In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  An hour’s worth of experimentation was enough to prove to Golescu’s satisfaction that Emil was more than able to count cards accurately; if a deck was even fanned before his face for a second, he could correctly identify all the cards he had glimpsed.

  “And now, dear boy, only one question remains,” said Golescu, tossing the deck over his shoulder into the night. The cards scattered like dead leaves. “Why hasn’t Madame Amaunet taken advantage of your fantastic abilities to grow rich beyond the dreams of avarice?”

  Emil did not reply.

  “Such a perfect setup. I can’t understand it,” persisted Golescu, leaning down to peer at the line stretching to the door of the forward wagon. A woman had just emerged, wringing her hands and sobbing. Though the fairground had begun to empty out now, there were still a few distinct thugs waiting their turn to...have their fortunes told? It seemed unlikely. Three of them seemed to be concealing bulky parcels about their persons.

  “With a lucky mannikin like you, she could queen it at gambling houses from Monte Carlo to St. Petersburg,” mused Golescu. “In fact, with a body like hers, she could be the richest whore in Rome, Vienna or Budapest. If she wore a mask, that is. Why, then, does she keep late hours fencing stolen spoons and watches for petty cutthroats? Where’s the money in that? What does she want, Emil, my friend?”

  “The Black Cup,” said Emil.

  When the last of the thugs had gone his way, Amaunet emerged from the wagon and looked straight at Golescu, where he lounged in the shadows. He had been intending to make an impressive entrance, but with the element of surprise gone he merely waved at her sheepishly.

  “Where’s Emil?” demanded Amaunet.

  “Safe and sound, my queen,” Golescu replied, producing Emil and holding him up by the scruff of his neck. Emil, startled by the light, yelled feebly and covered his eyes. “We had a lovely evening, thank you.”

  “Get to bed,” Amaunet told Emil. He writhed from Golescu’s grip and darted into the wagon. “Did you feed him?” she asked Golescu.

  “Royally,” said Golescu. “And how did I find the wherewithal to do that, you ask? Why, with this.” He held up the purse of somewhat less than twenty thousand lei and clinked it at her with his most seductive expression. To his intense annoyance, her eyes did not brighten in the least.

  “Fetch the horses and hitch them in place. We’re moving on tonight,” she said.

  Golescu was taken aback. “Don’t you want to know where I got all this lovely money?”

  “You stole it?” said Amaunet, taking down the lantern from its hook by the door and extinguishing it.

  “I never!” cried Golescu, genuinely indignant. “I won it for you, if you must know. Guessing how many grains of millet were in a jar.”

  He had imagined her reaction to his gift several times that evening, with several variations on her range of emotion. He was nonetheless unprepared for her actual response of turning, swift as a snake, and grabbing him by the throat.

  “How did you guess the right number?” she asked him, in a very low voice.

  “I’m extraordinarily talented?” he croaked, his eyes standing out of his head.

  Amaunet tightened her grip. “It was Emil’s guess, wasn’t it?”

  Golescu merely nodded, unable to draw enough breath to speak.

  “Were you enough of a fool to take him to the games of chance?”

  Golescu shook his head. She pulled his face close to her own.

  “If I ever catch you taking Emil to card-parlors or casinos, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

  She released him, hurling him back against the side of the wagon. Golescu straightened, gasped in air, pushed his hat up from his face and said:

  “All right, so I discovered his secret. Does Madame have any objections to my asking why the hell she isn’t using our little friend to grow stinking rich?”

  “Because Emil doesn’t have a secret,” Amaunet hissed. “He is a secret.”

  “Oh, that explains everything,” said Golescu, rubbing his throat.

  “It had better,” said Amaunet. “Now, bring the horses.”

  Golescu did as he was told, boiling with indignation and curiosity, and also with something he was barely able to admit to himself. It could not be said, by any stretch of the imagination, that Amaunet was beautiful in her wrath, and yet...

  Something about the pressure of her fingers on his skin, and the amazing strength of her hands...and the scent of her breath up close like that, like some unnamable spice...

  “What strange infatuation enslaves my foolish heart?” he inquired of the lead horse, as he hitched it to the wagon-tongue.

  They traveled all the rest of the moonless night, along the dark river, and many times heard the howling of wolves, far off in the dark forest.

  Golescu wove their cries into a fantasy of heroism, wherein he was possessed of an immense gun and discharged copious amounts of shot into a pack of ferocious wolves threatening Amaunet, who was so grateful for the timely rescue she...she threw off her disguise, and most of her clothing too, and it turned out that she’d been wearing a fearsome mask all along. She was actually beautiful, though he couldn’t quite see how beautiful, because every time he tried to fling himself into her arms he kept tangling his feet in something, which seemed to be pink candy-floss someone had dropped on the fairground...

  And then the pink strands became a spiderweb and Emil was a fly caught there, screaming and screaming in his high voice, which seemed odd considering Emil was a vampyr. “Aren’t they usually the ones who do the biting?” he asked Amaunet, but she was sprinting away toward the dark river, which was the Nile, and he sprinted after her, pulling his clothing off as he went too, but the sun was rising behind the pyramids...

  Golescu sat up with a snort, and shielded his eyes against the morning glare.

  “We’ve stopped,” he announced.

  “Yes,” said Amaunet, who was unhitching the horses. They seemed to have left the road in the night; they were now in a forest clearing, thickly screened on all sides by brush.

  “You’re camping here,” Amaunet said. “I have an appointment to keep. You’ll stay with the lead wagon and watch Emil. I should be gone no more than three days.”

  “But of course,” said Golescu, stupid with sleep. He sat there rubbing his unshaven chin, watching her lead the horses out of sight through the bushes. He could hear water trickling somewhere near at hand. Perhaps Amaunet was going to bathe in a picturesque forest pool, as well as water the horses?

  He clambered down from the seat and hurried after her, moving as silently as he could, but all that rewarded his stealthy approach was the sight of Amaunet standing by the horses with her arms crossed, watching them drink from a stream. Golescu shuddered. Strong morning light was really not her friend.

  Sauntering close, he said:

  “So what does the little darling eat, other than sausages and candy?”

  “Root vegetables,” said Amaunet, not bothering to look at him. “Potatoes and turnips, parsnips, carrots. He won’t eat them unless they’re boiled and mashed, no butter, no salt, no pepper. He’ll eat any kind of bread if the crusts are cut off. Polenta, but again, no butter, no salt. He’ll drink water.”

  “How obliging of him,” said Golescu, making a face. “Where’d you find our tiny friend, anyway?”

  Amaunet hesitated a moment before replying. “An asylum,” she said.

  “Ah! And they had no idea what he was, did they?” said Golescu. She turned on him, with a look that nearly made him wet himself.

  “And you know what he is?” she demanded.

  “Just—just a little idiot savant, isn’t it so?” said Golescu. “Clever at doing sums. Why you’re not using his big white brain to get rich, I can’t imagine; but there it is. Is there anything else Nursie ought to know about his care and feeding?”

  “Only that I’ll hunt you down and kill you if you kidnap him while I’m gone,” said Amaunet, without raising her voice
in the slightest yet managing to convince Golescu that she was perfectly sincere. It gave him another vaguely disturbing thrill.

  “I seek only to be worthy of your trust, my precious one,” he said. “Where are you going, anyway?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “To be sure,” he agreed, bowing and scraping. “And you’re taking the rear wagon, are you? One can’t help wondering, my black dove of the mysteries, whether this has anything to do with all the loot hidden back there. Perhaps you have a rendezvous with someone who’ll take it off your hands, eh?”

  Her look of contempt went through him like a knife, but he knew he’d guessed correctly.

  The first thing Golescu did, when he was alone, was to go into Amaunet’s wagon and explore.

  Though his primary object was money, it has to be admitted he went first to what he supposed to be her underwear drawer. This disappointed him, for it contained instead what seemed to be alchemist’s equipment: jars of powdered minerals and metals, bowls, alembics and retorts. All was so spotlessly clean it might never have been used. When he found her underwear at last, in a trunk, he was further disappointed. It was plain utilitarian stuff; evidently Amaunet didn’t go in for frills. Nevertheless, he slipped a pair of her drawers into his breast pocket, like a handkerchief, and continued his search.

  No money at all, nor any personal things that might give him any clue to her history. There were a few decorative items, obviously meant to give an Egyptian impression to her customers: a half-size mummy case of papier-mâché. A hanging scroll, hieroglyphs printed on cloth, of French manufacture.

  No perfumes or cosmetics by the washbasin; merely a bar of yellow soap. Golescu sniffed it and recoiled; no fragrance but lye. Whence, then, that intoxicating whiff of not-quite-cinnamon on her skin?

  No writing desk, no papers. There was something that might have been intended for writing, a polished box whose front opened out flat to reveal a dull mirror of green glass at its rear. It was empty. Golescu gave it no more than a cursory glance. After he’d closed it, he rubbed the fingertips of his hand together, for they tingled slightly.

  Not much in the larder: dry bread, an onion, a few potatoes. Several cooking pots and a washing copper. Golescu looked at it thoughtfully, rubbing his chin.

  “But no money,” he said aloud.

  He sat heavily on her bed, snorting in frustration. Hearing a faint squeak of protest, he rose to his feet again and looked down. “Yes, of course!” he said, and opened the drawer under the bed. Emil whimpered and rolled away from the light, covering his face with his hands.

  “Hello, don’t mind me,” said Golescu, scooping him out. He got down on his hands and knees, ignoring Emil’s cries, and peered into the space. “Where does your mistress keep her gold, my darling? Not in here, eh? Hell and Damnation.”

  He sat back. Emil attempted to scramble past him, back into the shadows, but he caught the little man by one leg.

  “Emil, my jewel, you’ll never amount to much in this world if you can’t walk around in the daytime,” he said. “And you won’t be much use to me, either. What’s your quarrel with the sun, anyway?”

  “It burns my eyes,” Emil wept.

  “Does it?” Golescu dragged him close, prized down his hands and looked into his wet eyes. “Perhaps there’s something we can do about that, eh? And once we’ve solved that problem...” His voice trailed off, as he began to smile. Emil wriggled free and vanished back into the drawer. Golescu slid it shut with his foot.

  “Sleep, potato-boy,” he said, hauling himself to his feet. “Don’t go anyplace, and dear Uncle Barbu will be back with presents this afternoon.”

  Humming to himself, he mopped his face with Amaunet’s drawers, replaced them in his pocket, and left the wagon. Pausing only to lock its door, he set off for the nearest road.

  It took him a while to find a town, however, and what with one thing and another it was nearly sundown before Golescu came back to the wagon.

  He set down his burdens—one large box and a full sack—and unlocked the door.

  “Come out, little Emil,” he said, and on receiving no reply he clambered in and pulled the drawer open. “Come out of there!”

  “I’m hungry,” said Emil, sounding accusatory, but he did not move.

  “Come out and I’ll boil you a nice potato, eh? It’s safe; the sun’s gone down. Don’t you want to see what I got you, ungrateful thing?”

  Emil came unwillingly, as Golescu backed out before him. He stepped down from the door, looking around, his tiny weak mouth pursed in suspicion. Catching sight of the low red sun, he let out a shrill cry and clapped his hands over his eyes.

  “Yes, I lied,” Golescu told him. “but just try these—” He drew from his pocket a pair of blue spectacles and, wrenching Emil’s hands away, settled them on the bridge of his nose. They promptly fell off, as Emil’s nose was far too small and thin to keep them up, and they only had one earpiece anyway.

  Golescu dug hastily in the sack he had brought and drew out a long woolen scarf. He cut a pair of slits in it, as Emil wailed and jigged in front of him. Clapping the spectacles back on Emil’s face and holding them in place a moment with his thumb, he tied the scarf about his head like a blindfold and widened the slits so the glass optics poked through.

  “Look! Goggles!” he said. “So you’re protected, see? Open your damned eyes, you baby!”

  Emil must have obeyed, for he stood still suddenly, dropping his hands to his sides. His mouth hung open in an expression of feeble astonishment.

  “But, wait!” said Golescu. “There’s more!” He reached into the sack again and brought out a canvas coachman’s duster, draping it around Emil’s shoulders. It had been made for someone twice Emil’s size, so it reached past his knees, indeed it trailed on the ground; and Golescu had a difficult three minutes’ labor working Emil’s limp arms through the sleeves and rolling the cuffs up. But, once it had been painstakingly buttoned, Emil stood as though in a tent.

  “And the crowning touch—” Golescu brought from the sack a wide-brimmed felt hat and set it on Emil’s head. Golescu sat back to admire the result.

  “Now, don’t you look nice?” he said. Emil in fact looked rather like a mushroom, but his mouth had closed. “You see? You’re protected from the sun. The vampyr may walk abroad by day. Thanks are in order to good old Uncle Barbu, eh?

  “I want my potato,” said Emil.

  “Pah! All right, let’s feast. We’ve got a lot of work to do tonight,” said Golescu, taking up the sack and shaking it meaningfully.

  Fairly quickly he built a fire and set water to boil for Emil’s potato. He fried himself a feast indeed from what he had brought: rabbit, bacon and onions, and a jug of wine red as bull’s blood to wash it down. The wine outlasted the food by a comfortable margin. He set it aside and lit a fine big cigar as Emil dutifully carried the pans down to the stream to wash them.

  “Good slave,” said Golescu happily, and blew a smoke ring. “A man could get used to this kind of life. When you’re done with those, bring out the laundry-copper. I’ll help you fill it. And get some more wood for the fire!”

  When Emil brought the copper forth they took it to the stream and filled it; then carried it back to the fire, staggering and slopping, and set it to heat. Golescu drew from the sack another of his purchases, a three-kilo paper bag with a chemist’s seal on it. Emil had been gazing at the bright fire, his vacant face rendered more vacant by the goggles; but he turned his head to stare at the paper bag.

  “Are we making the Black Cup?” he asked.

  “No, my darling, we’re making a golden cup,” said Golescu. He opened the bag and dumped its contents into the copper, which had just begun to steam. “Good strong yellow dye, see? We’ll let it boil good, and when it’s mixed—” he reached behind him, dragging close the box he had brought. He opened it, and the firelight winked in the glass necks of one hundred and forty-four little bottles. “And when it’s cooled, we’ll funne
l it into these. Then we’ll sell them to the poultry farmers in the valley down there.”

  “Why?” said Emil.

  “As medicine,” Golescu explained. “We’ll tell them it’ll grow giant chickens, eh? That’ll fill the purse of twenty thousand lei back up again in no time. This never fails, believe me. The dye makes the yolks more yellow, and the farmers think that means the eggs are richer. Ha! As long as you move on once you’ve sold all your bottles, you can pull this one anywhere.”

  “Medicine,” said Emil.

  “That’s right,” said Golescu. He took a final drag on his cigar, tossed it into the fire, and reached for the wine jug.

  “What a lovely evening,” he said, taking a drink. “What stars, eh? They make a man reflect, indeed they do. At times like this, I look back on my career and ponder the ironies of fate. I was not always a vagabond, you see.

  “No, in fact, I had a splendid start in life. Born to a fine aristocratic family, you know. We had a castle. Armorial devices on our stained-glass windows. Servants just to walk the dog. None of that came to me, of course; I was a younger son. But I went to University, graduated with full honors, was brilliant in finance.

  “I quickly became Manager of a big important bank in Bucharest. I had a fine gold watch on a chain, and a desk three meters long, and it was kept well polished, too. Every morning when I arrived at the bank, all the clerks would line up and prostrate themselves as I walked by, swinging my cane. My cane had a diamond set in its end, a diamond that shone in glory like the rising sun.

  “But they say that abundance, like poverty, wrecks you; and so it was with me. My nature was too trusting, too innocent. Alas, how swiftly my downfall came! Would you like to hear the circumstances that reduced me to the present pitiable state in which you see me?”

  “...What?” said Emil. Golescu had another long drink of wine.

  “Well,” he said, “My bank had a depositor named Ali Pasha. He had amassed a tremendous fortune. Millions. Millions in whatever kind of currency you could imagine. Pearls, rubies, emeralds too. You should have seen it just sitting there in the vault, winking like a dancing girl’s...winky parts. Just the biggest fortune a corrupt bureaucrat could put together.