He didn’t argue. Maybe that said everything she needed to know about the deaths that had placed him in the British Service.
“We rescue the woman,” she said.
“If it doesn’t get you killed and doesn’t let the Merchant escape.”
She shook her head. “The Leylands are as close to being Service as makes no difference. Get their niece out of the line of fire.”
“No promises.”
She hadn’t expected any. “Then there’s the aunts. The Merchant will go after them next.” Her mouth felt dry. She drank tea. “The Leylands must be protected.”
“Done. The Service will take care of them.”
“And finally, if I hand you the Merchant, if I play bait in your trap, will the Service give me a head start before they come after me? One week.”
“I’ll ask.”
Every one of those answers was the truth. He dealt honestly with her.
She closed her eyes. Opened them. “Semple Street, Number Fifty-six. Monday, eleven in the morning. I have to walk out and show myself before he’ll come.”
“That’s not much time. Do you—” He broke off.
He was looking at the door of Gunter’s.
She saw nothing there. Nothing happening. But Pax did. She quivered alert, every sense open, but saw nothing unusual. A big man in simple, respectable clothes had just walked in. Somebody’s coachman, large, square, reliable looking. The clerks behind the counter sprang to take his order, so he must work for some important family.
Pax, beside her, became invisible.
It had always been one of his skills, this trick of becoming part of the background. He acquired the stillness of an animal in the forest. But it was more than that. In some way, he simply wasn’t there. If she hadn’t seen it many times before, she would have been disconcerted.
Very quietly, he said, “Keep your hands on the table.”
She did. The shop continued its calm, well-ordered clockwork. The cheerful buzz of conversation didn’t waver. Waiters simpered and glided under their trays. The nearest people, two women eating tea cakes, talked about Scotland and the best soil for growing roses.
The coachman wanted a package prepared. Everything to be settled deep in shaved ice. This ice cream and that one and that. For a young girl on her sickbed, who had no appetite and was in pain. The man made payment in pound notes, peeled off a large roll.
The countermen conferred deferentially. “This will take a few minutes. Would you take a seat? Tea? Coffee?”
“No.” It wasn’t even arrogance. It was beyond that—an indifference that reduced this shop and the men who worked here to nothing at all. The coachman’s eyes skipped past fashionable women, past elegant men, and came to Cami. “I’ll find a seat.”
Pax murmured, “So. That’s who had you followed. I thought it might be.”
The man crossed the room and stopped at their table, in front of her. “You sent me a message.” He sat, without invitation.
This was someone senior in London’s hierarchy of criminals. Close up, he had the cold eyes of a banker.
“Please join us,” she said, feeling no temptation to sarcasm. “A cup of tea or coffee?”
“I can’t stay long.” He considered Pax. “Mr. Paxton. Always a pleasure.”
Pax didn’t answer and never took his eyes off the man.
“And you”—the man ran his eyes over her, weighed her up, measured, assessed—“claim to be a Baldoni. Explain to me why they’ve never heard of you.”
Twenty-five
We’re all just labyrinths of deception.
WILLIAM DOYLE
“Six men headed for Soho,” Hawker said, “armed with a copy of this.” He shoved aside an unlit lantern, three letters, and a pair of driving gloves to unroll the sketch on the hall table. “The Merchant, looking ordinary.”
“Many deadly men look ordinary.” Galba was already dressed for the street, meticulous in overcoat and hat. He frowned at the face that looked up at them from the table.
“I prefer it when killers show a little murder on their countenance,” Hawker said.
Doyle said, “It’s there. You see it in what’s missing.”
Galba put a glove on, finger by finger, stiff and emphatic about it. “I know this man.”
Doyle touched the corner of the paper. “You met him in France?”
“At Cambridge. Bring it in here.”
The downstairs study was empty, all the traffic of the early morning having run itself off to another part of the house or out to Soho. A dozen agents left a certain disorder behind.
In the study, Hawker laid the picture flat on the desk. Galba turned up the flame in the lamp, and they all looked at it.
Hawker said, “Cambridge?”
Galba narrowed his eyes, studying feature by feature. “This is Peter Styles.”
“Styles . . . Styles.” Doyle visibly shuffled through his memory. “The Honorable Peter Styles, who turned out to be somewhat less than honorable after all. That Foreign Office theft . . . it must be twenty-five years ago. He was the second—maybe third—son of one of the earls up north.”
“The Earl of Cardinham. I believe this Peter is now the heir. He took a First at Cambridge.”
“Before my time,” Doyle said. “Hawk, if you’re standing around idle . . .”
“I am never idle, Mr. Doyle. I am always preparing for the next stroke of brilliance.”
“Right. Do that while you put these in the dumbwaiter.” Doyle passed over coffee cups and hooked up a pair of ale tankards deftly in one hand, betraying some experience in that activity.
“I don’t know why everyone is determined to make me a waiter.” Hawker was not silent with the plates and cups. “So the Merchant is an Englishman.”
“This man is.” Galba picked up the sketch.
“I am casting my mind back a good ways now. Styles made a great noise at Cambridge.” Doyle rubbed the back of his neck. “I heard about it even in my day. He was leading around a band of noble radicals who were going to reform the world. A brilliant mind, but something wrong with him even then. Hawk, get that last cup on the windowsill, will you.”
“We would not wish to leave it behind, all forlorn without its fellows.”
“We would not wish someone to break it up and use the edges to attack,” Doyle said. “I don’t remember much more about Styles. He left behind nasty rumors and unpaid bills when he shook the dust of Cambridge off his boots. They say he crippled a man in a duel. They say he seduced his landlady’s daughter, age fourteen.”
“A charming fellow,” Hawker said.
“And a credit to the Foreign Office, which is where he went next. A year later he went through the offices and helped himself to every secret that wasn’t nailed down and a pile of money intended for bribes in the German states and took the packet from Dover.”
Hawker brushed his hands. “I have frequently asked myself why I don’t do the same. If you don’t have any more menial work for me, I will depart. I’m supposed to be following Pax.”
“Follow him,” Galba said. “Stay close. The Merchant knows his face.”
“And that she-wolf may cut his throat in a fit of pique. Maybe I can eliminate one or the other of those threats.”
“Don’t kill anybody,” Doyle said.
“You are tying my hands as an effective agent. You do know that.” The rest of Hawker’s commentary disappeared down the hall with him.
When Hawker was gone, Galba and Doyle stood in silence for few minutes.
Galba said, “Do you see it?”
“What?” Doyle said.
“Look closely.” Galba was doing just that. “Forget who it is. See it as if it were hanging on the wall in a country house.”
Doyle took the sketch. “I’d think it was good. I’d wonder who the artist was. I’d think the man looks familiar. I never saw Peter Styles, so I can’t—” Doyle stopped. Stared for another moment. Whispered, “Frogs and little dancing fishes. I don’
t believe it.”
Galba said, “The resemblance is unmistakable.”
Twenty-six
Family is everything.
A BALDONI SAYING
Some activities are unsuited to Gunter’s. Negotiating with criminals was one. Any reference to the Baldoni, root and branch, was another.
Cami said, “Let’s leave,” to the criminal who sat across from her. “I don’t want to talk about this here.”
“Now, why is that?” the man said softly.
She stood. “We can be overheard, and I’m cautious.”
“Happens I’m cautious myself. Why don’t we continue our discussion elsewhere?”
Pax dropped coins on the table and picked her cloak off the back of the chair and pulled it around her shoulders. He said, “She’s protected.”
“You’re not doing a notably good job of it, Mr. Paxton, if she’s face-to-face with me.”
“That’s her choice,” Pax said calmly. “It’s all her choice.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
She led two very dangerous men out of Gunter’s, greatly reducing the level of lethality within. Pax followed last, keeping an eye on things.
Sunlight struck bright after she’d been inside. There were more thugs on the street than she was comfortable with. She walked a dozen feet down the pavement to put some space between herself and the door of Gunter’s, observing which people noted the movement and which ignored it. Separating the sheep from the goats.
She selected a spot twelve feet down because it seemed more promising than the rest. A staid, self-important stone house on her right, every window closed. No one stirring. On her left, a black coach she’d seen drive up, curtains drawn, horses and driver profoundly uninterested in the passing scene.
A nice, tight, defensible space where no one could sneak up on her. “We’ll talk here.”
“As you wish.” Her criminal beckoned one of his attendant thugs, but it was just to send him to take charge of the ice cream when it was packed and ready. That chore completed, he gave his attention back to her. He was as frightening in the open air as he’d been sitting across a table.
She was something of a judge of brutality. The Baldoni had never entirely renounced the practical, everyday side of criminality. She could appreciate graded and careful intimidation.
Pax stood a pace behind her, at her left shoulder, probably thinking along similar lines. She didn’t have to turn around to look at him. She could feel him there, the way she’d feel a fire burning in a cold room.
There were a number of large, roughly dressed men on the street.
She said, “You’ve brought an audience. I don’t like that,” to the man she must parley with, seeing whether he’d make a concession.
He did. He made some signal, negligently, with his right hand and the three ratlike children who’d followed her since Covent Garden disappeared into the greenery of Berkeley Square. They would doubtless run about, playing children’s games unconvincingly. Dangerous-looking men up and down the street revealed their allegiance by strolling off to loiter in a more distant place. The visible menace faded away, except for a large black man who’d exchanged the wall beside Gunter’s door for the closest lamppost. That one leaned against the iron pole, arms crossed, face blank.
Behind her, Pax spoke softly. “The Service will be deeply annoyed if anything happens to her.”
“I have no quarrel with the Service,” the man said. “She came to me. I didn’t go hunting her.”
Pax, having made his point, went back to being enigmatic. He didn’t mention that the Service interest involved interrogating her and locking her up indefinitely. Or hanging her if that seemed most useful.
She’d come to London prepared to negotiate with villains from the rookeries of London. This held a certain danger, but, as the Baldoni so wisely say, the safest place is in the grave.
She folded her hands. “I’ve come to buy a service. I’m told anyone who does this is given safe passage.”
“None of them use a century-old signal to get my attention.”
His attention. Fear wrapped like a cold cloak, prickled her skin, seeped inward. This was no lieutenant of anybody. This was the King of Thieves. The ruler of London’s underworld. This was Lazarus himself.
Pax was a waiting silence behind her. He knew.
Endings grow from the seed of their beginning. Six days ago, trying to sleep in tall brush in a field in Cambridgeshire, she’d made her plans. It was too late for qualms.
She said, “Does it matter what sign I use? I could walk into the middle of a street and shout. You have eyes everywhere.”
She was immeasurably glad of Pax’s presence behind her, ally and friend, solid as rock, subtle as water, edged sharper than a knife.
Lazarus looked amused. “You’ve made me curious.” His gaze slid past her. “You don’t have any intention of explaining this, do you, Mr. Paxton?”
A shift of dark and light at the corner of her eye. Pax had made some motion. Maybe a head shake. No words from him, though.
Lazarus said, “Your lot was on the street last night, up and down the town, keeping an eye on her. But she hasn’t been to Meeks Street. I’d say you don’t know what she’s up to, either.”
No response from Pax this time.
She was the descendant of many generations of powerful, dishonest men. The problem in dealing with master criminals—one of several problems, actually—is that they don’t need the money. They like it, but that’s not the principal reason you are face-to-face with them. You are an antidote to boredom. A curiosity. A puzzle. It is not good to negotiate with someone who wants to be entertained. “I’m delighted everyone is so interested in me. If you have questions—”
“I like to know who’s buying my services. A foible of mine.” Lazarus half turned, looking expectant.
The black coach they stood beside was not empty, as she’d assumed. The door opened. A man emerged and set an elegant, well-shod foot on the step of the carriage. He was perhaps sixty years old. His long dark hair, combed back from his forehead, had gone white at the temples. He was nattily and expensively dressed in black and carried an ebony cane. In a hundred subtle ways, he did not look English.
She’d have said this sort of man would have nothing to do with business transacted by the London underworld. But Lazarus was waiting.
The old man’s face . . . Out of her childhood memories, across a dozen years, past deaths and revelation and the torment of the Coach House, she remembered him. She’d made a grave mistake using any password of the Baldoni.
The old man said, “Cosa abbiamo qui?” What have we here?
The voice reached back to a time beyond memory, to her cradle, to tumbling on the floor in a melee of dogs and cousins. To being pulled from her perch on the roof of the chapel and spanked soundly and hugged just as soundly. To warm milk at bedtime and warm laps in front of the fire.
Pax said quietly, “Who are you?”
The man said, “A man with a certain interest in anyone who claims the privilege of a Baldoni.”
When was the last time she’d let herself speak Tuscan, the language of home? She could name the day and the hour. It had been in Paris, when they’d arrested Papà, and she’d gone to her cousin to beg for help and been refused so utterly.
“Run away or the vendetta will take you, too. Go away. You are not one of us.”
Tendrils of a sort of madness twined through her brain. She knew him. Uncle Bernardo—her great-uncle Bernardo. She refused to lower her eyes. She said, “Ho il diritto, prozio.” I have that right, Great-Uncle. And with that she claimed the family that had turned their backs on her. Claimed the vendetta that had killed her parents.
He whispered, “Sara? Piccola Sara?”
She inclined her head fractionally. Barely at all. Barely admitting it. Those who said women and children weren’t part of vendetta lied. Her mother had died in la place de la Révolution with her father, both of them denounced to the C
ommittee . . . by a Baldoni. The doors of Baldoni protection had remained closed to a child who cried there and beat on the gate with her fists and pleaded. No one came to rescue her from the Coach House.
Uncle Bernardo came closer and stretched out his hand to touch fingers to her hair. She didn’t flinch. He whispered, “Sara? It is Sara.”
Too fast to predict or avoid—he’d been a great swordsman in his day, with reflexes like lightning—he pulled her to his chest, against the black wool and the starched ruffles of his old-fashioned neckcloth, into the memory of lavender and starch and eau de cologne. “Sara. Sei tu? Sei viva? You live?”
Old anger cracked inside her heart and loosened and disappeared, as spring breaks the ice on a stream and carries it off. “I thought—”
She was held at arm’s length and inspected minutely. Clasped again. “We thought you were lost forever. We thought you were dead in that French madness. Grazie a Dio. How does this happen?”
In Tuscan, with catches in her breath, words tumbling together, she told him about Paris and the riots. About Mamma and Papà, executed. “I went to Cousin Francesco and they sent me away at the gate. I sent message after message. No one answered. No one came.” She took a deep breath. “It’s been so long, I didn’t know you.”
The elegant long face twisted. Then he shook his head, as if dislodging a memory. “I have become old.”
“Never.”
That got her a hearty kiss on her forehead. “But you . . . how you have changed.” His laugh was a Baldoni, Tuscan laugh, unbounded, full of feeling. “You have grown up. I would have passed you on the street and not named you.” He took her left hand and raised it. “You are not married. You have no husband?” A dark look ran over Pax. “I cannot imagine why not. Wherever you have been, someone should have seen you married.”
Lazarus watched with interest but without comprehension. Perhaps he didn’t understand Italian. Perhaps.
“I’ve been busy,” she said.
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