The Black Hawk

Twenty-five

THOMPSON WAS WELL OVER SIX FEET TALL AND WORE the intensely black skin and long, sharp features of East Africa. He dressed plain as a Quaker, in black, his shirt and cravat startlingly white. His face stayed impassive, but his eyes snapped to alert. He called, without turning, “Mr. Chetri.”

Someone moved in the room in back. A chair scraped. Footsteps padded softly. The other clerk came in from the back, polite and attentive. His eyes fixed on Adrian and narrowed.

This was Chetri, no other name known for him. Like Thompson, Chetri had worked for the French in the East and around the Mediterranean. He was north Indian, gray-haired, fine-featured, square in body, quick of movement.

For a long moment both men found Adrian Hawkhurst absorbing. Two critical examinations plucked over him, head to foot. Assessing.

He’d seen these two any number of times from a distance. Studied them through the window glass. Quite the little nest of retired French agents here on Exeter Street.

“Something has happened to Mademoiselle Justine.” Thompson spoke fluent English, with the cadence of the African language of his birth underneath and a French accent overlying it all. “Tell us.”

Behind him, Pax threw the bolt on the front door and turned the sign to Closed. He could be heard, walking down the shop, pulling the shades down over the windows.

Chetri came to the counter and held the edge, tight fingered. “You have news of Mademoiselle?”

Thompson said, “There has been no message. I opened the shop myself, yesterday and today. This has never occurred.”

“Always, she sends word if she will be away.”

Time to say it. “She was hurt, but she’s alive. She was in an accident.” He watched the faces, eyes, hands, the muscles around the mouth, knowing Pax was doing the same, making the same assessments he was.

Shock. Worry. Their eyes turned to consult back and forth. Natural to do that. It rang true. He read relief in the way shoulder muscles relaxed and breath leaked out. In fingers loosening. They’d expected to hear Justine was dead.

An emphatic foreign phrase from Chetri. That was a string of syllables to save in mind and ask an expert about when he had a chance.

Thompson stepped closer. “How is she hurt? Where have they taken her?”

“She’s safe.”

“But she did not send for us.” Thompson said, “She is badly hurt, then.”

“Safe.” He could give that reassurance. “She’s out of danger. She’s asleep now, but she was awake and talking a little. We had the best surgeon in London working on her.”

Chetri pressed fingertips hard to the wood of the counter, making tense brown pyramids of his hands. Holding still. “She is at Meeks Street? It must be, or we would have news. I will close the shop at once and return with you. I will see her.”

Nobody was getting close to Justine. “Maybe in a few days.”

“I am not merely an employee of Mademoiselle. We are friends. My wife and daughter will be honored to care for her. They have some skill in nursing. I must—”

Thompson interrupted. “You won’t be allowed in. Look at him. He won’t let any of us near her. Not even Nalina.”

“Who knows a hundred herbs of healing. These British will kill Mademoiselle with their ignorance. I will go to her.”

“And be turned away. Why should they trust you? Or me? Or Nalina?”

“Pah.” Chetri shook his head impatiently. “We are hers. Does he think she is a fool to keep enemies this close?”

“He thinks no one can be trusted. Would you wish him to be gullible?” When Chetri said nothing, Thompson said, “If she cannot defend herself, he must.” He turned. “Ask your questions.”

Pax had been walking around the shop, poking into things, opening up the wooden medical boxes and peering in at the bottles and muslin bags inside. He looked over. “When did you last see her?”

Tuesday, it turned out. Mr. Chetri came from behind the counter to stand at the head of the long table and put his hand on the back of one of the wide wooden chairs. “Here,” he said. Mademoiselle had taken breakfast here that morning. A roll and coffee, as always, while they prepared the shop for opening.

Thompson said, “The bakery boy brings the newspaper as well as bread. I make coffee for her myself, in the manner of my homeland.”

“The coffee is not important.” Chetri made a chopping motion. “It was not yet seven. This is what happened. Mademoiselle tosses the newspaper down and leaves the shop, hurrying as if devils pursued her.” What devils, he could not say. One did not demand of Mademoiselle Justine where she is going or why.

She had returned three hours later. Perhaps four hours—before noon—and still hurrying.

It was raining heavily by that time and Mademoiselle was soaking wet. There was one client in the shop. The foolish young man from Oxford who wished to collect little bugs in the Hindu Kush. He would be shot by tribesmen almost at once, unfortunately. One preferred repeat customers. But Mademoiselle said nothing to him. She went upstairs—

“She took newspapers with her,” Thompson interrupted. “She took last week’s newspapers from the back room and carried them upstairs with her.”

“Why?” From Pax.

“She did not tell us.” Thompson was patient. “And we did not ask. Let me finish saying what I have to say.”

The right-hand wall of Justine’s shop was hung with lethal instrumentation, a collection of fifty or so. Spears for poking holes at some distance. Sabers for cutting from horseback. Knives for doing it close up. Bloodthirsty woman, Justine.

Pax picked down a kris knife to examine. Pretty, but impractical. “Go on.”

Chetri said, “In twenty minutes she descended to the shop. She was worried.”

“Not worried,” Thompson contradicted. “Angry. Very angry.”

A nod. “She cleaned and loaded her gun. The little Gribeauval she carries. She sat here,” Chetri patted the chair back, “and did so. She put her knife into the sheath inside her cloak, as if she would need to use it. She gave us no instruction, except to say we should close the shop.”

“I am ashamed,” Thompson said. “She loaded her gun, took a knife, and left in the rain. I did not offer her my escort. I knew she was going into danger, and I did not go with her.”

“She would have refused,” Chetri said. “You would only have annoyed her.”

“Yes. But I did not offer. I did not ask.”

Whatever ambush Justine walked into, she wouldn’t have dragged them in with her. “Did you know where she was going?”

The black man said nothing.

“We must show him,” Chetri said. Then, “This is the time. This is what she spoke of.”

Thompson did not hesitate or show uncertainty. He simply thought for a while before he spoke. “You are right.”

Abruptly he left. He strode toward the counter and around the end of it, to the door that led to the back. In his plain black suit, he walked as if he wore robes that spread out around him.

Chetri lowered his voice. “She was enraged when she walked into the shop yesterday. Furious. As soon as we were alone in the shop, she went to the shelves in the back room . . .”

Noiselessly, Thompson returned. He carried a plain wood case and laid it upon the table. “He is wondering why you babble secrets to him, Mr. Chetri.” He gave the other man no chance to reply. “We are not fools. We would not speak like this to anyone else.”

“We follow Mademoiselle’s orders.”

“Three years ago she told me—told Chetri as well—that if anything happened to her, we were to go to Number Seven in Meeks Street and seek out the dark-haired, dark-skinned son of a bitch who ran the place.”

“You forgive us,” Chetri said. “We only repeat what she said.”

“When she said, ‘dark-skinned,’ she looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Perhaps not so dark.’ She said, ‘He is called Black Hawk, but he moves like a cat.’ ”

Chetri spoke up. “I went—we both went—to spy upon the house in Meeks Street. To look at you. We had heard of you, of course, Sir Adrian.”

With a small click, Thompson turned the box. It was yew wood, without carving or inlay, thinner than a gun case, but with the same utilitarian design. “I was to give you this, if anything happened. She said I was to trust you.”

Thompson’s face had become grave, closed, and immovable as obsidian. He released the simple hook that clasped the lid. “That day, she opened this box. This is why she armed herself and went into the rain, to whatever fate awaited her there.”

The box was empty. The gray velvet lining showed three identical imprints where three knives had rested, parallel, point left. He didn’t have to pull his own knife to know it would fit right into place.

That was one mystery solved. Knives were sticking into Frenchmen across London. This is where they came from.

Somewhere, somehow, Justine had got hold of three of his knives.