Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Heavens,” the eyes remained closed, but Robert knew the man did not need to see in order to read his mind, “is the wee Scot still here? You have my permission to leave, though perhaps,” there was a flicker of amusement beneath the serene tone, “you’d like to kiss the ring before you go?” The emerald, seemingly on cue, blazed obscenely in the light.

  Robert knew he’d overstayed his welcome and was in danger of compromising everything if he remained a minute longer. He stood, noting that Sallie rose as well, her movements as polished as those of a woman born a king’s concubine. This, his practical Scots side admitted, was likely what she was.

  She indicated with a slight movement of one graceful hand that he should accompany her to the door. She opened it for him, a waft of lighter air from the antechamber stirring the delicately jeweled Egyptian crosses that hung from her ears.

  “What’s in the brazier?” he asked, wanting to prolong his brief moment in her presence.

  “Mugwort,” said the sun strung voice behind him that did not belong to Sallie Rourke, “mixed with sandalwood, said to be useful in scrying rituals. Apparently,” the voice continued lightly, “it prevents elves or evil spirits from entering at your door as well as being useful in the cleaning of crystal balls, or so,” the words were punctuated with a yawn, “a gypsy told me.”

  Robert, being possessed of a certain amount of Scots cunning to balance his practicality, knew when he’d been issued a warning.

  Sallie opened the door wider. “It’s lavender,” she said, casting a stern look at the recumbent figure, “to help him sleep.”

  “And the ground pearls?” Robert asked, wishing he dared to kiss her hand again.

  “Headache powder in port,” Sallie said tartly. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s a lamb under the wolf skin. He’s good at throwing up smoke screens, though having been raised by Jesuits one would hardly expect less, would one?” She smiled coolly as she delivered the last sting and closed the door in his face.

  Robert understood that her message was two-fold. ‘All is not as it seems and those who create monsters ought to be wary of their creation turning back to bite the hand of origin.’ He would, as he was certain he was meant to, communicate the warning to Father Brandisi.

  Retracing his passage through the dark, perfumed corridors, Robert sighed with relief and thought, despite the rather exorbitant amount of money the man had just offered him, it was likely that every penny of it was going to be hard earned.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Irish Sal

  The Kirkpatrick history in the Far East went back to the time of the original tea trade with China, just as the stranglehold of the East India Company was beginning to ease and it was possible to trade in China without risking the noose with every cargo. This particular arm of the company had grown swiftly, by using the fastest clipper ships and the most ruthless seamen who could be found sailing the Seven Seas.

  The Kirkpatrick Company put one of the first merchant steamers in the seas between Calcutta and Chinese ports as well, always keeping slightly ahead of the competition. When Japan opened for trade they were ready to establish themselves there with regular service between Yokohama, Kobe and the Chinese ports of call, and sub-offices in both Japanese cities.

  They had to abandon their holdings in Hong Kong during WWII, leaving them to the invading Japanese, but Jamie’s grandfather had rebuilt the company after the war and the retreat of the Japanese. He had wisely established offices elsewhere in China, thus never losing their commercial relationship with the Chinese.

  The first time Jamie had gone to Hong Kong with his grandfather, the Kirkpatrick family had been in possession of wharf space in both Hong Kong and Shanghai, with the godowns in Hong Kong at a capacity of 750,000 tonnes of cargo. Since Jamie’s tenure as head of the company had begun, he had increased their wharf space and built six-storey, concrete-reinforced godowns equipped with their own cranes and cargo lifts.

  These warehouses had long been a favorite place for him. They were invariably hives of activity and hubs for various exotic goods that came here to be dispersed in all their richness around the rest of the globe. It was a more modern version of the Silk Road, both overland and maritime. One could sense the ghosts of those intrepid traders here, and the goods they bought and sold; the lingering scent of the frankincense and musk; the medicines and spices; the jewels and glassware; and the rivers of silk that poured out of China herself. They still dealt in wools and oils, spices, silks, teas, and remedies. And of course spirits of the finest sort, which was how Jamie’s grandfather had originally met Daragh Rourke, the owner of Irish Sal’s Bar.

  Irish Sal’s bar was legendary. Irish Sal, aka Sallie, had inherited the bar from her father, an Irishman of romantic temperament and a taste for Chinese women. He had come to Hong Kong seeking his fortune and met it in the form of Lily Xu. He had, as the legend went, fallen instantly in love with Lily when he encountered her selling chickens in the marketplace. Many men had done so before him, for Lily had a face on her as delicate and perfect as a lotus blossom. Before Daragh, all men had been rebuffed and sent on their way with a flea in their ear, for Lily’s mother was possessed of a sharp eye and an even sharper tongue. Lily, however, was possessed of a rebellious streak and fell in love with the blue-eyed Irishman about five minutes after he succumbed to her.

  The ‘Bar’ was a bit of a misnomer, for though it served spirits of all sorts, it wasn’t traditional in any other way. Irish Sal’s floated in Victoria Harbor and consisted of a rescued and refurbished opium clipper that had seen thirty years of service under the aegis of the East India Company. Some people swore they could still smell the sticky sweet scent of opium in its teak boards, brass and copper fittings and gleaming mahogany counters. The Pearl Witch had made the run between London and Hong Kong for those thirty years, her needle-nosed, sharp-raking masts and heavily-sparred topside cutting the waves like a hot knife through butter. When Daragh found her, she was a rotting hulk listing off Kowloon Point, more barnacle than sea-going substance. But he had seen the beauty of her lines beneath the damage and bought her on the spot, spending the next five years restoring every inch. And then, to recoup his investment, he turned her into a saloon. There were only two things, people said, that Daragh loved as much as he loved his clipper ship, and they were his wife and daughter.

  Sallie was born to Daragh and Lily after seven childless years and was therefore that much more treasured for her late arrival. As if to make up for her tardiness, she was possessed of a beauty that was apparent by her second birthday and a fiery temperament inherited from both sides that brooked no nonsense and was fastidious in its choosing of both friends and foes.

  Sallie, whose Chinese name was Qiuyue, meaning Autumn Moon, was only delicate in looks. In personality, she was as fierce as the monsoons that regularly tore across her island city.

  James Kirkpatrick had first visited Irish Sal’s in his youth, on a business trip with his grandfather to oversee their tea warehouses. When in Hong Kong, his grandfather always stopped in for a pint and to say hello to Daragh and Lily. By the time they visited the famous clipper ship, Jamie had already fallen under the cosmopolitan spell of Hong Kong itself and was in a mood to be impressed and enamored by all he encountered, including the Chinese girl with the name that sounded like an owl hoot to his Western ears. He made the mistake of sharing this thought with Qiuyue, who was neither in a mood to be impressed nor enamored of a rude Irish boy no matter how pretty he might be. Her pique only served to intrigue him more, and so he set out to charm her, always a tricky proposition with a girl of Chinese-Irish origins.

  However, once he rescued a crow with a broken wing near her grandfather’s apothecary shop and splinted its wing, then sang her a song in pitch-perfect Cantonese about the beauty of her mind and the delicacy of her ankles, she began to relent a little. As his charm, humor and ability to both lead and follow her
on airy flights of fantasy weakened her defenses, she began to wonder how she had not been his friend her entire life. It became a defining state for her, being Jamie’s friend and having him for hers. Once she had obtained her law degree, working for the Kirkpatrick family seemed natural. Neither she nor Jamie ever found it awkward that she was his employee, perhaps because he never treated her as one.

  There were times that she questioned his approach to things, but she never doubted the results. She placed her faith in him, just as he placed complete faith in her ability to understand and negotiate her way through complex international trading laws and sanctions, as well as wily businessmen and all the various mores and quirks of the cultures they dealt with on a daily basis. They made, she knew, a very good team.

  “What a beast you were to that poor man,” Sallie said to the man reclined in front of her. His eyes were closed and he was so still as to seem unconscious, but the voice when it answered was fully awake and deeply acerbic.

  “He’s faced far worse than me. He’s a Scot. He wouldn’t be comfortable with soft words and sweetness, and frankly I’ve a short supply of both those virtues at present.”

  Once the ‘small Scot’ had left, she led Jamie by the hand to the inner chamber of the warren of rooms, knowing that his vision was severely compromised at present and wanting to spare him the indignity of banging into a wall or ebony footstool.

  The bed on which he now lay was old, but retained its imperial splendor. It was built of mahogany, six feet in length, five in width, its legs and posts carved in high relief. Panels shielded three sides of it from the rest of the room, giving privacy to whomever lay upon its silken mattress. Mother of pearl and jade crusted the base along with the archetypes of Chinese myth: dragons, butterflies, warrior monks, and fierce-faced demons. It was a bed fit for a merchant prince, which was a title, Sallie reflected, that defined Jamie rather well.

  The room was dim, the only light that of a lamp with a cut crystal chimney, shaded by a jade dragonfly attached to the lip of said chimney. In that coddling dark, Jamie’s hair blazed like a flag of gold against deep velvet.

  The diamond-hard surface that he had presented to the small Scot only moments before was gone and he had succumbed to the pain that he had held tightly in check during the interview. Very few people were allowed to see him vulnerable in such a way, possibly only three that she could think of—herself, Jonathan Wexler and Yevgena.

  Over the years, she had watched this man build a shield of reason and intellect to serve himself in the world. And certainly, though both intellect and reason were fierce within him, he was in truth a Romantic whose nature insisted on the pathways of intuition, imagination, and feeling through the senses, the world beyond, both visible and otherwise.

  There were ways to break these shields, to release the body and allow the spirit the escape it needed from the fetters of body and mind. This she could provide, for there were times men did not understand the ways of their own being, but a woman knew these things by instinct and could give the necessary balm. He was at the fine dwelling edge of his own nerves and must be brought back from the brink in the manner that served best. Deprivation was as harmful as over-indulgence, and this man had lived long enough beyond his senses that he must now be steeped in them for his own good. For though she was beautifully versed in the laws of business and finance, she understood even better the laws of the human heart, which superseded all others.

  One would not have known yesterday how severe the pain was. He had met in the afternoon with four of the Mountain Men, the leaders of individual sects of the Hong Kong triads. He had been chill as ice water, without a single outward sign that his head was fired with pain. These men were the most powerful and violent men in Hong Kong. Jamie, impeccably dressed in Hong Kong tailoring, had met with them and observed all the formalities and rituals so dear to the Chinese heart. He understood how to give face while keeping it perfectly intact for himself. It had been an especially arduous meeting, during which she had kept demurely in the background, though she did not miss one twitch or finger tap or any other sign that these men used to communicate beyond spoken language.

  Even she had been slow to realize that Jamie was near blind from pain. The green eyes had been as sharp and penetrating as they always were and he had not missed a nuance nor conceded a point with men who were world class at Hong Kong’s infamous ‘squeeze’—the bribe money paid out monthly by businessmen for the ‘protection’ of the local chapter of the triad.

  The meeting had lasted three hours, and Jamie had not agreed to higher pay for protection. But Sallie knew he had his own methods of dealing with the triads. Demanding higher pay was often a means of upping the ante and increasing their own face, something that Jamie understood. He granted what concessions he could, but refused to kowtow to those who cut too deeply into his profit margin or compromised the Kirkpatrick holdings in Hong Kong in any way. Once the men had left, Jamie had gone to look out the window of the large airy space they had rented for the meeting. It was only when she had gone to stand beside him to deconstruct the last hours, as they always did after a meeting, that she realized he was trembling like a leaf and his shirt was damp with sweat. And so she had brought him here and begun a series of treatments to alleviate his pain.

  She put a cloth in a hot bath of water infused with lavender and orange oils and then wrung it out, releasing aromatic steam. She unrolled the cloth carefully and placed it over Jamie’s face. He didn’t protest, which told her he must be almost insensible with the pain, as neither meekness nor submission were traits he normally displayed. And so she knew he was to the point of being receptive to her cure. She knelt and pulled out an ornately carved ebony box. Inside lay the tools of the opium den. The pipe was simple, the bamboo that the Chinese preferred for its size and ability to hold and store the resins of opium which resulted in a more luxuriant smoke. The Chinese pipes distilled the drug rather than burning it. She had prepared pipes for her grandfather and he had taught her exactingly how to make a pure pipe, how to set the ambience and ritual that were an important part of the experience. But the pipe she prepared for Jamie wasn’t going to be of that sort. He needed the concentrated morphine of the dross, and she had a small sticky ball of it ready.

  She had only tried opium once in her life and it had been with Jamie in their younger years. What she remembered of the experience was a great deal of laughter and their total absorption in a caterpillar for what seemed several hours, that happened across their landscape at the time. She also remembered how her body had felt, vaporous and eased, without the heaviness of flesh. It had been quite wonderful.

  Still, she had not smoked it since. She, however, did not get headaches that rendered her insensible for several days. She knew Jamie had certain tendencies in his personality that made narcotic substances unwise but she thought there were exceptions to every rule and this was one. She had brought every other remedy to his service, but none of them had worked: not the acupressure, nor the acupuncture, nor the massage, nor the burning of mugwort on his pulse points, nor the dark, bitter drink her grandfather had taught her how to make when she was a child. Because of their failure, she knew that the origin of his pain lay not in the physical realm, but rather the spiritual. Of this, however, he would not speak.

  At the very least, it would quell his nausea and possibly give him a few hours sleep, something he sorely needed. Sallie was a pragmatist above all and unnecessary suffering, whether spiritual or physical, seemed like the worst form of self-martyrdom to her, especially when there were remedies at hand.

  From a small ceramic pot, she took the sticky dark ball. She had acquired the chandoo from an old and trusted associate of her grandfather’s. She had been explicit in what it was needed for and the old man had nodded and taken her behind his shop counter to where a long line of enameled jars stood, each holding a different grade of chandoo. What she wanted was usually reserved for
addicts who were desperate for the direct hit of morphine, in which the dirtier grades of opium were rich. It was called the dross and was scraped from the leavings in the bowl of a pure smoke.

  Sallie took the ball and skewered it. It was large enough to provide three separate smokes. Cooking opium required a dexterous hand and great focus. It was a delicate process and like a soufflé in that even if it was slightly burned, it was ruined. She held it over the flame of the lamp, at just the right angle and proximity so that it wouldn’t overheat on one side and stay cold on the other. She picked up another ivory-handled skewer and began a gentle weaving, skewer over skewer, as though she were attempting to tie and untie knots with the needles. It had to be done just right, so the thebaine in it wouldn’t evaporate and leave the smoker with a much harsher and unforgiving pipe. Patiently, patiently, needle over needle, slowly the color began to transform from black to syrupy brown, to tan and finally to the brown gold that signified it was done. Her hands described a dance of precise steps upon the air, winding up with one skewer holding the majority of the opium and the other just enough for the first fill of the pipe. This she spun briefly in the heat of the flame and then rolled it rapidly in a small bowl until it formed a small tight cylinder which she then inserted into the heated bowl of the pipe. One more spin of the skewer and the opium was in place against the sides of the bowl and ready to smoke.

  Jamie had turned on his side, the emerald eyes dark and dense with pain. She positioned the lamp near him, placed the pipe in his hands with the bowl at just the right angle to the flame, and replaced the cloth over his eyes with a fresh one, knowing even the low, steady light of the flame, was an agony to him at present.