Post by Édouard Martel on Sept 29, 2011 17:51:30 GMT -5
In the first year of Queen Sabrina's Reign, Summer
The young Baron Eric Laval had been taken to the temple of Eisheth – what I found remarkably strange was that contrary to any other victim of a mugging, though hurt and bloodied he was, he'd been less than forthcoming. In fact, he'd remained quiet for quiet some time. That alone was not out of the ordinary – I could put it to the catatonia that follows a traumatic experience. However in the incident of which I had been the unwilling witness, first, then the interference, a single fact bothered me.
The muggers, I'd noted in the flurry that was the affrontement between them and myself, were not dressed so poorly as to be men of simple conditions merely looking to put butter on their bread. Two of them moved with a soldier-like efficiency which had seemed familiar to me, then.
It was nothing – the blur of a chance, really, that had made me wonder at this ghost of a memory.
I'd twisted and turned my own memories of war until the gestures and demeanors finally came clearer in my mind. I remembered these men, if only vaguely – soldiers who were indeed veterans as I was, serving under the orders of a captain I'd not known well.
It had taken some archival research to find the list of the men in Captain Lenfant's company, and yet more inquiries to weed out the dead, then to put faces to the names of those who still lived. Several had houses in the province, only a few had established dwellings in the City. Two were missing, and I suspected those were the men I was seeking.
After some further sleuthing in the less respectable establishments of Night's Doorstep, I'd found that these fellows, Bouvard and Pecuchet, were in fact boarders of a woman called Madame Petitout. And so I'd made it to the boarding house and spoken to the woman, an ugly thing riddled with fatness who smelled of too much absynth. After questioning her through the intermediary of a helpful serving of yet more fetid alcohol, I found out their habits, and after I'd rented a room of my own, I left, wishing her a prompt sobering.
Having confirmed Madame Petitout's drunken ramblings by observation, I knew that Bouvard always came home before Pecuchet, and so one night, I waited for him in the dimly lit corridor of Madame Petitout's unsanitary venture.
“Good evening, neighbour,” he said distractedly as he started to open the door.
“And to you. Fine eve, is it? I've a bottle of absynth to share. Won't you join me? I don't like drinking alone.”
In truth, I didn't like drinking at all – but he would be doing all the drinking, I would make sure of that.
Bouvard drunk and drunk, and when he was passably gone, I asked him what he did for his keep. “Bit of this, bit of that,” he said.
“Ah,” I asked innocently, “do you do jobs, perchance? You have the shape of a warrior, surely you put it to good use.”
“Well yes, I do, some jobs they come,” Bouvard muttered. “Did one a few weeks back. Money was good.”
“Ah,” I whined, “how blessed of you. I could do with some money.”
“Say,” my drunk guest uttered, “I might put you in for a gig, hmmm?”
And so on the morrow he'd given me a name, and I found myself knocking on the door of Lavigne, a low-ranking officer whom I knew not. From what rumors I'd gleaned from his neighbors, he was one to bring in whores day and night, and consumed much opium. His landlord seemed to infer that he was never on time with the rent and was about to be evicted.
How could such a man could finance muggings? And why? Pretending to be a creditor, I was led by the landlord's son to the Dragon's Den. Past the dragon – or so I deemed the owner, the boy pointed a finger at a man who was halfway to slumber. Lavigne seemed almost disposed to doze off, and so I sat by him, and murmured, “Bouvard sent me.”
He opened his eyes wide, snapping out of his ineptitude, just as if I'd spoken a demon's name. “He said you might have a paying job for me,” I hissed.
“Oh, no, not me,” Lavigne muttered. “Talk to Master Xang. He has all the money.”
And so I went up one more echelon, speaking to not Xang, but a whore he kept, who seemed rather content to tell me that Xang had asked Lavigne to find him some folks for a mugging in repayment for unpaid drugs. As to who the victim was, though, she claimed that he was ignorant of it, and I had no reason to disbelieve the girl – she was much too scared, and too eager for the money I was supplying her for the information. She told me then that her patron did keep some rather intricate relationships with men at the docks, seeing as his business was to import opium, and that he'd lately claimed to have repaid an Alban captain by the name of Achab Mab Nolwenn a long-owed favor.
From the port, little could be found, save the information that Mab Mohbdic was a rather elusive and solitary fellow, inclined to trafficking with many unsavory characters. It was even rumoured that he'd ferried slaves to Carthage once, though such a claim was difficult to prove by any standards. It took another two weeks before his ship docked in Marsilikos, but he was expected in the City shortly thereafter, though why he was paying this visit, one could not have told.
I found out his habitual lodgings and when his arrival was near, I waited patiently. I followed him, noting habits and deviancies. It became clear to me that this one sailor was more than a mere transporter. He visited Xang several times and left with a face smiling more than usual, which led me to believe that Xang had indeed repaid him as I had expected.
This led me to pay a visit to the man whose life had been attempted on, but none of the names I'd mentionned to him had stirred him of his prostration. Finally, he said, “My lord, pray not push further. If I am not dead yet, I will be soon.”
Ah, but it was about time the damned fool spoke.
“Ah?” I said lightly.
“He will send someone else. He always does.”
“Who, my good man, is going to send you another ticket to death, pray tell?”
“He might as well be Kushiel himself, death in an angel's face,” the shivering sop said, and then he said nothing more.
That was enough to make me double my efforts, though I spoke at once to the priest tending to him, and we resolved to announce his passing publicly – a lie for a good cause, the priest had said. I do not care for such justifications, but if those were useful to him, then so be it.
For myself, I was more interested in the resolution of this mystery. If the Alban was not the end of the trail, then I could only deduce that he was one more link in a wider chain, as Xang, Lavigne and Bouvard had been before him. This led me to presuppose that he would pay a visit to his creditor, confident in the security of his transaction, seeing as Bouvard and Pecuchet had not been brave enough to admit that they had been thwarted, and the clergy of Eisheth was remarkably... discreet.
I followed him time and time again, a shadow in the shadows of the city. I am unremarkable and though it was never deemed a quality by my contemporaries, it turned out to be quite an advantage. Several times, the Alban entered a nondescript, uninteresting building, only to leave moments later. After a sufficient number of attempts, I decided that the answer to the riddle must be in this shabby-looking place.
Spending enough time at the cafe across from it allowed me to observe the comings and goings – and there was indeed a man who might have been qualified to have an angel's face, if such a thing as beauty exists. He received visits on occasion, and seemed always quite pleasant and gentlemanly, in stark contrast to the surroundings. While one could have argued that he was an impoverished noble, I found myself suspicious of the comings and goings, and more so after noting that some came but did not go.
I had, however, no solid case yet, but I thought I might well be able to obtain a confession, in the face of the crushing circumstantial evidence. And so I went back to the Alban – I needed a confession.
I am not a man of many emotions. I am also not a man of many pleasures. But this once, I put on a stupidly jovial face and went to the Poulet Gauche, where I knew my bedamned sailor liked to spend his nights. Ah, but the ale flowed and flowed until too drunk to well resist me, he found me hissing into his face questions to which he sputtered responses.
In the end, he'd given me enough information to confirm that the man who had arranged this complex network of favours was indeed his contact, and had signed a complete confession, designating both Xang, who owed him a great deal of transport debt, and Vautier, the angel-faced-monster, to whom he owed information about a woman he'd left behind in the City.
Another perhaps would have felt pity for a sailor whose affections had led him to jealousy so monstrous that he'd indicted himself in the service of a thug to repay surveillance services. I felt nothing.
Of Laval, he knew nothing, though, and so that remained to be cleared with this Vautier.
The confession safely in my coffers at the Banque Palatine, a note sent to Jaime so that he would open the safe should I not return safely on the morrow, I made sure that all exits were kept by men I'd paid handsomely, and made my way to confront the Master of Favours.
To my surprise, I was almost thrilled by the whole expedition, and resolved that if I should escape this alive, the experience might well be worth repeating.
Yet it was without passion that I knocked on the door, as if I were simply coming to deliver a package or a letter.
[OOC: I hope this works, I, er, had a bit of a hard time. Poke me if there's anything that needs editing, I'm easy.]