Rogue Spy

by Joanna Bourne

  The young man across from him might have served in a draper’s shop or sold expensive gloves or pounded Latin into the heads of reluctant schoolboys. He was, in fact, a freelance seller of secrets. A collector of errors in judgment. An entrepreneur in other men’s moral failings. A blackmailer, in season.

  “I need to know by tonight. Noon is better,” Doyle said.

  “You give me very little time.”

  “Nobody has any time,” Doyle said. “Give me hints, rumors, a whisper . . . anything.”

  “I make no promises.”

  “Do what you can.” Doyle slid a folded banknote across the table. It was covered smoothly and instantly by a slender, well-kept hand. The younger man rose from his bench and left like an amiable snake setting off to swallow barn rats.

  At the tavern door he brushed past Bernardo Baldoni, entering.

  Bernardo stepped to one side and stood with his back to the window, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, giving Doyle a long moment to look him over. Then he threaded his way around two tables to the shadowy corner behind the bar.

  He sat on the bench recently vacated and set his hands in plain view. Bernardo was not a large or imposing man. He looked even less so when sitting across from the mass of muscle that was William Doyle. He said, “Mr. Doyle,” and it was a statement, not a question.

  Doyle frowned. “I know you.”

  “We met once, ten years ago, in Paris, over cards. I was a corn factor from Marseilles. You were a German count.”

  Neutrality settled over Doyle’s ugly face. “Right.”

  “The card game was at the Palais Royal. The play was high. We were both cheating.”

  “That’s ordinary enough. Cheating.” Doyle took up his mug and drank ale, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and waited.

  “So I thought. Until I noticed you were cheating to lose.”

  “Looked that way, did it?”

  “I sensed a complicated scheme in play, and it was not one of my own, so I withdrew with all prudent speed. Paris was full of political plots and plans at that time. Most of them ended badly for someone.”

  “Still true,” Doyle said amiably.

  “There was a murder in that club that night. A political murder. I was sufficiently intrigued that I made inquiries and discovered who you are.”

  “Did you, now?”

  “The British Service remains impenetrable. Your Military Intelligence is less so.”

  “I’ve been told that.”

  Bernardo motioned the barmaid closer and ordered coffee. “The military are a great trial to us all.”

  The two men sat, measuring each other, till the woman returned to swipe at a patch of table with her apron and slap down a mug.

  When she was gone again, out of earshot, Doyle said, “The coffee’s a mistake.”

  Bernardo sipped. Grimaced. “So it is.” He set it carefully aside. “A reminder that I am among the English. No other nation would call this coffee.”

  “We’re an imaginative race,” Doyle said.

  Bernardo leaned back in his chair. For a while they watched the other patrons of the Crocodile eat and drink. The tavern collected a mixed bag of workmen connected with the theater, laborers, market vendors, and women of various degrees of respectability.

  Bernardo said, “You may know who I am.”

  Doyle made no comment.

  “So.” Bernardo turned a hand palm up. “I am Bernardo Baldoni, brother to Cesare Baldoni.” He paused. “I see that you knew.”

  Doyle didn’t acknowledge that but didn’t deny it, either.

  “I have come to deliver a message to the British Service.” Bernardo’s voice became less genial. “You take an interest in the woman called Camille Leyland. This must cease.”

  “Why?” The single blunt word from Doyle.

  “She is ours. She is Baldoni. She is my great-niece.”

  Doyle closed his eyes. “I see.” A minute passed in silence. “Tell me she isn’t also Cesare Baldoni’s great-niece.”

  “She is his granddaughter. His only granddaughter. I think it is best that the British Service know this.”

  “Hell.”

  “She is also Ernesto Targioni’s granddaughter. Add to this that she is Scipione Zito’s first cousin and closest blood relative. You know what he is. I have not even begun to list the families she is tied to by blood and marriage across Tuscany. The Minutoli. The Scribanos . . .”

  “In short, related to everybody but the pope.”

  “There is a distant connection to—”

  “Damn.”

  “As I say, you should know this.”

  Doyle hissed out a long breath of impatience. “What the devil was a Baldoni child—that Baldoni child—doing unprotected, getting scooped up by the Police Secrète and put in the Coach House? Why the hell weren’t you keeping watch on her?”

  “Disorder beyond belief, and one man’s unforgivable villainy. It is a family matter.” Bernardo set the tips of his fingers together and looked down at them. “It is the family matter of several important families, in fact.”

  “And again, I have to say damn it to hell.”

  “You have an understanding of the politics of Tuscany. Cesare declared there would be no vendetta with the Targioni. We all assiduously covered over that ugliness. Now, unless it is seen that my niece is most abundantly cared for and happy, the old scandal will emerge into daylight.”

  Doyle closed his eyes and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed.”

  “It is Tuscany,” Bernardo said. “And it is family.”

  “The bloodshed happening in French territory, when our peace treaty with France is shaky as hell. It’s going to look like England’s making trouble on purpose.”

  Bernardo said, almost apologetically, “You are not the only one who finds this a difficult situation. You see the implications, do you not?”

  “I see the implications.”

  “For the Baldoni, for all the old Tuscan families of power, she is a lit candle tossed into a powder magazine.”

  “Which the French will blame on us.”

  “The small blessing of this day is that my great-niece is under my roof again, instead of in a British prison, accused of spying for the French. Or dead at British hands.”

  Doyle looked past him, at a blank spot on the plaster wall. “We wouldn’t kill her.”

  “Of course your Service would not,” Bernardo said. “Perhaps the blundering Military Intelligence of England also would not. But I am Tuscan and Florentine and we scent intrigue in the lightest breeze. No one in Italy will believe she spent ten years in England and the British Service did not know who she was. If my great-niece trips over a stone, or is struck by lightning in Hyde Park, or walks in the rain and catches pneumonia, the English will be blamed. That one death will drive the great families of Tuscany into the arms of Napoleon.”

  “We’ll have to keep her alive, then, won’t we?”

  “With the aid of various saints. Con l’aiuto dei santi.”

  The two men looked at each other for a time.

  Doyle picked up his mug. “I’d suggest the ale in this establishment, but I imagine you don’t drink it. Has she told you what she’s doing tomorrow?”

  “She goes to face Il Mercante di Tenebre. I do not stand in her way. Baldoni women have always fought. She honors us when she goes to face that beast.”

  “But it would be best if she didn’t get herself killed on English soil.”

  “Very much so. Your Mr. Paxton is in my kitchen, where the coffee is somewhat better than this,” he tapped his cup, “plotting to keep her alive.” He pursed his lips and continued, “It has occurred to us that Mr. Paxton may present a solution to another problem.”

  Doyle waited. It was impossible to know if he suspected what was coming.

  Bernardo said, “My Sara is heiress to inheritances in two great families—possibly the Zitos as well. She will ha
ve also the dowry of her grandmother, who was Maria Vezzoni . . .”

  “There is just no end to this, is there?” said Doyle, looking sour.

  “She must marry, and soon, to a family who will not cause troubles with this great inheritance. Someone tied to neither the French nor the Austrians. It has occurred to us that an Englishman may be the solution to our problems.”

  Doyle didn’t give anything away on his face. “It might.”

  “I will not force my Sara—Cami, as I must call her—into anything distasteful to her. Not with the least feather of persuasion. But she seems fond of your agent Paxton. He spent last night in her bed.”

  Doyle didn’t say anything.

  Bernardo made himself comfortable in the chair he had taken. “Tell me about Thomas Paxton.”

  Forty-four

  Do not have a good escape plan. Have three.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  Quiet, ordinary Semple Street sat complacently in the morning light and provided no clue as to why the Merchant had chosen it for their meeting.

  Pax wore a gaudy brocaded waistcoat and a jacket of exactly the wrong shade of blue. Uberto Baldoni had unearthed this outfit from some vast Baldoni clothing hell. The jacket didn’t match the buff trousers, which didn’t match the boots. The hat had ugly proportions. Everything was too shiny, too new, too bright, and of the shoddiest construction—the visual equivalent of chalk shrieking on a slate.

  He caressed the wide lapel of his jacket as if he considered it a thing of beauty. In a way, it was. This was the perfect disguise. He was invisible because he was so apparent. Men tracking the Merchant didn’t strut the streets in strident, flamboyant blue.

  His hair was dull brown. He hadn’t shaved that morning. He swaggered along with a bold, searching eye, looking like somebody who’d steal washing off a line.

  Cami strolled at his side. The Baldoni had decked her out in a blond wig, flowered hat, and fussy yellow dress that made her stand out from the sober matrons of Semple Street like a canary in a flock of sparrows. She carried a yellow parasol. Her walk was a paean of availability. The tilt of her head, nicely vulgar. A pretty little cake of a woman.

  Of course, if you bit into her, you’d find steel underneath the icing.

  “I’m not a vain man,” Pax said, “but I hate you to see me dressed like this.”

  Her bonnet swung in his direction. She gave a broad and bawdy grin. “I like this Paxton. He looks disreputable.”

  “I look like a pimp. Not my preferred disguise. Every eye on the street is on me.”

  “There are many ways of hiding. If you look like a pimp, I look like a woman of pleasure. Not an expensive one. Do you think the Merchant set somebody to watch the street?”

  “It’s not his way. Before he told you Semple Street was the meeting place, he’d cut all ties to it. He’s left nothing here that leads back to him.”

  “Unless he’s set a trap for me.” Cami dawdled, entirely the woman of leisure. No one would see her studying from window to window, looking behind the glass for watchers. Looking in reflection after reflection for anyone following. “He knows I’ll come here. When I do, I’m easy to kill. Easy to capture. Why not grab me off the street today and torture the Mandarin Code from my flesh?”

  “If he wants to capture you,” he said, “he won’t waste time watching Semple Street day and night. He’ll grab you tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning. He’ll have a couple of men with him when he picks you up.”

  “Three men. You flatter me.”

  “He underestimates women. I’d bring five well-trained minions and a supply of weapons.”

  She peeked under the frilled edge of the yellow parasol and batted her eyes at him. “So many compliments.”

  “You are in all ways admirable.”

  They’d reached Number Fifty-six. She stopped and he made a pantomime of retying the ribbon of her bonnet. It gave her time to take in the street, up and down, from this point.

  She said, “I’ll stand here to wait for him, tomorrow.” She chose a section of gray-brown pavement at her feet. “This spot.” Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, pupils dilated.

  He didn’t look down. It was too easy to imagine blood and Cami’s body curled on the ground and him too late to do anything but murder the bastard. “It’d be easier for me if I were the one walking out to meet him.”

  It was his job to face the Merchant, not Cami’s. It had always been his job. Now it was his job to stand back and let her take the risk.

  “Next time,” she said, “I’ll save the hard part for you.”

  He smoothed the wide yellow ribbons of her bonnet and let go.

  On both sides of the street, windows and doors gleamed under the bright sky. Cami considered them. “Before I became entangled with you, and thus with the British Service, I had envisioned a relatively simple exchange with a blackmailer, enlivened by a slight chance of dying.” She managed to make the parasol express irony. “Now I have the same chance of dying, but also the British Service. I’ll walk down this street under the gaze of five, six, seven British Service agents—however many of them. Their first objective will be to capture the Merchant. Then they’ll come after me.”

  “I won’t let that happen. If I’m not here, Hawker won’t let that happen.”

  “You mean, if you’re dead, putting it in frank and simple terms. If that happens, I won’t trouble Mr. Hawker, who will doubtless be busy. I’ll go—Look over there at the grocery. You’ve passed it, I imagine, on your tours of Semple Street. That’s my escape route”—she touched it with her attention, just a moment—“when I run from the Service. That track beside the grocery that looks like a delivery way to the yard in back. It goes to an alley that runs all the way to Tallison Road. It’s not shown on the ward maps.”

  “I walked it last night before I came to see you.”

  “I’m surprised you and Antonio didn’t run into each other. It’s a dim, grim alley, according to Antonio—high brick walls on both sides. We’ll block it just on general principles. Giomar and Alessandro will bring the pony cart in there just before dawn and overturn it and wait with a couple of guns each. It’s an escape for me and a trap for the Merchant, if he’s stupid enough to go that way.”

  He pictured them. Boys really. “They’re young.”

  “No younger than some of the men who followed you in Italy.” She grinned. “My family gossips. This morning they gossiped about Il Gatto Grigio and a third cousin of mine who went into the hills with him. He was fourteen.”

  He wanted to tell her he hadn’t led boys that young. But he had. He’d used them as lookouts, scouts, messengers, information gatherers, guides. Some of them—men, boys, even women—the ones who’d come from the gutted, burned-out farmhouses they passed, walked right behind him up the mountain passes, to lay ambush.

  She said, “Antonio wishes he’d been with you in the hills. He’s tired of playing the respectable banker while everybody else is roaming the Piedmont alps, shooting at the French.” Cami looked at him from under her hat. “I told him it probably wasn’t as much fun as he thought.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  She became more sober. “You don’t need to worry about Giomar and Alessandro. We’re an intensely traditional family. Baldoni children go out with the gold shipments when they’re thirteen. Those two have shot mountain bandits.”

  “Then they’re old enough to defend an alley. I’ll talk to them this afternoon. Speaking of guns . . .” He twitched his hand, indicating a house in the row behind them. “I’ll put a sniper there. Second floor, third window from the right. Your cousin Antonio found the place for us.”

  She examined the house and the window unobtrusively, taking it in, judging angles. “It’s odd, considering my many skills, that no one ever taught me to shoot a rifle.”

  “I’ll teach you someday. I didn’t learn to do it right till they sent me to Italy.” Five years back, before he sailed for Genoa, Grey had taken him out to Doyle’s big ho
use in the country. For a week they’d spent every daylight hour shooting rifles and every night drinking and talking with some of Grey’s old army friends about scouting and ambush.

  Nine of his kills had been long-range shots with a Baker rifle. He said, “There’s a straight line from that window, down the whole length of the street, from corner to corner. If the Merchant gets that far, the sniper will stop him.”

  “At that distance?”

  “He can notch a man’s left ear at that distance. Or hit his left knee.”

  “And leave him alive to chat with your Service. I’ll be annoyed if they kill him by accident. Especially if London Bridge blows up the next day and falls into the Thames. I’m very fond of London Bridge.”

  “The River Police are watching the bridges.”

  “They can’t watch everything. The mint, Brooks’s club, the shoppers on Bond Street . . . That’s enough gunpowder to topple Westminster Abbey like a house of cards. With people inside.” Her voice cracked a little around the last words.

  She took a deep breath. “We have to trap him here.” She took one last glance at Number Fifty-six. “I was hoping to see . . . something. But it’s just a dull house of nothing in particular.” She shrugged. “I’m done. We can walk on.”

  “Hawker’s told me what the service knows so far,” he said. “The vast resources have heaped up a pile of trivia. Shall I pass it along?”

  “Do. I dote upon trivia.”

  “Number Fifty-six. On the ground floor is an old man who tailors suits on Jermyn Street. The basement, two brothers who work in a blacking factory. Both floors upstairs are leased to a solicitor’s clerk and his numerous family.”

  “There’s a baby. I heard it crying. And the window with bars must be the nursery.”