by Sean M Locke
“Well, Pino will have to solve his own problems. What else did Wolfje tell you?”
“Not much,” Ludo said. “He don’t really tell me his plans. He mostly came here for the latest news on our end, and to ask me to do some things. No time to do his usual routine with the cutouts and dead drops. Risky move for him, coming here direct.”
“Risked you, too.”
He waved dismissively. “I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about him. About you. He asked a lot of strange questions, like whether I’d seen you with a noble girl, if you stayed here last night or somewhere else, if you seemed scared or angry or both. I tell you, Kaeri, he’s madder than I ever saw him—mad like a man with a gun and too many people to shoot at. But his brain is still working, and he’s worked out that you’re up to something big.”
“Maybe I am.”
Ludo shook his head. “Don’t be stubborn. Your brother is coming for his partner, and he’s coming with every gun he can get hands on. If he has to tear apart the Rademakers and us both to get that man back safe, he’ll do it. I need to know what you’re up to, Kaeri. I need to tell him, so he knows where to lead the cavalry.”
I drained my gimlet and thumped my glass on the table. “Tonight. It’ll happen tonight. Tell Wolfgang I hope his cavalry can swim.”
* * *
Ludo pointed me toward a private dining room and said Kasper and Hendrik were in there, but I had one more stop to make before talking to them. I found Cornelius Lewis parked in one corner of the ballroom, where he’d carved out an improvised workbench. The little engineer held a brass cylinder in calipers in one hand and a bottle of black powder in the other. Cigar boxes were filled with the makings of more 40-bore rounds—empty brass casings, freshly cast lead bullets, and vials of black powder. Dozens of finished rounds stood like tin soldiers on the table in front of him.
Pino was standing over Lewis’s shoulder, arms crossed, bobbing on his tiptoes. “Can’t you go any faster, Professor? Kasper said he wanted all the ammo you could cook up, and right away.”
Lewis winced and carefully set his instruments down. He looked up at Pino, irritation plain and magnified in his goggled eyes. “I’m well aware of what Kasper wants. Would you like me to stop and answer your questions, or do you want me to work?”
“Just do it, little man,” Pino sneered.
“Your constant interruptions are compromising the quality of my work. Should one or more of these cartridges misfire, you can explain to Kasper—”
“Hello, boys,” I interrupted, thumbs hooked into my suspenders. “How’s the knitting?”
Pino flinched and fell into Lewis, causing Lewis to knock over a half-filled cartridge and spill black powder on the table. When Pino managed to recover himself, he skittered backward away from me, arms folded across his chest, eyes darting left and right. Lewis sat up and dusted black powder from his hands and cursed a little more. Both coughed and sputtered from the powder that hung in the air.
“Great absent gods, what a mess. I will have to measure this powder again and recalibrate the . . .” Lewis trailed off and looked up at me, panic making his goggled eyes even bigger. “Kaeri, for the love of money do not, do not—”
“Do not what? Oh.” I looked at the lighter in my hand and made a face. The unlit cigarette hung loosely from my bottom lip. “You want I shouldn’t smoke in here?”
Lewis shook his head no and moved his lips like he wanted to say something.
I shrugged and put the match away. “Maybe I should quit again anyway. I hear these things will kill me.”
“You could try—” Lewis started, then cleared his throat. He shot Pino a quick look and tried again. “You could try candy. Candied lemon peels, specifically. I’ve read literature that suggests it has medicinal properties. Linked with helping one cease certain undesirable behaviors.” A weak smile quivered at his lips.
“Is that right?” I said. It sounded like a load of hooey, but why else would Lewis bring up candied lemon peels specifically? Maybe he saw someone eating them recently. Maybe it was the same someone I saw earlier that morning. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“I’m surprised you showed your face around here again,” Pino said.
“Not happy to see me?” I asked, smiling sweetly.
“Didn’t you hear? You’re poison around here now. Bad news. Persona non grata. No one’s on your—”
I held up a hand. “Enough already. You’re hurting my feelings. What do you care? It’s my neck I’m risking.”
“Just letting you know, like.” Pino edged toward the door, and I didn’t stop him. “So you can get out with your skin while you can.”
“Don’t worry about me.” I jerked my chin toward the door. “And your master already knows I’m here. You don’t have to run off telling tales if you don’t want.”
“Kasper already knows you’re here?”
“Was I talking about Kasper?” Pino turned pale, and I grinned at him with all my teeth. “Take care of yourself, now.”
Lewis had me by the wrist as soon as Pino bugged out. “Girl, I hope you are as perceptive as Donatella says you are.”
Donatella may have been comatose, but a compliment from her still meant something. “I hope so. Or anyway, I hope Pino is dumb enough to miss what you told me. I take it you weren’t at your workshop all night like you said. That you met with the lovely Vedette Sforza.”
“Indeed. Some Rademaker men caught me after I fled the Penders safe house and brought me to Mevrouw Sforza. She asked me at length what I knew about the drum magazine, about black powder composition and other technical matters, and about the reciprocating repeater itself. Of course I couldn’t say much about the weapon, but I speculated a great deal. Often in the most ludicrous directions. I don’t know if my misdirections were effective. I am not very good at reading people that way.”
“It’s not just you, Cornelius.” I sighed. “She wrote the book on being cagey.”
“At any rate, she installed me in a little workshop and had me advise her own tinkerers, who were busy hand-making 40-bore ammunition.”
“Were they stamped with the Cantabile seal? Could you tell?”
“No,” he replied. He picked up one of the loose pills from the cigar box and showed me the back, where it would fit into the brass cartridge. “They were blank, just like these. The casings also had no markings.”
“So whatever she’s up to, she isn’t planning on pinning the deed on anyone in particular. Small blessings, I guess.” I tilted my chin at the open magazine on the table. “She gave you that?”
“Yes, early on. As Mevrouw Sforza was taking me to her workshop, some of her soldaten were frog-marching a man in to see her, and one of them had my satchel with the magazine.”
“What did he look like, this guy?”
“I don’t know. They had a bag over his head, and he didn’t say anything. The soldaten said he was a police officer, and they offered to, ah . . . dispose of him. Mevrouw Sforza seemed to think he was a great deal more than just a policeman, and she told them to keep hold of him for a while.”
“I don’t think you were supposed to see that,” I said, “but she couldn’t exactly knock you off, either.”
Lewis scratched at his gray-stubbled chin. “It was a close thing, I think. I suppose in the end she valued expedience more than she valued secrecy. Perhaps also she concluded that I would not comprehend her plot. She . . . did not threaten me, precisely, but her polite suggestions to follow her instructions were abundantly clear.”
“Don’t sweat it, Cornelius. She’s the second scariest broad I know. So she gave you the magazine?”
“Yes. At her request, I supervised her technicians on making the ammunition and ensuring they would feed through the magazine. She gave me access to machine tools and a bit of sheet metal, and I was able to duplicate the magazine to the last detail. When we completed our work early this morning, her men put the loaded magazines in my satchel, hooded me, and sent me away in a
car. When they dropped me off at the alleyway near Wheelwright station, the only instructions they gave me were to wait, that someone I knew would be coming by to make sure I made it ‘home safe,’ in their words.”
“Pino,” I said, and it sounded like a curse word.
“Yes. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when I saw Pino, I knew something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t see any way to avoid going with him. If I balked, he could have killed me, delivered the magazines to Kasper, and made up any story he liked. The only value I had anymore was to lend some credibility to Rademaker’s plot, but damn it Kaeri, I wanted to live.”
Tears stood in his eyes now, and I wanted to get him thinking about something else. The last thing I wanted on my hands was a blubbering ladoni, and I still needed information from him anyway. I peered closer at the bullet, and Lewis’s hand, and the black powder smudged there. “Why was she asking you about powder composition?”
“I fear the answer to that question. I have done some bar-napkin work, and if this weapon does what I think it does, it must fire 40-bore ammunition exceedingly fast. Is that correct?”
“That’s what I hear. Something like fifty shots in three seconds.” I swallowed in a dry throat, remembering the jumble of bodies in the warehouse.
Lewis shook his head. “Something does not compute. That sort of fire rate would produce a great deal of fouling of the weapon’s firing chamber.” He rubbed his fingers together, and I could see the greasy residue forming. “It would also produce a prodigious amount of smoke. I don’t see how this weapon could be usable, but apparently it has been used.”
He picked up a finished cartridge and showed it to me. “Look at the casing. It’s much shorter than those used in traditional revolvers. I can only put half as much powder in this casing as I would expect, even with a dangerous amount of compaction. The muzzle velocity will be pretty low. Enough to kill somebody, probably, and only just enough to create the rapid reciprocal cycling effect I believe the carbine action uses. Insufficient blowback energy could cause this weapon to not cycle the next round, causing a misfire or worse. Also, do you know how often you have to clean a traditional revolver?”
I was barely treading water with his technical chatter, but I had a feeling this was important, something I needed to understand and remember. I answered, “Pretty frequent, I guess. I don’t know; don’t like the damn things.”
Lewis nodded. “Every thirty shots or so. More than that and the barrel and cylinder will get too fouled up, and the weapon gets dangerous to use. That drum magazine carries fifty rounds and is presumably designed to be safe to the operator to fire at least one full magazine.”
“And it didn’t blow up in Kasper’s face or anything when he used it.”
“Precisely.” Lewis started pacing now, getting excited. “The hypothesis I draw now is that the shortened casing and decreased powder load are only possible and useful if there is some different powder composition. Something that produces adequate muzzle velocity to be consistently deadly, something that produces enough blowback to constantly cycle the weapon’s action, something that burns cleaner than the black powder we use now.”
“Okay, I’m tracking,” I said, biting down on my impatience for him to get to the point. “But what does this mean for whoever uses that weapon today? This ammunition that Vedette Sforza had you working on—is it the usual black powder or the fancy powder that Cantabile cooked up?”
“Well,” he replied, sober now and pulling at his beard, “standard black powder. I did not understand the significance of that until after I came back here and had some time to sleep on it.”
“So if Kasper uses that weapon with black powder ammo, there’s a chance it won’t work too good.”
“It will very likely misfire after some use. In the worst case, the black powder fouling will be so bad that a round will explode in the firing chamber, causing irreparable damage to the weapon. That would be quite the shame.”
“And what about the guy shooting it?”
“I suppose it could injure the operator of the weapon as well.” Lewis’s eyes widened in sudden revelation. “Do you suppose that was Mevrouw Sforza’s plan all along? Send me back here with black powder ammunition in order to sabotage the carbine? Hurt Kasper?”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of things.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Don’t feel too bad about not seeing it”
“But the weapon will still work for a short while, and some Rademaker men may still get hurt. Would Sforza really sacrifice some of her own for a chance to assassinate Kasper?”
“I think she’d do anything to take Lange down a peg. Anything at all.”
Lewis grasped my wrist with both hands. “Can you stop it? I don’t love Kasper, but he is Donatella’s grandson.”
I stared into the little engineer’s eyes. I didn’t want to complicate things, not even a little. But I couldn’t help but think of Donatella, awake and closed off in the penthouse, not so far away. Lewis and Ludo had always been close to Donatella; maybe by staying loyal to them I felt like I was staying loyal to her. It was ridiculous, of course. And of course, I was going to help him.
“No promises, Cornelius, all right? Kasper is gonna get himself killed one of these days anyway. But here’s what we’ll do. You sit tight here, clean up this mess. Empty the second magazine and get rid of those bunk rounds. I’m gonna score you some ammo that has the fancy powder in it. That oughta keep the carbine from cracking open like an egg, right?”
“Yes, so long as it is of the correct caliber and—”
“It’ll be the right stuff, don’t worry.”
I patted Lewis on the shoulder and left him to his work. I let myself have about five seconds to wish someone would pat me on the shoulder and tell me to not worry, and then I headed up to Henriette’s room.
* * *
Breaking into the girl’s suite was simple as cake, but finding the ammo wasn’t. She had all manner of dresses and hats and skirts strewn about; anyone less familiar with the Exedra Arms rooms might have found themselves drowned in a pool of silk and lace before too long. It took precious minutes to find Maria’s ammunition box, the same one I’d seen in the armoire at the Hotel Mercure. Henriette had not-too-cleverly hidden it under her bed.
I opened it and counted forty rounds arrayed in a grid, forty unblinking eyes staring at me from their velvet-lined holes. I took one out and inspected it long enough to find the Cantabile family seal etched into the side of the cartridge, and then put it back and closed the lid. A sick realization dawned on me: If Kasper fired these rounds, I’d be implicating Cantabile in whatever happened next. But it was too late to back out now—Kasper had to be fully armed if this plan was going to go through at all.
Another few minutes to get back to the ballroom, where Lewis was stuffing the bunk black powder ammo into his many pockets. The tables were clean of spilled powder, and the cigar boxes of bullets and cartridges were nowhere to be seen. The drum magazine sat there like an open mouth, waiting for someone to feed it. It might have been the original or the copy—I couldn’t tell at all.
Lewis loaded it quickly and without saying a word—the forty rounds I found, and ten of the sketchy rounds he’d made. It would have to be good enough. I was grateful for his silence. My head was already full to bursting with technical jabbering, and I didn’t need more.
When he was done, he handed me the loaded magazine in his old satchel, and it was surprisingly heavy. He clutched the now-empty wooden ammo box to his chest, like he was looking for anything at all to comfort him.
“Good luck,” was all he said. I nodded and left the ballroom.
Kasper and Hendrik had picked a smallish dining room to talk over aperitifs, fried chicken, loaves of ciabatta, little bowls of seasoned olive oil, and a few scattered dessert pastries. The garlicky chicken and the sweet desserts hung heavy in the air, leaving me a little woozy, or the gimlet I had on an empty stomach earlier was giving me some trouble. The two
men looked up at me, surprised and annoyed that I showed up to interrupt their supper. One of the ever-present goons materialized with clenched fists from the gloom behind the two men, but backed off at a subtle gesture from Hendrik.
“I assume there’s a good reason you’re here, interrupting a family meal.” His emphasis on “family” wasn’t too subtle; it was clear I wasn’t part of that family now, if ever I had been.
“News, Boss, and a message. It’s urgent.”
“What message could you possibly have that would interest us?” Kasper snapped.
“A message from Rademaker. If you’d care to hear it.”
“Rademaker!” Kasper cursed and grabbed at the little glass of amari, slopping some of the bittersweet liqueur onto the checkered tablecloth. “So you’re their errand girl now?”
I’d thought Hendrik would tell him to shut up, but he just looked at me, his face unreadable. Seemed like he was letting Kasper flex his muscles a little bit, which was fine by me. If things worked out, Kasper would get his blood up and start making mistakes.
“Not at all. The news is that Rademaker waylaid Henriette and me while we were out earlier this afternoon. They overpowered us and took her weapons. They have her now. They let me live so I could send you a message.”
“What!” Kasper stood, his forehead suddenly red and damp. “They did what!”
I didn’t repeat myself, and let Kasper stew for a minute. His father only sat there, heavy hands folded in front of him, watching Kasper pace and curse. Kasper carried on like this for a bit, working himself into a lather and mopping his brow.
Finally he stopped and pointed at me, the delicate amari glass pinched tightly in his fingers. “What’s the message, then?”
“Message is this: If you want to see Henriette alive again, bring the aker haul and the cash from last night to the foot of the Ferro wheel at Grannis Island. Nine o’clock tonight, they said.” I said it like I had rehearsed it a bunch before coming to see them. I said it like I was scared, which wasn’t too far from the truth. “They said to bring as many guys as you wanted to assure your personal safety.”