Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

“Not anymore.”

“You’re not English. You’ve been a spy from the first day you limped into Meeks Street.”

“Yes.” He jerked his head to the side, abruptly. “No. I was—” He went silent.

Forty feet away, the door of the café banged closed behind some irritated customer. Glass rattled in the front windows. The noise scraped the lines of his nerves. Hell. This was hard. “You’re not the son of a British Service agent.”

“I’m not James Paxton’s son. I took that dead boy’s place. I took his name. Let me sit down.” He didn’t wait for a nod. He collapsed on the bench, putting his hands out in front of him, holding one inside the other. “I didn’t expect to get away with it for this long.”

“I have to tell Carruthers.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

“She’ll send men after you.”

Pax raised stillness to a fine art. Paint on the wall fidgeted, compared to him. “She’ll need to know how much I gave the French.”

“She’ll send them in twos and threes. You won’t be easy to take. Not alive. And you have to be alive to interrogate.”

It felt eerily familiar, laying the facts out. Predicting, discussing, getting the choices lined up.

“It’ll be an interesting little talk.” A muscle in Pax’s cheek tightened. A sign of cracks in the ice. “I count on Carruthers to finish up neatly. Don’t let her turn the work over to you. You deserve better than that.”

“I’m not her butcher.”

Pax waved for silence. “Both of you can leave it to the French. Justine DuMotier’s going to report this. The French execute turncoats.”

“You were about twelve, last time you were French.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have a day, after the French find out. Maybe less.”

In the main room, the lamps were getting blown, one by one, leaving the café darker every time. Murmurs, cautious and annoyed, said the owner and his wife were talking quietly between themselves and locking the windows up and down the front.

“They brought me to Russia, fast, by ship.” Pax took up a conversation they weren’t actually having. “When I was there, they did the rest. I didn’t see the fire.” He lost momentum, wiped his mouth, and started up again. “They made me go through the ashes and bury what was left. So I’d be convincing.” He ran his hand down his arm. “They burned me. For proof.”

He’d seen the scar Pax had snaking up his arm. Ugly and deep. “Authentic.”

“They were great ones for detail.” Pax sounded exhausted. Hoarse. “They told me to get myself to Meeks Street. ‘That way,’ they said, and pointed west.” He closed his hand on his arm, as if it still hurt. “It took me four months to walk across Europe. It’d started snowing by the time I got to England. Maybe the Coach House did make us tough.”

“Nobody trains agents like the French.”

“Nobody.” Pax took a couple of deep breaths. “Let me finish this. I was four months at Meeks Street when my directeur showed up. I’d done better than he hoped.”

“Your hand right in the candy box. He must have been pleased.”

“It’s not . . . Damn. It’s not a joke.” The table held a coffee grinder and a tray with a dozen cups waiting to be washed. Pax picked up dirty cups and began to lay them out in a row. “I gave him papers, Hawk. I followed orders. You have to know that. Three times, I gave him files I filched out of the cupboards in the basement. I picked old work. Dead operations. Agents who’d retired to some sheep farm in the Outer Hebrides.”

“You gave him garbage.”

“I was green as grass. I didn’t know what was important.” Pax began to stack dirty cups. “I’ll never know how much damage I did.”

Now that was vintage Pax, looking on the dark side, even if he had to run round the side and paint it black himself.

“I know what was stored down there. I burned it wholesale when they put me in charge of filing. How’d you kill him?”

Pax shrugged, all austere and disapproving. Did he think the whole damn story wasn’t obvious? “A dagger under the sternum, up to the heart. But I didn’t do it till the fourth meeting. None of this is going to make any difference to Carruthers.”

“No.” The seniors in the British Service were a scary lot. Carruthers more than most.

“Nobody showed up to replace him. A couple months went by and I was still waiting for the ax to fall. Robespierre died on the guillotine. The Coach House closed and the French wanted to pretend it never existed. You and Doyle went hunting Cachés up and down the length of England. But you didn’t look at me.”

“You were one of us.”

“By then, I was.” He kept stacking cups, one by one. “Somewhere along the line I turned into Thomas Paxton.”

“Who is in one hell of a mess.”

There wasn’t much more to say, so they sat there, not saying it.

Pax set the last cup in place. “It doesn’t get easier with waiting. If you’re going to kill me, you might as well do it here.”

“If I were going to kill you, I’d have done it ten minutes ago instead of listening to that whole maudlin story. ”

“I betrayed the Service from the first day I walked in the door.”

“You were a kid and it was a long time ago.”

“I’ve lied to everybody for years. I could have been a traitor all along. You’d never know.”

“Fine then. You’re so bloody traitorous, I’ll sharpen up a knife and you can do the deed yourself. That’s a private corner over there. Get on with it.”

There was enough light to see Pax’s lips twitch. “All right, then. How do I live through this?”

“That’s a topic of fruitful speculation. My advice is, run like a rabbit. Go to Germany. Maybe Norway. Settle down to a blameless life as a Latin tutor. Collect bugs. You’d enjoy that. I doubt we’ll bother to track you down in the frozen north.”

“And the French?”

“They don’t have to know, if your Caché mate keeps his mouth shut. I’ll convince Justine to stay quiet.”

That got a short laugh out of him. “Maybe you could at that. Let’s say I don’t want to teach Latin in the frozen north.”

“You can go to Carruthers and throw yourself on the thin and sticky gruel of her mercy. Or you can go to London, to Galba. At least he’ll listen to you before he slits your throat.” Nothing else to say. “I have money. And a couple watches. I spent the day picking pockets.”

“You’re a man of parts, Hawk.”

“My morality is complicated. Get out of Paris. The Americans tell me New York and Boston are cities of culture and opportunity. They’re probably lying through their teeth, but you could go take a look.”

“I might do that. I have to think about this.”

Too much damn thinking, that was Pax’s problem. “I can give you till dawn. Then I have to go to Carruthers.”

HAWKER STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF THE CAFÉ DE la Régence, waiting for Owl.

The café was silent around him. The owners had grumbled their way off into the night. It was just him and Owl. She was off in the storeroom, doing something or other.

It was dark outside. This late, they snuffed the big lamps in the arches of the arcade. The shops of the Palais Royale closed up tight. The shopkeepers went home. He could just barely hear the rumble of voices and music from the gaming rooms upstairs. A café down at the far end of the colonnade was offering Gypsy music.

A few fools were still coming and going. Englishmen and Germans, mostly, determined to lick up the last dregs of foreign sin. Easy work for pickpockets, that lot. A couple whores hadn’t given up yet. They’d be the ones too old or too shabby to get into the gaming rooms, out looking for men dimwitted enough to touch them. Every once in a while, a gendarme walked by, keeping the peace.

Four hours till dawn.

Carruthers was going to ask him where Pax was headed. He could say he didn’t know. Lots of routes out of Paris when you knew the city as well as Pax did.

Owl came up behind him, making the right amount of noise. Enough to say she was there, not enough to break his concentration.

She said, “You did not know he was a Caché?”

“No.” The French had done a thorough, convincing job. “Your friend told you?”

“Not so exactly. My colleague pretends to know Pax not at all. He has made a poor choice.” Owl was reflected a little in the glass of the window, like a serious, disapproving ghost. “He lies to me, ’Awker, despite the years we have worked together.”

“Does he?”

“He twists like a worm on the hook to avoid betraying a fellow Caché. I am supposed to be blind to the drama enacted under my nose and stupid as well. I have sent my friend away and told him to keep his mouth shut. I will deal with him later. For many reasons, he will keep silent.”

“That’s good.”

She was watching him, first in the surface of the window, then she turned to study him frankly. “You will give Paxton up to your superiors?”

“In the morning.”

“You have no choice, I suppose.”

“None.” When Carruthers set him to tracking down Pax, he didn’t know what he’d do.

He was mirrored in the glass, next to Owl. It looked like he was standing out there in the night, staring in.

“Listen to me.” Owl unpinned the top of her apron, first one side, and then the other, and untied the band at the waist, businesslike and calm. “Listen, ’Awker.”

“I am.”

“You are not, but I will let that pass.” She discarded the apron impatiently onto a table and pushed in front of him, between him and the window. She put her hand flat on his chest, and he had to look at her. “I will say nothing of this to my superiors.”

He wanted to shake his head to clear it. He wasn’t thinking well. “Why?”