“Out of my way.” Leblanc shoved her from behind. And she shot.
Hawker still held her eye. She saw the impact. Blood blossomed on his chest. The bullet hit him high, between heart and shoulder. Blood trickled down over the bright stripes of his waistcoat.
Hawker stayed, standing still, the space of an intake of breath. Shocked with getting hit. Shocked that it was her bullet going into him. Then he turned and ran.
She spun clumsily and managed to knock into Leblanc. Her pistol, empty now, knocked his arm aside.
“Stupid bitch.”
She snapped, “He’s hit. He can’t go far. Get the garde. Search the apartments upstairs. He’ll be hiding in one of them.”
She ran up the steps.
Hawker had left a trail of blood. He’d turned down this hall. One of the curtains was pulled back unevenly and the window was open.
Even Hawker with his legendary skill could not . . .
But there was blood on the stone outside. Had he managed to climb down? She searched the ground below, but he was not there. The men and women walking the Rue de Rivoli gave no sign a man had passed, dripping blood. Somehow, he had ambled away, blending into the crowd.
Hawker was alone in Paris, desperate and wounded.
He thought she had tried to kill him.
Forty
JUSTINE WAS DETERMINED TO ARISE AND COME TO breakfast. She was entirely weary of meeting men in bed when she was wearing no clothing.
She came downstairs, holding the rail. Séverine went before her, ready to throw her body down to cushion any fall. Surely no child wavering onto its feet for the first time was ever so closely watched.
The banyan robe she wore slithered under her feet when not persuaded otherwise. Silk brocade lipped about her bare legs, too heavy to cling. The crimson of it was a shout, a strident trumpet of a color. One could imagine confronting the emperor of China in such a garment. It was Hawker’s and smelled faintly of tobacco, sandalwood, and black powder.
At the bottom of the stairs, the carpet was chilly under the arch of her foot. Three doors were open into the hall and a light wind blew through. At the back of the house, men’s voices rumbled. She would head in that direction. If anyone was talking, it was probably Hawker.
Séverine said, “Catch your breath. Sit for a minute.” She gave other prudent advice.
“When I sit down, I will not want to stand up again. I am weak as pudding.” Ah, the beauty of great truths. They can be stated so concisely.
It was not so long a journey from the front of the house to the back. She set her right hand upon the wall from time to time and rested because there was no one to impress and she would need all her strength to deal with the men who awaited her at the end of the hall.
Séverine opened the door into a small, perfect dining room with Chinese wallpaper, graceful mahogany furniture, and quite a nice collection of English spies. A mound of untidy gray fur occupied a square of sunlight on the rug. This was the huge dog that visited her room several times a day, sniffed at her, and departed, grave and silent as a physician. The table held breakfast dishes and stacks of notes, folded newspapers, a teapot and cups, and a pair of black knives.
“. . . the witness statements. So far, we’ve talked to—” Doyle swung around in his chair.
Hawker, at the head of the table, looked up.
Silence. She took two . . . three . . . slow breaths and walked through the door to discuss various matters with the British Service.
Hawker was in shirtsleeves. He wore stark white linen of the finest quality, a cream waistcoat, and the impassive containment of a Byzantine icon. He was even thinner than he had been long ago.
He said to Séverine, “You had to bring her, didn’t you? I do not understand why nobody ever says ‘no’ to this woman.”
Séverine said, “She can faint as easily downstairs in company as upstairs alone. At worst she will topple over and bloody her nose. At best, one of you can catch her.” She went around the table to kiss Doyle on the cheek in a daughterly manner.
“And ain’t that a wonderful prospect for a man trying to enjoy his breakfast in peace.” Doyle had chosen to be scarred and unshaven today. It would suit his peculiar sense of humor to sit in this exquisite room in the rough, patched clothing of the barely respectable poor.
On the other side of the table, Paxton was a pale, ascetic scholar this morning, wearing shabby black. He had spectacularly proven his loyalty to England many years ago and paid full price for the right to sit among them. It was legend in the circles of spies, how greatly he had redeemed himself from suspicion.
The last man she also knew, though she had never exactly met him. He was the ingenious, insouciant agent known as Fletcher. She knew him only by sight, having avoided a closer introduction.
They had been discussing important matters. All the signs were there—the interrupted gesture, the bodies leaned across the table, the papers and coffee cups pushed aside carelessly. They were wondering, rather obviously, what she had overheard out there in the hall.
Everywhere, she met with suspicion. She, who was an honest shopkeeper. One may retire from spying, but not from one’s reputation.
Hawker pushed his chair back from the table and strode over to circle her. “Sit.”
“I am hardly in need of advice to—”
“Sit the bloody hell down.” He was the sleek animal who flashed from stillness into attack. He did that now. Without pause, without seeming to hurry, all in one long glide of intention, he scooped her up and deposited her in the chair. “Before you fall over.”
He used not one feather of force beyond what was needed to take her off balance, to support her as she sank back.
She allowed this because she did, in fact, wish to sit down. The determination that had kept her going packed up its tent and deserted. Little spots swirled before her eyes. She would not faint, but the fringes of this possibility were distracting.
He stood for a long minute looking down at her before he let go. His hold imprinted into her shoulders a sense of the solidity of the banyan’s embroidery. Where he held her, the silk remained warm.
The body has memories deeper than thought. Her body remembered him.
He lifted one of the chairs that waited at the wall and brought it to the table so he could sit and glare at her, close and familiar. “Too much to hope you’d spend the day flat in bed.” He turned to Séverine. “Too much to expect you’d keep her there.”
Séverine made herself comfortable in the chair at the end of the table. “I can’t stop her, you know. If you want her in bed, keep her there yourself.”
Hawker ignored that. “She’s the color of new cheese and she’s shaking when she moves.” He directed an order to the dark, sullen spy girl in training. “Get her some of that catlap we keep feeding her.”
In the long three years apart, she had forgotten the many ways in which he annoyed her. She said, “Coffee. Very strong. I do not wish to drink bouillon in the dawn, and I detest tea.’Awker, we must talk.”
“Right. That’s the first thing I said when you fell across my doorstep, bleeding. I said to myself, ‘I must talk to this woman.’”
“I did not mean to be stabbed. It is not my fault. In any case, you have discovered most of what I came to tell you. There are two murders.”
“With my knife in their gullet. When it’s my knives, I like to be the one who puts ’em into people.”
