Dream Thief, page 10
Down. He had considered walking someplace relatively close, challenging his foes to accidentally stumble across him at the exact right moment to perhaps join him for a meal.
That sounded petty. The wrong kind of petty, at least.
Instead, he moved to the lobby and looked around, with eyes as well as senses. Marie-Rose hadn’t been wearing a strong perfume, upon reflection. And that in a room of men who didn’t bathe as regularly as Augustus found appropriate.
He did not smell her. Nor see her.
Smiling sharply, he walked across, nodding to the young lady behind the desk as he did, and entered the restaurant.
It was early, as yet, but lunch had been early. There would be entertainment later, a band and perhaps a singer, though he rarely stayed for such things unless a professional obligation.
Looking around, Augustus allowed himself to appear to be pleasantly surprised to see Marie-Rose Guérin seated alone in the middle of a largely empty room, seemingly nursing a mug of coffee.
He’d lunched early. Had she gambled that he would sup early as well? Or had she been prepared to wait all night like a jilted lover in some terrible melodrama?
Augustus smiled as he saw her. Paused as if in consideration. Then moved her way in a manner calculated to bookend herself walking into a cafe several hours ago and by chance joining him in a bit of conversation.
He moved to the chair, as if to gesture, but she rose, stepping close imperiously to present a cheek.
He kissed her in the French style, then added a third on the lips because she’d started it. It did catch her off guard.
As intended.
Moving around, he got her seated, then took his own chair, like a husband or lover arriving a bit late, rather than a near-stranger contemplating bear traps and mechanically inclined Canadians.
“You’ll pardon my forwardness?” Marie-Rose asked in English as things settled. Not that it would help, as the staff here was broadly multilingual. They might hide a conversation in Cantonese. And then again, they might not.
“But, of course, my dear,” he indulged.
“You had mentioned the Imperial,” she continued. “I gambled that we might be able to continue our conversation from before. I did note the ring on your hand, Mssr. Derlyth, but you did not speak of meaning earlier.”
“Please, call me Augustus,” he said. “And no, the ring is sentimental, rather than matrimonial.”
After all, if she was going through all this effort to seduce him, the least he could do was not be a berk about it.
Not that he believed anything the woman might say
“Augustus,” she purred. “And I am Marie-Rose.”
“Charmed,” he lied brazenly. “I never got the opportunity earlier to ask what you did, Marie-Rose.”
“A bit of everything,” she replied with a coquettish smile. “I was lucky enough to come into a nice inheritance young, so I was able to travel and see much of the continent, though the war made that complex.”
“I could see that,” he agreed. “I spent a goodly portion of it in Tibet primarily, with trips into the British Raj and occasional visits into revolutionary China. What brought you to Marseilles?”
Again, serve and volley, but she had chased him down a second time, so Augustus felt more comfortable perhaps dancing closer than she might have anticipated.
Two could play this game, if they were skilled enough dancers.
“Normally I live in Paris.” She paused, nodded. “But the weather has been ghastly, so I sought a more pleasant interlude.”
The waiter was not the consummate professional as the woman at the cafe, and thus chose this moment to interrupt with menus and more coffee. It served to break the thread of chatter.
Augustus waited until they were alone again.
“I had considered my next stop from Marseilles,” he offered blandly. “At present, it is likely that I shall visit Paris, if only for a few days, before moving on, depending on what business presents itself.”
She was a beautiful woman. And a hard, cold crone at the same time. The latter appeared in her eyes for just a moment as he spoke, pretending to miss the change that came over her at the mention of the French capital.
Treading on your territory, perhaps?
He watched. She watched.
“Acquisitions in Paris?” she inquired, voice just a hint rough.
“Seeing who might have needs I could explore, in the buying and selling,” he said, setting it far enough off to one side conversationally that she couldn’t offer herself as a need to be explored, without a tawdry hint of commerce being involved.
Not even the whores he’d known in his time liked to admit to that sort of thing. And he had never used such a term in their presence, even when everyone knew the truth.
“What’s the prettiest thing you’ve acquired recently?” she asked now, a bit of a jar as she forced the conversation over to where she really wanted it to go.
He pretended ignorance of the motion, even though the welds were clearly visible.
“The prettiest?” he asked, leaning back as if in thought and letting his eyes roam the far wall over her shoulder. “A jade fan of the Tang Dynasty in China. Seemingly fragile but done with such delicate care that the buyer could have pulled it from the box to cool herself without worry.”
“In Marseilles?” she asked, blatantly surprised.
“Ah, no.” He shook his head and brought his eyes back down to lock on hers. “In Marseilles, I merely located and acquired a few golden baubles that were presumably valuable to the final buyer, but none of which had any great beauty to them.”
After all, the mask had been plain. Almost ugly. It had, however, contained a bit of power that would give it great value to those folks who understood how to use it. Same with the other tidbits currently hidden in his room in a manner that only the most powerful practitioners of the arts should be able to locate.
Marie-Rose didn’t feel powerful. Merely dangerous.
“Gold?” she asked, overly interested, he presumed, in trapping him into some manner of confession.
“It is a common enough base for jewelers and others to create things,” he nodded, as if oblivious. “Non-reactive, so it will retain its gloss long after lesser metals have surrendered to time. But at the same time, it rarely rises far enough to be beautiful. Such things are created by adding in other bits and baubles to accent and offset the shiny metal underneath.”
Augustus supposed that the man on the hill might have hired an outsider to come down from Paris to track his missing goods, but for the life of him, he could not see why. The man had sufficient puissance himself to conjure the sort of hound that would eventually sniff out the trail, if only because Tawfiq had struck Augustus as the sort of man who would unwrap the thing as soon as they left the harbor, to luxuriate in putting one over on the French.
Not understanding that he should have waited until he could scribe a powerful circle to hide it when he got home.
No, Augustus was willing to put down a franc note on this woman representing some or all of the thieves of Paris, come to see who had done the thing they had been unable to.
Hopefully, Jean-Marie Lachance was counted among that number.
At that, maybe the waiter was a dancer after all, as he returned to take their orders and all the tension bled away.
Chapter
Twenty-One
When they finished their supper, the sun was still up, visible through a few windows on a far wall that hadn’t yet been curtained for the coming evening’s entertainment.
They had danced some more verbally, but without gaining or losing ground. Stalemate, as it were, not that he considered that a terrible outcome.
She felt like one of the most dangerous women he’d ever known.
How had Lachance managed to inveigle her into his employ? Or was she another one like that man, merely faster to Marseilles and luckier to stumble across Derlyth’s path?
Hard to say.
And unlike Nava, he had no intention of allowing this woman inside the boundaries he had erected around his life, literal or esoteric.
Instead, he had suggested a walk to aid the digestion. Lacking any really good counters, Marie-Rose had accepted.
Dancing verbally, certainly. Still with knives concealed. For now.
The evening was just gearing up, with folks moving about from office to home or home to dinner. He walked with the woman on his left arm, keeping her away from the orichalcum blade on his right in a blazer pocket. It was a most lovely walk, at least on the surface of it.
“How is Paris this year?” he asked. “Save for the heat?”
“It is eternal,” she said wistfully. “Berlin is far too mechanical for my tastes. London tends towards a reverence to a past that might never have existed. Rome fell asleep centuries ago and refuses to wake up.”
He nodded. Poetical, but accurate in all cases. One of the reasons he preferred other places. Much farther afield, as it were. Dar es Salaam was quite lovely. Edo even more so, though it did tend to remind him a shade too closely of Berlin in the rising industrialism, once you removed from a few, choice inner neighborhoods.
She told him vague stories, though he had no easy way to determine their veracity. Not with her hanging on one arm where he could not easily invoke any incantations. Whether they were truth or whole-cloth lies, he enjoyed listening to her talk.
“And after the war?” he asked, as she spoke of her time as a young woman.
Hints dropped suggested thirty-two. Sixteen years his junior. A woman who should not be so enamored of a man like him. Nava had claimed she had an excuse.
Marie-Rose was looking for one.
She’d have been twenty-two when things came unassembled in Europe. Poised, as it were, though an inheritance would free her from needing to find a husband with any immediacy.
“After the war, things began to settle again,” she replied. “At least until my father began to be harassed by some of the older folks. The ones yearning for a return of the monarchy and upset at what had been done to the Kaiser. They are few, but remain devoted, more in the countryside than the civilized places.”
Augustus perked up. He could almost taste the acid rolling off her tongue.
“Oh?” he asked, all innocence.
“Paris was in ferment,” she nodded. “As happens regularly. The heat brings out the craziness, it seems, and small misunderstandings turn into riots if people turn their back.”
He nodded back. He had vague memories of reading such things. In America, there had been several years where race riots and the establishment hunting any socialist challenge to its racial and economic supremacy had gone hand in hand. Tulsa, in the former Oklahoma Territory, had been the worst, but only one of many, many massacres. Paris. Berlin, but Weimar had started poorly and continued downhill in ways that suggested greater problems coming.
“Hopefully, such things never come to Marseilles,” he offered as a deflection.
She nodded and leaned against his arm and shoulder as if drawing strength and warmth. He allowed it.
“Indeed,” she said in a voice hardly above a whisper. “I miss him terribly. He got caught up in one of those pro-monarchist riots, conservatives intent on smashing anything smacking of modernity, as if they could undo the original revolution and bring back one of those Bourbon scum.”
She shivered, but it was anger, not fear nor cold. Augustus slowed his walk and let her withdraw some.
Eventually, her smile returned, however wan.
“I fear I have become poor company, Augustus,” she offered.
“We have all lost people we loved,” he replied, utterly vague because he wasn’t about to try to explain some of those stories. Especially not to a potential enemy, however beautiful.
“I had thought to seduce you,” she said. “But that feels tawdry and wrong. At least tonight.”
“At least tonight,” he agreed, dangling out the possibility of other nights, however grand such a lie might be.
At least until he spent some time preparing a trap with himself as bait.
Who was this woman? Her words suggested a familiarity with the rage of Lachance, but Augustus didn’t suppose that to be a rarity, given the outcomes of the War. The lives lost or maimed.
The twentieth century was shaping up, at least hopefully, to represent something of the dying gasp of aristocracy as a governing philosophy.
Onto the ash heap of history, as it were, and good riddance.
He wouldn’t claim to agree with that Diderot fellow, exactly. He also didn’t disagree, either.
As an experiment, it had never been tried, so Augustus couldn’t say whether or not the world would indeed be better off with the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
However, he also couldn’t say it wouldn't improve things, either.
“I should kiss you here and now, then depart,” Marie-Rose announced.
In the back of his head, Augustus had been listening for those various alarms he had wrapped around his rooms, back at the hotel. It was entirely possible that she had intended to distract him, allowing a confederate to access his things, but if they had, they had left no mark.
Impressive, that.
Even he had been forced to destroy a few things in stealing the mask, leaving clues, if not fingerprints.
He leaned in and kissed the woman with perhaps more passion than the situation warranted, were they truly strangers met by happenstance a few hours ago at a cafe.
He didn’t believe that for a moment, though.
Instead, he watched her walk away and tried to decide which of many possible courses of action was the most likely to actually reveal who this woman really was.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Augustus had two options, really. Well, three, but immediately packing and departing for Paris or some other place wasn’t going to solve the problem of Lachance that Whitehall had thrust upon him. And blackmailed him to help.
He did find himself in a bit of a conundrum. In the end, though, stopping Lachance seemed the least evil of many, as the man was a threat to folks who probably were innocent of most of the crimes they might stand accused of.
Most.
Merely being complicit in a social structure erected before one’s birth was not a crime. Yet. Those Russian fellows might be about to unleash the sort of world revolution that put lie to his original thought, but then he supposed he might have to become personally involved.
Protecting innocents, as it were. Standing next to Digby athwart the rising tide, intent on going down before it rather than surrendering.
Ye gads, when had he gotten so morbid? Or was it the fact that he lived in a constant fog of grey ambiguity all his life that finding hard boundaries separating good from evil was itself a surprise?
Option One: he could return to his room and see what damage someone might have done while he was vacant.
Option Two: quietly stalk the woman.
She knew where he was staying. He knew almost nothing about her, save for stories that might be lies.
Well, he could just give chase now and let it be cheap and tawdry, but that would not do.
Not when the stakes were this high.
Augustus struck out as though returning to his temporary abode, though merely getting around a corner for now. He reached out for his favorite tracker.
The little demonling appeared almost instantly, as though it had been waiting impatiently on the far side of a hidden door for Augustus to knock.
After the last few such summonings, Augustus was not willing to gainsay that.
Instead, he smiled down at the thing. Like a compact, miniature weasel with wings like a hawk and eyes like an owl.
He held out a hand.
“Take her scent, little one,” he crooned. “Track her, but not closely. She might be able to undo you if bothered. Sidle along side streets until she goes to ground.”
Augustus got a nod that gave impressions of a snort of disgust cast in his direction, then the wee beastie was off, circling once on foot before striking out down a nearby alley.
Augustus began to walk, trusting that the evening sun would last longer than the walk, thus allowing him to center Marie-Rose at her own establishment, wherein he could begin to unravel the whole cloth she had presented for lies, innuendo, and perhaps those few truths necessary to hold the rest together.
Marie-Rose was not staying close to the Imperial. That was obvious quickly, as the tracker led him closer to the docks and somewhat around the harbor neighborhoods. Not to the bad ones, but only because there were a few nicer places tucked in like diamonds in a coal mine. One of those was where the demonling was certain she had gone to ground.
Augustus considered the sun. Setting, but not dark for another hour. He wondered if she would retire, or merely change out of a dress into something more suited to slipping through dark alleys en route to burgling his own hotel room.
He nodded to his assistant, then watched the little devil take off like a dove, flying an ascending cylinder around the hotel, as though placing her floor and room by esoteric triangulation.
Such would fail at the Imperial. On the other hand, would it produce a hollow spot in the senses of one such as that?
Augustus paused and considered the esoteric use of negative space, at least as artists executed it.
Yes, that might be a thing. He would need to consider how to hide without leaving emptiness when volume was expected.
Against almost all foes, that was not a consideration worth pursuing. Dream thieves were different creatures. And Marie-Rose appeared to be a threat. Perhaps not in his new league, but perhaps not far from it, either.
Dangerous. And not just her feminine charm and wiles.
He waited. A passage up, then a return, and his associate landed on the sidewalk with the flourish of a cat delivering a dead mouse to someone who obviously can’t hunt for itself.
They shared a wry smile. This demonling kept growing more interesting. More of a person and less of a tool.
What that said about the state of their relationship was not a topic Augustus was prepared to explore philosophically at present.
