Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

by Gordon Dahlquist

  Outright assassination was not Chang’s usual line, but he’d done murder before. More often, as he preferred to see it, he was engaged to influence behavior, through violence, or information, or both, as necessary. In recent months, however, he’d felt a growing disquiet, as if there were behind his every step the barely audible ticking of a clock, that his life wound toward some profound accounting. Perhaps it was a malady of his eyes, a general gnawing anxiety that grew from seeing as much as possible in shadow. He did not allow this lurking dread to influence his movements, but when Aspiche had offered a high fee, Chang saw it as an opportunity to withdraw from view, to travel, to disappear into the opium den—anything until the cloud of foreboding had passed by.

  Not that he trusted what Aspiche had told him of the job. There was always more to it—clients always lied, withheld. Chang had spent the first day doing research, digging through social registers, old newspapers, genealogies, and as ever, the connections were there for the finding. Trapping was married to Charlotte Xonck, the middle child of three, between Henry, the oldest, and Francis, as yet unmarried and just returned from a lengthy tour abroad. Though poor Adjutant-Colonel Aspiche might assume that the regiment’s rise in stature had been earned by its colonial triumphs, Chang had found that the order to invest the 4th Dragoons as the Prince’s Own (or Drunken Wastrel Whoremongering Sodomite’s Own, as Chang preferred to think of it) was issued one day after the Xonck Armory agreed to lower terms for an exclusive contract to re-fit the cannons of the entire navy and coastal defenses. The mystery was not why the regiment had been promoted, but why Henry Xonck thought it worth such a costly bargain. Love for his only sister? Chang had sneered and sought out another archivist to badger.

  The precise nature of the regiment’s new duties was not part of any official document he could find, every account merely parroting what he’d read in the newspaper—“Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”—which was gallingly vague. It was only after pacing back and forth that it occurred to him to confirm where the announcement had actually been issued. He again dragged the archivist away from his other duties to retrieve the folio of collected announcements, and then saw it on the cover of the folio itself—it was from a Ministry office, but not the War Ministry. He peered at the paper, and the seal at the top. The Foreign Ministry. What business had the Foreign Ministry with announcing—and thus, by inference, arranging—the installation of a new regiment of “Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”? He snapped at the archivist, who merely stammered, “Well, it does say Ministry escort—and the F-Foreign Ministry is indeed one of the, ah, M-M-Ministry offices—” Chang cut him off with a brusque request for a list of senior Foreign Ministry staff.

  He’d spent a good hour wandering through the darkened stacks—the staff had conceded access to Chang, reasoning it was less bother to have him out of their sight than in their faces—pushing these rudimentary pieces around in his mind. No matter what else it did, the most important work of the regiment would be under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry. This could only refer to diplomatic intrigues of one kind or another, or internal government intrigues—that somehow in exchange for Xonck’s lowered fee, the War Ministry had agreed to put the regiment at the Foreign Ministry’s disposal. For Xonck, Trapping would obviously function as his spy, alerting him to any number of international situations that might influence his business, and the rise and fall of the business of others. Perhaps this was reward enough (Chang was unconvinced), but it did not explain why one Ministry would be doing such an outlandish service for another—or why the Foreign Ministry might require its own troops in the first place.

  Nevertheless, this much information allowed Chang, after making himself familiar with Trapping’s person, the location of his house, his coach, and the regimental barracks, to position himself outside the Foreign Ministry itself, convinced that this was the crucial point of revelation. Such was Chang’s way, and while he performed such investigation to better understand what he was engaged with, it’s also true that he did it to occupy his mind. If he was but a brute murderer, he could have cut Arthur Trapping down at any number of places, simply by following him until he was isolated in the street. The fact that Chang might well end up doing that very thing in the end didn’t alter his desire to understand the reasoning behind his actions. He was not squeamish about his work, but he was well aware that the risk was his, and that a client might always wonder about furthering their own security by arranging things so that Chang too might fall victim to unpleasant circumstance. The more he knew—about the clients and their objects—the safer he was going to feel. In this case, he was keenly aware that the forces involved were far more powerful and vast than Trapping and his bitter Adjutant-Colonel, and he would need to be careful not to provoke their interest. If ’twere done, ’twere best done as invisibly as possible.

  On the afternoon of that first day and again on the second, Trapping’s coach had taken him from the regimental barracks to the Foreign Ministry, where he had spent several hours. At each evening the coach had taken him to his house on Hadrian Square, where the Colonel remained at home, without any notable visitors. On the second night, as he watched Trapping’s windows from the shadow of decorative shrubbery, Chang was startled to see a coach move past, the doors painted with the Foreign Ministry crest. The coach did not stop at Trapping’s door, however, but continued on to a house on the other side of the square. Chang quickly loped after it, in time to see a trim man in a dark coat exit the coach and enter the door of number 14, weighed down with several thick satchels. The coach drove away. Chang returned to his surveillance. The next morning at the Library he again consulted the list of Foreign Ministry staff. The Deputy Minister, Harald Crabbé, made his residence at 14 Hadrian Square.

  On the third day he’d once again gone to the Ministry, passing his time on the edge of St. Isobel’s Square, at a point where he could observe both the coach traffic in front of the building and the intersection where any coach by way of the rear alley would have to exit. By now he’d become familiar with at least some of the Ministry staff, and studied them as they went in and out, waiting for Trapping to arrive. Despite all the suggestions of intrigue around the Colonel, Chang judged the man himself to be a reasonably simple target. If he repeated his pattern of the previous two nights, it would be easy enough to enter through a second-story window (accessible from a drain pipe whose strength Chang had tested the night before) and creep down to Trapping’s chamber (whose location he had established from watching the appearance of light in the windows as Trapping climbed to the third floor to sleep). The precise method wasn’t settled in his mind, and would depend on the exact circumstances in the room. He would have his razor, but also come equipped with a poison that would, to a careless eye, suggest an apoplexy not unheard-of for a man of Trapping’s age. Whether anyone would consider it murder would be one more signifier of the intrigue, and the stakes of Trapping’s elevation. Chang was not overly concerned about anyone else in the house. Mrs. Trapping slept apart from her husband, and the servants, if he chose his time correctly, would be far from the room.

  He crossed the square at two o’clock and bought a meat pie, breaking it into pieces and consuming them one at a time while he walked back to his position. As he passed the sculpture of St. Isobel, he smiled, his mouth full. The truly hideous nature of the composition—garish sentiment, cloying pathos—never prevented him from finding lurid satisfaction in the image of the saint herself, the coiling serpents swarming across her slippery flesh. It amazed him that such a piece had been erected at public expense in such an open space, but he found the blithe veneration of something so obviously rank to be a comfort. Somehow it restored his faith that he indeed had a place in the world. He finished the meat pie and wiped his hands on his trousers.

  At three o’clock, Trapping’s regimental coach appeared, empty, at the alleyway exit, and turned left, heading back to the 4th Dragoons barracks. The Colonel was inside by w
ay of the rear entrance, and intending to leave by other means. It was four-fifteen when Chang saw a Ministry coach at the same spot. On one side of the coach sat Harald Crabbé and in the seat opposite, a splash of red and gold through the window, sat Arthur Trapping. Chang dropped his gaze while they passed and watched them go. As soon as they rounded the corner he sprinted for a coach of his own.

  As he expected, the Ministry coach was on its way to Hadrian Square, and easily followed. What he did not expect was that it would stop in front of number 14 and that both men would enter, nor that, when they reappeared some minutes later, their coach would take them on a direct path northwest of the city. The fog was growing, and he moved next to his driver to better see—though his distant vision was at its limit in the falling dusk—where his quarry took him. His driver grumbled—this was far beyond his normal reach—and Chang was forced to pay him far more than he would have liked. He thought of simply taking the coach for himself, but he trusted neither his own vision nor his driving skills, besides not wanting to spill any unnecessary blood. As it was, they were soon beyond the old city walls, and then beyond the sprawl of new building and into the country itself. They were on the road to the Orange Canal, which went as far as the ocean, and the coach ahead of them showed no sign of stopping.

  They rode for nearly two hours. At first Chang had made his driver pull back, allowing the other coach to drift to the edge of sight, but as the darkness grew they were forced to close, being unable to see if the other coach should turn from the road. He had followed Trapping initially as merely a continuation of his plan, and then farther at the prospect of isolating him at some vacant place in the country where a murder might be more easily managed. But the farther he went in pursuit, the more wrong-headed it seemed. If he were merely trying to kill the man, he should turn around and try again the next night—simply repeating the plan until he was able to get Trapping alone in his room. The long coach journey with Deputy Minister Crabbé was a matter for intrigue, for Xonck and the War Ministry, and while Chang was certainly curious, he had no idea what he was riding into, and that was always foolish. Aside from these doubting thoughts, he realized he was cold—a bitter wind from the sea had chilled him utterly. He was forming the very words to tell his driver to stop when the man grabbed his shoulder and pointed ahead at a distant knot of torchlight.

  Chang ordered him to stop the coach, and instructed him to wait for fifteen minutes. If he had not returned, the man was free to leave him and return to the city. The driver did not argue—he was certainly as cold as Chang, and still bitter over the unexpected length of this particular fare. Chang climbed from the coach, wondering if the man would even wait that long. He gave himself five minutes to make a decision—the last thing he wanted was to be stranded in the darkness, all but blind. As it was, he had to move extremely cautiously. He pulled off his glasses, this being a case where any light was better than none, and tucked them into the inner pocket of his coat. Ahead of him he could see the Ministry coach, waiting among several others. He moved into the grass and toward the torchlight, some thirty yards away, where two figures were walking toward a larger group. Chang crept as close as he dared on the path, and then stepped away from it and crouched, his eyes just clear of the grass to see.

  There was a low brisk conversation—it was clear Trapping and Crabbé were late—and what seemed like a perfunctory shaking of hands. As his eyesight grew accustomed to the torches, Chang saw that something was reflecting them—water—and what seemed to have been an abstract mass of shadow resolved itself into an open launch, tied up at the canal. Trapping and Crabbé followed the others along the canal and to what looked like carts (Chang could just make out the wheel tops above the grass). A canvas sheet was pulled back from one cart to show the late arrivals a number of wooden boxes, obviously loaded from the launch. Chang could not make out the faces of any other men, though he counted six of them. The canvas sheet was pulled down again and tied, and the men began to climb onto the carts. At a sharp whip crack, they drove off, away from the coaches, down a road that Chang from his place could not see.

  Chang moved quickly after them, pausing to glance into the launch—which told him nothing—and down the road, which was little more than a country path worn through the grass. He thought again about what he was doing. Pursuing the carts meant losing his coach. He resolved himself to being abandoned—worse things had happened to him, after all, and this still might be a perfect opportunity to execute his task. The carts moved much faster than he, however, and soon enough he was walking on his own, alone in the dark. The wind was still cold, and it was at least thirty minutes before he came upon the carts tied up at the kitchen entrance of what looked like a formidable building—though whether it was a dour mansion or a splendid fortress, he could not say. The boxes were gone, as were the men…

  Still annoyed from his interview with Aspiche, Chang walked back into the Raton Marine and was relieved to see that everyone who had been present at the trooper’s arrival was still there. He stood in the doorway a moment, allowing each person to glance up at him, in order to return those glances with a meaningful nod. He then went around to each man—including Nicholas the barman—and placed a gold coin next to his glass. It was all he could do—and if one of them were to go behind his back, it would at least be seen by others as a broken agreement reflecting poorly on the Judas. He ordered another cup of bitter chocolate and drank it outside. For all practical purposes, he was waiting for Aspiche to do something, but Noland Aspiche was at best a fool who hoped to profit from someone else killing his Colonel, or at worst part of the larger intrigue, which meant he had been lying to Chang from the start. In either case, Aspiche was unlikely to act. Despite the wallet in his coat, Chang was regretting the entire affair. He took a swallow of chocolate and grimaced.

  As soon as he’d seen the size of the house, he’d known where he was, for there was only one such dwelling on the coast near the Orange Canal, that of Robert Vandaariff, recently made Lord Vandaariff, the financier whose daughter was famously engaged to a German prince of some small state, Karl-Horst von Somesuch-or-other. Chang couldn’t remember—it was in any number of headlines he’d skipped past—but he was quick to realize, as he pushed his gloved hand through the pane of a delicate glass doorway, that he was trespassing into a rather large social occasion, some kind of formal masked ball. He watched from the shadows until he found a drunken guest from whom he could safely wrestle a mask, and then so covered (though again it meant taking off his glasses) moved out in direct search of Trapping. As most of the men were in formal black topcoats, the red-uniformed Colonel was relatively easy to find. Chang himself attracted attention for the same reason—the willfully brazen figure he cut in his usual environment, where intimidation balanced concealment, hardly lent itself to a fancy-dress party in a lavish mansion. But he simply carried himself with the disdainful air of a man who belonged. It amazed him how many people immediately assumed that, because of an unpleasant arrogance, he possessed more rights than they.

  Trapping was drinking heavily, in the midst of a rather large party, though it did not seem like he took an active part in the conversation. As he watched, he now realized that Trapping stood between two groups. One gathered around a heavy, balding man to whom all the others deferred—most prominently a young man with thick red hair and an exceedingly well-dressed woman (could this possibly be Trapping’s wife, Charlotte Xonck, and the men her brothers Henry and Francis?). Behind this woman was another, whose gown was more demure and who, much like Chang, occupied herself with subtly studying the figures around her—and in this struck him as the figure in the party to most carefully avoid. The other group was made of men, in both formal attire and military uniforms. Chang could not tell if Crabbé was present or not—the masks made it difficult to be sure. As curious as he was to watch such parties gathered around as unimpressive a figure as the Colonel—and to discover why—Chang was aware he could not linger. Bracing himself, he strode quite near t
o them, avoiding eye contact and addressing the servant at the nearby table, calling for a glass of wine. The conversation faded around him as he waited, feeling the impatience of both groups for him to leave. The servant handed him a full glass, and Chang took a swallow, turning to the man next to him—who was, of course, Trapping—fixing him with his gaze. Trapping nodded, then could not help but stare. Chang’s scarred eyelids, visible through the mask-holes, gave Trapping pause, for though he could not be certain what he was seeing, he knew something was not quite right. The length of the contact, though, allowed Chang to speak.

  “A fine occasion.”

  “Indeed,” answered Colonel Trapping. His gaze had dropped from Cardinal Chang’s eyes to his coat, and then to the rest of his garments, which though striking were hardly appropriate for the occasion, or even quite reputable. Chang looked at his own clothes, caught Trapping’s eye again and scoffed, chuckling.

  “Had to come straight from the crossing. Been riding for days. Still, couldn’t miss it, eh?”

  “Of course not.” Trapping nodded, vaguely mollified, but looking somewhat helplessly over Chang’s shoulder, where the rest of his group was drifting distinctly in the other direction to resume their conversation.

  “What are you drinking?” demanded Chang.

  “I believe it is the same as what you are drinking.”

  “Is it? Do you like it?”

  “It is indeed fine.”

  “I suppose it is. I suppose it would be, eh? Here’s to the host.”

  Chang touched his glass to Trapping’s and tossed off the contents, more or less forcing Trapping to do the same. Before he could move, Chang snatched the glass from him and held them both out toward the servant, barking for more wine. As the servant leaned forward to pour, and as Trapping groped for excuses behind him to leave, Chang deftly dusted a small amount of white powder onto his thumb, and—distracting the servant with a brusque question about a possibly spoiled cork—rubbed it along the rim of Trapping’s glass as he picked it up. He handed the glass to the Colonel, and they drank again—Trapping’s lips touching the rim of his glass where he’d placed the powder. Once this was done, just as abruptly as he’d arrived, Chang nodded to Trapping and walked out of the room. He’d watch from the margins until the drug took hold.