“To be frank, kitten, I don’t know that I can do that, even if I were still standing at the razor’s edge of relevance. But there are things I can do, assuming I cared enough.”
“Oh, my. You’re pouting.”
He shrugged and lit his cigarette with a lucifer. “No more than you. We make a lovely pair—your bruised face, my bruised ego. The Old Bear will find us an absolute hilarity.”
The waiter peeped around the frame of the swinging kitchen door. He scuttled forth at a gesture from Anselm, scrawled down their orders—two cocktails, a basket of figs and lean bread, a plate of herbed oil, and roasted aubergine—and was gone again after much bowing and muttering.
Rare spread her napkin on her lap and smoothed it with exaggerated care. “So he’ll meet us here. When?”
Anselm consulted his chronometer. “Half past the hour. He’s a man of principles, which means he’s punctual as well as damned irritating.”
“His principles haven’t prevented him from dealing with Ivor’s kind.”
The plates arrived, and they split up the meal amid the electric tension of two people putting up a show of mutual indifference.
“He won’t be coming alone,” Anselm said at last. “He’ll bring the girl, of course.”
“The delivery girl?”
“Naturally.”
“Whatever for?”
“A certain nostalgia for lost, broken things, I imagine.” Anselm’s mouth was an ironic curve. “I had thought you’d remember it.”
Rare flashed him a cold look. Anselm continued with an air of careless musing. “Or perhaps just those dusty principles. Given what’s probably become of Ivor, the Old Bear wouldn’t have sent the girl back where she’d come from—whatever’s left of it.”
“Foolish choice. The aigamuxa have seen her already. They’ve followed her once. If you’re right and it turns out they wanted the delivery and to shut up people who know anything about it, they’ll find her again.”
“They would probably come his way, in any case. The package was meant to be delivered to him. That links him to whatever business they care so much about. In the final analysis, there’s little risk added to his account by that charity.”
Rare dabbed her fingers with her napkin. “I’ve no use for charity.”
“I know. It’s one of your most seductive attributes.”
She frowned.
Anselm smiled over the rim of his drink. “There’s an immeasurable sweetness added to the pleasure of a woman putting your cock in her mouth, kitten, when you know she only ever does things for her own pleasure.”
A long moment passed, the two staring at one another.
Gradually, Rare returned the smile. “You are a magnificent bastard, Anselm Meteron.”
“A magnificent, irrelevant bastard,” he corrected. “Curious that the odor of disuse never kept you from my sheets.”
His hand was on her knee, warm and insistent, traveling upward, slipping under a drape of fabric. She felt his touch below and shuddered.
“The Bear,” she whispered, “he hasn’t started rambling in his old age? Won’t expect a lot of our time?”
Anselm was close now. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his mouth, the white hairs at his temples blending with the blond. His other hand cupped her face.
“Still not the loquacious type, no,” he murmured against her lips.
“Good. I’m afraid we’ve a very busy calendar today.”
“Do we?”
They kissed. She tasted gin and lime and felt for the laces of his trousers. “Oh, yes.”
Anselm slipped from the booth, pulling her after. They were nose to nose, trading a galvano-graph line of kisses, shorts and longs and longer still. If they had opened their eyes, they would have seen the sidelong glances of the other patrons, the winks and jabbing elbows between men out for dinner who now found themselves taking in a show.
“Why wait?” Anselm asked. “There’s a room upstairs. The maître d’ will keep his peace.”
“You old dog.” Rare opened her eyes and ran her fingers along his whitening temple. “I thought you said the Bear will be punctual.”
“Because he’s scrupulous,” Anselm replied. He walked backward, ushering her to a stairway half-curtained by long strings of beads. “We are not.”
They were gone in an instant, leaving behind the chuckles of the rest of the room and an uncommonly large tip.
15.
“I’ve told you and told you: he gave her the drink.”
Bess sat in the stony gray confines of a constabulary interrogation room, head in hands and hair unpinned. The phonocorder was spinning off its second cylinder. It wouldn’t tell the coppers much more than the first had.
They’d been going through the story for ages. Sometimes, the city inspector asked her to start at a different place—an hour before all the guests arrived, say, or the day before. She was probably trying to check her for inconsistencies, but there was nothing to be inconsistent about.
I didn’t do anything wrong. Why can’t they see that?
“Miss Earnshaw,” Inspector Gammon said, tapping her quill against a little pad of paper tattooed with notes and curlicues. “There’s no evidence corroborating your story.”
Bess wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry or to scream. She shook her head hard enough to drop the last pin still threaded in her hair.
“But it’s true. Abraham took me shopping for the ball, and we made a stop after at the Stone Scales. He talked to the Alchemist about buying something, but they wouldn’t do it where I could hear. And then the Alchemist told me that Abraham seemed to have a need for dangerous things.”
“Lord Regenzi has already told us of the trip to the Scales. He said the Alchemist spoke to you candidly—twice. The second time Lord Regenzi was out of the shop.”
Bess bit her lip. “That’s true.”
“And that he made an order for you, apparently free of charge.”
“That’s true, too, but—”
“Did you already know the man?”
The question froze her. If she said yes, she’d have to say how. That would bring Ivor up. If she dragged his name into this mess, the old man would see her pay hell for it. And if she admitted to having been one of Ivor’s birds, Gammon would have to know her employment wasn’t actually legal. Then she’d be collared for another charge altogether.
“No,” Bess said at last. “I didn’t know him.”
“Why would he give you anything in gratuity, then?”
For that, at least, she had an honest answer. “I don’t know.”
Gammon shook her head. “Regenzi’s admitted you’re not his goddaughter. You’ve only known him a fortnight.”
Bess looked down at her hands twisting the fabric of her skirts. God. It all seemed so foolish now.
“He also tells me,” the copper went on, “that you came to him by Smallduchess Avergnon’s recommendation.”
Bess looked up brightly. “That’s right. Ask her—she’ll vouch for me.”
“We sent a constable with a notary and a sketch of you to take a deposition in her home. She says she’s never seen you before in her life.”
Bess felt her breath leave in a rush, as sudden and sharp as when her maid cinched up her corset. “That’s a lie.”
Gammon leaned forward. “Miss Earnshaw, you’re asking me to believe you, a woman with no legal identity, over two members of the governor’s peerage. You entered Lord Regenzi’s life by apparent duplicity at the perfect time to gain access to many people of stature and renown, including a reverend doctor whose research might have changed the face of the EC’s public doctrine. There are people who would like that sort of thing stopped.”
Bess closed her eyes. She fought for an even tone. “I don’t know those kinds of people.”
“You insinuated yourself into proximity of Reverend Doctor Nora Pierce, and you poisoned her.”
“No.”
“The only thing I don’t yet know
is who paid you to do it.”
“Nobody.” Bess’s eyes snapped open even as her voice caved in. “I wasn’t hired, and I don’t know anyone, and I—”
Gammon stood, speaking over her papers in a flat voice as she swept them together. “If I called upon the Stone Scales with a warrant for the Alchemist’s financials, I might find some record of who paid in advance for whatever drug he passed to you. It was nothing subtle, in any case. Whoever hired you must not have cared much if you were caught murdering a woman who was about to become the most famous scholar in a generation.”
Bess shot to her feet. Her chair skittered back and toppled, the crash jarring the phonocorder’s needle out of place. “I didn’t poison her! I saw Abraham put the phial he bought at the Scales in the drink. He took the drink from me, and he passed it to Pierce. That’s how it happened!”
Gammon shrugged. “No one else seems to have seen things that way, Miss Earnshaw. If there’s anyone you should like to have sparked, or have sent a runner, let the sergeant on duty know.”
She rapped at the heavy steel door.
Bess’s legs buckled.
The door opened, a chorus of chattering galvano-graph scribes tumbling in through the gap. Outside, a man only a few years older than Bess snapped to attention. He wore the uniform of a junior officer, all blue and buttons without a single band or stripe. Gammon exchanged a meaningful look with him, a curt nod. And that was all.
Bess realized she was backing toward a corner, hands up as if to fend off the approaching officer. The door closed between her and Gammon, cutting short her sobs and the sound of the cuffs clinking free of the gendarme’s belt.
Haadiyaa Gammon entered her office in distraction, flipping through a folder full of freshly pressed reports and notes. None of them were the note she wished most to answer. Jane’s spark from three nights before still rested in her inner breast pocket, promising Sabberday luncheon and gently teasing about what she meant to do with Haadi after. The very thought made her ache. Haadiyaa had not seen Jane in nearly four weeks. Her present docket promised little hope of that changing anytime soon. Indeed, it promised little hope of even knowing the time of day for certain as she raced from duty to duty. It was past midday, she was fairly sure, but alchemical lamps still glowed, for her office was deep in the guts of the constabulary’s meandering second floor, far from windows and the promise of daylight.
“There you are. Blessed Reason, I thought you’d never get free of her.”
Gammon looked up at the voice’s owner.
Abraham Regenzi occupied her office chair, his feet on the desk and his hands behind his head. He still wore his ballroom finery, brocade tunic and vest and hose, looking damnably uncreased. He’d spent the long morning in a conference room with coffee and breakfast and whatever comforts he pleased. Beatrice Earnshaw had been moved from an iron-sided prison wagon to a holding cell to the interrogation room, all without a sip of water or a trip to the loo.
“These things take time,” Gammon answered, “if you expect them to look genuine.”
“Do they?”
Gammon closed the door. “I’ll thank your lordship to get out of my bloody chair.”
Smallduke Regenzi traded places with Gammon, who sat and began moving papers with perfect disinterest.
“You didn’t answer my question, Inspector,” Regenzi noted. He stood with arms crossed, whiskers impertinent as a ferret’s.
Gammon looked up at him. She had long since decided Abraham Regenzi was one of the most presumptuous, insinuating bastards she’d ever met—and given her work on behalf of justice and the Court, she’d known more than her share. Gammon wasn’t rich. The bribes she’d accepted to rise in station were infusions of information and allegiance, not coin. She had as little respect for the smalldukes and smallduchesses of Amidon as other folk of modest means. Less, really, as the daughter of Indine immigrants, converted Hindoo pantheists eager to work any job that might carve out an honest place under the Unity. Since she was a girl, Gammon had known the smalldukes were little more than wealthy merchants or well-connected raconteurs. Their chief merit was possessing principal enough to buy a place in the governor’s peerage. Their titles were manufactured, hereditary only if the family could afford the yearly retainer. Abraham Regenzi’s accounts could pay that astronomical fee several times over before he’d feel the strain.
But there were worse things in Corma than men like Regenzi—things that had made it worth Gammon auctioning a piece of her integrity to the likes of Anselm Meteron. There had been city inspectors before her who had helped make Corma a metropolis of orphans and vagrants, rapists and smugglers, and God only knew what else. Gammon believed her citizens ought to be safer. And she believed all good things had a price.
“So far,” she said at last, “it seems your story accounting for last night’s events will take root.”
Regenzi smiled. “Excellent. Good.” He pulled a chair under himself. “That will do.” And then he glanced at a little wet bar in a dim corner of the office, clearing his throat.
Gammon regarded the smallduke narrowly. If Regenzi expected she should act as his waitress, he had best think again.
“When you first asked me to . . .” Gammon paused. The verb Regenzi had used was telling, and it tried now to elude her.
“Consult,” his lordship suggested. He looked again at the bar and sighed, finally pouring himself a short glass of something brown.
“When you asked me to consult in this business, I had a different idea of what you wanted than what’s been happening, my lord.” She ticked a manifest of complaints off on her fingers. “I’ve helped conceal Pierce’s kidnapping. I’ve made a dumb show inquiry into her disappearance, suppressed details of Chalmers’s abduction in the gazettes, let you set up some wide-eyed child courtesan as the murderer of a new Pierce . . .” Gammon paused. “Who is this fresh corpse in my morgue really, Regenzi?”
The smallduke resumed his chair and shrugged. “An actress. She actually did come from Lemarcke. She was led to believe she was participating in an avant-garde audition for a part in a new form of immersive, audience-involved theater.”
Gammon raised an eyebrow.
“I chose her,” Regenzi continued, his pride in the plot growing more obvious, “because she had a certain resemblance to Nora Pierce—the right height and age, more or less the build. The hair was wrong, but women change their hair so often it hardly mattered. I probably needn’t have been so careful. The Ecclesiastical Commission is such a large fraternity, when you toss the lot of them together, you find that everyone knows a lot of names but not many faces. When your global conference takes place just once a decade?” Again, the shrug. “Well, you can imagine the difficulties.”
Gammon nodded. Now the Ecclesiastical Commission had good reason both to stop the search for Nora Pierce that Chalmers’s panic had engendered and to cancel her keynote address. A public murder, enough witnesses of appropriate station and credibility. It was a tidy piece of work. No one would ever look for Nora Pierce again. The body from Knox’s inquest—the true reverend doctor—could be safely recorded as a Jane Doe and incinerated. Procedure could take over from here. Gammon realized she’d already opened a drawer and reached for the necessary paperwork.
“There will still be an inquest,” she murmured over the forms.
“I want one. The case needs to be complete.”
“Then there’s the matter of the Alchemist. I’ll need to question him about the purchases you and Beatrice Earnshaw made yesterday morning.”
Regenzi frowned, his whiskers prickling. “That’s really necessary?”
“At some point, you’ll need the girl to go before the Bar and be convicted. The judge will expect either your story or hers to be corroborated by the Alchemist’s testimony. I doubt we’ll find him very cooperative. He would need to admit to selling a virulent poison. We used to give the rope for that. It’s prison time in the hulks now, but some men would rather just swing.”
“I can buy him,” Smallduke Regenzi insisted. The way his knee jogged suggested he was less than sure of that. “I can do it if you promise to look the other way on the poison sale.”
Haadiyaa Gammon laughed—a humorless bark. “How many crimes do you expect me to commit or forget in this cause, Regenzi? I have my limits.”
“Haadi,” the other man soothed. Gammon could already feel the ache in her jaw as she fought the urge to grind her teeth. There was something about her familiar name, something in its two syllables that the most devious men seemed unable to pronounce without a petting tone. “Haadi—remember why I came to you in the first place.”
Haadiyaa Gammon did remember. She was a God-fearing woman. An earnest and a Rational woman. She believed in God the Creator, God the Experimenter. She believed in Him because her mother’s grandfather had abandoned a thousand years of culture and history to put his children’s children on the side of Reason. She even had an aunt who had become a deaconess. Whether Regenzi had known of Gammon’s background or had simply wagered on the chief officer of the constabulary’s investment in the common good being authentic, she didn’t know. Still, the wager had been a good one.
“If this theory is correct,” the smallduke said gravely, “then the whole human race is held hostage by the actions of just nine people. Nine! It’s madness, Haadi. A bad gamble, if there’s any truth to it.”
“But you don’t really believe there is.”
Regenzi smiled. “I’m not sure a theosophical debate is essential to the present discussion.”
“I prefer to know when I’m being fed a line.”
“Whether I believe there really are nine people whose actions will determine if God throws the plans for this world into the furnace or lets it click along awhile longer isn’t important. There are tangible benefits to our present course.”
“Tangible benefits,” Gammon repeated, skeptical.
Regenzi shrugged. “I have certain needs my benefactor is seeing to, in compensation for my pains. One can only go so far on one’s own with a purchased peerage, but making an ally in high places can clear the most bothersome hurdles.” He reached inside his dress jacket and removed, with the air of a street-corner magician, a carefully sealed envelope. The smallduke passed it to Gammon with a smile.
The Nine Page 14