CHAPTER
SIX
When Aristide came down the stairs into the long, low dining room of the Crabtree House, he saw Cyril waiting at the bar. Unaware of Aristide’s scrutiny, Cyril curled one hand around his signature rye and soda and made the other a fisted column for the bowed weight of his head. His crisp navy suit and the high shine of his brogues might have fooled a casual observer, but Aristide knew the curve of those shoulders intimately, and all the pride had been beaten from them.
He didn’t brighten up over dinner. By the time the server took away the cheese plate, Aristide had had enough.
“You’re awfully quiet,” he said, stirring a lump of muscovado into his coffee. When Aristide had last seen Cyril, five days ago, he’d been hungover and peevish, gray with fatigue. Now, the flickering candle on the tabletop cast warm light onto the planes of his face, disguising the dark shadows under his eyes. He had shaved—no, been shaved—and the clean line of his newly starched collar made a bright stripe against his smooth skin.
“Am I?” Despite his fresh appearance, lingering exhaustion colored his speech and movements. He stared into a cordial glass, turning it on its base so the liqueur hung in veils on the crystal. “Sorry.”
“Hard d-d-day at the office, dear?” Aristide flirted over the rim of his cup, waiting for Cyril’s riposte. It didn’t come. Instead, Cyril snorted, and sipped his digestif.
The susurrus of other tables’ conversation, the quiet nip of silver against china, rose into the silence as their repartee faltered. Aristide sighed, loudly enough that Cyril looked up from his drink with weary eyes.
“Go on,” Cyril said. “I know you want to ask.”
“What is wrong with you?” Aristide set his spoon down harder than he meant to, spattering the tablecloth with coffee. “You haven’t said four words together all evening, and you look like a whipped spaniel.”
Cyril covered the coffee stains with his fingertips. “I have to leave Amberlough.”
“Trouble with the lower element?” asked Aristide, only half joking. “Who did you murder? I can p-p-probably smooth it out.”
“No, it’s just work. But thank you for the offer.” He was silent for a moment, then added, “I’ll be gone a while. A month or two.”
“So, Central’s finally realized you’re wasted on the d-d-demimonde.” Aristide slid his palm across the linen and took up Cyril’s resting hand. “Where are they sending you that required such a sublime manicure?” Cyril’s nails shone, freshly buffed, filed to white-tipped crescents. “I hear that fieldwork can be quite … strenuous. Won’t you only ruin it?” He didn’t have a clear picture of Cyril’s career, but that scar … it marred his skin with a memory of violence. Without thinking, Aristide tightened his grip.
“Not this time,” Cyril said, extricating himself. “At least, I hope not.”
“Are they sending you to woo foreign nobility?” asked Aristide. “Or imp-p-personate a concert pianist, perhaps?”
Cyril flexed his hands self-consciously, curling them into fists to hide his fingernails. “No,” he said, crisp with finality.
Aristide ignored Cyril’s irritation and kept up the banter. “True, I don’t suppose you know how to p-p-play. But you could learn. You’re clever. Culpepper wouldn’t p-p-put up with you, otherwise. And, let’s be honest: neither would I.”
“Ari—”
“So what is it? Or were you just suddenly struck by the shameful state of your cuticles”—here his diction turned sharp, accusatory—“and thought you’d have a shave and haircut at Padgett and Sons while somebody buffed your nails?”
Cyril’s face went slack in surprise, and he looked ten years older.
“Give me some credit,” purred Aristide, low and smooth with malice. “Not that you don’t keep in fine trim on your own, but even a common b-b-bootblack would notice the difference. And anyway, the scent of the pomade is unmistakable. You reek of sage and ambergris.” This last comment he kept light, tossed onto the table like a thoughtless tip.
It earned him a scowl. “Maybe I just decided to treat myself.”
“Cyril, p-p-please. From one professional liar to another, d-d-don’t work tired. Your t-t-t-technique suffers.” He finished his coffee. He’d been hoping for the gratification of Cyril’s trust, but settled for his shock instead. “Now. Why don’t we retire somewhere more p-p-private, and you can tell me all about Nuesklend.” Because of course it was Nuesklend. Aristide paid enough attention to politics to know what was at stake there.
Cyril’s expression settled between fury and affection. “Why do I consistently underestimate you?”
Aristide pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “A p-p-pretty face will do that. You, of all p-p-people, ought to know.”
* * *
Aristide had always been an insomniac. Usually, it didn’t bother him—he lived in a good city for wakeful people. But now he stared dry-eyed into the cavern of drapery above his bed. Beside him, Cyril’s sleep was fitful, more so than usual. Aristide was used to the twitches, the soft dream mutterings, but tonight Cyril was sweating, his face drawn into a deep frown.
It wasn’t unwarranted. Besides Cyril’s obvious misgivings about his upcoming trip, they’d sniped and hissed at each other on the walk back from the Crabtree House. Cyril accused Aristide of interrogation. Aristide acted grossly offended, but they both knew it was true. The upshot was that Cyril hadn’t told Aristide much about where he was going, or why.
They’d put fighting aside at the door to the flat. No use in wasting what time they had left.
Low against the column of Aristide’s spine, a tight muscle that had been threatening all evening finally curled into a spasm. He bit back a curse. Careful not to disturb Cyril, he eased himself up against the headboard and reached for the drawer of his bedside table. The chemist on Barley Street had mixed him a tincture of morphine and valerian to help with sleeplessness and back pain. He rarely used it for the former, but had needed it more and more for the latter.
Ten drops later, he set the bottle aside and closed his eyes, waiting impatiently for relief. He was just drifting off when Cyril jerked and came awake with a strangled yelp. Aristide startled, undoing all the good the drugs had wrought on his recalcitrant muscles.
“Sorry.” Cyril’s voice was hoarse and thick. A bar of light coming between the curtains showed his cheeks were wet.
He seemed to realize it too, and slashed at his face with the heel of his palm. “Damnation.” He took a deep, uneven breath, and went limp against the pillows. After a long moment spent considering the canopy above, he ran a shaky hand through his hair and looked at Aristide, and the bottle on the nightstand. “Trouble sleeping?”
Aristide nodded, his neck stiff. “My back.”
“Turn over.”
He complied, folding his arms and tucking his face into the crook of his elbow. Cyril lifted the covers away, exposing the aching length of Aristide’s back to the cold. Aristide felt the movement of air over his spine, and then the pad of Cyril’s thumb pushed into the center of the spasm. Aristide groaned. “Perdition.”
Cyril dug in harder, and Aristide could only exhale and blink against the pain. Tense muscles uncoiled like a knot of angry snakes teased apart. “They’d better count those ballots quickly. I’ll pay Culpepper very well to make sure you’re reassigned to—oof—my beat.” A tingling jolt ran down Aristide’s leg, and his foot twitched. “Cyril,” he said. Then, “Cyril.”
The pressure on his back let up, fast. “Too hard?”
“No. You’re just quiet.”
“Sorry.” Cyril’s hands settled into a rhythm again. After a moment, he said, “I haven’t had one of those in a while. Not since—well.”
Aristide turned his head so his cheek rested on his forearm, and he could see Cyril’s face. “Nightmares?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Oh, no. I’ve had plenty of those. Just … I haven’t woken myself up screaming.”
“More of a
squeak.”
Cyril’s smile was haunted, and he didn’t meet Aristide’s eyes. Abruptly, he patted the curve of Aristide’s hip and lay back down, turning his face away.
From their first meeting—outside the theatre, in the rain, after weeks of cat and mouse through various informants—Aristide had never asked questions. He didn’t want to hear Cyril’s answers. What he knew was secondhand, through reliable sources, and that was enough. It let him separate his own Cyril from the Foxhole’s.
He suspected Cyril practiced the same delicate art of compartmentalization. There was the Aristide lying beside him in bed—the charming performer and monarch of the demimonde—and there was the other Aristide, the one he was supposed to arrest and interrogate. The one whose life and livelihood he was meant to raze.
They both knew where the boundaries lay. It was impossible to love someone when you spent your time digging at their secrets in the hopes of undermining their career. And vice versa. But suddenly this Cyril, his Cyril, was crying out in his sleep because the other Cyril was afraid.
Aristide swallowed another ten drops of opiate, and considered his scruples.
When the tension began to drain from his limbs, he slid back beneath the covers. Wrapping himself around the fetal curve of Cyril’s spine, Aristide slipped an arm into the divot of his waist, pulling him close.
“Did you know.” Cyril choked, swallowed, and tried again. “Did you know, it’s even odds on your life when they pull your belly open and find your guts torn apart?”
Aristide did not let his hand stray down to the tough length of scarring that bisected Cyril’s middle, but some small movement must have telegraphed his curiosity. Cyril exhaled: not quite laughter, but not a sigh.
“They told me they had to pull everything out into a bucket and scrub my insides clean with salt water. My belly was filled with shit. If I had gone another day like that, I would have died.”
Aristide wondered what, or who, had come so close to ending Cyril’s life. The scar had been fresh when they met, but they were more careful with their mysteries then. “Darling,” he said, “I’m sure this time—”
“I never used to think about it.” Cyril’s interjection came fast, like he had to speak before he could stop to think about it. “Dying. I suppose I didn’t think I would. And then I almost did, and I realized I … Ari, I’m not sure I want to do it anymore.”
Uncomfortable with this sudden breakdown in their careful protocol, and trying for levity, Aristide said, “I rather think it’s the sort of thing you can only do once.”
“That wasn’t what I…” Cyril shook his head. “No. Never mind.”
Ashamed, Aristide pulled Cyril closer; close enough to feel the edges of his shoulder blades when he breathed. “I’m sorry. Facetious remarks are a nasty habit to break.” He buried his nose in Cyril’s hair, breathing in the scents of cigarettes and sage. “It will be fine, I’m sure. Nobody’s going to kill you. It’s just a little bit of politics: flirtation and double-talk.”
“Maybe they ought to send you.”
“Cheeky.” Aristide’s lips brushed the fine stubble at the base of Cyril’s skull, snipped short by the barber. “This is politics. I loathe politics.” It got him a laugh, at least. “You’ll handle it beautifully, whatever it is. The Ospies haven’t got a chance.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Cyril’s rooms in Nuesklend were freezing. Ocean currents kept the west coast temperate during the winter, but did nothing for the damp cold that pervaded every stone. And the capital was practically made of the stuff. Quarried from the Cultham Mountains, the gray slabs breathed mineral chill. Cyril tipped the bellhop who brought up his luggage, but didn’t let the man take his hat or overcoat.
He drew a chair up to the radiator and set his feet on the metal only to find it cold. Cursing, he searched for the valve, already fed up with Nuesklend.
On the long train ride from Amberlough City, where the false trail of Landseer’s journey left off and Cyril’s real one began, he’d composed a set of letters letting his correspondents know he had arrived in Nuesklend. When the train stopped at the state line in the village of Büllen, Cyril asked about good hotels in the capital, and had them wire ahead to the best one they could find.
On arrival, he’d posted the letters at the desk, collected his keys, and asked for a bath before bed. Outside his window, the last shreds of sunset colored the horizon. The sea was a dark plane, and seemed still until Cyril closed his eyes and listened. Waves struck the gravel shore and receded, rhythmic as breath.
The attendant who came to run his bath left a letter on the card table. Before Cyril abandoned himself to soap and steam, he slit the seal on the envelope and read his correspondence. From Rotherhite: an invitation to lunch at his club tomorrow. He’d got that one off fast. They really were slavering after Landseer’s money. Well, if they’d bought the whole of Nuesklend’s police force, or even just the capital hounds, they’d be nearly skint.
Cyril left his response for the morning, dropped his traveling clothes in a heap on the washroom floor, and sank into the deep brass tub.
* * *
Rotherhite’s club, the Klipsee, was farther up from the hotel on the steep cliff road that wound around the capital’s heart. Cyril, his legs still cramped from traveling, chose to walk it. A changeable sky spat brief showers, but the wind precluded an umbrella. He turned up his collar and tried to keep to sheltered side streets. Still, every now and then his route afforded him an ocean vista of frothing waves and gray rocks like broken teeth. Across the widemouthed harbor, where the wharves clung to a crimp of stone, dozens of ships rocked at their berths.
Ospie propaganda painted Nuesklend and Amberlough as wicked twins, exclusive economic gatekeepers; but in this colorless limpet of a city, Cyril saw nothing that reminded him of home.
He arrived at the Klipsee raw-cheeked but refreshed, in body if not in spirit, and gave his name. It wasn’t the first time he’d called himself Landseer—he’d been using it with every ticket taker and customs clerk on his journey west—but it felt different now, and it got a different reaction. Obsequious staff showed him to a quiet, dark-paneled room, offering him coffee, brandy, and some sort of absurdly red local liqueur.
Two men arrived shortly after Cyril’s coffee. A tall, underweight character with a severe mustache—“Willem Rotherhite. It’s good to meet you at last, Mr. Landseer!”—and a doughy man with a bland round face and thinning hair. Cyril recognized him, from the photograph in his file, but let himself be introduced.
“This is Konrad Van der Joost,” said Rotherhite. “An associate of mine.”
“Textiles?” asked Cyril.
“If only,” said Van der Joost, casting his pale eyes around the richness of the room. “No, we’re in the same chapter of the One State Party.”
“Oh, Konrad, let’s not get into it just yet. We’ve got a month or so to get our friend to open up his wallet. Have a brandy first, Seb, and let’s hear about Ibet. I’ll wager the slopes were fine, this time of year, and the schoolgirls finer. They all go up to the mountains for mid-quarter break, from the university. I studied for a few years there, back in my halcyon days.”
Cyril admitted the skiing had been excellent, but kept mum on the condition of the students. He’d read the letters; Landseer was cautious at first, socially. Even with a few years’ worth of correspondence, this was his first meeting with Rotherhite in person, and he’d never spoken to Van der Joost. Crass remarks could wait until Landseer was more comfortable.
They chatted for an hour or so, and lunched on bass and plovers’ eggs. Cyril let himself be talked into a glass of the scarlet digestif, which turned out to be tart cherry bounce—a Nuesklend specialty. Conversation was trivial. When Rotherhite checked his watch over brandy and declared it was time for his next appointment, Cyril shook his hand and accepted an invitation to dine at his home later in the week.
“I’ll have some of the others round,” he said, “K
eeler and her girls, and maybe old Berhooven. I’m sure they’d love to see you in the flesh. The young misses Keeler especially.” His wink was theatrical, almost flirtatious, but not in the way Aristide’s would have been. Cyril had a pang, and ignored it.
Van der Joost lingered after Rotherhite had gone. Cyril smoked and swirled his brandy, waiting for the other man to make some conversation. When it came, it made him catch his breath.
“You know, you’re not at all what I expected.” Van der Joost was busy slicing the end of a cigar, and didn’t see Cyril flinch. “From Rotherhite’s description of your letters.”
“Really?” He steadied himself with a sip of brandy. Not blown, not yet. “You thought I’d be … what? Older? Less charming?”
Van der Joost smiled around his cigar, puffing against the wick of an elaborate table lighter. “I can’t say I’m sorry you defied my expectations.”
“Well, Mr. Van der Joost,” said Cyril, grinding out his straight, “I’ll endeavor to go on defying them. Good day.”
Van der Joost’s handshake was cold and a little clammy. When Cyril was safely out of the room, he wiped his palm clean on his jacket. The fine dark wool wouldn’t show the sweat.
* * *
Cyril’s walk in the rain caught up with him; he contracted a nasty head cold for the next few days, rereading the Landseer letters and quizzing himself on his four main correspondents. Rotherhite he’d met—a widower, but a bit of a man about town. Then there was Pollerdam, a sober man with keen business skills, not apt to stray far from his factories. Berhooven was full of stories of rowdy weekends and big losses at the gambling table, but he could probably afford to lose.
Keeler was the most interesting. A widow, and Rotherhite said she had children, though she’d never mentioned them in her letters. Acherby hadn’t been too shy when it came to his opinions on working women—he was a raving Hearther evangelist—so Keeler must be supporting the unionists for purely financial reasons. Nuesklend’s mills would profit from lower shipping tariffs.
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