Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 10

  ‘They took Shamira?’ In his mind he saw again Sabid al-Muzaffar, deep in conversation with the official of the Paris police . . .

  The urchin shook her head violently. ‘The Arab girl got away,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t follow – there was just the two of us, and Poucet said to come get you. They got Ayasha.’

  NINE

  There was a statue of St Peter in a niche a few houses down, beside the door of the oldest house in the street; January shoved his music satchel behind it, with a prayer that it would still be there when – if – he got back. His blood like ice and all thought of sleep rinsed from his brain, he caught Chatoine’s hand. ‘Sabid’s house? In Charenton?’

  She nodded. He caught her up – she weighed no more than her namesake kitten – set her on his shoulder, and strode off toward the river in the icy dark.

  At this hour even the student cafés in the Rue St-Jacques were dark, and the workers’ taverns along the Quai de la Tournelle had not yet opened. Only in the Hôtel Dieu did lights burn, sullen orange dribbles on the moonless blackness. The towers of Notre Dame reared against the starry abyss, like the sterncastle of a ghost ship being swept through nightmare waters toward the uttermost ends of the earth.

  ‘Poucet’s keeping watch.’ Chatoine’s little fingers clung to his collar. ‘This afternoon the mec you put us on – the Abbé – went to the convent. Poucet sent me back to tell you, but you were gone, so Ayasha came out with us, all dressed up like a servant. She went in just before it got dark, and we all stayed outside to wait for her. But she didn’t come out.’

  Virgin Mary, Mother of God, January prayed as he walked, show me what to do. The cold air cut his lungs; beneath the arches of the Pont de la Tournelle the Seine sounded thick and menacing, sable water curling against the worn stones, invisible in the darkness.

  ‘We waited and waited, and it rained and got really cold. Poucet sent Malapatte back to look for you twice. Then just when the clock struck midnight the flics came . . .’

  ‘You’re sure it was the police?’ Virgin Mother, send me help . . . uphold Ayasha in your hand . . .

  The oil lamps that hung above the intersections of the larger streets had gone out. The Île St-Louis, with its ancient mansions and narrow streets, had the look of a necropolis across the water in the ghostly starlight: like the crowded brick tombs of the St-Louis Cemetery that January had known as a child, in that murky city where the dead could not lie in the ground.

  ‘They were dressed like flics,’ said Chatoine. ‘I recognized old Daddy Margis from the Châtelet station, and anyway they came in the chicken wagon. That Arab was with them, Sabid, and his men, and the flics all did what he said.’

  ‘Damn them.’ How easy Sabid would have found it, to twist the story as it was trumpeted from one wealthy matron to another at Tambonneau’s ball that evening. All he needed was a police official who was tired of making exceptions to the law for the benefit of the King’s friends. It is MY concubine they’re all talking about, my friend, and what they aren’t saying is that she robbed the house when she left it . . .

  Simple as spinning a little thread with your fingers out of wool you found caught on a bush.

  The girl is a liar and a thief and has no intention of converting . . . She’s making fools of those nuns and a fool of the authorities . . .

  ‘Then there was a lot of shouting,’ Chatoine went on as January’s feet thudded on the Pont Marie’s worn flagstones. ‘Two nuns ran out from the stable gate. Only, there were lanterns by the gate, and I saw one of them was really Ayasha. One of Sabid’s men came out right after them yelling to stop them. The other nun got away, and most of the men went after her, but three of them grabbed Ayasha. She was yelling curses really bad – she called the Mother Abbess a kosefil when she came out. A kosefil is—’

  ‘I know what it is. So the Mother Abbess came out?’ Starlight barely showed him the outlines of the riverbank, between the quay and the actual water – the batture, they called that marginal ground in Louisiana. The moist breath of the flood brought the stink of coal to him, and the bark of a bargeman’s dog.

  ‘She slapped Ayasha.’ The little girl’s voice filled with hurt and distress, that one who should have helped had believed the word of the enemy. ‘She called her a garce and a thief, and told the men they could take her away. That’s when Ayasha called her a kosefil. They put her in the chicken wagon with two of the Arabs and a flic. The rest of them went off with Sabid. Poucet followed them, and he told me to get you and tell you—’

  ‘How long ago were you waiting outside my house?’

  ‘An hour. I ran back as fast as I could.’

  All the way from Batignolles, in utter blackness and freezing cold. January thought of little Mesdemoiselles Harbonnière, who couldn’t even be bothered to learn their scales. France, don’t you understand what treasure you’re wasting, when you leave children of this courage and this loyalty to grow up in the streets? He slipped and scrambled down to the batture, shoes slithering in the clayey mud. The gates in the customs barrier would not open until nearly sunrise. Beyond the barrier, the remains of the ditches that had once been the city moat made an easy route to clamber back to higher ground. The old district of St-Antoine was a pitch-black labyrinth, every house barred against roving packs of thieves. Among the locked-up wine-depots behind the quay, January drew back from the movement of shapes barely seen in a narrow street; a hoarse voice whispered, ‘Hey, cossu, where you bound, eh?’ and a blade glinted in the blackness.

  ‘Piss off,’ retorted Chatoine, in purest thieves’ cant, ‘espèce de con; who you callin’ a cossu?’

  ‘Va-t’en, sonny—’

  ‘Va-t’en yourself! We need help against the flics – You gonna come, you gonna let us get on our way?’

  The shadows melted away. Chatoine called after them, ‘Hey! Connard! Give us a surin, eh? My friend don’t got one.’

  From the shadows, a voice asked doubtfully, ‘You really goin’ after the flics?’

  ‘No,’ retorted January, also in the slang of the underworld, ‘we’re meetin’ the King for tea, and I forgot to shave.’

  Metal flashed in starlight, then rang on the filthy cobbles at his feet. ‘Razor one up for me, eh, copain?’

  They were gone even as January bent to pick up the weapon. The knife was thin and balanced like a sharpened butcher’s tool.

  It was colder in the more open lanes of Charenton. Above the wall of Sabid’s villa, the windows of the house were dark. January circled cautiously through the lanes behind the property and sensed that the place did not sleep. A smudge of yellowish light – lamp, or candle – flickered for a moment on the underside of the stable eave. Stealthy feet crunched gravel. January’s heart seemed to turn over inside him at the sound.

  Ayasha was useless to her captors. She’d gotten Shamira out of the convent, but Shamira was gone. If Sabid had captured Shamira, he’d kill the woman who was with her simply to avoid an encumbrance. No witness, no risk.

  And if he hadn’t captured Shamira, he’d come back and ask Ayasha where the girl had gone.

  Dear God—

  January retreated across the road. Trees grew along a crumbling boundary-wall, the shadows below them an Erebus of black. Dry leaves crunched; he whispered, ‘Poucet?’

  A man seized him from behind. January turned, tried to slash with the knife, and Chatoine squeaked as she was pulled off his shoulders. In the starlight he glimpsed a second man in front of him as more hands caught his wrist. His leg swept out, hooked the feet from one of his assailants; he twisted his body. They’ll have knives . . .

  ‘Silence!’ Starlight ghosted along the bald curve of a shaved head. ‘One noise and they come out and kill us all. Who are you?’

  ‘Janvier.’ January yanked his arm from the loosened grip of the men behind him. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Abu.’

  The name only meant servant, but the man’s speech, and the smell of his clothing and that of the others behind him
– frankincense and strong tobacco – caused January to ask, ‘You are servants of Hüseyin Pasha?’

  The man before him nodded, and one of the men in the utter black of the shadows hissed, ‘Shaitan!’ and the next second, January heard the scramble of Chatoine’s tiny feet darting away into the night.

  ‘Did they bring in a woman?’ he whispered urgently. ‘Not Shamira. She’d have been in the black dress of a nun—’

  ‘What know you of Shamira?’ The man called Abu turned his face toward the house. Starlight showed January a jutting nose and thick lips, a mustache the size of a small raccoon and eyes overhung by a massive brow. ‘The other woman they brought in between two and three.’

  Four had struck some minutes before on the clock of Notre-Dame de Bercy.

  ‘I do not know for certain,’ said January softly. ‘But I am fairly sure that Sabid lied to the police, to get men and a warrant to take Shamira from the convent where she had gone for refuge.’

  ‘A convent?’ Abu’s ape-like brow clouded. ‘She—’

  ‘She was there.’ January held up his hand. ‘I know. My wife found her there and convinced her to leave, I don’t know how. It is my wife that Sabid’s men have taken. If they have not brought Shamira in, where she is I do not know. Has Sabid himself returned?’

  Abu shook his head.

  ‘Then we may be in time. I may be in time. And you, too, if you will help me . . . In the name of Allah, the All-Compassionate, will you help me? I can’t get her out of there alone.’

  Abu took January’s arm in one meaty hand, squeezed it reassuringly. ‘Have you been in the house? Or the grounds?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have. Who is with you?’

  ‘Only the child.’

  ‘Leave him out of this.’ Abu grunted and glanced in the direction Chatoine had fled. ‘Your child?’

  ‘A child of the streets.’ As always, January used the masculine pronoun to speak of Chatoine. Bad enough Hüseyin’s servants would think he would willingly endanger an urchin, without revealing that that barely-glimpsed urchin was a six-year-old girl. ‘My wife was good to him and his brothers. They were helping us find Shamira.’

  ‘Were they, indeed?’ As they spoke thus, in the barest of whispers, they moved through the darkness along the wall, to where it made a corner in a thin woodland. So dense was the night beneath the trees that the wall – and the shapes of the stable roof and the taller house-roof beyond – were barely to be seen, but January smelled tobacco smoke and guessed there was a gate of some kind in the rear that led out into the woods.

  And the gate was guarded.

  Abu signaled them to retrace their steps to the front of the property, which was in all about a hundred meters deep. Here at the edge of the faubourgs, where the houses were thin, the frontage on the road was far wider than in the more densely built-up areas. The next cluster of buildings – unwalled – lay perhaps three hundred meters away, lightless and smelling of cows. ‘And how comes this to be any affair of your good wife?’

  ‘As a woman, my wife pitied her.’ January strained his senses in the inky shadows, to guess how many men Abu had with him, or how well they might be armed. ‘And feared for her, when the Lady Jamilla told us that when Shamira made her escape, this man Sabid would follow her, to make her a pawn in the fight between himself and her master.’

  ‘And did your good wife,’ returned Abu a little grimly, ‘have the intention of returning Shamira to the house of her master, that Hüseyin Pasha might not be robbed of his child?’

  ‘I know not Ayasha’s intent. Perhaps neither did she. Only to keep Shamira safe from Sabid, and to speak to her. To see what it was that she wanted.’

  Abu grunted, then stood silent for a time, listening. For his part, January heard his own voice speaking with a kind of amazement. How can I sound so calm? Within him his heart was screaming at God: Don’t let them harm her—! Yet he noted, almost with detachment, that Abu and the others – there were three of them – wore the traditional Turkish garments that seemed obligatory for the servants of Hüseyin Pasha. That Abu was armed with a brace of pistols.

  ‘I think you need to learn to school your wife, African,’ said Abu at last, but there was a trace of humor in his voice.

  January took a deep breath. ‘If I can ever find a man who would show me how to survive such a lesson, I would think about it.’

  ‘Hmph. A woman—’

  What he would have said, January never knew, for distantly in the dark hooves clattered, and – blinding as sunlight after hours of starlight and dark – lanterns flared as they came into the lane. So bright did the light seem that for a moment January couldn’t see past it: two lanterns, and the dim flash of a horse’s eyes. In the same instant he heard light small feet on the dirt roadbed, and a youthful voice whispered, ‘Janvier?’

  ‘Here. It’s all right,’ he added, guessing that Poucet – for it was Poucet – would flee, as Chatoine had, from the shadows of the Turks.

  ‘They didn’t find her,’ whispered the boy. ‘Ayasha—’

  ‘You’ve got to get her out!’ added Chatoine’s voice from the darkness.

  ‘I didn’t understand what he said –’ desperate fear shook Poucet’s voice – ‘but you know he’s going to try to make her tell!’

  ‘Where would he have her?’ January glanced back at Abu. ‘Cellar or attic? Quickly, man—’

  ‘Cellar. He has French servants—’

  The riders were approaching the gate. ‘How many are with you, Poucet? Do you have your slingshots? Get across the road, now, and shoot at the horses when they reach the gate.’

  ‘You cannot expect those children—’ gasped Abu, shocked.

  ‘Run like hell the moment someone comes after you,’ January went on. ‘We just need the noise. Go! Now!’

  Brother and sister vanished like alley cats into the night. January caught Abu’s elbow, dragged him along the wall toward the rear of the grounds again. ‘If there’s a commotion at the gate the guards inside the house will run toward it. Can we get over the rear gate?’

  ‘If there’s no guard. The entry is arched, but the gate is flat across the top. There’s space between for a man to slip through, if he has someone to boost him up.’

  Weeds lashed January’s calves, and he stumbled on the uneven ground along the wall. Behind them he heard the angry whinny of a horse, and then another. Men shouted curses. Virgin Mother, watch over your children . . .

  ‘Would Sabid truly torture this girl, to obtain back the letter Hüseyin went to find in England?’

  ‘The Lady told you that, did she?’ Abu panted a little, striving to keep up with January’s longer strides. ‘He would. And anyone – even those poor children – who stood in his way.’

  Their feet slithered in the ditch. So cold was the night that ice had formed there, but January barely felt it, even when it soaked his shoes.

  ‘Sabid lost everything when he was banished,’ Abu went on. ‘The men who bribed him will support him in this country for a time, but he must return to power if he is to survive. And, he has his pride. He is convinced that what he does is for the good of the Empire. Such men are the most dangerous of all.’

  One hand touching the stones of the wall, January turned the corner, strode swiftly until he felt the stones of a gate arch and, an instant later, heavy panels of iron-strapped wood. ‘Here.’ The men gathered around them: a whisper of fabric, a thick breath of tobacco and spices and sweat.

  ‘Daud,’ breathed Abu, followed by a string of instructions in Turkish. A man grunted in reply. January had seen that one of Abu’s followers was nearly as tall as he was himself, muscled like an ox. He heard the wood of the gate creak as someone – presumably the mighty Daud – leaned against it. ‘Daud will be our ladder. Will you follow me over, African?’

  A moment later the hinges rattled. Distantly, January could still hear commotion around the gates, and he prayed that Poucet and his siblings were able to slip away in the dark. He tri
ed not to count the moments that he knew were all they’d have.

  A hand took his arm, guided him. Like an acrobat he put a foot into a stirrup made from a man’s clasped hands, and as he was boosted up – no small feat given his size – he scrambled for the top of the gate. A rope hung over it, aiding him as he went over, and he remembered to keep his head low. All I’d need is to brain myself on the arch . . .

  A single lantern beside the stable door showed him the bulky silhouette of Abu, the dark orifices of other doors: carriage house, laundry rooms, wood cellar, wine cellar. He turned back in time to see another of Abu’s men come over the gate, and a third: tough, solid soldiers in their loose salvars and short jackets, shaven heads bare. Abu drew the dangling rope to the side of the gate, so that its shape might not be as obvious in the darkness. January strained his ears to reassure himself that the tumult by the front gate continued, but heard nothing. Because the house is in the way? Because they’ve already come in . . . ?

  The third man over the gate carried a dark-lantern of pierced tin, which he kindled from the stable lamp.

  Abu led the way at a run across the stable yard, down a brick-paved ramp to a low arch. Wine cellar, thought January. Carts bring the barrels in, men roll them down below the house . . .

  Would Sabid drink wine?

  The cellar was closed with a padlock and hasp, and Abu made short work of these with a small crowbar. The lantern’s yellow gleam caught the flash of a blade as the henchman stepped back to keep guard on the cellar door. Then darkness, as Abu covered the light. In that darkness a thread of muddy orange shone in the cellar door’s cracks, and as January’s hand touched the wood of the door he heard, on the other side, Ayasha’s voice scream, ‘No!’

  TEN

  She added, in a fury of desperation, ‘Son of a dog!’ as January ripped one of the pistols from Abu’s sash, and both he and the Turk hurled open the cellar doors.