Reciprocity Read online

  “Handle it, won’t you?” Lewis squeaked. “You’re supposed to be my secretary.”

  Jurgen, bless his heart, busied himself with a pile of papers and an adding machine.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s a special delivery from the Boss’s son.”

  Lewis seemed to notice me for the first time. He peered up at me, fists planted on his hips. “Say, I know you. You’re Donatella’s little foundling, aren’t you? Running errands for her grandson now?”

  “Donatella has been sick for nearly a year, Meneer Lewis,” I replied, my cheeks burning. “You remember that. Hendrik has inherited my services. I’m just doing a favor for his son.”

  Lewis scrubbed at his face with a wet towel, and a cleaner ladoni man emerged from the soot. “Of course, of course. Well, let’s have it, then.”

  My eyes slid to Jurgen, who was stabbing the buttons of the adding machine with blunt fingers. “Kasper says he needs a reply from you. Maybe we can do this somewhere else?

  Lewis grunted and tossed the towel into the basin. “Come on.”

  Jurgen started to stand. “Meneer Lewis, did you need anything?”

  “Oh, as you were, Jurgen, honestly. Why don’t you keep an eye on the door, in case some other little girls come by selling cookies or flowers or murder?”

  I followed the little engineer into a short hallway, Maria’s slippers whispering behind me. The acrid stench of sulfur and electricity stung my nose. Lewis led us to a set of double doors labeled WORKSHOP—HARD HATS REQUIRED. He pushed them open, and heat from the forge in the center of the room billowed out at us. He donned a child-sized helmet with a carbide lamp on the forehead.

  “You will have to forgive Jurgen, my dears. He is annoyingly protective of Hendrik’s, ah . . . investments. And he’s a terrible secretary. This way, please, and mind that boiler—it’ll cook your skin in a second flat.”

  I looked at Maria, who stared wide-eyed at the machines around us. I didn’t recognize half the stuff, but she seemed to, the way she gestured at different things and muttered to herself. Silence was probably best. I just wanted to get this delivery done and maybe find some lunch.

  Lewis’s workbench was tidy, an array of tools hung with some specific method in mind on a pegboard behind it. The table itself was worn and well used but clean. A plate-sized magnifying lens sat on an articulated arm bolted to the table and was pointed at some small machine I didn’t recognize.

  “The package, if you please.”

  I handed the tube over, and he broke the seal and dumped the contents out onto his workbench. A couple leaves of paper and a ten-guilder note folded into a square tumbled out. The note made a solid metallic sound when it hit the table, like Kasper had stuffed a couple of coins inside.

  Lewis read the first paper, mumbling under his breath. “Compliments to . . . reverse-engineer the attached . . . enclosed are some expended shells . . . duplicate and produce five of the device.” He tossed the note aside and snatched up the other leaf of paper. “What madness, what impossibility does he want me to perform? Miracles I can do, but work from this, this child’s drawing, and produce a precision-crafted machine? Bah!”

  He dropped the paper he held, and it floated to the table, face up. As the engineer snatched up the ten-guilder note, I stole a look at the paper. It didn’t mean much to me—just looked like a flat drum with a wingnut in the middle, and a notch at the top.

  Maria gasped and grabbed my elbow, surprising me. I bared my teeth and tried to pull away, but the girl had a hell of a grip.

  Lewis didn’t see any of that, though—he was too busy cussing under his breath and messing with the ten-guilder packet. He finally got it open, and five tiny, hollow brass cylinders fell to the table—expended cartridges from a pistol. Maria sucked her teeth and pinched my elbow harder. It was starting to hurt, so I gave her a quick jab in the ribs.

  She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “Those are mine. My family’s. Look at the crest.”

  I squinted, and sure enough, there was something etched on the side of the shells. The empty cartridges rolled off the workbench and clinked on the concrete floor like coins. Maria and I picked them up hurriedly and set them back on the bench while Lewis muttered under his breath. He didn’t seem to notice there were only four cartridges on the table now, but I did. I snatched a look at Maria; she merely stood there, hands tucked into the sleeves of her robe, her cheeks and jawline tight.

  “That boy is really asking the impossible,” Lewis said. He’d tossed the cash aside and peered closely at the drawing again.

  “That so?”

  “Why, yes! Look at this so-called diagram.” He waved it at me, and it still didn’t mean anything. “It’s chicken scratch, nonsense. I will have to speak to him personally. If he wants me to duplicate the manufacture of some device, I will have to have the original as well.” He took a grease pencil from behind his ear, turned the diagram over, and wrote something. After a moment, he stopped and peered up at me. “Do you know where he goes of an evening? There are dance halls and gambling dens . . . oh, but I do not know the places.”

  “Club Madill, probably. That’s been the place to go, last couple of weeks. You might try after eight o’clock tonight.”

  “Very well, very well.” He finished his note and took the remaining cartridges. “I will keep these. Do take the rest of this stuff with you when you go, and please reassure Jurgen on your way out that you have not murdered me.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but he’d already checked out, peering at the brass in his hand and muttering to himself. Maria hadn’t moved; her shoulders shook a little and her gaze might have burned holes in Lewis’s back.

  “Let’s walk,” I said, my voice sharp but not loud.

  She blinked rapidly and looked at me, her trance broken.

  I showed her the ten-guilder note I held between two fingers. “I’m getting lunch and a bottle or two of beer on Kasper’s dime. You can tell me what’s on your mind. How about it?”

  Chapter 5

  We sat down at Drie Appels Bistro across the street from Lewis’s place and ordered a simple lunch of cold cuts, a variety of cheeses, brötchen and braadworst with mustard, and a fruit plate. Drie Appels knew how to put on a spread—a lunch for two could feed four easy, with plenty to take home after. I got a short glass of beer, and Maria asked for a small bottle of sweet white vermouth. She tossed the first glass back and made a face, but didn’t object when I poured her another. She bolted that one, too.

  “All right?” I asked.

  She coughed delicately into her napkin and then dabbed her eyes with it. “Yes, thank you. This vermouth is terrible, but it will calm my nerves.”

  “It’s bad?”

  “Far too sweet, and too young. And it has hardly been chilled at all,” she said, and inspected the bottle. She made another face. “Oh. Gozio Aurelia. I know them. ‘Aged twelve months,’ indeed—it cannot be credited. Always taking shortcuts.”

  I eyed her. “Did you want something else?”

  “I would be grateful for a white spritz,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “It is impossible to bungle that.”

  I shook my head and signaled for the waiter. Kasper’s cash might not cover our bill after all.

  “Now, like they say in dime novels, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  She drew her shoulders in. “I am not sure where to begin.”

  “The beginning is a good spot,” I said.

  She was silent for a little while, shifting in her chair under my gaze. The waiter came with Maria’s spritz and another glass of beer for me and left again. I ran my thumb along the condensation of the glass and waited.

  “I am looking for something,” she said finally. “Something that belongs to my father and was stolen.”

  I made an interested-sounding noise and waited some more.

  “But you wanted the beginning of the story. You mentioned that you were familiar with Cantabile Vineya
rds.”

  “You’re a long way north, am I right? Near the frontier. A week by airship at least.”

  “That’s correct.” She smiled, genuine and open. “I’m surprised that you know about us at all.”

  I shrugged. Ever since Josef and Henriette Cantabile started hanging around the Exedra Arms, we’d been keeping a better class of booze around the place. Hendrik took special care to order a respectable amount of Cantabile wines, since a little goodwill could go a long way. Whether he seriously intended Kasper to marry Henriette I couldn’t say, but the investment was sound. I smiled back at Maria, encouraging her to continue.

  “We arrived in Leemte at the beginning of spring and settled in Bacigalupi Tower. My sister Henriette had her debut, you see, and Mother wanted to find a good match for her in the city—perhaps a merger with one of the sons of a respectable winemaking family. Perhaps Ogterop, or van Haadraad, or even Gozio Aurelia. She had also sent discreet queries to a handful of families whose businesses run parallel to the wine industry—coopers and that sort of thing. Father is less interested in a partnership in the wine vertical. He believes diversifying into a more technologically oriented venture would be more profitable in the long term, and frankly, I agree with him.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked. Usually the ins and outs of some Middle family’s business weren’t too interesting, but something about those rich up-country vowels made a girl want to listen. “Not like people aren’t buying wine. In good times, people like to celebrate. In bad times, they like to drown their sorrows.”

  “Father isn’t planning on divesting the wine business—only using some of the profits to invest in new technologies that are closer to his passions and interests. A partnership with a mechanical engineering concern like Lamberti or an arms manufacturer like Nadal would be invaluable to Father’s plans. Those profits can in turn go back into the winery, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

  “Father may prevail, or Mother may, or they may yet compromise, I do not know. Henriette doesn’t care what they do. She is a selfish creature, and loves only attending balls and dueling. Within days of her debut, she surrounded herself with all manner of sharp-edged bravos from less reputable families for the excitement of it all. Those young men indulged her fancies with the races and games of chance.

  “She was dutiful at first and came back to Bacigalupi to conduct family business, though she grumbled. And yet her associations became rougher and lower class by the week. My brother chaperoned her, and so perhaps Father thought that she could not find too much trouble.”

  She lowered her voice and looked left and right before leaning in. Dutifully, I leaned in, too, the better to hear her. “I overheard my siblings arguing one early morning at the tower’s aerodrome. The sun was scarcely up, and they were just landing one of the tower’s ornithopters. That’s scandalous enough—what reputable business could be had in the predawn hours, and where had they just come from? I heard Josef chastising her about gambling debts and associating with rough characters in the Lower Terrace. My sister was adamant that she would satisfy those debts with no one else’s assistance.”

  I nodded. She was starting to talk my language now. “Do you know which rough characters?”

  “I do not, and truthfully I did not want to know then. My siblings were attending to their own troubles, and I was trying hard to stay out of it. They hate it when I meddle and find ways to punish me if I do. I attended Father on his business instead. There were investors and suppliers to visit.”

  “You said your sister was younger than you, right?” I knew the answer, of course. But she didn’t need to know that I already knew her siblings. “Shouldn’t you have . . . debuted, or whatever it is, and found a match before she does?”

  Maria set her palms on the table and sat a little straighter, her cheeks flushing. She took a sip of water before continuing. “Henriette and I came out together this past spring. My debut was delayed, mostly by me finding every excuse to drag my feet. I have had little success in finding a match since the spring. I admit I have not tried terribly hard.”

  “I don’t know how things work in the Middle, but maybe you don’t need to jump into a family merger right away, anyway.” I leaned back in my chair, ankle on knee, and laced my fingers in my lap. “You were saying something about attending your father’s business?”

  She nodded and nibbled at a piece of cheese. “Yes. One of the items Father wished to take care of in the city was a patent for a device of his own making. The invention is rather far afield from our usual work, but Father has a peculiar passion for tinkering, as I have said. He and our head armsman invented a weapon, a variation on the cavalry carbine.”

  “That’s far afield, all right,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  Maria nodded again and lowered her voice to a whisper. She couldn’t meet my eyes and spoke into her lap. “Father had the prototype in his possession and intended to show it to the Office of Patents and Innovation. The device disappeared. It disappeared the very day after I saw Josef and Henriette in the aerodrome. Father was struck by heart palpitations when he discovered the weapon missing. Mother sent us all about the tower, intending to tear it to its foundations to find the device. The reciprocating repeater carbine is very dangerous, you see? If it fell into the wrong hands, if someone got hurt, well . . . that would be awful, wouldn’t it? Our family would be ruined.”

  “Not to mention the poor bastards who’d get shot up, of course.”

  Her head jerked up, and wide eyes stared into mine. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Go on,” I said, making my voice soft. It was an effort. “Please.”

  She stared at her still-full plate. Her voice quavered as she spoke. “The very night it went missing, my sister called me out before the family and several servants. She said that she saw me steal the device. It’s . . . it’s not unprecedented for one sibling to call out another for satisfaction, but it is rare, and beyond scandalous. I can’t guess at her motives for lying, but it didn’t matter in that moment. I could not defend myself before the weight of Mother’s fury and Henriette’s accusation. Father’s constitution was weakened already by the loss of the weapon, and the possibility of a duel within his own household was too much to bear. He collapsed and was taken to sickbed.

  “The tower’s resident doctor judged that Father had suffered an acute apoplexy of the heart but pronounced him able to recover, if only his nerves could have some rest. He could take no more shocks to his sensibilities. Mother sequestered him to his sickbed and would allow no visitors, least of all me. I grew afraid of staying in the tower, of thinking that my sister would want to fight.” She looked up at me, her eyes large and wet. “I do not want to die, Kaeri, and I do not want to kill her. Either end would bring irreparable shame to our family and strike my father dead.”

  I sipped the beer. “So you took off. Thought you’d find this weapon on your own. Bring it back to dear old Dad, clear your name?”

  “Well, I suppose it would clear my name,” she replied, not looking at me. “But that isn’t really the point. I want to preserve my family’s reputation. I want to keep that weapon out of the wrong hands. And, and as you said, I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  I chewed on her story and a bite of braadworst for half a minute, just looking at her downcast face and trying to decide if she was on the level. If I spilled what I suspected about the weapon, and what I’d seen in the warehouse, I could clear it up with her in half a minute or less.

  But I wasn’t going to do that. Not yet. Instead, I watched Maria shift in her seat, twisting her napkin in her lap. “What do you think happened to your father’s weapon?”

  “I don’t know. That is to say, I have my suspicions, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It wouldn’t be charitable to my poor sister to speculate aloud.”

  “Your poor sister hasn’t exactly done you any favors lately,” I replied, pointing at Maria with a speared olive. “But if you don’t mind
someone else being uncharitable toward your sister, I can tell you what I think happened.” She only looked up at me through her lashes. I took her silence for permission to continue. “First things first—eat up. You look like you could use the strength.”

  “Oh,” Maria said. She obediently picked up half a brötchen. “Yes, of course.”

  “So I think it happens like this. Little Sister comes in from the provinces and gets a taste of the big city. She starts palling around with young rakes from the swell set. I can take a guess about these guys: Bored and rich and looking for trouble or a good time. Both when they can get it. Through them she gets introduced to some rough characters who specialize in procuring trouble. She gets in over her head with dice, cards, the fights, the races. Big Brother tries to make her see sense, but Little Sister is having too much fun to listen. Sound about right so far?”

  “One might say it that way, yes.” Maria said, muttering behind her brötchen.

  “Something scary happens, and Little Sister starts to see how deep she’s stepped in it. Maybe these rough characters arrange it so that she sees what happens to some poor sap who couldn’t pay his debts, or maybe they’re less subtle about it. Little Sister decides she needs to settle up, but she can’t draw on the family books since she’s too young and someone would notice. Pawning jewelry won’t work; Mama’s bound to notice, and Little Sister needs her baubles to attract a match anyway.

  “But she knows that Papa brought something valuable to town. She knows that it’s a weapon, and she knows that her new rough friends can appreciate things like that. She also sees a chance to throw you under a streetcar, so—”

  “I’m sorry? Streetcar?”

  “You know. Pin it on you. Play you for a patsy. Catching on?” She nodded with a frown that said I wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already thought of. “So she gives the rough guys this weapon, and she figures she’s square. She also gets rid of her big sister—maybe the parents disown you, or maybe you cash out in a duel. I’m not sure why she’d do that, because you seem all right to me. Anyway, how does all that sound to you?”