“Yes. And I like to be able to spend the money I get for it, too. Besides,” he said, flicking at the paper, “this is substandard workmanship. I wouldn’t turn out something this poorly done, no matter whether my life were on the line or no.”
I thought back to what Josef had said about the letter. “The flaws were minor at best,” I said, “and damn hard to find.”
“But you found them,” said Baldezar. “A good forgery should be able to withstand an amateur’s scrutiny. This did not.” He pointed at various spots on the page. “Improper forms here, here, and here. Inconsistent pen strokes on the third and fifth lines. And at least two scraped and redone stylistic errors I can see at a glance. This is beginner’s work. Forging is as much art as it is duplication; whoever did this was a copyist, not an artist.”
“Whoever it was had access to Baroness Sephada’s letters,” I pointed out. “And he knew about our business arrangement. That still points to you.”
Baldezar nodded. “Yes, and that’s what troubles me. It means someone either gained access to my office, or someone in my shop is involved. Either way, I’m not pleased. But I have no reason to want you dead.”
Baldezar studied the letter again, then held it out to me. “I’ve explained to you why I wouldn’t have done this, Drothe, but I can’t prove it to you. It’s a forgery, and that’s what I do. But I’m an excellent forger, and this isn’t an excellent forgery.”
If it had been anyone besides Baldezar, I would have laughed in his face at that explanation. But it was Baldezar, and I had been dealing with him long enough to know he was right; he couldn’t put out a bad document even if he wanted to. His ego wouldn’t allow it.
I took the letter from his hands and leaned in close. “All right,” I said. “Even if you didn’t do it, I’m thinking the information about the baroness and me came from here. Find out how they got it and who they are, or I might be less ‘pragmatic’ my next visit.”
“Not to worry,” said Baldezar. “We’re both victims in this. I want whoever did this as much as you do.”
I grinned darkly. “I doubt that very much, Jarkman. Very much, indeed.”
The sun was a good two hand spans above the horizon when I finally made it home and crawled into bed. Ideally, I could have used ten hours or so of sleep, but my brain was having none of it. Dreams of fighting, falling, sewers, and giant pen-wielding Angels filled my head. By midafternoon, I decided to cut my losses and crawl back out into the day.
I had a quick bite at Prospo’s, checked for messages with three of my usual drops, and began working the streets. Not surprisingly, half of the rumors I gathered in the first two hours dealt with me-or, more specifically, with Tamas’s attempt on me, and what it had meant. When you have a running fight in your own front yard, the locals are going to notice. Little of what I heard was accurate, some was downright wrong, and a few people even seemed surprised to see me alive.
I wrote that last reaction off to overblown accounts of the fight-until I ran into Betriz. Like me, Betriz was a Nose, Wide to my Narrow, and like most Noses, she told me something I didn’t want to hear.
“Street says you’re holding out on Nicco.” She said it matter-of-factly as she popped an olive into her mouth. She had six more on the tips of her fingers-the easiest way to carry the snack she had purchased moments before.
“What?” I said. “Holding out how?”
Betriz was a long, lean woman, with deep brown eyes and the knowing smile of a Nose. She swallowed her olive and showed me that smile now.
“Whispers are you found a Snilch in Nicco’s house and haven’t told him,” she said, licking the brine from her lips. “That true?”
I stared at her, my face impassive even as my mind raced. The Snilch rumor was supposed to be soft, dying-not making the circuit with other information brokers. I’d had Mendross put out the word to kill it. What in the hell was Betriz doing with it?
“You’re a fool,” she said, reading my silence. “You, of all people, should know better than to hold out on Nicco, Drothe.”
“I’m not…” I began, then stopped. I took a deep breath and started over. “I’m doing my damn job, which you, of all people, should understand: I’m separating the bull from the shit. I’m keeping Nicco from tearing his own organization apart to look for something that isn’t there. There’s nothing solid on this. The last thing I need is for him to start swinging ham-handedly at anything that catches his suspicion.”
Betriz arched a sun-faded eyebrow. “The last thing you need?”
“Me, the organization, everyone.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound completely convinced.
“Where’d you hear this?” I said.
“Oh, you know…” Betriz gestured vaguely with an olive-tipped finger. “Around.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “How much?”
Betriz beamed down at me. “That’s what I love about you, Drothe-you know how to cut through the bullshit.”
I paid Betriz, got a handful of names, and spent the rest of the afternoon tracking rumors. Fortunately, there weren’t a lot to find. The rumor about me and Nicco was young yet, and the one on the Snilch still fairly mild. I talked to some people, paid off some others, and put the lean on a couple more. It wouldn’t solve anything permanently, I knew, but it might give me some working room.
If I wanted to fight these rumors-if I wanted to keep Nicco from digging into his own organization, not to mention holding my feet to the fire for not telling him about the whispers-I needed to come to him with something bigger, something better. I needed to be able to stand in front of him with names and answers and maybe even a body or two, so that I could tell him that instead of chasing after rumors, I had spent my time getting results.
Success was my best argument now, but to get that success, I needed to go to back into Ten Ways.
Word of my previous visit to Ten Ways had already gotten around. The locals had tagged me as Nicco’s man, and some even blamed me for Fedim’s death. The irony of the latter was not lost on me.
Few of the local Kin had any interest in talking to me. Being Nicco’s Nose was almost the same as being Nicco himself in that cordon, and most Tenners would rather be gut-stabbed than help a foreign boss.
Still, hawks have a way of starting conversations. And, as it turned out, so did mentioning Rambles’s name.
Rambles, it seemed, had been stepping on more toes than anyone could count. According to the street, he’d come in, set up shop, and begun acting as if Nicco’s tenuous holdings were a bastion of criminal strength. Sure, he needed to throw some weight around and reestablish Nicco’s presence in the cordon, but that didn’t mean he could roll over the native talent, push out local operators, and call the neighboring gangs to heel like a pack of misbehaving dogs. Nicco-and by extension, Rambles-didn’t have the clout to pull off something like that in Ten Ways.
I needed to talk to Rambles to see what the hell was going on. Nicco hadn’t wanted me to pay a call on him, but, if Rambles was going to make my job harder, I wanted to know why he was doing it in such a damn efficient manner.
Rambles’s people, it turned out, were depressingly easy to find, and his base of operation not much harder. He had established himself in the back of a gaming den, one floor above a milliner’s shop. The gambling room wasn’t so much a cover as a source of income, I gathered, given the ready action in the place. I passed among the tables to the back of the room, where a big Cutter was busy making the door he guarded look small.
“Rambles in?” I asked as I came up. My hand went out for the handle, was engulfed by a slab of meat with fingers before it reached it.
“He’s out.”
I looked meaningfully at the light showing beneath the door. As I watched, a shadow passed across the sliver of illumination from the other side.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I gave my hand a slight tug, but it stayed where it was. “Well, in case he isn’t, you may want to tell him Drothe is here. He’ll be in for me.”