Part 57 (2/2)

He could shout. But Balda.s.sare could kill him before the household could break down the door. And the sorcerer was staring at him, one eyebrow lifted, as if to see what he would do.

Tylney held his tongue, and the door rattled once more before footsteps retreated.

”Just a historian,” Balda.s.sare answered, when the silence had stretched a minute or two.

”Historian? But the play's not three months old!”

Balda.s.sare shook his head. ”Where I come from, it's far older. And it's-” He hesitated, seeming to search for a word. ”It's dead. No one has ever read it, or seen it performed. Most people don't even know it once existed.” He laid fingertips on the papers, caressing. ”Let me take it. Let me give it life.”

”It's sedition.” Tylney grasped the edge of the script, greatly daring, and pulled it from under Balda.s.sare's hand.

”It's brilliant,” Balda.s.sare said, and Tylney couldn't argue, though he bundled the papers close to his chest. The sorcerer had been strangely gentle with him, as a younger man with an older. Perhaps he could gamble on that. Perhaps. It was his duty to protect the queen.

Balda.s.sare continued, ”None will know, no one shall read it, not until you and Elizabeth and Jonson and Nashe are long in your graves. It will do no harm. I swear it.”

”A sorcerer's word,” Tylney said. He stepped back, came up hard against the door. The keys weren't in the lock. They must be in Balda.s.sare's hand.

”Would you have it lost forever? Truly?” Balda.s.sare reached and Tylney crowded away. Into the corner, the last place he could retreat. ”Sir Edmund!” someone shouted from the hall.

From outside the door, Tylney heard the jangle of keys, their rattle in the lock. ”You'll hang,” he said to Balda.s.sare.

”Maybe,” Balda.s.sare said, with a sudden grin that showed his perfect, white teeth. ”But not today.” One lingering, regretful look at the papers crumpled to Tylney's chest, and he dropped the keys on the floor, touched something on the wrist of the hand that held the metal plate, and vanished in a s.h.i.+mmer of air as Tylney gaped after him.

The door burst open, framing Tylney's steward, John, against blackness.

Tylney flinched.

”Sir Edmund?” The man came forward, a candle in one hand, the keys in the other. ”Are you well?”

”Well enough,” Tylney answered, forcing himself not to crane his neck after the vanished man. He could claim a demon had appeared in his work room, right enough. He could claim it, but who would believe?

He swallowed, and eased his grip on the play clutched to his chest. ”I dropped the keys.”

The steward frowned doubtfully. ”You cried out, milord.”

”I stumbled only,” Tylney said. ”I feared for the candle. But all is well.” He laid the playscript on the table and smoothed the pages as his steward squatted to retrieve the fallen keys. ”I thank you your concern.”

The keys were cool and heavy, and clinked against each other like debased coins when the steward handed them over. Tylney laid them on the table beside the candle and the play. He lifted the coin purse from the window ledge, flicked the drapes back, and weighted the pages with the money once more before throwing wide the shutters, heedless of the night air. It was a still summer night, the stink of London rising from the gutters, but a draft could always surprise you, and he didn't feel like chasing paper into corners.

The candle barely flickered. ”Sir Edmund?”

”That will be all, John. Thank you.”

Silently, the steward withdrew, taking his candle and his own keys with him. He left the door yawning open on darkness. Tylney stood at his table for a moment, watching the empty s.p.a.ce.

He and John had the only keys. Balda.s.sare had come and gone like a devil stepping back and forth from h.e.l.l. Without the stink of brimstone, though. Perhaps more like an angel. Or memory, which could walk through every room in Tylney's house, through every playhouse in London, and leave no sign.

Tylney bent on creaking knees and laid kindling on the hearth. He stood, and looked at the playscript, one-quarter of the pages turned where it rested on the edge of his writing table, the other three-fourths crumpled and crudely smoothed. He turned another page, read a line in Jonson's hand, and one in Nashe's. His lips stretched over his aching teeth, and he chuckled into his beard.

He laid the pages down. No more sense than a tabby cat. It was late for making a fire. He could burn the play in the morning. Before he returned Jonson's bribe. He'd lock the door behind him, so no one could come in or out. There were only two sets of keys.

Sir Edmund Tylney blew the candle out, and trudged upstairs through the customary dark.

In the morning, he'd see to the burning.

Knock on Coffins ”Drive on, think positive, get off your b.u.t.ts, knock on coffins, etc.”

David Berkowitz, 1977 Act I June 2007 Each Friday morning, Hafidha brought in two dozen doughnuts. One box contained two plain old-fas.h.i.+oned (Reyes); two sour cream glazed (Falkner); one chocolate dipped and one lemon-filled, no powder (Brady); one blueberry cake (Lau); one glazed and one chocolate-frosted (Worth); and two chocolate crullers (Todd). Because the bakery Hafidha favored considered any proper dozen to contain thirteen, she added two miscellaneous pastries, different every week.

The other box held six Boston custard creme, six a.s.sorted jelly, and a single chocolate- frosted with rainbow sprinkles. There was only one house rule regarding their consumption: no one could have the sprinkled one until all the rest were eaten. Hafidha and Chaz schemed mightily after that thirteenth doughnut, even when stragglers remained in the first box. Because the second dozen was the exclusive property of Shadow Unit's anomaloids, and G.o.d save any alpha-Special Agent or civilian employee -who wandered too near.

Daniel Brady watched rangy, brown-skinned, floppy-haired Chaz Villette spider across the bullpen from the kitchenette, four pastries balanced on a napkin and a cup of coffee in the other hand. Chaz nibbled at the Boston creme doughnut teetering atop his pile with crooked, functional teeth. Brady ran his tongue across his own even bite, wondering if years of orthodonture had been worth it.

Brady leaned across the divider to Nikki Lau's desk and stage-whispered, ”You know, a lot of serial killers are serious sugar junkies-”

”I heard that.” Chaz slid into his desk across the aisle. If Brady were a strobe camera, Chaz would have been leaving trails of elbows and knees on the film. Chocolate smeared his upper lip; he sipped coffee and licked it off. ”Is that true? I've never seen it in the literature.”

”What, you might not have read a book in the English language?”

”It's Truman Capote,” Solomon Todd said, from his desk behind Chaz's. He did not look up from a series of pie charts that appeared to hold him engrossed. ”In Cold Blood. Our Danny boy is a reader.”

Todd was fit, five-seven, bespectacled over dark-ringed gray irises, and somewhere in the indeterminate valley between forty-five and sixty. His dark hair was balding, his long una.s.suming face defined by horizontal lines: the slash of a concerned frown, the ladder of concentration up his brow. He mostly moved like somebody was puppeteering him. Hafidha called him Duke, after the comics character.

Brady was catching it.

”See? Capote. It must be true.” Brady winked at Chaz, then turned back to Lau as she made one of her characteristic thinking fidgets. She wasn't his type, but he could manage an aesthetic appreciation of a pretty Chinese-American woman tucking glossy razor-cut hair behind a seash.e.l.l ear.

She said, ”Just be grateful you don't have to eat like that.”

Enter Daphne Worth, stirring coffee, compact and professional in a tan summerweight pantsuit and a burgundy blouse that flattened her pale complexion, brown hair caught back in a short ponytail. ”Grateful? I wish I could eat like that. But no, a second plate of spaghetti and you might as well roll me home.”

”I'll eat it for you,” Chaz offered, licking raspberry jelly off his mouth, one forefinger, and then his mouth again. There was powdered sugar on the lapel of a blue blazer that made him look like an awkward teenager dressed up as an FBI agent.

”Sure, but then I don't get to enjoy it, except as garlic sweat-” Whatever Worth had been about to say would hang forever unfinished on the air, because Esther Falkner- tall, athletic, brunette, olive-complected, reflexively hiding the old sore hitch in her step -swept past with a coffee cup in her right hand and a manila folder upraised in her left, her head tipped slightly toward it. Her loafers made no sound on the industrial gray carpet, and the gray wings of her tailored suit coat flared from her hips.

Chaz accordioned half a doughnut into his mouth and stood, dusting the powder from his coat. Brady held back and waited until Chaz, and Lau, and Worth, and Todd had grabbed cups and pens and notepads and Palm Pilots and Blackberries and fallen in behind Falkner like a row of somewhat fl.u.s.tered ducklings, and only then joined the end of the line.

Because tail-end Charlie was his job, that was why.

The briefing room was already hot and close, p.r.i.c.kling sweat across Todd's bare scalp. He scrunched sideways in his seat to make more room for Brady's football-player shoulders, happy enough to have won the daily game of musical chairs. Hafidha Gates was last, having the furthest to walk. But Hafidha always got a seat, on behalf of her laptop-and the preservation of the credit rating of anybody who might try to shark her. And n.o.body but Reyes ever took Reyes' chair.

<script>