Luz laughed ruefully, even as her toes curled a little at the thought and the prickling heat it brought.
“What’s funny?” Ciara asked.
“The way my own nobility sickens me at times,” she said, which brought a puzzled smile.
The fact is that it would be taking advantage of the circumstances, and of you, Ciara. You’re all alone and need my protection, and that might hurt your feelings later, and I like you too much already to risk that, she thought. I must be developing the finer sentiments. Ah, well, probably not a good idea for practical reasons either. You have Virgin in Every Possible Sense of the Word written on your lovely funny face, my dear, and I couldn’t be sure how you’d react in this pressure cooker.
“And yes, I do like to cook,” she went on aloud. “Sometimes you just can’t face another restaurant, even a good one; I travel a good deal, you see. It’s even better with an audience to appreciate it. Back in California we have a thing called a barbecue I like to put on sometimes, but that means pit-roasting and it takes a lot of preparation, and you need at least a dozen guests to make it worthwhile. Great fun when you’re all around the trestle tables under the pepper trees, passing the jug of red wine and playing the guitar and getting sauce on your face and fingers. You?”
“Oh, I can cook—I did for Colm and Da, for years—but it was always a bit of a chore, and of course you have to shop every day and that took time from everything else needing to be done, especially after Da was too ill to sit at the cash desk and Colm was off doing mechanic’s work, or at night classes. Auntie Colleen would come and fill in for me at the desk in the shop sometimes, and then I did her shopping too when Auntie Treinel was too busy with her lesson plans or whatnot to go to market, since the walking was harder for her with her poor foot.”
Luz blinked. Well, yes, shopping every day would swallow a lot of time, she thought. Not everybody can have what they need sent over with a message or by telephone, or store the non-perishables in bulk, and even iceboxes are still expensive.
“Though I did it well, I’d say; not fancy cooking, but proper solid meals a man wouldn’t turn up his nose at as the aunties had taught me, and a nice apple cake with custard sauce to follow, or whiskey cake or barmbrack. We had Father Flandry in sometimes, and he never complained, and you could see that he liked a meal from the way he filled his cassock! Now, Auntie Treinel is an artist with the pots and pans, as I said, the best in the family. Auntie Colleen, she’s more with the baking—her oatmeal scones with raisins are a treat on a cold winter’s day when the snow is at the window and a good cup of cocoa’s steaming beside them.”
She chuckled. “I must admit that the eating part appeals to me much more than the cooking. Can I have another of these . . .”
“Coquitos,” Luz said. “And try a sip of the wine with it.”
Ciara looked at the liquid glowing in the glass dubiously. “I can’t say I’ve liked wine much, the few times I’ve tasted it—never envied the priest at Mass, you might say. Not for the likes of me, perhaps? Though books I’ve read with pleasure do go on about it and all the types and the flavors they’re supposed to have, and then it tasted like spoiled grapes with spirits in it to me, and sour. Quite the disappointment.”
“That’s probably because you were tasting near-vinegar, or paint-thinner, or what someone made in the cellar out of Concord fox grapes. This is a dessert wine from the Moselle and quite a good one. Trockenbeerenauslese, and it’s made to be taken with sweet things. Just let a little of it over your tongue for a moment, swallow slowly, and then wait a bit for the rest of the taste to come out.”
She sipped a little of her own and sighed; notes of citrus, honeyed apricot, spice, honeysuckle . . . Luz nibbled at the coquito, sipped again. Ciara was making inarticulate sounds of pleasure in the background, and visibly forcing herself to sip slowly.
“That’s splendid . . . and it does go with the coquito . . . so, I was misjudging wine?”
“Sweet wines are more accessible for a beginner,” Luz said, and smiled. “Perhaps sometime I can introduce you to the drier types.”
“I’d like that. I’m a bit surprised you’d like it, cooking, that is.”
“Why?” Luz said.
“Well, you’re . . . you’re so stylish and elegant and beautiful, and so . . . so dashing and adventurous and modern, and . . .”
Another fiery blush. “So very much a New Woman,” she said—something she’d obviously always wanted to be. “Like a hero . . . heroine . . . in a book, really!”
“Why, Miss Whelan, you’ve put me to the blush!” Luz said, accompanying the old-fashioned phrase with an even more old-fashioned gesture that put the back of her hand to her forehead. “You wouldn’t by any chance be flirting with me, would you?”
Ciara looked at her open-mouthed for a moment, then joined in her laughter at the absurdity of the notion.
Though the thought’s there now, joke or no, Luz mused. She said:
“And the point of being a New Woman is that we get to do what we have the talent for. If I like cooking and I do it well? Why shouldn’t I do it, then? Just as there’s no reason you shouldn’t be a second Tesla.”
“No, no, there’s only one Tesla! Though working in his laboratory, that would be a dream and no mistake!”
Luz chuckled. “Don’t underestimate yourself. I’ve met Tesla a few times—”
“You have?” Ciara said, awe in her voice.
¡Ay! Did I just grow a halo, or start to glow with an electric-blue crackle?
“What’s he like?” she continued eagerly. “I’ve heard he’s elegant but eccentric.”
“The most brilliant mind I’ve ever met, and an impeccable dresser with a gentleman’s manners to boot, but mad. Quite mad, mad as a hatter,” she said. “He’s not living in the same world as the rest of us, most of the time. But he brings extraordinary things back from the one he does live in . . . and often, they work here too.”
And sometimes they don’t. Mad’s not the half of it. If he weren’t a genius nobody would say he was eccentric for falling in love with a pigeon or seeing tongues of living flame giving him visions, or . . . He’d be locked up somewhere with soft walls! And I really can’t tell you too much about him, given what he’s working on for the Black Chamber and the Iron House.
The latter was the nickname for the great new headquarters of the consolidated War and Navy Departments, standing like an exercise in neoclassical geometry around a courtyard. Uncle Teddy had used his National Advanced Research Projects Institute to give Tesla all the toys he wanted and turned him out to play in the flower meadows of applied science. Without the stress of patent fights and money worries and dealing with businessmen, the Croatian scientist had . . .
Blossomed, Luz thought. Into something passing strange. Like Prospero in the play, but with his book.
She went on aloud: “Where was I . . . cooking . . . But I couldn’t get the salary a French man-chef does for it, or his job in the fancier places, be I never so good.”
“You couldn’t?” Ciara said, her puzzlement turning to indignation. “And why not?”
“Why do you think?” Luz said.
“For cooking, of all things, men get paid more and get the best jobs?”
“The Constitution may say we’re equal now, but putting flesh on those bones isn’t the work of a year, or two or three, alas. Not that I want to be a chef, you understand, but there would be a wall in front of me if I did. Women are well enough for cuisine bourgeois, but the haute evidently requires a . . . um . . . set of whiskers. Which makes you wonder exactly what they do in the kitchen, no?”
“Oh. Well, it’s a shame and an outrage.”
“Another thing I’m not going to argue with you on. One more coquito each,” she said. “And another glass of the wine or two. It’s been a hard day and I can use some if I want to sleep. This takes me back—it’s l
ike the old days at digs in university, when we’d get together and talk about all the woes of the world and how we’d solve them, until lights-out.”
“Ah, now that I would enjoy,” Ciara said; then her voice dropped to a dreamy croon: “University! Though your father’s alma mater, MIT, that would be my choice.”
They sat and watched the flames flicker over the surface of the coals for a moment in companionable silence.
“What I’m really worried about,” Luz said musingly, “is how to get into Colonel Nicolai’s office.”
Ciara choked a little; she’d been upending the wineglass for the last drop. “Past those guards with machine pistols!” she said. “There’s a post at the bottom of the stairway and another one level below him! And no other way up! The guards are changed every six hours, four times a day, so they’re always fresh!”
“Now, that’s very observant of you,” Luz said with delight. “What hours?”
“Starting at noon for the ones on the bottom of the stairwell, and four hours later for the ones on the landing below the office, from what I saw,” Ciara said. “It would be suicide! Luz, even if you were Scáthach come again, the warrior-woman who trained the Hound . . .”
“I’m a Black Chamber field operative, not a soldier: I’m supposed to be capable of subtlety. It would certainly be suicide to try to force my way past,” Luz agreed. “They’d shoot me into dogmeat, and any attention would be fatal anyway.”
Ciara winced slightly. Luz shrugged: “It’s my trade, querida, I have to think in those terms.”
Then she closed her eyes and sipped more of the sweet wine. “No, the way to do it would be to go over the rooftops and up the side of the tower late at night; I’ll have to observe when he turns out the light and leaves, which fortunately is in line of sight from this room. The problem with towers and stairs is that people think the only way to get into the top of the tower is by the stairs, and they focus their precautions on that.”
“You could?” Ciara said, wide-eyed. “It’s . . . very high and steep.”
“Oh, yes, it’s not as difficult as it looks if you’re fit and you’ve had some practice, which I am and have, and if you have the right gear . . . which I do. The problem would be to get in, get the information—the precise targets, locations, timing—and get out undetected, without leaving any sign that his security had been breached. Information only stays fresh if the other side doesn’t suspect you have it; the least hint it’s been blown on and it’s as useless as fish three days in the sun. That means I have to do it muy, muy rápidamente, and like a ghost. Nicolai has one of the German virtues—he pays attention to detail. If anything’s out of place he’ll notice . . .”
“Could you copy that much, quickly?”
“I’ve a little camera along that can do wonders in that line, courtesy of our technical office . . . and yes, you can see it, tomorrow, after the wine’s worn off.”
Ciara laughed, but turned serious again. “Then there’s the alarm system,” she said.
Luz turned her head and looked at her. “Alarm system? Ah, more progress,” she said, pronouncing the last word as a vile curse.
“You didn’t see it?” Ciara asked.
“No . . . I was more or less focused on Colonel Nicolai. And you, and whether I was about to die or be carried off for torture,” Luz said . . . lightly but truthfully. “And my relief when you saved my life.”
Ciara nodded soberly, then brightened. “It’s not very complicated. There’s a circuit of wires around the windows, with a little switch at the lower right hand of each window frame, running up to a master line around all four sides of the room at the junction of wall and ceiling. I’d give odds that when he leaves the office for the evening he makes sure the switches are closed. If the window’s opened without the switch being thrown, the circuit’s broken.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, that depends on what’s on the other end, you see. Possibly a loud bell . . . or any number of things.”
¡Me cago en Dios! Luz swore silently; it seemed to be what God was doing to her. On the other hand it was miraculous that she’d gotten an observer with specialist knowledge who’d had access to the office and had used the time to observe. She very much doubted Nicolai was going to let either of them in there again.
I think she may have saved my life again. And my life is valuable here, because this mission looks more and more crucial the more I learn.
Her mind raced: “At a guess, a quiet bell somewhere that will send a squad pounding up the stairs and others covering the windows with automatics,” she said. “Thus neatly trapping any intruder. I’m going to have to think about this . . .”
Ciara frowned. “But, Luz . . . if they think we’re working for them, won’t they just tell us what they’re going to do?”
Luz chuckled ruefully. “Not unless they’re idiots, and they’re not that type of idiot. They’ll tell us in very general terms; any specifics will be no more than the absolute minimum we need to do the limited things they want us to do, and that will be given at the very last moment. I may be able to get a little more—”
No need to shock you with exactly how I can get a little more out of Horst. But only a little; he’d smell a rat immediately if I tried to get the things that a double agent would be looking for.
“—but nothing like the detail we need. We need what’s called in the trade actionable intelligence. Data we can give to the military so they can stop this.”
“Yes! Stop this . . . this horror.”
“And now, let’s get some sleep. We have a few days.”
* * *
• • •
Luz woke. The sobs from the other side of the big bed were strangled, but they showed no signs of stopping.
She sighed, silently. Being wept on was never something I liked much, she thought. Especially if there’s a running nose involved too. But really, she’s been holding up remarkably well; she’s entitled to blubber a bit . . .
“Bad dream?” she said softly, extending a hand cautiously—you could be startled into fits if a nightmare was interrupted too abruptly.
There was an inarticulate sound of misery and two damp hands grabbed hers with almost painful force.
“Faces,” Ciara gasped quietly. “I keep seeing their faces!”
“Shhhh, it’ll be all right. Come here.”
Luz had just enough time to grab another clean handkerchief before the streaming face was crammed into the angle of her shoulder and neck. She put an arm around Ciara’s heaving shoulders and rubbed her back soothingly with a slow motion, like stroking a cat.
“It’ll be all right,” Luz said.
That’s a lie, I’m afraid, she thought. You get used to things but it’s never really all right. Still, bleak realism really wouldn’t be what you need at this point.
“Sshhhh, cry all you need to. You’re not alone anymore. Shhhhh, shhhh, there now.”
Eventually the sobs died away into hiccups, and Ciara used the handkerchief loudly. “Sorry,” she mumbled sleepily. “Tha . . . feels nice.”
“That’s all right. I have bad dreams too, sometimes. See if you can sleep now.”
“Mmmmm . . .”
Well, at least her hair does smell like strawberries, Luz thought.
She hummed very softly:
“Aruru mi niño, arrurú mi amor
Aruru pedazo de mi corazón
Este niño lindo que nació de día
Quiere que lo lleven a la dulcería . . .”
Even if she seems to be part octopus, she thought.
Besides a head firmly on her shoulder, Ciara had an arm around her stomach and a leg over her knees, and though she had gone limp she still shifted and clung if Luz moved. Luz slowly squirmed over onto her side, then let herself fall into a bottomless well of darkness. Nothing seemed to be waiting t
here but sleep, this time.
ELEVEN
Schloss Rauenstein
Kingdom of Saxony, German Reich
SEPTEMBER 10TH, 1916(B)
This is my friend from America, Fräulein Carmody; Elisa, Herr Karl Böhm,” Ciara said brightly.
The electrician—a civilian, and so probably a von Herder employee left in place when the military came in—wiped his hands on a rag before he shook with her. He was in his fifties, with a gingery handlebar mustache whose formidable proportions made up for the way his hairline had retreated under his cloth cap, but the hard dry callused hand felt as if it had formidable, controlled strength. One of his assistants was big-nosed, thickset, and bald as an egg. The other looked to be about twelve, or possibly an underfed fourteen, with a mop of straw-colored hair. All three of them looked tired, and their dungarees were stained and worn.
They look like two middle-aged men and a boy doing four men’s work, or maybe five men’s, Luz thought. It’s amazing how good everything looks, considering. Say what you like about Germans, most of them know how to keep their noses to the grindstone.
The same tiredness showed in the little power generation station with its stone walls and timber roof, for all their efforts. It had probably been a simple watermill of some sort originally. The engineers who’d put in the power system for Schloss Rauenstein had used the same mill-dam and water-race, and now there was a bank of dials and switches in a frame of cast iron and walnut. There was a bitter smell of metals and ozone, as well as of cold fresh water and damp rock, and one end held workbenches and mounts and racks for tools.
Papá would have nodded in approval, I think.
“Is the Fräulein also a student of electricity like our gracious Fräulein Whelan?” the mechanic inquired, giving the younger woman a beaming look like a prideful uncle’s. “She has told us many interesting things of electrical machinery in America! And she knows her way around an armature and a winding!”
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