Camera Obscura (13 page)

 
 

There had been a fat man at the Clockwork Room that night.
That was what Henri had told her at the Speckled Band. A fat man standing with the lizardine ambassador. Very fat, with a prominent forehead, a prominent nose, and deep-set eyes that seemed to miss nothing – deep-set eyes that had fastened onto Yong Li as if they had been expecting just such a man.

  That the fat man was with a royal lizard was significant. Yet he did not seem to Henri to be an assistant, an aide-de-camp or a servant – he had the manner about him of a man not easily fazed, and when he turned to speak to the tall lizard beside him he did it with what Henri could only describe as an indulgent smile.

  The fat man had moved slowly and drunk little, and seemed to pass through the room attracting surprisingly little notice – "And my attention was on Yong Li, you understand, not on the fat man."

  "I understand."

  And now she remembered that Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, too, had noticed a fat man…

  "When I saw Yong Li going up the stairs to the private rooms, naturally I followed him," Henri said. "There was a room at the end of the corridor and the door was closing behind him and I went to it and knocked. A voice said, "Who is it?" and I said, "It's me, Henri, let me in."

  The door had opened then, and the Asian man stood there, his face stricken. "You must go, now!" he said. Both his hands were on his belly, not patting it but – "Like he was holding it in, trying to stop it from bursting, you know?"

  He'd said, "Quick! You must go. You must not be seen."

  "But why? What are you doing?"

  "For your own sake, man! He's coming!"

  The door had slammed shut. Henri was left alone in the corridor – and as he looked from door to staircase he heard footsteps climbing, slowly but with an even step, up the stairs.

  "I don't mind telling you I was unsettled," he said. "But, you see, I know the Clockwork Room well."

  And so he opened one of the doors lining the corridor and stepped inside, shutting it behind him just as the footsteps had reached the top of the staircase and began coming down the corridor, towards that last room.

  "There was a woman in there – oh! I knew her very well. A very famous novelist. I had been to her salons several times. But she did not see me. No – she was inside one of the clockwork engines of that place, and it was working at her – I would have liked to have sketched it."

  "That's nice."

  "Yes, well… she did not see me. And so I was safe."

  He heard the footsteps coming closer. When they came to Henri's door they paused – "I don't mind telling you I was worried" – but finally moved on. Henri had opened the door then, just a crack. He saw the fat man disappear into the last room, the one holding Yong Li. The door had closed shut behind him.

  "I should have left then. But I needed to
see
."

  And so he left his hiding place, machine and novelist and all, and tiptoed to the last door, the unmarked one. "I peeked through the keyhole," he said. His eyes grew very large then, and his hands shook. His head sank back against the cushions. She was losing him, she knew then. "What did you see?" she said – demanded. But the little artist's eyes were no longer seeing, and the expression on his face was filled with both fear and longing. "I saw it," he said. "I
saw
it."

  His eyes closed, and his breath came softly, scented with the sweetness of opium. "What did you see?" She slapped him, but it made no difference.

  "I saw their world," he said, and he smiled, a small, child-like smile, and then he spoke no more. She tried, but could not rouse him, and at last she left him there, to dream his grey dreams.

 

"We believe," Madame Linlin said, "that Captain Li was in Paris to meet secretly with a representative of the lizards' secret service." She grimaced, a disconcerting sight as one side of her face remained metal-smooth. "His name is Mycroft Holmes. His influence is far-reaching. He is very dangerous."

  Milady almost laughed. She had no doubt Madame Linlin was just as dangerous. And no doubt she occupied a similar position to this Mycroft's in her own country's service. She said, "Why did Yong Li – Captain Li – not meet them across the Channel?"

  "In the lizards' own domain?" Madame Linlin shook her head. "No. Paris was a sensible choice."

  It did, Milady had to admit, make sense. Yong Li's master had something to – to sell? To trade? – with the lizards. He had chosen the one place they could not move openly in. "What does he look like, this Mycroft Holmes?" she asked, waiting for the answer to confirm her own thoughts.

  "He is a very fat man," Madame Linlin said, with some distaste.

  "Ah."

  "You know of him?"

  "I think," she said, "that he had indeed met with Captain Li."

  "Yes. My people have not been as diligent as they should have. We have not been able to locate him in time."

  "Did you kill Yong Li?"

  The old woman smiled, then shook her head. "No. It would have made things simpler if we had. And you and I wouldn't be talking."

  "Do you know who did?"

  The smile disappeared. "No. We need to find out, and we need to retrieve the object. It must be destroyed."

  "I need to know what it is."

  The old woman shrugged. "It is a piece of something which should not exist," she said. "A legend, a folktale."

  "I am tasked with finding it," Milady said. "For my own people."

  "It must be destroyed."

  "That is not my decision."

  The woman shrugged. "We can make our own arrangements with the Council," she said. "It is the lizards we are most concerned with."

  "Are there others from… from Chung Kuo looking for this object?"

  The old woman looked at her sharply. And now she extracted another cigarette and fitted it into her holder. "You have encountered others?"

  "I am merely asking."

  For the first time real anger came into the old woman's eyes. "There are secret societies," she said. "They are little more than criminals. Bandits." She muttered something under her breath. "Colonel Xing!" she called, and in a second the man was there. She spoke to him in what Milady took for Chinese. The man nodded, his face expressionless. In a moment, Madame Linlin had switched to French. "Please escort Lady de Winter safely out of the building. We have concluded our little conversation."

  "Have we?" Milady said. The old woman smiled her halfsmile, not mistaking the threat in Milady's voice. "Only for now, I'm sure," she said sweetly.

  "Only for now," Milady said, returning the smile.

  She turned to Colonel Xing. "Shall we?" she said.

  "It would be my pleasure, please," he said.

 
 

 
 

She was not happy about the old woman's involvement – not happy about the direction the investigation was taking. She had a feeling she was being used, and she didn't like that either. She had the feeling she should shoot someone, but she resisted it, for now. Colonel Xing, at least, had good manners.

  They did not take the elevator down this time. Instead he led her through another corridor and through a secure door and suddenly she was standing in a vast, cathedral-like space, and all around her were the goblins.

  They were not the creatures of European folklore. They were… she wasn't sure what they were.

  In the middle of the great open space of the factory stood a large pool filled with boiling, liquid metal. Figures moved down there, human-shaped and small, and she suddenly realised just how large the building was, how high above the ground they were on this level.

  And the pool was very large.

  There were machines down there, enormous machines, the sound of their engines filling up the space, blocking all other sound. Steam and smoke rose through enormous metal pipes all the way to the ceiling above her head.

When she looked down she could see a heap of arms.

  There was another one, of legs.

  Hanging from the walls, on every available space, were the goblins.

  They were mute, unmoving. They came in many different shapes. Some looked almost human. Some looked aquatic, some avian, and several looked very much like…

  Like royal lizards.

  Down below, a human figure flicked a giant switch and sudden lightning flashed in the great hall of the building. Milady shivered. The lightning caught between two giant balls of metal and continued to pass back and forth between them, growing in intensity all the while. She looked away from it.

  A hand touched her, gently, on her arm. Wordlessly, Colonel Xing motioned for her to follow him. She did, over to an observation platform jutting from the side of the surface they were on. When they had stood inside it, it began to descend.

  She watched the goblins – the automatons – if that was what they were. She wasn't sure. She had never seen so many, and there was something about them that did not recall to mind those few beggars in the catacombs, or even those ancient beings on the Quiet Council. These had a definite…
martial
feel to them.

  The makeshift elevator took them down slowly.

  Past faces staring out – not the rubber-flesh skin of humanlike automatons, not the crude machine faces, like a caricature of the human, such as belonged to the truly old ones.

  No. These were smooth, smooth masks and faceless, making no pretence, no attempt to deceive as to what they were. Here was a silent army of machines, and as they went down she could see more being made, down on that vast factory floor, where human shapes in masks and protective clothing moved along a moving belt, assembling parts…

  Did the Council know about this?

  Colonel Xing led her through the floor. She felt the heat rising from that pool of toxic metal and, skirting it, saw an area set aside that resembled Viktor's place in the under-morgue – surgical tables, bright lamps, refrigeration units, scalpels… She turned away from it and a moment later they were outside.

  The night's air was cool, wonderfully cool after being inside. She felt as if she had been trapped inside the belly of a giant monster and had at last been spat out. She had been sweating, she realised. The doors, when they closed behind them, had shut out the constant sound of the engines, but she could still feel them under her feet, tiny tremors in the ground.

  And now she understood the smoke that was constantly, endlessly belching out of the chimneys. She said, her voice too loud in her ears, "What are they for?"

  "You know what they are for."

  "Whose?" she said, and he began to smile, then stopped. "Anyone who'd pay," he said, as if the question surprised him – as if it were evident.

  "Does
she
own it?"

  He looked surprised, again. "No," he said. "The Shaw brothers bought it from the Gobelin line, years ago. They did the conversion. It's their factory now."

  She didn't ask who the Shaw brothers were. She was just happy for the silence.

  "I hope we meet again," Colonel Xing said, and smiled. He smelled nice, she thought suddenly. "I will see you again, please."

  She said, "What will you do now?"

  "Wait," he said. "See."

  "See if I find what you're all looking for?"

  "Unless we find it first," he said.

  "Where have you been looking?"

  He said, "There is a large community from Asia in this city. Chung Kuo, Siam, Kampuchea… Perhaps some of our own people are involved. Many of the –" he used a word she didn't know, realised it, said, "the secret societies, they operate here too. Wudang, Shaolin, the Beggars' Guild… they too are searching, I think."

  "Have you been keeping an eye on the British agent?" she said, and he looked at her, alert now, and said, "Yes, that too."

  "Where is he staying?"

  He told her. Then, very formally, he shook her hand. Then he grinned and, unexpectedly, kissed her on the cheek. "Goodbye, Milady," he said.

  She nodded, and he smiled again, and disappeared back into the building.

  She touched her hand to her cheek.

  She didn't know what to think.

  She walked away, into the night and the streets of Chinatown.

 
 

 
 

There was a body floating in the Seine and it was Tom Thumb's.

  There was a metal taste in her mouth. She stared at the small corpse. Tom's eyes were open, staring up at the stars. The current carried him gently. Milady said something – she wasn't sure, later, what it was. Tom had been slashed open with a knife. Grey swirls were forming on his skin, moving disconcertingly, at odds with the current.

  She ran down to the embankment, pushing people out of her way.

  She fished the little man out of the water.

  Tom Thumb lay dead on the stones, a pool of red water forming around his body. Milady knelt beside him.

  Backtrack.

  Connect the dots.

  She'd left the Goblin factory and had been thinking as she walked.

  Some things did not ring true in Fei Linlin's account.

  For instance, who had attacked her in Montmartre?

  She remembered the tattoos on their arms.

  She remembered back to the under-morgue:

  
The Hoffman automaton took the sketch from her and studied it.

  She had thought, at the time, he had meant Victoria. But what if he meant the Empress-Dowager? And yet now, as she thought about it, it seemed unlikely. Another Asian faction, then? It was getting hard to keep count.

  
"The secret societies," Colonel Xing had said. "They operate here
too. Wudang, Shaolin, the Beggars' Guild… they too are searching,
I think."

  Yet she had spoken to those from Shaolin and Wudang, and they seemed to have the same objective as the others. Everyone wanted the missing object – or almost everyone…

  What, she thought, if there were other factions, other secret societies at work? For all she knew there were hundreds of factions in that huge, secretive empire of Chung Kuo. And some might have a different agenda – and she wondered again what this object was, what its importance really was – and why it was sent to Paris, and for whom.

  The lizards. And it occurred to her the one faction
not
looking for the missing object was the one which had already, so it seemed, seen it. She decided she needed to have a word with the fat man from across the Channel, this mysterious Mycroft – and soon.

  And she was still thinking when she found herself along the river and, looking down, discovered her one-time friend floating face-up in the dirty water of the Seine, dead eyes staring at her accusingly.

  Tom Thumb looked very, very dead.

  And now that she was crouching beside him she felt the press of the crowd lessen, and two small figures appeared by her side–

  "Milady de Winter," the girl said.

  "Mistress Yi…"

  "Milady," the boy said, dipping his head.

  "Ip Kai… I wondered when you two would show up."

  She felt tired, and angry, and she looked down at Tom Thumb's dead face, remembering him from all those years before, from the circus, the shared times – knowing he was a rascal and a rogue but liking him nevertheless – losing touch, as one does, hearing he had gone off to England, had become involved in revolutionary politics – being surprised to see him here in Paris, but knowing he was still involved, still walking on the wrong side – a short but busy man, a short but busy life, leading to–

  She almost screamed.

  The grey circles along Tom's body moved more rapidly. It was almost as if a storm was picking up across his skin. And now the corpse blinked.

  She stared into Tom Thumb's eyes, and saw broiling grey clouds forming.

  She felt rather than saw the two beside her step away. They didn't speak. She said, softly, "Tom, can you hear me?"

  There was
something
behind those dead eyes. But she wasn't sure it was Tom – and the sudden realisation was chilling.

  The eyes focused, and that was eerie. They looked at her face. And now the mouth opened, and a wet, bloated tongue licked wet lips, the gesture strangely obscene.

  Then it spoke.

  The word came out with a whisper of foul-smelling air. "Waiting…" it said. The body was crawling with grey spirals, currents washing over the corpse. Milady moved back from the body and her hand twitched on the handle of her gun.

  Though what use was a gun against something that was already dead?

  "Soon…" the voice whispered, and the lips formed into something resembling a smile. Then the eyes closed, and grey activity ceased, and it was only Tom Thumb lying there, and his throat had been cut with a very sharp knife, and Milady stared and thought, my, how the corpses are piling up.

  She knew the killer must be close. She was disturbed by this grey plague that seemed to be slowly creeping up everywhere, something alien and strange and disturbing, but it had not killed Tom Thumb.
Someone
had, and she meant to find him.