Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “You’re an American, sir?” Luz said coolly.

  “A Southron,” Daubigny said. “Here as a representative of a brotherhood struggling for liberty for my people, as you valiant ladies are.”

  He was a slender whipcord-tough man in his late thirties, deeply tanned, with a rather archaic-looking pointed chin-beard and mustache of dark brown, longish hair cut above the ears, and hazel eyes. His well-styled beige linen suit was bespoke and probably comfortable where he came from but would be chilly here soon enough, and he wore it with a black string tie; the whole effect was almost comically regional, like an illustration of a Kentucky colonel in an adventure novel. The accent was definitely southern, but not the hush-ma-mouf gumbo one you usually heard, nor the hard upcountry hill-and-holler rasp that was so common in the Army: He said heppy for happy and didn’t drop the r-sounds except after a vowel. In a way it was reminiscent of a very, very old-fashioned English way of speaking, with an overlay of modern British public-school speech as well.

  South Carolina low-country. Charleston, she thought. Upper-class Charleston, old family.

  What was it Lincoln had said about the state of South Carolina? She’d learned most of his sayings, not least because Uncle Teddy considered him the greatest of all presidents.

  ¡Ay! That was it! “Too small for a country, too big for a lunatic asylum.”

  “I understand that the lovely young lady from Boston represents the Clann na nGael,” Daubigny said. “Fellow sufferers from the hand of the descendants of the Roundhead Puritans, with their insufferable meddling and unwillingness to leave anyone alone to live as they please. And you, Miss Carmody, are of the Mexican Revolutionary Party.”

  “And you, Mr. Daubigny?” Ciara said, unexpectedly bold.

  No, thought Luz. I should have expected it. She may have led a sheltered life by my standards, but she also ran a bookstore. She had to talk to anyone who came in, and deal with salesmen who develop faces of brass as a professional necessity.

  He inclined his head. “I, Miss Whelan, am an emissary of the brotherhood which fought the northern occupation of our lands until they agreed to restore at least a minimal degree of community self-government and the protection of white womanhood. The noble Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Ciara stared at him blankly. Then . . .

  “Oh. That was after the Civil War . . .”

  “Properly the War of Northern Aggression, Miss Whelan, but yes.”

  “There was a cinema last year about it,” she added.

  That was D. W. Griffith’s masterpiece, Birth of a Nation, a dramatized history of the Reconstruction period that was just slightly biased, full of leering Negro rapists, corrupt northern carpetbaggers preying on the bones of the fallen South, evil scalawag collaborationists, and the heroic defenders of Dixie in those rather comical outfits of white sheets—which had a striking resemblance to the pointed hats and masks penitentes wore when parading through the streets in Holy Week in the Latin countries.

  Luz had heard Uncle Teddy cursing a blue streak and damning the film and its creator comprehensively in that way of swearing he had without using obscenity or scatology—and not knowing she was in the Director’s waiting room in Washington. The irony was that it was a masterpiece, the first one she’d seen that really convinced her that moving pictures could be an art form like drama on the stage.

  Like much great art it was causing no end of political trouble, though, and there was enough of that down in Dixie anyway. For all that his mother had been from a Georgia planter’s family and that uncles of his had fought for the Confederacy, Uncle Teddy had been loathed there ever since he’d invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, and refused to let Jim Crow into the federal civil service—when he’d had some Negro civil servants and their wives to a White House social along with their white colleagues, the screams of outrage and defilement had been deafening. They’d have hated him for nominating a colored man as chairman of the 1884 Republican Convention in Chicago, if most people hadn’t forgotten that he’d done it.

  It had gotten worse lately, with the rumors (which she knew were perfectly true) about a new Federal Elections Act to enforce the post–Civil War amendments . . . especially since these days the federal government had the power to actually enforce laws whether the locals liked it or not, and a formidable patronage and presence everywhere. But reports from the southern division of the Chamber headquartered in Atlanta hadn’t been her specialty—she’d operated in the Protectorate, and then retrained for Europe in New York. She hoped the specialists were on top of it, and the FBS was ready to act.

  Because even if this R. E. Daubigny represents nobody but a few lunatics mumbling slogans and stories about befo’ de woah at each other over their mint juleps on the verandah of some decaying mansion amid the moonlight and magnolias, it’s still a few lunatics ready to commit outright treason. In which case, Dixie will be getting a taste of what we in the Black Chamber, and the FBS, and the Army did in Mexico. ¡Y justo el jodido que esos cabrones se merecen!

  “The Klan has been revived,” Daubigny said. “Secretly, for the most part. But we have powerful friends and allies in many of the state governments and National Guard units.”

  Luz recognized his tone and the gleam in his eyes; fanatics were something she had long unpleasant experience with. Unfortunately he didn’t seem to be technically stupid, something else you could usually tell quickly. And he was obviously an educated man. Intelligence, education, and fanaticism were a dangerous combination; it made for people who could convince themselves they were right in doing absolutely anything, and who could think up quite ghastly things to do.

  The Herr Privatdozent, for example, will do quite literally anything for Sacred Germany, and use all his technical brilliance and organizational skills to do it. He’s a monster, but he wouldn’t be a bad old abuelo if it weren’t for that, and the bees planted in his bonnet by misunderstood Nietzsche. Greed and cruelty can be satiated, but idealism never tires. It’s bad ideas that make for the great crimes, not bad character in individuals. Not that I should take too lofty a tone. I’m perfectly willing to do almost anything for America, after all.

  She remembered standing unmoved as the figures in their ragged clothes were pushed toward the edge of the trench and the machineguns brought up.

  It’s a narrow path to salvation, almost is, but it’s what I’ve got.

  “The tyranny in Washington that crushes Mexico and Central America—that conspires with the British oppressors of Ireland—that tries to tear up the bargain that ended Reconstruction in our own country—”

  Daubigny seemed to realize he was getting a little loud. With a shy smile he ducked his head.

  “Let me just say that there are patriots all over the South ready to resist to the last drop of blood the threat of mongre—”

  He stopped, cleared his throat, and went on: “—threat to our cherished honor and way of life. We’ve taken up the name of the first Klan, to show that we aspire to the heroism of our fathers and grandfathers.”

  Aspire to take on someone who outnumbers you three to one and go down to heroic defeat? And he was probably about to say threat of mongrelization. Then he realized on the fly it’s not the most tactful possible thing to say to a purported Mexican revolutionary, who’s probably a mestizo herself. Which I almost certainly am in fact, even if the Arósteguis would rather face the Inquisition’s rack than admit it. The really ironic thing is that this gentleman’s ancestry almost certainly includes some Negroes too, given the number of octoroons who moved a few hundred miles, changed their names, and blended in over the centuries. I saw that old book from the fifties at Bryn Mawr, the one that the abolitionists published, full of escaped-slave notices from southern newspapers with descriptions like blue eyes, blond hair, freckles, will attempt to pass himself off as a white man. There’s nothing more amusing than watching a man run faster and
faster in an attempt to escape his own sweat . . . except when he’s willing to kill to do it.

  “And did you see the . . . demonstration . . . this morning?” Luz asked.

  “I participated in the cleanup operation afterward,” he said.

  “You went into that stuff?” Ciara cried, shocked and impressed.

  “In a sealed protective suit,” Daubigny said casually, obviously not averse to mentioning he’d done something that took nerve. “Gruesome work, but educational. A few of the German naval officers I came over with were there too. We arrived just too late to see the actual use.”

  “You didn’t miss anything worth seeing,” Luz said, and mentally gritted her teeth at his patronizing smile that made allowances for the squeamishness of women. “Not unless you have very odd tastes.”

  “When you’ve thought as long as I have about revenge, miss, the prospect of finally achieving it strengthens the sinews.”

  “Revenge?” Luz said. “I have . . . personal reasons for what I do, but an American?”

  Daubigny flushed. “My father lost his leg at Fort Wagner when he was sixteen years old. All four of his older brothers died, at Second Manassas and Antietam and Gettysburg, and one of hunger and disease in a Yankee prison camp. Sherman’s bummers, scum disgracing the name of soldiers, burned our home on the Pee Dee where six generations of my family had been born and buried, shot my grandfather down like a dog—an old man, helpless and unarmed—when he tried to stop them, and threw my grandmother out in the clothes on her back. She died by the road of hunger and despair. That was what my father came home to, he himself all that was left of our family. Three thousand acres of the best rice land in the world, and now it’s gone back to the swamp it was before my family spent two hundred years reclaiming it—”

  With just a little help from the slaves, solo un poco, but I see your point, Luz thought. The Aróstegui family would probably put it exactly the same way.

  “—good for nothing but hunting as it was to the Indians. Yes, Miss Carmody, I have personal reasons too.”

  Then he paused, looking down at his hands. “I must admit . . . the bodies . . . it did remind me of some things in Poe.”

  Luz felt memory stir, but it was Ciara who quoted: “And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,” she said softly.

  Luz decided to switch to something a little less inflammatory, not to mention depressing; “The Masque of the Red Death” was far too good an allegory for the picture her mind painted of the Breath of Loki unleashed on a city of humankind.

  “You arrived by U-boat?”

  “How did—” Daubigny began, then nodded with a smile and tapped a warning finger alongside his nose. “I won’t say a word to that, except to note that you are as clever as you are beautiful, Miss Carmody.”

  “It’s still very difficult to detect a submarine that doesn’t attract attention by attacking,” Luz said. “We have strong allies, now, gracias a Dios! Ones who can sail into the enemy’s very ports undetected.”

  That’s it! she thought, smiling at him as he nodded again. Somehow they intend to deliver the Breath of Loki by submarine!

  She was making progress. Not enough, and getting the information out would be somewhere between difficult and . . .

  Between difficult and very difficult. There is no impossible. Not with this!

  TEN

  Schloss Rauenstein

  Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich

  SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1916(B)

  Ciara Whelan straightened up from where she’d been kneeling by the baseboard. “That’s the last of it,” she said. “No microphones in our bedroom.”

  Luz frowned. “You’re sure?”

  “This wall is solid stone,” Ciara said, and thumped it with the heel of her hand. “It’s load-bearing. So are the other three. There’s no microphone made will pick up significant sound through these oak floorboards. With a very large horn collector and one of the very latest Siemens thermionic-valve modulated signal amplifiers you might be able to pick up some by using the ceiling, if there weren’t any background noise and you could put the horn directly on the other side of the plaster. Except that directly above us is the water-closet and bathroom, and the piping is twenty-five years old and groans and rattles all through the night.”

  “So, you’re sure?” Luz said; as if to emphasize the point, the plumbing did rattle and gave a wheezing choke like a grief-stricken whale with pneumonia.

  “No, I’m morally certain, if you want to be persnickety,” Ciara said. “To be sure I’d need to go into all the rooms to either side and above and below. Well, not below, that was where we were this afternoon and there was nothing there.”

  “You’re the expert,” Luz said. “Good, we’re reasonably safe talking here.”

  I’m not an expert on electronics, but I know enough to recognize someone who really is. ¡Ay! Las paredes oyen, but not all of them.

  Ciara had been standing rather belligerently with her arms crossed over the laced front of her nightgown. Now she looked doubtful.

  “You’re not going to argue?” she said, as if unaccustomed to being taken at her word.

  “No, that would be silly,” Luz replied. “I asked you because you have knowledge I don’t, and I’d be una boba if I didn’t listen to you when you use it, wouldn’t I?”

  The room had a pleasant glow from the low coal fire. Ciara had laid it, and skillfully; half a newspaper ripped up, three sticks of kindling making a triangle to contain it, another three on top at an angle, then the larger pieces of coal around the edge of the bottom triangle. With that she’d lit it, adding the smallest pieces of coal with the tongs gradually as the kindling caught, then larger ones placed to give plenty of paths for air and fire. They’d pushed things around to open out a space around it, and the orderly who’d brought water and changed the pot for a fresh one had been perfectly willing to scrounge some fuel for a few pfennigs tip; Luz would have been surprised if some wasn’t available even in wartime, with a military-priority train station a quarter mile away. The night had grown a bit chilly, the weather on the verge of changing.

  Her Vuitton trunks acted as armoires if you opened them wide, and they had a number of individually designed pockets. Luz took out a bottle that Horst had slipped to her after dinner—her sharing it with Ciara was not what he’d had in mind, but that was his problem—and set it and two glasses on the little table between the chairs, along with a jar in a padded holder that she unscrewed. She was already comfortable in the black silk Chinese pajamas, which had gotten her a shocked but admiring look.

  “You confirmed what I thought after I’d had a look. Good electrical wizard! Have a coquito!”

  She held out the jar; within limits the little pastries improved with age, if you kept them from drying out. Ciara took one and sniffed curiously as Luz worked with the corkscrew and poured two glasses of the amber-golden wine.

  “Mmm!” the younger woman said, after a nibble, sinking into the other chair. “Coconut?”

  “Sí. This is Mima’s recipe, it’s Cubana. She called them a taste of home because she’d loved them as a girl. Shredded coconut—real coconut, mind—butter, sugar, eggs, pastry cream, a touch of vanilla extract, some cornstarch. And an apricot glaze. I made these myself in a friend’s kitchen a day before I left America, and left her half. Which her children will have finished off that very day. A pity, because they’re better a few days later.”

  “Mmm! Very nice!” Ciara said. “Sweet and nutty and . . . this rich dense taste. I didn’t realize coconut tasted like that at all!”

  Then, curiously: “If your mother was a great lady, wouldn’t she have had cooks to do the kitchen work?”

  Luz nodded. “When she was a girl in her parents’ home, certainly. After that . . . usually we did have a cook of sorts, but Mima always said that you couldn’t supervise work you didn’t understand. An
d she meant understand through your hands, something you could do and do well yourself, so she spent time in the cocina of the Aróstegui family’s casa grande when she was young, learning, and doing some of the fancier things herself, for saints’ days and such.”

  She gave a rueful chuckle. “From what she said, it was a relief. You don’t know what boredom is, apparently, until you’ve been raised like a well-born Cubana girl a generation ago. They usually wouldn’t let her even read anything but saints’ lives and other improving literature—newspapers were bad for female minds, for example. And later, I can remember that sometimes it was just the three of us, when we were traveling.”

  Softly: “And sometimes she liked to do things like these coquitos with me, just for the fun of it. I can remember standing on a chair to chop things, and her laughing at me because I was squinting and had my tongue out of a corner of my mouth.”

  “Do you like cooking?” Ciara said, curling up in her chair.

  My, that’s an interested look, Luz thought. Pupils a little dilated, lips parted . . .

  She smiled back, head a little to one side, considering the other in a new light. Ciara Whelan was extremely pretty now that she’d relaxed, pretty in a way that had little to do with the conventional, fashionable canons.

  Appealing, Luz thought. Very appealing, with those big eyes and snub nose and that air of intelligence and wounded innocence.

  Her hair hung down over one shoulder, a thick shining fall in the firelight, and the cerulean eyes were bright with thought and feeling. What really made a face . . . or a person . . . attractive was that sense of how the being inside dwelt, though the package certainly helped.

  Helps quite a bit, to be honest. And her hair probably smells like strawberries. That is a girl asking to be kissed, if I’ve ever seen one, and eminently seducible . . . even though she has no idea of what she’s feeling. A little wine, a little music, some gentle talk, maybe a waltz . . . about an hour to the whispered poetry and then the horizontal part . . . I’ll bet she has very sensitive earlobes and would turn bright pink in the most interesting places, and she’d give this little shocked gasp when . . .