The Black Hawk

“That would be salutary. But then, you would not hear my thoughts upon Monsieur Millian’s letter, would you?”

“We’ll talk about that. In a bit, we’ll talk about being lovers. You might,” he glanced up, “reconsider.”

“Do not delude yourself.” She did not trust the many resolves that lurked behind his bland placidity while he toyed with the apple tart. But he was no longer angry. “Meanwhile, there is a trivial little riddle before us that will change the course of the world for the next several centuries. Perhaps it deserves our attention when we are quite through with the matter of who shall sleep with whom?”

“Go ahead.” Hawker leaned back and folded his arms before him.

“‘La Dame est prête.’ The woman is ready. She is at the start of this, I think, whoever she is.”

“The most efficient of the lot, anyway. So we know one of them is a woman. A Frenchwoman.”

“It is not so uncommon for French conspirators to be women. We are a hardy breed in France. There is this also . . . Millian wrote those words with capitals—‘La Dame’—as if it were a title. That is the way he heard it, I think.”

Hawker’s hand stilled from the restless play he made, finger upon finger, tapping. “Yes. That makes sense.”

“It is an . . . an old-fashioned way to speak. A respectful way. One might say ‘La Dame’ of a very old woman. Or an aristo. It adds the flavor of disgruntled Royalists.”

“Or he didn’t hear ‘La Dame’ at all. He heard ‘La Place Vendôme’ or ‘the dome of St. Paul’s’ or some other fool thing.”

She opened a gesture around her coffee cup, agreeing. “It may be. Or this may be a code. Amateurs love their codes.”

“Oh yes. We have our own amateurs.”

“‘La Dame’ may be a box or a book or a fifty-year-old veteran of the Vendée. ‘Tours’ may be the steps of Notre Dame. ‘Le fou’ may be an army unit or gunpowder or a shipment of boots.”

“In which case we’ll never figure it out.” Hawker had become brisk and practical. “Let’s stick to possibilities. We got ‘The Lady.’” He dipped a finger in his glass and took a drop of water to draw a line on the tabletop. “We got ‘Tours.’ Something or someone in Tours.”

“I would hazard the British Service has sent men to Tours.”

“Don’t fish for information.” He drew another line. “Tours is a sleepy provincial town a hundred miles to the southwest. What’s happening in Tours?”

“I have no idea. It is a city that plays a very small part in the life of France. I do not think of Tours from one month to the next.”

“Napoleon’s not going there?”

“Not at all. I have inquired—not once, but from three sources within the Tuileries Palace. There is no journey to Tours.”

“So we think of places in Paris. La Tour du Temple. La Tour Saint-Jacques.”

“La Tour is simply ‘the tower.’ It could be the tower of any church in the city.”

“So we stack up another pile of nothing useful.” He wet his forefinger again and drew a third line. “‘Le fou.’ The madman. The fool.”

“Which is obvious. Only a mad fanatic would attempt this assassination. It tells us nothing. The supply of fanatics is inexhaustible.”

“And we come to the Englishman.”

“Of which there is also an endless supply. We have nothing.”

Under the canopy of linden trees in the great courtyard, women chattered like exotic monkeys. They pushed their chairs close together and leaned against each other and passed something back and forth to coo over it. Something small that glinted in the sun. She could not see exactly what it was—a jewel, a gilt box, a painted miniature, a bottle of perfume. One could buy anything in the shops of the arcade of the Palais Royale.

They were some years older than she was, entirely lighthearted and pleased with themselves. They made her feel centuries old.

Hawker had barely touched his apple tart. Delicately, she slid his plate to her side of the table and began to eat, using his fork. “I have questioned three senior officers of my service, also several operatives who feel the pulse of Paris in their blood. They know nothing. All morning I have rolled a madman, a lady, an Englishman, and the Palais Royale around in my mind like so many peppermint drops in a mouth. I am no wiser.”

“I spent the last three hours talking to Millian’s idiot friends at the British embassy. Nobody was with him. Nobody knows where he was when he overheard all that.”

“Gaming rooms, restaurants, shops. There is a whorehouse, also, though it calls itself a club. He might even have been here where we sit. The Café Foy is the veteran of many conspiracies.” She pointed with the fork to the arches of the colonnade. “See there? Desmoulins stood on that table and sent the mob marching on the Bastille. It was the first great strike of the Revolution. Men are impelled to rashness by the coffee of the Café Foy.”

“Might be. But I wouldn’t conspire here if a damn Englishman was sitting at the next table.”

“I would not also.”

“Cross off the cafés. You’d go someplace with men coming and going, crowded together, talking. The gaming rooms.”

But he spoke almost at random. The feral animal inside him looked out of his eyes. He reached out. “You have sugar. Here.” He touched the side of her mouth. When he took his fingers away, she saw the fine sparkle of sugar grains. He licked his fingers.

She knotted inside and scooped in a sudden breath. She . . . wanted. This will stop. When I accept that I cannot have him, this will stop.

He said, “It’s been a while since we sat and drank coffee.”

The Piazza San Marco of Venice. Carnevale. He had worn the costume of a corsair, his shirt open at the neck, a red sash at his waist, a small gold ring in his ear. The saber was quite genuine.

She was avoiding the corrupt and brutal police of the Austrians that night. England was the ally of the Austrians. But Hawker had taken her to the pensione on Via Ottaviano, saying, “The town’s overrun with French spies. You’re my spy. Let them find their own.”

For all of Carnevale they had strolled the city together, masked, and pretended they were not enemies. She’d kissed the pirate ring in his ear, tasting gold and the hint of blood. He’d pierced himself to wear it. He was always a man of precision in his disguises. The taste of Hawker was . . . She swallowed and remembered. The nights had been a rough insanity and the tenderness that follows madness.

Hawker watched her from the hot core of his eyes. “You’re distracting me.”

“We distract one another. This must stop. Talk to me about the Palais Royale. If it is our only clue—”

The waiter approached, bringing her a second cup of coffee, taking away the old, glancing into the bowl that held its small lumps of sugar. He came and took himself and his small round tray away, all in a single movement as expert as the transit of a hummingbird to and from a flower.

Hawker said, “I’ll come back tonight with some men. We’ll walk around, listening in the gaming hells. You do the same with those dozen people you got.” He pulled at his lower lip, something he did when he was thinking.

I know his lips. I know the taste and texture of them at every hour of the night. I have kissed his lips a thousand times.

Never again. Never. Never. Never. She made herself pour water from the carafe into her glass. Made herself drink. The fabric of her dress scraped her breasts when she breathed, she had become so sensitive.

Hawker’s hand slid across the table till it just touched her, the back of his hand to the back of hers. “I’m not pushing you, Owl. It’s your choice. Always been your choice.”

“But you will be persuasive.” At the core of her body, the memory of him inside her arose, sweet and tenacious.

“I am that.” He grinned. “We are about to be invaded by the English.”