“Well, it wouldn’t have to be a long meeting, cupcake,” Dexter said thoughtfully, just to watch her at work a little longer.
Somehow, Charlotte managed to keep smiling and simpering as she began flaying him with tiny verbal knives. “You’ve taken such a great many meetings with Mr. Murcheson already, darling. One might almost think you weren’t on your honeymoon at all. Isn’t that so silly? If you spend too much time on all your business I’m liable to forget it’s our honeymoon too, and then where will we be?”
Certainly not in the same bed, she somehow managed to imply. Her eyelashes seemed to have grown half an inch or so, expressly for the purpose of batting. Had he been a henpecked husband in truth, Dexter thought he might be in serious trouble. “Of course, darling, but as we’re in Europa anyway and the opportunity to meet with—”
“Ah!” Charlotte said, a dainty little cry of distress. Her fingers pressed to her temple in a tasteful display of genteel agony.
“Lady Hardison, are you quite well?” Murcheson asked, leaning in like a considerate grandfather.
“Oh dear. I’m terribly sorry. I’m suddenly feeling quite overcome!”
“Darling, perhaps we should return to the hotel.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what we ought to do,” Charlotte agreed. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, as though she might faint at any minute.
Dexter caught a lapse on Murcheson’s part; the man couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the swooning bride. For his part he was struck by the utter absurdity, all of them standing there pretending they didn’t know what the others were about. It was not just theatre, it was farce. Suddenly he was sick to death of the whole ridiculous thing.
“You must take my car,” Murcheson offered. “Plenty of time in the second act for my driver to see you home and return for me.”
“Oh, how very kind,” Charlotte said, drooping picturesquely against Dexter’s arm.
“Do you think that wise?” Dubois said suddenly. Dexter looked at him sharply. He seemed unduly agitated, and was hiding it badly; his face was decidedly pale and damp. “Should we not summon a doctor here for the lady if she is ill?”
“Nonsense.” Dexter put an arm around Charlotte’s waist, taking shameless advantage of the feigned illness to press her inappropriately close. His interest in her, at least, was genuine. And the sooner they were back at the hotel, the better. “A bit of fresh air and quiet, a few minutes out of the crush and the lady will be right as rain. Won’t you, my love?”
“If you think so, husband,” Charlotte answered with a breathless earnestness. “You always know best.”
Murcheson suffered a sudden coughing fit, and Dexter sneezed in a way that strongly resembled a stifled snort of laughter.
The chimes sounded the approaching end of the interval, drawing the crowd back into the house. With a last frantic glare at Murcheson and Dexter, Dubois departed reluctantly to return to his seat as the two men half-carried Charlotte out the door.
“Overdoing it a tad at the end, don’t you think, my fruit-bedecked meringue?” Dexter teased Charlotte once the coast was clear.
“Shameless,” Murcheson agreed, hailing his driver from the middle of the rank of waiting steam cars.
“It was either that or slap him. Didn’t something about that man just make you want to strike him?” Charlotte asked.
Dexter nodded. “Yes, but to do it I would have had to touch him, and he’s such a slimy toad I decided it wasn’t worth it.”
“YOU CAN COME out of the shadows, Martin. Here, sit.”
As Dubois swept past him, Martin stepped forward from the darkest corner of the booth, eyeing the theater warily before taking the seat Dubois indicated. In general he avoided theaters, the boxes particularly. He hated the feeling of sitting at the edge of a precipice, exposed and trapped at the same time. Anyone in the audience could lift a weapon and fire before he even noticed the threat. Anyone could slink into the box from the hallway behind and end him with a silent garrote. And then there were the fires. Theaters were deathtraps.
“I nearly lost an agent,” Martin said without preamble. “He’d been set to watch on the roof of Murcheson’s Gennevilliers factory. He suffered severe burns and a broken leg, and barely managed to avoid being identified by his rescuers. Some warning might have been helpful.”
Dubois shrugged. “He lived, I take it. If he hadn’t, he certainly wouldn’t have been the first peasant in history to die in service.”
Gritting his teeth, Martin swore an oath to himself that one day Dubois would die in lingering agony.
“This is a man in your employ. A good man.”
“No,” Dubois contradicted him. “He is a man in your employ, and his goodness doesn’t concern me. Don’t think I’m unaware you have your own agenda, Martin. Why would you ever think I’d let your agenda interfere with mine?” When Martin remained silent, Dubois shook his head, for all the world like a father disappointed in a child who has failed to learn a simple lesson. “Jacques, Jacques. Are you still so naïve? You’re Coeur de Fer, are you not? Where is the iron, my friend? Did you learn nothing from Simone’s death? I’ll eliminate anybody who stands in my way, even a person I care for. It’s as simple as that. I know my priorities. And don’t try to claim you’re any different. You’ve done the same in your time.”
Never a person I’ve cared for, Martin thought. But then he’d never found out a mistress of several years’ duration was a government agent gathering potentially ruinous information on him, preparing to have him exiled or shot for a traitor. Perhaps he would’ve done the same after all. He would never know. When the documents had come into his life, all else of importance had left it, including all the people he’d once cared for.
At least I have my pouch back. Empty and ready for use. Perhaps a cobbler could recondition the leather.
“Simone cared for me too, you know.” Dubois went on. “That was her weakness. It blinded her, and after all those years she let her guard down. Just once, but that was all I needed. She really shouldn’t have been foolish enough to fall asleep in my bed. Though the first stupidity was drinking wine I’d poured out of her sight. She made it very easy, in the end.”
Martin didn’t need to hear it. He knew how Simone had died, knew the cretinous malignancy beside him had suffocated her in his own bed, then paid a doctor to testify that the death had been from natural causes. Simone’s downfall was legend in French intelligence.
Dubois was right, however. She had been foolish to visit him while exhausted from her jaunt to England, and even more so to drink his wine. As foolish as Martin had been to think that his deal with Dubois could ever end well. And now that he’d lost the documents to the British—for the second and final time—the deal would never end until either Dubois or Martin was dead.
Martin thought that considered in those terms, the choice became very clear to him. The plan of action practically sprang to mind full-formed. All he needed to do was choose a time and place to implement it.
“She never did care for you, Dubois,” Martin said softly but firmly. “She thought you were scum, and a pig in bed.”
He didn’t know why he’d said it. So careful, he was usually so very careful. But Dubois normally steered clear of this topic too, knowing that Simone had meant something to Martin, even if he wasn’t sure what she’d meant.
Dubois’s tone was jovial, though. Perhaps he had finally forgotten what a danger Martin could still be when pressed. He seemed to assume the old dog had lost his fangs. “You think I didn’t know my own woman? She was a whore for me, whatever else she was.”