by Sean M Locke
The car stopped, and I could hear the Cirkel clattering overhead. Someone unlocked my handcuffs, and someone else pulled the hood from my head. Not rough, like I was expecting. I might have even said they were polite.
One of the goons got out and held the door for me. He held out my hat in his other hand.
“Thanks, friend. Say, what time is it?”
His bland face got as thoughtful as I supposed it could. He chewed my question over and laid thick fingers on his belly. He scratched at his vest.
“Almost lunch.”
The other two goons were cut from the same cloth—big and dumb and disinterested, sitting on the edges of their seats, scarred hands on knees. Bored, but ready.
I grimaced and touched my eyebrow in salute. Their car puttered away.
It took less than a minute to get my bearings. They’d dropped me off at the Wheelwright Cirkel station, and the rotting fish-seawater-coal smoke smell of the Zuider Strand was about as bad as usual. It had been about twenty four hours since Maria and I walked this same stretch of street to visit Lewis. Entirely too many things had happened between then and now.
Some things were also not happening right now, like my brunch date with Wolfgang and Felix. They’d just have to be sore at me about it.
I was only a block from Lewis’ place, so I decided to swing by and see if the cops were crawling all over it. A glance upward told me the police aerostats were fairly quiet. I picked a newspaper out of a trash barrel and leaned against a lamp post across the street from Lewis’ place. Looking over the top of the paper, I saw a wooden sawhorse marked POLICE DO NOT ENTER sitting in front of the door. The casement for the door was broken in places, and the door stood ajar. Two bulls stood at the doors, smoking and chatting. More cops were probably inside, tossing the joint, but I wasn’t going to find out.
Something caught my eye, and I saw a little man standing in the alley next to the workshop. He lifted his hat a little, and I saw it was Kasper’s toady Pino. The ladoni stroked his jaw with his thumb and retreated into the alley. The cops were catcalling a pair of women strolling by, which made it a good time for me to cross the street and follow Pino.
“Am I glad to see you,” said Pino, his eyes flicking back and forth in the alley. He took a drag from his cigarette, and the cherry at the end shook in an unsteady hand. “Look who I found.”
Lewis stood next to him, his face dark, and clenched fists at his sides. He wore a schoolboy’s book satchel slung over one shoulder, and he wore the same clothes as last night. He shot a dirty look at Pino before greeting me.
“Kaeri Hawen. You’re looking well-rested this morning.”
“What’s the story here? Where’d you go last night?”
Lewis pursed his lips. “I left when the shooting started.”
“You fouled up Jeanne’s aim when you ran by,” I said absently.
“If you say so. If I did, it was an accident.”
“Okey,” I said, but I marked it down in my mental ledger that I owed him one. “What happened then?”
“I came back to my workshop,” he said stiffly, like he’d rehearsed it. “Worked the night through, and managed to make a copy of the device Kasper gave me.”
“You didn’t need the dingus after all?”
“I got a good enough look at it while I had it. It’s an ingenious design, and beautiful in its simplicity. It’s a wonder someone didn’t come up with it sooner.” He looked away from me, seemed to study a bit of trash on the ground. “I managed a little over a score of cartridges of the 40-bore ammunition as well.”
I raised my eyebrows. “But the cops.”
“Yes, quite,” he said, and traded a look with Pino. Lewis made a face like he ate a bad lemon, and Pino just looked nervous like he usually did. “They came just an hour ago and broke down the door. I left immediately and ran into this fellow.”
“Kasper sent me to find him, and some of the other guys are trying to find you,” Pino said, his eyes never quite settling on me. “What happened to you last night? People been talking.”
Both of these little guys were being cagey as hell about something. Whatever it was, I had the feeling they weren’t in on it together. Their race and stature was about the only thing they had in common.
“Nothing you need to worry about.” I wanted to ask Pino for a cigarette, but damned if I was going to show him I was nervous too. I tugged at the cuffs of my shirtsleeves and straightened my coat lapels instead. “Should we go now, or should we hang around in the alley a little more?”
Pino narrowed his eyes at me before flicking the stub of his cigarette away. He started off down the alley, aiming to cut behind Lewis’ workshop. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to Exedra arms, straight into Hendrik’s teeth, or Kasper’s. The last thing I wanted was to rope Henriette into shenanigans with Rademaker. She might have been an awful person, but she was just a spoiled kid, after all. She didn’t deserve what was about to happen to her. What I was about to do to her.
Lewis and I followed him, but not before Lewis grabbed my wrist and looked up at me. He looked like he was going to say something, but he didn’t. I couldn’t read his face, but something about it gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. Like things were about to go straight to hell, and none of us thought to bring a warm coat.
* * *
We got ourselves back to Exedra Arms with only a little trouble, and even that wasn’t too bad. It was mostly jumping at shadows and ducking into alleyways to dodge any cops on foot, and under awnings to avoid their eyes in the sky. It was peaceful enough to let me think long and hard about how lucky I was to run into Pino and Lewis, minutes after the Rademaker goons dropped me off.
No one has any business being that lucky.
I knew better than to let the easy trip get my hopes up for an easy conversation with Kasper or Hendrik. The doorman probably didn’t mean it, but the pitying look I got from him told me I was in for a serious talking-to.
The lobby was mostly deserted. Ludo leaned against the front desk, his ankles crossed before him, a lowball glass in his hand. It was a bit early for it, but the sight of it made me lick my lips anyway. He finished whatever he was drinking and straightened, and his eyes met mine. A grimace flashed across his face, but he schooled his face into blandness.
Kasper was wearing a groove in the carpets with his pacing. He didn’t notice me, and I wouldn’t have minded if it had stayed that way.
Pino had other ideas. He bobbed back and forth on his heels, like he couldn’t decide whether to run to his master or stay with Lewis and me to make sure we didn’t wander off. “Kasper, hey Kasper! Look who I found.”
Kasper stopped his pacing and took the three of us in with a glance. His eyes settled on the satchel at Lewis’ side, and he showed his teeth in a hungry grin.
“That what I think it is, Cornelius?”
Lewis tensed and clutched the bag a little closer to his side. “We should talk.”
“By all means,” Kasper replied with a gesture toward the banquet room. His eyes followed Lewis as the little engineer passed him. He looked up and shot me the same the same hungry smile he gave Lewis’ satchel before turning away.
When Kasper was gone, Ludo walked up, empty glass still in hand. He swirled the ice around and looked at Pino with raised eyebrows. Then he studied me for awhile, a hundred questions likely milling in that bald, seamed skull of his. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either.
Pino broke first. He was good for that. “So. Meneer Verboom. I’ll just, uh, walk this one up to the Boss, huh?”
“I’ll send her up,” he replied, his voice like a barrel full of rocks. “You should go find something to do.”
Pino bobbed on his feet again, like he wanted to keep me company, but he wanted to run away from the mountain of a man standing in front of him. Ludo let his eyelids droop and he thrust the empty glass at Pino.
“Take this back to the bar on your way, there’s a good man.” Pino took the glass and fr
owned like a mouth full of anchovies, but he ran off all the same.
When Pino was out of earshot and we were well and truly alone in the lobby, Ludo let his shoulders slump.
“Well,” he said. “You’ve found yourself in a bit of trouble, haven’t you.”
“I suppose I have.”
“I wish there was time for you to tell me your angle on things, but there isn’t. Ten’ll get you twenty that the little rat fink is hustling upstairs right now to tell the Boss you’re here.”
“He’s more Kasper’s fink than Hendrik’s.”
“If I know anything at all in this business, it’s that a fink’s a fink. Pino looks out for Pino first. And there’s something else fishy about him.” He sighed and ran a scarred hand over his head. “Never mind. Hendrik wants a chat.”
“I gathered.”
“I hope you’re ready for it.”
“Hope so too. You got anything I can use in there?”
Ludo chewed it over. “Not really. You know everything Donatella taught you, and everything I taught you. If you can keep your cool and walk out of there under your own power, I suspect you’ll be all right. And for what it’s worth . . .” He looked away, squinting into the sunbeams that slashed through the glass of the front doors.
“Meneer?”
“For what it’s worth, in vestry parz.” The old language sent my mind reeling for a moment; I hadn’t used it regularly since my school days. It translated very roughly as I’m on your side, but it held some familial connotations too. “More than you know.”
I set my jaw and stared at Ludo hard, like I might see his meaning written in the seams and scars in his forehead. Outside somewhere, a church bell rang one o’clock.
“I’d better go see the man.”
He clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder and nodded, but said nothing. I headed upstairs.
Chapter 14
Hendrik’s office took up half the fourth floor of the hotel—the highest floor besides the penthouse-hospice he kept for his mother. A private elevator opened onto a large, cherry paneled foyer. A pair of receptionist-cum-bodyguards occupied oversized U-shaped desks on either side of the room. The gilded ironwood panels of the desks were decorative, but entirely functional. If things ever went ridiculously bad for the Boss, the two ladies behind the desks could hunker down, haul out one of the scatterguns or revolvers or whatever they had in there. The half-inch thick iron plates behind the desk panels didn’t hurt the secretaries’ chances much either.
One of them frisked me while the other kept her seat, hands under the desk. They took my baton, the arm rig and holster, and my suspenders for good measure.
“Want my shoelaces too, in case I get the idea to choke someone?” I said, eyes wide and innocent.
You couldn’t say anything good about their sense of humor. They gave me blank looks, and the one sitting at her desk pressed a button and murmured something quiet into the intercom. The other one returned to her seat and pressed a different button, and I heard the click of a lock on Hendrik’s door. They both looked at me expectantly, and said nothing.
I laid a hand on the doorknob, and went inside.
Hendrik was sitting in a high wing-backed chair behind the desk in his office, an ankle propped up on the tabletop, his wingtips polished perfectly. His eyes were closed, and he was nodding and humming along to Infantino’s 4th Symphony on his phonograph. He was directing an imaginary orchestra with the stub of a cigar clamped between his thick fingers. His desk was the big brother of the twins outside, and I didn’t doubt that it had all the same bells and pistols.
There was one of those sitting on his desk. An oversized revolver with a stubby thumb-thick tube slung a little forward of the cylinder and under the barrel. That one held a shotgun shell, and there was some kind of clever mechanism that would let him decide which barrel to fire. It laid on his desk, barrels pointing casually at the door, an errant sunbeam making the nickel plating glimmer. The ebony grip was close to his hand, but not too close. It was a statement, of course: that there was a gun in the room, but no one was really threatening anyone with it.
It wasn’t a very subtle statement.
Hendrik was content to make me wait, and so I waited. It had been a long time since I’d been in this office, but I saw that Hendrik kept it much the same as his mother did. The same man-sized grandmother clock sat in one corner, tock, tocking my seconds away. Its gilded face told me that it was just past one o’clock; a secondary face showed the day and month and the phases of the moons, and a third face counted down the days until the next Great Abatement. Not that those things mattered anymore. I’d been excited once to see the Abatement, since it was supposed to happen before I turned thirty. Now, turning thirty seemed as likely as winning a lottery.
The oak paneling in that imposing room was old and well-polished, and portraits of bygone Bosses looked at you no matter where you stood in the room. There were five of these, men and women whose names and histories I knew, whose legacy I now stood in front of. A space for the sixth stood empty, but ready for Donatella’s portrait. I wasn’t sure what Hendrik was waiting for, exactly.
A four-paneled wooden screen stood behind Hendrik’s desk, to his right. Donatella had used that screen when dressing, even when it was just me and her in the room. She was queer about things like that—old-fashioned, modest. The ironwood panels had a map of the world hand-carved into them; how any tools could have done the work, I couldn’t have said. Ironwood could sometimes stop bullets, and from what I’d heard, doing any kind of work with it was an almighty pain. The depiction of the Equatorial Storm Band was a hand-thick stripe of stylized clouds, lightning bolts, and menacing serpents. No one really knew what happened in there, apart from roiling clouds, missing ships, and evil seas. Every couple hundred years or so, the Great Abatement would let ships pass between hemispheres, if their crews were brave enough.
My eyes wandered north from the Band, to the Great Socket Bay, and to the spot where Leemte straddled the Lieflijk River. The carving of continents and rivers and islands pierced the screen in places, and let a person standing behind it see out without being seen. When Donatella had guests visit her office, I would sit on the stool behind that screen to take notes for her.
Was someone sitting there now, taking notes for Hendrik?
The mantelpiece held a number of small treasures, little gifts of tribute given to the bosses by other families that Lange had absorbed over the last hundred twenty years. A fist-sized golden egg here, glittering with jewels; a glass box there with a delicate leaden lace-work screen on top, precisely calibrated to let five fragments of spraystone float and tumble inside. There was even a pair of decorative, functional o’atha tamhaks there, their chipped-obsidian axe heads glimmering dully in the sun. Other little things, all worth a small fortune, all whose stories I knew from sitting at Donatella’s knee.
Across the room from the fireplace were the half-dozen straight-backed chairs, the arms of which were always too narrow for my hips. That was purposeful too, the better to make people wait in discomfort while facing the disapproving stares of long-dead bosses and the treasures of a criminal legacy. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see Milan sitting there, shifting his weight and wincing and trying his best to not look like a scolded schoolboy.
Milan mopped his brow with a handkerchief and stared at me, his eyes roaming all over my face. He didn’t have that hungry look he usually had when he looked at me; now he just looked desperate, his cheeks tight and his teeth showing. I guessed that he wanted to tell me something real bad, and I wouldn’t have minded to hear it. But the office wasn’t the sort of place for chit-chat, not while the Boss was listening to his music.
The phonograph hissed and popped as the record wound down, and I stood a little straighter, letting my hands hang loose at my sides. Hendrik sighed contentedly and opened his eyes.
“Kaeri. I’m so glad you could come.”
“Of course, Boss.”
“Brandy?”
/>
“Bit early for me, Boss.” He raised an eyebrow, and I knew I made a mistake. I clenched my teeth, and relaxed. “Then again, I am a little thirsty.”
“Milan, why don’t you pour Kaeri and me a drink?”
Milan looked from Hendrik to me and back again, and then levered himself out of the chair. He limped as he walked across the office, and I saw that his suit was dirty and torn in places—sort of like how it might if someone wearing it dove out of a window and into a flowerbed. One rip in the leg of his trousers showed quite a lot of blood, where I suppose a bullet grazed him. His hands shook as he handled the decanter.
He handed us our glasses and returned to his seat. He didn’t pour himself one, but the Boss hadn’t exactly invited him to, either. Hendrik and I looked at each other over our glasses, and a small smile played at his lips. I waited for him to drink first, but that was stupid. Poisoning me wasn’t his style, and anyway the brandy smelled all right.
I took a healthy sip and breathed through the burn. When Hendrik smirked and set his glass down, I started to have second thoughts about the poisoning. But it was good brandy, anyway. If this was how I was going to buy it, at least it was with something tasty on my lips.
“Do you know why I asked you stop by?”
I looked at Milan, pale and sweating in his seat, and back to Hendrik. “I imagine so.”
“Yes, him. Milan had quite a story to tell me. Riveting, really.” He waited for me to say something, but keeping the panic at bay was about all I could do. “You were at the Penders safe house last night, with Cornelius Lewis and some cop, and a young noblewoman, of all things. If I can believe what Milan says.”