Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  Ferrera summed up succinctly. “Dame like you? Don’t have to ask.”

  Sitting in the lush box, sipping the notorious gunrunner’s champagne, Hargreaves felt somehow transformed. All her hard edges served her no use here. She needed to be soft and alluring. A barmaid, a farmhand, and a waitress, she had gone undercover in positions where she could be a fly on the wall. She had not often posed as a society peacock, in the spotlight at all times. It made her feel conspicuous, objectified, and bulbous. Even more disconcerting, the character she played was supposed to be looking for a fat tomcat to restore a depleted family fortune. A cougar, on the hunt.

  Hargreaves had told Burgess as much in her letter, banking on both his taste for women and the potential connections ‘Duchess Valerie Von Hammerson’ would have in the Old World. Von Hammerson would be the legitimate society face of Burgess in Europe, something he should be very interested in possessing.

  Her box looked on a luxurious theater arrangement, but staring at a blank curtain wore on her patience. Keeping a duchess waiting was criminal even for Stan Burgess. Just as she was contemplating leaving in a huff and rescheduling the interview, the lamplight was extinguished in the theater.

  “Blimey.” Vanessa couldn’t help herself, as gentle riffs rolled through the room, a uniquely American torrent of notes she recognized as ‘soft jazz.’

  Somewhere in the orchestra pit was a glinting organic shape of the instrument, someone playing along to a device a lot like a calliope. On stage, an equally lulling play of light began to grow into a soft, steady glow Hargreaves recognized as filtered, softened arc lighting. Fancy stuff for a cabaret.

  A woman stalked, feline, on stage through darkness like jungle. Hargreaves saw the slim lines and small breasts and recognized her as Cammie Alberta from the poster outside. Cammie got up from all fours, and the lighting playing across her nude form showed up like leopard spots.

  Flash! A hissing beast, caged.

  Flash! Needle-sharp points of fingernails.

  Flash! Wildly tossing hair, the feral look of seduction a tonic, an ounce-shot of life zipping through the crowd, infectious, insatiable.

  Hargreaves felt the chill of the performer’s art shoot up her spine, the beauty and attraction, even though she had seldom felt arousal for her own gender before. Undercover work was in essence performance art. Hargreaves watched, rapt, as another woman came into the cage and the two writhed around each other. Legs opened and closed, always tastefully hiding each woman’s gentler parts, matched with a genius orchestra that rose and fell in mounting notes.

  Finally, Cammie closed her lipstick-red mouth on the other woman’s neck, whose ample curves rose and fell in a pantomime of a small death. A cheery, humorous number replaced Cammie onstage, with women in ragged wigs and severely damaged dresses.

  In between the first and second acts, Hargreaves felt rather than saw the lean form of a man seat himself beside her in the box. Rapt as she was by the country music and the beautiful women on stage, she nevertheless noted the severe cut of chin, and the scent of a man in the prime of life. She pretended not to notice, keeping her eyes on the show. It was a wonderful show, and the illusion was not difficult to create.

  The third act was a shadow show, created in different colors by Tesla lights. The women stripped off gloves, garters, and other intimates, showcasing their wonderful physiques in silhouette more beautifully than full frontal nudity ever could. Xylophone and harp tickled the air as each woman teased the straps off perfect landscapes of Venus. In Vanessa’s periphery, the man who seated himself held his head in his palm. Though he did not look at her, Vanessa was self-conscious of her own curves.

  There was an intermission after the third act, and once the lamplights flickered into life, the man beside Hargreaves spoke at last.

  “Many people think cabaret is a sleazy strip show or some kind of bordello advertisement.” It was a refined voice, a metropolitan voice, a Manhattan voice. It also sounded rehearsed, a set piece that ended in suggestively veiled bedroom props. Hargreaves knew when she was being seduced—or at least a fairly good attempt at it.

  “Do they?” she asked, allowing Burgess his theater. Burgess seemed to adore drama. Though he was educated, and his clothes were extravagant luxury, the very tip of his finger tapped always a rhythm against the arm of his chair. It betrayed a certain boredom, impatience. With a minimal gesture he called a man to replace the empty champagne. With another, an usher below dragged a man bodily out of the theater, a man whom Hargreaves recalled had been catcalling in a very ludicrous manner.

  “People regard burlesque as theater, as art, as drama. Is it prostitution? By its very nature art is prostitution; an artist sells more than his body for his art. A painter blinds himself studying landscape, a musician deafens his ears searching for soul-lifting melody, and a dancer opens herself to the sound of applause.”

  Hargreaves imagined he had repeated this little speech many times. Burgess took deep succor with the rarefied air of the enclosed box, as if the smell of champagne, decades of cigars, and the bouquet of Chesterfield sofas could sustain the minuscule bellows of his lungs.

  “Cabaret is like any other art. It is sacrifice.”

  Despite the theatrical quality, Hargreaves listened with rapt attention. They fell not in her ears but across her back, chilling her to the bone. This was a very dangerous man, Vanessa suddenly realized, with all the certainty of experience and Yard training. The rich words and silken delivery were nothing but a mask. He was more dangerous than the thief or murderer. Vanessa Hargreaves had been trained to handle those. This man was a monster of a different color.

  A psychopath.

  “Mr. Burgess,” Vanessa began, but was shushed by a rapid finger movement, as if Stan Burgess’ name was anathema to his own ears.

  “The show begins,” he merely said, and Vanessa turned to behold the stage once again.

  This time, the darkness of the cabaret filled with light, a vital, sudden flare amplified by the sudden hiss of sodium bulbs. It was as white as could be, betraying only the slightest tinge of yellow from igniting wire. The stage was flooded with brilliance, all ghosts fled.

  An impossibly high heel stepped through the curtain. One piano note, high C. Tiptoe, tip. The leg retracted. Then again; piano, here, there, dance, tease. Fishnets seemed to rear high like an animal scenting, then scoot back into its lair behind the curtains. Slowly, timed perfectly to a rising introduction of piano, the animal probed with a pure white sleeve, pawing at the air with black tips. The cufflinks were orange blossoms.

  Bit by bit, the leg was joined by the right hand, and the left, cradling a cane. Black bowler hats seemed to dance a jig quite otherworldly. Almost imperceptibly, the lights dimmed, and the audience reared forward to catch the curves emerging from the curtain. There! A coat-tail! A bit of firm derriere!

  The music stopped.

  Four notes dropped like a bomb, one-two-three-four all at once, the last invading and taking over the fifth space, the true space, Beethoven’s space. Lovely music, such as Hargreaves could not deny. The music of the ages! White coattails joined firm, lush flesh. With the bomb of the fifth, the dancer struck out! A kick! A flourish! A pirouette!

  Suddenly the curtains rose and the stage was full of golden dancers, topless, with exaggerated eyelashes and wide collars toothed like gears, all queer, all otherworldly, all seductive. Like pips in an orange, Hargreaves thought, as the procession drew into a circle round the ecstatic mocha-skinned woman moaning her passion into the bowler hat.

  Vanessa Hargreaves sucked back her gasp into a gulp of shock.

  Her old friend the airship pirate Rosa Marija stood poised up there, starkly naked under her tailcoat.

  6

  Of Burglaries and Burlesque

  “Quite a… beautiful… show,” Hargreaves complimented the cabaret later, in Stan Burgess’ private parlor.

  “From a woman as radiant as the sun, that is quite the compliment. Cabaret is, if nothing else, a
celebration of women by women,” Burgess answered, tipping his top hat. He chilled her. The words were like a carefully chosen blinds, his eyes flat and dull like a shark’s. His audience crowded around, held not so much by the content but by the feel of the words, the velvety way he said them. A psychopath is the ultimate extrovert.

  “Splendid as always!”

  “Bravo!”

  “And will we see such a performance at market? Hmm?”

  “Leave Old Burgy alone. But honestly, what do you think of steel? Bullish or bearish?”

  Bourgeoisie crowded in on either elbow with brandies and cigars, a dense miasma of ownership. Hargreaves was choking on it. In the far corner, Rosa Marija stood with the other dancers, swathed in handsome silk robes. Her eyelashes and makeup were outlandish in the close quarters. No doubt she remained as naked as the day she was born underneath. Hargreaves resolved to work her way over as soon as the fluttering admirers scattered.

  The parlor was cozy, set in a converted, smaller theater of the old picture-house, and lit with comforting gas instead of Tesla. Velvet cordons roped off the entry to an old projection booth. In the smoky glow, Hargreaves observed Burgess wore a silk-backed pinstripe vest and pointed Italian shoes. She nearly missed her cue to blush.

  “Thank you,” she said to Burgess, just in time to be introduced. She looked nervously into his eyes, but it seemed as if she had said the right thing in present company.

  “What business might a countess have with a common cabaret owner like Stan Burgess?” Burgess said. The self-deprecation came out perfectly natural, not a hint of ego. It was frightening.

  “The duchess,” she intoned as dulcetly as possible, “Valerie Von Hammerson simply desires a social evening with New York’s finest members of gentry… but of course you have no royal family.” The accent was easy to fabricate, but the dance was unfamiliar. She had come prepared to sort the gentry by station, occupation, and personal wealth, but nobody seemed to have any of those Victorian preoccupations. This was a pleasure palace, not the social rat race of parlors in London. What mattered seemed to be instant gratifications: momentary trysts, trips to the powder room. Fruit from the tree. A group of gentlemen snorted from a mirrored plate. Others were gambling in a back room, occasionally raising an uproar.

  “You’ve certainly made swift work of New York society,” a chalk-faced woman with doe-brown eyes quipped at Hargreaves. She looked in her twenties, but clung to a graybeard glittering with gold and full in the paunch. “The Luminescent Cabaret is a Gotham tradition, and Burgie here doesn’t invite just anyone into his parlor.”

  “Like a great big spider he is, choosing all the juiciest morsels for himself,” said another woman of similar ilk. Blond locks framed an ermine collar, dusted with flakes of ash despite her long cigarette holder.

  “Now, now, Burgess,” interrupted her distinguished-looking husband, a man with a multi-lens monocle permanently jammed into his head. An air pirate affectation? Perhaps the colonials hadn’t forgotten they came from pirate stock. “You mustn’t keep the rest of us guessing. How did you find the means to invite a duchess, when none of us were even aware royalty would be gracing our shores?”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment fancy. My dear Aunt Marilyn owns a manor outside of Boston, and Stan was good enough to offer me entertainment during my brief layover,” Hargreaves lied through her teeth. Was the first name too much? To Burgess, she gave a knowing look, hoping she played the part of the sheltered nubile well enough. Thankfully, the sharp proprietor evidenced a detached affirmative.

  “Is that Marilyn Ann Roth? Why I had heard she had no family…” whispered one guest. A chill dropped across Hargreaves’ bared back.

  “My Luminescent Cabaret has a distinct reputation for distinguished guests.” Burgess now took over the conversation. It was difficult to read his face. There was a simmer of names, Princes of Far Arabia, Nipponese Captains of Industry, and Very Important Bankers. His skillful manipulation of the crowd hadn’t escaped her, though.

  Society banter grew wearisome, slowly grinding down Vanessa enough that she began disengaging herself from the crowd. It was an incredibly homogeneous one—everybody in dinner jackets, the women like herds of beribboned, sculpted cattle. On Ivanov’s ship she’d seen women veiled for their gods, gentleman scholars, even one Icelandic hunter, a vast, muscled veteran who had found her fortune and was seeing the world. It made for a bubbling cauldron of company.

  To her lasting relief, Rosa Marija saw fit to glide through the crowd and materialize next to the plate of smoked salmon. “Fancy seeing you here, gorgeous,” Rosa Marija breathed in her ear. Hargreaves nearly jumped out of her slinky gown, blushing red enough to match it.

  “Fancied seeing your fanny, Rosa Marija,” she said in return, and a Cheshire grin spread like butter across the beautiful air pirate’s face. Glitter and makeup masked her lush dark features, but Rosa Marija seemed to exude glamour. Likely she looked fabulous in just about everything. Or nothing.

  “There was spirit gum over the good bits,” Rosa Marija remarked, disguising their conversation by gesturing towards the various plates and drinks on the table. Between delicate tidbits, Rosa moved the conversation to a corner, pretending to entertain Hargreaves. Just a bored, wealthy duchess condescending herself to a thespian thrill. Hargreaves snacked daintily at the hors d’oeuvres, though she wished the guests weren’t there so she could really get stuck in. Airships made Midwestern beef and Maine lobster available in Britain, but they were still dear and not happy regulars in a detective inspector’s household.

  Rosa Marija’s hair was done up in a complicated nest of clips, but the glittering sumptuousness of a few stray locks flowed over her neckline like liquid caramel. Hargreaves felt the stares of the surrounding gentry at the two beautiful women conversing together, one blood and gold, the other mauve and mocha. She almost didn’t catch Rosa’s familiar brand of pirate guff: “Sort of like gaffer tape, only it doesn’t hurt when you don’t have hair there.”

  “Right; I get the gist.” Hargreaves halted Rosa before she got too riled up. Her grin was exploding out of either side of her face. “What does Albion have to say about this?”

  “He suggested it, actually, but I think his original plan was to come here in drag. It was supposed to be a one-time recon, but the loot has been hard to extract and the work is surprisingly satisfying. I’m sure you saw it.”

  “Oh, I saw everything, thank you.” Hargreaves hid her face behind a bit of sliced flank steak on a party pick. “Your show is a smashing success.”

  “Of course! Who do you think I am, someone less gorgeous? Mustn’t jabber; Cammie is right over there. Anyway, I bet we’re both here for the same reason. This is a bad place to talk.”

  Rendezvous delayed for the time being, Hargreaves allowed Rosa Marija’s coltish legs to stride away into a clot of pipe smoke and testosterone, her hands fluttering and fending away the drooling patrons. Amazing. How was it done?

  When Hargreaves turned to spot Burgess, however, she found the host missing in action. Perhaps he had been diverted by a society dame. After another half-hour of verbal backgammon with the trophy wives and dirigible barons, Vanessa Hargreaves finally extracted herself from the mass of patrons. It seemed these New Yorkers were used to bandying about the town at all hours, but a real duchess would find a prudent excuse to end the evening at a decent time.

  Ortega and Ferrera met her a few blocks away in their crotchety Feint.

  “Inspector?” Ferrera inquired through their rolled-down windows. “Was Burgess as much of a cad as we thought?”

  “On the surface? A perfect gentleman. Now if you can just turn your heads toward the street, I believe I shall shimmy out of this dress.”

  Hargreaves was as fed up with the tight gown as she was the night’s unsuccessful raid. How does a lady hide a decently sized gun without even a bustle? While the sheepish detectives kept a polite distance, she shrugged on a more practical blouse over warm leggings and a thigh-
high wool skirt. She sighed as her tortured feet found familiar places in her good boots. Her coat went over all, including a sturdy gun belt holding her new best friend, the Browning from her stash. Her Tranter lay safe in one boot.

  “I shall endeavor to investigate the cabaret,” Hargreaves informed the two detectives, who looked a bit overwhelmed by her gear, and her bare limbs rising and falling in the back seat.

  “You will need help, señorita,” Ortega offered, but the inspector shook her head.

  “I do not wish to implicate the city,” she said. Privately, she did not want an incident to turn up the fact she was not actually British Intelligence. Some things were just too complicated to explain, and for everything green and good, she did not want the Americans to get their hands on Cook. “It would be better for you to stay. They will have a hard time noticing one woman.”

  Even if the two detectives wanted to protest, she did not let them. Instead, she gave them a winning smile before running back to the Cabaret. The bouncers, remembering her scintillating entry, did not balk at letting her back in. She didn’t even have to pretend she’d forgotten something; her coat just reminded them of the goodies underneath. Back at the party, she slipped quietly along the stairs, and then up into the cordoned-off projection door. As she expected, the door also let off onto a corridor so well-padded there could be no doubt of the place’s less than savory reputation. She could almost feel the night market pulsing on the other side of the walls.

  “Now, we will see about your records, Burgess. If you are every bit the scoundrel you are the gentleman, you ought to be keeping tabs on just about every automata criminal in the city,” Hargreaves reassured herself. It wasn’t a bad assessment. New York was the capital of the New World. Still, Hargreaves felt as if she was reaching too far. She had come because of a tiny machine part in the wreckage of a crime scene, and there was no guarantee an American had done the deed. She couldn’t go back to Britain without something to show for it, but the automata nut was the only lead she had.