Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

“Do you think that wise?” Dubois said suddenly. Dexter looked at him sharply. He seemed unduly agitated, and was hiding it badly; his face was decidedly pale and damp. “Should we not summon a doctor here for the lady if she is ill?”

“Nonsense.” Dexter put an arm around Charlotte’s waist, taking shameless advantage of the feigned illness to press her inappropriately close. His interest in her, at least, was genuine. And the sooner they were back at the hotel, the better. “A bit of fresh air and quiet, a few minutes out of the crush and the lady will be right as rain. Won’t you, my love?”

“If you think so, husband,” Charlotte answered with a breathless earnestness. “You always know best.”

Murcheson suffered a sudden coughing fit, and Dexter sneezed in a way that strongly resembled a stifled snort of laughter.

The chimes sounded the approaching end of the interval, drawing the crowd back into the house. With a last frantic glare at Murcheson and Dexter, Dubois departed reluctantly to return to his seat as the two men half-carried Charlotte out the door.

“Overdoing it a tad at the end, don’t you think, my fruit-bedecked meringue?” Dexter teased Charlotte once the coast was clear.

“Shameless,” Murcheson agreed, hailing his driver from the middle of the rank of waiting steam cars.

“It was either that or slap him. Didn’t something about that man just make you want to strike him?” Charlotte asked.

Dexter nodded. “Yes, but to do it I would have had to touch him, and he’s such a slimy toad I decided it wasn’t worth it.”

“YOU CAN COME out of the shadows, Martin. Here, sit.”

As Dubois swept past him, Martin stepped forward from the darkest corner of the booth, eyeing the theater warily before taking the seat Dubois indicated. In general he avoided theaters, the boxes particularly. He hated the feeling of sitting at the edge of a precipice, exposed and trapped at the same time. Anyone in the audience could lift a weapon and fire before he even noticed the threat. Anyone could slink into the box from the hallway behind and end him with a silent garrote. And then there were the fires. Theaters were deathtraps.

“I nearly lost an agent,” Martin said without preamble. “He’d been set to watch on the roof of Murcheson’s Gennevilliers factory. He suffered severe burns and a broken leg, and barely managed to avoid being identified by his rescuers. Some warning might have been helpful.”

Dubois shrugged. “He lived, I take it. If he hadn’t, he certainly wouldn’t have been the first peasant in history to die in service.”

Gritting his teeth, Martin swore an oath to himself that one day Dubois would die in lingering agony.

“This is a man in your employ. A good man.”

“No,” Dubois contradicted him. “He is a man in your employ, and his goodness doesn’t concern me. Don’t think I’m unaware you have your own agenda, Martin. Why would you ever think I’d let your agenda interfere with mine?” When Martin remained silent, Dubois shook his head, for all the world like a father disappointed in a child who has failed to learn a simple lesson. “Jacques, Jacques. Are you still so naïve? You’re Coeur de Fer, are you not? Where is the iron, my friend? Did you learn nothing from Simone’s death? I’ll eliminate anybody who stands in my way, even a person I care for. It’s as simple as that. I know my priorities. And don’t try to claim you’re any different. You’ve done the same in your time.”

Never a person I’ve cared for , Martin thought. But then he’d never found out a mistress of several years’ duration was a government agent gathering potentially ruinous information on him, preparing to have him exiled or shot for a traitor. Perhaps he would’ve done the same after all. He would never know. When the documents had come into his life, all else of importance had left it, including all the people he’d once cared for.

At least I have my pouch back. Empty and ready for use. Perhaps a cobbler could recondition the leather.

“Simone cared for me too, you know.” Dubois went on. “That was her weakness. It blinded her, and after all those years she let her guard down. Just once, but that was all I needed. She really shouldn’t have been foolish enough to fall asleep in my bed. Though the first stupidity was drinking wine I’d poured out of her sight. She made it very easy, in the end.”

Martin didn’t need to hear it. He knew how Simone had died, knew the cretinous malignancy beside him had suffocated her in his own bed, then paid a doctor to testify that the death had been from natural causes. Simone’s downfall was legend in French intelligence.

Dubois was right, however. She had been foolish to visit him while exhausted from her jaunt to England, and even more so to drink his wine. As foolish as Martin had been to think that his deal with Dubois could ever end well. And now that he’d lost the documents to the British—for the second and final time—the deal would never end until either Dubois or Martin was dead.

Martin thought that considered in those terms, the choice became very clear to him. The plan of action practically sprang to mind full-formed. All he needed to do was choose a time and place to implement it.

“She never did care for you, Dubois,” Martin said softly but firmly. “She thought you were scum, and a pig in bed.”

He didn’t know why he’d said it. So careful, he was usually so very careful. But Dubois normally steered clear of this topic too, knowing that Simone had meant something to Martin, even if he wasn’t sure what she’d meant.

Dubois’s tone was jovial, though. Perhaps he had finally forgotten what a danger Martin could still be when pressed. He seemed to assume the old dog had lost his fangs. “You think I didn’t know my own woman? She was a whore for me, whatever else she was.”

Martin permitted himself a smile as he turned to the dismissive Dubois, letting his imagination run for a second or two. There was a beauty in the extremity of death, sometimes, a poetic quality to the last expression on a victim’s face as the breath left the body. Martin suspected even Dubois might display that sort of beauty at the very end. “Believe what you will.”

“You’re tiresome this evening, Martin, and the second act is beginning soon. Go find a whore of your own or something, leave me to my amusement. Your little errand boy will heal in time, and Murcheson needed to be hit hard. I’m only disappointed the bastard wasn’t there as I’d hoped. Still, there’s time. Other plans are already afoot.” He frowned, tenting his fingers over his ample midsection. “This very evening, in fact. Perhaps they are going a little awry, but I think the outcome might be just as useful in the end.”

Dubois’s plans, Martin thought, usually did go awry. But his own would not.

THE DRIVE FROM the Opéra to the Ritz was a short one, even in traffic. But they had barely turned onto the Rue de la Paix when Dexter leaned forward, tapping the glass that separated the driver and passenger sections of the steam car.

“Do you hear that?”

The driver slid the window panel open and spared a glance back before returning his eyes to the busy street ahead. “Sir?”

“The boiler. Do you hear it? The pitch is wrong, and it sounds . . . dull.”

“Sir? I don’t hear anything different than usual. Shall I pull over? We’re only a few blocks from the hotel.”

“What is it?” Charlotte asked, looking on her way toward being irritated.

“I’m not sure,” Dexter admitted. “But I’m familiar with this model of engine and it just sounds off .”