Read Online Touchstone by Laurie R. King - Free Book Online Page A

felt as if Grey was counting the pores on his face. “You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, have you?”
    “Not really, no.”
    “The Major brought you here without telling you about me?”
    “Basically, Carstairs told me just enough to get me on the train. He said you’d been injured, left with some, what he called ‘peculiar abilities,’ and came here to get away from things. He seemed to think you might be able to help me with a, er, problem I’m having. Oh—and he said you weren’t a mind-reader.”
    After a moment, Grey’s mouth twitched, and the ghost of a handsome man flitted briefly through the worn features. “Must have cost him something to admit that,” he said. “Tell me, does he still pull out that damnable note-book of his? I know he still smokes those bloody awful cigars, I could smell them from across the yard.”
    “Yeah, he writes notes sometimes in a little book. Why? What’s in it?”
    “God knows. It used to make me shudder, that book. Look, would you like some tea, or there’s coffee?”
    “Coffee’d be great,” Stuyvesant agreed, thinking that it might be good to get some into Grey, as well; if he had a little more than four hours to figure out how the man was to help him, he didn’t want to waste it watching the blond head snoring face-down on the table. Grey pushed back from the table and stood—or tried to, but his balance failed and his leg gave out on him, tipping him back into the chair and nearly upending it. Stuyvesant’s big hand shot out and seized one flailing wrist, snapping Grey back against the table. This time when Grey’s head went into his hands, it was from dizziness, not pain.
    Stuyvesant got up instead and went to hunt through the cupboards for a packet of coffee grounds and a pot. He filled the kettle and stirred up the fire, talking all the while: Keep Grey focused, keep him awake, and, most of all, keep him from going for a refill on the rotgut. And if it took chattering like a cleaning lady, that’s what he’d do.
    “Look. Carstairs told you I know what he’s got in mind, or some of it anyway, but like I said, I really don’t have anything more than an educated guess. Maybe I ought to begin with me—how I got here, what I’m after—and we can go from there. That sound good to you?”
    “Fine.”
    “Okay. Harris John Stuyvesant, at your service. I’m an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. You don’t see a lot of Bureau agents outside the States, but for the last five or six years, my job’s been agitators. Anarchists, Reds, Unions, the lot. Same as you have here, for the most part, although our strikes tend to be more violent than yours, and a lot of the chief agitators were born outside the country. Then again,” he mused, “most of our workers were born outside the country as well, so maybe it doesn’t signify. Anyway, until recently the Bureau’s main goal, outside of bank jobs, has been to keep the agitators under control. Now, what with Prohibition and all, things are shifting to straight crime, but I’m still mainly—”
    “Anarchists.” Grey seemed to be addressing the oil-cloth. “Did you have anything to do with the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti?”
    Yeah, Stuyvesant thought: Grey might live at the end of the world, but he kept up with the London papers, and apparently some kind of wireless broadcasts penetrated this remote toe of England. He might know as much about the two Italians as any man on the streets of New York. “I worked on the case for a while, but I got myself reassigned when I flat out told my boss he had the wrong guys. Those two aren’t lily-white innocents by a long shot, but they’re not guilty of
that
murder.”
    “Will they be executed?”
    Stuyvesant shifted the kettle to a hotter spot, then raised his eyes to the window, tracing the lines of Grey’s Phoenician city. What had those ancient residents done by way of law enforcement? “I hope to Christ not. They’re on