by Kin Law
Four patrons drunk under the table and some hours later, Hargreaves had the inklings of a lead.
Of the strange characters reported seen in London, there could be no sign. Hargreaves hadn’t much of a description to work from in the first place. Reports of a brilliant light, accompanied by a thunderous clamor a fortnight ago appeared more promising. The din had resulted from the loss of the façade Hargreaves visited earlier in the day. The building itself was one of many respected laboratory facilities in a city as respectful of the sciences as Oxford.
Such a phenomenon matched the reports of Westminster’s destruction (or acquisition?) like teeth to a gear. Had some device or contraption been tested here, discharged to disastrous effect, then rushed down to London before it could be investigated? What could possibly have produced such an astounding destructive force? Hargreaves found her detecting mind boiling with conjecture, a dangerous habit.
Under a gothic arch in the gates of the laboratory the next morning, Hargreaves was beginning to regret her particular brand of investigation.
Even Gerhardt tablets could not suppress feelings of nausea or the almighty hammering in her noggin. Sensible women should not be gallivanting about gentlemen’s clubs at all hours of the evening, progressive England be damned. Then again, Hargreaves doubted any of the Queen’s agents could be sensible people. Even Oxford’s legendary pax academia could not dissuade the sense of foreboding. Quite apart from her general queasiness, she felt the familiar copper tang of danger approaching.
Entry into the laboratory proved fairly simple, at the least. She dared not flash her Metropolitan Police Service identity this far from her jurisdiction, but Hargreaves had not escaped the drear pits of uniformed service without the magic bullet of resourcefulness. She merely pranced through the front door and pretended to faint dead away, clutching at her corsetry in a fit of prudish martyrdom.
“Quickly, get her out of the entry chamber!” someone commanded , directing others to pull her from the closet-sized nook just inside the door. Hargreaves heard a gush of air as she passed through. Negative pressure, gentlemen? This was fancy security, not counting the four guards attending to her needs. The fools rushed about like headless chickens, going for smelling salts, water, sensibilities best reserved for inebriated Duchesses or hopeless invalids, in her opinion. In the hubbub, she merely rolled herself off the rough bench and slipped through a nearby door.
“The laboratory should be about…” Hargraeaves mused, navigating the labyrinthine galleries of the building.
Even the interior proved tastefully appointed, built in a grand old style and not simply cut like biscuits into institutionalized blocks.
The building appeared to be a multiple-use laboratory, with several partitions and independent research rooms behind thick steel doors. Eventually, she found the cordoned-off rubble behind two more sets of pressure seals.
“No respect for architecture. Not locals,” Hargreaves reasoned intuitively.
“But intelligent enough to make use of some very sophisticated equipment.”
Behind sheets of thin canvas, the gutted laboratory spoke volumes. A high, vaulted ceiling suggested something quite large, and the skeletons of platforms rose to the height of a dirigible’s floor at boarding. The warped, splintered corpses of workbenches lay scattered in a rough spray toward the ruined wall, which cast everything the blue of tarpaulin. Glass crunched underfoot, still marked by increment measures. One forlorn blackboard lay tumbled off its rolling frame like an ignored, senior professor in the corner of the room. From the center of the room to the ruined window, a clean swathe of flooring showed a pattern of something seemingly blown away by a strong wind.
“Hello, what’s this?” Hargreaves said aloud. Though much of what had not been annihilated in the explosion had been carefully smudged out or burned, the Inspector was able to pick her way delicately through the rubble toward signs of hasty, perhaps careless activity. Not a soul stirred in the entire laboratory, but in one corner a bureau had been tipped over and set aflame. She bent to sift through the blackened papers, by the hulking sentry of scaffolding in the high-ceilinged chamber.
“Not an explosion,” Hargreaves muttered as she searched, “One direction of destruction. The clean floor, bolt holes in the frame, looks like whatever it was had been airlifted by dirigible by the time any authorities arrived.”
Hargreaves was beginning to work out something of what had happened. Someone had been building some kind of weapon, and it had likely discharged prematurely.
The room looked well worn, as if whomever had been here made themselves quite at home. She counted seven workstations, each with a sprinkling of photogram frames, souvenir figurines and various personal charms as made a worker feel more comfortable in their place of business. It had been a carefully planned stratagem suddenly pushed into application. Such a spectacular display likely necessitated a hasty departure, and a shifting of timetables in the nefarious theft of a national landmark. Hargreaves allowed herself an amused smirk. It was like some child’s educational picture-house piece, where the mistress thief went from place to place stealing national symbols for the benefit of waifs ignorant in world geography.
“There we are,” Hargreaves whispered victoriously. She clutched in her hand a half-burned vellum folder. Surely what had protected this sheaf of documents had been the file’s very thickness. Before she could examine the contents, voices in the hall beyond signaled the Inspector’s time was up.
Hurriedly, she stuffed the leaves into one of many hidden pockets. Oxford was sadly deprived in feminine progress, in spite of, or because of academia, and she doubted the menfolk would pat her down for pockets. In a moment, the men reached the hallway just outside the canvas partitions and proved her very much correct. She thanked the antiquated forces of chauvinism for one small boon.
Hargreaves put on a mummery fit for the Globe, staggering down the hall apparently shaken and lost but none the worse for wear.
As she left the guards looking to one another in their silent pact of ineptitude, she assumed a brisk trot beneath Oxford’s famous dreaming spires, heading towards her nearby hotel room to examine her prize. It took her all of four paces before she noticed the presence of another practitioner of the feminine arts dogging her steps with a flurry of French lace. As she rounded a cramped Romanesque palazzo, she caught the reflection of a scarlet figure trimmed in black, about a street behind.
“I believe I am shadowed,” Hargreaves remarked to a stray calico, who seemed as comfortable on its patch of Baroque sculpting as Hargreaves was alienated by Oxford’s convoluted streets. Four or five blocks ago, the Inspector had already become quite lost in her attempts to lose her tail. The malicious stalker seemed content, and quite unfazed, in drifting between the colleges and universities after the Inspector. The calico yawned, almightily.
“Let us see if a change of scene will put a bee in her bonnet,” concluded Hargreaves.
When the cat had had enough of Hargreaves’ attentions, it bounded up a trellis of ivy and the Inspector continued on her way. It was still early in the afternoon, but the spires’ shadows tended to put the streets in gloom. In the fading light, a fatigued lady gesturing for a cab did not seem out of place, and so Hargreaves did so, along a busy interchange. As she got into the rumbling, bubbling carriage, the warm comfort of the cabin nearly disarmed her. Where were the cramped London rigs with their scalding pipework and hard, buckwheat seats? There were some advantages to travel, Hargreaves concluded.
She commanded the driver to proceed in a convoluted fashion through the busiest parts of the city. Barely had their gears clunked into place did she observe her tail hailing a cab of her own. Then she was lost around a corner. Hargreaves waited a good four turnings before alighting from the cab in a darkened alley full of Venetian archways. In a manner of speaking, she did not so much alight as hoist herself out of the cab’s skylight onto a passing archway.
She observed the bumbling passage of another cab, a
coach, in fact, able to seat six. She dared not peer into the windows from her vantage point atop the arch, but Hargreaves possessed the single most useful tool in the Metropolitan Police Service arsenal: her notebook. Within its leaves were written a set of directions. As she did not know the way, these were taken down at the preference of her own cab driver. The middle-aged, dun-colored fellow had been quite keen at participating in some tuppenny spy fiction nonsense. Hargreaves had, of course, couched it in terms of a game between members of the idyllic gentry.
Climbing across verandas and through gardens, the Inspector soon reached the agreed spot. Her conservative travelling dress was well made for the activity, sliding in and out of place with cunningly cut panels and slits.
Between two lazy townhouses, she crouched behind a nook of masonry perched atop a loosely trafficked bit of road. In a moment, she recognized the scuffed black of her cab rumble by, followed inconspicuously by the heavy coach.
This happened twice more, before the coach overtook the little cab and swung out in front, stopping not four paces from Hargreaves’ hiding spot.
With the precision of a well-trained team, four men swung out of the coach and accosted the cab. None of them matched; they looked assembled out of various berets, suits, and jackets, from all walks of life. Her original pursuer, the black-and-scarlet woman, followed close behind. Hargreaves was treated to their shock as they opened the cab and found only her duster and some plush cushions tumbling out. She had paid the driver to continue driving about with her duster propped up in the back, in a rough facsimile of Hargreaves herself, perhaps slouched to read her recently acquired sheaf of papers. Evidently infuriated, the pursuers yanked open the driver’s side door and began to yell.
There was a moment of gut-wrenching panic. Hargreaves had formulated her plan with all the training the Service had bequeathed an Inspector of her caliber, but it had still been a plan concocted on the fly, with what resources she possessed. All manner of things could go wrong. A secondary stalker might place his hands round her neck the very next moment. There might be well-trained marksmen in the group, able to guess, then spot every place Hargreaves could be hiding. She was an Inspector, not a seasoned operative of British Intelligence. Murphy’s Law haunted Hargreaves’ brow, a spectre of uncertainty. Worst of all, she had no idea whom these people might be working for. For all she knew, they had been given leave to kill or torture someone like her innocent driver simply for crossing their path.
“Good man,” Hargreaves murmured as she watched the exchange, and breathed a sigh of relief. Her driver turned out to be a darn good thespian, feigning surprise good enough for the picture house.
Finding the driver knew nothing, the whole party piled into the coach once again and took off at steam. Hargreaves’ driver chuckled visibly to himself, waved at Hargreaves’ hiding spot and moved on. The whole affair occupied no more than two minutes.
While the incident was well within the Inspector’s control, Vanessa Hargreaves felt a little disappointed. She had hoped to learn something of her pursuers, but had only confirmed her suspicions: these were well-trained men (and woman!) deployed by a very cautious puppet master. Hargreaves counted herself fortunate, and in the manner of all those who dealt with danger regularly, she resolved to use what little luck she had while she had it. Right there on the street, she found a spot of liquid lamplight and undid the vellum file from the laboratory.
What lay within was a labyrinth of numbers: invoices, logistics accounts, expenditure records. Hargreaves feared for a moment she had defended a useless pile of beans, but the resourceful young Inspector had not risen to her rank on the merits of her golden locks alone. It took mere minutes to find her lead amidst a pile of contractor’s invoices: Steamboat Man, a moving firm whose services seemed far too overpriced for a simple delivery service. Hargreaves was quite sure, if she cared to visit the local town registry, no such company would be logged in the Oxford mooring offices, nor any such office in Britain.
Instead, she pointed her sturdy walking boots in the direction of the nearest airmen’s pub, and another hangover. Though it cost her in Gerhardt tablets and a long soak in the hotel tub scrubbing the scent of inebriation from her body, in the morning Hargreaves had the answer.
She called for pen and paper, and wrote out a missive to Arturo C. Adler.
“Arturo. Oxford yielding dividends. Will attend Steamboat Man down to Portland; Reports of Moroccan troupe treading the boards. Our mutual friends don’t seem to like theatre. You would hate it. Will contact you when I arrive. Be assured your company, though welcome, is unnecessary.”
Which roughly translated to:
“You two-pence hack, Oxford was a good lead for once. I have a suspect under the alias of Steamboat Man, reportedly flying a ship with Morroccan colors in Portland. Pirate dirigible, most likely, and a boat our enemies don’t want me to find. Wouldn’t you just love to meet a pirate? Tough titty. I’ll write when I get there. Stay out of this! I mean it!”
As she sealed and mailed the letter via overnight Royal Mail, Hargreaves felt satisfied Arturo’s insatiable thirst for meddling now provided her a watchful guardian over her impending journey south. She was also not in the least bit surprised to learn a multiple-use laboratory building had been destroyed in a gas explosion late in the night. Innumerable Gothic arches had been reduced to rubble in a spectacular fireball.
It was the second such disaster to happen to such a grand old building, and as she remarked to a talkative gentleman later on the dirigible south to Portland, only made the case for the shift to Teslaic arc lighting over the antiquated, dangerous kerosene much more essential.
3: Paris
Cezette Louissaint looked out through her window above the Rue Fremicourt. None of the buildings were higher than her sloped room under the roof, planned to exacting aesthetics by the city’s architects. The sprawling wheel of Paris was called the city of lights, and wherever those lights shone there was beauty: countless mansard roofs dotted with mountainous cathedrals, broad boulevards lined with Napoleon’s arboreal legacy, and along those brick valleys the traffic of chariots, jitneys, and carriages moving between veils of scented mist. Crooked chimneys and errant steamworks only served to frame the majestic Tour D’Eiffel in the medium distance.
Cezette loved to watch the evenings. She would sit on her narrow iron bed, her chin tucked behind her boyish knees, and watch as the city streamed through the little rippled rectangle of glass. Glittering soft gaslights danced like grand belles with the brusque shadows of Teslaic lights over her whitewashed wall.
Le Tour seemed the brightest of all, lighting up Maman’s picture on the bed stand. Its gardens had always been Maman’s favorite place in the city, in spite of the tourists crawling everywhere with their clacking photogram machines. She would go there to draw everything: the Tour, the people eating crepes on the benches, the crows pecking at their leavings. Cezette still remembered her Maman’s charcoals, as black as her hair, and Cezette’s too, lying in a sheet almost blue against the white bedspread.
A distant crash below brought her shuddering and burrowing deeper inside her comforter. Was it Papa, home from the burlesque? Had he been thrown out again?
It would explain the violence: slamming the door, enraged at being spurned by another imagined paramour. She could see him hanging up his stovetop and his cane, loosening his cravat to show the curly hairs on his chest. She nearly retched.
No, it couldn’t be, it was far too early. The moon hadn’t yet appeared in the Seine, glimmering despite her rivals below. Cezette peeked once more outside the window, at the city she knew so well, yet had seldom visited. It was a constant comfort against the dread now enveloping her frail form.
Spread out before her, the beaux-arts rooftops of Paris seemed particularly jittery tonight, like hunched crows anxious of an oncoming storm. Stars shone clearly, not in the sky but in a child’s diversion of dots across the city. They were further outdone by points sprinkled overhead, from the fe
minine curves of airships doing circuits of the city.
The clearness of the evening only served to highlight the strangeness hanging in the sky above. For a fortnight, a mass of cumulus had gathered, not dissipating as clouds were wont to do. Its very solidity seemed to exude a certain je ne sais quoi, a quality she could only describe as eldritch. The English word had a strange cadence on her tongue, pulled as it were from Maman’s vast, multilingual library, but it felt right. Eldritch befit a mass of mist seeming never to change shape, size, nor move from its position. Odd she would feel the strangeness this night, when the cloud had been there for so long already.
Another crash- this time, accompanied by the Romanian maid, Volga, cursing in bad French. So, it was only a small blunder.
Cezette relaxed a little, and she found her bedclothes damp with sweat.
Her fingers were clamped like vises round handfuls of comforter. Her favorite bear, Stefano, lay strangled in the crook of her arm. Was there no end to the night? Cezette’s eyes trailed back out over the city, as if one of the floating ships there could lift her to safety atop some haven in the sky.
Suddenly Cezette put her finger on it- the ships had moved. Though the cloud itself had not budged, all the airships in her familiar sky had given it a wide berth, forming a sort of ring. No, the sentiment wasn’t quite right- it was not a ring, but a perimeter. There was movement on the ground below. Faintly she made out the splashes of blue and red crawling across masonry and flower-clad balconies all over the city. They were the blisters of light reflected from the steam chariots of police. Cezette was intimately familiar with their silhouettes; she had seen them night after night as they combed the city for evildoers. From above, the pattern was clear- something was happening over the city.
