Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  “No, I learned that as a girl, oddly enough.”

  “Can I see it? The knife.”

  Luz flipped the weapon and offered it across her palm. “Careful! It’s sharp.”

  “It’s . . . well made,” Ciara said with a slightly queasy fascination. “And heavy.”

  “Heavy for a knife, light for a sword,” Luz said. “About the best of its type I’ve ever seen.”

  It was old and finely crafted and the hilt use-smoothed, a pound of Toledo steel and brass and bone and mother-of-pearl. Luz took it back and closed it—there was a ring on the back at the join of blade and hilt; you ran your middle finger through that and pushed up. That pulled the pin free and unlocked the ratchets and it snapped shut like the folding straight razor it had originally been named for.

  “This saved my life the night I was conceived,” she said as she slid it back into her skirt pocket and sat again.

  “It did?” Ciara said.

  Her voice held a little of a child’s appetite for wonders, or someone who’d always loved tales of the faraway and strange.

  As I do myself, Luz thought, with a smile; and this was one of the oldest family stories her parents had told her. And it will appeal mightily to this romantic youngster, who very much wants to be somewhere else right now.

  “I told you my parents eloped? In the middle of the night, and rode for the coast—my father had a boat waiting there. There was a full moon, and my father stood on the saddle to help Mima down from the balcony, as I was told, and carried her before him on the saddlebow through the fields and woods, hotly pursued.”

  Ciara’s eyes shone at the image, imagining starlight and the lovers’ hair mingling in the rush of speed. “Pursued? Her family sent men to bring her back?”

  “After them yes, but more likely to kill them both, to avenge the Aróstegui family honor, you see. Certainly to kill Papá. So, old Pedro El Andaluz . . . the Andalusian, that night he brought the horses, and followed along behind. He was born in Seville, a deserter from the Spanish Army who’d gone to work for the Arósteguis long before. As a coachman, in name, and he was superb with horses, but really as my mother’s bodyguard from the time she was a little girl.”

  “She needed a bodyguard?”

  “A rich girl in Cuba in those days? Oh, por Dios, yes. Bozal runaways and mambises in the mountains when they were in the country, hampas in town. There wasn’t much law in Cuba even between the rebellions, except what the strong made for themselves; not like today when there’s an American-run police force and the gendarmerie the Marines trained. Pedro wasn’t the only armed man in their employ, and God have mercy on the common man my mother’s papá took against. He’d be lucky to get off with a beating.”

  “But Pedro helped your mother elope?” Ciara said eagerly.

  Luz nodded. “He said it was time for her to have a man and children of her own, and a real man, not a eunuch in breeches, which is what he thought of the one her parents had picked. This navaja . . . carraca, it’s called too, or la Sevillana . . . was his. He left it to me, along with his guitar, the only two fine things he owned. So, they got away from the casa grande without raising the alarm, but after a while Pedro could tell they were being tracked through the jungle; this was not far from Santiago de Cuba; the Aróstegui estates are mostly there, south of the Sierra Cristal, in the good sugar land of the valley bottoms. My father agreed with him; they thought they’d be overtaken before they got to the cove, and they didn’t want my mother exposed to a gunfight, but they couldn’t leave her alone either.”

  Ciara clapped her hands together. “And what did Pedro do?”

  “Sent my mother and father forward, saying he’d catch them up. They waited at the boat, more and more anxious; there were a couple of shots, and silence . . . and my father told me later he was feeling torn in two but would have pushed off in another instant for his beloved’s sake, except that Pedro did show up. Strolling, and wiping the blade on the seat of his britches; he always wore estilo andaluz, even after thirty years in Cuba.”

  At her questioning look, Luz said with a fond smile at the memory that rose up before her mind’s eye:

  “Think of a matador, but scruffy instead of glittery, and with a sash, and a black silk bandana tied around his head and knotted at the back. And a patch over his left eye, which he’d lost years before, and a gold ring in one ear; like a pirate in a pantomime, except it was no act. And then he bowed and said, No need for hurry, they will not trouble us any more, Don Patricio, Doña Luciana, and my father said: How?”

  “And Pedro just smiled and said: ‘La Sevillana los beso. They kissed the girl from Seville, and she left them too breathless to pursue the matter.’ La Sevillana is a Seville girl, but it’s a nickname for that type of knife, too.”

  It was a literally murderous pun.

  “He . . . well, he sounds sort of appalling,” Ciara said, torn between delight and horror. “Brave and loyal, to be sure, but . . . a bit wicked?”

  Luz grinned reminiscently. “Oh, he was. A barratero, a killer and a rogue and no mistake. He drank and gambled and chased girls—caught quite a few, too—and was bone-idle about anything that didn’t involve horses or fighting or betting money. Papá was always getting him out of scrapes, or jail, or both, which he took as nothing less than his due from el patrón. In the old days he’d have trailed a pike behind Pizarro or Cortez.”

  “Still, I can see why your parents put up with him!” Ciara said.

  Luz nodded. “When I was about six, playing in a garden while my parents took the siesta in hammocks—we were in Mexico, Durango, Papá was laying out an irrigation project on an estate in the Laguna district—I heard this buzzing sound and my mother gasped and made this little shriek. I looked around and there was the head of a rattlesnake not a foot from my face with Pedro’s hand around its neck; a big one longer than a man’s leg, and he snapped its spine with his thumb. He’d seen it coiling while I played at scratching the soil with a stick, and he’d glided in and caught the thing, faster than the snake itself.”

  She gestured to show the motion, a flicking snatch. “My father went white as a sheet when he saw the snake, for in the hammock he could never have gotten close enough. He called it a brave deed of Pedro’s, though.”

  “Indeed it was brave!” Ciara said. “A rattlesnake with his bare hand! The man was a hero, and must have had no nerves at all. Brave and loyal indeed, to do that for another’s child.”

  Luz chuckled again. “¡Verdad! Pedro smiled a little and said: ‘De nada, Don Patricio, estas viboras Mexicanos always give themselves away before they strike. Whether they walk or crawl they brag with every breath.’ I do still remember the pink color of its mouth, and the drops on the ends of the fangs.”

  Ciara gasped. “The poor child you were, I’m surprised you weren’t shocked into convulsions!”

  Luz shrugged. “I was young . . . I just said: ‘Can you show me how to catch snakes like that and can I have the rattle and a bracelet from the skin, Abuelo Cabo?’”

  “What did he say to that?” Ciara said, laughing.

  “Laughed long himself, and told me I could have both, as befitted a princess.”

  “You called him . . . Granddad Corporal, that would be?”

  Luz nodded. “It sounds right in Spanish; he had been a corporal in the Army, which is how he came to Cuba. Enlisted because it was that or the public garrote, and left the King’s employ in Havana over a little matter of stabbing a sergeant who wanted too big a cut of his winnings with the dice. Mima called him Tío, Uncle, or sometimes Cabo Pedro, Corporal Pedro.”

  “Was that when he showed you how to use the knife? It strikes me it’s not something you could learn overnight.”

  “It started a little after that. I asked him to teach me after I saw him practicing, the way I did just now. I think he liked that I didn’t flinch at the snake, and that I loved
the look and feel of the navaja. Though he had high standards, sometimes when we’d gotten on beyond the basics I’d end a session with tears running down my face from tiredness and pain in the muscles . . . that was part of the teaching, you see, to learn to work through pain and see if I really meant it.”

  “And your mother didn’t mind?”

  “Mima didn’t know about the lessons . . . officially. She’d have had to disapprove if she admitted she knew, like when Father started teaching me to ride man-fashion and taking me on hunting trips.”

  Though she didn’t disapprove very loudly or long about that, Luz thought. Perhaps because she always felt a little guilty he’d have no sons, about which he said not a word nor glance nor sigh, though the lack of more children was a grief to them both.

  More cheerfully she went on: “Pedro said his sister had always carried a navaja tucked into her garter, a little one, so that anyone who raised her skirts without asking got a little something, but not what he was looking for.”

  Ciara chuckled; her face looked charming when she did, not just pretty but keen and interested.

  “It looks . . . very graceful,” she said. “Like a dance. And so quick!”

  “It is a dance,” Luz said. “One that makes you quick. Flamenco de la muerte, Pedro called it. When he handled a blade . . . suddenly he wasn’t this scruffy skinny old man with two days’ white stubble and a cigarillo hanging out of the corner of his mouth anymore; he was a dancer, a toreador, quick and quiet as a cat. He taught me all three styles of pelea de navaja. The barratero, which is street fashion; gitano, for the flash and fancy and for el duende . . . the demon, the spirit; and then Sevillano for the art. By the time I was sixteen he allowed I was quite passable.”

  “Well, I’ll call him a grand old man for saving you that way,” Ciara said. “What happened to him?”

  “He fell off a horse one night and broke his neck, in Santa Barbara,” Luz said, lightly, but remembering the bitterness of not being there, since it had been during her first year at Bryn Mawr. “Probably drunk and probably on his way back from an assignation with a cook at the Potter Hotel. He must have been . . . at least seventy then. Better so. My parents were killed the next year, and he couldn’t have saved them. Nothing could.”

  She shook herself a little. “Your father owned a bookstore, you said?”

  “Indeed he did! Or rather, we did; in an old house, and then two we knocked together. I helped him with it from as early as I could remember, and ran it after he was too ill. There was hard work to it, and I learned the buyer’s part too, which meant traveling about a little, even to New York once!”

  There was an innocent pride to her voice, and Luz hid a smile. There was more than a little respect in what she was feeling anyway. For a girl to succeed at a hard-bargaining trade like that required more than brains; it needed plain grit, and in large quantities.

  And I don’t suppose she’d have ended up here in Castle Rauenstein if she were a shrinking violet, Luz thought.

  “But it was a grand education, even better than going to high school! A quiet life, but I loved the books; reading them, and cataloging, and the smell and feel of them, and finding just the right one a customer wanted. And the way it felt like a thousand friends were always waiting for me to drop by. My brother didn’t want it, and started doing more with motors and electrics—though I helped him with that too, when I got the chance.”

  “You have a knack for that?”

  “Oh, yes. I—” She blushed. “Well, I know it’s not ladylike, but . . .”

  Luz grinned and patted the pocket over the navaja. “Ciara, do I look as if I grow pale when a young lady doesn’t flutter like a helpless butterfly and swivel her eyes about for a man to help her? It’s the twentieth century; women have the vote! We can fly, and speak instantly across continents, when in our grandparents’ time the fastest way to send a message was on horseback. I’m good with guns and horses because my father trained me and it was fun, and I can keep an engine running because I had to learn that, but if you’ve the natural talent for machines, I admire it.”

  “I don’t see why most people think it’s hard,” Ciara said, frowning a little in puzzlement. “It’s . . . seeing how things flow, the structure of them, how they fit together. Like mathematics, or music. It’s patterns.”

  Luz blinked in genuine admiration. I can make figures work for me, but it’s like digging a ditch—digging a ditch if you were blind and had to do it all by rote. I can see the patterns in people’s faces and hear it in their voices or see a fight or a dance as a whole thing, but numbers? A language I have no ear for. Speaking of which . . .

  “How did you learn German?” she said.

  “From books mostly. It’s very important for the sciences, you know! And Auntie Treinel had it, her mother and father having been from a little place called Lermoos, in Austria, and she spoke it at home as a child. Though what she speaks isn’t much like the books.”

  Luz raised a brow. “You have an aunt from Austria?” she said. The name Treinel was regional, not just German, very much like Ciara’s accent in that language, in fact, which was sort of a hyper-Bavarian-Tyrolese.

  “Oh, she’s not really my aunt, not by blood. My father’s elder sister—Auntie Colleen—and she are both spinsters. Auntie Colleen was thirty and still unwed with no prospect of it when she came over with Da, she having no inheritance and a clubfoot, too. And in Ireland these days it’s common for folk to stay unwed anyway, unless they’ve a holding or a trade. Or a good dowry, for a lass. The which is a big reason so many leave.”

  Luz nodded. It was, even if you didn’t count the huge number of Irish who were celibate religious, and those who did marry did so late in life. The Emerald Isle was full of younger brothers of farmers who were still bachelors at forty living by themselves in a loft, or with their spinster sisters; it was a habit that had come in with the Famine, and the fanatical fear of splitting the family’s possessions it had bred. Few actual farmers had perished in the great hunger, whether tenants or freeholders. It had been the landless men unable to rent a holding and depending on day labor who had died by the hundreds of thousands, or the little cottars with a quarter-acre patch of potatoes who held as sub-tenants of a farmer in return for their labor, and their wives and children. Those with just a little more money or luck had fled wearing all that they owned. Only abroad in lands where work and food were more abundant could the Gael keep up their old habit of early marriage and big families.

  “Auntie Colleen kept house for Da until he married, but by then she and Auntie Treinel were fast friends. They’ve shared a flat not far from where I live . . . lived, ever since then. With never a quarrel and happy as a pair of cats in a basket, with their cats, and cage of birds, and books and knowing everyone in the neighborhood and they so well liked, for being such good neighbors always ready with a hand for those who need it from sickness or ill-luck. Auntie Colleen was like a mother to me and a good sister to Da in his illness, and Auntie Treinel helped too. Helped me with the German when I started on it as well, and with other lessons too, the way Auntie Colleen helped me with the accounting. That being how she makes a living. Auntie Treinel teaches school, but she, Auntie Colleen, since she’s lame and has a talent for the numbers, she has account books sent in and cleans them up for folk. More than one crooked bookkeeper has confessed or run for it at the mention of her name!”

  Ciara frowned and went on quietly: “That’s how I knew there was something going on with the bookstore. When I started doing the accounts, a few years ago. Money flowing in and out that didn’t belong there—always balancing, but more than there should have been, and more by a good bit. The bookstore made us a fair living, until the doctor’s bills were very bad—thank the saints for the new National Health Insurance; I don’t know what we’d have done otherwise! Never a fortune, you understand, just an honest living for honest work. That other money, it wa
s too much. Enough to frighten me.”

  “Ah,” Luz said, her ears pricking up. “Not my specialty, but I’ve had specialists describe it to me. Money’s the fuel and grease of organization, and an underground one has to tap into conduits to move it around and account for it and store it places where it can’t be stolen but won’t attract attention. Especially these last few years, with income tax and currency controls and official channels for bullion transactions.”

  “Yes! I knew friends came and visited my father . . . some of them from the Old Country . . . and later with Colm. They didn’t talk much about it with me. And hard men, some of them. There’s one named Sean McDuffy who sent me here . . .”

  “Ah, now there’s a familiar name,” Luz said. “We never had enough on him for an arrest . . . He organized this?”

  Ciara nodded, and her face went bleak. “He didn’t tell me details, but what he said made me think that what this was . . . that it would be some sort of arms smuggling, from here back to Boston, and then from there to Ireland on neutral ships, since it’s too dangerous for U-boats to try.”

  “Mr. McDuffy keeps bad company,” Luz said thoughtfully.

  Ciara nodded. “Gunmen, killers. There’s a look about the eyes, especially when they think they’re alone.”

  “Oh, yes,” Luz said. I’ve seen it in the mirror at times. “Does this Mr. McDuffy know Elisa Carmody, do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He might, but probably not—he only came to Boston about . . . three years ago, to my knowledge.”

  Ciara’s own face went hard and furious for a moment. “And when Colm left and then he . . . was killed . . . and my father had his last stroke, I tracked McDuffy down and made them let me help.”

  She bit her lip. “I was stupid!”

  “No, you weren’t,” Luz said, her tone clinical rather than sympathetic, which was more helpful.

  Ciara looked up. “You needn’t flatter me. I ended up here, didn’t I? And not because I was so clever.”