Smoking a green cigar with the window down changed the flavor, mellowed it without becoming smoky. The wind pulled at the burning leaf, and the Baron faced the open air to keep the ash from scattering onto his lap with every draw. In another time and place, it would’ve bothered the Baron to smoke under these conditions, but he only wanted enough nicotine to soothe, not to excite his nerves. With the central partition up and the window down, the cabbie permitted the vices of a man with taste and wealth. The dollar tip didn’t hurt either.
The Zombie was inspecting his dress shirt for drops of blood. There weren’t any, but despite his careless attitude about damaging clothes, he preferred to leave a sharp impression.
“That’s vain of you,” the Baron noted.
“Clothes are like tissues,” the Zombie responded primly. “They’re disposable, but you’d rather use something clean, even if it doesn’t truly matter.” He smoothed his sleeves and grinned. “Why are you smoking in a car?”
“I’m feeling… bothered. Also, I might stink of gunpowder.”
“You’re bothered?”
“Men died.”
“You saw a lot of dead people during the Fall of Trust,” the Zombie said. He’d killed a lot of people in front of the Baron during that decade in Europe.
“That bothered me too, but that’s not the problem here. Well, not the primary problem. That mafioso with the thick lips and mustache? He wanted revenge, and I told him he could have it.” He drew on the double claro, held the flavor—like herbs with a hint of grass and fruit, all burning—and blew the smoke out over the open road, gone in the wind.
The Zombie chuckled. “You’re going to need to explain that one.”
With his free hand, the Baron scratched the side of his nose. “Am I really the virtuous atheist? After all that?”
“I’d say so.”
The Baron grunted with dissatisfaction. “I promised one man to the dogs, and I probably killed the other while shooting to wound him. Not because it was good or bad either. Only because it was convenient.” He took a brief draw.
They were passing into the Red Hook area. Small brick homes stood between empty office buildings. The low rooftops and endless grimy alleys reminded the Baron of missing teeth in an old soldier’s mouth. Most of the war industry in this neighborhood had been abandoned within days of the German surrender, and few of their factories had produced for the Pacific Theatre. All that remained were the stevedores working the mouth of the Hudson. This place formed the first stage of the Erie Canal and essentially controlled shipping north to the Great Lakes. It was also a hotbed of secular Cosa Nostra activity, with almost every laborer paying dues to a mob-controlled union boss while playing deaf and dumb to murder and theft.
“Seems like you cared more about the results,” the Zombie replied after some time. “The stakes could be the world. No half-measures, right?”
“I don’t know? Maybe, probably even. At that moment, I just knew I wasn’t going to scrap with gangsters for the right to hand the man over to the police. It wasn’t moral.”
The Zombie reached out with a hand, then hesitated. No reason to risk a touch when there wasn’t much need for it. “Listen, you’re not wrong. You’ve changed, but for the better.”
The Baron glanced out the crack of the open window. Smoke and ashes fluttered off the tip of his cigar like butterfly wings, caught in a high spring breeze. “You think so?”
“I know it. In 1800, even after ten years of running in my bloody footprints, you wouldn’t have given that man to the Cosa Nostra. You might’ve risked your life to save your enemy. Now, you recognize that a murderer is worth less than the people you’ll help ”
“Mm. Times have changed.” The Baron drew briefly on the cigar, just to keep the tobacco burning. “Maybe I have a little too. Everything feels different after the atomic bomb.” He looked over at the Zombie. “What makes you so confident in your philosophy?”
“I’ve killed a lot of people, all kinds, and they’ve left all kinds of holes in the world. Some of them make the world better only by leaving it.”
The Baron frowned. “Could you ever tell which was which?”
The Zombie laughed. “I’d love to lie and say yes, but truthfully, I’ve never cared. I just noticed how things change. I’ve learned what killing means.”
The Baron shrugged. “I still haven’t figured it out—even after a world war or two. Or three, if you count the Napoleonic Wars.”
The Zombie smirked with such smug bravado that it nearly broke the Baron’s somber mood. Then he followed it up with equally absurd rhetoric: “If you need a lesson in applied ethics, just watch me. I’m sure I can show you a thing or two.”
The Baron grinned. “Maybe one or two dead bodies.”
“Just saying, dead people don’t fight. That’s pragmatism.”
The Baron shook his head, then returned his attention to the passing architecture, the crunching gravel of the streets, and the chill bluster of the morning wind. “All I can learn from you is how to drink a bottle of bleach without looking like an idiot.”
“That’s a trick you can only do once,” the Zombie said.
The Baron took one more draw and knocked the ash off his cigar. He had enough left to save for the end of the ride. He’d need to clip the burned end first though. “It’s too bad. You look so refreshed after a cup of someone else’s household cleaners.”
“That’s just style,” the Zombie said with exaggerated swagger.
The Baron removed the guillotine cutter from his case and snipped the cigar short, then packed everything away for safekeeping. The driver turned onto Clinton Wharf and slowly rolled down the empty road towards an emptier cruise terminal. To the right, there were chained lots with cars in them, slowly cooking their interiors until they cracked like lakebed mud. It must’ve been mixed parking for guests and American employees on the cruise.
To the left, there were brick and tin Dutch-style factories, row after row, with empty-socket streetlights and barren trees standing at the corners like sentinels of winter or something worse. The Baron could imagine a time, as yet unseen, when nobody lit the streets or patched up the broken windows, and on dark nights, animals crawled over the sills to hide in deeper shadows.
Where the road came up against the river, Governors Island was clearly visible. In contrast with this barren stretch of Red Hook, the trees across the water were a bright spring green, and before manila-colored houses were stretches of lawn marked irregularly with docks and motor-pools circled in chain link fencing. Technically the island was a US Army base, but from here it looked like a high-class residential district, isolated from the darker world all around.
Further out, Manhattan’s skyline and the lacy pattern of the Brooklyn Bridge stood visible through the light-blue haze of pollution, appearing as flat as a painting.
The Baron knocked on the partition between them and the cabbie. A moment later, a little glass door was opened to receive instructions. “Barilla’s Shoes, over there,” he said. There was a factory half a block from the water with light blue letters bolted to the facade.
The cabbie pulled up outside the factory and stopped. They’d paid ahead of time, no need to pay now, and they got out.
“Atheist!” a man shouted at them. “Devils!”
The warm, almost joyous tone was a pistol shot, shattering the Baron’s renewed calm, and his pulse raced away like a champion horse. He felt as tight-chested as he had after smoking his first pipe of tobacco as a young man. They’d been beaten to their destination by the most powerful man on the continent after the Zombie himself.
Meister Schuler was watching them from the shadow of recessed double doors. He wore an Anglican cassock and fine Franklin-style bifocals with thin, brightly polished copper rims. He smiled warmly at the Baron and the Zombie, his dirty blonde hair all mussed, like an old uncle back from the funny farm to greet his favorite nephews.
The Baron’s response was more than polite. It was friendly, and genuinely so, because the Baron preferred friendship over whatever this man could do to his enemies. “Meister Schuler,” the Baron greeted the Diviner. It was time to button up his nerves and steel himself for a possible confrontation. In his heart, he was ready to fight back. To survive.
Meister Schuler’s smile turned into a happy grin. “My boys! Welcome!”
The cabbie waited, looking through the window at the exchange. He was probably wondering if he should hang around for the return fare and another fat tip, but the Baron waved him off. After a three-point turn, the cab left with a little too much speed, as if Clinton Wharf were a hostile place or a badlands, inimical to life or good health.
The air had the smell of dust, brick, and the ancient sourness of rancid, acidic motor oil. It definitely felt like dead Earth. It was easy on the eyes like cool ashes.
“Are you waiting for us?” the Zombie asked Schuler sweetly.
“No, no!” Schuler replied. “But I am glad to see you here. It’s a complicated Sunday, and I’ve had a lot to do. A lot on foot, you see, to walk to. A future to walk to.”
The Baron nodded, guessing that the Diviner was talking about the microtasks that usually called to him around the city. While this conversation was innately risky, the Baron needed to understand what they were up against, so he opted to push a little further: “Are your minders helping you today?” This question cut an important difference in the world. If New York sent Schuler, his minders would be close by. If he wandered off alone, then nobody would’ve known to chase after him.
The Diviner seemed briefly hurt by the question. “My friends? No. They had other things to do today, and this is business, real business, oh no. I came here, I walked, I listened with the gods. You understand. The future… the little things that I will do. To earn.”
“Prestige,” the Zombie offered.
“Exactly!” the Diviner yelled with delight.
The Baron weighed his next words carefully. They were almost certainly acting in indirect opposition to Schuler’s personal goals, so any moves made here had to be elegant, almost threatless. “We need to go inside,” he said, opting for the simplest tactic, utterly free of any connections to any other concepts. Even with this friendly atmosphere growing between them, he didn’t dare ask for permission. That might remind Schuler of any orders coming down from the New York cult—like a blanket request to deny them access to any more cultists.
Meister Schuler closed his eyes and silently repeated something to himself. He reached up with shaking fingers and touched the rims of his glasses, then let them drop. “Oh, oh, I don’t know. I was here to speak with someone important, but a very large man told me to wait outside, even after I told him my name, and everyone listens to my name, d’Holbach, everyone listens, but he didn’t. Oh no, no.” Schuler opened his eyes. “If you could hear the gods, they said to wait outside, and I don’t mind waiting because I know people are safe while I’m here!”
The Baron exchanged glances with the Zombie, who shrugged. He didn’t know how to play this. The Baron was the diplomat. The Zombie just frightened people, but Schuler wouldn’t be scared. The Baron said, “Did Barilla ask you to stand outside?”
“He asked his friend to ask me to wait. He is busy, and I’m busier.” Schuler looked up at the roof of the alcove. “Yes, I can hear it.”
This was a relief. Schuler either hadn’t been told, didn’t remember, or simply didn’t care about the Zombie’s assault on Tammany Hall last night. He seemed happy to be where he was, as if everything was already under control. It was time to extend a harmless olive branch. “Do you want me to ask Barilla to let you come speak with him?”
Schuler’s smile grew wider, revealing a child-like impishness that echoed a touch of the Zombie’s manic nature. “I’d love that. You’ll help, not hinder. It’s good that you would.”
The Zombie very, very carefully tapped the Baron on the shoulder and whispered into his ear, “How did he find this place?”
The Baron nodded. “We’ll talk about this inside,” he said loudly.
“No need!” Schuler bowed. “I’m here to help Barilla. Someone is unhappy about his work, yes sir. I…” He paused and looked distracted. Then he slowly stumbled back against the wall.
“Are you okay?” the Baron asked honestly.
“So much to do in the Congo Basin,” Schuler said quietly.
Without asking for elaboration, they opened the front door to Barilla’s Shoes and left one of New York’s most important figures idling on the doorstep like a messenger boy.
Throughout history, powerful cults had accepted and nurtured their Diviners because they demonstrably defied common sense. They couldn’t predict the future, not exactly, but when they weren’t debilitated or distracted by their condition, they seemed preternaturally aware of their surroundings. Worse, the capable ones were swimming in vast oceans of prestige. A perfect awareness of all tasks meant constant awareness of all opportunities, and it was claimed that they could sense and complete ancient tasks, assigned and forgotten hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
If it wasn’t for their incredible mental instability, cults would’ve demanded the creation of pet Diviners. Depending on one’s perspective, it was fortunate that someone like Schuler only came along once every few decades. It seemed to be something in their character or their nature that set them apart from the rest of the human species. It might be a specific, helpful madness, or maybe a technique that only a few stumbled across while trying to cope with the mental strain. Who knew? No Diviner had ever explained their supernatural stability, at least not in a way that led to reproducible results. In fact, most of the failed Diviners reversed the wish or eventually died in a gutter, choking on their own tongue in some horrible fit of neurological disease. Few were like Schuler, and few should want to be.
It still surprised the Baron that people risked the wish to hear everything the gods had to say. If an Oracle was sensitive to a local signal, a Diviner was an Oracle tuned into every channel on Earth, including stations that nobody else could hear. It was the crash of every ocean against every continent, funneled down into your ears like thunder, deafening.
How could a man keep such sharp hearing in a hurricane of thought? The Baron wished he knew; the answer might explain much about the true mechanisms of the world.
The shoe factory engulfed them, a voided sepulchre of wartime industry. Dusty streaks of waxed concrete floor spread between bare production tables, arrayed in lines for a process that’d been torn out years ago. Looking at the thin daylight, diffusing long and low across the factory from distant windows, the texture of the floor changed, revealing footpaths cut through time’s patient dusting. Boots had passed from door to door and nowhere else.
During World War 2, this shoe factory had been running on a government contract to produce footwear for soldiers in the Pacific. Hundreds of women had staffed these long, isolated lines, each with a single rote purpose. There hadn’t been any professional cobblers in the building—only seamstresses, cutters, stampers, and punchers, summing up to the raw human intelligence behind single-purpose machines. Manipulation was required to move part of a shoe from one skilled tool to another, professional cogs in a process. There was no art to shoemaking in a place like this. There was only an imitation of someone else’s original design.
Then the contracts had stopped, but the money wasn’t returned to the public wallet for spending on social or economic issues. They’d simply shifted from industry to R&D, putting their defense dollars to use on the next generation of Cold War technology while leaving industries like Barilla’s Shoes to starve.
It’d finally failed in the last couple years, the Baron guessed. Upon closer inspection of the nearest table, still-greasy boltholes and squares of freshly exposed lacquer suggested a relatively recent change.
The room itself was one long hall. It must’ve been filled from end to end with people doing the exact same job at once. To the left and right were suspended double doors much like a hospital. They swung both ways and would’ve allowed heavy carts to pass in either direction. Presumably there were other line rooms that’d served another purpose in the boot-crafting process. What they needed was to find Barilla’s office.
“Which way?” the Baron asked aloud. Maybe the Zombie had a guess.
In answer, a large man pushed through the right door, a meat slab dressed in black wool pants and a starch-white wool shirt. He had a newsie set high on his receding hairline.
“That way,” the Zombie answered.
“This is private property,” the large man said, as if that explained everything and put the matter to rest. When the Baron didn’t immediately respond, he added, “Scram.”
“We’re here to speak with Federico Barilla immediately.”
“Yeah, that’s too bad. Why don’t you go outside and get in line behind Mister Crackers with the glasses, and Barilla will call for you when he’s good and ready.”
“It’s a Sunday,” the Zombie said, implying that Barilla shouldn’t have much work.
The large man sneered. “Yeah, well, Barilla is so busy, he’s workin’ instead of prayin’ with his mother at the church. Now get before I call the police.”
“You don’t want to do that,” the Baron said.
A derisive snort. “Really? Barilla’s talking up a troupe of boys with zip-guns who might say otherwise. Now, do I want to call the police, or do I want to call the boys in here?”
“You don’t want to do either,” the Baron repeated. “We just helped the Ozone Park Boys with a shootout at the Belmont-Sutter Homes. They’d be unhappy if we were delayed.”
The man hesitated as he processed the facts. The Baron had dropped a lot of relevant names in one sentence. “Did someone send you here?”
“Bettino Lucci was murdered, but we managed to save Rufino Piazzi.”
The slab looked alarmed beneath his newsie.
The Baron decided to press for closure. “You’ll know him as the frog man who sank the Paines. We need to talk with Barilla.”
The Zombie let the thinnest crescent of a grin crack on his face. It was eerie to imagine how calm and well-behaved he was so shortly after a man’s death. It was a strange mixture of reservation and satisfaction, and the Baron had spent decades learning to recognize and handle it. It was almost too quiet for comfort, like a volcano stilled by sacrifice.
“Can I ask you a question,” the Baron said to the slab.
“Sure?”
“What is prestige?”
The man was nonplussed. “What, you mean fame?”
“Nevermind,” the Baron said, “show us to Barilla.” At least part of the staff was fully secular, which boded poorly for an open conversation with the boss.
They were led through several sets of doors to the far end of the factory, where cheap wood framing and dry walls sliced offices out of an unused production room. There was an office door, fancier than the others, which had been propped open with a surly looking child for a doorstop. The kid had a penny knife, blade out, and was threatening to scratch the soft wood.
A shout came out of the door, “Miles!”
The kid pointed the knife at the Zombie. “Mr. Barilla! Martin is bringin’ heat.”
“They ain’t fuzz,” said the slab, as he ducked into the office. The Baron followed him quickly, while the Zombie paused by the kid with the naked blade.
There were six more kids ranging from early teens to nearly twenty, each of them wearing the same mix of tight pants and short-sleeve dress shirts, their hair greased up into disaffected duck’s arses, just as shiny and water-resistant as the real thing.
One of the youngest boys had an arm in a cast slung to his chest. The eldest one next to him was rubbing the well-healed stumps of his right ring and middle fingers against the fabric of his pants. Likely the victim of a failed zip-gun, he nevertheless had a fresh chunk of wood with a hollow car antenna dangling off a belt loop, secured by a frayed shoestring.
Against the quality of his dress and the neatness of his hair, the improvised firearm was shockingly primitive. The firing pin appeared to be a tack taped to a huge rubber band, the kind used to clamp lumber together. One misfire and the car antenna barrel could pop, pulping more digits for a surgeon to amputate.
Next to him stood a very small, studious looking woman in her mid-40s. Her plain light blue blouse, makeup-free face and mousy beehive hairdo reminded the Baron of a high school teacher, but her sharp glare and shifting gaze suggested a keen attitude. The fact that she was standing in a small office with a street gang spoke volumes about her true skillset.
Behind her, seated behind a heavy wooden desk, there was Barilla, sweating profusely from sheer agitation. He was a large man, top-heavy from a youth of dock work and generally heavy in his late middle age. His hair was white and tidy, and he dressed like he starred in a Marlon Brando film. Unlike the rest of the Cosa Nostra, he didn’t enjoy the functional and dignified clothes of a laborer. He proudly donned the entirely fictional style that Hollywood had invented whole cloth, and he’d retroactively fooled himself—and his new subordinates—into believing that an expensive black suit gave you class.
“Martin,” Barilla snapped, glancing at his door guard. “What the fuck?”
“I know they’re tresspassing, boss—”
“Yes, they are—”
At that point, they started talking over each other so thoroughly that it wasn’t even a conversation, it was a verbal fistfight. The meat slab of a man “Martin” tried and failed to explain why he was leading the trespassers into some kind of war meeting, but Barilla wasn’t having it.
“Why are these men in my office?” he said repeatedly, coming back around to say it louder and louder whenever Martin failed to apologize and escort the Baron out of the building. Martin’s problem wasn’t a lack of loyalty. He was simply too smart to shut up and follow orders. He reasoned with an angry man. He argued common sense against territorial instinct.
It was stupid in its own special way.
“Get them out of here!” Barilla finally shouted, losing any last scrap of dignity in the process. “Get them the fuck out!”
“I’m sorry,” Martin said to the Baron.
“Federico Barilla,” the Baron said loudly, “what is prestige?”
Barilla stiffened, sitting up. “Wait, what?”
Martin hesitated. Was this an opportunity to ignore Barilla’s bad orders?
With that one question, the Baron knew that Barilla was not a particularly active cultist. Most neophytes memorized the London Password because it made them feel important. Barilla must’ve learned and forgotten it years ago.
“It’s God, right?” Barilla asked, filling the silence.
The woman with the beehive hairdo looked the Baron over. “Who are you?” she asked, taking the position of authority when Barilla was nominally in charge.
It struck the Baron that she might, in fact, be in charge somehow. “I’m Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach,” he answered, wondering if she’d recognize him. He hoped so.
“Then the man behind you is the Zombie?” she asked.
The Baron carefully avoided reacting, even though his urge was to shout with surprise. A woman cultist was rarer than a fist-sized diamond, and they were almost universally persecuted and driven to the margins of the system of prestige. Either Barilla was implicitly fighting against centuries of occult tradition in the west, or he was starkly ignorant, and a real honest to goodness member of the Cult of Artemis was using him to surreptitiously participate in New York occult society. Her question signaled the Baron clearly—I’m here, I recognize you, and this man doesn’t understand what’s happening. Keep my secret safe.
The Baron turned to face the Zombie, if only to hide his shock. “That’s him,” he said.
The Zombie grinned, immediately aware of the eyes on him. The kid at the door was holding the knife out at him for inspection. “Watch this,” he said. He reached out slowly and wrapped his hand around the naked blade of the teenager’s knife. The kid gawped. Then the Zombie gently yanked the knife away, fingers squeezed across cutting edges.
The teenager yelped, then smiled. This wasn’t frightening; this was machismo. “You ain’t hurt?” the kid asked.
“Nah, kiddo. I’m cool.” Like many of the criminals that the Baron had met, the Zombie treated children as strictly off limits, even if they were old enough to believe they were men. He never chose to frighten them or intimidate them, let alone hurt them. “How much for the penny knife?” he asked.
“It’s yours man,” the kid said proudly.
The Zombie folded up the knife and opened his palm for everyone to view. “No blood.”
“A magician?” Barilla asked the woman.
“He’s the Baron’s bodyguard,” she answered promptly.
The Cult of Artemis wasn’t actually a cohesive cult, didn’t worship Artemis, and had no connections to the original Cult that’d been nurtured in ancient Greece. It was more like a loose political alliance between female cultists. Since most of them worked alone by necessity, a codified set of rules obligated them to help and support each other whenever they met.
“Are they important?” Barilla asked her.
“Very,” she said, and she offered her hand to the Baron. “My name is Phyllis.”
He took her hand and shook once, briefly. “It’s good to meet you.”
The Cult of Artemis was a recent invention. Shortly after the Fall of Truth, Elizabeth—the Apostate—had penned a short bible of useful knowledge and important commandments about the system of prestige. Her book, Apostasy, was designed to be copied by hand and distributed to other women cultists. It outlined a cultic network, structurally ignorant of its full membership, which would allow female cultists to operate inside Christendom in opposition to the dominant religious institutions. Soon after printing the work, her immediate allies were captured or slaughtered and she was driven into hiding, but the change was irreversible. The book survived and multiplied along with the growing female cultic population, ensuring that the Cult of Artemis remained long after its original practitioners were scattered or hung till dead.
The Baron was confident that Phyllis had only revealed herself because he was an outsider of a different kind, though his position was uniquely easier. He was a man protected by the Zombie, and he had a reputation for peace. This made him a sleeping giant, and instead of increasing the threat of violence by having power at his back, his presence decreased it.
However, she also represented a risk. The Baron and Zombie couldn’t question Barilla about the Cat with Phyllis listening. She might try to take the Cat for herself, or worse, she might already have it and would make herself scarce the moment she knew they were looking for it.
“What’re you here for?” Barilla asked. “Make it quick. I’ve got the boys here for a pow-wow about the Cougars.”
“They been all over the north end of the wharf,” said the older boy with missing fingers.
“Don’t bother the man!” Barilla berated the gangster. “Let’s talk, Mr. Baron.”
“It’s just Baron d’Holbach, like a landed noble. The man outside—” He looked at Phyllis directly “—do either of you know him?”
“He’s some nutbar preacher from Manhattan,” Barilla said. “You here for him?”
“No, but he’s important to Tammany. After we’re done here, you should let him in.”
Barilla frowned skeptically. “And when will you be done here, exactly?”
“We just have a few questions. You set up the job to scuttle the SS John G Paines. Tammany Hall contract, right?”
“Sure, I helped Emanuele with my contacts in the Anastasia family. He had money, I had men. He didn’t make it back though. Man named Jacono had to sort everything out.”
“I know Jacono. So this Emanuele landed the job?”
“Of course he did, I don’t have time for this secret society bullshit. I would’ve had Phyllis do the work, but she’s just a woman and Anastasia’s boys got the blood of Sicily in them, real mafioso. You need a strong personality, and Emanuele wasn’t any muscle either. I had to take care of organizing everyone, to make sure they were a real team.”
Barilla seemed proud of his responsibilities in scuttling the ship, which was deeply odd, considering the result. Four of the seven on the task had died outright, and two more had died afterwards—or did Barilla not know? Regardless, the mission was a failure by almost all accounts. That’s why Schuler was waiting outside to talk with him.
“Jacono and Lucci were shot by someone looking for you.” The Baron waited for Barilla’s reaction.
The man seemed slow to understand. “Psycho boy got murdered?” he asked skeptically.
“Because he wouldn’t rat you out. Apparently his killers knew a little about who was on the ship, but they didn’t know who you were, or at least where to find you. They questioned Lucci this morning though, before they executed him. That’s why I’m here, Barilla. The enemy was slowed down after a couple of theirs died, but we need to move you before they catch up.”
Phyllis took one step in front of the desk, almost physically intervening to get the Baron’s attention. “Wait, who is after him?”
“Mercenaries of some kind. Can you think of anyone who’d want Barilla?”
Barilla answered, “Nobody should know I’m part of the ship deal unless one of the boys told them, and they’re all loyal members of the family.”
“Well, six of the seven are dead and I don’t think Piazzi hired these killers. We won’t know who gave you up unless we get a chance to question them.”
Phyllis interrupted again. “Any idea why they’d want to kill Barilla?”
The Baron was pleased, though he couldn’t say much in this company. She’d asked the questions that Barilla should’ve, acting as the brains behind Barilla’s cultic operations. It was unfortunate that he couldn’t answer her, not before he knew where the Cat o’ Nine Lives had gone. “We’re not sure, but Jacono was in some kind of shootout on the Paines. A third-party was on the ship.” He omitted the rest of the tale, waiting to measure their responses.
Phyllis stepped back to her faux-subordinate position at Barilla’s right hand. “Jacono told Mr. Barilla that much,” she admitted. “There was some kind of assassin on board.”
“We don’t know much either,” the Baron said, “but I must be blunt. There isn’t much time for discussion, Barilla, and there are a few sensitive questions we need to ask before we move. Mostly about the ship task, maybe a little about Emanuele.” In truth, he wanted just enough time to identify the Cat and its whereabouts. He suspected it would be in Barilla’s personal belongings, vastly undervalued in every sense of the word. If he knew what he was doing, he would’ve already handed it to New York and gone into hiding.
“Go ahead and ask,” Barilla said.
“They’re for your ears only,” the Baron said. “Step out into the hall?”
Phyllis didn’t hesitate. “If this is about occult matters, you’d do better to ask me, Baron. Mr. Barilla leaves most of the work in my hands.”
The Baron frowned, affecting an image of exhausted disapproval. “I’m afraid these questions are just for him.” He hated to adopt this tone, but he needed to push her out of the conversation, if only for a minute. “If he needs a woman’s input, he can ask for it.”
She squinted. The book Apostasy mentioned the Baron by name, both for his role in cultic history and for his social attitudes. He was a well-known progressive who’d written explicitly about women in favorable terms. Even in New York’s records, the Baron was listed as a Hound of Artemis, a term for an ally of the Cult of Artemis. In most mouths, it was an insult born from an era when calling someone a “dog” would end in bloodshed, but to a woman cultist, it meant that the Baron could be relied upon to provide support. To hear him say “woman” with such distaste was a strange sign, one she was obviously struggling to read.
Barilla scratched his cheek. “I don’t mind her listening. My people are loyal.”
“My presence is necessary,” Phyllis added carefully. “Mr. Barilla delegates the details. He’s a fine boss, but he won’t know much about the ship task.”
“It’s true,” Barilla said with pride, as if delegation were a talent.
The Baron shook his head slightly. “Everyone has secrets they need to keep.” He glanced once at Phyllis. “That makes them vulnerable, exploitable. They could be compromised.”
Barilla waved the idea away like a pesky fly. “No, not my people.”
“This matter is too important to risk it,” the Baron pressed. “These are exceptional circumstances. I hate to be insistent, but there isn’t much of a choice here. Trust me.”
The subtext would be clear to Phyllis. The look of steel on her face suggested that she knew what was being threatened and resented it, but the very fact that they hadn’t ratted her out implied that they wanted to be on her side—as long as she stepped out of their way.
After a long pause, she finally relented: “Fine.”
And instantly, Barilla stood up with a huff of frustration. “Yes, fine, Baron, fine. I understand. We’ll have a conversation without Phyllis.” He whistled and snapped his fingers. “Martin, come with me and the Baron. This will all be fucking fine!”
The Zombie sidled up beside Baron d’Holbach. His bored expression was actually mild worry, but he was very good at hiding his concern.
The Baron knew why he was upset. Barilla was fighting with them through malicious compliance, wasting precious time. ”I meant that I’d talk to you alone,” the Baron said. “This isn’t about Phyllis. Anyone could be a security risk.”
“Just talk to him,” Phyllis said, barely containing her own frustration. Then she side-eyed Barilla. “If you need me, boss, you’ll call for me?”
Barilla sniffed airily. “If I need you,” he agreed. “Are you game, Baron?”
The Baron suppressed a frown. At this rate, someone outside of their control would hear about the Cat, but if the Baron could at least get ahead of everyone—or if the Zombie could run ahead and attempt to capture the artifact—then they might be able to recover it without starting an occult war. As it was, this conversation was the only way forward, so he gave up on strict control. Luck would shape events, and then he’d react to them. “After you. Let’s talk.”
Author’s Note:
I really enjoy writing Phyllis.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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