Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  Transatlantic travel had nosedived because of the war in Europe, especially after the Mauretania met its torpedo and its sister the Lusitania got its close shave, but for the same reason many who did have to cross the ocean anyway wanted an airship passage if they could possibly get it. The risks of a means of travel only six months old looked good by comparison to running the iron gauntlet of the U-boat packs, and every commercial trip had seen the airships fully booked both ways three times a week. Fortunately for the company and for American prestige they’d all made it across even in the worst weather with nothing more than airsickness and the occasional stretch of hull fabric torn off.

  “Thank you,” she said to the stewardess—there were three to attend the twelve female passengers—and slipped her an Indian Head quarter eagle, which was a very generous but not outlandish tip. “Please turn down the bed while I’m in the dining compartment.”

  “Shall I unpack your cabin case, miss?” the woman said.

  She was thirtyish, alertly competent-looking, and very black, much like a female Pullman redcap—which was something her father, brothers, and uncles might well be.

  “No, I’ll take care of that myself, thank you,” Luz said.

  When the door had clicked home she locked it—you could shut out the staff with an unbeatable deadbolt while you were in the cabin yourself—and grinned for an instant as she put the brass-strapped leather suitcase on the folding stand. There were things inside that the stewardess would probably have been startled to see. Nothing strictly illegal, not in the United States at least, but she might have talked. The O’Malleys had always had some servants once they settled down in a place for more than a few days. Luz knew how difficult it was to keep secrets from the people who handled the underwear, and how easy it was to forget the constant presence of those ears and eyes.

  Germans were usually the world’s worst spies, but part of being a good one was not confusing usually with always and assuming they weren’t plugged into the staff grapevine.

  One corner of the cabin held a set of drawers where she put her underthings, including lace-trimmed modern brassieres, chemises, and fashionable tight short underdrawers and silk stockings; some rather daring Chinese-styled black pajamas instead of the conventional nightgown; and two sets of shoes as unfashionably flat-heeled as the ones she was wearing now. She hung up her outfits in the closet next to it; there were only three, selected for wrinkle resistance, which was much less than she’d have had to take for an ocean voyage. A first-class passenger had to change her dresses at least twice a day on a ship and have a ball gown as well. That would have been difficult if she were on her own.

  American National Airways tried to make their airships sound like ocean liners of the sky in their advertising copy. So far they were actually more like an airborne luxury train, say the 20th Century Limited; not surprising, given the numbers of passengers and crew—eighty and fifty-two, respectively—and the fact that ANA was a subsidiary of the new American National Railways. ANR was still working hard on unifying the chaotic mass of North America’s rail systems, though already you could travel from Boston to the Yucatan on one ticket, and you didn’t have to switch in Chicago to get to the West Coast anymore. They’d had a blank piece of paper to start with a few years ago as far as dirigibles went, but the influence of Pullman cars was evident.

  The first part of the secret compartment at the bottom of the suitcase was actually just a very inconspicuous flap. When she lifted the concealing cover back, there were six slim books custom-bound in soft leather lying within. One was the inevitable Kim by Kipling, which Teddy adored and which was the Chamber’s unofficial official novel—she’d had to play that revolting memory game the pinche escuincle Kim suffered through hundreds of times in training, but she admitted to herself that the book was a masterpiece. And so popular having it wasn’t likely to raise any alarms. K by Rinehart, Life and Gabriella by Glasgow, both trashy, guilty pleasures. The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs, even guiltier because to her it held fantasies of frolicking on the lost tropic isle with that fascinatingly herculean roughneck Billy Byrne and his deliciously refined Barbara in ways that would probably have sent Burroughs running screaming for the hills, poor man. The Hunt for Villa, by Richard Harding Davis and a runaway best seller—she’d given the famous war correspondent a few tips on that one, sub rosa; and a copy of the uncensored edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.

  She’d included that because she liked it, to help keep her French up, and because the very, very naughty color illustrations by Schwabe would give a customs agent something to be indignant about if he got past the inconspicuous-flap part. Nothing soothed a petty bureaucrat’s suspicions like finding something, preferably something that made him feel morally superior to the wealthy people who sneered at him every day.

  The books’ real use were as keys to several ciphers she’d memorized for this mission, and since she was undercover, she’d been able to avoid lugging around her autographed copy of the paralyzingly dull and earnest Party bible, The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly (1914 edition), one of the most-bought and least-read books of modern times. Uncle Teddy had read both versions, but then he read two or three books a day and never forgot a word.

  As a bonus the Baudelaire was an ongoing revenge on “Specs” McGuire, the codes-section manager in the growing New York station, who was always hinting that she’d only gotten into the Chamber because the president was a friend of her family or that she’d slept with Director Wilkie or both. He was an unbearable prig as well as a woman-hater and had to embarrass himself hideously and publicly every time he took out this illustrated edition to decode a message, and she always tried as hard as possible to have the cipher hit something extremely juicy like Femmes Damnées. As an added joy everyone else laughed at him when his ears went red.

  The books went by her nightstand, and then she painstakingly unscrewed the really secret cover below; the volumes also helped disguise the fact that the suitcase weighed more than you would expect if it held nothing but toiletries and frilly silk unmentionables. Built into the frame of the suitcase was a layer of hard rubber with shaped holders for a number of other things, including money from different countries, identity documents for several different identities, her lockpicks, a magnifying glass and a miniature monocular telescope, several sets of thin black leather gloves with unusual properties, a coil of slender but extremely strong silk cord, a chamois-covered sap filled with fine lead shot, and assorted chemicals in small thick vials.

  Right now she removed two items. One was a six-inch navaja folding knife, which she’d inherited from her mother’s coachman-cum-bodyguard, ancient one-eyed Pedro El Andaluz . . . along with years of the wicked old barratero’s clandestine instruction in the Sevillana style of pelea de navaja. She tucked it into a loop sewn into her skirt pocket on the right, which left the hooked handle in just the right spot to be whipped out with a single finger and slapped into her palm as it opened and made that demoralizing little crick-crick-clack sound when the blade locked.

  The other was a small compact Browning FN 1910 automatic, which went into a molded holder in the inside left front of her jacket under a thin silk pad that cunningly concealed the outline from the most discriminating eye; ordinary shoulder holsters didn’t go with a bosom. She smiled fondly as she balanced the little Belgian pistol in her palm for a moment before tucking it away. Uncle Teddy kept another just like it in the drawer beside his bed in the White House, and her father had given her this one on her nineteenth birthday. He’d insisted that she and her mother learn to use firearms, just as a precaution given the way his occupation took them to odd places, and Luz had been a crack rifle and pistol shot by her midteens, and a hunter who’d bagged deer and peccaries and jaguar.

  Most Black Chamber field operatives used Colt .45 automatics when they carried a pistol, but while she wasn’t a small woman—she was a lithely fit five-six—she thought the .3
80 was easier to her hand and that a lighter bullet that actually hit was infinitely more effective than a .45 monster thrown off aim by mule-kick recoil to break windows and kill bystanders.

  After all, when Princip shot the archduke with one of these he started the Great War. In a way it’s killed more men than the Maxim gun!

  Using a pistol was usually a rare desperation move anyway when you were undercover, though when you did need one you needed it . . .

  Desperately, she mused.

  Fortified by that thought she did a little discreet eyeliner and lipstick by Rimmel and paid some attention to her hair.

  “Ravishing, as always, mi corazón,” she said to her reflection. “I fall at your feet and plant kisses like flower petals upon your so-delectable toes.”

  Then she spent a final moment using a very little spirit gum and a few hairs from the brush to make sure she’d know if anyone searched the suitcase left temptingly on the stand. The door locks were a joke to anyone who knew what they were doing, and the staff had keys anyway. Her handbag was harmless, except for the very compact little film camera that spent most of its time built into it, and a few experiments showed that the noise of the airship covered the soft click when she triggered it by pressing the concealed button in the handle.

  The passenger cabins made up the top deck. The crew quarters and baggage were on the bottom; the lounges, kitchen, and dining areas were in the middle. She walked along the corridor past the ladies’ toilet and shower-baths and down a spiral staircase of wrought aluminum in sinuous vine shapes into a subdued glow of light. Vast slanting windows stretched along nearly eighty feet to either side, and you could lean on the railing and look directly downward, or sit at your leisure on a chaise longue or around tables set on the polished spruce veneer of the floor and glance out toward the horizon, though right now the view was of the interior of the hangar.

  There was even a bandstand, and the brochure promised dancing to Morton’s Red-Hot Ragtime Band. Currently it held a single striking-looking young Negro musician—

  As a good Progressive, Luz always used the respectful term Negro. Besides being polite, it also stuck a thumb in the eye of the Dixie-dominated Democrats, who could barely bring themselves to say colored or the mildly insulting black.

  —in a tuxedo and bow tie who was tinkling out something quick and light that wasn’t quite ragtime on a surprisingly good aluminum-framed piano, and doing it very well.

  Now that’s an interesting piece, and I don’t recognize it, she thought, pausing for a moment and cocking her head to the side to listen. I’d dance to that! I wonder if it’s his composition?

  Unfortunately she couldn’t just go up and ask, since she was here on business and had to keep character.

  There’s just a bit of tango style there too, sort of a smoky undertone. Much more complex than you’d think . . . four themes, sixteen bars each, four-bar bridges . . . AABBCCA, I think.

  It gave a cheerful background to the big bright room. Weight was at a premium on dirigibles, and everything was of light strong construction, wicker and aluminum and cloth, but empty space for the designers to play with was plentiful. Removable eighteen-foot-high fabric panels marked off the dining area, covered in colorful mural-like designs of tropical flowers and vines and parrots. The whole ensemble had a spare, cathedral-like modern elegance.

  It’s well-designed, and well-designed means pleasing, she thought.

  Luz was the daughter of an engineer who delighted in an efficiently crafted spillway or the elegant transfer of forces in an arch. She took one of the last of the small round tables still available and set her handbag on it so that the lens concealed in a fake topaz covered most of the rest of the lounge. A waiter came by, and she ordered a glass of seltzer water with lime; it came at the same time as a trolley of pre-dinner canapés and another with magazines and newspapers.

  Let’s see what light reading’s available, she thought, nibbling on a toast point dabbed with patriotic, nationally sourced but quite tasty Columbia River caviar amid a background hum of conversation. It wouldn’t do to just stare squint-eyed at people.

  The usual periodicals were at hand, starting with the inevitable copies of the New Republic, which was Croly’s rag and more or less the Party’s house organ. She took a quick glance at the table of contents for the August issue and decided she didn’t need to know . . .

  . . . how wonderful the New Nationalism is. What a surprise dear Croly thinks so, since he gave Uncle Teddy the idea for the name.

  She also didn’t need to read another puff piece about Secretary Mather’s ever-expanding national parks . . .

  Or . . .

  Her eyes flicked down the list.

  Or new sewage plants in the Protectorate . . .

  Or cooperative grain elevators . . .

  Or universal labor arbitration boards for everyone down to the Amalgamated Chicken-Pluckers . . .

  Or a debate on whether the Scouts should be compulsory as a preparation for national service . . .

  Which, what a surprise, Croly thinks is a wonderful idea.

  Though Uncle Teddy would probably insist that Fred Burnham head up the program, and he’d do it splendidly. The deadly, soft-spoken little bantam adventurer was already running wilderness-scout training for the Ranger battalions and Black Chamber operatives from the camp near his Yaqui Valley hacienda, and Luz liked him a great deal. Besides being able to out-Apache real Apaches, when he did talk about the things he’d done in war and wild places he was among the few men who reduced Uncle Teddy to a listener.

  Her eyes went to the last entry in the table of contents:

  Or, finally and worst of all, “Efficient Citizenship: How to Taylorize Your Life” by “our editors,” which meant the man himself.

  Someone had said once that when Croly really got going you could see the homemade lemonade boiling in his veins.

  She took the New York Times instead and held it up to read while scanning faces around it without being obvious, and also occasionally struggling not to laugh. Reading newspapers was a bit surreal if you were behind the curtain and saw some of the machinery that cast the public shadows. One of the editorials actually seemed to think there was still doubt about the United States declaring war on the Central Powers, for example. As if Uncle Teddy had told the Iron House—the War Department’s monumental new headquarters, shared with the Navy even though it wasn’t quite finished—to conscript three million men and federalize another million guardsmen and reservists back in the spring as a just-in-case precaution.

  The European news on the front page was, as usual since August 1914, bad.

  But there is bad and then there is something rather like a cinema film of an avalanche coming right at you, done with the projector turned to slow.

  It started with the perennial French claim that they were going to retake Verdun really soon now, any day, honest we will! And Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm publicly laughing his Royal and Imperial buttocks off about it, which was fair enough since he’d commanded the Army group that finally took it back in the spring after months of interminable massacre. The Russian offensive against Austria had gone well until the German General von Mackensen smashed it up; and the Rumanians were already saying how very, very sorry they were that they’d joined the Entente and tried to grab off Austro-Hungarian Transylvania just before the aforesaid smashing of General Brusilov. Which had been an act of monumentally shortsighted stupidity astonishing even by the standards of the Great War’s participants.

  Luz smiled wryly. The Bible said it didn’t profit a man to lose his soul and gain the whole world; but getting your head kicked in for the privilege of a three-week stay in . . . Transylvania? Now they were begging for mercy from Germany, which was rather like pleading with a shark not to take a second bite.

  And mutual slaughters continued on the Somme as both sides tried to turn Picardy into an
artillery-sculpted replica of the moon, or of the humid, leprous skin of some monstrous toad . . .

  The domestic news was more cheerful, especially if you were a Party member. A lead headline was the Democrats’ attempt to filibuster the Dyer anti-lynching bill, doomed under the new Senate rules on closure, since they only had twenty-six seats now and were helplessly split between the southern Bourbons and the northern Progressive wing, which was gradually dribbling away bit by bit to the PR or to Debs and his Socialists. Senator Bankhead of Alabama had invoked states’ rights and the virtue of southern womanhood menaced by the lustful nigra and accused the president of waving the bloody shirt of the Civil War.

  The president had formally said no comment but had been heard to say off the record that the senator could have a bloody nose to drip on his bloody shirt if he’d rather stand up in the ring and settle it that way, man-to-man.

  Luz grinned. She could just see him grinning as he let that comment about the Alabaman drop, while meaning every word of it. To add some mulato peppers to the mole, she happened to know that in the coming session one of Uncle Teddy’s cronies was going to reintroduce a stronger version of the Federal Elections Bill that the southern Democrats had filibustered to death when Henry Cabot Lodge proposed it a generation ago. That would guarantee black suffrage in federal elections; they couldn’t block it this time and the Negroes would all vote Progressive Republican in lockstep until the Day of Judgment and instantly send the Party’s vote in the Deep South from nothing to at least a third and finally bring New Nationalism to Dixie . . .

  Which will have the Bourbons down on all fours snarling and foaming like rabid dogs, which is art imitating life. ¡Ay! ¡Pero que estupidos son esos pendejos!

  That was Uncle Teddy to the inch; he was the canniest of all politicians, but he was also the man who’d once leapt off his horse and stabbed a cougar to death with his hunting knife because the dogs mobbing it blocked a shot. He enjoyed life more than anyone she’d ever known, at least anyone over the age of eight.