“No, never that. Laughable, really. I’ll be sorry to see the old girl go, though. Mrs. Plash was something else in the old days. So was Emmeline, really. The war broke her.”
“And Mrs. Plash is just old.”
“We’ll all be there in time. Us, our beautiful girls. Someday we’ll be looked at with pity and derision.” He ground out his cigarette. “If you’ve nothing else, I do need to make some decisions.”
“Of course,” Les said. “I suppose I hoped for some kind of ordinary explanation, that Sadie had left me a note at the desk or something.”
“No, but you should check your microphone to be absolutely sure she’s not with the Russians.”
“I did that. Nothing suspicious.”
“If you think she’s in danger, I’ll do everything I can, but you need to check Montagu Square. I’m sure that’s where she is.” Eyre glanced up, and Les was sure he saw his own exhaustion mirrored in the other man’s eyes.
He stood and walked away, his face throbbing.
* * *
Sadie crawled out of bed on Monday morning. Olga had allowed her to stay in her room so she could sleep in a bed instead of on a sofa. Since Olga had gone down the hall to wash up, occupying the only washroom, Sadie went downstairs and made tea with what was available in the Plash shelf in the boarding house kitchen. She carried the heavy tea pot upstairs, realizing she’d gained strength in her arms and muscles after a few weeks of being a chambermaid.
Emmeline opened the door when she knocked. The woman looked knackered and had a thin brown stain down the front of her embroidered Chinese wrapper. She stepped aside and Sadie set the teapot on a trivet on the low table in front of the loveseat in the sitting room.
Emmeline gathered teacups from the sideboard. “Don’t you need to dress for your shift?”
“Why should I go to work?” Sadie shrugged and poured the tea.
“Don’t be stupid,” the other woman said crossly. “Work gives you options, keeps you from feeling worthless.”
“A few days ago I was so excited about being promoted to the next floor, but it’s still the same work,” Sadie grumped. “I don’t see any meaning in it. It’s empty.”
Emmeline sat next to her and took up another teacup. “Go back to the hotel, Sadie. Any husband is better than none. You don’t want to end up in limbo.”
“Limbo?” Sadie asked.
“Divorced? You’re too passionate to live without love and sex. No man is perfect, but at least you have someone.”
“He’s deceived me. Olga doesn’t even think I’m really married.”
“What does a Russian princess know about English law?” Emmeline asked. “Tell your Mr. Rake you think you’re going to have a baby. I’m sure he’ll shore up any irregularities quickly.”
Sadie’s mouth drooped in shock at idea of such falsehood. “But if he did it on purpose?”
Emmaline reached under the sofa and pulled out a red tartan tin of shortbread. “Who forges a special license? Who even could? There’s got to be a good explanation. You need to give him a chance. He could have been fooled. We’re raised to think men have all the answers, but they don’t. Not about anything, really.”
Sadie wasn’t about to explain Les’s lifestyle. “That’s a depressing thought.”
Emmaline opened the tin and took a piece of shortbread, then passed the tin. “I’m quite a lot older than you, Sadie, and I’ve done my share of disappointing men, and had them return the favor. Don’t assume malevolence when incompetence might be to blame.”
“But if you always look for the best in people you can be badly hurt,” Sadie said. Her tea was already gone though she didn’t remember drinking it. She took a piece of shortbread then handed the tin back. Behind the door, she heard a series of wheezing coughs.
“That’s my mother,” Emmeline said, wincing. “Poor dear. Your sister is a wonder at keeping her calm. When I go in, she wants to tell me something and becomes so agitated.”
“Do you have any idea what it is?”
“No, but her life is an open book. What could there be that I don’t know?”
“Does she ramble? Maybe Alecia will have some clue.”
“No, she’s mostly silent now. The coughing. It’s pneumonia, we think. The doctor comes in, but since we can’t get her out of bed, it’s just settled into her lungs.”
“Maybe she wants the bliss of heaven, and just can’t wait any longer.”
Emmeline pursed her lips. “Who can blame her?”
Sadie set down her teacup as a rap came at the door. She went to open it and found Olga, already in her coat and hat. Her supervisor frowned at her dressing gown.
“You’re going to be late,” Olga snapped.
“I’ll change quickly. There’s plenty of tea left in the pot if you want to sit with Emmeline for a minute.” Sadie stared hard at Olga, hoping she’d keep company with the grieving daughter for a few minutes.
“Very well.” Olga swept past her in the doorway, somehow managing, in her regal way, to keep any part of her from touching Sadie.
Sadie smirked, despite the sadness of the day. It took all kinds. Both women had a lot to teach her, even though she’d been raised to believe, like all girls did, that marriage was the attainment that mattered, and therefore, she was superior to both of them.
Except she was probably a fallen woman, a concubine. Sadie squeezed her eyes shut hard before stepping out. She went to gather her clothes and wash up. Les had a lot to answer for. It wasn’t just a broken heart, he’d broken her life, too.
Chapter Eighteen
“Brandy,” Les muttered, setting down his headphones. Why were the Russians discussing brandy at ten A.M. on a Monday morning? He rubbed his hands over his face. Between his runaway wife and his sore nose, he hadn’t slept well.
He put the painting back in place and paced the sitting room, running associations with the word brandy. Nothing came to him. Finally, he forced himself to let it go because he and Robert McCall were meeting in the basement to explore the hidey holes one last time before Peter Eyre had them sealed off.
Les hoped to see Sadie somewhere in the halls, but even though he ducked into the staff lounge to make sure she’d signed in to work, he didn’t see her, or Olga. The night before, he’d reconnoitered at the boarding house on Montagu Square and he’d seen her through a first floor window, so he knew she had gone there as Peter Eyre had suggested. It hadn’t helped him sleep but at least he knew she was safe.
His worst fear initially had been that she’d run afoul of the Russians. He thought about that as he went through the obscure door that led to the passage under the business office on the hotel’s ground floor. Could brandy have something to do with kidnapping?
“Smuggling!” he exclaimed aloud.
“Excuse me?” Robert McCall stepped forward, a dim, solid figure in front of the door to the room where the explosives had been found.
“Upstairs the Russians are discussing brandy. Do you think they might be talking about smuggling something into the country?”
“Like explosives?” McCall said in a sarcastic tone.
“They can buy those from the miners. They have good connections due to their rabble rousing.”
“What are you thinking?”
Les pulled out his lock picks and went to work on the locked door. They needed to check all the walls for false panels like the one in the bathroom closet. “What if they are planning to bring in Mikhail Lashevich?”
“Wouldn’t he be likely to come in through Hull? Why would Russians here in London be concerned with that?”
“I haven’t seen anything in my drops relating to Semyon. Rather odd that I haven’t heard from him.” Les straightened and tucked away his picks, then opened the door.
“Is Special Branch up north monitoring his activities?”
“I’m sure. He’s a known agitator.”
McCall took out a notebook and pencil. “I’ll check on it. Brandy, huh. What was the context?”
Les told him what he’d heard as he ran his hands along the walls.
“It sounds rather salacious,” McCall said, drumming his pencil on his notebook.
“Yes, but they were making fun.”
“Would they smuggle in Russian women? Prostitutes?”
“I can’t imagine why. They can get plenty of those here.”
“Guns?”
McCall finished his note and put his pad and pencil away, then returned to the wall. “Perhaps.”
“We still have a tail on Fedor Verenich,” McCall said. “I’ll make sure we don’t have any holes in the surveillance.”
“I think Ovolensky should be tracked as well.”
“You would,” McCall said. “Let’s check the passage. There’s nothing here in the room.”
Two hours later, Les was dusty and covered in sticky spider webs. “I don’t think the Grand Russe is being used right now.”
“No,” McCall agreed, picking a long trail of ants mummified in spider webs off of his coat sleeve. “Not by the Russians. We’ve scared them off.”
“See what you can do to watch all of the members of the entourage,” Les said. “I’ll listen closely and see if I can gain any sense of the time factor in this brandy situation.”
“You’d best be in place upstairs then. I hear Sadie’s been brought into the fold. Is she listening for you?”
Les’s body seemed to sink into itself. “No, she’s left me.”
McCall grinned as if Les had been joking, then the smile slowly melted away. “Whatever for? That girl is silly over you. I still remember her adoring gazes at the Russian Tea Rooms.”
Les failed to summon a chuckle. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. Eyre tells me that Sadie’s sister might need her due to the woman she’s caring for being about to die, but Sadie didn’t leave a note.”
“Could it have fallen underneath a table or something?”
“I’ll look. I was hoping to see her around the hotel. She is working today.”
McCall ran his fingers down the lines developing along the side of his mouth. “Do you want me to speak to her?”
Les clapped him on the shoulder. “No, I can handle my own domestic dramas. The truth is, we aren’t really married. I don’t know what the future holds.”
McCall bit down on his lower lip and stretched his mouth into the rictus of a grin. “Do you think she figured it out? The special license, I mean?”
Les’s feet rooted to the ground. What if? “Come upstairs with me.”
McCall followed him to the service lift. A couple of waiters passed them, with curious expressions at their filthy clothing, but no one troubled them. Another one of the Russians was in the hall again, but studiously ignored them.
After Les closed the door to his suite, McCall said, “They didn’t used to post a guard, did they?”
“I think it’s because of Sadie, and me.”
“Because Ovolensky tried to drag her into his suite?”
“Yes. Either they are trying to protect Ovolensky from himself, or Ovolensky from me.”
“Yet you’re the one with the broken beak,” McCall said with a smirk.
“I’d like to dump him in the Thames with a bag of bricks tied to his feet,” Les muttered.
“Why are we up here?” McCall surveyed the sitting room.
Les waved two fingers in the direction of the bedroom. “In here.” He went into the closet and searched the drawers of the built-in chest, then swore.
“What?”
Les stared at the detective. “She took our marriage records when she left.”
“She’s suspicious,” McCall said.
Les rubbed his forehead. His head was really starting to pound now. “I married her under the Rake name. That doesn’t matter. It’s the license that keeps us from being legally married.”
“How would a young girl recognize the forgery?”
“Vicar’s granddaughter,” Les muttered. He brushed past McCall and went into the bathroom for his pills.
McCall followed him and leaned against the bathroom door while Les swallowed the gray oval pill. “Those look homemade.”
“Only the doctor knows what’s in them, but I could kill a bear when it’s in my system,” Les said. “And I don’t hurt.”
“Probably kill you in under a year if you keep taking them.”
“They didn’t give anything like this to me after my head injury,” Les said. “This is just for the nose.”
“Lay off as fast as can be advisable. I find getting drunk is much safer than pills.”
“You’re right,” Les said. He shook the pill bottle. He had five more of the pills. After he tossed the bottle back in the drawer, he stared at McCall in the mirror. “Sadie is a vicar’s granddaughter. She’s probably seen a special license before.”
“Well, bugger that,” McCall said. “You were doomed from the start. Still, it might be time to move someone else into the suite and be done with your fake marriage. A certain devilish young detective comes to mind.”
Les stared at McCall blankly as he lifted his coat collar like a dandy and paraded around in a half circle. “You’re a disgrace.”
McCall dropped his collar. “What are you going to do?”
“I didn’t marry her for this assignment. She was meant to help me with the Kozyrevs.”
“She isn’t going to be much help now. At least, not unless you marry her for real.”
“Would that be the worst thing?” Les asked.
McCall’s thick reddish eyebrows rose to his hairline. “You want to be saddled with one woman for the rest of your life? A life like yours?”
Les sat on the toilet lid. “She is one to go with the flow of a man’s life, up to a point. She saved me, Robert. Literally saved my life.”
“Right-o.” McCall leaned against the sink. “Do you love her?”
“I loved Natalia.” Les cleared his throat. “I was with her in Russia. She’s dead now.”
“So you’re capable of the emotion. I think most men in your profession are dead in this region.” McCall made a circle around his heart.
Les had thought himself inoculated against the emotion after Natalia’s death. Was he wrong? “Sadie’s a game girl. And when I’m with her, intimately, well, there’s nothing like it.”
“She’s very young.”
“I’m just twenty-five,” Les said. “I only feel older.”
“All I can say is you’d better clear it with Glass if you want to marry her for real. It might be the only thing that saves your relationship, but it does put her life in danger. Plus someone can hurt you, compromise your missions, through her.”
“I’ve already pulled her into this life. But I want to keep her safe. She’s equal to it.” She’d proven that, and he’d let her down with lies and subterfuge.
“I like her,” McCall declared. “Maybe it’s the right thing to do. She’s wasted as a chambermaid. I fear for any spy with children though.”
Les nodded and folded his arms over his chest. “I hear you, but healthy young bodies and all that. It might already be too late.”
“I’d like to say we play a gentleman’s game, but the truth is we exploit weakness to get what we need. Watch your own weakness.”
Les glanced up and met McCall’s eyes. He nodded and the other man pushed away from the sink.
“I’ll be on my way.”
“Can you take my disks to the drop?” Les asked. “Then I can stay in.”
“Certainly.” McCall waited while Les packaged up what he had and changed the active disk, then departed.
Les spent the rest of his afternoon listening to the Russians, wishing he could have a telephone installed to relay information instead of counting on messages sent through the floor butler and watchmen. Discussion about “brandy” continued in the Piano Suite. His ears pricked when he started to hear information about three cases. Whatever it was, there were three of them, and the information pushed the Russians into motion. D
oors opened and shut as men left the suite and returned in short order. They must have gone no further than downstairs.
Then, he heard that the cases needed to be picked up in the next forty-eight hours. That did it. He needed more men in the suite to live-monitor next door. Surveillance was brutal at the best of times and one man couldn’t remain vigilant around the clock. Whatever was happening with these three cases, it would be happening soon. Surely Glass could spare the manpower for a couple of days. He sent another message through the waiter who turned up with a pot of tea, an arrangement he’d requested to occur on the hour all day so he could have messages picked up. At seven P.M. a knock came at his suite door.
He was standing to answer it, hands on the headphones, when one of the Russians mentioned the West India Docks. Devil take it. The cargo was flowing in through London. After thirty seconds, when nothing more telling was said, he carefully closed up and went to open the door.
He recognized another Secret Intelligence Service agent, Bill Vall-Grandly, at the door. “Hello, old boy. Here for that game of whist you promised me.” The short, rotund, yet surprisingly athletic youngest son of a family who’d made its fortune in the previous era with patent medicine, held up a bottle of brandy.
“Well done, my man,” Les said, for the benefit of the Russian keeping watch in the hallway. “Just what I need to cheer me up.”
Bill set the bottle down on the small table next to the door and took off his coat. “Glass sent me. Sounds like someone should be manning the headphones at all times, eh?”
“West India Docks in the next forty-eight hours,” Les said. “The information keeps coming in.”
“Does Glass know?”
“Not about the location. It just came in a minute ago.”
“I’d better get the headphones on. Why don’t you stretch your legs and have a bite to eat? We can spell each other in shifts. I’m good for at least four hours.”
“I’ll telephone Glass from the manager’s office before I eat,” Les said. “I’ll stay in the hotel.” He quickly shared his arrangements with Bill then left so he could make his call.
The hotel did not bustle on a Monday evening like it did toward the end of the week, though many well-dressed couples, mostly past their first youth, were drifting across the Grand Hall between the Restaurant, the Reading Room with its bar, and the Coffee Room.
I Wanna Be Loved by You Page 25