“Do call me Ciara, Luz,” she said shyly. Then, more firmly: “We need to—”
Luz leaned closer and spoke softly, but without the sibilance that carried: “We need to talk, but not necessarily here.”
She glanced around the cluttered room, then picked up a copy of The Electrical Experimenter from the bedside dresser; the June 1916 issue, price twelve cents, editor Hugo Gernsback, with a rather gaudy but fundamentally accurate cover about electrical guidance of aerial torpedoes launched from above that should never have been allowed to leak to the civilian press. Skimming through it she found an illustration advertising Murdoch Complete #55 headphones for six dollars each. Luz held it up in one hand while pointing to it with the other, then glanced around, putting a finger of her free hand to her lips and finally tapping an ear. Ciara looked puzzled for a moment, then shocked.
Luz shrugged and made a palms-up, maybe-yes-maybe-no gesture. Ciara spoke brightly . . . and very slightly artificially and a bit too loud, though Luz found it a creditable performance for an amateur.
“Let me show you around, Luz!”
They went down a floor, and then through a hallway. “They were taking things out of here yesterday, so it’s probably . . . yes!” Ciara said.
The near-empty ballroom was well lit by a long string of windows giving out on a view of the forested Ore Mountains, a mirror-lined space impossible to eavesdrop on invisibly, and unlikely to attract some staff aide busybody. The windows were open, letting in air still comfortable with September but damp and fresh and pine-scented, and cool enough to hint at what the central European winter would be like once the weather broke in these remote uplands still haunted by wolf and boar. It was exactly the sort of room Mozart had written for and performed in, too; probably the piano’s original home.
Ciara sank into one of the spindly-looking chairs ranged along the wall, all carving and gilt, and folded her hands together in her lap, fingers working on each other. She was still pale but determined.
“We need to talk,” she said after a moment’s silence, looking up sharply. “After what we saw . . . I’m certain I’ll have no part of this horror the Germans are making for our country. You’re an agent for the government in Washington?”
“Yes. The Black Chamber; you’ve heard of it?” Luz said.
And you shouldn’t have assumed that was the truth because it was mostly likely, but still . . . perhaps dancing around it wouldn’t have helped either.
Ciara’s eyes widened; the name was frightening, from her perspective, but now reassuring as well. A name of secret power, reaching out into an enemy citadel.
“Yes. Oh, thank God!”
Then: “How do I know you really are? You might be working for the British!”
Luz smiled wryly. That’s a bit of healthy skepticism, she thought.
Aloud: “Welcome to the world of the intelligence operative, where everything depends on trust and nobody can trust anyone.”
Ciara put her hands to the sides of her head. “It’s like a hall of mirrors!”
“Let’s put it this way: You know for certain that I’m not working for the Germans and do want to stop this. And this morning I saw you lie to them, so I know you’re not working for them either. Besides, do I look English?”
“No,” Ciara said, her head slightly to one side. “You might be Welsh, though, or Black Irish . . . but I’d have said Italian or French or Spanish, or even Greek. So tell me who you really are, then.”
Ciara’s voice challenged, and their eyes met.
Luz thought for a moment, pursing her lips. She wants to believe me, she mused. But she knows that and she’s fighting it. The odd thing is that I’m telling her the actual truth, mostly . . . Is she any good at picking up on that?
“All right,” she said, decision firming. “I’m going to do something dangerous, but you did save my life when you confirmed my cover, and we need to work together. I’ll tell you the truth. Not all of it, because what you don’t know you can’t yield if they interrogate you, but what I do say will be true.”
Ciara nodded, obviously reserving judgment. “Who are you? Really? What’s your name?”
“Luz,” she said. “It means—”
“Light, in Spanish. I speak Spanish . . . well, I can read it and speak a bit.”
Luz smiled a little. “Luz O’Malley Aróstegui,” she said.
There are times when the main problem is remembering which one I’m using. Knowing that wouldn’t help the opposition.
“Thank you,” Ciara said. Then as a thought struck her: “That’s not too much of a risk?”
“Names are the small change of intelligence work at this level. The crucial thing is that they think I’m Elisa Carmody de Soto-Dominguez. If they discovered I wasn’t her, I’d be dead anyway regardless of who I really was.”
Then the red-gold brows went up. “You are Irish? And part Mexican, like Elisa?”
“Not Mexican. Cubana on my mother’s side, Irish on my father’s. Boston Irish, that is, three generations from Erin.”
“Oh? And you were born on the South Side, I suppose, two blocks over and up one street from myself?”
Well, that’s a little more healthy skepticism! Luz thought. Not bad, when you must want something to cling to like a life-ring after a shipwreck. This one is nobody’s fool, just vastly inexperienced.
“Nothing so convenient,” Luz said in reply. “I was born in California, in the house my father built in Santa Barbara—that’s a town . . .”
“Just north of Los Angeles, by the map,” Ciara said.
“The Irish get around, don’t they?”
“Well, that we do. How did that happen?”
“His grandfather, Pat O’Malley, came over in the first famine year. From Kilmaine, in County Mayo, with nothing but the rags on his back and the lice in his hair and very much of nothing but hunger in his belly. He worked carrying a hod full of mortar, then laying the bricks, then built a little contracting business with a pair of wagons and a few men and boys working for him. His son built it bigger until he was a man of substance . . . as such things went for an Irishman and a Catholic in Boston in his day . . . and sent my father to MIT—class of ’87.”
Ciara’s face thawed a little. Luz had thought it might; though every word of the story was true, she couldn’t have made up anything better to appeal to someone from the Irish enclaves of the Bay State. It wasn’t impossible for those who’d landed hungry and in bug-crawling rags from the coffin ships to better themselves in America, but it wasn’t easy either beyond getting what a strong back and willing hands would bring, enough to eat meat with the potatoes five days a week and buy shoes and put a roof over your head. The streets of Boston in particular hadn’t been paved with gold for the sons of the Gael, being at the time the most purely English and Protestant place on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. Though nowadays Irish political bosses ran it, to the vast chagrin of the likes of the Lowells and Cabots and Saltonstalls, and the Irish themselves felt the Italians and French Canadians stepping on their heels.
Then the younger woman frowned, in thought rather than anger.
“That wouldn’t be . . . wasn’t there an O’Malley who helped build St. Agnes on Fourth Street, wouldn’t take anything but his costs for it? I remember a plaque, when I went to school there.”
“I think so,” Luz said. “Though I couldn’t swear to it without looking through Papá’s papers in the trunks in the attic at home.”
“Well, then,” Ciara said, less suspiciously. “How’d he meet a Cuban lady?”
“Papá met my mother in Cuba in ’91, but her family were . . . are . . . hacendados, sugar barons. Owners of plantations, and of slaves by the hundred in the old days—which in Cuba means ‘before 1886.’ Old family, richer than God and prouder than Satan as the saying goes, and they didn’t much fancy plain Patrick O’Malley
, the bricklayer’s son, at the table of an evening or fathering their grandchildren, even though he was laying out their new cane railway and mill, so he and Mima eloped. There was also the matter of a man they did want her to marry, without consulting her wishes very much.”
That brought a shyly charming smile, one that made Ciara look more like her twenty years.
“And you?” Luz said.
“My father was Irish-born,” the younger woman said. “He came over in ’85 with his sister Colleen, him on the run from the English law. She had nobody else to look to and was crippled in one foot besides. He had enough to start a bookstore in south Boston. We might have met, perhaps!”
Luz returned the smile and felt her shoulders relax slightly. That was sincerity if she’d ever heard it, and profound relief at not being alone among malignant strangers, and desperate hope that an ally had been found, someone who knew what they were doing. Luz would very much have regretted having to kill this naïve well-meaning youngster who’d wandered into waters much deeper and more shark-infested than she could have imagined.
“Probably not,” she said. “My father was the only son of an only son . . .”
“The poor man!” Ciara said. “There was only me and my brother, Colm, in my family too; my mother died when I was born, and Da never took another. Being ill by then, and saying he was no use to a woman.”
Luz nodded; that made them both children of unusually small sets. She went on:
“And my father was almost as glad to leave Boston as his granddad had been to board the coffin ship out of Galway; he said he preferred to live where he could be just an American, not a jumped-up bogtrotter beneath the feet of the Back Bay snobs.”
That brought a flash of understanding. Luz went on: “We lived in California when we weren’t on the move from project to project, mostly in the Latin countries, or the West when we were in America. No kin in Boston when my grandparents had passed, and no sister or brother for me, and so not much reason to visit. And you?”
“Just my brother, Colm.”
For a moment the bright blue eyes went narrow and very hard.
“The Sassenach killed him in April, in Dublin; he’d gone back to fight for Ireland as our father had in his day. Da had been ailing for a long time, and that news was the death of him, as sure as a bullet. A stroke. I sold the bookstore and volunteered for . . . well . . .”
“Courier work for the Clann na nGael? Which means the Irish Republican Brotherhood, too,” Luz said.
A quick nod. “I thought it was revenge for my Colm,” she said.
Luz’s face went bleak. “I understand. I joined the Black Chamber because my parents were killed in Mexico by the revolucionarios. I was in the room when it happened, hiding . . . five years ago, now, so I’d have been about your age then.”
Ciara gave a small shocked gasp but didn’t venture any offensive stranger’s sympathy, just a quick nod.
“I thought . . . I thought this was for Ireland,” she said. “But it’s not. They’re going to use that stuff we saw on us. On America. I won’t help with that, even if it means my life. In Boston I felt very Irish, but here in Germany I’ve realized that it’s American I am, at seventh and last.”
“Sí,” Luz said. “That’s well put! At a guess, they’re planning to use it on our port cities—as many of them as they can, though I don’t know how. Yet. That’s an incredibly deadly weapon, far worse than chlorine or phosgene or even the new mustard gas. There were only a few pounds in that mortar shell, and it killed them all; killed or crippled or drove gibbering mad. One twenty-pound shell, a thousand men. Imagine tons of it released on a city.”
Ciara blanched and crossed herself, swallowing hard and obviously imagining it on her city. “Mother of God!”
“Exactly. I’ll have to get the details out of Horst, or otherwise; that’s why I’m here. We caught wind of some plot, but only vague hints. They were reckless sending von Bülow . . . the white-haired man, he’s a chemist . . . to America with all that in his head, but at a guess he was picking the sites for the attacks in full detail, so they needed someone fully briefed. There’ll have been factions in the government and military here who didn’t think it would work, or even had scruples about it, so he needed to make it convincing. He and Colonel Nicolai.”
Ciara took a moment of frowning thought. “What . . . happened to the real Elisa?”
“Were you close?”
“No, we only met once, for a moment, and that when I was fifteen and she about the age I am now. I wasn’t altogether sure you weren’t her; people change fast in those years and you’ve much the same hair and complexion, until I saw your eyes close—hers were light hazel-brown, and yours are that blue that’s almost black, something you won’t forget.”
Luz pursed her lips. “I did say I’d tell you the truth, so what happened to her was . . . very bad things, probably followed by death, after we caught her. That’s not my side of the job, but I won’t pretend I don’t know about it. There’s no Hague Convention for spies; we’re vermin without rights if we’re taken by an enemy. That’s how this game works, and those are the stakes we’re playing for here, you and I. It’s harder than going for a soldier.”
Ciara winced a little, but Luz could see she’d gained a little more confidence by her frankness.
“What can we do?” she said. Then she dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, God, I keep seeing those men—”
Then she raised her face and said fiercely: “They only wanted to be free!”
Luz laid a hand on her shoulder for a moment, before she stepped back. “That’s natural. That was a . . . hard thing to see.”
“You’re used to . . . such things,” Ciara said. “I’m not and I feel . . . empty inside. And I keep imagining it happening to my friends and my neighbors.”
“I’m not used to things like that,” Luz snapped, then controlled the flush of anger; it was part of the reaction.
She took a deep breath: “Not a thousand men gassed like rats in a cage to prove a theory! And I’ve seen hard things, yes, but it always . . . does something to you. You can shove it away for a while, but it comes back later.”
Ciara looked up, met her eyes for a moment, then nodded. “I thought about what to do . . . but I don’t know anyone in the American government, even if I could get away from here. And who’d believe a girl with such a tale anyway? Half the time men don’t listen to you when you try to talk to them about anything but themselves or the weather or what’s for dinner, if you know what I mean. It’s as if they don’t hear what you’re saying unless you’re saying certain things.”
Luz gave her a wry smile. “Yes, and I do know what you’re talking about, as one girl to another! But I’m a Chamber operative, I’m trained for this work, and I can get people to listen.”
And if it came to the last piece to play, I can talk directly to the president, since I played Bear with him and his children at Sagamore Hall. As long as I don’t waste it on trivialities . . . and this is definitely not trivial.
“Precisely how to get the information out once we’ve got it . . . that we’ll have to improvise.”
And I’m certainly not telling you anything about codes or drop boxes!
Aloud she went on: “I’m here under deep cover. First we need solid intelligence: numbers, places, times. This would have to be closely coordinated, however they plan to do it. An overwhelming onslaught attack, probably coordinated with a massive offensive on the Western Front.”
“I need to think,” Ciara said. With a shudder. “Though not about what we saw. I wish I didn’t have to think about that!”
Wait until you see the faces in your dreams, Luz thought grimly but did not say. Or in that hour when you lie wakeful before the sun rises.
Instead she went on: “We’re supposed to be known to each other, so it’s natural enough that we talk. See this?”<
br />
She ran her right finger behind her right ear, as if dealing with a mild itch. “That’s the sign it’s safe to really talk. Do not say anything that you wouldn’t say to the real Elisa unless I give you that sign, right? Remember that!”
Ciara nodded, though Luz wasn’t very confident she would remember, especially under stress. Consistent falsehood was hard for amateurs, but you did what you could.
Then she went on: “In the meantime I’m going to practice a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Practice?” Ciara asked.
“A physical drill. I need to settle my nerves too, and it’ll seem in character to Horst if he happens by.”
Luz stood and made each muscle of her body relax. That itself helped calm the mind. Then she flipped the navaja from her pocket into her hand and snapped it open—the thumb stud that let her do that one-handed was the only modification she’d made to it, and it would have offended old Pedro’s purist soul. As the click-click-click of the blade locking sounded she dropped lightly into guardia stance, crouched with right foot forward, right hand at waist level with the curved hilt held in a saber grip and the cutting edge down and to the right, left hand open in front of her navel and moving fluently in graceful sinuous curves.
The quick darting movements took her out of herself, a dance with the invisible . . . until she took one final deep breath, imagined her enemy coming in with a thrust to her face, and threw herself forward under it to land on left knee and left hand in the pasada baja, body bowed, right leg straight back and knife hand flung forward with her weight behind the lunge of the point into his gut just below the breastbone. After a moment’s stillness she swept her right foot around slowly, using the change of balance to sway upright again.
“Faith,” Ciara murmured, looking a little wide-eyed. “And do they teach you that in the Black Chamber?”
Luz blinked back from the state of absolute concentration. Her body felt purged, loose and balanced, cleaned of the poisons the morning had brewed as the music earlier had cleared her mind. She controlled her breathing and rolled her head and shook it, then sank into a chair. She was sweating a little, but it was worth it.
Black Chamber Page 18
