The Heartless (The Sublime Electricity Book #2)

by Pavel Kornev

  "You're fast!" Elizabeth-Maria snickered acridly on my return, not stopping her dusting.

  "And you, I see, have really taken to housework," I replied, going tit for tat and looking with surprise under my feet, only now noting the bare floor. "What happened to the rug?"

  "The rug?" the girl asked in surprise.

  "Yes, the rug!"

  "Leo, do you take me for a housekeeper? How should I know about your rugs?"

  I frowned and raised my voice:

  "Theodor!"

  "Yes, Viscount?" my butler asked, having come to my call.

  "Theodor, did you take the rug from the entryway?"

  "No, Viscount," my servant answered dispassionately and said nothing further.

  Elizabeth-Maria stared at me with lively curiosity. With a no-less-interested tone, I answered her:

  "And you say you had nothing to do with this either?"

  "That's right," the girl confirmed.

  I'm not sure why, but I believed her. And that put me all the more on alert.

  I walked through the guest room, looking carefully underfoot and soon noticed a long reddish-brown splotch on one of the skirting boards, as if someone had tried hastily to wipe off some spilled red ink. Or blood?

  "Look," I said to Elizabeth-Maria.

  The girl gave a graceful curtsy, scratched it with her long nail, licked her finger and, perplexed, drew out her words:

  "How interesting!"

  "What is it?"

  "Blood," the girl stated her verdict and added: "It’s fresh."

  Theodor's distant tranquility disappeared in a flash.

  "Please!" he flared up. "Only the three of us have been in the manor. Others have no way of even entering! That must have occurred to you, Viscount!"

  "And yet, the rug disappeared, and the floor is dirty with blood," I muttered, continuing to look around the room. At first glance, everything was in place. I didn't manage to detect any other traces of another's presence.

  "Another one of your nightmares, perhaps?" Elizabeth-Maria purred.

  "I do not know," I replied, shrugging my shoulders and looking into the hallway. "Theodor, bring me a lamp!"

  The butler carried out my order and, soon, the uneven light of the bat-like bulb hanging down from my ceiling allowed us to discover another few drops of blood, smeared and partially dry.

  I pulled my Roth-Steyr from its holster and chambered a round. Someone had been in the house uninvited, and I didn't even want to think why they had rolled out the rug. However, the blood on the floor didn't leave me much room for imagination.

  Someone had killed someone else and then covered their tracks.

  But who? And most importantly, who did they kill?

  Theodor armed himself with a poker from the fireplace. Elizabeth-Maria ran for the saber and we followed the bloody spots as if it were a trail of breadcrumbs. This person wasn't particularly precise, so it wasn't a difficult task to discover the reddish-brown spots.

  We breezed through the pantry and closet, turned down the side corridor and Theodor hazarded a guess:

  "The carriage-house!"

  And he was dead on. The drops of blood extended right up to the door from the annex into the carriage-house; unlike many modern homes, my manor had a door directly from the living quarters into the vehicle storage area.

  "Quiet!" I whispered, flinging the door open and stepping in with my pistol at the ready. Theodor quickly came after me and raised the lamp over my head, illuminating the dark garage.

  The leprechaun, caught unawares, peevishly moved his accordioned top hat onto the back of his head, spit his rolled cigarette onto the floor and cursed:

  "Bugger, what bad timing!"

  And it was hard to disagree with him. We’d caught him with a fresh corpse laid out on a workbench, hacksaw in hand. It was, in fact, very bad timing...

  "What the devil?!" I snarled and, ducking my head as not to hit it on the low door jamb, went down the stairs. "What the devil are you doing?"

  The leprechaun didn't answer, though. He tore off his kitchen apron and skillfully leaped out an open window.

  I stuck my pistol in the holster and walked up to the body. Its throat was ripped open from ear to ear. The cadaver was unfamiliar to me, but I could say for sure that it was not an illustrious gentleman. In his dead eyes, the bloody murk of the curse that enveloped my house had already taken hold. The body of an illustrious person wouldn't have capitulated to the Diabolic Plague so quickly.

  "Do you know, Leo...?" Elizabeth-Maria said, drawing out her words with an incomprehensible look on her face, slowly going through the tools the leprechaun had laid out: a hacksaw, a hatchet, a set of utility knives, a small hammer and a chisel, "your fantasies are quite a bit darker than I supposed..."

  I cursed.

  "This isn't my fantasy!"

  "Your nightmare, then?"

  "Come off it!" I retorted with a wave. I then went through the cadaver's belongings on the floor.

  He had a wallet with a few hundred francs, a pair of gloves, and a pen-knife, which didn't arouse any suspicion. But the mask with eye slits, set of lock picks, small crowbar and glass cutter spoke for themselves.

  Someone had tried to break in. What could I say? He picked the wrong house.

  "It occurs to me that the situation is not unambiguous," I muttered, sticking the money in my own wallet.

  "Alright. If you want to think so..." Elizabeth-Maria grinned, amused at everything.

  Theodor remained imperturbable.

  "What shall we do, Viscount?" He asked. "Get rid of the body, or inform the police?"

  I paced through the garage, nervously tapping my fingers on the boxes and trophy weapons, then decided:

  "Bring him to the icehouse."

  "Fresh meat?" the girl cracked up laughing and threw up her hands. "Leo! Don't be so serious, I was only joking!"

  "Alright, I guess," I muttered, spreading out the blood-soaked rug. "Theodor, help!"

  Together, my butler and I lowered the corpse to the floor, wrapped it up and dragged it into the house. Elizabeth-Maria lifted the hatch, so all we had to do was lower the body down and lay it on the ice.

  "This isn't right," my butler said, pursing his lips. "He cannot stay here!"

  "You're right," I agreed, hurriedly leaving the basement; I didn't want to stay down there any longer than necessary.

  "And what will we do with him?" Theodor asked, coming up after me.

  "We'll think something up," I replied, shrugging my shoulders. My plan now was to bring the armored car back here later and take the body out of town.

  Elizabeth-Maria lowered the hatch and inquired acridly:

  "You don't want to ask your imaginary friend what he was planning to do?"

  "I can get by without his advice, thank you very much."

  "Viscount," the butler started. But I cut him off:

  "Later, Theodor! I have business to attend to first."

  Elizabeth-Maria adjusted my neckerchief and smiled:

  "Dear, are you really saying there are more pressing matters than a fresh corpse in the icehouse?"

  "Much more pressing," I confirmed, donning my derby-cap before the mirror and leaving the house.

  3

  MY ATTORNEY'S office was located in one of the faceless towers of glass and concrete that grew up from a new neighborhood in the northern part of the city, which was quickly becoming the center of the Imperial business world. Huge corporations bought whole floors of office buildings there according to their needs. Less well-off companies made do with just individual offices. The successful industrialists considered offices with a view of the historical part of New Babylon especially prestigious; my lawyer's place, though, might as well have been a windowless jail cell.

  A recent graduate from law school, the red-headed and sickly pale young man tore himself from his papers and stretched out his lips into something resembling a warm smile. The greenhorn lawyer wasn't getting a single centime from me, e
ither. He was satisfied just to have the status of Viscount Cruce's attorney, though he did think that gave him the right to do half-assed work. Normally, that didn't bother me. Normally, but not today.

  When the young man began standing up, I pushed him back into his chair, myself taking a seat on the edge of the table.

  "I've got an urgent job. It must be done without delay!" I ordered in a tone that wouldn't bear objection.

  "But, Viscount, I cannot abandon my other clients!" the lawyer protested. He really did seem to have been working on some other papers before my arrival, too.

  I set a check for ten thousand francs in front of him and smiled:

  "Your commission would be ten percent."

  My attorney studied the check and shot me a gaze of amazement.

  "Ten percent?" he asked with badly hidden trepidation.

  "Yes," I confirmed. "Ten percent of ten thousand. But you'll have to work for it."

  The lawyer opened his notepad and inquired:

  "Under what circumstances did you come by the check and on what grounds was it protested?"

  "Unimportant," I said with a wave and jumped back from the table. I then instructed:

  "File a suit to recover the whole value of the check. And just in case, ask for an injunction against the Count's bank accounts, his suburban estate and his dirigible, Syracuse. Also, you must put out a search notice for the dirigible immediately."

  "But, Viscount!" my attorney protested. "For a sum such as that, these are rather extreme measures..."

  "If the suit can’t make the Count pay in cash, we'll have no choice but to follow the accepted procedure and wait out the funds from the sale of his property. I wouldn't like that. Would you?"

  The lawyer shook his head and bleated out indecisively:

  "But the dirigible?"

  "My uncle may attempt to flee to the continent by air. If we can deprive him of his means of transportation, he'll be a lot more ready to negotiate."

  "And if he voluntarily pays the check..." my attorney started, nervously cracking his fingers, "will my commission remain in force?"

  "Yes, the ten percent is yours no matter how this shakes out. But if you don't get to this right now, I'll have to hire someone else."

  The lawyer jumped up from the table, adjusted his vest, grabbed his well-worn jacket from the hanger and reported back:

  "I'm headed to court immediately!"

  "Stop!" I yelled out, barely getting his attention in time. "First, draw up an official complaint. I'll take it to my uncle's attorney first so we can't be later accused of bad faith."

  That was how anyone would have acted if they didn't know for sure that the Count had fled, and I was not preparing to give a reason to suspect me of knowing too much.

  The lawyer went back to his table, loaded a sheet of paper into a time-worn typing machine and started clacking away on the keyboard with a mad speed, glancing from time to time at the check in front of him.

  I didn't sit down in the wobbly visitor's chair, instead pacing from wall to wall. The uneven flickering of the electric lamp under the ceiling was having a bad effect on my nerves.

  "There. It's done! Sign!" the lawyer said a quarter hour later, handing me the sheet.

  I didn't sign anything, first studying the complaint in excruciating detail, telling him to correct a few typos and only after that placing my signature.

  "If you lose that check, I'll tear your head off," I warned my attorney, placing the complaint in my inside pocket.

  "I don't doubt it for a second!" he said insightfully. "I'll send it to my notary's office for safe keeping."

  "Please do," I nodded. "And don't dally."

  "I'm already on my way!"

  Not waiting for my lawyer, I went outside alone, stopped the first cabby I met eyes with and told him to bring me to Via Benardos, which is where my dear uncle's lawyer worked.

  Maître LaSalle rented an office on the upper floor of a building that looked a lot like a piece of pie from the outside: its facade was of a normal width, but the side walls met in a sharp corner, allowing the architectural abomination to fit between the two neighboring buildings. If desired, I wouldn't even have to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I could just walk.

  A finicky watchman at the entrance wanted to know the purpose of my visit, then relayed it up the listening tube to the lawyer's assistant. Only after getting the go-head from him was I allowed inside. There were no elevators in the building. I had to take the stairs, which snaked around an internal courtyard all the way up to the fifth floor. The view out the windows revealed a tiny, dark space reminiscent of the inside of a well.

  The lawyer's assistant met me in the entryway and tried to impede me with questions. But, feeling annoyed, I waved him aside and barged straight into the lawyer's office.

  "Viscount Cruce!" said the lanky, if not to say frail gentleman of fifty years with surprise, looking up from his papers. He handled the affairs of several members of the old aristocracy. They were all still well off, but had long ago burned through their former influence. "To what do I owe your visit?"

  I turned to the pushy assistant standing in the doorway and barked out:

  "Make yourself scarce!"

  "Leave us," Maître LaSalle ordered. Then, he reproached me: "Have a bit of courtesy, Viscount! Nothing costs so little and is valued so highly as common courtesy."

  "You may find that to be so, maître, but I prefer cash," I parried, tossing the complaint on the table. "Ten thousand francs, for example."

  The lawyer clipped his reading glasses on his nose and started studying the document; I didn't want to loom over him, so I went over to the window, which looked out onto the neighboring building with a rusty rail of a fire escape. It revealed a view of one of the side streets, narrow and curving.

  "This must be some kind of mistake!" my uncle's attorney then exclaimed. "A mere misunderstanding!"

  "I do not agree with that assessment, maître," I shook my head, continuing to stand at the window, "but in any case, there's nothing stopping you from getting in touch with the Count and speaking directly."

  "Have you brought the check with you?"

  "What do you think?"

  "What claptrap," the lawyer muttered, picking up the phone and asking to be put through to Count Kósice's manor. Soon, he threw down his phone and told me: "The line's malfunctioning."

  "What a shame."

  "Where did you get the check, Viscount?"

  "That's not important. It's got his name on it."

  "Then I place your right to it in doubt. I also have doubts on its authenticity and the very fact that it was refused in the first place!" the lawyer said, putting forth three mutually exclusive arguments with glee. But I couldn't be deterred so easily.

  "I guess you’ll have to convince a court of that, then," I smiled.

  "This is plain abuse of the legal system!" the lawyer objected. "The demand for an injunction on his property, bank accounts and means of transportation over such a trivial matter is simply laughable!"

  "Get in touch with the Count, maître," I recommended. "Get in touch with him and insist that he meet with me as soon as possible. The longer this goes on, the worse it'll get."

  The lawyer got up from the table and said very quietly and distinctly:

  "You'll come to regret this, Viscount. You will regret your negligence very much."

  "Whatever happened to courtesy!?" I exclaimed, leaving the office. "Maître, remember your courtesy!"

  I didn't try to catch a cab on Via Benardos. I immediately turned down one of the side alleys and walked through the arch onto a quiet boulevard to the Emperor's Academy. Thankfully, the broken feeling in my leg wasn't bothering me quite as much today. And also, I was in no rush.

  In the end, it took me ten minutes to reach Leonardo-da-Vinci-Platz. When I entered Mechanisms and Rarities, Alexander Dyak was reading a paper.

  "Leopold Borisovich!" the inventor cried out, glad at my arrival. He walked around the dis
play case and extended a hand. "Allow me to congratulate you"

  "On what?" I perked up my ears.

  "On a successful end to the experiment, naturally!" Alexander Dyak burst out laughing, then faltered. "Or was it not you that brought Procrustes to his doom?"

  I took a fateful sigh and corrected the inventor:

  "It wasn't Procrustes."

  "If you say so, Leopold Borisovich, if you say so!" said the shop owner, nodding his head several times. "I trust you haven't forgotten my request? The timeframe is very important for science..."

  As surprising as it was, I hadn't forgotten the inventor's request and, while still in the opium den awaiting the police, I had written down a full chronology in my notepad from the first shot to the werewolf’s last breath.

  "Here you go," I said, handing him a piece of paper taken from my notepad. I then grabbed a newspaper from the display case and immersed myself in reading but, beyond the flashy headline "Procrustes Dead!" there was nothing concrete in the article. The inspector general's prohibition against talking to the press was being rigorously observed. Only one of the coroner's assistants hadn't managed to hold his tongue about the fact that the bite marks on Isaac Levinson's servant matched the jaw size of the werebeast shot down in the Chinese Quarter.

  My name was not mentioned.

  "Staggering, just staggering!" Alexander Dyak muttered to himself, studying my notes. "There's quite a lot to think about here."

  "I'm afraid werebeasts are rather infrequent visitors to New Babylon," I smiled.

  "The world isn't confined to just New Babylon," the inventor shrugged his shoulders, turning the sheet and hiding it in the pocket of his frock. "How's the cane?"

  "Above all praise," I answered, not exaggerating one bit. "But today, I've come to you with a new request of an applied-science nature."

  "Very interesting," Alexander Dyak replied, curious. "What is it this time?"

  "Fire," I told him. "I need a compact device capable of creating a powerful flame."

  "A flamethrower?" The inventor asked in surprise. "Leopold Borisovich, do you need a flamethrower?"