by Kage Baker
“Yes, see what I mean?” Ludbridge murmured, opening out a folding tripod. “Gloves or better shielding for the ammunition locker, either one. Now, where’s the hareem? . . . Ah.”
“It’s those rooms on the third-story terrace with all the latticework,” said Bell-Fairfax. “To judge from the girls peeping out of it yesterday. But you won’t be able to see much from this distance, I’m afraid.”
“Reach up and feel about on the left-hand optic rim on your goggles,” said Ludbridge in a preoccupied voice. “The three little buttons, there? Just touch the midmost one, lightest pressure possible, two or three times.”
“Oh.” Bell-Fairfax caught his breath. “Like a spyglass. Opera glasses, I mean. Good God, it’s as though—”
He stopped in confusion, and Ludbridge chuckled quietly.
“Ever fancied seeing what goes on in a Turkish seraglio? What you’re glimpsing there, in all that scarlet confusion behind the lattice, is the master of the house paying a visit to his concubines. Watch carefully. Certain of the patterns of movement might be familiar to you.” Casting a glance over his shoulder, Ludbridge noted Bell-Fairfax’s features suffused with brighter fire. He turned back and peered through his goggles.
“Of course, the ideal shot would be through the latticework, but one can’t be certain of hitting a vital organ and one certainly doesn’t want to hit any of the women by mistake. Still . . . might be possible . . .”
“You’ll never hit him through the screen!”
“Won’t I? Let’s just see. It’s a high-accuracy weapon, this, with very little recoil. Perhaps he’ll order one of them to kneel before him, which would give me a delightfully clear shot. And a roomful of screaming women would confuse matters no end; by the time anyone saw the body in clear light, the bullet ought to have melted. Assuming the ladies screamed, of course. For all I know they’d be delighted to see the beggar unexpectedly dead—hello, what’s he doing?”
For the biggest, reddest blur had detached itself from the main mass of shifting lights and moved from right to left behind the lattice. It vanished for a moment, and Ludbridge was just growling in disappointment when a door opened and the pasha, red as Mephistopheles if more rotund, stepped out on the terrace. As Ludbridge swung the barrel of the weapon and fixed the target in his sights, the scarlet figure adjusted its waistband and voided a fine arc of fiery urine over the terrace wall into the garden below.
“Thank you,” said Ludbridge, and pulled the trigger.
The weapon gave a faint cough. A black spot appeared between the brighter points of the target’s eyes; it fell straight backward and vanished.
Ludbridge grabbed up the weapon in his arms and more or less rolled backward off the end of the dock, into the caique. “Row for your life,” he told Bell-Fairfax, who obeyed promptly. Without even rising to his knees, Ludbridge switched the weapon off, folded up the legs of the tripod, and removed the canister on the barrel. He shoved it back in the satchel.
“Something to remember, son,” he said, as the first of the distant screams rang out over the black water. “In the unlikely event anyone spots us and we’re pursued, and should it appear that we are in real danger of being caught or killed, I shall promptly drop the satchel over the side. The goggles will need to go, too. That’s always your first concern, on any mission: do not allow the machines to fall into enemy hands. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” said Bell-Fairfax, gasping as he labored at the oars.
“I’d have thought that if the fellow we’re looking for is a Greek, he’d be in the Greek Quarter,” said Hobson. They sat at an outdoor table at a café on the Cadde-i Kebir, drinking coffee. The café was deserted, for it was only midday.
“And so he would be, if he wanted the authorities to find him,” said Ludbridge. “Or anyone else, for that matter. He has a great many enemies.”
“I have to confess, I’m not sure this is quite the thing,” said Pengrove uneasily. “I mean, he’s a fellow Christian, isn’t he? Fighting against the oppressive Turk? And weren’t we on the side of the noble Greeks against the Ottomans? Lord Byron dying in Saloniki or wherever it was for their independence, what?”
“Messolonghi,” said Bell-Fairfax.
“True,” said Ludbridge. “And now Greece is free, or at least the Turks aren’t running the shop anymore. This chap is simply carrying on the struggle for vengeance’s sake. And it doesn’t make sense, does it, for him to sharpen his knife for the fellow who’s trying to make the empire less oppressive? Heedless, I might add, of the reprisals that would fall on his own people, and the fact that the Sultan’s brother—who’d take over the job in the event of anything happening to Brother Dear—is quite a bit more inclined to rule by the sword.”
“There’s our man,” said Bell-Fairfax.
They managed to avoid all looking up at once. The person in question was the Russian, Dolgorukov, apparently a minor diplomatic aide, whom they had noted going in and out of the embassy. He strolled past the café, and went into the tobacconist’s next door.
“Go,” said Ludbridge.
Pengrove rose and, walking with a distinct list, wandered out of the seating area and into the tobacconist’s. They heard his voice raised, petulantly asking for a pound of Latakia. He vanished into the shop. A moment later Dolgorukov emerged, and walked on—not back toward the embassy, but in the opposite direction.
“What do you say, chaps, is it time for another brandy?” said Ludbridge, lurching to his feet.
“I should say so!”
“Jolly good!” Bell-Fairfax and Hobson sprang up at once, and all together they staggered out to the street. Ludbridge and Bell-Fairfax set out after Dolgorukov, keeping him in sight, while Hobson peeled off and went into the tobacconist’s after Pengrove. A moment later Hobson came out pulling Pengrove after him, with Pengrove crying, “But the chap was going to sell me a chibouk, you know!”
“Got him?” Hobson murmured.
“Beautiful full-face shot as he turned around at the counter,” Pengrove replied under his breath.
They dawdled along after Ludbridge and Bell-Fairfax, who kept the Russian in sight for some four blocks. He turned down a side street at last.
“Here’s a jolly bar!” cried Ludbridge, pointing at one diagonally across the intersection. With cries of “Jolly good!” and “Oh, I say!” and “Who’s for a glass of raki?” they made their wobbly way across, greatly disgusting a pious dragoman who was coming in the other direction. Pengrove took several shots of the side street as they went, tracking Dolgorukov’s progress.
By the time they had seated themselves at a curbside table, however, Dolgorukov was nowhere in sight.
“Bell-Fairfax, watch for him,” said Ludbridge in a low voice, and Bell-Fairfax, who had taken the chair with the view, nodded.
The owner of the bar was obliged to exercise patience while waiting on the quartet of Englishmen who lounged at his best street table. He was a Corsican, and disinclined to suffer fools particularly, and these were certainly fools of the first order. First they dithered over their order, with the particularly degenerate-looking one in the straw hat asking repeatedly whether he mightn’t get a Pimm’s Cup. When informed that none was to be had, he seemed to feel that if he explained what was in one often enough, and loudly enough, and slowly enough, a Pimm’s Cup might materialize on the table. When finally convinced that he was never going to be served a Pimm’s Cup in that bar though he sat there until Doomsday, he requested a crème de violette instead and sat there pouting until it arrived.
And then the oldest of the four, who had clearly been drinking well before he entered the Corsican’s establishment, began telling a number of off-color jokes, at which his compatriots roared with laughter, pounding on the table and weeping in merriment. The excessively tall Englishman had a particularly oafish guffaw. When they had laughed themselves to silence, for which all the Corsican’s other customers were grateful, they grew bored and began to play some sort of tabletop game that involved kn
ocking a crumpled ball of paper to and fro and attempting to catch it in their hats. A drink was spilled and then a glass was broken, causing the idiot in the straw hat to utter piercing cries of distress. The Corsican descended on them in fury, and they were ordered out.
“All right, did you see him come back?” Ludbridge demanded, as they walked back across the intersection.
“Yes. Don’t all of you look at once. See the place with the blue door near the end of the street?” said Bell-Fairfax. “That was where he came out. He hadn’t the parcel from the tobacconist’s with him anymore, either. He left and walked quite quickly back toward the embassy.”
Ludbridge nodded. “Right. You’ll find occasion to wander down that street tomorrow. Pengrove will go with you. Get it from every angle, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I could fancy another drink, chaps, what do you think?” said Hobson, in a bright voice. Ludbridge gave him an assessing look.
“No,” he said.
Hobson had just made the six o’clock report, and was glumly closing up the Aetheric Transmitter, when Bell-Fairfax and Pengrove came in the next evening.
“Where’s Ludbridge?” Pengrove took off his hat and threw himself down on his bed.
“He went out for a coffee with the dragoman,” said Hobson. “Said you were to develop your photographs as soon as you came in.”
“Oh, bother Ludbridge,” said Pengrove, sitting up to pull off his boots. “I’m ‘most run off my legs. I’ll get to them,” he added peevishly, for Bell-Fairfax had picked up Pengrove’s hat and removed the canister of exposures.
“It’s important, or he wouldn’t have asked,” said Bell-Fairfax.
“It is important,” said Hobson. “London’s had a chap who speaks Russian listening in on the embassy. He says the Russians were told to aid and abet this Greek fellow. It’s their refuge you chaps went sneaking around today.”
“Who told them?”
“The implication is, somebody high up. Who’s the Czar’s foreign policy chap? Count Nessel-something?”
“Nesselrode,” said Bell-Fairfax.
“Yes, possibly him. When the Greek—his name is Arvanitis, by the way—had to go into hiding after the last plot failed, Dolgorukov was the one who got him out and then sneaked him back in. He’s providing him with money now. When we shadowed him yesterday, Dolgorukov was taking him a packet of banknotes.”
“But what for?”
“To pay for building up another ring of conspirators, I suppose,” said Bell-Fairfax. “If the Ottoman Empire goes to pieces, it leaves more room for the other powers to bustle in.”
“So the Russians are sitting about like vultures waiting for an elephant to die,” said Hobson. “But one of ’em’s had the bright idea of paying a lion to give it the coup de grâce.”
“Or like an impoverished nephew waiting for a rich uncle to snuff it, but the bloody old fool lingers on for years,” said Pengrove, climbing to his feet with a sigh and taking the canister from Bell-Fairfax. “And the nephew starts thinking about things like putting arsenic in Uncle’s strawberry jam. Not that I ever did. That was purely a figure of speech. He left everything to his college anyway.”
He was shut in his closet developing the photographs, and giving vent to an occasional fit of racking coughs, when Ludbridge came in.
“Much luck?” he inquired of Bell-Fairfax, as he shrugged out of his coat.
“We went all round it getting pictures,” Bell-Fairfax told him. “Every window and door, as you asked.”
“Good lads. Report went out as per schedule?” Ludbridge turned to Hobson. Hobson explained what the London office had found out about the Russians. Ludbridge nodded grimly.
“Of course that’s what they’re doing,” he said. “They want to upset the balance of power. Can’t have that, can we?”
“Though it might conceivably be for the best, if the Ottomans fell,” said Bell-Fairfax, hesitant.
“Only if we got to the effects sale first,” said Ludbridge. “Nor we wouldn’t be likely to, would we, with the Czar poised right on the other side of the Danube? And we certainly don’t want the French snapping up unconsidered trifles. You can rest your conscience about this Noble Greek, by the by. Polemis brought me a great deal of information on him. Quite lavish with the blood of others, but entirely unwilling to risk a drop of his own. Much the sort of fellow who prefers to spin his plots at a safe distance and send some other patriot off to deliver the bomb.”
Later, after Pengrove had brought out the pictures and dragged himself off to bed, and Hobson had gone downstairs to see if anyone in the kitchen could make him a sandwich, Ludbridge sat at their one table and studied the photographs by the light of an oil lamp. He saw a high narrow house, one of several wedged together along the street. Its stuccoed walls had bay windows on the upper floors, overhanging the street level.
“Where’s the back door?”
“It’s in this third picture,” said Bell-Fairfax, turning the image so Ludbridge could see it. Ludbridge took up a pencil and added to the plan he was making.
“So the back door’s there . . . who lives to either side, eh? Did you notice?”
“Both neighboring houses appear to be vacant, sir.”
“Good. Any evidence of dogs?”
“None that we observed, sir.”
“So there’s a street door here . . . and a back door here . . . That’s a chimney-pot of some kind, I’ll lay odds there’s a kitchen hereabouts.” Ludbridge blocked in possible rooms on his floor plan. “But on which floor? Shouldn’t be surprised if the place has a cellar, too. Well. No locks with keyholes, I see.”
“No, sir. Nor are there hinges on the outside. Pengrove and I thought the doors must be bolted on the inward side. But there’s a knocker here.” Bell-Fairfax pointed to the photograph of the street door. “And see the window, directly above? We worked it out that when anyone visiting him knocks, he must look down through the window to see who’s there, and then runs downstairs and unbars the door to let them in.”
“Maybe.” Ludbridge rubbed his chin. “I suppose we could station ourselves on the roof of one of the neighboring houses, arrange to have his door knocked on and shoot when he comes to the window. A bit public, though, that . . . and it may be that he’s only expecting visitors at prearranged times, and would be suspicious enough not to move if a knock came unscheduled. Nor have we any idea whether he’s alone in there.”
“We saw no one enter or leave, sir.”
“Bah. We’ll need more information. Here’s a possibility . . .” Ludbridge picked up the photograph showing the building front, and pointed at the vacant house next door. “That looks like a proper lock with a keyhole to me. Are you very tired, Bell-Fairfax?”
“No, sir.”
“Then let’s go for a little walk, shall we?” Ludbridge went to his trunk and, opening it, removed a few items and slipped them into his pockets.
The Cadde-i Kebir slept, but for one or two coffee houses spilling yellow lamplight into the street. They crossed to the opposite curbs passing them, keeping to the shadows. Without speaking, Ludbridge drew a brandy flask from his coat and passed it to Bell-Fairfax. Bell-Fairfax had a mouthful of brandy and passed it back. Ludbridge drank too and dabbed a little on his lapels for good measure. They encountered no night watchmen who might take them for an innocent pair of inebriates, however, and quickly reached the side street opposite the Corsican’s bar.
At the end of the block were the houses in question, three in a row with vacant black windows. Ludbridge spotted the blue door of the midmost house, and grunted in disapproval. There were indeed no hinges visible, nor even a doorknob.
Next door, however . . .
He drew a small cylinder from his waistcoat pocket and twisted it. The tiny vacuum lamp in the end lit up, for which Ludbridge was grateful; this particular field apparatus tended to be temperamental. It flickered slightly, even so, as he surveyed the door’s hinges and then its lock in rapid
succession.
“Bugger,” Ludbridge whispered. He reached out, grabbed Bell-Fairfax’s hand and stuck the lamp in it, and was pleased to note that the younger man understood to keep the dim pool of light hovering over the lock. Ludbridge next drew a vial of penetrating oil from his pocket, as well as a tiny apparatus with a nozzle and plunger. Deftly screwing it into the vial, he sprayed oil into the keyhole, and all around the knob and lock bolt where it met the striker plate. At last he thoroughly oiled the hinges. Slipping the vial back in his pocket, he drew out a slender case of lock picks.
A moment’s work opened the lock. The door opened with a satisfying lack of noise. They slipped inside, into ammoniac darkness and silence.
“This place is infested with rats,” whispered Bell-Fairfax, sounding pained. He lifted the little lamp and swung its beam about, but it failed to show them anything beyond a three-foot radius. This was enough to let them glimpse the filthy entryway, littered with fallen plaster-flakes and the evidence of rats, in which they stood. A black doorway yawned to their right; before them a staircase ascended into blackness.
Muttering something uncomplimentary about de la Rue, Ludbridge took the lamp and started up the stairs, as slowly and silently as could be managed. Thanks, perhaps, to the dank atmosphere, the staircase creaked little, though its timbers were alarmingly spongy. Ludbridge, reaching the first landing, held the lamp out as far as he might and saw nothing but more steps ascending, more dust, more fallen debris and black mold. Deciding that they had climbed far enough, he handed the lamp to Bell-Fairfax once again and took out the last of the objects he had brought with him. It was a tiny tin case, no bigger than a snuffbox.
Bell-Fairfax, watching as he opened it, glimpsed a number of small black cylinders of metal lined up on a card. They were identical to the miniature crossbow bolt presently lodged in the window frame of the Russian Embassy. Ludbridge selected one, briefly checked the number engraved on its side and, lifting it between finger and thumb, looked up at the wall adjoining the apartments next door. He waved to indicate that Bell-Fairfax ought to hold up the lamp. A moment’s cursory search by its light located what he wanted: a hole left by a nail or screw, where once a lamp bracket had hung. He wedged the bolt in, twisting it to fit securely into the crumbling plaster.