The Eterna Files (15 page)

“It's good to see you, too, Fred,” Clara said with a laugh. His energy wiped away the disaster site's lingering chill.

“Oh. Yes. Right. I haven't seen you in, what, a month?” the man processed. “Sorry. Hello!” He waved at them both.

“Two months since we last called upon your services, my friend,” Franklin clarified.

The tall man blinked chestnut-colored eyes. “Has it truly been that long?”

Clara nodded. “What has been keeping you busy?” she asked.

“Well, I read the whole collection of the circulating library near Union Square.”

“What were you looking for?” Franklin asked.

“Peace,” the man replied, staring Clara straight in the eye. Fred was compulsive. A voracious reader and live wire, he kept himself content by constant intake.

“May we all find peace,” Clara said softly. “Now, tell me why the British are coming.”

“You remember Brinkman, right?” Fred asked. “Our slippery Brit, snooping for years?”

He leaped over to sit in the chair opposite Clara, bumping his skinny knees against her desk. The man was a bloodhound of logs and ledgers, of finding needles in haystacks, an invaluable asset, as America was vast and so was her paperwork. It was a blessing that Bishop had found him and his sister through a mutual circle of progressive Republican activists.

“Do you see this in yesterday's southbound logs?” he said, pointing to a line on a ledger page. “Look how a Mr.
Bankman
appears, an alias of Brinkman, you can tell as there's the same slant to the script, he appears on liners via the same agents who deal chiefly in British interests.”

“Good eye, Fred,” Clara declared.

“Thank you, ma'am. But this is a man who, it seems, shuttles solely between New York and London. Why would he now travel so far, having bought passage all the way to New Orleans? It doesn't mean that that's where he's going, but the ticket gives him leave to travel the length of the Mississippi. Is there something down there to be aware of?”

Clara ignored the searing pain that seized her at the mention of New Orleans; that magical, mysterious place that had raised Louis Dupris. There could be a correlation: maybe dear Louis was the one who escaped after all. Her heart leaped at the hope.

“Maybe there is,” Clara said quietly. “Fred, you're a genius.” She closed the ledgers and returned them to the man, who would return them to their rightful owners, the ships' companies. “But do take a moment, breathe, eat something. You're all elbows.”

“Will your office be sending a tail?” he asked with a grin.

“But of course, Fred,” Clara declared. “Set your sister loose.”

Fred clapped and called over his shoulder, “Effie!”

“You brought her with you.” Franklin chuckled. “Of course you did.”

Clara and Franklin watched Miss Ephegenia Bixby traipse into the room in a modest calico day dress that covered a figure as gangly as her younger brother's. Her brown spiral curls, less red than her brother's, were wound tightly to her head and mostly covered by a lace bonnet. She and her brother both were dusted with a smattering of brown freckles.

As far as most knew, the Bixbys had always lived in Greenwich Village. But Clara, Franklin, and Josiah knew the truth: they used to go home to a neighborhood where the average skin color was far darker, the law less fair, and the opportunities far slimmer. Unfair as Clara thought it was that they felt they had to, the conditions of the country were such that the Bixbys had made a harrowing choice to leave those lives behind and reinvent themselves.

It was something Louis had talked about often. When he imagined a future with Clara, not in New Orleans but in New York, if they dared go public, Louis would continue to pass.… Clara clenched her jaw and forced him from her mind.

Effie kissed her brother daintily on the cheek, then turned to Clara.

“‘Bankman.' won't be far off yet,” she stated, her voice musical and pleasant. “If I take one of the newer express trains, I could catch up to a port of call in a day. Shall I go?” Excitement lit her brown eyes, indicating her happiness at the thought of more adventure than was usually afforded her sex.

Effie was as energetic as her brother, but better at controlling it. The young woman could find anyone. Anywhere. A family of bloodhounds—one for names and paperwork, one for actual persons—and Clara had had the great fortune of utilizing their services in honor of their country. She felt sorry for snooping England, who couldn't possibly possess such unique talents.

“Yes, Miss Bixby,” Clara exclaimed. “Please go and foil that bully England!”

CHAPTER

SEVEN

When Harold Spire woke, he did the same first thing he did nearly every morning; clear the crimson-drenched image of his mother out of his mind. The human body has a great deal of blood to spill. Despite being moved to new, still unfamiliar apartments, despite the fact that the majority of his modest belongings remained in boxes, the daily routine of wiping horror away remained, unchanged. Something within him had died with his mother, seventeen years earlier. Only police work made him feel as though there was still a heart somewhere inside his hollow body.

But his new appointment was hardly police work and it hardly gave him purpose. Indeed, it was an example of the very thing he'd sought all his life to avoid, having grown up in his mad father's absurd worlds of extremes and ridiculous fictions.

Knight urging Spire to visit his father had struck quite a chord. A woman of the theater, she didn't have to be psychic to know about the disconnect between father and son. The last time Spire had gone for an indefinite time without visiting his father or seeing one of his shows, the man launched a production about filial abandonment. All over London, adverts and plastered playbills announcing the show brightly proclaimed:

My Son, My Son, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?—The Truth in Two Acts
by Victor Spire.

This angered the junior Spire more than he could possibly express. He got quite the ribbing for it at the precinct, save from his trusted colleague Grange, who had found it in as poor taste as the sensational account Victor Spire had published of his wife's death years prior. That, for Harold Spire, had been the nail in the coffin of paternal affection. The play about the faithless son did, however, ensure that Harold paid
dear old dad
a reluctant visit once a month. His usual interval having nearly expired, Spire had determined today would be the day. Now more than ever, he could not afford light being shone his direction and so he embarked upon the dread routine, lest his father once again expose him to the world.

His whole day, in fact, would be trying, he thought, prematurely weary. After his reluctant visit, he would attend an Eterna “team meeting” at their new offices. Keys had been deposited through the mail slot of his door with a note giving the address—somewhere in Millbank—and setting the meeting time at noon.

Seeing the building where he had been raised, down a curving street just outside the Covent Garden district, always made Spire anxious. Not only because of the violence that had taken place here, but because his father did nothing to deter the air of misery and anxiety that permeated the walls.

He climbed the stoop and tried the lock in the weather-worn door that needed a new layer of black paint. As always, he was surprised to find the locks from childhood unchanged.

“Father,” Spire called up the stairs.

“Harry, I presume?” growled a voice.

“Unless you have another son,” Spire said wearily.

“Oh,” followed by a dramatic moan, then, “I have a
son,
do I?”

Spire sighed.
And so it begins …

Harold Spire ascended the wooden stairs, noting dusty railings, moldering carpet, and wood that groaned beneath his boots. The house's front windows were sooty and there was no lamp or lantern to light his way; everything inside as gray as a London alley. Victor Spire could not keep a housekeeper. Spire didn't know if his father's trouble with staff was due to the widespread knowledge that there had been a death in the building—histrionic folk claiming to see the specter of Mrs. Spire—or to his father's odd temperament. The lack of a housekeeper was probably for the best as Victor didn't have enough funds to employ one anyway.

Two flights up, Spire stepped onto the landing. He heard other footsteps now and studied the half-open wooden pocket doors before him, whose intricate carvings bore the same level of dust as the balustrade. A sweeping flash of red within made Spire squint.

Victor Spire had bought the town house after the financial—though not critical—successes of his first novel and its popular stage adaptation. The home had Gothic tracery and detailing, arched windows with stained glass in deep reds and blues, and was the closest Victor could come to the castle he'd written about in his homage to Horace Walpole, his idol.

The Northernmost Castle
had been filled with every titillating thing usually encountered in a Gothic yarn, but with an absurdly high body count. Spire had started reading it before his mother was killed. After, he blamed the novel for the heinous act and moved out of his father's house as soon as he joined the police.

Police work, to Harold Spire, was the antithesis of his father's fantasies. Victor Spire made up ridiculous ways of hurting people and getting on in the world. Harold Spire fought against troubled fools who made such fictions reality.

Spire slid open the doors and entered an empty space with lancet windows of deep-colored stained glass like those described in Edgar Allan Poe's “Masque of the Red Death.” Shafts of color speared into the room but the result was more muddy mess than cathedral of light.

The threadbare carpet that Victor had paced holes in had once been a beautiful Persian rug in an intricate black and white floral pattern. There was little furniture in the room apart from a chair, a writing desk, and a tea tray, yet it was still too much, an over-the-top clash of color and pattern, of hard edges and blurred lines.

At the sound of the doors, Victor Spire had paused in mid-step, his back to his son. He wore a long red satin robe, something Asian-looking, his white hair wild. Unless he had shaved it since Harold's previous visit, his aging father sported a lengthening white goatee. To his relief, Harold Spire had more of his mother's features; a refined, genteel look, comely and stoic, as opposed to his father's hard angles and drooping mouth. It seemed as if the years were turning the elder Spire's face into the tragedy half of the paired masks that had come to symbolize the dramatic profession.

“Harry,” Victor Spire growled.

“Father,” Spire replied shortly. He hated being called Harry. “The place is looking worn,” he continued, standing beside a shaft of yellow light from a bit of jaundiced stained glass. “What happened to that nice box keeper from the Lyceum, one of those long-suffering friends who make up your theatrical circle. Didn't she used to come around and straighten things up?”

“Left for Paris,” Victor said, waving a languid, wrinkled hand as he continued walking; his hair took on different colors as he passed in and out of the colored beams of light that penetrated the room. “Why do all the good souls of this earth go to France?”

Spire gritted his teeth and ignored his father's inadvertent jab. Victor Spire likely didn't remember that the woman Spire nearly proposed to had been a French spy. The man didn't take the trouble to know or ask much about his son's life.

“Haven't the foggiest,” Spire said, trying to sound dismissive. “I've come to tell you I'm living in Westminster now, Rochester Street. I've a new appointment. I can't say anything about it, the department is classified. So if you come looking for me at the Metropolitan, you won't find me. If you need anything, send word to this address.” He placed a card on his father's writing table, adding bitterly; “I can't have you writing another play about a vanished son.”

His father made a nondescript sound. Spire wasn't sure it was a response to what he'd said, but considering there was no calculating look in his father's eyes, he felt confident that the man hadn't had anything to do with the Omega appointment. Fate was instead playing a particularly cruel joke. If there was a God, surely this was evidence of His great love of irony.

“Father.” Spire sighed. “Would you stop pacing a moment?”

“No,” Victor said, sounding horrified. “Pacing keeps me sane.”

Spire chortled. “I think that's relative.” He found his father's unfailing habit of relentlessly pacing the floorboards, day in and day out, childish and self-indulgent.

His father whirled to face him, red robes jerking to a halt. “Smug. You know, that's what you've become, smug. I hate smug.”

Harold stared at his father, wondering when he'd last felt genuine affection for the man. “Smug keeps me sane,” Spire replied after a tense moment. A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of Victor's pursed mouth.

“Congratulations on your appointment,” the older man said with sudden brightness. “Will you come see my new play? It opens next month.”

The consequences if he refused to attend would be as melodramatic and absurd, but far more long-lasting and public than suffering through the play itself. “Yes,” he replied simply.

His father beamed, for the first time, showing a flicker of true warmth. “Good then!” He rummaged among the papers strewn on his desk, selected a sheet, and thrust it at his son.

Spire kept his face neutral as he read it: a theater bill, printed in bright red:

AT THE LYCEUM FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!
A Seventh Wonder of the Dramatic World
by Victor Spire, inimitable author of
The Northernmost Castle
! PRESENTING A STORY OF PASSION AND POISON! OF REVENGE, RUINATION, AND LARGE REPTILES: