Clan Corporate by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

strode on toward the intersection with New Street. The crowds were thicker here, and as he stepped onto the pavement at the far side a fellow ran straight into him.
    “I say, sir, are you all right?” the man asked, dusting himself off. “You dropped your paper.” He bent and handed a folded broadsheet to “Rudolf.”
    “If you’d been looking where you were going, I wouldn’t have.” “Rudolf”
    snorted, jammed the paper beneath his arm, and hurried off determinedly. Only when he’d passed the outrageously expensive plate glass windows of the Store Romanova did he slow, cough once or twice into his handkerchief, and verify with a sidelong glance that the paper clenched in his left hand was a copy of The Clarion.
    Queen’s Counselor Denies Everything, Threatens Libel Suit! screamed the headline. “Rudolf” smiled to himself. And so he should, he thought, and so he should. If Farnsworth said there was no substance to the rumors then he was almost certainly telling the truth-not that his loyalty was above and beyond question, for nobody was beyond question, but his dislike for her majesty was such that if there had been any substance to the rumors, the dispatches he sent via Jack would almost certainly have confirmed them. “Rudolf” took a deep, slow, breath, trying not to irritate his chest, and forced himself to relax, slowing to an old man’s ambling pace. Every second that passed now meant that the incriminating letter was that much further from its origin and that much closer to the intelligence cell that would analyze it before making their conclusions known to the Continental Congress.
    At the corner with Bread Street, “Rudolf” paused beside the tram stop for a minute, then waved down a cab. “Hogarth Villas,” he said tersely. “On Stepford High Street.”
    “Sure, and it’s a fine night fir it, sor.” The cabbie grinned broadly in his mirror as he bled steam into the cylinder and accelerated away from the roadside. His passenger nodded, thoughtfully, but made no attempt to reply.
    Hogarth Villas was a broad-fronted stretch of town houses, fronted with iron rails and a gaudy display of lanterns. It stretched for half a block along the high street, between shuttered shop fronts that slept while the villas’
    residents worked (and vice versa). One of the larger and better-known licensed brothels at the south end of Manhattan island, it was anything but quiet at this time of night. “Rudolf” paid off the cabbie with a generous tip, then approached the open vestibule and the two sturdy gentlemen who stood to either side of the glass inner door. “Name’s Rudolf,” he said quietly. “Ma’am Bishop is expecting me.”
    “Aye, sir, if you’d just step this way, please.” The shorter of the two, built like a battleship and with a face bearing the unmistakable spoor of smallpox, opened the door for him and stepped inside. The carpet was red, the lights electric-bright, shining from the gilt-framed mirrors. In the next room, someone was playing a saucy nautical air on the piano; girlish voices chattered and laughed with the gruff undertone of the clientele. This was by no means a lower-class dive. The doorman led “Rudolf” along the hallway then through a side door into understairs quarters, where the carpet was replaced with bare teak floorboards and the expensive silk wallpaper with simple sky-blue paint. The building creaked and chattered around them, sounds of partying and other sport carrying through the lath and plaster. They climbed a narrow spiral staircase before arriving on a landing fronted by three doors.
    The bouncer rapped on one of them. “Here’s where I leave you,” he said, as it began to swing open, and he headed back toward the front of the building.
    “Come in, Erasmus.”
    She sounded amused. Erasmus-Rudolf no more-set his shoulders determinedly and stepped forward. No avoiding it now, he told himself, feeling a curious sinking feeling as he met the opening door