The Forbidden Rose

Twenty-two

HAWKER STOOD FOR A BIT, TAKING EVERYTHING IN, scratching under his arm on the principle that somebody scratching looks harmless.

It was odd, being in a city where none of it was familiar. Miles of places he’d never been in every direction. The mumble of a language that wasn’t English all around him. Having to think about what he said before he let it out.

And his clothes. Back home, he’d be wearing something with a bit of color in it. Men knew him in London. He had a reputation to live up to. He’d been the Hand of Lazarus for three years. He’d killed men. His mates expected a certain degree of style.

Paris was about being invisible. Blending in.

Nothing smelled right. Sour wine, instead of beer. Brandy, not gin. Garlic and some kind of herbs coming out of the chophouses. Just plain foreign.

He felt strange, walking the streets without the damned donkeys.

Funny how he’d figured it out at last. Those donkeys were stalking horses. Nobody looked at the man driving the donkeys. All they saw was the animals. A pair of donkeys in your company and you could stop anywhere you want, as long as you wanted, and nobody thinks it’s odd. You could look at the hooves. That’s a job to keep a fellow occupied for the better part of the day if he does it right.

He strolled along, his thumbs hooked in his breeches. East was this way. Only took a second to figure it out from the way the shadows lay. That was another trick Doyle knew. Watch the sun. Keep a map in your head. Always know where you are. Always be thinking about which way to run. Those hard-faced coves in Meeks Street had a hundred maps with notes all over them. They’d made him study them for hours. He was a right expert in Paris before he set foot in it.

He never had to worry about maps before. Not in London.

Look like you know where you’re going. That was something Doyle let drop. Just no end to what Doyle knew about this work. He called it the Game. That felt right somehow. The Game.

He’d have to learn what he could from Doyle before they parted company. Before one them got his throat cut.

Rue de Montreuil. He knew where he was. He wrapped his lips around Rue de Montreuil a couple times, practicing how to say it. They put names on the streets. Carved them right into the houses sometimes. You’d think folks who lived here would know where they was. If somebody didn’t live close by and was too stupid to ask where he was, who gave a damn about them anyway?

Funny folks, the French.

Le Brochet wouldn’t be hard to find. A day like this, hot as Hades, he’d be in some tavern, out of the heat, easing his throat. He’d be a hundred yards from his ken. Men like him stuck close to home and did their drinking with friends. It was dangerous, going after a cove tucked up in the middle of his mates.

DOYLE signaled Pax up to the lead position and dropped back. It’d take three men to follow somebody like Hawker. That was the Service for you. Never enough agents.

Pax set down the board he was carrying and pulled a cap out of his jacket.

Hawker looked French. Walked French. Held his hands like a Frenchman. He walked the same speed as the men in front of him. Became one more fish in the stream, a little grubbier and less interesting than the others. He had the art. You couldn’t teach that.

He was headed east and down to the Seine, which meant he’d be crossing a bridge. In Paris, following somebody was all about the bridges. You could slip by your man and wait on the other bank. Your pigeon would walk right to you.

Doyle took a side street down to the river.

HAWKER ran his man to earth at L’Abondance, the tenth tavern he tried. Le Brochet was sitting in the back, with friends. Unsavory lot of friends he had. “Remember me?”

Le Brochet squinted a while. “You’re the boy with Lazarus . . . Hawker. That’s right. They called you the Hand. I remember you.”

Except Le Brochet said, “ ’awker.” When the French said his name they didn’t slap a howling great h out in the front of it the way a nob Englishman did. They said ’awker and made it sound right. Hell of thing when a pack of Frenchies could say his name better than Englishmen.

“You’re the one brought me that girl. Polly. She was a lively piece.”

“A right artist in bed, that girl.” Hawker sat down with his back to the room, which marked him as a fool, except that the glasses of wine on the table were good as a mirror when it came to seeing somebody come up behind. “Let’s talk.”

“Alone,” he added, when Le Brochet’s mates didn’t shove off.

Le Brochet grinned. Not one of the world’s most beautiful sights. The other men wandered away, leaving them to discuss Dorcas and Fat Legs Lucy and a few more. Le Brochet had fond memories of his stay with Lazarus.

After a bit it was time to say, “Wine,” to the old woman behind the counter. He used the tone Doyle had used this morning. Set the same coin down on the table. His glass got sloshed barely half full—that hadn’t happened this morning—with wine of the dog piss persuasion. There was just no reason in this world not to drink gin.

“I’m on an errand,” he said. “For Lazarus. Thought you might be of use to me. I need to find the man who paid Lazarus for the killing job.”

Le Brochet coughed up a laugh. “Him? His kind don’t come here.”

“Where is he, then? There’s money and I can’t leave this bloody country till I’ve got shut of it.”

“Money?” Le Brochet brightened.

“We can’t do the contract. Lazarus says, ‘Give it back to the man who paid. To the Frenchman. Go find him.’ ” If Le Brochet swallowed that story, he didn’t know much about Lazarus. He touched the money belt at his waist where he had that stack of assignats folded up. Made it rustle. Let it incite a little greed. “So that’s what I have to do. Trouble is, I don’t know how to find the bastard.”

He pretended to take a swallow and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Don’t know where to look. And I don’t like carrying this much around with me.”

He touched the money again and sealed his fate. He saw Le Brochet decide to kill him.

Don’t be impatient. That was what Lazarus always said. Be generous with your time. Anything worth doing is worth taking pains over.

He made Le Brochet work fifteen minutes to lure him out into the yard behind the inn. Made him use three “Got something to tell you” and half a dozen “Don’t like to say it in here” before he let Le Brochet lead him out of the room, through the hall beside the kitchen, and into the stinking courtyard.

“This is nice and quiet.” He admired the courtyard. It was private enough back here to kill five or six men. As he walked, he rolled his right sleeve up to the elbow, which would have been a warning to somebody knowledgeable.

Le Brochet moved in behind him. The slip of cloth on cloth and the change in breathing told him Le Brochet had his knife out.

If a man doesn’t know how to fight with a knife, he should leave it at home. Hold a knife and you can’t do anything else with that hand. Hold it stupid and it throws you off balance. A fool with a knife keeps trying to jab it at you instead of using his whole body to fight.

So the fight started with Le Brochet lurching at him. Which meant he ducked under Le Brochet’s arm, slammed an elbow into that flapping mouth to keep him quiet, and kicked him in the bollocks. Took the knife away. Ten seconds’ worth of fight, give or take.

He stepped over Le Brochet’s back. Straddled him. Took a handful of hair and pulled his head up, throat bare. He held his knife under Le Brochet’s ear. It’d be a clean stroke in, down and across. With his sleeve rolled up, he wouldn’t even get his shirt messy. He’d be over the wall and out of Faubourg Saint-Marcel before the corpse stopped twitching.

Doyle won’t like this.

That messed up his concentration. Le Brochet started gargling, so he pressed the knife in, just a bit, to remind the man of his own mortality.

Lazarus said to kill the cove. Clean up the loose ends. Nobody disobeyed Lazarus.

Doyle wanted the names on that list. Wanted to save men slated to die. He wouldn’t mind knowing the French agents working in England either. Nobody was going to get answers out of a corpse.

Damn and rot Doyle anyway.

Le Brochet babbled, “I swear it. I was just scaring you a little. I swear to God. Sweet Saint Vincent, forgive me. I wasn’t going to kill you. Wasn’t going to lay a hand on you.”

Unlike some, Hawker didn’t get any pleasure out of men begging. That was why he was good at his job. He didn’t get distracted.

Doyle would say any damn fool can kill a man. A dog can kill a man. A little bug you can’t barely see can kill a man. “Shut yer trap. I can’t think with you yapping.”

“I got money. Jewels. Aristo stuff. The real thing. I can tell you where. Split everything with you. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I swear it. By Saint Vincent. Just having a little fun. Wasn’t going to—”

If I leave this garbage alive, Lazarus is going to break my neck in one snap. He’s going to laugh while he does it. “Let’s talk about your visit to England. Just you and me, friendly-like. You are going to tell me every man you saw. Every paper you carried. You are going to tell me every time you took a piss by the side of the road.”

It took a while. His arm got tired, holding Le Brochet’s hair.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Just a man. A gentleman. Nothing to say about him. I swear. He met me on the street. He knew me. I didn’t know him.” Le Brochet sucked in blood, his face having got cut up while they were refreshing his memory. “I run messages. Carry packages. Do it all the time. He give me the money and told me where to go. Go to Lazarus. A man named Crawford. Go to this tavern. Ask for Mr. Phineas. Hand over an envelope. Then go somewhere else and ask for Mr. Tuckahoe.”

He hadn’t noticed what they looked like. Just men. Ordinary men. Some were French—he thought. Some were English—he thought. No, he hadn’t looked at the papers he was delivering.

He remembered every girl he’d slept with in obscene detail. He hadn’t noticed a damn thing about the assassins he paid to kill men.

Waste of blood, putting it in this fool. Bigger waste letting it out. Nobody’s going to believe him if he talks about Lazarus.

Le Brochet panted, “Swear to God. I don’t remember any more.”

That was the trouble with leaving the bugger alive. You had to conduct damn, bloody conversations with him. He’d got wet and sticky with blood. For this much gore he could have just killed the cully.

Time to leave. He kicked Le Brochet in the gut, so the man didn’t have a chance to poke him with some knife he’d got hidden on his verminous body. He pulled up over the wall and took off running.

A dozen streets away, he turned a corner and found a public fountain and stopped to wash the blood off. Le Brochet was yelling death threats after him in the distance.

He had the meeting places used by French spies in England. He had some descriptions that weren’t worth much and a few passwords the French used. That was a start. Might be enough for the Service to track some of them down. Nobody could have got more.

Pretty good for a rabid weasel.

DOYLE uncocked the pistol and lowered it. There’d been one moment he’d almost used it. The boy had taken a while, deciding whether he was going to slit that Le Brochet’s throat.

It had been close.

The attic was an oven, which was why none of the tavern girls was up here plying their trade on that filthy cot in the corner. When he stayed still, behind the shutters, he could look down into the filthy tavern yard. See and not be seen. Hear everything.

The boy got the information out of Le Brochet and let him live. There wasn’t an agent in Paris who could have done a better job of it.

The tavern boiled out Le Brochet’s friends and cohorts, snarling like hornets. Hawker was long gone, over the wall, down the alley.

Time to find him and take him back to Carruthers to get yelled at and cleaned up. Time for the boy to make his first report to a Head of Section.

I’m glad I didn’t have to kill him.

He’d taken a risk, leaving his street rat to deal with Le Brochet. It could have been a mistake. Could have been the kind of mistake that makes a man leave the Service.

I hope you’re worth it, boy.