He doubled over and fell to his knees, choking. She kicked his gun, clattering, across the stones.
Devoir was down. Another betrayal to mark on her slate. She was a Baldoni, after all.
The mélange de tabac—the snuff mixture—was a Caché weapon. On the sparring field of the Coach House they’d been trained to survive it. The Tuteurs would throw the powder suddenly and follow it with kicks and punches. “Get up. You are a soldier of France,” they’d say. “Fight like a soldier. Get up. Fight.”
Devoir always staggered up again. He’d been the toughest of them all.
He was tough now. He scrubbed his mouth and nose into his sleeve, snarling and cursing, his hat lost under the pews, his pale hair wild over his face. He didn’t rub his eyes. The Cachés taught each other these useful skills in whispers in the cold dormitory at night. Never touch your eyes.
She headed toward the blackmailer, who stood squinting in the gloom. His right hand was thrust deep into his coat pocket, almost certainly because he was carrying a gun there. She’d just as soon it stay pocketed. Men didn’t like to draw a gun and put it away without using it. There was an old Baldoni saying to that effect.
She rounded the last pew and put herself in the line of fire between that gun and Devoir. Not a tranquil place to be.
She went forward, making every step an interval, individual and distinct, hoping the blackmailer would avail himself of these moments to make wise choices. If he was experienced and controlled and intelligent—a professional, in short—they might avoid gunfire and death in the church today. That was a worthy goal in the great scheme of things.
Or the man might shoot her, reload in a brisk fashion, and then shoot Devoir. If she’d misjudged how important she was to this man’s long-term plans, she would be dead and never get to tell the lies she’d crafted. That would be a great pity because they were very good lies.
In the background, Devoir blundered against wooden pews that screeched and scraped. She could hear him panting, almost feel the pain of air pushing past a tight, burning throat. She didn’t look back to see whether he was up on his feet, being concerned with the important matter of not getting shot in the next little while.
In a minute or two, Devoir would retrieve his own pistol. She was almost sure Devoir wouldn’t shoot her. She had no such sanguine expectations of the man she walked toward.
Close up, the blackmailer was a fellow of pleasant features, brown hair, and washed-out, light-colored eyes. He was well groomed and well and comfortably dressed, even fashionable. Over it all, like a slick surface, he carried an air of conscious superiority. She placed him in his fifties, of an age to be one of the bitter dispossessed fanatics who’d ruled France during the Terror. A few of them had escaped the guillotine when Robespierre fell. Since he knew an uncomfortable lot about her, he was, or had been, Police Secrète. Maybe even one of the men who’d created the Coach House and pulled the strings of the Tuteurs. She might even have seen him, long ago in Paris, which would explain the uneasy twinge of recognition plucking at the back of her mind.
He eased a nasty little cuff pistol out of the pocket. She said, “Put that away. We have to get out of here. Now. Before his friends show up.”
“I told you to come alone.”
“In your informative letter. Yes. I didn’t bring him. He followed me.”
“Who is he?” He peered into the obscurity of the church.
She collected the last step that lay between them. “He’s an unforeseen complication and I’ve dealt with it. Get out of my way.”
He didn’t budge. He didn’t send the gun back into hiding. These were not good signs. He said, “Did you blind him? What did you use? Poison? Acid?” He had a surprisingly melodious voice.
“I employed methods sufficient for my purpose.” Let him think she was armed with poison. Always let an enemy overestimate one’s ruthlessness. “He won’t interfere again.”
He lifted the pistol and appraised it briefly. “I’ll make certain of that.” His voice was perfectly genial. His gaze, emotionless as the stare of a doll.
There are men who chill the blood when you glance into their eyes, passing them on the street. There are reptiles who walk in human form. Monsters with no soul looking out of their eyes. This was one of them. It amazed her that most people did not recognize them at once.
She said, “You’re wasting time and I have none to spare. The man is nothing.”
Nothing. She had called Devoir “nothing.”
The wind from the street blew in and skipped across her and lifted the smell of snuff from her clothes. For a vivid instant, she was back in the sparring field of the Coach House.
It had been one of the very bad days. The Tuteur had thrown the snuff mélange in her face and beaten her till she collapsed in the mud. They called this training, but its purpose was to break her spirit.
When the Tuteurs put their coats on and left, Devoir took her up into his arms and carried her to the pump. He held her head tight against his belly through the cold, drenching shock of bucket after bucket the others drew from the pump. His muscles were hard as a wall and warm under her cheek. His fingers, careful, parted her eyelids and he dribbled water across. He said, “Open your eyes, Vérité. You have to do this.”
The pain and helplessness didn’t break her because Devoir was there. For her. For all of them. The Tuteurs had never understood Devoir.
Today, ten years later, she betrayed him. “The man is nothing,” she repeated. “Get out of my way.”
The blackmailer’s eyes went from her to the dark of the church. “He’s seen me.” His gun leveled past her, toward Devoir.
“Dozens of men saw you walk in here. They’re watching you through the door this minute, wondering who we are and why we’re standing here. I intend to become less conspicuous.” She jostled his gun aside and pushed past.
If she wanted to kill a blackmailer, she could do it now. She could draw knife from sheath, press it to his kidney as she passed, and slip it home. It would rid the world of some moderate amount of evil. But it wouldn’t protect the Fluffy Aunts from this man’s colleagues. It wouldn’t lead her to Camille Besançon.
She let the moment for murder pass. One does not seize all opportunities.
At the door, she said, “Shoot him, slit his throat, smother him with a pillow. Please yourself. I leave you to deal with the corpse and these interested onlookers.”
“Don’t turn your back on me.”
She ignored him. She wrapped her cloak tight and strode off, taking his attention with her, out of the church. Before she got to the iron pickets that separated the sacred of the church from the profane of the street traffic, her blackmailer abandoned the church and followed her.
Devoir would not die today.
* * *
Through the roaring in his ears, Pax heard Vérité talking to the Merchant at the door of the church. He couldn’t catch the words over the noise he made strangling on his own breath.
That son of a bitch wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her. Death was nothing to him. One death or twenty. The Merchant sowed it wholesale.
Gasping, sweeping his hands in circles on the cold stone, he found his gun. Took up the dark, familiar shape.
Air knifed his throat and raked in his lungs. He grabbed the end of the pew. Pulled himself to his feet. He forced his eyes open to splinters of shattered color and indescribable pain. The doorway was an empty rectangle of agonizing light.
He staggered toward it.
They were gone. Vérité and the monster. The Merchant was out there somewhere. Alive. Loose in London. Had to find him. Had to—
Someone ran toward him, a dark shape against the light. His fingers were so clumsy it took both hands to cock the gun.
“It’s me,” Hawker said. “Don’t shoot. Where are you hit?”
“Not . . . Not hit.” He choked. He couldn’t get the words out. He pointed the gun to the ground and let it hang loose in his hand. It wasn’t doing him any good.
“Bloody hell.” Hawker pulled him forward, down the steps. Three steps. “She threw something in your eyes. Gods in hell. Your eyes.”
“Follow him. The man . . .” Words were fire and ground glass in his throat. “Go after him.”
“Right.”
The stones of the path tripped him. Hawk was under his arm, keeping him from falling.
“Water. Ten more steps. Hang on.” Hawk dragged him the last of the way, pushed him to his knees, and thrust his head into the horse trough.
He breathed water. Came up gasping. “Follow him.”
“She’s poisoned you. That bloody bitch of a woman did this to you.”
“You have to—” Coughing racked him. Twisted his lungs inside out. “The man. Go after him. Now!”
“One of my priorities has always been doing what you tell me.” Hawker raised his voice. “I need a bucket here.”
“He’s . . . French spy. Important.”
“Keeping you alive is important.”
“Kill him.” The explosion of coughing was a poker of hot iron in his lungs. He dropped the pistol, shut his arms tight around the pain in his chest, and spoke through fire and vitriol. “Find him. Kill him.”
“I’ll just do that. Kill him out of hand. Damn. And they say I’m bloodthirsty.” Hawk was talking to somebody in the crowd, giving orders. Saying, “Here’s money,” and “Take care of him.”
Hawk’s hand clasped his shoulder. “I’ll be back. If she’s blinded you, I’ll cut her fucking eyes out.”
He’ll do it. He had to say this. Had to get it out before Hawker left. “Don’t hurt her! An order. That’s an order.”
A dark shape blocked the hideously bright light. Hawk stood over him one last minute. “Hurt doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Eight
Do not consort with men who carry guns.
A BALDONI SAYING
Cami inserted herself into the noise and confusion of Fetter Lane, slipping between stout workmen who were stolid and oblivious and nearly as good as a solid wall for concealment. The blackmailer followed her, fuming. She’d get well away from the church and its many opportunities for unpredictable violence before she talked to him.
Devoir needed—
She pushed Devoir out of her mind.
Fetter Lane was a fine noisy place to weave in and out of, smooth as a fish among waving weeds. She tossed tendrils of attention to left and right, to the traffic passing, to the laborers wheeling barrows, to men who lingered in doorways and chatted in front of shops. Under a fold of cloak, her right hand with its little knife, cum cultellulus as it were, was ready to slice or stab. She intended to be a difficult woman to hit on the head and haul away in a private carriage.
She’d given considerable thought, lately, to the business of daylight kidnapping in London. She wouldn’t attempt it on Fetter Lane, herself, but there was no reason to assume this blackmailer was equally cautious. Many things could go wrong in the next half hour. She was prey to a variety of qualms.
Her blackmailer had qualms and imperatives of his own. He caught up with her. “We’ve left a witness alive behind us. A wiser woman wouldn’t have stood in my way.”
She summoned up a Baldoni smile. “A wiser woman would have ignored your letter altogether. You write nonsense about a ‘genuine Camille’ and a code you’ve taken a fancy to. You—”
“Enough. We can’t talk in the open street.”
“On the contrary, this is a perfect place to trade confidences.”
“I did not come here to—”
She left him talking to empty air and continued toward Fleet Street. He followed, as she had known he would.
It had been a long time since she’d bamboozled a dangerous man face-to-face. She hoped she still had the knack of it. This was, after all, what she’d been born to do. To lie, befool, and cheat. If she was afraid, she’d press that fear into a small, coldly pulsing ball and set it aside from her. “Fear is meat and drink to a Baldoni. We eat fear. We thrive on it.” How often had Papà said that?
She wouldn’t think about what she’d done to Devoir.
A small boy, weighted sideways with a bucket, crossed the pavement and slopped some mess in the swale at the side of the road. A horse and rider passed on her left, trotting. The smell of cooked meat expanded from the kitchen of an inn.
She glanced back to see a man dodge horses and wagons and run to the door of the Moravian church. She could only hope he was a friend of Devoir’s and not one of the blackmailer’s confederates, taking a detour into the church with a sharp, silent knife.
She’d left Devoir easy prey.
Walk away. Don’t look back.
She matched the steps of one man, then another, hiding in the flow of the crowd. One bird in the flock. One herring in the congregation of herrings. It was a dark satisfaction to keep the blackmailer trailing after her.
He caught up. “Where do you think you’re going? I don’t plan to chase you across London.”
“Fleet Street. Just around the corner.” She didn’t pause. Didn’t bother to look at him. That would anger him, and angry men made mistakes.
Past the old inn, past half-open doors that smelled of fresh paper and held the creak of printing presses, she turned onto Fleet Street. The pamphlets and newspapers of the kingdom were printed here. Every fourth building was a bookshop. The taverns were filled with men who had ink on their hands.
She’d come here yesterday, as soon as she arrived in London, to assess possibilities and consider tactics. No actor, rehearsing a part, had ever walked the stage more carefully than she’d walked Fleet Street.
Franklin’s Bookshop set an enticing table of books just inside the front door, right beneath the big plate-glass window. She ducked into the shop to the sound of the bell above the door, walked to the far side of the table, slid her knife into the pouch beside her gun, and selected a volume at random.
The blackmailer followed. “What are you doing? Why are we here?” But he was no fool. He already knew why.
“You wish to talk in private? So do I. But I feel safer with witnesses.” . . . Even if the witnesses were the shopkeeper, absorbed in inspection of an elderly volume, and a square, sturdy woman working her way down a row of books on botany.
“You’re overly cautious.” The words were mild enough. Underneath, she heard his anger like a nail scraped across a slate.
She said, “One cannot be overly cautious.”
She lowered her eyes, as if she were reading the book she held. She could look out the wide window and see all of Fleet Street. But this time of day, no one outside could see past the reflection on the window and discover her. She’d investigated this thoroughly. “Will you give me a name to call you by?”
“I see no reason to do so.” He chose his own book. “It adds to your danger, the more you know about me.”
He must have thought she was very stupid. “So awkward to think of you as ‘that man who writes threatening letters.’”
From this carefully chosen vantage point inside Franklin’s Bookshop she could watch the corner of Fetter Lane. Anyone following her would walk just there, beside the streetlamp. Unless he’d been supremely well trained, he’d pause and look both ways on Fleet Street and betray himself utterly. Very few men were trained as she had been at the Coach House.
He said, “You may call me sir. Where is the Mandarin Code?”
She wished to appear the smallest bit stupid. A stupid woman would be insolent right now. Besides, she was angry. “The squire in Brodemere has a pair of mastiffs. He’s always yelling, ‘Sit, sir!’ and the closest one plops its hindquarters on the floor and slobbers. I shall think of that when I call you sir.”
The narrow, pale, intellectual face froze. The lips tightened. “You may call me Mr. Smith.”
She turned a page. “I expected more originality from the man who sent that letter.”
“I leave a foolish cleverness to amateurs, Mademoiselle Molinet.”
&nb
sp; So. The Police Secrète knew more about her than she’d realized. She’d come prepared for unpleasant surprises. The day was delivering them.
In the Revolution, in Paris, Papà had been Philippe Molinet for a while, a banker, a man of many financial schemes. The sans-culottes who helped themselves to the wealth of the dead aristos had been endearingly gullible when it came to investments. That had been Papà’s last role.
So strange that the French had assumed she would spy for them after they sent Papà and Mamma to the guillotine. Perhaps they thought children forgot. Baldoni do not forget. She shrugged. “Mademoiselle Molinet belongs to the past. One sheds a dozen such names, Mr. Smith, as snakes shed their skin.”
“Shall I call you Vérité? They must have been feeling humorous that day at the Coach House when they called you that.”
She didn’t like him holding that name in his mouth so soon after Devoir had said it. She returned her eyes to the book she held, which appeared to be about rocks. Why would anybody want to read about rocks? “Not Vérité.”
His nod was amiable. She saw him chalk that up as a trifling victory. “Camille, then.”
“We’ll save ‘Camille’ for the merchandise you offer. Call me Miss Leyland.” She licked her index finger and slipped another page of smooth, dense paper from right to left. There were many drawings. Drawings of rocks, apparently. Under lowered eyelids she watched the corner of Fetter Lane and Fleet Street. Where were his henchmen? She said, “Tell me about this Camille you have acquired.”
He made her wait. Deliberately and slowly he slipped his watch out of its pocket, left-handed, and clicked it open. “She is considerably more genuine than you.” The hour and minutes satisfied him, apparently. He put the watch away. “She lived in Lyon. An orphan, like you. Another lost soul of the Revolution.”
“How sad.”
“The Besançons died when they attempted to flee France, all of them, except for her. Life is fragile.”
Rogue Spy Page 5
