Chapter 234: A Polite Sort of Murder
Bert’s hand closed around the guard’s throat from behind.
He murmured. "Do forgive the hour, sir, and the intrusion, and the liberty I’ve taken with my hands. I must confess the manner of it as well."
He squeezed.
The sentry was a heavy man, with a cold clay pipe between his teeth. His heels struck the dirt twice and his neck gave a wet little click, like a knuckle cracked over a card table, and the whole of him went slack in Bert’s arms.
For a moment the weight of him dragged before the body went loose. The pipe dropped, and Bert caught it with his free hand a finger’s width above the ground.
Clay pipes make a fine noise when they strike stone, and this was no time for a chapel bell.
Few paces farther across the low rear wall, Edmund repeated the takedown to another guard, this one wiry with a pistol tucked through his belt. He was quicker about it, jerking the man back hard enough to knock his heels from under him, neat as a man wringing out a wet shirt.
The sentry’s head struck Edmund’s shoulder, and then he sagged.
Edmund propped the body against the wall, straightened the man’s hat, and murmured,
"Splendid hat, sir. Do sleep well."
The brothers’ cutlasses stayed sheathed at their hips, like guests who had been told to wait in the hall.
Wesley lowered James over the wall like a sack of flour and made no comment on the matter.
Naturally, back in the shack, James had answered Bert’s proposal with a grin, and the brothers, being gentlemen, took that for a yes.
Esperanza’s two men remained in the street behind the estate as lookouts.
The smuggler herself had spoken exactly four words against the plan, all of them Spanish and none suitable for church, and then followed along. This was fair enough, since she’d helped plan the last occasion when he got himself arrested on purpose.
Milagros had given the sort of shrug belonging to a helmsman who had already sailed through the same storm twice, then gone to check her knife.
The courtyard James remembered had been full of sun, wine, and shouting. This one had the night’s cold in its tiles, while the gallery above made a black roof overhead.
Far off at the front of the house, two men by the plain timber door argued over dice, and a lantern moved across the front wall as another sentry made his round.
A third sentry leaned beside the bead curtain at the entrance of the passage, a big-bellied fellow picking his teeth with a fish bone.
Bert and Edmund bent their heads together, and James heard every word in the silence.
"After you, Edmund."
"I couldn’t dream of it, Albert. You’ve the better hands for a neck."
"You’re too kind."
"I merely observe. On three?"
"Two, I think. He looks the fidgeting sort."
"Two, then. Do proceed."
They went in together, Bert’s arm around the man’s throat while Edmund’s palm covered his mouth.
The big fellow fought hard enough to set the beads clicking.
He bucked once, hard enough to rattle the curtain, but Edmund held him fast while Bert tightened his grip.
"Struggling rarely improves matters in circumstances such as these, sir," Bert whispered.
"Indeed."
The neck cracked beneath Bert’s hand. The man’s fingers clawed once at Edmund’s wrist, then fell away.
James had seen men killed by cutlass, by pistol, and by a ship of the line.
Never with an apology attached to it.
Beside him, Esperanza stared at the brothers with both eyebrows nearly in her hair.
They skipped the stairs, which climbed beneath a lantern bright enough to shame a tavern at midnight, and took the dark corner beside a stout stone that rose to the rail.
Three men built like church doors climbed it one after another.
Nothing fell, nothing rang, and no board complained when their boots reached the top.
James had picked them for this reason, and half the walk across Havana he’d wondered whether he’d made a fool of himself.
Bert leaned over the rail and held down a hand the size of a shovel.
"Captain, if you’d be so good."
The hand caught James by his good elbow, just as it had on the city wall, and hauled him over without either man wasting a breath.
The women followed, Milagros moving as though she’d been born on a yardarm, Esperanza with her skirts hitched up and a glare ready for James in case he had anything to say.
He had plenty to say.
He kept it all behind his teeth.
The gallery spread the length of the house, black and silent, every door across it shut on people snoring behind it.
Wesley took the lead without a word.
A fourth sentry stood halfway down with his elbows on the rail, young and sunburned at the neck, humming a hymn to himself.
He was still humming when Wesley reached him.
One large hand clamped over his mouth. The other caught the back of his skull and wrenched his head sharply back.
The hymn broke into a muffled sound and bone cracked. The boy’s boots kicked the boards once, then again, before becoming rigid.
Wesley laid him down as carefully as a man putting a child into a cradle, then straightened.
"Certainly."
He walked on.
Behind James, Milagros and Esperanza had fallen into step at the back of the line, their heads bent close.
They whispered in Spanish, too fast and too softly for him to catch anything except cabrón, which told him nothing, since half the Spaniards used it for good morning.
Even then, their eyes kept finding him often enough that he was fairly sure he was the subject.
Milagros was a grown woman and could answer for her own choices. If her sister intended to settle accounts over them, James had nothing on his conscience worth losing sleep over.
The worst a sister could do was hit him, and Anne managed that daily, albeit for more indecent reasons.
While the brothers tried the next doors ahead, James dropped back a step and leaned close until his mouth was a hand’s breadth from Esperanza’s ear.
He had been carrying the thought with him since the shack.
"Lass," he breathed. "Ever fancied a matched set?"
"A what?"
James explained kindly. "Like a pair of good pistols, you and your sister, both in the one bunk, and me on me back tryin’ to work out which of you bites harder. Bad arm, mind, I’d need the pair of you to do the heavy work."
Esperanza stopped dead.
She stared at him, her lips flickering like a gunner who had loaded three charges and couldn’t decide which one to fire.
When the answer came, it came in a hiss.
"Oh, you bastard, señor. Have you gone mad?"
Her chin lifted.
"And you ask me this with my sister three feet away and a knife on her belt."
"Aye, only fair where she can hear."
"La puta madre, ask me again when you’ve two good arms and I’ve had a drink, cabrón."
She turned her face away, and the tips of her ears had gone red.
"And do it better."
Milagros had heard every word.
She made a noise like a kettle boiling over, then hissed in Spanish, English, and a third tongue that seemed to contain mostly vowels.
She jabbed a finger at him, then at her sister, then at nothing at all, and went red enough to light the whole gallery without a lantern.
"I don’t... you can’t... ¡Madre de Dios, no!"
The gallery ended at a tall door of dark carved wood with a brass handle polished bright. Of course, a greedy merchant who waxed his mustache into two points would naturally buy himself a door to match.
The brothers took up positions on either side, and Wesley stood a pace back, watching the gallery behind them. No sentry remained along the walk, while out at the front the argument over the dice went merrily on.
Both sisters pushed forward at once, fists already half-closed.
"I’m first," Milagros whispered. "That fat pig put me in a bloody prison."
"He put you in that cell to get his hand in me, mocosa. I’m first."
Each got a hand on the brass, and they wrestled over it in whispers that sounded like two cats fighting in a sack.
James raised his good hand between them. "Easy, lasses. I’ve a few words for Ambrosio before either of you lays a knuckle on him, and I’d sooner the bastard was awake to hear ’em. After that, ye’ll have yer turn, every swing of it."
They glared at him, then at each other, and finally let go of the handle together, two women calling a truce for exactly as long as it suited them.
James turned to the door.
Behind it, if the man kept a rich man’s hours, slept the fellow who had tried to sell him for forty thousand reales.
His grin came up wide, red at the corner where he’d bitten his cheek raw.