I thanked Robert sincerely for driving me home, and gave him a good tip. As he maneuvered Vashti Savage’s carriage around in order to head back to town I put out my right hand to catch a few clusters of snowflakes, in order to ascertain whether they still had black hearts, or whether that tiny measure of abnormality had stolen quietly away.
It hadn’t. The melting snow still left tiny black particles on my palm. I peered at them more closely, trying to make out some kind of detail, but they were too tiny.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice close to my right ear said: “Master Rathenius?”
The twilight had almost faded away, but Jean-Jacques had set a lamp over the front door, as he always did when I was out after dark, so I was able to make out the features of the youth who had spoken.
“Tommaso?” I said. “You scared me half to death. Where’s Lorenzo? What are you doing here?”
The questions lacked logical order, but not logic. The one thing one always wondered on seeing one of the Dellacrusca twins was where the other one might be, since they were usually inseparable. The mighty Dellacrusca had returned to the mainland four weeks previously, as he always did when the end of his “vacation” fell due, always taking his unruly sons with him; Tommaso and his brother should have been raising their particular brand of hell in the Capital, or enduring one of their father’s legendary punishments.
“I need to tell you something,” Tommaso Dellacrusca muttered.
It was then that I realized that he must have been there for some time, waiting for me. He was wet and cold.
“Come inside and get warm,” I said, as soon as the door opened. “Why didn’t you wait for me inside?”
“I did ring,” Tommaso said, directing a reproachful glance at Jean-Jacques, “but your man wouldn’t let me in.”
Sometimes, Jean-Jacques can be a little too strict in his duty, and it had to be admitted—even by Tommaso—that the Dellacrusca twins would not be high on anyone’s list to obtain instant admission to a house in the absence of its master.
I set out to repair the damage: “Tommaso needs some hot soup and a glass of brandy,” I told Jean-Jacques. “Is there a fire in the drawing-room?”
“No sir. You didn’t...”
“I know, I know—but there is one in the studio, at least?”
“As always, sir.”
“Good. Bring the soup there. Take Tommaso’s coat to the kitchen to dry by the stove, and fetch him one of my mantles. I need to talk to you before I go to bed, by the way—important matters.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jean-Jacques, dutifully, looking at Tommaso almost as reproachfully as Tommaso had looked at him.
I put some extra logs on the fire in the studio, and stoked it up. Then I sat Tommaso down in a chair beside it and studied the condition of his trousers. They were dirty as well as damp, but it wasn’t his fault.
“What do you need to talk to me about, Tommaso?” I asked—and added, because it seemed a natural question in the circumstances: “Has something happened to Lorenzo?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy replied, unconsciously picking to Jean-Jacques’ manner of address to go with his carefully respectful tone. “I don’t know quite where to begin...”
“At the beginning,” I suggested.
He nodded his head, as if acknowledging wise advice.
“Yes sir. Well, sir, as you know, Lory and I have… something of a reputation.”
“Indeed I do,” I agreed.
“And you won’t be surprised, I suppose, to know that it’s even worse in the Capital than it is here, where we’re old enough now to pass for real bravos… apaches, they call them on the Mount and in Bellevue, but my father always says bravos, so that’s how we think of it. Not that we are real bravos, you understand… if anyone does, you do… but we do like to give the impression… to pose, I suppose you’d call it...”
“I do understand,” I assured him.
“Well, the thing is, three days ago we were out on the Mount, having a good time, and we were a bit drunk—not very, but enough. We’d been in a bit of a brawl—nothing serious—and we slipped away afterwards into a tavern where we thought no one knew us, needing to lie low. Except that somebody there did know us, and might have been following us, because this fellow comes to sit down with us, and buys us a drink, and then asks if we know the island of Mnemosyne.
“Well, obviously, we want to be seen to know what’s what, especially when we do, so we assure him that we know Mnemosyne like the backs of our hands. And then he asks if we know a way of getting from the mainland to the island and back again without anybody knowing—and of course we do, because we’ve done it dozens of times, so you could say that we’re past masters at it… and that’s what we told him.
“Then he asks us whether we’d like to earn a little gold—he specified gold—by showing him the way, and giving him a helping hand getting across and back, so we naturally said yes we would. And then he buys us another drink, and tells us that he has a little business to do on the island that isn’t exactly legal—which we’d already worked out, of course—and that he could do with some help. So we, naturally enough, ask him what kind of help, and he says, the kind that’s paid for in gold.
“That was good news, of course—or so we thought—so we asked him for more details. He was tentative, as you might expect, but he tells us that it’s a matter of a robbery, and that although he doesn’t intend or expect anybody to get hurt, he might have to take some time looking for what it is he wants, and that it would be necessary in the meantime to keep the occupants of the house quiet—bound and gagged, that is—maybe for a couple of hours, and make sure that they didn’t get up to any mischief.
“So we, naturally… or maybe not naturally, but it seemed so at the time… ask him how many people we’re talking about and are they the kind of fellows who might be difficult to handle, and he, probably by way of flattery, says that two lusty lads like us could certainly take care of it, especially with a couple of good American revolvers to threaten them with, and that the number involved would be three.
“Well, we asked him to name a fee, and he did, and it seemed rather tempting—Father, as you know, although he’s as rich as Croesus, tends to keep us on what he calls a tight rein, money-wise, and we were drunk… and anyway, to cut a long story short, we said that we’d do it—and then, which was obviously the wrong way round, but we weren’t quite thinking straight, we asked whose house it was he wanted to burgle, and he said it was yours.”
I had seen that punch-line coming for some time, but he paused expectantly, so I said: “Ah!” in order to encourage him to continue.
“Well, Master Rathenius, that put us in a bit of a quandary, as you can imagine. I mean, of all the people on the island, you’re the only one who’s ever treated us half way decently. I won’t say you’ve encouraged us, except for that one time when we rather let you down, but you’ve always seemed more amused by our pranks than disapproving, and once or twice you’ve even supported our stories when you knew full well we were lying, which takes guts when you’re talking to Father, who isn’t a man you want to get on the wrong side of....”
He was right about that. If ever there was a man one did not want to be on the wrong side of, it was Dellacrusca. He was reputed to the most powerful man in the province, and the nastiest, both of which reputations I was willing to believe, having had various dealings with him during his summer visits. I’m not easily intimidated, but he could send a chill down my spine with a glance. He didn’t like me—or any artist, apparently. I had no idea why he came to Mnemosyne for the summer, although he’d certainly helped to make it fashionable with highly placed people. Perhaps it was a conveniently remote place to discuss the darker aspects of provincial security in relative peace.
“Go on,” I said to Tommaso.
“Well, the long and the short of it is that we told him we couldn’t do it. We weren’t nasty about it, and we apologized, but we said that you were the one person on the island that we couldn’t do a bad turn to, and certainly couldn’t hold at gunpoint while we tied you to chairs and let some Italian thug ransack your house. I don’t say there aren’t people on the island that we could and would have done it to, but not you. I mean, when I came up behind you in the dark just now, you knew right away that it was me and not Lory. Even Father wouldn’t have known that. You’re the only man I know who can tell us apart. So no, I wasn’t going to help him rob you.”
I had painted the Dellacrusca twins—the only commission that the rich but somewhat miserly Dellacrusca had ever deigned to give any of the island’s artists, thanks to one of Myrica’s little miracles—and I had studied them with all my usual intensity as well as my gift. They’d been a good deal younger then, but I could still tell them apart at a glance. It wasn’t really a compliment, but I was perfectly prepared to let Tommaso think that it was. One can never have too much moral credit with people who like to cultivate the image of being bravos and practical jokers.
“He seemed to take it in good enough part,” Tommaso continued, “and he didn’t get nasty any more than we had. He left, and so did we—only, when we’re on our way home, and maybe a little unsteady on our feet, but not helplessly drunk, as we’re crossing the street, this carriage comes hurtling out of nowhere, straight at us. Lory manages to push me clear, but because he thinks of me before himself he can’t get out of the way, and the horse knocks him down, and the wheel runs over his leg. Broken tibia—not that serious, apparently, but he won’t be able to walk for weeks.
“We thought about telling Father, who would have turned the city upside down looking for the fellow, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shoes if he found him, but some of the hell he’d have raised would surely have rebounded on us, so we decided to let him think that it was just an accident—except that we figured that I’d better get out here as fast as humanly possible, to warn you that someone has it in for you. Without us, of course, he won’t find it quite so easy to find a way to get back and forth from the island without any inconvenient indiscretion, but it’s not that difficult. It won’t be as easy for him to find his way around if all he’s got by way of hired help is a couple of thugs from the Mount and some local fisherman he’s recruited in the tap-room of the Sprite… but all things considered, he’s not likely to be more than a day or two behind me.
“Anyway, I had to come—and after what happened to Lory, you can be absolutely bloody certain that if the bastard wants to get to you, he’s going to have to go through me to do it, so two thugs won’t be enough, even if they do have fancy American pistols. I know that you can handle yourself, and your man looks like a scrapper, so between the three of us, we should be able to hold the fort. What do you think?”
I had a great many thoughts, but I wanted to get them in order before I discussed them with Tommaso, so I left him to eat the soup that Luzon had warmed up for him while I went to have a word with Jean-Jacques. Rapidly, I told him what Tommaso had just told me.
“Shall I recruit extra troops, sir?” was his immediate reaction.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want a war, I want to know what the hell is going on. I don’t think anything’s likely to happen tomorrow, but I was going to ask you and Luzon to go over to the old Toustain house anyway, to help the new owner move in. We’ll stick to that; it’ll make certain that Luzon’s out of the way, and you’ll still be within easy reach if I need you back here. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is a rumor I’ve picked up about Toustain. Apparently, Guillot—that’s the notary looking after his affairs—has let something slip that he shouldn’t have. Have you heard anything?”
Jean-Jacques was not an islander himself, but in the twelve years he had been in my service he had made a lot of friends and acquaintances, and the servants’ gossip circuit is always more reliable than the ones to which Niklaus Hylne belonged.
“I have heard it said that Toustain wasn’t his real name, and that if word of who he really was had got abroad while he was alive, he would have been in trouble—not with the law, apparently, but something worse. The Cult of Dionysus has been mentioned, although I’m not sure it even exists any more, although the other one certainly does. I can fish for more details, but you know what notaries are like, sir—they love to tease, dropping hints one by one. You might get more out of him by confronting him.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Direct pressure would make him clam up. His is a profession that thrives on prevarication and procrastination. Find out what you can—and thank you.”
“Do you want me to acquire one of those American pistols, sir? Just in case?”
“No. I don’t want any shooting. First of all, I have to figure out what on earth it is that this mysterious individual wants to steal, why he thinks I’ve got it, and why he hasn’t simply offered me the gold he’s apparently willing to shell out in order to get his hands on it.”
In order to do that, or at least to make a start, I went back to Tommaso, who had finished the soup and was sipping his brandy while warming his stockinged feet in front of the grate.
To begin with, I thanked him warmly for the trouble he’d taken to bring me the warning, and expressed my regret for what had befallen his brother as a consequence of his scruples. Then I got down to business.
“Did this mysterious Italian give you any idea of what it was he wanted to steal?” I asked.
“No. One of your paintings, I assumed.”
“Not if he thought he might have to spend several hours searching. The likelihood is that it’s something I’ve acquired recently, and could, in principle, hide away. How do you know he was Italian? Did he speak to you in Italian?”
“No, but he had an accent. I’ve only been to Italy once or twice, but Father used to live there before he married Mother and set his mind to taking over the province He still has lots of Italian friends and he’s always jabbering away with them, so I’m familiar with the accent—it was odd, though, not Roman Italian. Venetian, maybe? I don’t know.”
Venice, I thought, was where real real bravos came from. But the would-be burglar had wanted someone with local knowledge—hence the Dellacrusca twins. Local knowledge and reputedly no scruples… but how was he to know that the twins, in spite of their image and reputation, had a few, specifically in respect of my person?
Silently I thanked the mischievous inclination that had always caused me to approve of at least some of the terrible twins’ antics.
“Right,” I said. “First of all, we’re going to try to make a picture of this enemy I didn’t know I had. You describe, I’ll sketch, and between the two of us, we’ll get a picture that we can give to Constable Clovis.”
“The Constable!” said Tommaso, alarmed. “I don’t want any of this getting back to Father!”
“I’ll keep your name out of it,” I promised. “Nobody needs to know that you were ever on the island.”
I fetched a sketch-book and repeated the operation that I’d carried out earlier in the day with Vashti Savage—with much more difficulty, given that Tommaso had been at least half-drunk during his encounter with the Italian, and I had no convenient resource that would allow me to help him out. We ended up with a portrait of sorts, but I wouldn’t have bet money on it being a good enough likeness to permit recognition if I happened to bump into the man who wanted to rob me.
“Right,” I said. “I’ll make a couple of copies later. Now, we have to get to work.”
“What work?” Tommaso asked.
“We have to find what the Italian wants to steal. Once we have it, we can make a decision about what to do next.”
“How are we going to do that?” the youth asked.
“We’re going to go down to the library, and we’re going to search very carefully through the three crates of books that Monsieur de Toustain left me in his testament. There’s no way to be sure, but weighing up the timing and various other coincidences, the likelihood is that there’s something among them that escaped my attention when I looked through them hastily on the day of their delivery.”
“I’m not sure that I’d recognize a valuable book if I saw one,” said Tommaso, uneasily.
“It might not be the book itself,” I said, “but something hidden inside one.”
“You man a secret message—a cryptogram?”
I suspected that the only books Tommaso and Lorenzo had ever read, at least outside the classroom, were vulgar thrillers. They had probably been as good a training as any for the vulgar thriller that he and I now seemed to be living.
“Something like that,” I agreed.
We went down to the library and I showed him the three crates. “Let’s take the books out one by one and leaf through them,” I said. “If you see anything that seems unusual, let me know.”
I assumed that I would have to check them all myself eventually, but he needed something to do while I worked. The kindest thing might have been to put him to bed, but it wasn’t that late yet, even though he must have had a hard day.
“I don’t suppose,” I said to him, by way of making conversation, “that you’ve ever heard mention of the Cult of Dionysus?”
“As it happens, I have,” he said. “Father says they’re the scum of the earth, and ought to be exterminated.”
For the second time that day, my jaw had to resist an almost-irresistible temptation to drop. “Lord Dellacrusca told you that the Dionysians are the scum of the earth?” I queried.
“Well, no,” Tommaso admitted. “He didn’t exactly tell me. In fact, he didn’t know we were listening. It was one of his secret meetings. He’s always having them. We used to make every effort to listen in, secretly, but it wasn’t worth the trouble. They were always boring—incomprehensible, for the most part. The only interesting thing, really, was that his club is at daggers drawn with the other one you just asked about. And I don’t mean daggers drawn metaphorically—I mean that it’s a real feud, murders and all.”
I presumed that he was exaggerating, but even so… Dellacrusca, an Orphean! Not, I presumed, in any religious sense—if ever there was an utterly godless man it was Dellacrusca—but in the more modern sense that the “cult” functioned as a kind of conspiratorial elite, dedicated to securing and holding on to as much political power as possible by the occult mans available to them; which, in their case, presumably meant stilettos and skullduggery rather than prayers and incantations. I recalled that Jean-Jacques had been certain about the continued existence of the Cult of Orpheus, even though he had been dubious about the survival of its legendary rival. If he was aware of some presence on the island…could that possibly explain why Dellacrusca, Alectryon and their cronies in the Peerage had taken to vacationing here? Were they holding meetings of what Tommaso called their club?
“That Dionysus fellow was supposed to have murdered one of theirs,” Tommaso explained, helpfully, “but it was way back when, before Julius and the Empire. I don’t think it’s a real vendetta—just jockeying for lucrative posts in various administrations. There are more than two sides in that competition, on course, but the only ones that Father’s friends really hate like poison are the Dionysians.”
That didn’t seem to me to be good news, given that the rumor seemed to be oozing around that the pseudonymous Toustain had been a secret Dionysian, and that I was one too. But if that was why someone wanted to rob me, it was hardly likely to be an Orphean who’s tried to hire the Dellacrusca twins covertly to help him do it—not if Dellacrusca was himself an Orphean. On the other hand, if Dellacrusca was active in the political wing of whatever secret society considered itself to be keeping the Orphean torch alive, it didn’t seem quite so ludicrously unlikely as it had when I had scoffed at Niklaus Hylne’s suggestion, that the Marquis de Mesmay might be an Orphean too, and that his interest in possessing a symbolic triptych wasn’t purely that of an art lover.
“Merdre,” I said, suddenly overcome by the suspicion that I might have accidentally got myself into the middle of a contest whose crossfire might be dangerous. I cursed Toustain for his seeming generosity. What on earth had he been thinking? Had he realized that his real identity was bound to leak out after his death? Had he wanted to prevent whatever it was he was hiding from going up for auction with the rest of his worldly gods? If so, then why not simply bury the damn thing? Why drop it into my lap, without warning?
But I was getting ahead of myself. It was all wild conjecture. There might not be a single word of truth in it—apart from the overheard remark that Lord Dellacrusca had made about the Dionysians, which might only mean, now I came to think about it, that he was a high-ranking member of the Emperor’s secret police, dedicated to wiping out all conspirators, of whatever notional stripe. That seemed more plausible, on reflection. It was far easier to believe in Dellacrusca as a secret policeman than an Orphean… except that appearances, as Niklaus Hylne had scrupulously pointed out, can be deceptive, especially when people are trying hard to deceive...
There was, after all, no contradiction in terms in thinking that Dellacrusca might be the leader of the secret Cult or Orpheus as well as the province’s political police, and one could even argue that it might be a convenient functional combination.
In the meantime, I was going through the books as carefully as I could. There were no pieces of paper slipped between the pages. The books were all relatively recent, none more than a century old and very few more than half a century. There were dozens of books on religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Druidism, Mithraism, and the syncretized rites of Zeus-Jupiter-Amon and Minerva-Athene-Isis as well as the Greek Mystery Cults, but as I’d told Niklaus, they were all scholarly histories and commentaries, or popularizations of such studies for general readers. There were a handful of supposedly sacred texts, but nothing esoteric. Some of them were handsome volumes, with fancy binding and high-quality engravings, but they were just trade editions, easily purchasable even on the island, where almost all of them seemed to have been acquired. There were other history books, including some on the history of art and architecture, and a few works of philosophy, science and geography. No fiction or poetry at all. Some of the texts were in Italian, but most were in the vernacular.
“There’s nothing here,” said Tommaso, after each of us had inspected every single volume. There weren’t that many—only a hundred in all.
“Seemingly not,” I agreed. I examined the crates in which they had been packed. They were just crates.
“There isn’t anywhere to hide anything,” said Tommaso. “Except...” He picked up one of the few demi-folio volumes, and weighed it in his hand speculatively.
“Except what?” I said.
“Well, the covers are quite thick. If we’re looking for a piece of paper, it might be inside.
I looked at the binding of the volume carefully. It was, indeed, sturdy, and it was not impossible that there might be an extra sheet between the thin leather surface and the board on which it was mounted—but I checked the spine first, as that seemed to be the likeliest hiding place.
I checked a lot of spines; there was nothing hidden inside them. If there was anything hidden in the bindings, it had to be laid flat on the board, underneath the surface sheet.
I checked all the demi-folio volumes, very carefully, and selected out the likeliest candidate.
“If we’re wrong,” I said, “we’re about to ruin a work of art.”
Tommaso didn’t care. “Go ahead,” he said.
I slit the binding. There was nothing hidden within it. So much for my judgment of likelihood. I slit two more, and only ended up ruining two more works of art. Works of mass-produced art, admittedly, but still, there was an element of uncomfortable sacrilege involved.
I was on the brink to giving up when I hit gold—or, to be strictly accurate, parchment. It was very artfully concealed, by someone who had gone to a great deal of trouble to do so, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the likely size of a hidden document had made the demi-folio and quarto volumes far more probable hiding-places than the octavos, a searcher who had no idea what title to look for could easily have gone through three-quarters of the volumes without finding the right one.
I took the utmost care extracting the piece of parchment from its niche without inflicting any further damage upon it than the slight nick I’d made in making the initial slit. Then I studied my prize.
“You were right,” said Tommaso, meaning that he thought that he was right. “It’s a cryptogram.”
The parchment was full of strange symbols—more than a hundred and thirty in total, arranged in sixteen lines—not one of which was recognizable in the context of any written language I had ever seen. They might not have been letters or ideograms at all, in fact.
“How do we decode it?” Tommaso asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted.
“What are we going to do, then?”
“First of all,” I said, “I’m going to make copies of it—two, at least.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” Tommaso said. “Those squiggles are very intricate.
The “squiggles” were, indeed, very intricate—but I’m an artist, and I have a very reliable hand and eye. It would be difficult at first, but as my mind adapted to the script, if it really was a script, my hand would become more fluent. Assuming that I could make do with two or three hours of sleep, as I often do when working with real intensity—successfully, provided that I don’t attempt it too often in the course of a week—I hoped that I could, indeed, make at least two, and perhaps three adequate copies before daybreak.
“It’s going to take some time,” I admitted to Tommaso, “But I can do it. Then I’d like you to do me a big favor, if you’re willing.”
“Will it put one over on the Italian?”
“I hope so. That’s the purpose of the exercise.”
“Count me in, then.”
“There might be some risk.”
“Good.” He meant it. He was giving every indication of spoiling for a fight. Coming here to warn me had apparently been step one in paying the debt of vengeance that he thought he owed his brother, but it wasn’t enough to set his mind at rest. He was wound up, ready for action. It was probably a good idea to give him something to do rather than accepting his offer to help me “hold the fort.”
“I’m not sure that there’s anyone on the island at present who might be able to help unravel this,” I explained to him, “although there are a couple of people that it might be worth trying, and I shall. In the Capital, on the other hand, there are real scholars of ancient scripts. I’ll give you the name and address of one; if he can’t decipher it himself, he’ll surely know someone else who stands a better chance—and if there’s anyone at all who can read it, he’ll winkle him out eventually. You’ll need to be careful, though. Someone’s apparently willing to go to a lot of trouble to get their hands on this. They might not like the idea of copies being distributed hither and yon. I’ll be as discreet as I can be, but if someone with an interest finds out that you have a copy in your possession, and are attempting to decipher it, you might be in danger of something worse than a broken leg. Until we know what this is and who wants it, there’s no way of knowing what lengths they might go to in order to get it.”
“Tell me where it has to go, and I’ll get it there,” Tommaso promised, firmly.
“Good,” I said. “You’d better get some sleep now, while I make the copies. The sooner you can make a start in the morning the better. Can you get back to the mainland without delay?”
“Without anyone but you being any the wiser,” he assured me.
I was probably the only person on the island who would have trusted a Dellacrusca twin with any kind of delicate mission, especially after what he’d just told me concerning the results of his eavesdropping on his father, but it seemed to be a worthwhile gamble, and it would get him out of the way—which anyone sane person would have wanted to do, given that he was the very model of a loose cannon.
“I’ll get to work now,” I said. “Tomorrow will be a busy day, given that we can’t assume that your man will be long delayed in getting here. We need to make sure that even if he arrives tomorrow evening, he’ll find that it’s too late to get what he wants, no matter how many bravos and revolvers he has.”
“You’ll be running more risk than I will,” Tommaso pointed out, scrupulously.
“Good,” I said. It seemed the least I could say. There are times when one has at least to pretend to play the hero.