Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“Could have fooled me.” Hawk pulled off his hat and tossed it over. “Switch hats. You put this on.”

“Let me tie the hair back.” He found a thin black ribbon in his pocket and hobbled his hair back in a club under the hat.

“Next time, dye your damned hair. A babe in arms could spot you at a hundred yards with your hair hanging down.”

It was too hard to explain the reasons he’d come to Meeks Street without disguises. “It’s not that bad.”

“Yes, it is.”

The coach rolled to a stop and they swung out, fast, Hawk on one side, him on the other.

Cami joined the thin outer edge of the crowd, well back from the unfolding drama. Men pushed a way behind her or in front of her and stopped to satisfy curiosity or strode on impatiently, going about their business. Glimpse by glimpse, she watched Devoir deal with the damage she’d done him.

A man—a colleague from the British Service, doubtless—jostled past her and elbowed through the onlookers, swearing at them in a ripe city voice. He was brown skinned, black haired, quick moving, and annoyed. That was another face worth adding to her memory.

Devoir staggered to his feet, dripping wet, eyes slitted against the sunlight. He moved like one of the great predators, wounded but not clumsy, like a tiger who’d fallen a long way and landed on his feet, jarred and dizzy but ready to fight. She was immeasurably glad she didn’t have to face him at this moment when his inner nature was so close to the surface.

She was one of the few dozen people on earth who knew this truth about his deadliness. His Service comrades would have seen it. Cachés who’d been in the Coach House with him knew. Maybe he had enemies who’d fought him and somehow survived. Nobody else.

The two men talked, heads together, words emphatic. They were friends, then.

In the glare of midday, Devoir stood in wet shirtsleeves and an unbuttoned vest. The linen of his shirt was almost transparent where it stuck down tight to his skin. Distinct, clearly defined muscles wrapped his arms and strapped long lines across his upper chest. He didn’t have the body of one of those hearty gentlemen who rode to the foxes or took fencing lessons and sat down to a comfortable dinner every night. She knew, in some detail, what the strength of such men looked like. Devoir was muscled like a workingman—a sailor, a soldier, a bricklayer, somebody shaped by unrelenting labor. The strength of him had been formed in days of work without respite and nights with too little sleep. He was, inside the drab, ordinary clothing, inside that tanned skin, a professional, a spy to the bone.

Devoir dried his hair with a white towel, vigorously, and talked to his friend. A hackney coach drew up to the curb. The crowd parted. The two men got in and it drove away.

Devoir would go back to whatever plans and schemes he pursued at Meeks Street. She’d go about her own business. They wouldn’t meet again. She would sink into memory. He’d call her to mind once in a while, when someone mentioned betrayal.

She knew nothing of his long-ago past, but she knew this much—before he’d been taken to the Coach House, everything weak in him had already been burned away. He must have survived terrible things to become a metal, like silver, like steel, that you could hammer upon or put through the fire, and it emerged unchanged. The Tuteurs had never broken the strength at the center of him.

She watched the hackney till it turned at the corner and was lost from sight. Then she walked briskly toward Holborn, Mr. Smith’s minion sneaking along behind, surreptitious and easy to spot. With luck, he’d never notice when she circled around and started following him.

Pax kept his eye on what he could see of Vérité, which was a six-inch swath of her cloak, a gin bottle, and the line of her shadow on the cobblestones. She’d curled herself on the steps leading down to a cellar, holding the bottle balanced on her knee. She was perfectly unobtrusive. Perfectly patient. Sixty paces beyond that, the furtive man who’d followed her out of Fetter Lane was behind the door of a tavern.

“We could take her,” Hawk said.

“Not yet.”

“I could scoop her up all by myself.” Hawk’s eyes unfocused for a minute. That was Hawk, thinking. “I’ll walk around back and come up the street behind her. You count two hundred, then make some noise. I set a knife at her throat and talk to her persuasively till she decides to be sensible. We truss her up and tuck her in an alley, quiet and neat. Then we pick up the Frenchman.”

“You’d hurt her or she’d hurt you.”

“I don’t mind hurting her some.”

“I realize that. You don’t get to do it. And none of that would be quiet. She’s Caché.”

“Not the first Caché I’ve met.” Hawker scratched his forearm through his coat. “Not the first one I’ve fought with, if it comes to that.”

Thirty yards away, Vérité lifted her gin bottle out of his sight, pretending to take a drink, then set it back on her knee. On a grimy little street like this, anyone—man, woman, or child—could find a corner and settle down with a bottle and be ignored. Folks didn’t strike up conversations with the drunken, who tended to be belligerent and less than clean. The bottle itself was a handy weapon.

“She acts like you do,” Hawker said. “Holding a bottle of gin is one of the tricks you taught me. She stalks her target with the same . . . I guess you’d call it the same flavor.”

“We were trained by the same men.”

“At the Coach House. Almost makes me wish I’d gone to school sometime or other.”

“You didn’t miss anything.”

“Latin.”

“There’s that.” He had a sudden memory of Vérité and Guerrier out on the training field, waving the stubs of broken bottles at each other, leaping around, dancing, making faces, acting like the children they were. They’d have been ten or eleven years old. Guerrier making jokes. Vérité laughing. Everybody in a circle around them, shouting encouragement, clapping.

Deadly, deadly children.

He said, “Be careful when you face her. She’s dangerous, even for a Caché.”

“I’m dangerous myself,” Hawk said mildly. “I’ll accuse you of the same.”

“‘But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.’”

“Not the Bible.” Hawker frowned. “Shakespeare?”

“Hamlet.”

“Jolly fellow, Hamlet. I’m surprised it took five acts for somebody to kill him. I could have done it in three.”

He and Hawker leaned, side by side, against a damp, slightly gritty brick wall that was crumbling, flake by red ochre flake, to the dirt of the alley at their feet, powdering into dissolution. Give London five or six hundred years and it would reduce this wall to dust and wash it into the Thames.

He was eroding, himself. His eyes hurt. His mouth was dry as bone dust. Each breath was a long, stinging ache right down to his chest. The undercurrent of pain scraped away at his concentration. Every breath and blink was a distraction.

Ignore it. Set it aside.

He kept his eyes on Vérité. Hawker ran his attention up and down the street, into all the blind corners, across the windows that looked down on this road, and up to the rooftops. They’d worked together so long, in so many places, they didn’t have to settle how to divide up the duty.

Hawk said, “I am officially disgusted with this slinking along the byways of London, hoping your erstwhile female colleague leads us someplace interesting. Let’s drag somebody back to Meeks Street and be rudely inquisitive. I vote we start with the woman.”

“We’re not voting. And I don’t crack eggs by slamming them with a hammer.”

“That’s profound, that is.” Hawker began picking coin from his pockets and spreading it across the palm of his hand. “I like that word ‘erstwhile.’ I’ve been trying to work it into conversations. Right. Not the woman. We’ll go to the tavern.” He studied his hand. “Where I will carelessly set ten shillings, thr’pence, ha’penny spinning across the floor. While the assembly scrambles for coinage, we drag your Frenchman off to Meeks Street.”

“And warn off the man I really want.”

“The one yonder maiden went to meet in the church. The fellow you want dead.”

“That one.”

The man in the tavern belonged to the Merchant. They were always the same type—men who wore the dull skin and heavy, subtly stunted body of workers from the starved, laboring quartiers of Paris. Men who obeyed without question. Men with the angry, shrewd eyes and stolid, obstinate faces of fanatics.

He’s one of the Merchant’s men. He knows where the monster is.

Hawker sighed and put his money away. “They know we’re following, even though you’re reasonably skilled in the art and I am extraordinary. Hundred percent likelihood on the woman. Fifty-fifty for the man.”

“They know.”

Hawk pulled out his watch, heavy, embossed silver, worn dull, and opened it. “Two hours till dark. We can continue our tour of the public houses of Soho, pausing at intervals to let the Frenchman piss in alleys on the way between. After that, we won’t be able to see him clearly. No loss, in my opinion.” He put the watch away. “Are we learning anything at all from this peregrination around the capital?”

“We’ve seen a face. One of the men in one of these taverns came to carry a message.”

“We’ve seen one hundred and seventy-two faces. Half of Soho.”