“I will not force my Sara—Cami, as I must call her—into anything distasteful to her. Not with the least feather of persuasion. But she seems fond of your agent Paxton. He spent last night in her bed.”
Doyle didn’t say anything.
Bernardo made himself comfortable in the chair he had taken. “Tell me about Thomas Paxton.”
Forty-four
Do not have a good escape plan. Have three.
Quiet, ordinary Semple Street sat complacently in the morning light and provided no clue as to why the Merchant had chosen it for their meeting.
Pax wore a gaudy brocaded waistcoat and a jacket of exactly the wrong shade of blue. Uberto Baldoni had unearthed this outfit from some vast Baldoni clothing hell. The jacket didn’t match the buff trousers, which didn’t match the boots. The hat had ugly proportions. Everything was too shiny, too new, too bright, and of the shoddiest construction—the visual equivalent of chalk shrieking on a slate.
He caressed the wide lapel of his jacket as if he considered it a thing of beauty. In a way, it was. This was the perfect disguise. He was invisible because he was so apparent. Men tracking the Merchant didn’t strut the streets in strident, flamboyant blue.
His hair was dull brown. He hadn’t shaved that morning. He swaggered along with a bold, searching eye, looking like somebody who’d steal washing off a line.
Cami strolled at his side. The Baldoni had decked her out in a blond wig, flowered hat, and fussy yellow dress that made her stand out from the sober matrons of Semple Street like a canary in a flock of sparrows. She carried a yellow parasol. Her walk was a paean of availability. The tilt of her head, nicely vulgar. A pretty little cake of a woman.
Of course, if you bit into her, you’d find steel underneath the icing.
“I’m not a vain man,” Pax said, “but I hate you to see me dressed like this.”
Her bonnet swung in his direction. She gave a broad and bawdy grin. “I like this Paxton. He looks disreputable.”
“I look like a pimp. Not my preferred disguise. Every eye on the street is on me.”
“There are many ways of hiding. If you look like a pimp, I look like a woman of pleasure. Not an expensive one. Do you think the Merchant set somebody to watch the street?”
“It’s not his way. Before he told you Semple Street was the meeting place, he’d cut all ties to it. He’s left nothing here that leads back to him.”
“Unless he’s set a trap for me.” Cami dawdled, entirely the woman of leisure. No one would see her studying from window to window, looking behind the glass for watchers. Looking in reflection after reflection for anyone following. “He knows I’ll come here. When I do, I’m easy to kill. Easy to capture. Why not grab me off the street today and torture the Mandarin Code from my flesh?”
“If he wants to capture you,” he said, “he won’t waste time watching Semple Street day and night. He’ll grab you tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning. He’ll have a couple of men with him when he picks you up.”
“Three men. You flatter me.”
“He underestimates women. I’d bring five well-trained minions and a supply of weapons.”
She peeked under the frilled edge of the yellow parasol and batted her eyes at him. “So many compliments.”
“You are in all ways admirable.”
They’d reached Number Fifty-six. She stopped and he made a pantomime of retying the ribbon of her bonnet. It gave her time to take in the street, up and down, from this point.
She said, “I’ll stand here to wait for him, tomorrow.” She chose a section of gray-brown pavement at her feet. “This spot.” Her eyes were dark and thoughtful, pupils dilated.
He didn’t look down. It was too easy to imagine blood and Cami’s body curled on the ground and him too late to do anything but murder the bastard. “It’d be easier for me if I were the one walking out to meet him.”
It was his job to face the Merchant, not Cami’s. It had always been his job. Now it was his job to stand back and let her take the risk.
“Next time,” she said, “I’ll save the hard part for you.”
He smoothed the wide yellow ribbons of her bonnet and let go.
On both sides of the street, windows and doors gleamed under the bright sky. Cami considered them. “Before I became entangled with you, and thus with the British Service, I had envisioned a relatively simple exchange with a blackmailer, enlivened by a slight chance of dying.” She managed to make the parasol express irony. “Now I have the same chance of dying, but also the British Service. I’ll walk down this street under the gaze of five, six, seven British Service agents—however many of them. Their first objective will be to capture the Merchant. Then they’ll come after me.”
“I won’t let that happen. If I’m not here, Hawker won’t let that happen.”
“You mean, if you’re dead, putting it in frank and simple terms. If that happens, I won’t trouble Mr. Hawker, who will doubtless be busy. I’ll go—Look over there at the grocery. You’ve passed it, I imagine, on your tours of Semple Street. That’s my escape route”—she touched it with her attention, just a moment—“when I run from the Service. That track beside the grocery that looks like a delivery way to the yard in back. It goes to an alley that runs all the way to Tallison Road. It’s not shown on the ward maps.”
“I walked it last night before I came to see you.”
“I’m surprised you and Antonio didn’t run into each other. It’s a dim, grim alley, according to Antonio—high brick walls on both sides. We’ll block it just on general principles. Giomar and Alessandro will bring the pony cart in there just before dawn and overturn it and wait with a couple of guns each. It’s an escape for me and a trap for the Merchant, if he’s stupid enough to go that way.”
He pictured them. Boys really. “They’re young.”
“No younger than some of the men who followed you in Italy.” She grinned. “My family gossips. This morning they gossiped about Il Gatto Grigio and a third cousin of mine who went into the hills with him. He was fourteen.”
He wanted to tell her he hadn’t led boys that young. But he had. He’d used them as lookouts, scouts, messengers, information gatherers, guides. Some of them—men, boys, even women—the ones who’d come from the gutted, burned-out farmhouses they passed, walked right behind him up the mountain passes, to lay ambush.
She said, “Antonio wishes he’d been with you in the hills. He’s tired of playing the respectable banker while everybody else is roaming the Piedmont alps, shooting at the French.” Cami looked at him from under her hat. “I told him it probably wasn’t as much fun as he thought.”
“It wasn’t.”
She became more sober. “You don’t need to worry about Giomar and Alessandro. We’re an intensely traditional family. Baldoni children go out with the gold shipments when they’re thirteen. Those two have shot mountain bandits.”
“Then they’re old enough to defend an alley. I’ll talk to them this afternoon. Speaking of guns . . .” He twitched his hand, indicating a house in the row behind them. “I’ll put a sniper there. Second floor, third window from the right. Your cousin Antonio found the place for us.”
She examined the house and the window unobtrusively, taking it in, judging angles. “It’s odd, considering my many skills, that no one ever taught me to shoot a rifle.”
“I’ll teach you someday. I didn’t learn to do it right till they sent me to Italy.” Five years back, before he sailed for Genoa, Grey had taken him out to Doyle’s big house in the country. For a week they’d spent every daylight hour shooting rifles and every night drinking and talking with some of Grey’s old army friends about scouting and ambush.
Nine of his kills had been long-range shots with a Baker rifle. He said, “There’s a straight line from that window, down the whole length of the street, from corner to corner. If the Merchant gets that far, the sniper will stop him.”