“Madame,” I said. “I maybe have some things to tell you about.”
“My office,” she said. “Right now.”
Chapter Thirteen
Of course, Miss Francina weren’t about to let me get away with taking the fall for her, and she followed me right down the hall to Madame’s office and stood with me inside the door. Madame watched her do it with an expression of exactly zero surprise. Madame didn’t follow us right on, and I didn’t know whether she was making us sweat or taking a closer survey of the damage. Either way, I was pretty sure none of it looked good.
I wanted to say something to Miss Francina, but I wasn’t sure what. The door was closed, though, and she was eyeing me like maybe she was trying to reckon out what to say as well.
“It was my plan,” I said. “I should be responsible for the results.”
Miss Francina scoffed at me, “Ain’t you a martyr, just like our Lord. ’Cause I sure as hell didn’t volunteer myself as a grown free woman, and you’re the only one in the room as cares about Priya.”
Well, when she put it that way.
I frowned and twisted the toe on my boot on Madame’s blue-and-cream knotted silk rug. Her office is made to look like a boudoir, all lace and mother-of-pearl and silk draperies. “Damn me to hell,” I said. “I’m as self-important as Da always said I could be.”
Miss Francina shrugged. “You have your good qualities, too.”
Whatever we might of talked about next, we never got to it. Because there was a hitching tread in the hall and the door swung open, then closed again as Madame stepped into the room and shut it behind her. She walked between Miss Francina and me, went around her gilt, scrolled desk, and sat heavily in the armchair there, using her cane as a prop to lever herself down.
“You girls sit,” she said to Miss Francina and me.
We sat.
Madame stared at us for ten seconds or so. I could hear her desk clock ticking. Then she looked from one of us to the other and sighed and said, “All right, then. Which one of you wants to explain what exactly just happened in my parlor?”
We looked at each other, Miss Francina and I. Apparently it was one thing to volunteer. And another entirely to actually carry out the task you had volunteered for.
When we broke, though, we both started to talk at the same instant. Then I knuckled back and let Miss Francina have it, but she’d quit also. We stared at each other.
Madame sighed. “Karen,” she said. “You first. Though by rights I should be interviewing you separately. So you don’t get your stories straight.”
Miss Francina looked righteously hurt at that. “I have never lied to you.”
“Nor do you tell me everything,” Madame said. She held up her hand, forestalling further protest. “God help me, nor do I want you to, Francie. I want to hear from Karen, please.”
No way through but both feet in, I reasoned. I said, “Peter Bantle has a machine that lets him change people’s minds.”
“People,” Madame said. “Voters?”
I nodded. “And it can make people do hasty things. Hurt people they don’t mean to hurt. Get in fights with friends.”
When she sucked her teeth like that it was unsettling, because I knowed it meant she was thinking. She said, “That’s what happened downstairs, then? He … influenced a passel of my clients to wreck up my parlor?”
Miss Francina nodded. I bit my lip.
“How do you know this?”
“Priya told me,” I said. “About the machine. And he used it on me, when he chased her and Merry Lee in here. I just about took Miss Bethel’s shotgun from Effie and pointed it at her. And I know he’s used it on the Marshal, too—”
I choked up before I could tell her what had happened the previous night. We’d gone against her direct orders, and I knowed it. But whatever I was holding back — and I meant to tell her, I swear I did. I just … choked on it.
But Madame gave me a canny look anyway. “So why’d he pick today to have another go at us?”
“To scare us,” Miss Francina said quickly.
Madame shot her a warning glance. She subsided, but not without a sigh.
“Karen?”
I fixed my gaze on that carpet and stared at it like to set it on fire. “What I said about him using that machine on the Marshal?”
“Yes?”
“That were last night,” I said on a rush. “Marshal Reeves and his posseman and Merry Lee and me went and busted Priya’s sister out of the cribs.”
“And I,” Miss Francina said dryly, so at first I thought she were playing Miss Bethel and correcting my grammar, but then I realized she was putting herself in the rescue party, too, when I’d intentionally left her out.
“Francina, dear,” Madame said. “Fetch me that decanter, please?”
Miss Francina rose and did it and brought her a snifter, too. She set both on the edge of Madame’s desk blotter. As Miss Francina sat again, Madame poured two inches of brandy into the bottom of the balloon glass, and knocked it right back. Then she poured a second, smaller glass, closed up the decanter, and held the snifter under her nose for a long minute or two.
“I’m not overjoyed with either of you,” she said, unnecessarily in my holding. “Do you know what Bantle can do to this house — to all of us — if he makes mayor?”
I didn’t, really. Not know. But I could come up with some pretty chilling fantasies. And Miss Francina nodded, so I did, too.
Then she put the glass down. “But it can be fought off?”
“The men who started the fight,” Miss Francina said. “They were the ones who had been drinking the most, or smoking a little hemp. Maybe their idea of what was wrong and right had gotten a little … malleable.”
“That’s true,” I said. “None of the girls was drinking much. And none of the girls went crazy. And when he tried it on me, before … I was sober. And I could kind of … see around it?”
We didn’t drink much, on duty, in Madame’s house. She thought it weren’t safe to cloud our wits that way while dealing with customers. And she didn’t want no woman whoring for her who had to get herself tangle footed to get through it. “And you and the Marshal both shook it off on your own.”
I nodded. “And Mr. Jonathan Smith, who started it all downstairs — he could have kilt me with that stool he was waving around. But he just waved it around for a bit and then threw it at the back bar. And he’d had several whiskeys.”
“So maybe it ain’t too powerful.”
“I’m unsettled to point out that I’ve only ever witnessed him use it when he was right near whoever he was aiming at,” Miss Francina said. “Priya says it’s a big machine in his house that does the dirty work, but it seems to my observation as if he has got to focus it through his glove. If I’m right about that, he was right here. Right outside, maybe. Might still be, although I sadly expect he’s got more sense than that.”
“It sounds more like an urge than a compulsion,” Miss Francina said.
“Or he uses it on some drunk who already thinks it might be a good prank to bust up a whorehouse. Or dump a whore on her ass for laughs, especially if he ain’t none too comfortable around the sisters,” Madame said, as if she was thinking out loud. “So he’s got enough to sway somebody who thinks it’s their own whim. Like whether to run for mayor, or for whom to vote.”
“Especially,” I said slowly, “if there’s also some blackmail in train. You know, for the old-fashioned kind of attitude adjusting.”
I didn’t say Dyer Stone, and Madame couldn’t fault me on that. She nodded, though, and flicked a fingernail back and forth against the stitching of a leather-bound book that was resting on her desk. I weren’t used to seeing it there, but that didn’t signify: she kept the ledgers locked up when she was out.