“But you came back with a gun.”
“He said that, in any event, I’d been brave, that I deserved a second chance for trying to penetrate the camps. So I am temporarily assigned to his flying squad.”
Hadrian lowered the pipe and leaned forward. “You understand what happened?”
“I never understand the governor.”
“Trust his actions, not his words. He has to dismiss your story officially, but appointing you to his flying squad means he is worried you might speak the truth. Easier for him to keep an eye on you. A lot harder for Fletcher to reach out to you.”
“There’s talk all over town. The Council is in some kind of deadlock. The others won’t ratify the man Buchanan appointed to fill Van Wyck’s seat on the Council. They say they don’t know him, that he’s a stranger.”
“You mean the head of the millers’ guild.”
Jori nodded. “He made a speech praising the governor for his bold action in recapturing the assassin. This miller no one knows even suggested canceling the next election as a distraction in this time of public disorder.”
“They’re calling Nelly an assassin now?”
“Everyone is waiting for her to be brought back and executed. With the size of the bounty, it will be any day now.” Jori bit her lip. “He won’t stop until she is dead, Hadrian.”
IT TOOK HIM nearly half a day to find Dax, and he succeeded only because he gave up searching for the boy and followed the bait. It was midafternoon when the boy entered the back of Mette’s cafe. Dax had been hiding in plain sight, trimming his hair, wearing the dark clothes prescribed for students. But he could not hide his craving for Mette’s maple sugar pastries. Hadrian waited by her backyard stable until he reappeared several minutes later, watching as Dax stopped to pet a cat.
Off-balance already, he had no time to react as Hadrian darted out of the shadows and grabbed him by the belt. But as Hadrian pulled him toward a bench the boy slammed a knee into his groin.
“Hello to you too,” he gasped, staggering backward.
The boy’s expression changed from fear to shame as he recognized his assailant. “Stone the crows!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you was . . . you could have just . . .” His words trailed away as he helped Hadrian to the bench. “I’m cheered you ain’t dead.”
“I have to stay in the shadows,” Hadrian explained. “Which means I had to find you in the shadows. You’ve gone back to school after all.”
The boy brushed off his pastry, which had fallen in the dirt, then broke it in half. He shrugged as he gave one piece to Hadrian. “Three squares and a warm bed.”
Hadrian nodded thanks. “You didn’t tell me about your present for Jonah,” he said.
Dax studied Hadrian warily.
“Ducks taking off at dawn. He would have liked it.”
His listener’s eyes gave nothing away.
“Some of the jackals broke your friend Nash’s foot trying to find out where that painting is. Why?”
“Ain’t seen Nash, not for weeks.”
“He’s on their farm with his mother. Staying out of the way. You were his budge, the one who climbs inside and waits until it’s safe to unlock doors. Why would the jackals be interested in that painting? Was it stolen from Fletcher?”
“Never in life!” Dax exclaimed. “He’d drop me in the fish chopper if he caught me. It was just some house. White clapboard, white fence, big stone chimney. Sometimes the owner works nights.”
“Where’s the painting, Dax? You never gave it to Jonah.”
“He told me his birthday was next month. I was waiting for that. It’s at the mill. Mergansers. He liked mergansers, the ones with the big green crests. Once we watched some take off, running like clowns on the water, and he laughed and laughed. Second floor,” Dax added. “An old feed bin filled with empty burlap sacks. Except the bottom sack ain’t empty.” He bit into his sugary cake.
He watched the boy eat. “What was it like the first time you went to the camps?” Hadrian asked.
“I was scared. Jonah had given me a note to explain I was helping him. But we always heard about the monsters and mutants who lived there. You know, two heads, with skin like snakes.”
“But you went anyway.”
“Mr. Jonah gave me a note,” he repeated. Dax looked up as if remembering something. “Kenton asked for you. When he first found me last month he put me in jail for a night to help me remember where you were, no food or water for twenty-four hours. I said I thought you were dead.”
“Good idea.”
“I mean I really thought you were dead. I saw that piece of wood in your back, then saw the waves crashing over you.”
“It was a close thing.” Hadrian finished his piece of pastry and licked his fingers. “What I don’t understand, Dax, is how you had the time to travel so often to the camps.”
“Weren’t just me. We split it. Jonah let me pick two others, from the orphans.”
“Who? Where are they now?”
“Told you. They got taken to iron salvage.”
Hadrian gazed at the boy, trying to unlock the mystery of his words. “The two Kenton took for salvage runners? He couldn’t have known.”
“Bad luck is all. They were with me when he came that night. He knew they were my friends. Worse for them.”
“Who has the words for the camps now, Dax?”
“There’s always families trying to get notes out. But nothing for that Nelly and her friends.”
“But what about messages from the jackals to Kinzler?”
The boy looked with worry into the stable’s deeper shadows as if suddenly frightened of something. “We should go,” he said.
“When did the jackals start sending messages to the camps?” Hadrian pressed.
“Last fall. Nelly had given me one of those carved ironwood knives they use in the camps, with a turtle shell handle. I was outside the fish plant, opening clamshells with it when one of the jackals grabbed me. He asked who I stole it from. I said no one around here. Two days later they found me, took me to the jackals’ place, that white house by the docks. One-eyed Fletcher was waiting for me. He asked me questions to see if I knew my way around the camps.”
“They thought you went there to steal things.”
Dax nodded. “Captain Fletcher took off his eye patch and looked at me with his dead eye, the zombie eye, and told me if I ever told anyone about our talk that eye would see me.”
“That’s when they said you could become a jackal.”
Hadrian watched him cast another nervous glance into the shadows. “We should go,” he said again.
“Is that when?” Hadrian pressed.
The boy grimaced. “No, not then.” He stood, made a gesture toward the alley.
Hadrian silently studied him. “Not then,” he ventured, “because the promise to make you a jackal came when you stole the book from Hamada for them.”
Dax went very still. “You don’t know that.”
“You were in and out of Takeo’s barn for Jonah. But he’d never ask you to steal a book. Listen to me. I need to know what it was,” he said more urgently. “What book was so important to the jackals?”
“A di-rect-ory.” The boy pronounced the unfamiliar word slowly.
“A directory of what?”
Dax took a step toward the light. The pain on his face was unmistakable. “Businesses. Later, I saw it on Kinzler’s table in that compound of his. I’ll get it back. I said that into the phone the day they put Jonah in the ground. I kept seeing Jonah’s face when I was going to die in the icy water that night the boat blew up. When the waves starting breaking over me and my hands were too cold to hold the paddle, he kept calling to me, like he was on the shore waiting. That’s why I didn’t pass out, why I stayed alive. He kept me alive for a reason. I went to his grave as soon as I got back to town—before I even found dry clothes. I promised him again I’d get it back.” Suddenly they were interrupted by a low groan from the back of the stable, growi
ng in volume to a howl. Dax ran.
Hadrian, too, began moving quickly away. But then he paused as the howl became a long sob. Mette seemed not to see him as she darted out of the cafe carrying a small tin bucket. He ran into the shadows behind her, halted six feet away as she unlocked a door and slipped inside what appeared to be a workshop, leaving the door ajar.
Peering inside, Hadrian could see chairs in various stages of repair, all of which hung on the wall to make room for a low cot. Mette bent over a limp figure on the bed, murmuring words of comfort in Norwegian, sounding like a mother soothing a sick child. Her patient was a blond man in his late twenties, and he wasn’t confined to bed by a sickness, he was bound to it by ropes across his elbows and knees.
The man quieted under Mette’s touch and she poured milk from her bucket into a mug for him, then retrieved a vial of powder from inside her apron and emptied it into the milk. As he drank the man’s eyes seemed to regain their focus, gazing gratefully at Mette before widening with fear as he glimpsed Hadrian behind her.
The Norger woman spun around with surprising speed and seemed about to launch herself at him before she froze. “Hadrian!” she gasped. Then she collected herself and extended her arms for an embrace. “Hadrian, thank God!” she murmured warmly, folding her arms around him with a sigh of relief.
She quickly explained that the man on the cot, now sinking into unconsciousness, was her nephew Arne, a shipwright who lived with his parents near the waterfront. A quiet, steady worker, he had recently begun acting peculiarly, borrowing money from his parents, shouting out in the middle of the night, acting tipsy though he never touched a bottle of spirits.
When he sliced himself in the leg with a shipyard adze, his parents had kept him at home under orders from the hospital. But he had soon grown violent, repeatedly hobbling outside at night and reopening the wound, then returning much calmer despite the blood running down his leg. Next they discovered he’d been stealing his mother’s jewelry. But only when he had started howling like a wolf at all hours did they ask Mette for help. Living in the commercial district, she had few neighbors to complain of the disturbance.
“He asked me to tie him like this,” Mette explained as her patient drifted off to sleep. “He has to face this sickness alone, he says. His medicine helps,” she added, dabbing at the sweat beading her nephew’s forehead.
“Mette, I need to know where you get his medicine.”
She shook her head. “I don’t really know. After the first couple days a friend from the fishery showed up, saying he could get a powerful medication that would help Arne. I don’t mind paying.”
A chill crept down Hadrian’s spine. “Do you know the name of his friend?”
“He won’t say. He comes every evening. Says they miss my nephew at the shipyard.”
“Does he wear dark glasses?”
“What a strange question,” she said distractedly as she lifted the mug to Arne’s lips again. “Yes, yes, he wears shaded glasses. It’s becoming quite a fad. Wears glasses and has a snake tattooed around his wrist.”
They sat in silence, Hadrian wringing out the cloth as Mette washed her nephew. “Jonah used to come almost every day, you said,” he observed as she finished. “Did he ever leave you anything to hold for him, something secret?”
“Never. I think he believed sharing too many secrets would endanger his friends. Sometimes he borrowed things from my kitchen. Measures and pots.”
Hadrian nodded, then pulled out his transcription of the code from the last journal page, the one Jonah had tried to destroy. He spread it out on the side of the bed. “Does this mean anything to you? It’s important. I think it’s some sort of code.”
She lifted the paper for only a moment before reaching into her pinned-up hair and extracting a pencil. “Not a code, Hadrian,” she said in a patient voice. She laid the paper on her knee and began making marks between the clusters of letters and numbers. H2G, then MAN4MG, SS3G, BC2CC. “Like this. You might want to ask Emily at the hospital what the letters stand for—their lab has some system for abbreviating ingredients they use.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not a code, Hadrian, it’s a recipe. I use the same shorthand in my bakery. H two grams, MAN four milligrams, SS three grams, BC two cc’s.”
Hadrian looked at her in wonder. He had tortured himself trying to understand it, trying to make something more complicated of it. Startled and grateful, he stuffed the paper back into his shirt. The recipe would be useless without the missing pieces, but an important part of the puzzle had fallen into place.
As he stepped toward the stable door Mette gestured him to stop. She rose, removed the bright woolen scarf from around her neck. “I just knitted it,” she said, draping it over his neck. “You need it more than me. Winter’s come early.”
Hadrian retreated into the shadows of the alley. It was nearly an hour before a tall man entered the stable, five minutes before he left the building. Hadrian followed him down the hill, grateful for the snow that had begun to blow in from the lake. The drug dealer hurried to get out of the elements, straight back to the smugglers’ apartment where Jansen had died.
THE OLD MILL had a haunted air under the moonlight. Small dark shapes scurried across the floor as he opened the door. He reached along the wall until he found the hanging lantern, lit it, and moved up the narrow stairs. Well-worn hemp sacks did indeed fill the feed bin, empty except for the rectangular object in the last one.
In the dim light he admired the framed painting, an expert rendering of mergansers on a slow running takeoff toward the rising sun, then looked out the window at the moon, bright enough for him to use the forest paths. He returned the painting to the sack. It was time for Jonah’s present to be delivered.
An hour later he laid the painting on the trestle table of Jonah’s dining room. Jori listened silently while he described its mysterious connection to Fletcher’s men, then she turned it over and pulled a knife from her pocket. She pulled back the cover to reveal two sheets of paper inside. Hadrian carefully laid them on the table and arranged several candles around them before pointing to the upper right corner of each. “Page thirty-three,” he read, “and page eighty seven.” They were cut from a ledger, both sides crowded with handwriting.
Jori lifted the first page and began reading. “Franklin Bishop,” she said. “Age fifty-six. Cause of death cardiac arrest.”
“Jonathan Hampden,” Hadrian read from the second. “Age fortynine. Cause of death cardiac arrest.”
The first sheet was dated over a year earlier, the other three months after that.
“Why?” Jori wanted to know. “Why would someone steal death reports for men who died of natural causes?”
“More importantly,” Hadrian asked, “why would Fletcher care if they did? Who was he protecting?” Was he at last beginning to glimpse the unknown players inside Carthage?
They sat and read the full reports out loud. Both men had died of heart attacks after consuming large dinners, and heavy quantities of alcohol, at the same waterfront restaurant. One had been a shipwright, the other a miller. They had no obvious family connection. Their death examinations had been conducted by two different doctors.
Hadrian stared at the names again. “I knew them,” he said with sudden realization. “Or at least knew of them. Each was the head of his guild.”
THE LITTLE COTTAGE a block away from the hospital was surrounded by gardens, many planted just with herbs but others just for the pleasure of their flowers. Late-blooming asters and coneflowers swayed in the breeze. The last golden leaves of elderberries drooped from the cold. Hadrian waited in the darkness, watching the house, then circling it at a distance, following the tracks in the shallow snow that led from the street to a clump of evergreens at the side of the house. Squatting, he studied the packed snow where someone had stood and stomped their feet from the cold, not missing the half-dozen fresh cigarette butts by the tracks of heavy-treaded shoes. He rolled one of the
butts in his fingers, knowing from the touch of the parchment it was a Bookstick.
He rounded the house once more, making sure there were no other tracks, pausing to study the well-lit kitchen, then climbed up onto the front porch. Testing the front door, and finding it locked, he retrieved the key from the lintel of the front window.
Two of those at the kitchen table leapt up in alarm as he entered. Emily stayed seated. “I don’t recall leaving my door open,” she said, but made no effort to conceal her weary smile. She did not seem surprised to see him. Jori had visited the hospital.
“There is a community of criminals on the north shore,” he said abruptly. “They mean to take over Carthage.”
No one spoke. The two men, both tall lean figures with muscular hands and leathery faces, dropped back into their chairs. Hadrian recognized them now. Melville and Wilmot, the farmers who served on the Council with Emily.
It was the doctor who stirred first. She rose and gestured Hadrian closer. “First let me see how your arm and shoulder are healing,” she said, motioning for him to pull his jacket and shirt off. Only after she had leaned close to the wounds, uttering low syllables of approval as she pushed and stretched the skin around the scars, did she pull out a chair for Hadrian. “Only you could find a way to sink a ship a second time,” she said, then confirmed that Hadrian was acquainted with the two Council members. They were stalwart, trustworthy men who Buchanan had originally nominated for service on the Council because they would be quiet, backbench members who would always support his government. Yet here they were, meeting with the independent-minded Emily, far from Buchanan’s scrutiny.
“From the beginning,” Emily instructed him as she passed a mug of tea. “First you took my mare to the camps. Fortunately she found her way back without being eaten. That’s all I know.”
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