“He could use MacIntosh. Or Ambleside. Dalrymple. Higgins. Widding-Smythe.” Hawker set the tray in the space cleared on the desk. “Or Jones. There’s something reassuring about a Jones.” He lifted the lid off the pot and looked in.
“Or he could stop trying my patience.” Galba found an empty folder in a pile behind him. “You are not the first man to take a nom d’espion as his own. You have been Thomas Paxton all your adult life. Continue. I have better things to do than cater to your sudden qualms of conscience.” Galba dropped the folder on his desk. “As you seem to have been working for the British Service for the last ten years, you are still my agent and under my orders. You will therefore sit down.”
The moment stunned him. Tore all his words away. Left him unable to think. He sat abruptly in the straight-backed chair beside the desk.
Hawker put a cup of tea on the desk in front of him. “Drink this, since I went to the trouble of carrying it in. Not my job, I will just mention.”
The tea was warm, full of milk, and sugared till it was syrup. He took a sip, then drank the rest in one long swallow.
“For the moment, Adrian, your job is to be silent. Now . . .” Galba set his hands together. “Mr. Paxton, you do not fail in your assessment of the important. Tell me what we’ve been chasing across London.”
He was tired so it came out simple and blunt. “The Merchant is alive.”
Nineteen
A man who looks only at his goal is blind in one eye.
Galba picked up the teapot and weighed it in his hand. “Do you want the last of this?”
“None for me. I’m sloshing with tea.”
“Something stronger?” Galba tipped the teapot toward the bottle of twenty-year-old brandy that inserted itself into a row of books. A general in Napoleon’s army repaid an old debt by keeping Galba supplied.
“I wouldn’t do it justice. I’m tired and I’m headed home to Maggie.” A warm thought on a cold night. Doyle folded his hands across his waistcoat and leaned back, savoring it. “There’s a couple hours of night left. I’ll pluck my wife out of bed and we’ll watch the sun come up.”
“I envy you, Will. You spend too much time away from home. Go to her.” Galba gathered papers together—Pax’s confession, Carruthers’s letter, Pax’s service record, the coded note that had set everything off, still undecoded—and slid them into a file with a red stripe on the lip. “This mess will still be here in the morning.”
“I’ll put people on the street in Soho as soon as Pax makes us some sketches.” Doyle scratched the fake scar that ran the length of his cheek. It didn’t come off in the rain, but it itched. “I’ll pull in everybody who’s worked Paris. If the Merchant is using any of his old crew, one of our men might spot them.”
“Keep Paxton away. If he knows the Merchant, the Merchant knows him.” Galba frowned at the chair Pax had been sitting in. “I applaud Mr. Paxton’s attention to detail, but he’s left his blood in my office.”
“And most likely a trail of it down the hall. Any slice he cuts in himself is going to bleed for a while. He has a genius for authenticity.”
“One of many reasons he is supremely useful to the Service. I will not lose Paxton as an agent because he was a French agent first.” Galba sat scowling a moment longer. Abruptly he slapped his hands flat on the desk, scraped the carved oak chair back, and levered himself up. “This is a damnable business.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more.”
“He allowed a Caché to walk out of a trap he set for her.”
“Using some considerable ingenuity to do it.” Doyle stretched his legs out comfortably. “I’ll just mention that I’m the one who let her wriggle out of the bookshop tonight.”
“I realize that.”
“I backed Pax’s instincts.”
“Those instincts have him lying to us about that woman.” Galba swept the Paxton file into the top drawer of the desk and locked it with a key from the ring in his pocket.
“An exercise in futility, locking things in this house,” Doyle said.
“Adrian stays out of my office. We have an agreement, which he has not yet breached.” When Galba crossed the room to open the door to his office, no one lurked in the hall.
“Hawker’s upstairs, getting Pax bandaged.” Doyle pushed himself to his feet and followed Galba into the hall.
“I don’t have agents. I have a menagerie.” Galba took the lantern from the table outside his office, frowning at Pax’s gun and knives, still piled there. “A French menagerie.”
“Technically, Pax is Danish. Hawker’s Cockney to his fiendish core, so that’s one Englishman. Fletcher claims to be the descendant of Cornish kings. Ladislaus—”
“They planted a spy on me, Will, and I didn’t see it.”
“I had him underfoot for years and didn’t catch it. Makes me look a right fool. If I had any particular faith in my own judgment, Pax would have pulled the bung on it tonight.”
Side by side, down the hallway, they passed old maps on the walls and the bureau at the front that held the gloves and hats of everybody currently sleeping in Meeks Street.
Doyle began to pick his scar off. It left a thin, shiny line where the glue had held it. “I sent him on missions when he was sixteen. Dogged, cold as ice, ingenious, utterly fearless. I could walk off and worry about something else, knowing he was on the job. The perfect agent.”
“We have arrived at the end of that fiction,” Galba said testily. He took the stairs upward.
Doyle followed. “I should have asked myself why that boy came to us knowing how to kill. That’s not what James Paxton would teach his son.” The false scar came off as a thin skin, pale and stretchy. He rolled it between his fingers, making tacky little balls he dropped into the pocket of his coat.
Removing the scar was getting out of disguise. For him it was becoming the man who’d go home to Maggie and the kids.
The second-floor hallway was cool silence with a single candle left burning in a glass chimney at the end. One bedroom showed a bright strip under the shut door and there were low voices inside. No words leaked through, but the tones were clear. Hawker exasperated. Pax determined.
Galba didn’t pause there. He waited till he was halfway up the next flight of stairs to say, “Paxton knows where the Caché woman is, or how to find her. He knows more about the Merchant than he’s saying.”
“We’re all of us founts of mystery and intrigue when you delve deep enough.” The last of the scar was off his face. Doyle rubbed the rough place it left behind. “One of the things he’s not saying is that he plans to kill the man. When Pax was hurt, he sent Hawk to kill the Merchant. Not follow or capture. Kill.”
“It is not his decision to make. I’ll give orders tomorrow.”
“You’ll give orders. Well, that’s the problem solved, then.”
The third-floor hall was another dim, silent corridor, this one hung with lithographs from a manual on the art of the duello. Swordsmen saluted, lunged, parried, riposted. Agents on long-term assignment to London slept here. They were asleep now, or at least staying quiet as men walked past.
The door to the attic was halfway down the hall. Galba pulled up the simple latch and the attic stairs were revealed, steep, narrow, and utterly black. A draft of chilly air hit their faces.
“Either Pax is a Service agent taking my orders or he doesn’t belong under this roof.” Galba lifted the lantern as he climbed. “I have uses for the Merchant alive. Alive, I can question him. I can trade him to the Austrians. I can give him to Military Intelligence and buy future cooperation. Dead, he’s just an embarrassing corpse. I will not have an agent who kills without orders. That is intolerable.”
“He hasn’t done it yet.” Doyle waited till they reached the top of the stairs, beyond range of anyone’s ears, to say the rest. “We didn’t do well by the boy, putting him to the work we did.”