“Probably,” Folkestone admitted.
Phylus-Zant grinned. “Capital! I knew as soon as I saw you, you were a prince among humans, a man above your breed, a man whose word was his…”
“Can it, as Sergeant Hand would say,” Folkestone snapped.
Phylus-Zant shrugged. He did not understand the idiom, but he caught the gist of it. “If you have no further questions, I had better start packing a few trunks, just some necessities to help me make a new start elsewhere. I shan’t enjoy living among aliens, but life must take precedence over sensibilities.” He sighed wistfully. “I’d rather start out with Alza-Lo, but…ah, well. Should you find the rascal, you can have him.”
“The names of the smugglers you used,” Folkestone prompted.
“Smuggler is such an ugly word, don’t you think?”
“I feel my gratitude waning.”
“Don’t be like that, Captain,” Phylus-Zant pouted. “Allow me what remains of my dignity. I need to get the information from the outer office, but grant me two things, Captain.”
“You’re in no position to set conditions.”
“Yes, I am at your mercy, Captain Folkestone, I know that, but humor me, please.”
“What are the conditions?”
“After I give you the names, please wait two hours before you do whatever you are going to do,” Phylus-Zant asked. “One of those names is my escape route. It would be most awkward if he learned of my betrayal too soon. Once I am outbound to…well, wherever I can get to, it will hardly matter what either you or Baphor-Ta do. He can hardly interfere with my flight once he is in custody, can he?”
“One hour,” Folkestone offered.
“Very well,” Phylus-Zant sighed. “If I am not mistaken, there is an applicable saying among you humans—beggars cannot be choosers. How true, unfortunately.”
“And the second thing you want?”
“When we go in the outer office, let me clear it of workers.” He thought a moment. “And please keep your Highlander away from me. I do not want witnesses, and I do not like the way your Sergeant looked at me. You know how those Highlanders are. And don’t give that knife back to him until you are well away from here.”
“Agreed,” Folkestone said. “Let’s go. The sooner you provide those names, the sooner you can be on your way.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Phylus-Zant gushed. “You’ll not regret your kindness to me.”
“I already do.”
“But…”
“Do not worry, Phylus-Zant, you have my word as an officer and a gentleman, and there is no greater bond in the Solar System,” Folkestone assured him. As Phylus-Zant started out, Folkestone gripped his arm and half turned him about. “Wherever you end up, dig yourself a deep hole, for Baphor-Ta and the Temple sects will be told of your crimes. And you know their tenaciousness.”
“But you promised!”
“You are getting what you asked for, and only that.”
Phylus-Zant sighed. “I suppose I can ask only for so much. At least, once I am well away, they’ll never be able to reach me. But I believe I will take your advice and dig a very deep hole.”
They entered the outer office, and Phylus-Zant sent all his clerks and aides scurrying like moss-beetles exposed to the light. He clapped his hands, yelled and shouted, drove the confused clerks from the office in a mad rush, both his slaves and the few freemen he employed. Folkestone pulled Hand off to the side.
“Everything work out, sir?” Hand asked.
“Very well,” Folkestone replied. “We’re giving him an hour’s head start in getting off Mars.”
“Baphor-Ta won’t like that.”
“No, no he won’t,” Folkestone agreed. “But he will cheer up when he gets his hands on the names all the major smugglers, and breaks up a ring dealing in black market Martian relics.”
“Cor!”
“Phylus-Zant is looking this way,” Folkestone said. “Scowl or snarl or something.”
The merchant tuned away quickly, then bent down and started to open a heavy safe.
“Orange in the face, eh?” Folkestone smiled. “That was a very nice touch. It convinced him more thoroughly than anything I could have said to him.”
“Thank you, sir.” Then he said: “Oh, sir, my knife please.”
Folkestone shook his head. “I have to hold on to it till we are away from here. That was one of the conditions, along with the head start. You were quite convincing.”
Sergeant Felix Hand grinned apishly.
“And when we approach him, stay behind me and away from him,” Folkestone warned. “That was another condition.”
“Perhaps I missed my calling as an actor, sir.”
Folkestone shrugged. “Iago or Caliban?”
“Actually, sir,” Hand said with a hurt look, “I was thinking more on the lines of Romeo.”
Phylus-Zant stood up from the safe and faced the two men. Hand moved behind Folkestone, as the Captain had asked, but only slightly behind. He still had a good view of Phylus-Zant and the expression on his fat face, one of anxiety mixed with fear.
They heard a tinkling sound, glass breaking. Suddenly, all the anxiety and fear vanished from Phylus-Zant’s face, replaced by faint surprise. Then his eyes rolled upward, blood dribbled from a corner of his mouth, and he slowly crumpled to the floor. They saw the shattered window behind him and heard the crack of the rifle that had fired the bullet.
Folkestone and Hand already clung fast to the floor when more bullets burst through the windows of the outer office. Folkestone returned fire in the general direction of the shots while Hand crab-scuttled across the floor. Hand fired his revolver, and Folkestone joined him.
“Can we see what we’re shooting at yet?” Folkestone asked.
Hand shook his head. “No, sir. But whoever it is, they have to be by those crates over there to fire in like they did.” He looked to the unmoving mass of Phylus-Zant. “Shooting at him or us?”
More bullets flew through the windows.
“Six of one, a half-dozen of the other, I think.”
“Give me my knife,” Hand said.
Folkestone looked at him.
“Sir,” the Martian added.
He frowned, but passed him the great knife. “Are you planning to do something brash and reckless, perhaps a little foolish?”
“Just a little,” Hand admitted. He handed the Captain his revolver. “People are more afraid of blades than they are of bullets.”
“Speak for yourself, Sergeant.” He glanced over the edge of the sill. “Covering fire, I suppose?”
“If you would be so kind, sir.”
“At the very least you’ll get that,” Folkestone promised.
“Sir, it won’t do for both of us to be brash and reckless,” Hand observed. “Perhaps a little foolish.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” Folkestone replied, noticing Hand did seem quite a bit ‘orange in the face’ now, and he doubted it was an act. “Do have a care about yourself, Sergeant. You take a bullet in that clockwork heart of yours this time, and it will be pure luck and the grace of God if an artificer can get it ticking again.”
Hand made no reply. He was too busy concentrating on the ancient war hymns and battle paeans of his Highland ancestors, conjuring the images and symbols of antiquity. Though much had been lost with the rise of the Lowland civilizations and the coming of other cultures from the worlds beyond Mars, much still remained, the blood lust that still lurked in the hearts of every Highlander, no matter how sated or degenerate. And in a man like Sergeant Felix Hand, who had found a life among aliens, those ancient urges were never very far away.
He became orange in the face as hot blood flushed through him. To him, it seemed an orange veil fell over the world. His lips moved without volition, muttering ancient theurgic chants said to channel the ancestral blood wrath from Amduat, the realm of heroes.
With a scream that chilled friend and foe alike, Hand burst from cover running toward the pile of c
rates and bales behind which their assailants had to be hidden. As soon as Hand was on his way, Folkestone popped up, fired two shots, then followed in the wake of the Sergeant, aiming vaguely and firing quickly.
Long before Hand ever came close to slicing and dicing the enemy, they fled from their hiding place, leaping off the dock and into a steam launch below. They were in mid-canal and moving off swiftly by the time Hand reached the edge of the dock, the Captain seconds behind him. Folkestone grabbed the Sergeant and yanked him back to keep him from leaping into the canal and swimming after those who had tried to kill them.
The Martian whipped around, fiery murder in his eyes, knife raised. Folkestone slapped him across the face, hard. He staggered back, but when he came back he was not quite so orange in the face, the primal berserker rage of the ancient Highlander replaced by the bland expression of a British non-commissioned officer.
Hand started to speak when Folkestone suddenly pulled him to the rough surface of the dock. The men on the steam launch were out of range of their handguns, but they were still just in range of the rifles on the steam launch. They sat up and saw the steam launch vanishing in the distance.
“You saw, sir?”
Folkestone nodded. “Tanaka and Zimmer. We’ll alert the canal patrol, but they’ll abandon that launch as soon as they can. Since all our security forces and those of the Court are already looking for them, there is not much else to do about those two.”
Hand stood, groaning as he did.
“Sergeant, what is wrong with…” Looking down at Hand’s tunic, Folkestone grimaced. “You’ve been shot.”
“Have I?” He touched his side and his hand came away a deep ochre. “I guess I have, sir.”
“We’d better get you to an artificer.”
“I think a surgeon will do nicely, sir,” Hand said, sheathing his hungry knife, sorry he had not been able to feed it. “This time it seems only a flesh wound. In and out. A few stitches of catgut, and I’ll be good to go.”
“Shall we let the surgeon decide that?” They started back to the merchant house of the late Phylus-Zant. “We’ll get that list of his smuggling contacts, take care of you, then give the information to Baphor-Ta and the Admiralty.”
“Well, there’s one good thing what’s come out of this, sir?”
“And what’s that, Sergeant?”
“Phylus-Zant won’t need that head start after all,” Hand said, chuckling despite the pain it caused.
“No, Sergeant Hand,” Folkestone agreed. “Phylus-Zant does not need anything now…except mourners.”
“Well, you can’t have everything, can you, sir?”
* * *
The Pigalle Quarter of Paris was ablaze with gaslight as well as many of the new electrics built into flashing signs that extolled the sins and pleasures available to the curious and the adventurous. Women beckoned from doorways and alleys, from beneath glaring lights that revealed every perfection and flaw.
Marie Poulpe kept close to Chief Inspector Ethan Slaughter as they made their way down the avenue, and Slaughter kept her close to him. She had never seen such a blatant display of wantonness and impiety, but the resolution she had to bring her father’s murderer to justice steeled her. For Slaughter, it was just a matter a degree, Soho to the tenth power. He gritted his teeth.
They passed a café out of which spilled the most raucous music and screams and laughter. It was evidently full of revelers and more were trying to push their way in. The most startling thing about this Parisian café was its doorway, set into the mouth of a massive grinning demon. Slaughter was not surprised when he read the sign above the demonic mouth: Café de l’Enfer—Hell’s Café.
Slaughter and Marie turned off the main avenue and into the public square. Ahead, he saw their goal, the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, where the man Forgeron was supposed to meet them. The entrance to the café was at the intersection of two streets, where the building was flat, as if someone had neatly sliced off the corner of the two-story structure,
Slaughter had been given no indication what intelligence Forgeron would share, but he suspected the man was an agent of Section 6, either someone inserted into France at some point in the past or, more likely, a Frenchman made to serve England’s interests by means of money, blackmail or feminine wiles. Slaughter was under no illusion about the dubious ethics of Section 6, but, despite his clash of conscience, he knew he had no choice but be a reluctant servitor in the organization’s defense of the realm.
Slaughter knew little about the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, so he was forced to ask Marie. He had been initially reluctant to involve her in a situation which he himself loathed. He felt being responsible for her would hinder his own actions, but she had so far proven herself a valuable and quick-witted companion, whose knowledge of the City of Lights and its varied inhabitants was much greater than his own. Though their investigation through the long day had yielded almost no actionable information, he still counted the day a profitable one, and perhaps not as long as it might have otherwise seemed.
“The Café de la Nouvelle Athènes is perhaps a cut above the other establishments infesting the Pigalle Quartier, though they likely share much of the same clientele,” Marie explained. “From what I understand it is quite the bohemian crowd—writers, poets, artists, and crazed engineers of the type who continually search for the chimera of mouvement perpétuel. Who is this man, Forgeron, we are to meet, that he would feel at home here?”
Slaughter shrugged. “I couldn’t say, Marie, except that he’s probably mad. Most of the people who get involved with Section 6 are mad as hatters, and I include myself in that.”
Marie smiled at Slaughter’s remark. She had started out the day thinking of him as an enemy, a foreign agent somehow involved in the death of her father. Having failed to inveigle any information from him or to discover anything of value in his hotel room, she had trailed him about, hoping he would lead her to someone who might have answers to the questions she burned to ask. Though at first she had cursed her own incompetence, blundering into her father’s secret residence while Slaughter was still there, she now understood it was the best thing that could have happened. She now knew more than she would have ever learned on her own, relying on her own instincts and the assistance of those who would say anything for enough money.
And this man from Scotland Yard, this Ethan Slaughter, was not at all what she had expected from an Englishman, much less a Detective Chief Inspector. Ruthless in pursuit of truth, he did not let anyone keep from him the information he wanted, yet there was also a gentle side to him, one which empathized with the travails of others. Admittedly, her experience with the English was limited, just a few girls at the Swiss school, whom she considered morveux; as far as Detective Chief Inspectors from Scotland Yard went, her familiarity was even more superficial, gleaned entirely from the pages of tawdry and sensational magazines which some girls hid in their notebooks and read only when they were sure the headmistress was not looking.
Detective Chief Inspector Ethan Slaughter compared very well with his fictional counterparts, not being at all dense or dim-witted. And she found him not bad looking, for an older man.
As they approached the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, Slaughter did not notice any undue attention. His gaze slid over the men and women seated at the outdoor tables without seeing anything out of the ordinary. At the last table, almost out range of the gaslamps and the illumination spilling through a window, sat a short man in a long coat, a slouch hat pulled slightly down, reading a newspaper. Slaughter’s attention lingered a bit longer on the man than on any of the other patrons, as if some sense of familiarity had been alerted at a subtle level, but since the man’s gaze was fully concentrated on the pages of the open newspaper Slaughter eventually looked away and they entered the café.
Inside the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, the air was thick with bluish smoke, laughter and murmurs of intense conversation and debate. A thin man with a violin played a bright song. Win
e glasses clinked, and the bubbles in the wine flashed and sparkled, catching the lights of the hissing gaslamps. More than a few of the café’s patrons sipped from bell-shaped glasses containing a green liquid, the infamous absinthe about which Slaughter had often heard but never imbibed.
Marie grabbed his arm, pulled him a little closer and gave him a brilliant smile, the first genuine sign of joy he had seen since first meeting her. She moved her lips close to his ear.
“Oh, it is like the painting,” she murmured, indicating a couple who sat upon a hard bench at a table.
A woman in formal dress and a large hat stared dully ahead. A mostly empty glass of absinthe was before her. To her left sat a man wearing shabby clothing and a shapeless hat. He was unkempt with stringy hair and a rather dodgy beard. His chin was tucked in such a way he might have seemed asleep, but his left hand toyed with a glass of segir. They sat close together, but seemed worlds apart.
“What painting?” he asked.
“Are you familiar with Degas?”
He shook his head.
“Edgar Degas is a painter, sometimes admired, often despised,” she explained. “A few years ago he created an oil painting called ‘Figures sketched at a Parisian café,’ which matches those two in a way that is most uncanny. It was not a painting popular with critics. It was removed from exhibition, but I saw a litho of it when I was going to school here, in a revolutionist paper one of my school friends had…before the headmistress took it away.” She looked around. “I had no idea this was its venue.”
Amidst Dark Satanic Mills (Folkestone & Hand Interplanetary Steampunk Adventures Book 2) Page 16