Merovingen - Fever Season Part 18

CJ. Cfcmyh He thought that Rosenblum understood that. Il was worrisome that someone had been watching Rosenblum. But it was still possible that Rosenblum had run for home. Boregy had to have the papers. Boregy had to know what had happened. Boregy had to have the other gambling note, in case.

And have the papers yesterday, that was the d.a.m.nable problem. By now Anastasi Kalugin might well be moving to find out why Thomas Mondragon had betrayed him and to whom. Or moving, having decided in his own mind that Thomas Mondragon was about to betray him: Anastasi had everything to lose if Mondragon talked, and the Thomas Mondragons of the world were always replaceable.

"What d' they say?" Jones asked.

"You don't want to know. But I think they're real enough," Cough "That part doesn't matter. Boregy can still use them."

"Ye let me run *em t' Boregy. I c'n make it fine."

"No."

"Well, you ain't in no shape."

He ran a hand through his hair and let his head back on the pillows, trying to think.

"Look, I can do 'er. No problem."

"Jones, -I'm a day late. With men who get panicky when people don't keep their schedules. I don't want you out there alone. 1 don't want you in this apartment. G.o.d, I don't know where's safe. Look, I want you to go downstairs, get Tommy to run over to Grand, up to Boregy, get Boregy to send the launch down. I can take the papers over. In person."

"Ye think it ain't likely Anastasi heard about the fracas over on Archangel? Ain't heard how ser Constancy Rosenblum got kicked into the ca.n.a.l?"

"G.o.d." His head was throbbing. He noticed the pain finally. He was not thinking down all the tracks. He knew he was not. Focus kept coming and going.

"I figure," Jones said, "he knows d.a.m.n well you made pickup today, not yesterday."

"d.a.m.n noisy. Everything was d.a.m.n noisy."

"Well, that ain't bad."

"It ain't bad-except the papers haven't gotten to Boregy, FEVER SEASON (REPRISED).

183.

dammit, and by now Tatiana and losef and Magruder and Rosenblum and every other d.a.m.n interest in town know somebody just made a delivery here. Who was it?"

"Student name of Justus. Same that saved Denny's skin. Raj come back to him-"

He thought that was what he had heard from the hallway. Strangers in this thing gave him cold chills. He entertained the lightning-flicker of a suspicion that Raj was in deep trouble, the papers a ploy, the student a decoy, everything set up by their enemies. But there was the reality of the papers in his lap to tell him that somehow, someway, St. Murty had worked on their side.

Or a resourceful kid had handled himself like a professional in this, which was just about as likely as the Angel's personal intervention-handled himself like a professional until he had run into ambush and then found a way to leverage a perfect stranger into risking his neck. If the student had known.

But the student must have known-having fended the attack off Denny-that Raj was not in any ordinary kind of bind.

d.a.m.n, he distrusted charity. It all led in circles. It scared h.e.l.l out of him. But there were the papers. Which meant that every a.s.sa.s.sin of every faction in Merovingen might have marked the boys, the student-it was the one thing Raj might not have thought of. It was a shadow-war. And someone was always watching.

Watching-for something to leave again.

"Someone will come here," he said, "looking for these papers."

"Who?"

"Make a list. Half the d.a.m.n town's on it." He had a mental flash of the roof over on Hagen, the walks and bridges around Petrescu, as a battlefield of spies, littered with detritus, one faction and the other trying for position, and winced. Of himself outright throwing up the window and yelling at all and sundry that he was throwing them the d.a.m.n papers and they could swim for them. But he was wandering. His face 184.

CJ. Chenyh was hot again and his focus kept coming and going. This was the mind trying to think its way through a maze of cross and double cross. "If we just stay put, someone's going to come. If they try shooting their way in, that brings the blacklegs. . . ."

"Which is Tatiana's bully lads."

"d.a.m.n!" He shut his eyes and figured the best thing was to go down there, himself, be the target, take the hit. But that left Jones. Who knew too much for Anastasi to let her alone. And the boys. Everyone. It kept coming back to himself and Jones, making the run to Boregy. Best chance they had.

"Look, I c'n make it."

"Boregy won't like the racket. If you live to get there."

"I c'n do it," a higher voice said. Jones twisted around and he flattened his knees and looked in consternation at the urchin who put his head in the door-listening on hands and knees, he had been. Denny scrambled up and stood in plain view. "I c'n go right over the roofs."

"Out of the question," Mondragon said.

"Ain't no problem," Denny said, and fished in his back pocket. Pulled out a folding grapple and a wad of cord. "1 do 'er all oV time."

"Why, ye little thief!" Jones exclaimed. "That's a filch's line!"

Denny shuffled and put the evidence behind him with a little wince. "I ain't no filch, I'm a runner!"

"Come here," Mondragon said, folding up the papers. "Come here." As Denny hesitated. Denny came, with a wary look at Jones, still with the grapple behind him.

"As happens," Mondragon said, "a thief would be more useful.''

Denny winced and lifted a shoulder. "Well, if I was, I could do it, couldn't I, get right over to Boregy-"

"There's likely men on Hagen's roof."

"Yey. Blacklegs've laid traps too, but they ain't never caught us."

"You little sneak," Jones said. And: "I'll go with 'im."

Denny looked her up and down and sneered. "You're too big. You couldn't keep up. No way."

FEVER SEASON (REPRISED).

185.

"Denny," Mondragon said. "They'll shoot at you."

"They done that before too." Denny pointed straight up, looked toward the imagined roof. "Ye got a little tower up there. Got a lock-door. Tower down t' the other end. They got this beam ties Petrescu up with Vaitan, 'bout that crack on the north side-"

"You know it all the way to Boregy?"

"Sure." Denny gave his hair a toss, grinned as it fell back into his eyes. Mean-looking and impish as any cana!-brat. "What table ye want me t' !ay them papers on?"

"Listen. They're going to have Boregy watched."

"Boregy's got a lot of windows. Ye mind if I break one?"

"I don't mind."

Denny's eyes lit.

Vega Boregy lifted the teacup, perusing the market reports, meticulously penned by the House copyist, and sipped.

Something in Boregy exploded, with a racketing clank of ma.s.sive shards of gla.s.s. .h.i.tting the ground, that sound unduplicatable and unmistakable in timbre, which sent Vega Boregy's heart to a lurching double-beat, the teacup banging onto the table in a puddle, and the market reports sliding every which way as Boregy headed for the drawer and grabbed a pistol.

Retainers and poieboatmen and every member of the house who remembered the Sword attack up the watergate-stairs, that had rendered the elder Boregy an invalid and killed two of the Family and wounded a dozen of the staff-were headed toward the sound with guns and swords and knives and every other weapon at hand: when Vega Boregy came into the great dining room he had a naif dozen retainers in front of him and a dozen more behind- -to face black night and a free-blowing wind through the ruin of the great hall window, tall as three men. Shards of gla.s.s were everywhere, the whole central pane having come down and showered over the polished dining table, the chairs, the tesselated floor.

186.

C.J. Oterryk "Did they get in?" his chief of security yelled' "Search the halls! Fan out! Ware of gas!1'

But Vega Boregy crunched his way through the wreckage to the agent of the ruin, a single brick, a very substantial brick bound about with cord.

There was an envelope bound to it.

Addressed to him.

The awful part of it was, Denny mourned, that he could not see the end of the matter. He was busy running, among the chimneys and the flues and vents, down over the copper plates of the big gable, eeling his way over the lumpy ridge-cap, and down the other side, down the guttering to grab a tall chimney, swing round and over to White on the top of the covered bridge, flat as he could make himself, and s.h.i.+nnying along fast and light as one of Merovingen's mult.i.tudinous cats, far side of the slope, because if there were watchers who had seen that big window go, they were on White, and he was going right by them.

Just as slick as ever he had done it: he heard the uproar, heard the thief-bell tolling, the whole town in upset, and himself with a glorious view of the Signeury itself right across the Grand.

Alarm, alarm, alarm,'

The big Signeury bell took it up, thundering its moral outrage.

And Denny drank it all in with a thrill of absolute and pa.s.sionate delight.

Jones paced, paced the bedroom till she was aware she was doing it, back and forth so often her feet stopped being cold; and then forced herself to stand still, which felt stupid; and then to sit, which was d.a.m.ned near impossible, while Mondragon lay silent and followed her with his eyes, as if he would do much the same if he had the strength in him.

She imagined a sound in the all-too-silent apartment. She went upstairs again with the gun. She came down again and padded to the front and listened with her ear against the wall, FEVER SEASON (REPRISED).

187.

then went back and paced the bedroom again till she knew she was driving Mondragon mad. Then she just stood where she was and shoved her hands into her pockets and confined her pacing to smaller, rocking movements.

"Takes a while.1' she said.

But all the while she was thinking of that roof up there, and the way the kid had lit out the way Tom had told him, out that rooftop door fike a shot, with a tumbling roll right to the cover of the chimney; and she had not bothered to see anything else. She had shut that door and thrown the deadbolts and listened for a long time, hearing running then. Light and quick.

She had dived right down and closed the trap that was Mondragon's second line of defense, bolted it, and come on down the stairs.

To pace and fret.

But of a sudden a thief-bell rang out somewhere far away, nothing unusual in Merovingen. And hard on that, the deep voice of a different bell.

"The Signeury," she said, her heart leaping up. She exchanged a look with Mondragon, listening, listening, as the pealing went on.

"Could be," he said. Then she knew how afraid Mondragon had been, because there was so much and such desperate hope in his eyes as he looked toward that wall. Like he could see through it all the way to Boregy.

She came and sat down by him and held onto his hand.

"It isn't over yet."

No. A very young boy had to get away. Had to take a devious route all the way over to Ka.s.s, where Raj was; pick up his brother and get over the roof-ways to Moghi's, to the shed where a couple of boys with a purseful of money and Mondragon's note: ("This should pay for them. -M.") would find shelter not even blacklegs eould crack.

"Them out there," she said, with a jut of her jaw toward the ca.n.a.l, the general vicinity of Petrescu, where their enemies watched quietly, "I dunno if they're onto him, but they got to know something's happened up there."

188.

CJ. Oterryh "They'll know," Mondragon said. "They'll know real soon. Whatever's happened."

"They going to hit us?"

Mondragon shook his head slowly, against the pillows, his eyes wandering to the other, the front wall, as if his thoughts were down on the ca.n.a.l, out there on the roofs. "No. Whoever's out there, they're professionals. If they lose, they lose. Revenge costs too much-generally. No. We'll smile at each other-in Boregy's drawingroom. Or when we meet OR the walkways."

It was something like what he had said about Min and the Suleiman skip being down there on the ca.n.a.l: No. Too noisy. Too uncertain. You don't murder ca.n.a.lers wholesale in [his town. They don't need a quarrel with the Trade.

She had halfway understood that. Even if they were foreign. Mondragon had understood it right well.

But the business about drawingrooms baffled her.

Waiting did.

Mondragon held onto her hand, and squeezed it. While the Signeury bell fell quiet. "If Boregy gets the papers, they'll know, that's all. Publicity is what these people have to dread. It'll go all quiet again. Boregy will get the word to Anastasi. And Rosenblum. And Tatiana will regroup. That's the way it works. The boys hide out a day or two. Moghi won't let them out till it's safe. Then everything goes back to normal. If those papers got through. You aren't going out on the water tomorrow. Hear?"

"Huh," she said. "If that Denny got through, if he gets to Moghi's, I got somebody coming f get t' Del. Del's going to take my skip down to Moghi's. Moghi'll keep 'er at tie. Like we was in the Room. I set it up with Denny."

He looked a little surprised. "Good," he said.

And in due time, there was a to-do out on the ca.n.a.l, A thumping on the water-stairs then. And a voice singing: "There's a wheel that's moving fast through our time And we've seen the track it made. I believe you know where it has to go, And the way that the game is played. ..."

FEVER SEASON (REPRISED) * * *

189.

"He made it, he made it, he made it," Jones cried. And hugged Mondragon hard.

Three days on, Mondragon got out of a hired poleboat and rang the bell at Boregy. He was still short of breath, still p.r.o.ne to chili, and carried no sword, first because it was daytime m a high-cla.s.s neighborhood, and secondly because he reckoned he would be doing well just to walk. He had thought of taking the gun, highly illegal, but he had to surrender the cloak to Boregy servants, and Boregy was a nervous man. He went without, having told Jones to stay at Moghi's for the morning- ("Please, Jones. -Jones, shut up, don't fight me, just do this one thing for me. A few hours. Say I'm hiring you to sit, all right?") In fact it was Jones' fretting and pacing that stirred him out earlier than he might have tried it. Sitting still was eating her gut out; and he had come finally to the conclusion that there might indeed be protection in wailing tiil he was solidly on his feet before putting in an appearance at Boregy's, in the case there was trouble waiting; but there was more percentage in letting Boregy see that he had come there as soon as he could physically make it.

Jones was fretting to get back onto the ca.n.a.ls, there were two boys fretting in Moghi's shed, and if he was determined on one thing, it was that none of them were going to probe the way for him: if it was safe, he would find it out, he would feel out the temper of things uptown, and in the hightown, and if he was wrong in his estimation, Jones would take the boys and take the money he had left with her, everything he had, and get herself and them whatever safety his money could buy.

He hoped. G.o.d, she was stubborn. She had listened very quietly at the last, when he gave her the purse full of gold and forcibly wrapped her hand around it; and Jones listening quietly was either an uncommonly good sign or a very bad one.