The Spy's Reward

by Nita Abrams

  “But—but,” Anthony stammered. “It was an act. Of course you thanked him, of course you let him search you. There were five of them, and they were armed, and the women were there.”

  “And yesterday?” Meyer was angry now. “When you were outnumbered two to one, taken by surprise? Yes, Rodrigo appeared and disabled your attackers. You compare yourself to him and feel inadequate. His opponents were facing the other way, you young idiot, focused on you! The women were there with you as well. How much difference would it have made if you had known some sparring techniques? Is it not possible that resistance would have angered them even further? Or that in a three-way fight in a small room one of the women could have been hurt? I accepted my humiliation to prevent something worse from happening. Is your dignity so much more precious than mine?”

  Anthony was looking a bit stunned. Meyer realized that he had been nearly shouting. It was unlike him. He was always quiet, cool, collected. For years he had worked doggedly to become imperturbable, a man ruled by logic, a man who calculated costs and benefits even when the costs were lives. Logic had told him that he should placate the man with the rifle, should allow himself to be searched and even to be stripped. But logic was no consolation afterwards. The memory of their safe escape was an abstraction—a negative, a sorrow avoided rather than experienced. The memory of standing in the wind while eight people eyed his battered torso was all too concrete.

  “I am sorry,” Meyer said, drawing in his breath. “I am overwrought. But think about what I said. You give yourself, and perhaps Miss Hart as well, too little credit. Our situation is difficult. We should not reproach ourselves if we sometimes make poor choices in the heat of the moment. Or even good choices with unpleasant consequences, as in your case.” And in his own case as well. The unpleasant consequences had not yet arrived. But they were coming.

  Anthony nodded, a little shamefaced, and started to walk away. But then he paused. “Sir,” he said, turning back, “will Mrs. Hart be riding in the gig with me?”

  “Very likely. Why?”

  His nephew looked uncomfortable. “What shall I say? That is, if she asks me about—what she saw.”

  Here, of course, was one of the unpleasant consequences, the first and most obvious one. “Tell her you were as surprised as she was.”

  “She will know I am lying,” Anthony said with certainty. “I can spin tales quite happily to armed thugs; I cannot be so plausible when I am speaking to someone I respect.”

  Meyer made a helpless gesture of frustration. “Tell her something. Anything. Be vague. Look unhappy if she presses you.”

  “Why not simply let me tell her the truth?”

  It would almost be a relief to have it over with. He wavered.

  “I know some in the family are embarrassed by your activities, but I am not one of them,” Roth said. “Trust me, I would not condemn you to her.”

  No, he thought. I am managing that quite nicely on my own.

  “Do as you think best,” Meyer said at last.

  Abigail did not ask Roth about his uncle. She certainly wondered about Meyer’s scars, and about the little arsenal which had emerged from various hidden pockets in his clothing, and about his sudden transformation into a Spaniard. But it seemed to her that Roth had been through quite enough in the past two days. More to the point, she was not certain he really knew the answers. Instead she waited until they stopped again to rest the horses and have some refreshments. After they were all seated indoors, and Meyer was busy forcing an increasingly pale and feverish Anthony to drink some tea, she slipped out and went to the stables.

  “Mr. Santos,” she called softly, stepping inside. The place seemed empty; the only sounds were the occasional thunk of a hoof against wood or the soft crunch of some animal eating its hay.

  He appeared suddenly right next to her. “Did you call me, Mrs. Hart?”

  Startled, she jumped. “Ah. Yes. Do you have a moment?”

  He nodded. It didn’t look like an answer to her question so much as it looked like a confirmation to himself of something he had suspected. “If you would come this way?” He ushered her into a small tack room. Most of it was taken up with a table, strewn with various bits of harness and awls and nails and scraps of leather. He pulled out the lone chair and held it for her.

  Sitting down was a mistake. She realized that as soon as she did it. Now she was looking up at him. And she could not be as firm, as insistent, when she was sitting down. But it would look rather odd to get up again. She compromised on looking around for another seat for Rodrigo, and spotted a bench with a saddle on it. “Please sit,” she said, indicating the bench. “And pull it closer to the table. I wish to speak with you in confidence.”

  He gave that same unsurprised nod, and dragged the bench over.

  After he had been sitting in front of her for a full minute, she realized that he was not going to help her by providing any helpful prompts, such as “How may I help you?” or “What did you wish to ask?” On the other hand, he had not refused to speak to her, and he would have been well within his rights to do so. He was no servant of hers. She decided to start with something neutral and work her way up to the questions he would not want to answer.

  “How long have you been with Mr. Meyer, Mr. Santos?”

  “I do not use my surname unless absolutely necessary,” he said, almost apologetically. “For personal reasons.”

  “Oh.” Well, not surprisingly, the mysterious Nathan Meyer had an equally mysterious servant.

  “Ten years.” When she looked confused, he clarified his response. “The answer to your question, señora. I have been with him for ten years.”

  “Did you meet in Spain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Mr. Meyer there on business?”

  “Señora,” he said gently, “why not ask what you really want to know? Someone might come in here at any moment.”

  She looked at him warily. “Will you answer me?”

  “Perhaps. It depends on what you ask.”

  She was beginning to feel as though she were in an ancient temple, consulting an oracle that answered only in monosyllables, or worse, in riddles.

  What did she really want to know? Did she want to know how Meyer had come by those scars? Why he had a knife in his boot? How he had made his face look like someone else’s, just by changing his expression? She blurted out the first question she could think of. “Does he have any children?”

  Rodrigo looked surprised. “He has a daughter and a son, both recently married.”

  The daughter was the one who had married a Christian. As far as Abigail was concerned, she no longer existed. “Is the son a banker as well?”

  The servant shook his head. “He is a captain in the army.”

  She frowned. Surely Jews could not hold commissions? The son, too, must have converted. She thought of Diana, lighting the candles at the wayside shrine as though it were some quaint local custom. How big was the gap between the sentimental gesture of a tourist and conversion? If Diana married outside the faith, would Abigail renounce her?

  Suddenly she knew the real question she wanted to ask. “Does he see his children often? His daughter? Are they—are they still fond of each other?”

  “Of course.” The Spaniard looked surprised.

  That offhand “of course” was very, very painful. She got up abruptly. “This is very wrong of me. I should not be asking you questions about your employer. It places you in an impossible position. Please forgive me. I do not know what I was thinking.”

  After she had gone, Rodrigo sat back down on the bench and waited, frowning. That conversation had not gone at all as he had expected. He began sorting the bits of harness into neat piles. He had barely started the first pile (“needs new buckle”) when a shadow fell onto the table.

  “Well?” asked Meyer impatiently. “Did you tell her?”

  Rodrigo shook his head. “She did not ask. I think she meant to, at first, but then she changed her mind for some re
ason.” He looked at Meyer, exasperated. “Señor, why do you not go to her yourself? She will hardly be surprised, after what she saw this morning. Go now, before something else happens.”

  “Impossible.”

  “What do you think she will do? Denounce you to the next group of vigilantes? Shoot you? Scream and run away? She seems to be a very sensible woman.”

  “Sensible, yes. But also principled.”

  “True,” Rodrigo conceded. “She did not leave just now because she heard you coming, for example. She decided that it was wrong of her to question me about my own master.”

  “I know.” Meyer leaned against the wall. “I heard that part. I was eavesdropping, of course, as I so often do. Here I was, listening to a conversation she thought was private. And she, with ample evidence that I was at the very least a liar and likely something far worse, had scruples about questioning my servant. The contrast between her principles and my lack thereof struck me forcibly.”

  “Señor,” he said, exasperated, “you should go to her yourself and explain.”

  He set his jaw. “No. It would do no good now. If I had confessed before she suspected anything, it would be different. But after this morning she will think I am simply making the best of a bad situation.”

  Rodrigo gave up. “Am I driving again?”

  Meyer nodded. “Anthony by all rights should be in bed, but the gig is the best we can offer at the moment.” He thought of something else that was worrying him. “Did they search it, by the way?”

  “Search the vehicle? At the roadblock? Yes. Ruffled through a few bags.”

  Well, obviously they had not found anything, or Rodrigo would not be here. He told himself not to be so nervous. But then, he did not usually have secrets from Rodrigo as well as from the French. If his servant ever found that jar of sulphur, there would be hell to pay. There would still be hell to pay, eventually, but Meyer was hoping to postpone it until the jar was empty.

  11

  The Auberge du Marchand consisted of two century-old town houses on one of the principal streets of Gap. The houses had been acquired and then remodeled piecemeal, and the interior of the hotel thus resembled a three-dimensional maze. Staircases went up half a flight and ended abruptly at a single door; corridors turned and ran into a wall. Doors five yards apart proved to open into the same apartment; single doors gave access to three smaller doors. The stables were in an alley four buildings away and were impossible to find unless one of the hotel clerks led the way in person.

  Meyer was not happy with the situation. He had ridden ahead to book rooms there on the recommendation of the host of a pleasant roadside tavern they had passed a few hours back. It might be “a very superior hostelry, very congenial to the ladies,” as the tavern keeper had promised, but as Meyer looked around with a professional eye he thought he had never seen any place better suited to an assassination—if, of course, the assassin could find his victim. From the point of view of a man determined to protect someone, it was a nightmare. There were no adjoining rooms big enough to house a party of five, and after the experience in Sisteron he was unwilling to lodge the Harts in any room more than three steps from his own bedchamber. In the end he settled for two rooms, one of which was quite large and included a sitting area. The two shared a small hallway, and there were no other guest chambers anywhere nearby. The doors were even two different sizes: the larger room had double doors, and the smaller room, which the men were sharing, a single one. Meyer was determined not to stumble into the wrong room this time.

  The two other men did not like the place much either. Anthony, who had climbed immediately into bed the moment they arrived, would have very much preferred his own room. Until he fell asleep he complained petulantly each time the door was opened. Meyer suspected very strongly that Anthony was coming down with a fever. As for Rodrigo, when he discovered that the easiest route to the stables involved traversing three courtyards, two of which were locked promptly at sundown, he informed Meyer that he would sleep in the stable loft with the grooms. Meyer felt sorry for him, but he was in no mood to let anyone lock up a possible means of escape from Gap. If Rodrigo was to take his turn riding south tonight there was really no choice in the matter. And of course, that also meant one fewer person in the already-crowded smaller room.

  The ladies, on the other hand, did find the Auberge du Marchand congenial. Or at least, the younger lady did. When Meyer escorted the two women upstairs, Diana exclaimed rapturously. The room was so large! So elegantly furnished! It seemed more like part of a private home than a hired room at an inn! (Here Abigail had glanced at Meyer and raised her eyebrows expressively. Both the sleeping area and the sitting area were relentlessly decorated in high imperial style: gold eagles and red-velvet upholstery juxtaposed with Egyptian-style pieces—the most hideous of which, an ebony table in the shape of a crocodile, had actually made both adults wince when they saw it.) In addition, the hotel had several dining rooms, and Diana was looking forward to what she called “a proper meal, for once,” meaning at least six courses and more waiters than diners. As Meyer left, she was shaking out her only evening frock and lighting all eight candles in the sconces attached to the mirror.

  It was only when Meyer returned to his own room down the hall that he discovered the most serious disadvantage of the Auberge du Marchand. Certain rooms had unusual acoustical properties—unbeknownst to the guests being overheard—eerily projecting conversations to another room next door, or around the corner, or upstairs. Diana and Abigail Hart, for example, had no idea that their voices were emerging from Meyer’s fireplace. The voices were so loud that he glanced over at the bed to see if Anthony had been awakened again. Apparently not. Meyer was just about to go next door and warn the two women to speak more softly when he heard his own name.

  “Mama, how old do you suppose Mr. Meyer might be?”

  “I don’t know.” There was a pause. “He must be over forty; he has two grown children. But he certainly doesn’t look it.”

  “Did you peek . . . when he took his shirt off?”

  “That is a very ill-mannered question.” Abigail’s voice was tart.

  “Well, I did. I admit it. How do you suppose he came by all those scars?”

  The reply did not come through as clearly; Abigail must have moved to a different spot in the room. He could hear only the word “affair,” which he suspected had been preceded by the phrase “none of our.”

  “Do you think he is a criminal? A bandit? His servant is Spanish, you know, and they say Spain is full of bandits.”

  Spain was not full of bandits, he wanted to shout. Spain was full of men who had lost their land when Napoleon invaded and had never gotten it back, even after the Allied victory. Men like the character he had played today at the roadblock. They hired themselves out as fighters. What else could they do?

  He didn’t hear her next reply at all.

  “Did you see he had a knife hidden in his boot?” Diana’s voice rose so high on the last word that it was almost a shriek.

  Now he could hear Abigail again: “Yes, I saw that.”

  “And where did he get those papers, the ones that said he was Spanish?”

  “Perhaps experienced travelers furnish themselves with that sort of thing.” She sounded hesitant.

  “Mother! Don’t be absurd! It is all very suspicious. Suppose he is not Mr. Meyer at all? Suppose he murdered the real Mr. Meyer and took his place?”

  “And hired an actor to impersonate his nephew as well? Or do you believe Mr. Roth is also a bandit?”

  “No.” Grudgingly. “But Mama, something is very odd. You must see that. You must ask him to explain.”

  “I suppose you are right. I will speak with him tonight. After dinner.” She sounded very reluctant.

  “He is never to be found after dinner. Or sometimes even during dinner. That is another odd thing. I think you should find him now. Or I will, if you don’t dare.”

  “Diana!”

  He heard a door ope
n.

  Panic-stricken, his first impulse was to hide. He quenched the lamp and headed for the armoire, hoping it was big enough to conceal him. Then he reminded himself that they would knock. All he had to do was not answer.

  Quick footsteps came down the hall, followed by an imperious tattoo on the door. “Diana, for goodness’ sake, you need not beat the door down!” Abigail sounded exasperated. “Obviously there is no one there.”

  “I will just look.”

  Had he locked the door? He was not sure. He dove under the bed just as the answer became clear: no.

  “You see?” The voice came from the doorway. He could see Abigail’s feet in the block of lamplight spilling in from the hall. “It’s dark. There is no one here.”

  But there was someone there. Meyer heard the bed creak suddenly above him.

  Then sheets and covers flew over the side of the bed, and Anthony’s voice roared, “Damn it, Rodrigo, I told you to stop leaving the door open!”

  There was an appalled silence. Meyer saw Abigail’s feet stepping back.

  “Oh God.” There was another whirlwind of sheets, this time back up off the floor. “I do apologize. I thought—I was asleep—”

  “We—we were looking for your uncle,” stammered Diana.

  The feet were retreating rapidly. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Roth, most sincerely. We did not mean to disturb you.” That was Abigail, a bit breathless. “Please go back to sleep. You do not look very well.”

  Meyer waited at least a minute after the door closed to slide out from under the bed. Anthony gave a choked cry and nearly dropped the lamp he had just rekindled.

  “What the devil were you doing under my bed?” he demanded. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes very bright.

  Fever, thought Meyer. Another complication. “Hiding.”

  “What?”

  “Shhh.” Meyer pointed to the fireplace. Sure enough, two female voices were once again floating out of it.