Rogue Spy

Forty-four

Quiet, ordinary Semple Street sat complacently in the morning light and provided no clue as to why the Merchant had chosen it for their meeting.

Pax wore a gaudy brocaded waistcoat and a jacket of exactly the wrong shade of blue. Uberto Baldoni had unearthed this outfit from some vast Baldoni clothing hell. The jacket didn’t match the buff trousers, which didn’t match the boots. The hat had ugly proportions. Everything was too shiny, too new, too bright, and of the shoddiest construction—the visual equivalent of chalk shrieking on a slate.

He caressed the wide lapel of his jacket as if he considered it a thing of beauty. In a way, it was. This was the perfect disguise. He was invisible because he was so apparent. Men tracking the Merchant didn’t strut the streets in strident, flamboyant blue.

His hair was dull brown. He hadn’t shaved that morning. He swaggered along with a bold, searching eye, looking like somebody who’d steal washing off a line.

Cami strolled at his side. The Baldoni had decked her out in a blond wig, flowered hat, and fussy yellow dress that made her stand out from the sober matrons of Semple Street like a canary in a flock of sparrows. She carried a yellow parasol. Her walk was a paean of availability. The tilt of her head, nicely vulgar. A pretty little cake of a woman.

Of course, if you bit into her, you’d find steel underneath the icing.

“I’m not a vain man,” Pax said, “but I hate you to see me dressed like this.”

Her bonnet swung in his direction. She gave a broad and bawdy grin. “I like this Paxton. He looks disreputable.”

“I look like a pimp. Not my preferred disguise. Every eye on the street is on me.”

“There are many ways of hiding. If you look like a pimp, I look like a woman of pleasure. Not an expensive one. Do you think the Merchant set somebody to watch the street?”

“It’s not his way. Before he told you Semple Street was the meeting place, he’d cut all ties to it. He’s left nothing here that leads back to him.”

“Unless he’s set a trap for me.” Cami dawdled, entirely the woman of leisure. No one would see her studying from window to window, looking behind the glass for watchers. Looking in reflection after reflection for anyone following. “He knows I’ll come here. When I do, I’m easy to kill. Easy to capture. Why not grab me off the street today and torture the Mandarin Code from my flesh?”

“If he wants to capture you,” he said, “he won’t waste time watching Semple Street day and night. He’ll grab you tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning. He’ll have a couple of men with him when he picks you up.”

“Three men. You flatter me.”

“He underestimates women. I’d bring five well-trained minions and a supply of weapons.”

She peeked under the frilled edge of the yellow parasol and batted her eyes at him. “So many compliments.”

“You are in all ways admirable.”

They’d reached Number Fifty-six. She stopped and he made a pantomime of retying the ribbon of her bonnet. It gave her time to take in the street, up and down, from this point.

She said, “I’ll stand here to wait for him, tomorrow.” She chose a section of gray-brown pavement at her feet. “This spot.” Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, pupils dilated.

He didn’t look down. It was too easy to imagine blood and Cami’s body curled on the ground and him too late to do anything but murder the bastard. “It’d be easier for me if I were the one walking out to meet him.”

It was his job to face the Merchant, not Cami’s. It had always been his job. Now it was his job to stand back and let her take the risk.

“Next time,” she said, “I’ll save the hard part for you.”

He smoothed the wide yellow ribbons of her bonnet and let go.

On both sides of the street, windows and doors gleamed under the bright sky. Cami considered them. “Before I became entangled with you, and thus with the British Service, I had envisioned a relatively simple exchange with a blackmailer, enlivened by a slight chance of dying.” She managed to make the parasol express irony. “Now I have the same chance of dying, but also the British Service. I’ll walk down this street under the gaze of five, six, seven British Service agents—however many of them. Their first objective will be to capture the Merchant. Then they’ll come after me.”

“I won’t let that happen. If I’m not here, Hawker won’t let that happen.”

“You mean, if you’re dead, putting it in frank and simple terms. If that happens, I won’t trouble Mr. Hawker, who will doubtless be busy. I’ll go—Look over there at the grocery. You’ve passed it, I imagine, on your tours of Semple Street. That’s my escape route”—she touched it with her attention, just a moment—“when I run from the Service. That track beside the grocery that looks like a delivery way to the yard in back. It goes to an alley that runs all the way to Tallison Road. It’s not shown on the ward maps.”

“I walked it last night before I came to see you.”

“I’m surprised you and Antonio didn’t run into each other. It’s a dim, grim alley, according to Antonio—high brick walls on both sides. We’ll block it just on general principles. Giomar and Alessandro will bring the pony cart in there just before dawn and overturn it and wait with a couple of guns each. It’s an escape for me and a trap for the Merchant, if he’s stupid enough to go that way.”

He pictured them. Boys really. “They’re young.”

“No younger than some of the men who followed you in Italy.” She grinned. “My family gossips. This morning they gossiped about Il Gatto Grigio and a third cousin of mine who went into the hills with him. He was fourteen.”

He wanted to tell her he hadn’t led boys that young. But he had. He’d used them as lookouts, scouts, messengers, information gatherers, guides. Some of them—men, boys, even women—the ones who’d come from the gutted, burned-out farmhouses they passed, walked right behind him up the mountain passes, to lay ambush.

She said, “Antonio wishes he’d been with you in the hills. He’s tired of playing the respectable banker while everybody else is roaming the Piedmont alps, shooting at the French.” Cami looked at him from under her hat. “I told him it probably wasn’t as much fun as he thought.”

“It wasn’t.”

She became more sober. “You don’t need to worry about Giomar and Alessandro. We’re an intensely traditional family. Baldoni children go out with the gold shipments when they’re thirteen. Those two have shot mountain bandits.”

“Then they’re old enough to defend an alley. I’ll talk to them this afternoon. Speaking of guns . . .” He twitched his hand, indicating a house in the row behind them. “I’ll put a sniper there. Second floor, third window from the right. Your cousin Antonio found the place for us.”

She examined the house and the window unobtrusively, taking it in, judging angles. “It’s odd, considering my many skills, that no one ever taught me to shoot a rifle.”

“I’ll teach you someday. I didn’t learn to do it right till they sent me to Italy.” Five years back, before he sailed for Genoa, Grey had taken him out to Doyle’s big house in the country. For a week they’d spent every daylight hour shooting rifles and every night drinking and talking with some of Grey’s old army friends about scouting and ambush.

Nine of his kills had been long-range shots with a Baker rifle. He said, “There’s a straight line from that window, down the whole length of the street, from corner to corner. If the Merchant gets that far, the sniper will stop him.”

“At that distance?”

“He can notch a man’s left ear at that distance. Or hit his left knee.”

“And leave him alive to chat with your Service. I’ll be annoyed if they kill him by accident. Especially if London Bridge blows up the next day and falls into the Thames. I’m very fond of London Bridge.”

“The River Police are watching the bridges.”

“They can’t watch everything. The mint, Brooks’s club, the shoppers on Bond Street . . . That’s enough gunpowder to topple Westminster Abbey like a house of cards. With people inside.” Her voice cracked a little around the last words.

She took a deep breath. “We have to trap him here.” She took one last glance at Number Fifty-six. “I was hoping to see . . . something. But it’s just a dull house of nothing in particular.” She shrugged. “I’m done. We can walk on.”

“Hawker’s told me what the service knows so far,” he said. “The vast resources have heaped up a pile of trivia. Shall I pass it along?”

“Do. I dote upon trivia.”

“Number Fifty-six. On the ground floor is an old man who tailors suits on Jermyn Street. The basement, two brothers who work in a blacking factory. Both floors upstairs are leased to a solicitor’s clerk and his numerous family.”

“There’s a baby. I heard it crying. And the window with bars must be the nursery.”

“Our clerk copies legal briefs, most recently for a case concerning inheritance of a woolen mill in Yorkshire. Servants in the attic. Next door, at Fifty-eight . . .” They walked, and he organized what he knew and laid it out for her. “Across the street, at Number Twenty-nine, the house belongs to a sea captain’s widow who lets rooms. We have an old woman who feeds cats in the basement. The ground floor is a retired nanny. One floor up . . .” House by house, he matched windows to inhabitants.

They came to the corner, where Semple Street ran into Medwall Street. Cami sighed and tucked the parasol under her arm, evidently feeling it had served its purpose in establishing her role. “We Baldoni say, ‘One insight is worth a hundred facts.’ But I have no insights, except to say the men and women of Semple Street are ordinary as rocks. It’s as if somebody went to the warehouse and bought dull people as a wholesale lot.”

Cami’s mind saw patterns when the facts were still scattered like stars across the sky. “There’s something we’re not seeing.”

“We will continue to not see it, no matter how long we linger in this vicinity.” Cami shook her head. So strange to see her in these bright, frilly clothes with such a serious expression on her face. “I’ll go home and take out a map and stare at it till the very writing crawls away to hide from my intense scrutiny.” Impatient now, she turned and started down Medwall Street. “It’s my turn to be informative. I’ll show you where the Baldoni will be busy. If the Merchant gets this far, they’ll deal with him. It should be safe. The Merchant will doubtless have discharged his pistols somewhat before he gets here.”

“Cami . . .” There wasn’t anything to say. The stark fact that she would probably be dead within minutes of meeting the Merchant lay between them. Neither of them wanted to say that in simple words.

“I’ll wait for you tonight in my bedroom. Come to me,” she said.

Everything—daylight, the street, house sparrows hopping on the pavement, people walking by—receded. He was overwhelmed by the memory of her body, laid back on white sheets, her legs open to him.

“To love you again,” he said.

She said, “To talk and for the joy of your company. Also, I expect to have trouble sleeping.”

“That’s a prosaic reason for inviting me.”

“I’m lining up the next twelve hours and filling them with simple things. Chocolates and good red wine and you. Will you come?”

“Yes.”

Last night, in the coldest hour before dawn, he’d left her bed and climbed down from her window. No dog barked, nobody stirred, but he slipped away from the house with the uneasy certainty his presence had been known. Instinct had set the hairs prickling on the back of his neck.

He’d climb up to her room again tonight. Instinct be damned.

Cami said, “And there is Mr. Hawker, leaning against a horse. What a surprise.”

Hawker waited for them at the corner, his shoulder against the flank of a bay mare, the hoof curled up to rest on his thighs. He was cleaning the hoof with a little pick. Nobody had to get close to see he was cursing.

“He does that well,” Cami said.

“He’s putting something in there to give himself a lame horse to walk slowly past whatever he wants to look at.”

“A coin, probably, under the shoe. It’s very convincing and does little harm. Do you think a Baldoni ever worked for the British Service at some point? You seem to know a lot of the family secrets.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

When they got close enough, Hawker looked up and was amiable, pretending to a slight acquaintance. The hoof was returned to the pavement. The hat was tipped. Hawk was gallant in Cami’s direction. Cami smiled and twirled her parasol and was bitingly sarcastic.

“Next street up,” Hawker said, shaking his head as if he were handing over bad news about the horse, “the hackney’s pulled over to the curb. Tenn’s on the box. Doyle’s waiting for you inside. Last-minute advice.”

Beside him, Cami constructed a tight little smile. “I will excuse myself, then. I have no wish to meet Mr. Doyle again.”

Hawker said, “Leave her here with me. I’ll take care of her.”