Joanna Bourne: The Black Hawk

“Now you’ve got me nervous.” He put his picklocks away inside his jacket and pushed the door back. A long, straight stair led upward. “Why don’t you stay a ways behind me.”

“Certainly. We will allow Mademoiselle Cardiff to attempt your life instead of mine. That will be a nice change.”

He was already padding soft-footed upward. She left the door to the street ajar, drew her pistol, and followed, guarding behind them.

He did not fill the dusty stairwell with unnecessary chatter. The next sound she heard was the door at the top of the stair swinging open. Another door had been left invitingly unlocked.

Hawker led the way into the apartment, radiating a cautious readiness, setting his feet with the grace of a cat on a high wall. Hearing, smelling, sensing everything. She was content to send him and his great cunning ahead while she held the gun and followed. She would, at the least sign of hazard, shoot someone. Hawker could explain to the authorities later. Much of life is wasted worrying about the authorities.

The foyer was a scene of malicious disorder. The little tables were thrown down. A vase of indigo-blue Sèvres-ware was broken. The roses had been crushed underfoot.

All the delicate, elegant rooms were torn apart. The sofa was ripped open and the feathers spilled out in white piles. Every book was ripped from the bookcase and thrown to the floor. She stepped over a marquetry cabinet, its glass in pieces, the china boxes from the shelves crushed to white chips. The poker that had smashed them was across the room beneath the black mark it made where it was hurled against the wall.

“Someone is in a rage.” One does not meet rage with rage. One does not become afraid. But this destruction was very ugly. “This is not a proper search. This is a tantrum.”

“Fast and sloppy.” Hawker stalked around, poking into what was broken and what was not, disgusted. “Even setting aside the damage, this is a poor job of searching the place.”

Wide glass doors let in the dawn and showed a balcony where the pots of ferns and flowers had been overturned. She eased her pistol to half cock and stepped out. The garden below was shadowed. It possibly contained Doyle.

“I don’t know why people always check the flowerpots.” Hawker joined her. “I have never yet found anything in a flowerpot.”

“I do not see Doyle. I gather one doesn’t.”

“He’ll drop by when he’s through breaking into the shop downstairs. It shouldn’t take long.”

Hawker pushed a spindly table out of the way in the hall. An open door revealed the kitchen, ransacked. It would be a desperate or stupid man who searched for secrets in a kitchen, where maids would poke about in every cranny and crevice. Smashed china and spilled flour covered the floor, full of boot prints.

He said, “This was done after the salon. There’s no flour in there. I make it the foyer first, then the salon. Here, in the kitchen. Then down the hall toward the bedroom.”

She knelt, holding her pistol at her side, not getting flour on her dress, and touched the pattern of a boot heel. “It was one man in this room.”

“If we got one man, it took him an hour. Two men go a little faster. Not twice as fast. They get in each other’s way.” Hawker would always make a good estimate of the time needed for theft.

She agreed with a nod. “This destruction was done recently. The roses in the foyer have only begun to wilt.”

“An hour or two.”

“We have just missed him. Almost certainly he was alerted by your search of the brothels today.”

“Or he saw us in the Pickerings’ ballroom. He came looking for something smaller than this.” Hawker touched the broken pieces of the salt box with his boot. “Less than eight inches long.”

“Something important that belongs to Jane Cardiff.” She did not say, “Where is she?” but they were both thinking that. “This is an evil man. I can taste it in what he has done.”

Crescents of flour marked the long carpet toward the door at the end of the hall. Jane Cardiff’s bedroom.

A hand lantern stood on the writing desk, still lit. The embroidered bedspread, the red velvet pillows, and the mattress were thrown to the floor and slit open. The drawers upended. Dresses, cloaks, and bonnets were tumbled in heaps.

“And we have more random breakage.” Hawker curled his lip. “He didn’t find what he was looking for.”

She saw what Hawker saw. This was the last room searched—the lamp had been left behind here. There was no corner left undisturbed. No sign a search ended and the searcher picked up his prize and departed.

She said, “Perhaps Jane Cardiff grabbed it up and ran. Perhaps he was too late.”

She uncocked her gun and laid it beside the lantern where it would be handy if she needed it. Every cubbyhole in the desk had been emptied. The secret drawer—such desks always contain one—was pulled out. On the blotter, six fabric-covered boxes, such as jewelers use, were open and empty. Séverine would be able to tell her which jewelers these were. She did not know, herself. She had no reason to buy jewels. “This is robbery. But it is an afterthought.”

“I never trust a man who is not attracted to valuable objects.” Papers had been shoved from the desk onto the floor. Hawker picked them up and shuffled through, making sense of them. “They’re crumpled up one by one.”

“Ah. Bon. And these books were opened one by one before they were tossed down. See how they fell? That is true in the salon, also. All the books were searched.” The bookends had been bawdy figures, the shepherdess with her dress raised high, the shepherd with his breeches lowered. They were smashed against the fireplace. More malice. “He is looking for a paper or a book, almost certainly.”

“Stupid to keep secret papers lying about in your bedroom.”

“A wise agent does not produce incriminating papers at all.”

“Not everybody’s as careful as you and me. Sad fact.” He began to circle the room, deft and deliberate. Not touching anything. Looking and thinking. “Let’s say Jane Cardiff has secrets to hide, being a woman who lives a full and interesting life. Where does a woman hide secrets, Owl?”

“Women do not think alike, mon vieux . Do not expect me to understand her merely because I am a woman.”

“But you’re a sneaky woman. Have I ever told you how much I admire that? We can eliminate the easy places—all the drawers and bookcases.”

“Certainly, that is a foolish place to hide something.” She set aside her distaste for the man who searched this apartment. It was not the vandal she must understand. It was Jane Cardiff.

“I’ll send men to pick the place apart. It’ll take a few hours.”

But she did not want to wait for that. Neither did Hawker.

“She is no sweet squire’s daughter to trust a secret drawer in her desk.” She had picked up the poor, sad obscenity of the broken shepherdess. The lingering of malevolence disturbed her more than she had realized. “The man who did this was one of her lovers. He comes to her apartment and searches it as such a man would.”

She had Hawker’s attention. “Tell me.”

“He gives his time to the places he knows. His world. The salon, where she entertained him. This bedroom, where she practiced her art upon him. These are important to him, so he thinks they are important to her.”

“What he searches, he destroys.”

“Her clothes, this pretty dressing table, the sofa in the salon. This vulgar object.” She set the little shepherdess upon the desk. “He crushes all the trappings of a harlot. And he takes his jewelry back.”

Hawker pulled at his bottom lip, thumb and forefinger. “Searches the familiar territory. His territory. What he feels like he owns.”