The Black Hawk

Thirty-one

HAWKER CROSSED THE CAFÉ, KEEPING HIMSELF BETWEEN Pax and the front door. One thing he didn’t need was Pax escaping into Paris before they had a chance to sort this out.

Pax sat like a man kicked in the belly—that first instant when you’re stunned, hot and cold, and you stop still because the next breath is going to let the pain loose.

He came up to the table, picking the spot behind Pax and to his left. The weakest point. It was where you stood to defend a friend or watch an enemy.

The bloke Pax was playing with had been annoyed when he was losing. Now he was annoyed Pax had given him the game. He was prepared to argue about it, point by point.

You can’t please some people. Waste of time trying. “You. Leave. They’re closing in a minute.”

That didn’t cut off the comments. Seemed like conceding was an insult to both players and a lack of respect for the game. Some Spanish fellow had played for three days straight because he wouldn’t concede. Some Frenchman had played even longer. Some Russian . . . It could only go downhill from here.

He shifted to a rougher accent, a street argot from the east of Paris. “You shut your trap and scuttle out of here. You’re annoying me.”

There is no substitute for frank discourse. The old man stopped huffing about the honorable history of chess and took himself off.

Pax raised both hands to the table and pressed them down, fingers spread, showing he wasn’t reaching for his knife. The world had twisted into a shape where Pax had to convince him of that.

There wasn’t going to be a fight. He kept an eye on Pax’s shoulders, on muscles up and down the neck, on the tendons of his hand, but it was just training and habit. Pax wouldn’t go for him. And he wouldn’t give any warning if he did. “We have to talk. There’s a storeroom behind the counter.”

“Quiet spot.” Pax said it as if they’d planned this, working together. “That’s good.”

“After you.”

He’d seen Pax backed to a wall, fighting like a maniac. Seen him staggering, with his eyes swelled shut, peering through blood, crawling out of that ditch in Cassano behind the battle lines. Seen him silly drunk. He’d never seen him with his eyes completely empty.

The café was full of men collecting coats and hats, taking newspapers back to the counter to drop in the pile, making note of where the pieces lay on the board, finishing the last of their brandy in a couple swallows. Pax wove through like they were made of straw. The Caché who’d given him away was talking to Justine. Pax passed him without a glance.

The room behind the counter was the usual cubbyhole—storeroom and kitchen, a little hearth, a table, some rough benches. The walls were lined with shelves holding cups, plates, glasses turned upside down, wine bottles lying sideways, and piles of napkins, ironed and stacked neat. A broom kept company with a bucket. The copper water cistern was behind the door.

Pax walked in and stopped, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t turn around. Maybe he was counting towels. Maybe he was waiting to get executed, abrupt-like. Pax could be a damned dramatic son of a bitch. Should have been on stage.

What do I say? What can I possibly say? “I never understood the business about not stabbing a man in the back. It’s safer, for one thing. And if I have to kill somebody, I’d just as soon not watch his face.”

“You’re a sensitive soul,” Pax said.

He came up to stand beside Pax and stare at the inventory of the Café de la Régence. “I’m not sure what comes next. I think I ask questions and you lie. At some point, one of us hurts the other. Matters deteriorate from there.”

“Let’s skip that part.”

“That’s my preference. But damned if I know what I’m supposed to do.”

“You’ve caught French agents before.”

It was a stab of shock, hearing Pax call himself a Frenchman. Ten minutes ago, they’d been on the same side. Two minutes ago, they hadn’t said the words. Now they had. “You admit it?”

“That’s a cat that won’t stuff back in the bag.” Pax pulled his mind back from wherever he’d sent it and faced him, making the turn slowly, with his hands out from his sides to show a lack of weapons. Not that it mattered. Pax didn’t need weapons. “I was careless, eight years ago, letting you see the hand signal. I thought I’d kept it hidden.”

“That’d be one of your Caché secrets.”

“We had a few. I needed to use that one. Those kids were about to tear us to pieces.” Pax looked past him, keeping half an eye on the main room of the café, making sure they weren’t overheard. “They would have, you know, in another minute.”

“Bloodthirsty lot.”

“We weren’t nice children. That attic they were in . . . It was cold as a Norse hell in February. They gave us one blanket, summer and winter. We were soldiers of France, they said. Soldiers sleep on the ground in any weather.”

“I bet soldiers don’t like it, either.”

“We had to say we liked it. Had to say we wanted to give the day’s food to the army. They’d do that to us unexpectedly when we were hungriest. We never knew when.”

“That was a mistake on their part.”

“It made us good liars, if nothing else.”

“I’m trying to work this out. The timing. You would have been—”

“I was one of the first. When they brought me, the strongest kids were bullying the others, taking their food and their blanket. We made rules.” His lips twisted. It was almost amusement. “I made rules. It turned out, I was the strongest kid.”

“I know all about your rules. ‘Don’t wear green. Strike low and strike often. Never budge from a good lie.’”

“With them it was more like, ‘Elect a leader. Never betray another Caché. Protect each other. Take care of the little kids.’ ”

In the café, the noise was dying down. The woman who poured drinks and took money at the counter headed their way, got to the storeroom door, ready to stick her head in and say something. She met his eye and had second thoughts. Walked off without whatever she was looking for. Good decision on her part.

Pax went on talking, not making sudden moves, holding his hands still and open. “We named ourselves the Cachés. They started using it later, but it was us, first. They didn’t know what we were hiding from, was them.” He thought a while. “The ones who came after me kept the rules. In all the Cachés you uncovered, not one of them led you to another.”

“Not one.”

“When we walked into that attic that night, the kids had a leader, speaking for all of them. They kept the small ones in the back. They knew the hand signal. That was mine. I made that up.”

“It gave you away. They have some word . . . that Greek God of bad luck.”

“Nemesis.”

“That sounds like it. Who were you, before you went to the Coach House and took up being a Caché?”

Pax shook his head.

“Fair enough. It doesn’t matter.”

“Not anymore.”

“You’re not English. You’ve been a spy from the first day you limped into Meeks Street.”

“Yes.” He jerked his head to the side, abruptly. “No. I was—” He went silent.

Forty feet away, the door of the café banged closed behind some irritated customer. Glass rattled in the front windows. The noise scraped the lines of his nerves. Hell. This was hard. “You’re not the son of a British Service agent.”

“I’m not James Paxton’s son. I took that dead boy’s place. I took his name. Let me sit down.” He didn’t wait for a nod. He collapsed on the bench, putting his hands out in front of him, holding one inside the other. “I didn’t expect to get away with it for this long.”

“I have to tell Carruthers.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

“She’ll send men after you.”

Pax raised stillness to a fine art. Paint on the wall fidgeted, compared to him. “She’ll need to know how much I gave the French.”

“She’ll send them in twos and threes. You won’t be easy to take. Not alive. And you have to be alive to interrogate.”

It felt eerily familiar, laying the facts out. Predicting, discussing, getting the choices lined up.

“It’ll be an interesting little talk.” A muscle in Pax’s cheek tightened. A sign of cracks in the ice. “I count on Carruthers to finish up neatly. Don’t let her turn the work over to you. You deserve better than that.”

“I’m not her butcher.”

Pax waved for silence. “Both of you can leave it to the French. Justine DuMotier’s going to report this. The French execute turncoats.”

“You were about twelve, last time you were French.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have a day, after the French find out. Maybe less.”

In the main room, the lamps were getting blown, one by one, leaving the café darker every time. Murmurs, cautious and annoyed, said the owner and his wife were talking quietly between themselves and locking the windows up and down the front.

“They brought me to Russia, fast, by ship.” Pax took up a conversation they weren’t actually having. “When I was there, they did the rest. I didn’t see the fire.” He lost momentum, wiped his mouth, and started up again. “They made me go through the ashes and bury what was left. So I’d be convincing.” He ran his hand down his arm. “They burned me. For proof.”

He’d seen the scar Pax had snaking up his arm. Ugly and deep. “Authentic.”

“They were great ones for detail.” Pax sounded exhausted. Hoarse. “They told me to get myself to Meeks Street. ‘That way,’ they said, and pointed west.” He closed his hand on his arm, as if it still hurt. “It took me four months to walk across Europe. It’d started snowing by the time I got to England. Maybe the Coach House did make us tough.”

“Nobody trains agents like the French.”

“Nobody.” Pax took a couple of deep breaths. “Let me finish this. I was four months at Meeks Street when my directeur showed up. I’d done better than he hoped.”

“Your hand right in the candy box. He must have been pleased.”

“It’s not . . . Damn. It’s not a joke.” The table held a coffee grinder and a tray with a dozen cups waiting to be washed. Pax picked up dirty cups and began to lay them out in a row. “I gave him papers, Hawk. I followed orders. You have to know that. Three times, I gave him files I filched out of the cupboards in the basement. I picked old work. Dead operations. Agents who’d retired to some sheep farm in the Outer Hebrides.”

“You gave him garbage.”

“I was green as grass. I didn’t know what was important.” Pax began to stack dirty cups. “I’ll never know how much damage I did.”

Now that was vintage Pax, looking on the dark side, even if he had to run round the side and paint it black himself.

“I know what was stored down there. I burned it wholesale when they put me in charge of filing. How’d you kill him?”

Pax shrugged, all austere and disapproving. Did he think the whole damn story wasn’t obvious? “A dagger under the sternum, up to the heart. But I didn’t do it till the fourth meeting. None of this is going to make any difference to Carruthers.”

“No.” The seniors in the British Service were a scary lot. Carruthers more than most.

“Nobody showed up to replace him. A couple months went by and I was still waiting for the ax to fall. Robespierre died on the guillotine. The Coach House closed and the French wanted to pretend it never existed. You and Doyle went hunting Cachés up and down the length of England. But you didn’t look at me.”

“You were one of us.”

“By then, I was.” He kept stacking cups, one by one. “Somewhere along the line I turned into Thomas Paxton.”

“Who is in one hell of a mess.”

There wasn’t much more to say, so they sat there, not saying it.

Pax set the last cup in place. “It doesn’t get easier with waiting. If you’re going to kill me, you might as well do it here.”

“If I were going to kill you, I’d have done it ten minutes ago instead of listening to that whole maudlin story. ”

“I betrayed the Service from the first day I walked in the door.”

“You were a kid and it was a long time ago.”

“I’ve lied to everybody for years. I could have been a traitor all along. You’d never know.”

“Fine then. You’re so bloody traitorous, I’ll sharpen up a knife and you can do the deed yourself. That’s a private corner over there. Get on with it.”

There was enough light to see Pax’s lips twitch. “All right, then. How do I live through this?”

“That’s a topic of fruitful speculation. My advice is, run like a rabbit. Go to Germany. Maybe Norway. Settle down to a blameless life as a Latin tutor. Collect bugs. You’d enjoy that. I doubt we’ll bother to track you down in the frozen north.”

“And the French?”

“They don’t have to know, if your Caché mate keeps his mouth shut. I’ll convince Justine to stay quiet.”

That got a short laugh out of him. “Maybe you could at that. Let’s say I don’t want to teach Latin in the frozen north.”

“You can go to Carruthers and throw yourself on the thin and sticky gruel of her mercy. Or you can go to London, to Galba. At least he’ll listen to you before he slits your throat.” Nothing else to say. “I have money. And a couple watches. I spent the day picking pockets.”

“You’re a man of parts, Hawk.”

“My morality is complicated. Get out of Paris. The Americans tell me New York and Boston are cities of culture and opportunity. They’re probably lying through their teeth, but you could go take a look.”

“I might do that. I have to think about this.”

Too much damn thinking, that was Pax’s problem. “I can give you till dawn. Then I have to go to Carruthers.”