“A late riser. I have to admit, I’m envious.” It was almost too easy to play this part. The words and actions flowed like oil over the top of water, leaving him untouched beneath the veneer of his character.
“I get about as little sleep as you. Nights run late in my line of work.” Cyril raised an eyebrow, and she scoffed. “Please. If I was, you couldn’t afford me.”
He smiled at her grammatical slip-up—she might have climbed out of the Mew, but bits of it clung to her shoes. “You don’t know that.”
“True.” She dragged her gaze up his front, and he could almost feel her fingers catching on the cables of his sweater. “I don’t. What is it you do, Mr. DePaul? Ari didn’t say.”
He fought the urge to look around, make sure no one had heard her use Aristide’s name. “I can’t exactly talk about it.”
“A man of mystery,” she said. “I’m intrigued.”
“Intrigued enough for a second drink?”
“You don’t have to intrigue me for that.”
“Ah, but I’d like to. Even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, necessary.” He waved a waiter over. “Another glass for the lady—actually, leave the bottle. And … oh, hang it. Two of the stuffed lobster tails. And asparagus tips, with white truffle butter.” There was no menu, and if there had been, he wouldn’t have needed it. Bellamy’s was one of Ari’s favorite haunts.
“I was happy with just the fizz,” said Cordelia, as the waiter poured her a second glass.
“To tell the truth, I haven’t eaten yet either. And that’s from a man who was up and out with the sun.” He pulled his napkin from the table and spread it across his lap. “If you can’t do justice to your lobster, please know it won’t go to waste.”
He hadn’t been up early by necessity; he just hadn’t been sleeping well. So far, Culpepper wasn’t asking for anything beyond his initial debriefing. She’d sent him a note telling him to sit on his hands until Hebrides asked to see him. That summons had not been forthcoming.
His other task kept him hopping. Van der Joost had left his base of operations in Nuesklend under the watchful eye of a deputy and had relocated to Amberlough City under the assumed name of Karl Haven.
Cyril didn’t know where he was staying. They’d met a few times in public places, and he had been sending instructions daily and arranging rendezvous as if Cyril was a sponging younger son who needed to be married off. Cyril, who was used to a more lenient approach, ground his teeth and put up with it. The kitty was big in this game, and he had to bring it home.
Time was short, too. Van der Joost wanted things wrapped up by midsummer. Cyril thought it was ambitious, and told him as much. That conversation had been uncomfortable, and ended badly. Like it or not, Cyril was operating under a deadline.
Before lunching with Cordelia, he’d spent a cramped and smoky hour in a private room at the back of a down-market club, listening as the deputy chief of police for the fourth precinct—Eel Town included, poor man—listed his grievances against Taormino and haggled for the price of his service to the unionist cause.
Cyril knew the ACPD intimately: who was susceptible to bribery, who was not. Who had long-standing grudges, and who could be torn apart with a well-placed word. The fourth district would be easy to snatch, from the top. Getting the hounds on the beat to crack down on unlicensed pros … harder, especially when they made it so profitable for the force to turn blind eyes.
He realized he’d let his conversation stutter to a halt. When he looked up from smoothing the spotless napkin over his knees, Cordelia was watching him. She had her fingers pressed against rouged lips, her free hand hooked into the crook of the opposite elbow.
“You look sort of familiar,” she said.
“Would you believe I hear that all the time?”
“Must be you look like somebody in the pictures,” she said, so preoccupied her syntax slipped. “Come to think of it, you’re a dead ringer for Solomon Flyte. You know him? Murdered by his girl a few years back.”
“Are you trying to insinuate something, Miss Lehane?”
She smiled a cat’s smile, her carmine lips pulling into a shallow vee. “Don’t worry, Mr. DePaul. I ain’t that dangerous.”
* * *
A few hours and a second bottle of champagne later, they parted ways. Cyril left Cordelia with a promise to ring her up soon. She didn’t have a card, so she wrote her number and exchange on the back of one of Bellamy’s matchbooks and tucked it into his pocket. When she got close, he smelled cheap perfume and the faint chemical scent of her freshly dyed curls. She had a wrap around her arms, but it left her freckled shoulders bare.
“Will you be warm enough on the ride home?” he asked. “I like this suit, but I’d part with my jacket if your need was greater. As long as you promised to return it sometime.”
“Keep it, Mr. DePaul. I’ll be just fine.”
“It’s Cyril,” he said.
The trolley slipped by, speeding up as it headed west from the Armament transfer down the road. With the ease of a born Amberlinian, Cordelia stepped off the curb and reached for the handrail. In one smooth motion, she was up on the rear steps. She blew him a kiss as the trolley crested Seagate Hill. He waved back, but she had already disappeared over the rise.
He strolled home through Loendler Park, in the opposite of a hurry. Wandering led him to the famous lilac walk that lined each approach to the park’s central fountain. Decades of careful tending had produced four straight allées of uniform lilac trees. Their canopies burst like champagne from the necks of slender bottles. Fragrance from the drooping bunches of flowers lingered in the air, soft and sugary sweet. He tossed a coin into the rippling water of the fountain’s pool, checked his watch, and sighed.
Dusk had gathered by the time he arrived at home. He put down his post and poured two fingers of rye against the chill spring evening. The glass beckoned from the sideboard while he shucked off wet socks and outerwear in exchange for slippers and a smoking jacket. The post sat beside his drink, less inviting, but more important.
He turned the radiator valve, raising the heat in the drawing room, and put a record on the gramophone. With Aster Amappah’s clarinet crooning along above her big band, Cyril settled across his sofa. He propped his head up on a throw pillow, envelopes and telegrams piled on his chest. Bills and business correspondence he discarded for later perusal. There was a letter from his sister in Porachis, where she was stationed with the diplomatic corps. Her son had added a postscript in blocky child’s writing: a crooked heart in blue crayon, “Uncle Cy” cramped within its lobed confines. He smiled and almost laid the letter aside on the coffee table. But he saw what was behind it first.
The thick, plain envelope was addressed by typewriter. All his unionist communiques came like this—unidentifiable, in cheap but sturdy packets, with no hint about what lay within. No postage, either. Likely they came by courier, to avoid Foxhole interference.
The fine grain of Lillian’s letterhead lay against the Ospie envelope like silk against rough skin. He ran his thumb over the lines of his nephew’s drawing, fighting sudden apprehension.
They would be fine. They were far away. Lillian was high-ranking and very, very good at what she did. They wouldn’t approach her. And if they dared, she would maneuver neatly out of the trap. She had never gotten in trouble when they were children, even when she was naughty. It was always Cyril who ended up locked in his room without his supper, depending on Lillian to sneak him some.
Sighing, he set aside her letter and picked up his whiskey. After a drink, he tore the Ospie envelope open: fast, like removing a sticking plaster from a healing wound.
Another envelope fell out, this one soft and cream-colored, sealed with a gold stamp. It was wrapped in a piece of onionskin paper, spidery with writing. Cyril unfolded the note and read it through, then opened the second envelope.
It contained a heavy piece of card stock, velvety smooth and embossed with more gold. The Honorable Baroness I Fa requested the
honor of his presence at a musical evening featuring the acclaimed Asunan contralto Ms. Srai Sin.
The party was in three days. The instructions said Cyril’s reply had gone out last week; of course he would attend. Deputy Police Commissioner Alex Müller’s wife was an intimate friend of the baroness. Müller would likely be accompanying her to the soiree.
Van der Joost’s people were good at what they did; there was no denying. Cyril didn’t have anyone on Maxine Müller. He was trying to run a network without a stable of agents, and he couldn’t be everywhere all the time. But it still grated that the Ospies had scooped him on this one.
There was bad blood between Müller and Commissioner Taormino—the latter had gone from deputy chief of police in the third precinct straight to her current position, crushing Müller in the citywide election; there were rumblings of graft and underhanded favors. More importantly, Müller’s wife was a close friend to expatriate nobility. The Ospies were nationalist to an ugly fault; connections to foreigners would not behoove anyone once Acherby took power. In addition, the baroness was a known associate of one Aristide Makricosta.
Müller was a straitlaced policeman, so bribery was out. But if he could be won over to the Ospie cause, by persuasive argument or some less pleasant means, he could be controlled through his wife’s close friendship with an undesirable alien.
The record finished playing. Cyril set aside his correspondence and covered his face with his hand, listening to the hiss of the gramophone needle on ungrooved shellac.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Cordelia had just arrived in her dressing room and sat down to supper when Malcolm barged in without knocking. She ought to put a lock on the door if he was going to keep this up.
Spinning around in her makeup chair, she faced him and demanded, “What do you want?”
“Smells like an Asunan flophouse in here.”
Cordelia reached back for one of her spicy pork skewers and bit off a mouthful of juicy meat, grilled crispy on the outside and rubbed with garlic and hot peppers. She chewed slowly, waiting for him to lay out whatever was bruising him.
“Telephone call for you,” he said. “In my office.”
She swallowed the pork and got up, licking her fingers clean. Malcolm followed her down the hall, needling her like a Market Street heckler. “What makes you think you can give out my office line to your johns?”
“Who said he was a john? When have you known me to hire out?”
“I know you done it.”
“And you know I ain’t doin’ it now.” She shoved him aside.
“How am I supposed to?” he demanded. “How am I supposed to know you ain’t been taking three bits a jockey ever since I picked you up?”
“You didn’t pick me up,” she spat, bracing herself across the entrance to his office. “You begged for me.” And then she slammed the door in his face and shot the bolt home. Because of course he had a lock.
“Delia!” His fist came down against the wood and made it rattle. “Delia, damnation! Open the rotten door!”
She sat in his chair: a rolling, swiveling throne of ripped leather that stank of old civet cologne and stale cigarettes. Drawing her feet underneath her rear, she picked up the earpiece of the telephone and leaned in to speak.
“Hello?”
“Miss Lehane?”
“Cyril,” she crooned, drawing out the “l” with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Who was that character that picked up the ’phone? I couldn’t tell if he was your husband, or a tight-fisted landlord.”
“Neither,” she said. “You’re lucky he didn’t hang up on you.”
“He did; I called back. Twice.”
She laughed into the mouthpiece, glad he couldn’t smell the garlic on her breath. “Sorry about that. He’s my boss.”
“This is your work exchange? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no,” she said, “it’s all right. I gave it to you.” Then, pulling a face, she admitted, “I ain’t got a telephone at home.” Now he knew that, she might as well slip back into the cant.
“I’ll send a telegram next time,” he said, “if you’ll give me your address.”
She gritted her teeth. Her flat was in a bad part of town. Not as bad as her childhood Mew, or Eel Town, but not exactly Harbor Terrace, either. “What’s the occasion?” she asked, trying to put him off. “For the call, I mean.”
“I was wondering if you’d like to meet me tomorrow afternoon for the cherry blossoms.”
She hadn’t been to see the famous cherry trees of the central city in … well, not since she was a kid. She’d noted them in passing—they were hard to rotten miss, once they got going—but it had been a long time since she took a good stroll under the branches. And never with such a fine gentleman on her arm. “Sounds like a treat.”
“Around noon?” he asked. “Or is that too early?”
“Better make it half one. I’ll meet you at the Van der See Arch. Sound good?” Malcolm hammered on the door again.
“Perfect,” said DePaul. “What is that racket?”
“Workmen,” she replied. “Sorry. See you tomorrow, then?”
“Time will drag.”
She snorted at his smarm, and hung up. Was all this some kind of scam? What was Ari getting out of it? What did Cyril expect?
Whatever the two of them were hoping for, she had money in her pocket. And if things kept up like this, she and Ari might work out a tidy arrangement. Ongoing. Lucrative.
“Are you good and done yet?” shouted Malcolm. “Get your worthless ass out of my office and go put it in some tasseled panties—we got punters coming in.”
Now she was off the ’phone, she let her voice rise sharply. “Mother’s tits, anyone’d think you’re about to wet yourself and this was the only washroom.” She opened the door. “Though mind you, the way it smells … Lucia must have a time scrubbing it. Probably worse than changing the sheets at Mama Filetti’s.”
“At least she’s not liable to get the clap cleaning up after me.” Malcolm pushed past her and prowled around his desk, as if he was trying to figure out what she’d stolen or soiled. “Your little warren, though … I hope she wears her thickest gloves.”
“Go yank yourself,” she said, and turned tail.
* * *
She remembered to set her alarm clock when she got home, and sure enough, it rang her out of sleep at noon. She broke off some stale bread from the loaf on the mantel and coated it with butter, going off but still edible.
Once she’d splashed her hands clean in the basin on the dry sink, she went to pick through the pile of clothes on the foot of her bed. She needed something that said good girl, but not too good. Whatever Ari had told this punter, she didn’t want to come off like a racehorse, but she didn’t want to look too buttoned up, either. Let him think he might get a squeeze or two. Oh, hang it, he was easy on the eyes; she might let him.
When she’d finally painted up her face and put herself in harness, it was going on one and she looked likely to be late. Well, she’d never met a man who didn’t like to be kept waiting. They squealed about it like bit-pinching fishwives, but they loved thinking she’d put in all that work for them.
On Talbert Street, the trolley whisked beneath the hanging branches of the cherry trees, stirring up a wake of petals. When Cordelia stepped off the trolley, the heels of her shoes sank a quarter inch in fallen flowers.
She let her scarf slip down around her neck, baring her loosely gathered hair. She knew it was garish, but it was also a calling card. Nobody forgot that shade of red. Sure enough, not half a minute passed before Cyril spotted her from the park gate and waved her over.
“I thought we’d go down to Blossom Street,” he said, “and walk to the Ionidous Arch. Then we can cut through the park and come back to Talbert Row for a late lunch.”
“Suits like a tailor.” She’d find out what he was after,
but she’d try and wait till after they ate. No sense marring a free meal with business.
“Good.” He offered her his arm, and they started down the street through a soft snow of petals.
* * *
In the park, they took a footpath along the side of a wooded riding trail. Naked oaks stood tall between the tender green of smaller trees. A horse whinnied from the trails in the ramble, and the thin sound reached them through the forest. The air was still nippy in the shade, and Cordelia buttoned up her coat. Cyril surprised her with an arm around her shoulders. A woman on a glossy hunter cantered past, spraying mulch as she sped toward a jump.
“Do you ride?” Cyril asked, and she couldn’t help snorting. “Me neither,” he said. “Not for years, anyway.”
Swells. You had to laugh or you’d want to slug ’em.
They came out of the woods into a sea of tulips. A breeze made the flowers sway, top-heavy and bright. Cordelia caught her breath.
“Spring’s my favorite time to walk here,” said Cyril.
Cordelia turned a full circle, taking in the view. “And no wonder.”
A wide gravel path divided the flower beds, following a gentle slope down to the shores of the lake. The water lilies weren’t blooming yet, but the drooping branches of the willows dusted the currents with pollen. A pair of russet swans floated across the open water. Ripples spread where their wakes crossed.
“You know the swans were a gift from a Niori ambassador?” he asked. “They’re protected by a state endowment. The gamekeepers take them indoors before the first frost. There’s a special outbuilding hidden in the ramble.”
As if they’d been listening, the pale copper-pink birds drifted closer. Probably looking for breadcrumbs, the greedy things.
Cyril led her along the shore until they reached a small, curved bench of painted iron. He gestured for her to sit, then lowered himself into the space beside her. The side of his thigh touched hers, warm and solid. The metal was cold on her rear.
“Cordelia,” he said.
“Hm?” She looked away from the swans, who had figured out there was no bread in this for them and were back to dipping their dark beaks between the lily pads.
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