“Thank you,” I said.
Having the Marshal and Tomoatooah in the room bothered me — the Marshal turned his back ostentatiously and Tomoatooah never even glanced over, but I guessed maybe his people didn’t fuss so much about hiding what preachers might call their shame, not being Christians and all. But all those months in a whorehouse and I was still self-conscious about stripping off in front of Priya.
Maybe she realized it, because when Merry and Effie started peeling my clothes down, Priya stepped off. She went into the coat she’d been wearing — she’d tossed it over the chair by the door in just the manner that would of made Mama chew her ear off — and started pulling stacks of papers she’d rolled and squashed into tubes out of the pockets and the sleeves. She turned around before Effie was quite done sponging me off — Aashini and Merry was holding one arm apiece to keep me standing — and I was too interested in what she was holding on to to remember to blush.
“Those from Bantle’s desk?”
She nodded. “Everything from on top, and the top drawer.” She settled down on the ottoman beside Tomoatooah’s legs and started reading.
Those flannel trousers were the warmest and most comfortable thing I’ve ever put on. I suddenly understood why Priya might want to wear men’s clothing all the time. Effie and Aashini let me sit back down again while they put the shirt over my arms, which was a good thing. They’d been doing more and more of my standing for me.
“It’s safe,” I told the Marshal, and he turned back around.
Effie took the dirty clothes and that basin of water away. I was warm and — aside from the bruises and burns — I was comfortable and didn’t stink anymore. But something was still niggling at me. “Horaz said a meeting. What meeting?” I asked — Priya, mostly, as she had the pile of papers in her lap.
Priya, still flipping papers, frowned. “I don’t think you’re going to like the answer to that.”
Merry looked like she already didn’t like it, and she hadn’t even heard it yet. “Tell us.”
“There’s a note here that probably relates,” she said. She waved part of her pile with her left hand. “And a whole sheaf of sheets of figures I can’t make head nor tail of—”
Aashini stepped over to her and lifted the papers from her hand. I caught a flash of red and black ink on creamy paper. She squatted down on her heels — close to the same chairside lamp Priya was using — and started flipping through them. Her hair fell forward across her face, her brow wrinkling in concentration behind it.
Merry said, “Tell me more about this meeting.”
Priya continued, “I don’t know where this is. Baskerville?”
“North,” I said. “It’s a logging camp by the Quaker River. They load the barges there and float ’em down to the Sound. And us. Or the port, anyway. They’re always talking about building a seaport there — the river’s deep enough, I reckon? — and skipping Rapid City entire, but it ain’t happened yet. And there’s already a seaport here, so the papers all say why spend the money?”
The Marshal snorted. “And the papers are owned by the same people as own the Rapid shipping, right?”
I shrugged, in the sort of way as allowed as he was probably right, but I didn’t rightly know.
Priya pursed her lips. “Well, that’s where we need to get to.”
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
She tapped the papers, seeming not to notice that we was all staring at her. “Bantle is meeting with some other person — Bantle calls him or her Nemo — at dawn. I get a sense that this person is foreign. Bantle has a note to bring a translator.”
She made a helpless little gesture. That cold whirl was still inside me, but a kind of spark kindled in it. Curiosity — satisfaction? The satisfying excitement of a problem solved — or at least the solution glimpsed.
“Nemo,” I said. I shook my head, but it wasn’t from being confused. “From Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and L’Île mystérieuse!? He’s the Indian submersible captain fighting the British by destroying their warships with the powerful drill mounted on the nose of his ship!”
Every single person in the room stared at me. Even Effie, and I’d have thought better of her. Apparently she hadn’t been paying attention to the French lessons.“Jules Verne?” I asked. “No? Beatrice has the books — oh, they’re books, people!”
Marshal Reeves pursed his lips in disbelief. “Bantle’s meeting somebody from a book?”
“No,” I said. “I think he’s meeting a foreign agent that he calls Nemo. Probably because he’s an Indian. Maybe an Indian who’s fighting the British. And us.”
“We need to go there,” Priya said.
Effie looked at her. “We already broke Bantle’s machine.”
I tried to pitch my voice gentle. “Tomoatooah and me, we’re not moving so fast, Priya—”
“But we need to go there. To the meeting.”
I took a breath. “But why do we need to go there?”
“To stop them.” She said it like it was self-evident. “Whatever they’re doing. It’s no good for any of us.”
I hated myself for thinking she sounded a mite hysterical. Especially as she had the best of reasons to sound that way when it came to Peter fucking Bantle. I knew I should be holding her stirrup. But I wanted to understand why.
“I have a few questions I want to ask Mr. Bantle about this Bruce Scarlet fellow,” Reeves allowed in a leisurely fashion.
“Nothing Bantle’s doing anywhere is good news,” Effie said. She gave me a look that dared me to contradict her.
Aashini cleared her throat, and what had been on the brink of turning into a brawl got real silent real fast.
“These are accounts,” Aashini said. “I can’t be sure I’m reading them correctly. But it looks like Bantle’s paying this Nemo for girls.”
“I don’t like the British,” Priya said in a controlled monotone. “But I like anybody who would sell girls to Peter Bantle less.”
“You might know this Nemo,” I said. “When you and Aashini came over? If he’s supplying the cribs?”
“We never saw anybody,” Priya said. “Just the steward who brought rice. The men on the boat were white, anyway.”
I had a short horrible inkling of what their passage might of been like. It curdled me.
“Wait,” Aashini said in her soft, high voice. She brushed her hair back. “I read these wrong. It looks as if Nemo is paying Bantle, not the other way around. Or rather, they’re paying him. But he’s paying them twice as much.”
Nobody said nothing for a long minute, but we all just sort of looked at one another.
“Why would an Indian agent be paying American pimps to take his girls?” Effie asked.
“Because he ain’t paying them to take girls,” Tomoatooah said. He cracked his eyes — he’d been resting them and I’d thought he might of dozed off, but I guess not — and ogled us as if we were all a pack of idiots. And maybe we was. “He’s paying them to provide intelligence. Or perform sabotage.” He sat up, painfully.
“Nemo could as easily be an agent of the colonial British powers, you know,” Priya said.
“That’s not how the book goes,” I protested, but even as I said it I could hear how stupid it was.
“You think Bantle’s a real stickler for literary accuracy?” Merry asked.
“No.” I sat on my hands, because I couldn’t step on my damned tongue. Anyway, they felt sore inside the dirty disarranged gauze wraps and pressing on ’em make ’em hurt less.
“I say we go,” Merry Lee said. “Maybe we can find out something that will put a stop to Bantle. Once and for always.”