A Web of Air (15 page)

“Who? Why?”

“The
why
I do not know. As for
who,
I have only a name. Lothar Vishniak.”

Fever tried to hide her little start of recognition, but he noted it, and nodded. “Who he works for, I don’t know, but I’m certain he was in Nice when Carax died, and in Thelona a few months ago when young Saraband was killed. It would be a shame if Arlo Thursday turned out to be next on his list.”

“Why do you care?” asked Fever.

“Because I believe that Thursday is on the right track. He is building an
aëroplane,
isn’t he? Come, Miss Crumb, I know you talk to him. He will not open his gate to me, I can only keep watch on him from a distance, but you, you’ve been up to the house; I’ve seen you. He has shown you the machine, hasn’t he?”

He was leaning towards Fever across the narrow desk, his eyes bulging slightly in his eagerness to know. She said nothing.

“Miss Crumb,” said Flynn, “Vishniak is in Mayda! I have seen him! Your friend Thursday must be made to understand how much danger he is in. I have tried. I have sent letters, posted notes, rung at his bell, but he takes no notice. He thinks I am a bad man, an enemy. But you, you talk to him. You must go and warn him. And you must take me with you. If I am with you, perhaps he’ll listen to me. Perhaps he will let me protect him and his invention!”

That’s what he’s really after,
Fever thought.
He doesn’t care about Arlo at all. This story of murders he’s spun me is probably all lies. Perhaps he’s told the same lies to Arlo in his notes and letters and that’s where Arlo got the notion from. He’s just after the machine. Maybe he invented Vishniak just to scare Arlo into sharing his secrets
…

“Well?” said Midas Flynn, still watching her. His steep forehead was covered with beads of moisture, like warm cheese. “We can go now. Tonight. This building will climb to the second level soon. It’s not far from there to Casas Elevado. Will you introduce me to Senhor Thursday, Miss Crumb? Will you vouch for me?”

Fever wondered what she should say. She had no intention of taking him to Arlo, but if she told him that, he might become unpleasant. She was alone here, at Flynn’s mercy. Those hired thugs of his were still downstairs. It would be more rational to lie and pretend she would go along with him, then find some way to escape once they were outside. But she hated lies, and knew she was no good at telling them. She needed to calm herself and prepare, but it was impossible with Flynn’s eager eyes fixed on her. She looked away. A door in the corner of the room stood ajar. She could hear water trickling in there; a toilet cistern filling. To buy time she said, “May I use your…”

“Of course,” said Midas Flynn. “I am a patient man, Miss Crumb. But we may not have much time…” His eyes followed her all the way to the door.

She closed it behind her. The room she had stepped into was bigger than she’d expected. It contained not just a toilet but a bath too, left over from days when the Red Herring had been some Maydan merchant’s high class villa. The bolt did not work. She closed the door and leant against it and wondered what to do. She went to the washbasin and stared at herself in the mirror, her face lit by the red glow of the big gas-lit sign bolted to the wall outside the frosted window. Rain was patting at the glass. She wondered if it was raining in Meriam, too. The
Lyceum
would have to raise its awnings to keep the audience dry…

The room lurched suddenly like a land-barge going over rough ground. Midas Flynn’s greyish toothbrush jiggled in a glass mug on the side of the bath. The Red Herring was on the move. Fever heard a bang from Flynn’s office, a startled shout. She thought he had dropped something. But that seemed strange; he must be used to the club’s movements. He had told her himself that it was about to set off, so it should not have caught him by surprise…

“Great gods!” she heard him say, his voice sounding strange and muffled through the door. And then,

“Vishniak!”

A second bang, just like the first. The thud and scuffle of something heavy falling.

She held her breath, standing there in the half dark, in the blood-red glow from the window. The building quaked and rumbled as it was dragged up the cliffside. On the other side of the door she could hear someone moving about; opening and closing drawers, dropping things. She bent down and peered through the keyhole, which showed her a corner of Flynn’s desk and a swift glimpse of a wet weatherproof cloak as someone walked past.

It wasn’t Flynn.

She straightened up quickly and the floor creaked under her heel. The movements outside stopped suddenly and she knew that whoever it was out there had heard. In the next instant there was another gunshot. A hole appeared in the bathroom door and a tile shattered on the wall behind her, dust and splinters pattering to the floor. The bullet must have missed Fever by inches. She froze; made a statue of herself, not even moving her eyes, which stayed fixed on the hole in the door, on the rod of yellow light which poked through it from the room beyond.

Footsteps came to the door. The hole darkened. She could hear someone breathing, just the other side of the thin wood.

Slowly, silently, the doorknob began to turn.

Fever waited until the door started to open, then stepped as noiselessly as she could into the angle behind it, flattening herself against the wall. Light came into the bathroom, and with it a silvery smell of gunpowder. A shadow fell across the chessboard tiles on the floor. Someone in a cloak and a hat. Someone with a pistol in his hand.

Vishniak,
she thought.

The hand holding the pistol came into view around the edge of the door. A man’s hand, the cuff of a wet sleeve, the pistol itself of northern workmanship, blond wood and steel, the long barrel decorated with a snarling wolf’s head.

She needed to breathe and she dared not. If the gunman so much as touched the open door it would press against her and he would feel the resistance and know that she was there. If he took just another step into the bathroom…

The cistern trickled again; a long trill of falling water and then a series of single, musical drips. The sound was a semitone higher than the noise the loose board had made, but to the man with the gun it must have sounded the same. He let out a sigh that was half a snort, turned, and was gone. Fever waited until she heard the outer door close before she let her own breath out. The moving building rumbled on. The toothbrush jiggled.

When she went back into the main room she could not see Midas Flynn at first. Then she spotted his feet poking out from behind the desk, tangled with the fallen chair. The patterns of hobnails on the soles of his boots glinted in the red light from the window like the eyes of spiders.

Fever stood in the bathroom doorway and watched the boots. They didn’t move. She listened, and heard the whisper of the rain, the drip of the cistern, her own raggedy breathing.

aster Flynn?” she said cautiously.

She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one. She went to the desk and looked over into the narrow gap between the desk and the wall. Midas Flynn was lying there, and the carpet under him glistened wetly in the red light. He was dead. You could tell he was dead because of the expressionless way his eyes watched the ceiling and because of the two big holes in the front of his tunic. There was blood on the wall too, and on the desk, which Fever didn’t notice until she put her hand down in it; it was thick and slightly warm. One of the drawers of the desk was half open and she could see the handle of a gun in there. She pulled it out, wondering if it were loaded, remembering how she’d loaded Kit Solent’s pistols for him in that sedan chair back in London.

“Midas?” said a voice, the door opening. She looked round. The girl who’d shown her up was coming into the room, a faint frown between her perfect eyebrows. Fever held up a hand to halt her. The girl stared at it; stared at the blood on it, at the pistol in Fever’s other hand, stared at the splashes on the wall, stared at Midas Flynn’s dead legs sticking out from behind the desk.

“He’s been shot,” said Fever.

The girl started to scream. It was a shrill, awful sound, like a klaxon, and Fever started to go towards her, wondering how to make her stop, but the girl backed away from her and slammed the door on her way out. “No!” shouted Fever, dropping the pistol and running to the door, but by the time she opened it the corridor outside was empty. She could hear the girl running away from her down the stairs, her fading shrieks mingling with the distant music. In a few moments she would be back, probably bringing Flynn’s hired thugs. They’d hear the girl’s story and they’d come up here and find her and find Flynn dead and there’d be nothing she could tell them that would make them believe she wasn’t the killer. She imagined trying to reason with them, but she knew too well that when people get panicky, reason is the first thing they abandon. They’d probably shoot her before she could get two words out. How had Vishniak come in and out without them seeing him? she wondered. He must have found a way in over the roof…

That gave her an idea. She went back into the room and closed the door, turning the key in the lock. She crossed the room and got in between the blind and the window to force the casement open. The night air smelled of rain and metal as she scrambled on to the shuddering, rain-slithery wooden window ledge. Above her a flaking cornice jutted out, spattered with the droppings of pigeons and angels. Raindrops fell from it and plunged past her through the red light from the fish-shaped sign and down into the steep ragged strip of cliff garden which separated The Red Herring from the rails of its counterweight. The rails glistened wetly in the light from the club. Fever looked up the slope and saw the counterweight coming down; a big white restaurant, stately as a ship. Beyond it, all along the cliff-side, buildings were going up or coming down, lights gleaming through the rain.

Back in the room she could hear fists pounding on the door and muffled voices shouting at her to open it. She glanced up the line again. The counterweight restaurant was still a hundred yards away, but it was coming quickly closer. She estimated The Red Herring’s speed to be a brisk walking pace; say four miles per hour. The counterweight must be moving at the same rate, which gave a combined speed of eight miles per hour. They would both reach the track’s halfway point at the same moment, and at that speed they might take twenty seconds to pass each other. That should be time enough…

The door burst open and the room started filling with men. They carried knives and swords; one held a pistol. Fever peeked in at them through the streaming windows, watching between the slats of the blind. She saw the one called Vigo giving orders to the others. He pointed to the half-open door of the bathroom and two of the others went in to check it. He stooped over Midas Flynn and she saw him shake his head. Then he raised it and looked straight at her through the blind.

She started to edge along the ledge. The wood was wet, slippery, rotten. A chunk fell off under her weight and dropped, turning over and over in the red light. She dug her nails into the wet boards of the wall to save herself from going with it.

“There she is!” Vigo was leaning out of the window, pointing her out to another man; the one with the pistol, who stretched it out towards her, holding one hand over the firing mechanism to keep the rain off it.

“It wasn’t me!” she shouted. “There was someone else! Vishniak, I think…”

“Don’t give me that!” he shouted back. “You killed Flynn!”

He was being as unreasonable as Fever had feared. She looked away from him. The descending restaurant was only a few yards uphill now, but it was veering away from her. In the spill of light from its verandas she saw that the rails curved here to allow the two buildings to pass each other with a few yards to spare.

Could she jump those few yards?

There was a flash and a hissy bang and a pistol ball sang past her nose and thudded into the cornice above her, spraying her with scales of old paint and splinters of rotted wood. She looked round. The gunman was already reloading, while one of his mates scrambled warily out on to the ledge with a knife in his hand.

It was either jump or die.

The restaurant was passing, filling the air with noise, splashing pale light up the walls of The Red Herring.

There was only one rational choice.

Desperate and ungainly, flapping her long limbs as if she were trying to fly, she flung herself across the yawning space between the buildings. Caught a whirling glimpse of the canyon between them, the lighted windows and the falling rain. Then she slammed against roof-tiles and slithered down, grabbing for a handhold, gasping, fetching up in a guttering. A pistol ball shattered a tile a few feet away. She turned her head and saw The Red Herring go grinding past, the Shadow Men watching her furiously from the window of Flynn’s room.