Reciprocity

by Sean M Locke

  She pirouetted, she pulled everything into her orbit—me, the breath from my mouth, and all the light in the room. I was just some chunk of the Spray, forever falling, and never quite landing.

  Her muscles corded and relaxed under taut olive skin. She’d braided her hair in a single, complex plait that swung like a chain made out of the night sky. A pair of white shorts left most of her legs bare, and a white halter revealed the topography of her broad shoulders and back. Both pieces were loose and allowed freedom of movement, and both pieces had some kind of tight garment underneath. That second layer seemed to keep everything from bouncing uncomfortably, which the more practical, less besotted part of my brain appreciated. I didn’t know what that outfit was, but I definitely wanted a set for myself.

  Maria finished the pattern she was practicing with a muffled stamp of her bare foot on the carpet, and a final thrust at some imaginary opponent’s heart. She held still for a moment, rock solid in her long lunge, her arms forming a gorgeous line from sword tip to counterbalancing hand. Her eyes slid from her imaginary target to me. She watched me watching her, and then came out of the pose. Maria stood at attention and saluted with her saber like a military officer would—blade pointed to the ceiling, basket hilt held in front of her face, forearm parallel to the ground. When she swept the sword downward, something changed in her face that I couldn’t quite read. Was she smothering a smile?

  “Kaeri,” she said, only a little winded. Sweat stood out on her forehead like tiny stars. “You’ll catch a fly.”

  I closed my mouth, my teeth clacking together like a trapdoor. I stepped inside the room and shut the door behind me.

  “Hi,” I said. Six clever things erupted half-formed from my brain all at once, but thank the gods they all clattered to a halt behind my teeth. I settled for my second-best smoldering gaze and rakish smirk and leaned against the doorjamb, my thumbs hooked over the waistband of my trousers. “Your door was open, you know.”

  “I’m aware.” Maria tried a smirk of her own, and damn if it didn’t work. She conjured a flutter in my stomach, a prickling of sweat on the back of my neck. “I knew you’d come.”

  “I could have been anyone. What if I meant to cause trouble?”

  “Some kinds of trouble I might welcome. As for the other kind, well.” Maria twirled her saber with a glittering flourish and scabbarded it, her eyes locked on mine the whole while. “I expect I can handle myself.”

  I smoothed my tie and made no secret of how I admired her body. “I noticed.”

  Maria dabbed her forehead with the back of her wrist and turned away to find a hand towel. “Be a friend and fix us something cold to drink? Icebox is in that corner, and you’ll find the necessary in that armoire.”

  “Don’t need to tell me twice, your Ladyship.”

  “You know,” she said as I got two steps closer, “I know that you say ‘your Ladyship’ in jest, but do you have to? I really would like it if you just called me Maria.”

  “Yeah, sorry, your—” I pursed my lips and made for the icebox, avoiding her eyes. “Maybe it’s obvious, but I crack jokes when I’m nervous.”

  “Do I make you nervous?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said lightly, “I think I’m going to avoid that question by chipping at this block and making us those drinks you wanted.”

  “Very well,” she said after a moment’s thought. “I’ll just go freshen up.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t see her; my eyes were too interested in the icebox. I couldn’t read her voice; she sounded neither upset nor amused. The en suite bathroom door closed, and water ran through the pipes inside the thin walls.

  Maria had the makings for gimlets in the armoire—sweetened lime juice, a bottle of seltzer, and a quart bottle of gin. Good stuff, too, at least two tiers up from my usual bathtub swill. The armoire also held clothes, luxurious cuts and fabrics that I could never afford and wouldn’t look right on me anyway. Maria was shaped like a marble statue of a mythical hero, long and lean, and a burlap sack would look good on her. I was built more like a concrete tetrapod thrown into the sea—sturdy and useful, but not too elegant. None of that stopped me from admiring the clothes, though. None of that stopped me from wondering what Maria would look like in them.

  Next to the drink fixings sat an ornate wooden box, big enough to hold in two hands. The top had the Cantabile family crest carved into it and stained dark—the same crest I’d seen on the spent shell casings earlier that day. She’d left it slid open, and inside were dozens of brass pistol cartridges, standing neatly in rows inside a red felt-lined stand. Some of the cartridges were missing—presumably loaded in the gun she carried. I didn’t count them.

  I made the drinks stronger than I strictly needed to.

  A damp, well-muscled forearm reached past my ear and into the armoire. I stiffened and spun around—somehow I’d missed the water turning off, the bathroom door opening. Gimlet sloshed onto my hands, and I stared up into Maria’s startled eyes, wide and blue as the sea. All thought of pistol cartridges and fancy clothes fled my brain, and it filled with the sound of blood rushing, of surf crashing onto shore.

  She held her towel closed with her other hand. Droplets of moisture glittered across her broad shoulders, the sweep of her neck. Adrenaline sailed through my veins, and my head swam from holding my breath.

  “They don’t have dressing gowns at this hotel,” she said. I nodded, and she instantly screwed up her lips and furrowed her brow, like she wondered why she’d said that. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Yeah, nope, s’okay,” I said, all in a rush. I ducked under her arm, barely keeping the two drinks straight. “What kind of dump doesn’t have dressing gowns?”

  Nervous laughs and blushes all around. Her skin tone hid the flush in her cheeks all right, but I knew my pale, freckled skin did me no favors at all. A little sliver of my brain raged at the rest of me to quit acting like a giggling schoolgirl and get my act together—Maria had questions to answer before we headed to Club Madill, and she needed to know the plan for when we got there. And she needed to get dressed, that was for damn sure. My grip on the drinks and the blood singing through my veins was fit to boil the gimlets in place.

  I cleared my throat and took a healthy sip, hiding my face behind one of the glasses. It really was the good stuff, piney and strong, with sweet lime dressing the booze nicely. “All right, listen, no drinks for you until you get decent. Okay?”

  “Of course. You’re absolutely right.” She banished the shy smile, making a solid attempt at a serious face. “Make yourself comfortable while I slip into this. Not too comfortable, though—I do want that drink.”

  Maria glanced at me over her shoulder and then let the towel drop to the floor. I took in the vast topography of her back at a glance and turned away, desperately looking for a place to sit, a place to set Maria’s drink. My head swam again, and it might have been the booze I’d been putting away since lunchtime.

  I shook my head to clear it. I was being ridiculous, of course. If Maria liked girls, I had no reason to be shy about looking at her body. If she didn’t like girls, then I still didn’t have any reason to be shy. She’d been sending signals that I could read either way. But damn my eyes, none of that mattered. We had a job to do, and we had some things to hash out before we could do that.

  I found the writing desk and the little chair and settled in. By the time I looked back at Maria, she was brushing her hair out of its braid and was mostly dressed in a white square-necked top over a flounced black skirt, knee-length and split down the middle. A few layers of crinoline rustled over bejeweled silvery leggings. It wasn’t the sort of thing the good-time girls at Madill usually wore, but it would let her stay nimble and mobile if things got down to a fight. I looked down at my own second-best navy blue suit and realized I wasn’t really dressed like the other girls, either. We made a fine pair, and we’d both be ready to knock some heads in if we needed to.

  “All right, sister, give,” I said, settli
ng my ankle on one knee and resting my hat on the other. “What’d you and Felix have to talk about after lunch?”

  Her pearl-handled brush stopped midway through its stroke, and then resumed. Her face remained utterly still. “That’s not the question I thought you’d ask me.”

  I bit my cheek to keep from inhaling too sharp, and from standing up and kicking my own ass. “Well. Fun’s fun and all, but I need to know whether you spilled all your guts to the trade regulators, or just some of them.”

  “I did not tell him everything,” she said quietly. “I told him that I had a delicate family matter to attend to in the Lower, that I needed to extricate my sister from some rough characters. I also told him that I had a . . . a priceless family heirloom I wanted to retrieve. I said that it was a private affair, and that you were helping me. I said that while I appreciated his sense of duty to one of the peerage, that I would appreciate it more if he kept his distance. He said he would do just that.”

  “Did he,” I said. I ran my free hand through my hair. “Absent gods, you really sewed me up, you know that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You really have no idea, do you.” My voice rose. I didn’t mean it to, but it did. I snatched my hat off my knee and started pacing. “You have no idea.”

  “You could try explaining it to me,” she said, her voice quiet, conversational. “Instead of being angry.”

  She knew that trick, too, I guessed. Talk soft when someone was yelling, and they’d either get louder or calm down. If they calmed down, then great: You could have a reasonable conversation. If they got louder, well, at least you knew what you were dealing with. I let her soothing words roll over in my head for half a minute before deciding to calm down, and then I did.

  “I told you before that my brother Wolfgang is Felix’s partner. I might have mentioned just how close they are. What one man knows, the other knows. Wolfgang has wanted to get his hooks into me for years, ever since I joined up with Lange. He’s a lawman to the bone, and the fact that he’s got a crook for a sister, it scrapes at him. He wants me to stool-pigeon for him.” I waved my hat at a mosquito that had taken a pass at my neck. “If he knows your sister is tangled up with Lange, and he knows I’m working with you, he’ll see his chance to use me to take down Lange.”

  “Would that be so bad?” Maria asked, tilting her head. A braid-curled lock of hair fell across her exposed neck. “Would it be so terrible if Lange took a fall?”

  “I owe Lange a debt. Donatella got me out of a tight scrape.” I ground my teeth at the memory of bullets shattering concrete, shattering bodies. “She gave me a life. Her son Hendrik is the boss now, and now he owns that life.”

  “No, he doesn’t. You’ve decided to throw him over,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t be here now talking to me.”

  “Damn it, yes,” I said, suddenly tired. I went back for my drink. “I’m tired of him pulling my strings, and his boy Kasper won’t be any better. I want out. And this whole thing with you, your sister, that gun—that’s my ticket out of here, see? But I didn’t want Wolfgang involved. I don’t need him pulling my strings. I don’t need to trade one puppet master for another. And now you’ve thrown a juicy steak right in front of him. He won’t be able to resist, and you’ve made my life a damn sight harder.”

  “I thought that might be it—that you were helping me for selfish reasons.” Maria crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “You need not trouble yourself on my behalf any further. I can find the engineer Lewis and take the carbine’s magazine from him on my own.”

  “Oh, for gods’ sakes, no, you won’t. You won’t make it out of there alive without me.” I stopped pacing and tossed my hat across the room. “I envisioned this conversation happening a lot differently.”

  “I’m sure.” She could have frosted the windows with those two words.

  “Listen. We both want the same thing, so let’s not fight over it. We want to get your sister and that gun the hell away from Lange and out of the Lower Terrace. We want it for different reasons, but they’re, you know, what’s the word?”

  I hooked my index fingers together and pulled. Maria looked from my eyes to my hands and back again. “Compatible.”

  “Yeah, that. Compatible. So we can be friends, right? For a little while.”

  She tilted her chin upward and shifted her weight to her other leg. She kept her arms crossed.

  I kept my eyes on hers, and definitely not on the curve of her hip or the breadth of her shoulders. She wanted me to say something else, and the moment stretched to a snapping point before my brain sloshed through the gin and figured it out. “And hell, I’m sorry. All right?”

  “Sorry?” she said, her voice still chilly.

  “For being sore about Wolfgang. I’m just tired of some man or another pulling my strings. I don’t care if it’s Hendrik or Wolfgang, or the Absent Father himself. But that’s got nothing to do with you, and I oughtn’t to have yelled like that.” I wrapped my hand around my throat and massaged it. The hot lump of coal in there didn’t go away. “So I’m sorry.”

  Maria’s posture softened, and she crossed the distance between us. She moved so fast and wrapped her long arms around me, resting her cheek on the top of my head. Warmth flooded through every limb and every vein, and I melted into it. I never even considered stiffening up or backing away, like that tough-girl part of my brain just went on a sudden vacation. I just leaned in.

  “I’m sorry, too.” Maria’s voice came from everywhere at once and strummed my bones like guitar strings. The pressure inside my throat eased just a little. “We’ll figure out something with your brother.”

  “And yours, too,” I said, suddenly remembering Josef. I didn’t want to think about him, about the dead limpets in the graveyard. I let myself melt into her just a little more, knowing it couldn’t last. “What a pain in the ass.”

  Maria let go and gripped my shoulders in her sword-strong hands. She pushed me away just far enough to look into my eyes. “One problem at a time,” she said, and put on a bright, brave smile. “You have a plan for tonight, I’m sure. I want to hear it.”

  I told her.

  * * *

  Club Madill had its namesake animal picked out in lights above the main door, big as a train car. Madills were about that big, too—huge nomadic beasts rolling across the vast northern prairies that I’d never seen, and probably never would. This cartoonish sign above the club probably bore some resemblance to the creature—six clawed feet holding up an enormous, hump-shaped body. The madill’s skin had bony plates covered in a kind of segmented scale that looked a lot like antique armor.

  I nodded up at the leering mascot, a martini glass grasped improbably in one clawed foot. “You ever seen one of those things?”

  “Yes, once,” Maria said, peering up at the gaudy thing. “A herd of them rolled past our estates during one migratory season. They came very close to our vineyards. It was nearly a disaster. The few rifles we have scared them only a little, but enough to steer them away.”

  I nodded. “They’re bulletproof. I’d heard a story of a guy tried robbing a bank wearing a madill-hide suit of armor. Got shot half a dozen times, and the armor held up.”

  “But let me guess: the man died anyway.”

  “Yep. Ribs cracked to hell and gone, and his insides mashed into pulp.” I shrugged and offered her my arm. “He looked like he got worked over by a cricket bat.”

  “The bullet may not pass through the madill skin, but its kinetic energy has to go somewhere. On a madill, the energy will go throughout its enormous body, and the madill hardly feels a thing. On a person, well.” Maria made a small, elegant gesture with her free hand. “I suppose that’s why the hides are illegal to own.”

  “Sure. That, and wearing something bulletproof is a direct challenge to the swells who get to carry guns.”

  I smirked and gave her a sideways glance to see if she appreciated how clever I was. Hard to tell—she just had a thoughtful little look. She kept q
uiet as we made the front door.

  About a half hour before Kasper’s usual crowd was due to show up, I got Maria settled in at a small table. It sat in a dark smudge of shadow on the mezzanine, but had a good line of sight to the long table where the Lange heir apparent liked to hold court. Maria managed to bring her gun, strapped to her thigh under that flounced skirt, but left the sword back in her hotel room. Just no room on her to bring that thing and keep it hidden. Shouldn’t matter, I told her. We weren’t here for a fight.

  I brought a couple drinks and a bowl of shelled peanuts from the bar. Maria eyeballed the drink, a dubious twist to her lips.

  “You were game for gimlets back in your room,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’ll remember I drank about half of one. I don’t typically indulge in distilled spirits.”

  “Sweet of you, then, getting gin just for me.”

  “It’s the least I can do.” She lifted the drink and turned away as the bubbles tickled her nose. “Whatever in the world is this?”

  “Just tonic water. Keeps you safe from malaria, if you’re worried about that. Tonic water tastes like crap, though, so you drink it with lots of gin.”

  “Ingenious,” she said flatly.

  “I probably don’t need to tell you to go easy on that glass. Donny likes me,” I said, looking over at the bar. Donny could see us, but probably not hear. “And he doesn’t water down my drinks like he’s supposed to.”

  I tilted my chin up at the skinny bartender and winked, touching the tip of my tongue to my front teeth. Maria looked at me and then back at him. She tried a smile on him, too, a coquettish thing, and raised her glass his way in salute. Even from across the mezz, I could see Donny erupt in a blush. He found somewhere else to be, scrubbing a glass furiously.

  “You’re a charming rake, aren’t you?” she asked, pressing the rim of the glass to her lips. She didn’t drink any, but it looked convincing enough.

  “Am I?”

  “Indeed you are. You charm men like Donny and even Piet. You must have charmed the large man at the door, and the hostess as well, with something I didn’t see. They both let us pass with barely a wink and a smile. You have a gift for getting what you want out of people.” She set her drink down and touched the slice of lime floating amidst the ice. It bobbed and turned in a slow circle. “I have to wonder if I’m that easy to charm. If you’re getting what you want out of me.”