Stiletto (31 page)

“Without the protections and the order imposed by something like the Checquy, the European continent is, secretly, a savagely dangerous place,” said Marcel. “These people — these things — are free to do what they want. They have the power to indulge their whims and their tastes. People get killed; children go missing. They can act without fear or consequence.”

“It sounds dreadful,” said Felicity. The old man gazed at her for a long moment. Without taking his eyes off her, he spoke to Alessio.

“Alessio, would you please go to your room? I need to talk to Pawn Clements privately.” The boy left the room, closing the door behind him. “Let me tell you a story.”

*

In 1914, Marcel Leliefeld was born into the world, delivered expertly by his father with some expert direction from his mother. He was joined ten minutes later by his twin brother, Siegbert. From a young age, the two boys were completely aware of the Broederschap. This was unusual. As a matter of policy, the Grafters kept their true occupations (and their physical capabilities) a secret from everyone, including their own families. Merely being the spouse or child of a Grafter did not automatically qualify one for a membership. The most that such a relationship guaranteed was a seemingly lucky immunity to various infectious diseases, a lack of cancer, and blessedly perfect offspring who were conceived and delivered with an abundance of ease. To become a Grafter, one needed to demonstrate exceptional aptitude.

Marcel and Siegbert’s knowledge of the Grafters was a result of their parents’ unorthodox approach to, well, pretty much everything. The parents in question, Hendrika and Arjan, were both Grafters. Important Grafters.

Arjan was the son of a Grafter, and Hendrika had been brought into the organization as a child from Delft when a neighbor, who was also a Grafter, had been struck by her facility with a paintbrush. The neighbor’s justification had been that anyone with that level of unorthodox imagination
and
such fine motor control would make a marvelous Grafter. Hendrika and Arjan had served their apprenticeships at the same time and, after the (predictable) period of intense competition and mutual loathing, had (predictably) fallen in love (slightly less predictably) over an autopsy table of Siamese quintuplets (who had been longtime friends of the Grafters, as they would not have been born without some Broederschap assistance, and who had died simultaneously after living a good, long collective life, leaving behind three widows, two widowers, thirteen children, a wardrobe of intricately tailored clothes, and a well-established mercantile business).

Arjan and Hendrika were married in Amsterdam in a huge church full of well-wishers and then promptly moved to Paris, where they embarked on dazzling careers of experimentation and research, constantly on the cutting edge (as it were) of innovative surgery. Their home was renowned, not only among the Grafters but also among the artists, intellectuals, and scientists of Paris as
the
place to come and talk and argue and drink.

It was a salon unlike any other, where the good and the wicked, the rich and the poor, the unearthly and the earthly came to meet and disgust and inspire one another. At any given moment, there was a wide variety of visitors.

In the parlor, one might find a debate involving Arjan, a Turkish cabinetmaker, a Catholic priest, and a drunk individual whom no one seemed to know but who kept muttering about some goddamn beekeeper and the dynamics of rocks in space.

Lounging on the front stairs, a centuries-old Grafter drinking oolong tea might be discussing scissor technique with an apprentice hairdresser, while on the back stairs, one might find an Oxford don locked in a passionate embrace with a Cambridge don (both dressed in full academic robes). In the kitchen, one could come across a cellist and a boxer smoking opium and staring fixedly into each other’s eyes as the cook and the scullery maids bustled around them, laboriously sewing the front end of a dead pig to the rear end of a dead peacock in preparation for cooking.

In the library, Baron László Mednyánszky had painted a now-famous portrait of a hermaphroditic Grafter cousin.

In her studio upstairs, Hendrika had once removed the Spanish ambassador’s appendix and put in a fresh one before descending to have afternoon tea with Marie Curie. Architects fought in the garden, mathematicians and sculptors folded origami in the gazebo, and rosellas and parakeets flew freely through the rooms, never relieving themselves on guests’ heads, since they had been altered to subsist entirely on sunshine and secondhand cigarette smoke.

In that house, children and theories were conceived. Lectures were given and drawings drawn. Venereal diseases were contracted and then effervesced away after the infected person drank some of Arjan’s jasmine tea. Symphonies and viruses were composed, and hypotheses and cadavers were deconstructed. There were fabulous dinner parties in which the guests feasted on meats from animals that had never existed and drank wine that glowed faintly in their mouths and left them in states of heightened creativity.

This was not to say that Arjan and Hendrika were indiscreet. Or rather, they were not indiscreet about the fact that they were Grafters. They were indiscreet about most other things, but as far as their non-Grafter guests were concerned, the Leliefelds were a naturalist and a (woman!) surgeon, both possessed of great wealth and intellect. The glorious nature of their hospitality always carefully straddled the line between the improbable and the impossible, and guests who caught a glimpse of the unexplainable were left to doubt their own eyes and swear off drink.

Above the second floor of the house, however, all doubt would have been removed. In their separate studios (they maintained that the key to a happy marriage was being able to get away from the other person), Arjan and Hendrika developed startling new techniques and pushed biology to its limits. In the bedrooms, Grafter guests slept, hanging from the ceiling or cocooned in the closets.

And in a vast rooftop greenhouse of wrought iron and stained glass, two identical little boys romped amidst flowers that nuzzled them like kittens, beneath vines that gave off perfume that hung in the air like trails of smoke and tasted sweet on the tongue.

Siegbert and Marcel grew up surrounded by the preposterous. Their mother might come down to breakfast with feathers cascading down her back instead of hair. Their father was usually surrounded by a choir of chirping dragonflies and had been known to vault down the side of the building rather than using the stairs. The family dog, a West Highland white terrier named Chloe, did not age. Visiting cousins would excuse themselves to the bathroom to shed their skins and reemerge as members of a different race.

The boys themselves did not receive any enhancements. Like ballet dancers who had to wait for the bones in their feet to ossify before they could go up
en pointe,
they were kept completely and perfectly human. However, they often observed their parents’ projects and might be called upon to put a finger on some sutures, drip compounds into a subject’s eyes, or reach their little hands into an incision and tweak something that Mama could not reach. When they were twelve, their understanding of anatomy and medicine would have placed them in the highest echelons of normal surgeons. That, plus the fact that they were direct descendants of Graaf Ernst, meant there was no question that they would become members of the Broederschap.

Except that Marcel questioned it.

He was well advanced in his apprenticeship as a Grafter when he made the decision. Under Marcel’s care, a somewhat startled dog had given birth to kittens, and he’d had several useful organs added to his system. However, two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, Marcel canceled his appointments and retired to his bedroom, where he spent several days meticulously removing all the alterations that had been made to his body. He emerged several pounds lighter, sporting his original cheekbones and teeth, and calmly announced to his startled parents that he was enlisting in the French army.

*

“Why?” asked Felicity.

“I was dissatisfied with the direction my life was taking,” said Marcel easily. “I did not care for the person I was at that point. I judged that a drastic change was needed.”

*

Marcel’s parents were distraught at this rejection, and the Broederschap was shocked, but in the high ranks there was no tremendous concern. Marcel had made it clear that he was not severing connections with his family, that he held no resentment toward them for their lifestyle, and that he had no intention of revealing any secrets or using their knowledge for his own gain. No one doubted his character or, more important, his discretion, and so they wished him the best of luck as he began his career as a private in the VIIe Armée.

Marcel did well in the army, rising at a respectable clip and acquitting himself with valor on every occasion where it was appropriate. Though his appearances at family functions were always welcome, and he and Siegbert corresponded on a regular basis, relations with his parents remained painful and awkward, even after he married his second cousin Claudette, who was a Grafter. Siegbert, meanwhile, had married a sensible lady named Aimée who was not a Grafter but who had figured out her new family’s capabilities through the simple strategy of observing them and being willing to accept that the impossible might not be.

Marcel’s letters to Siegbert grew more and more concerned as the political situation in Germany became increasingly turbulent. Marcel urged his brother to pass his disquietude on to the heads of the brotherhood. The disquietude was duly communicated, but if any action was taken, it was not apparent to Siegbert.

In 1939, Marcel was posted to the northern front under Giraud. He saw serious battle against the Germans and was promoted to lieutenant. When Giraud’s army was crushed in Belgium in May 1940, an injured Marcel could not face the prospect of evacuation to Britain — his Grafter upbringing and the terrifying stories of the Checquy prevented him from even entertaining the possibility. Instead, he deserted and took refuge with family members in Antwerp. He reluctantly permitted them to repair his damaged leg on the firm understanding that it would be restored to standard leg specifications with no convenient weaponry or storage pouches added.

At that point, the leaders of the Broederschap, Graafs Ernst and Gerd, arrived, word of Marcel’s situation having been passed along the family grapevine. They sat down with their descendant and, after some cursory inquiries after one another’s health, the talk turned to current events. Thus, over tea and pfeffernüsse, Marcel learned that the Grafters were in a state of crisis.

It seemed that while the members of the Broederschap were more than willing to eschew earthly affairs, earthly affairs were unwilling to render them the same courtesy. This did not astound Marcel, but most of the Grafters were completely taken aback. The graafs and the elder members had lived through a number of conflicts, including the Kettle War, the Napoleonic Wars, la Guerra de los Agraviados, l’Insurrection Royaliste dans l’Ouest de la France, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Austrian Civil War, but none of them had proven to be terribly disruptive. Even the Great War had not really done much more than mildly inconvenience them. As a result, while some preparations had been made, they had anticipated that this squabble, like so many others, would wash on by.

Instead, the weight of modern war had descended upon the brotherhood just as it had on all the normal people in Europe, bringing with it all the attendant problems: supply shortages, armed conflict, general chaos. Lines of communication between the chapter houses were constantly disrupted. No contact could be made with the Grafter relatives in Germany, and it was feared that they had been arrested or killed. There had already been casualties among them — an errant bomb blast had consumed an important laboratory with a group of apprentices inside; soldiers had gunned down a two-hundred-year-old master crafter of lungs. Most dire of all to Marcel, Paris had fallen to the invaders, and they had received no word from the Grafters who lived there.

Paris, home to Claudette, Siegbert, and Aimée (who, last anyone heard, had been pregnant with their first child), as well as Marcel’s parents.

In Marcel, the graafs saw a man who was fully engaged in the world. A man who knew the brotherhood, who was bound to them, and who could be trusted. They asked for his help and struck an agreement. Two Chimera soldiers, equipped with some of the most deadly weaponry in their arsenal, would accompany Marcel to Paris. They would ascertain the status of the seventeen Grafters known to reside there, including Arjan, Hendrika, Claudette, and Siegbert. The graafs’ greatest priority was to prevent any Broederschap technology from falling into the hands of the Nazis. Marcel’s greatest priority was to get his family somewhere safe.

If the Parisian Grafters were dead, their corpses were to be incinerated and every trace of their work removed or destroyed. If they had been imprisoned, they were to be rescued or, failing that, rendered useless to the enemy through any means necessary. If they were alive and free, Marcel and his team would bring them to Belgium, which, though occupied, was where the Grafters were consolidating themselves. Then, provided he survived, Marcel would take the security of the Grafters in hand and bring them through the war, however long it lasted.

Marcel and his two hulking soldiers, Hans and Henk, set out for Paris. There were few cars or trucks available — most of the private vehicles had been commandeered by the military — but the Broederschap had provided them with a wagon and a draft horse named Angus who had received modifications that gave him the strength and endurance of four normal horses, night vision, and the tracking abilities of a bloodhound. They joined the hundreds of refugees on the southern road, a stream of people with wagons, prams, and barrows loaded with possessions.

Despite their efforts at disguise, they had to spend a goodly amount of effort avoiding enemy troops. The three of them were unmistakably warriors (Henk and Hans, in particular, had literally been designed to wreak havoc), and just the sight of them seemed to provoke antagonistic feelings in the occupying authorities. After three days, they had already been in several fights, and word had gone out among the Nazi authorities to be on the lookout for the three men, although their apprehension was a comparatively low priority; there was a war going on, after all. Still, whilst evading a patrol near the French border, the three were forced to abandon the wagon and set Angus free to either make his way home or end up in the possession of some incredibly lucky farmer.