Farnsworth nodded. "I-yes." He pocketed the tiny device hastily, then finished his beer. "Another pint?" he asked Jack. "In the interests of looking authentic…"
"By all means." Jack stood. "I'll just go to the bar."
"And I must make haste to the jakes," said Rudolf, nodding affably at Farnsworth. "We won't meet again, I trust. Remember: eight, then to Jack. He will give you a replacement. Good night." He took his hat and slipped away, leaving Farnsworth to sit alone, lonely and frightened until Jack returned with a fresh glass and a grin of conviviality, to chat about the dog racing and shore up his cover by helping him spend another evening drinking beer with his friend of convenience. Jack the Lad, Jack be Nimble, Jack the Leveler…
The man Farnsworth knew as Rudolf was in no particular hurry. First he took his ease in the toilet. It was a cold night for the time of year, and he was old enough to have learned what a chill could do to his bladder. As he buttoned his coat and shuffled out the back door, through the yard with the wooden casks stacked shoulder high, he stifled a rattling cough. Something was moving in his chest again, foreshadowing what fate held in store for him. "All the more reason to get this over with sooner rather than later, my son," he mumbled to himself as he unlocked the gate and slid unenthusiastically into the brick-walled alleyway.
The alley was heaped with trash and hemmed in by the tumbledown sheds at the back of the buildings that presented such a fine stone front to the highway. Rudolf picked his way past a rusting fire escape and leaned on a wooden doorway next to a patch of wall streaked with dank slime from a leaky down-pipe. The door opened silently. He ducked inside, then closed and bolted it. The darkness in the cellar was broken only by a faint skylight. Now moving faster, Rudolf crossed over to another door and rapped on it thrice. A second later the inner door opened. "Ah, it's you."
"It's me," Rudolf agreed. The sullen-faced man put away his pistol, looking relieved. "Coat," Rudolf snapped, shedding his outer garment. "Hat." The new garments were of much better cut than those that he'd removed, suitable for an operagoer of modest means-a ministry clerk, perhaps, or a legal secretary-and as he pulled them on "Rudolf" forced himself to straighten up, put a spring in his step and a spark in his eye. "Time to be off, I think. See you later."
He left by way of a staircase and a dim hallway, an electrical night-light guiding his footsteps. Finally, "Rudolf" let himself out through the front door, which was itself unlocked. The coat and hat he'd arrived in would be vanishing into the belly of the furnace that heated the law firm's offices by day. In a few minutes there'd be nothing to connect him to the man from the royal household other than a tenuous chain of hearsay-not that it would stop the Homeland Security Bureau's hounds, but with every broken link the chain would become harder to follow.
The main road out front was brightly lit by fizzing gas stands; cabs rumbled up and down it, boilers hissing as their drivers trawled for trade among the late-night crowds who dotted the sidewalk outside cafes and fashionable eating houses. The music hall along the street was emptying out, and knots of men and women stood around chattering raucously or singing the latest ditties from memory-with varying degrees of success, for the bars were awash with genever and scrumpy, and the entertainment was not noted for genteel restraint. Overhead, the neon lights blinked like the promise of a new century, bright blandishments of commerce and a ticker of news running around the outside of the theater's awning. "Rudolf" stepped off the curb, avoided a cab, and made his way across to the far side of the street. The rumble of an airship's engines echoed off the roadstone paving from overhead, a reminder of the royal presence a few miles away. "Rudolf" forced himself to focus as he walked purposefully along the sidewalk, avoiding the merrymakers and occasional vagrant. Dear friends, he thought; the faces of multitudes. He glanced around, a frisson of fear running up his spine. I hope we're in time.
Passing a penny to a red-cheeked lad yelling the lead from tomorrow's early edition, "Rudolf" took a copy of The Times and scanned the headlines as he walked. Nader Reasserts Afghan Claim. Nothing good could ever come from that part of the world, he reflected; especially Shah Nader's thirst for black gold he could sell to the king's navy via the oiling base at Jask. Saboteurs Apprehended in Breasil. All part and parcel of the big picture. Crown Prince James Visits Santa Cruz made it sound like a grand tour of the nation rather than a desperate hope that the Pacific warmth would do something to ease the child's ailment. "Rudolf" turned a corner into a narrower street. Prussian Ambassador Slights French Envoy at Gala Opening: now that didn't sound very clever, did it? As the joke put it, when the French diplomat said "Frog" the Germanys all croaked in chorus. Murdock Suit: Malcolm Denies Slur. All the best barristers arguing the big libel case on a pro bono basis-a faint smile came to the thin man's face as he read the leading paragraph, squinting under the thin glare of the lamps. Then he folded the paper beneath his arm, palming something between the pages, and strode on toward the intersection with New Street. The crowds were thicker here, and as he stepped onto the pavement at the far side a fellow ran straight into him.
"I say, sir, are you all right?" the man asked, dusting himself off. "You dropped your paper." He bent and handed a folded broadsheet to "Rudolf."
"If you'd been looking where you were going, I wouldn't have." "Rudolf" snorted, jammed the paper beneath his arm, and hurried off determinedly. Only when he'd passed the outrageously expensive plate glass windows of the Store Romanova did he slow, cough once or twice into his handkerchief, and verify with a sidelong glance that the paper clenched in his left hand was a copy of The Clarion.
Queen's Counselor Denies Everything, Threatens Libel Suit! screamed the headline. "Rudolf" smiled to himself. And so he should, he thought, and so he should. If Farnsworth said there was no substance to the rumors then he was almost certainly telling the truth-not that his loyalty was above and beyond question, for nobody was beyond question, but his dislike for her majesty was such that if there had been any substance to the rumors, the dispatches he sent via Jack would almost certainly have confirmed them. "Rudolf" took a deep, slow, breath, trying not to irritate his chest, and forced himself to relax, slowing to an old man's ambling pace. Every second that passed now meant that the incriminating letter was that much further from its origin and that much closer to the intelligence cell that would analyze it before making their conclusions known to the Continental Congress.
At the corner with Bread Street, "Rudolf" paused beside the tram stop for a minute, then waved down a cab. "Hogarth Villas," he said tersely. "On Stepford High Street."
"Sure, and it's a fine night fir it, sor." The cabbie grinned broadly in his mirror as he bled steam into the cylinder and accelerated away from the roadside. His passenger nodded, thoughtfully, but made no attempt to reply.
Hogarth Villas was a broad-fronted stretch of town houses, fronted with iron rails and a gaudy display of lanterns. It stretched for half a block along the high street, between shuttered shop fronts that slept while the villas' residents worked (and vice versa). One of the larger and better-known licensed brothels at the south end of Manhattan island, it was anything but quiet at this time of night. "Rudolf" paid off the cabbie with a generous tip, then approached the open vestibule and the two sturdy gentlemen who stood to either side of the glass inner door. "Name's Rudolf," he said quietly. "Ma'am Bishop is expecting me."
"Aye, sir, if you'd just step this way, please." The shorter of the two, built like a battleship and with a face bearing the unmistakable spoor of smallpox, opened the door for him and stepped inside. The carpet was red, the lights electric-bright, shining from the gilt-framed mirrors. In the next room, someone was playing a saucy nautical air on the piano; girlish voices chattered and laughed with the gruff undertone of the clientele. This was by no means a lower-class dive. The doorman led "Rudolf" along the hallway then through a side door into understairs quarters, where the carpet was replaced with bare teak floorboards and the expensive silk wallpaper with simple sky-blue paint. The building creaked and chattered around them, sounds of partying and other sport carrying through the lath and plaster. They climbed a narrow spiral staircase before arriving on a landing fronted by three doors. The bouncer rapped on one of them. "Here's where I leave you," he said, as it began to swing open, and he headed back toward the front of the building.