Rogue Spy (26 page)

Because she laughs at me,
Pax thought.
Because she's
never had a lover who gave a damn about her. Because we both may die soon. Because she's beautiful.

I have to make this good for her.

Cami curled on the bed, biting her knuckles to keep laughter inside. Her breasts were pebbled up. The lithe, strong muscles of her thighs shook in fine tremors, thrusting a little toward him. Wanting. Ready.

He'd known the mechanics of this. He hadn't known how he'd feel when he threw himself into this maelstrom and let it pull him under.

“If I don't have you soon, I'm going to die,” he said.

“Come between my legs.” She opened her arms to him. Opened her knees. “Now.”

“Now,” he agreed. “Before Fate calls up hellhounds and vultures as well as cats.”

She drew him down to her. It wasn't so complicated. Not when he wanted her this much. There, at the center, she was slick. She pressed against his hand when he stroked her hair aside.

When he entered, she rose to meet his cock. More than meet him, she thrust herself against him. He was inside her and she was smooth and beautiful, warm as rose madder. She closed around him and closed tight.

With everything he was, he drove into her. Again. Again.

Hard, he drove into her, felt her thrust back to him. Return everything he gave. Delight in it, need it, glory in it. All her strength answered to his.

She sobbed in a way that was also laughing. Her fingers clawed into him and she groaned deep in her throat. She tightened everywhere around him. Her entire body stiffened and thrashed hard, suddenly, once, twice, again, again.

The pleasure was like exploding everywhere, helplessly. He was in time, barely, to withdraw from her and spend against her thigh.

She shuddered one last time and softened under him and he collapsed on her, sucking in air. It smelled like lovemaking.

Men didn't talk about this part, about holding a woman afterward, both of you plastered together, damp everywhere, your bodies somehow melting into each other.

I'll keep you alive, Cami. I swear it.

He said, “I'm glad one of us wasn't a virgin.”

The blankets and sheets were everywhere, but he laid his hand on one and pulled it up to drag over both of them. There didn't seem to be any more hidden animals.

Cami lay perfectly limp. When he pulled her in next to him, she poured into the space like water. His cock stirred. Soon they'd make love again.

She opened her eyes. “What did you say about virgins?”

“Not anymore,” he said.

One must sometimes invite the wolf to the table.

A BALDONI SAYING

In the early hours of the morning, when the Crocodile tavern in Covent Garden was filled with petty tradesmen and laborers on their way to work, William Doyle took his ease at a narrow table in the dark corner, engaged in quiet conversation, eating breakfast, collecting information. He wore a leather vest and plain shirt, and around his neck, a Belcher neckerchief. Anyone glancing in his direction would assume he transported wagonloads of bricks for a living or sold cattle at Smithfield Market or, if they got a closer look, that he routinely committed theft with violence.

The young man across from him might have served in a draper's shop or sold expensive gloves or pounded Latin into the heads of reluctant schoolboys. He was, in fact, a freelance seller of secrets. A collector of errors in judgment. An entrepreneur in other men's moral failings. A blackmailer, in season.

“I need to know by tonight. Noon is better,” Doyle said.

“You give me very little time.”

“Nobody has any time,” Doyle said. “Give me hints, rumors, a whisper . . . anything.”

“I make no promises.”

“Do what you can.” Doyle slid a folded banknote across the table. It was covered smoothly and instantly by a slender, well-kept hand. The younger man rose from his bench and left like an amiable snake setting off to swallow barn rats.

At the tavern door he brushed past Bernardo Baldoni, entering.

Bernardo stepped to one side and stood with his back to the window, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, giving Doyle a long moment to look him over. Then he threaded his way around two tables to the shadowy corner behind the bar.

He sat on the bench recently vacated and set his hands in plain view. Bernardo was not a large or imposing man. He looked even less so when sitting across from the mass of muscle that was William Doyle. He said, “Mr. Doyle,” and it was a statement, not a question.

Doyle frowned. “I know you.”

“We met once, ten years ago, in Paris, over cards. I was a corn factor from Marseilles. You were a German count.”

Neutrality settled over Doyle's ugly face. “Right.”

“The card game was at the Palais Royal. The play was high. We were both cheating.”

“That's ordinary enough. Cheating.” Doyle took up his mug and drank ale, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and waited.

“So I thought. Until I noticed you were cheating to lose.”

“Looked that way, did it?”

“I sensed a complicated scheme in play, and it was not one of my own, so I withdrew with all prudent speed. Paris was full of political plots and plans at that time. Most of them ended badly for someone.”

“Still true,” Doyle said amiably.

“There was a murder in that club that night. A political murder. I was sufficiently intrigued that I made inquiries and discovered who you are.”

“Did you, now?”

“The British Service remains impenetrable. Your Military Intelligence is less so.”

“I've been told that.”

Bernardo motioned the barmaid closer and ordered coffee. “The military are a great trial to us all.”

The two men sat, measuring each other, till the woman returned to swipe at a patch of table with her apron and slap down a mug.

When she was gone again, out of earshot, Doyle said, “The coffee's a mistake.”

Bernardo sipped. Grimaced. “So it is.” He set it carefully aside. “A reminder that I am among the English. No other nation would call this coffee.”

“We're an imaginative race,” Doyle said.

Bernardo leaned back in his chair. For a while they watched the other patrons of the Crocodile eat and drink. The tavern collected a mixed bag of workmen connected with the theater, laborers, market vendors, and women of various degrees of respectability.

Bernardo said, “You may know who I am.”

Doyle made no comment.

“So.” Bernardo turned a hand palm up. “I am Bernardo Baldoni, brother to Cesare Baldoni.” He paused. “I see that you knew.”

Doyle didn't acknowledge that but didn't deny it, either.

“I have come to deliver a message to the British Service.” Bernardo's voice became less genial. “You take an interest in the woman called Camille Leyland. This must cease.”

“Why?” The single blunt word from Doyle.

“She is ours. She is Baldoni. She is my great-niece.”

Doyle closed his eyes. “I see.” A minute passed in silence. “Tell me she isn't also Cesare Baldoni's great-niece.”

“She is his granddaughter. His only granddaughter. I think it is best that the British Service know this.”

“Hell.”

“She is also Ernesto Targioni's granddaughter. Add to this that she is Scipione Zito's first cousin and closest blood relative. You know what he is. I have not even begun to list the families she is tied to by blood and marriage across Tuscany. The Minutoli. The Scribanos . . .”

“In short, related to everybody but the pope.”

“There is a distant connection to—”

“Damn.”

“As I say, you should know this.”

Doyle hissed out a long breath of impatience. “What the devil was a Baldoni child—
that
Baldoni child—doing unprotected, getting scooped up by the Police Secrète and put in the Coach House? Why the hell weren't you keeping watch on her?”

“Disorder beyond belief, and one man's unforgivable villainy. It is a family matter.” Bernardo set the tips of his fingers together and looked down at them. “It is the family matter of several important families, in fact.”

“And again, I have to say damn it to hell.”

“You have an understanding of the politics of Tuscany. Cesare declared there would be no vendetta with the Targioni. We all assiduously covered over that ugliness. Now, unless it is seen that my niece is most abundantly cared for and happy, the old scandal will emerge into daylight.”

Doyle closed his eyes and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed.”

“It is Tuscany,” Bernardo said. “And it is family.”

“The bloodshed happening in French territory, when our peace treaty with France is shaky as hell. It's going to look like England's making trouble on purpose.”

Bernardo said, almost apologetically, “You are not the only one who finds this a difficult situation. You see the implications, do you not?”

“I see the implications.”

“For the Baldoni, for all the old Tuscan families of power, she is a lit candle tossed into a powder magazine.”

“Which the French will blame on us.”

“The small blessing of this day is that my great-niece is under my roof again, instead of in a British prison, accused of spying for the French. Or dead at British hands.”

Doyle looked past him, at a blank spot on the plaster wall. “We wouldn't kill her.”

“Of course your Service would not,” Bernardo said. “Perhaps
the blundering Military Intelligence of England also would not. But I am Tuscan and Florentine and we scent intrigue in the lightest breeze. No one in Italy will believe she spent ten years in England and the British Service did not know who she was. If my great-niece trips over a stone, or is struck by lightning in Hyde Park, or walks in the rain and catches pneumonia, the English will be blamed. That one death will drive the great families of Tuscany into the arms of Napoleon.”

“We'll have to keep her alive, then, won't we?”

“With the aid of various saints.
Con l'aiuto dei santi.
”

The two men looked at each other for a time.

Doyle picked up his mug. “I'd suggest the ale in this establishment, but I imagine you don't drink it. Has she told you what she's doing tomorrow?”

“She goes to face Il Mercante di Tenebre. I do not stand in her way. Baldoni women have always fought. She honors us when she goes to face that beast.”

“But it would be best if she didn't get herself killed on English soil.”

“Very much so. Your Mr. Paxton is in my kitchen, where the coffee is somewhat better than this,” he tapped his cup, “plotting to keep her alive.” He pursed his lips and continued, “It has occurred to us that Mr. Paxton may present a solution to another problem.”

Doyle waited. It was impossible to know if he suspected what was coming.

Bernardo said, “My Sara is heiress to inheritances in two great families—possibly the Zitos as well. She will have also the dowry of her grandmother, who was Maria Vezzoni . . .”

“There is just no end to this, is there?” said Doyle, looking sour.

“She must marry, and soon, to a family who will not cause troubles with this great inheritance. Someone tied to neither the French nor the Austrians. It has occurred to us that an Englishman may be the solution to our problems.”

Doyle didn't give anything away on his face. “It might.”

“I will not force my Sara—Cami, as I must call her—into anything distasteful to her. Not with the least feather of
persuasion. But she seems fond of your agent Paxton. He spent last night in her bed.”

Doyle didn't say anything.

Bernardo made himself comfortable in the chair he had taken. “Tell me about Thomas Paxton.”

Do not have a good escape plan. Have three.

A BALDONI SAYING

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.”