“Of course. It’s to be expected.” Adamat returned to his seat.
“Did you go with the police yesterday?” Ricard asked.
“Yes.”
“And? Do you think it was Claremonte? It was Claremonte, wasn’t it? The bastard. I’ll tear him limb from limb, I’ll–”
“It wasn’t Claremonte,” Adamat said.
Ricard leapt to his feet and instantly began to pace. “What do you mean? Can you be sure?”
“I’m quite certain,” Adamat said.
Lady Cheris interjected, “But how?”
“Believe me, ma’am. It wasn’t Claremonte.”
“I’ll believe you when I know how you can be certain,” Cheris said. “He has the means and the motive. He almost certainly ordered it done.”
“Bah.” Ricard stopped his pacing just long enough to fetch and light another cigar. “If Adamat says it’s not Claremonte, then it’s not Claremonte. But who?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve only just begun my investigation. You have enemies, don’t you?”
“No,” Ricard said, sounding somewhat offended. “I make friends. It’s what I do best. Friends are far more useful than enemies.”
Adamat gave Ricard a long look.
“Well, maybe. All right, yes. I have enemies. But not an overabundance of them.”
“Any of them who would want you killed?”
“I don’t know if any of them hate me that much. Perhaps some of the other union bosses. One or two of them have been angling for my job for the last couple of years.”
“Who?”
“Jak Long, the head of the blacksmiths’ union. Lady Hether, the head of the street cleaners’ union.”
“She died in the bombing,” Cheris said quietly.
“Oh. Right.” Ricard stabbed his finger into the air. “The gunsmiths of Hrusch Avenue might have had something to do with it. They certainly know gunpowder, and they don’t like that I’ve been trying to unionize them.”
“Do you have candidates for a new textile union head?” Adamat asked, voicing a sudden thought before it slipped his mind.
“Of course. I can’t stand any of them.”
“And you have the power to just appoint one?”
“Technically. In an emergency. It would make a lot of people very angry, though.”
“There’s a foreman in the textile mill off of Vines Avenue. Her name is Margy. Very intelligent. Might shake things up a little if you appointed her.”
“An unknown,” Cheris said. “Intriguing.”
“It’s just a thought. She’s politically conservative, vocal about her opinions, but not a troublemaker. She has no love of Tamas or the council, but there’s no chance that she’d back Claremonte. Not after he leveled all of the churches in the city.”
“Fell!” Ricard yelled. “Fell, where are you, damn it!”
The woman appeared in the doorway before he finished his sentence. She gave a slight bow at the waist. “You called, sir?”
“Look into a woman named Margy. See if she’d make a good candidate for the head of the textile union as an appointee. She’s a foreman in the mill in…”
“On Vines Avenue,” Adamat supplied.
“Yes. On Vines.”
“Yes sir. Good afternoon, Inspector.”
“Good afternoon, Fell.”
“I’ll send a man over, sir,” Fell said to Ricard.
“Do it quietly. I don’t want anyone getting wind of this.”
The grandfather clock on the far side of the room suddenly chimed twice. Lady Cheris removed a pocket watch from the folds of her dress and checked it, then approached Ricard, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “I have to go.”
“Come by tonight?”
“Of course.”
She bid Adamat a good afternoon and left quickly. Ricard moved over to her spot by the window, his fist under his chin. “What was that?” Adamat asked.
“What was what?”
“The kiss. Are you two…?”
Ricard flashed him a tight grin. “Perhaps a little.”
“I remember you mentioning that she hated you.”
“It’s an alliance of convenience. For both of us.”
“So she doesn’t hate you?”
“Oh, she does. And I hate her back. We’ve been on-and-off lovers for the last fifteen years. You know how it goes. Passion, politics.”
“And you’ve never told me?”
“A man has to have some secrets.”
“You’ve been married to various wives for much of that time.”
Ricard gave a noncommittal shrug. “Cheris is very smart. And ambitious. That’s attractive to me. And my money and ambition are attractive to her. It’s a match made in the pit. We’ll be back to trying to kill each other after this whole thing is over.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
“What? Oh. I know what you’re thinking,” Ricard said. “Cheris didn’t try to have me killed. She’d have nothing to gain from it. She’s not in my will and most of the other union bosses hate her. Without my support she’d be out of the union within a year.”
“I see.” Adamat wasn’t convinced. He’d have to go through his memories later and try to sort out anything he knew about Cheris – or anything Ricard had mentioned about her. If the two had been lovers for that long, they had certainly hid it well. It reminded Adamat that boisterous and loud though Ricard could be, he also had a talent for subtlety that most people missed.
“Something good has come about from this whole affair with Claremonte,” Ricard said.
“Oh?”
“Apparently I have the support of the religious right.”
Adamat couldn’t help but bark a laugh. “Is that a draft in the room, or has the pit frozen over?”
“Cigar?” Ricard offered after a quiet laugh. “Glass of wine?” Without waiting for an answer, he shouted for Fell again.
The undersecretary appeared once more in the door, a bottle of wine already in one hand and two glasses in the other. “Ahead of you, sir.”
“Adamat, have I told you that I couldn’t live without this woman?”
Fell poured two glasses and handed one to Adamat, who swirled it around and took a sip. He eyed the undersecretary cautiously. Assistant, political liaison, seductress, bodyguard, assassin. Trained at the most exclusive finishing school in the world, Ricard had said. Somewhere between a slave and an indentured servant, Fell was the most capable person Ricard had brought onto his staff in… well… ever.
Could she have betrayed him?
Adamat pushed the thought away. Ricard had let Fell completely into his confidence. If she wanted to kill him, she could have done so any number of ways. She could have killed or destroyed him several times over in the last few months. Unless she had something more long-term in mind…
“Ricard.”
“Yes?”
“Can Claremonte really win?”
“What? Of course not. He’s a foreigner. He destroyed historic public property. The man is a menace.”
“Seriously, Ricard.”
Ricard returned to his pacing, wine in one hand and cigar in the other. He paused on the opposite side of the room and drained the rest of the glass in one long draught.
This wasn’t going anywhere. Adamat turned to Fell, who had slipped into a chair along the back wall of the suite. She had one foot tucked under her and the opposite knee pulled up to her chest – no mean feat in a black tailored suit. “Can Claremonte win?” he asked her.
She glanced at Ricard, then said, “He has a good chance. He has managed to gain a remarkable amount of support in just the last few weeks – much of it had already been arranged through intermediaries.”
“Lord Vetas?” Adamat asked, the very name making his skin crawl.
“Some,” Fell admitted. “That’s what he’d been in town doing, after all. Paving the way for Claremonte. When we took Vetas, we got a list of names of people he’d bribed, cajoled, and threatened into backing Claremonte. Some of them we’ve been able to turn. Others are still in his pocket.”
“But it’s worse than we thought.”
“Much worse,” Fell said. “Several of the prominent gunsmiths have backed him and – coincidentally – the Brudania-Gurla Trading Company has signed countless new contracts for Hrusch rifles. Dozens of big merchants are campaigning for him and will not even see our people. We think they fear the Trading Company and the power they have over shipping. His public approval is high because of his perceived protection of the city.”