of his mouth in a squeal of agony.

  Luz twisted at his arm, which didn’t resist much now that it was dislocated. That let her land with both feet planted wide in a kiba-dachi, a horse-stance. Her right fist touched her left ear, and she twisted her body as she slammed the elbow around into the spot behind his ear. That hurt her elbow and made her hand tingle, and the turban blocked it slightly, but the big Indian abruptly lost all interest in the fight and collapsed to the floor.