The Dark Volume

matches. He lit one and offered it to her, nodding to his own case, still in her hand.

“May I?”

“It is very lovely,” she remarked. “I suppose the laws of salvage compel me to return it.”

She held it out and his fingers just barely grazed hers—cool, soft—as he took it.

“As if you were one for laws.”

The Contessa blew a plume of smoke toward the guttering fire.

“These are quite raw,” she said. “Where do you get them?”

“Purchased from a fisherman,” replied the Doctor. “Danish.”

“In the city, you were smoking something else. They were black.”

“Russian,” said Svenson. “I buy them from an agent in Riga. I used to call on him when my ship stopped in port. Being no longer with a ship, I order them over land.”

“I'm sure you could acquire them nearer.”

“But not from him. Herr Karoschka—one so rarely finds a decent man of business.”

“Rubbish.” The Contessa tapped her ash toward the fire. “The world is ankle-deep with decent men of business—it is exactly why so many are so poor. Their delusion is merely the ordure in which more hardy crops thrive.”

Svenson nodded in the direction of the barge-master's body. “Are you always so merry after killing a man?”

“I am this merry when I have survived. Will we speak like reasonable people or not? The food is wholesome, the bottle contains—it is the country, one condescends—a clean-tasting cider, and if you put more wood on the fire like a kindly person, it might well revive.”

“Madame—”

“Doctor Svenson, please. Your querulous niceties only make it more awkward to speak freely, as we must. Unless you have decided to dash out my brains after all.”

Her tone was arch and impatient, but Svenson could see the fatigue in her face—and it surprised him. The Contessa's normal temperament was so fully armored—he naturally thought of her as a seductress or a killer, but never anything so fragile as a woman. Yet here the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza had been reduced to cutting a man's throat for his dinner and a meager fire.

“Where is Eloise Dujong?” he asked, his voice even.

The Contessa burst out laughing. “Who?”

“You were with her, madame. In her uncle's cottage—you arranged—”

“Arranged what? And when?”

“Do not hope to lie to me! You saw her—”

The Contessa choked gleefully on her cigarette.

“Madame! She directed you to Parchfeldt Park.”

“We did not meet at all. I saw her in Karthe, I admit it—a slag-heap I have scrubbed from my memory—but she did not see me. She was skulking after some man.”

“She was attacked by Francis Xonck.”

“I don't suppose it was fatal?”

“He mistook her for you.”

The Contessa shrugged as if to say this meant nothing, but then met the Doctor's cold gaze. Her smile faded away. “And so Francis followed on the train—not reaching the freight car before I was gone. It was you that prevented him from doing so, wasn't it? That gunshot.”

Doctor Svenson was silent. The Contessa exhaled again, wearily.

“Being obliged in any way is hateful. Very well. I have not seen Eloise Dujong since the train yard at Karthe. Miss Temple traveled with me. I left her quite alive, free to re-enter her cocoon of respectable hotels and tractable fiances. Now, will you please sit down?”

HE KNEW the Contessa to be the worst of women, and yet whenever she spoke, even if he knew it to be a honey spun of nightshade, it was as if her candor was meant for him alone. He stuffed the kindling into what remained of the embers. Could she truly not have been at the cottage? The Contessa uncorked the cider, took an unhurried pull, and held out the bottle. He felt the dizzy throb at the back of his skull and drank, reflexively wiping the bottle with his sleeve—at which the Contessa chuckled. She pushed across the barge-master's dinner: a half loaf of coarse brown bread; a block of cheese, its edges scumbled with mold; and perhaps six inches of blood sausage. The Contessa raised her eyebrows with a knowing expectation. He looked at the sausage, then met her eyes again and felt his face grow warm.

“You have the fellow's knife, I believe,” she said.

“Ah.”

Doctor Svenson cut sausage and cheese for them both and then returned the clasp knife to his pocket. The Contessa piled a slice of each onto a torn hank of bread and took a small, estimatory bite.

“A bit of mustard would do well.” She shrugged. “Or caviar on ice with vodka—but what can one do?”

They ate in silence—like Svenson, the Contessa was evidently starving. But it was enough to simply watch her chew, or her nimble fingers pluck together each mouthful, or the action of her swallowing throat—the display of the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza as a human machine. While this brought her status in his mind as an especially splendid creature somewhat down to earth, it also—combined with the lines lack of sleep and comfort had sketched around her eyes, the dull bloody color of her unpainted lips, and the untucked strands of black hair that fell about her face—made her seem so much more a palpable woman. He sawed apart the rest of the meat and cheese and smiled as she snatched the slices away as they appeared, marveling at how effortlessly companionable she had become. Doctor Svenson caught himself staring at her hands. The pain in his head had eased, he realized, only to be replaced by a growing, embarrassing ardor. He reached for the bottle and shifted what had grown to an uncomfortable position, drank, and groped to change the subject in his own internal conversation.

“WHAT DID you think of the glass card?” he asked. “It was taken from my pockets. Don't tell me you didn't look into it.”

“Why should I tell you that?” She reached for the bottle, drank, and set it down. “I think she does her best to warn you.”

“Why?”

“Because she is an idiot.”

“You mean she wants to save my life.”

The Contessa shrugged. “If she cared for you truly, if she had a scruple of genuine sympathy for your soul, she would have instead provided you with the experience of Arthur Trapping having his beastly way with her on the floor of his children's schoolroom. You would have felt their pleasure—it would have aroused you, but sickened you even more. No doubt your skin crawls to think of it, of them, those little chairs, the room smelling first of notebooks and chalk, but then more pungent, the air thick with her—the barnyard grunting, the secretions—my goodness, you must know each by its Latin name!”

She stopped at once, her eyes innocently round. “If Mrs. Dujong cared for you, she would have done her level best to drive you away by whatever means might be at hand. She has instead attempted to explain… and thus sent along your own death warrant.”

“Do you think so?”

“Listen to yourself defend her! The only question is whether she did so knowingly or is stupid. In either case, again—really, Doctor—pah!”

SVENSON HAD no answer. The blue card had been placed in his pocket by Eloise… but what justification could it possibly offer? How other to read the attack in her uncle's cottage save as the tipping point where she had been forced to reveal her true allegiance? But why should he trust the Contessa? He glanced once more toward the shadows where the barge-master's cooling body lay hidden.

“Is it likely we will receive visitors from the large building down the road?”

“That depends on whether the fellow whose dinner we eat was merely a guard to mind the barge or someone with a task, the non-doing of which will draw notice.” She reached for a last slice of cheese. “One reason to maintain the fire of course is to maintain the illusion of his continued presence.”