Hot and Steamy (4 page)

Chance exhaled slowly, laying his cards face up on the felt. “Jack and queen. Zero.” He glanced at the manager. “A card, please. A nine would be convenient.”

The manager patted the automaton's shoulder. “The choice of card is not up to me,
Monsieur
. I do wish you good luck.”

“Most kind.”

The manager touched the fourth button. Gears ground. The automaton's hand slowly drew back. A card thrust forward. The brass hand delicately plucked the card, and then rotated at the wrist.

A nine.

Chance clapped his hands. Virginia gasped and Trent groaned.

“I believe, my dear, the
nothing
you ventured is now
mine.
”

Virginia nodded slowly. She turned in her chair. Stockton quickly moved to draw it back for her. She smiled at him then, standing, started down at Chance. “So you really
did
want revenge for Bremen.”

He removed the blindfold. “We all pay for our sins, Ginnie.”

She brushed a single tear away. “Such a bitter price.”

“Oh, yes, your price.” Chance plucked five of the £10,000 chips from the caddy before the manager and tossed them toward her. “I keep my promises. Your things have been packed. The airship
Vesuvius
leaves for Naples at dawn. You'll enjoy your berth.”

Virginia's hand hovered for a heartbeat before she scooped up the chips. “I would say,
Monsieur
, that it has been a pleasure, but I shan't add prevarication to my list of sins. Gentlemen, good night.” She turned and departed in a rustle of scarlet silk.

Chance closed the jewel box and slipped it into his pocket. He returned the other necklace to a velvet bag and pocketed it as well. Standing, he smiled. “I should be happy,
Monsieur
LaPointe, to offer you champagne in the saloon. Too bad, Trent, you won't be able to join us. You've been entertaining but, I do believe, your value in that department is at an end.”

C
licks and snaps gave Chance the warning he'd have denied Trent had their roles been reversed. The nobleman, his bow tie askew, his cheeks flushed with drink, and his arms sheathed with the
convincers
, blocked the companionway deep in the
Fortune's
bowels. Stockton stood further down the passage, his expression almost apologetic.

Trent, white froth at the corners of his mouth, pointed with a quivering finger. “You aren't getting away with this, Corrigan. You can cheat that witch. I don't care. But you can't cheat me.”

Chance sank his hands into his pants pockets. “Seems I already have.”

“Give me the Queen of Hearts.” The man hesitated. “And £50,000, same as you gave her.”

The one-eyed man laughed. “Take a lot of convincing before I do that.”

Trent balled metal-clad fists. “I shall enjoy this.”

“Doubt it.” Chance shrugged and drew a flat, silver metal disk from his pocket. The diameter of a silver dollar, but three times as thick, the disk traveled effortlessly back and forth over Chance's knuckles. “Go away. I don't want to hurt you.”

Trent set himself. “I'll beat you to within an inch of your life.”

Chance flipped the disk at Trent.

The nobleman contemptuously backhanded it out of air. “That was supposed to hurt me?”

“Stockton, he says you're good with wrinkles.” Chance smiled. “How good are you with scorch-marks?”

Trent's mouth fell open, incomprehension softening his expression. He looked at his right hand. The disk, instead of flying off, had attached itself to the back of his hand. Trent shook it, trying to flick it away. He then brought his left hand over to pry it loose, but the steel wristband clicked tight to the disk.

Chance nodded. “Magnets. My specialty. Oh, and electricity, too.”

Jagged blue-white electric tendrils raced along the
convincers
. Trent bounced up and down, and then capered around. His jacket smoked. He slammed into one bulkhead, then rebounded into another and slumped to the deck. A couple more sparks engendered twitches. His head lolled to the side.

Chance looked through the thin vapor. “Your master will be fine in a few minutes. A stiff brandy or two, and he'll be calculating how to explain all this.”

The manservant nodded mutely.

Chance hesitated, then fished into his jacket pocket. He tossed the jeweler's box onto Trent's chest. “It's worthless now. Just like him. Call it a souvenir. Something for his pains.” Chance laughed at his own joke, eclipsing Trent's groans, and made his way unmolested to the ground and his bed.

 

She came to him through the balcony's French doors. “You need to be more careful with valuable treasure in your room.”

Chance shook his head. “Why lock doors you'd have been through in an eyeblink?”

Virginia smiled and crossed to the sideboard, where a magnum of champagne cooled in an ice bucket. “Shall we celebrate our success?”

“I'm going to disappoint you.” Chance sat in the wingback chair in the room's opposite corner. “I gave the Queen of Hearts back to Trent.”

“You what?” She glanced back at him over her left shoulder. “You had £750,000 and gave it back?”

Chance pointed at the velvet sack in the middle of the bed. “I was playing a bigger game, Ginnie. Trent is a link. I want his bosses terrified. The Queen of Hearts you wore, the one LaPointe authenticated, it was paste. I paid LaPointe to create it and claim it was real. Caine and the Rothschilds had chosen LaPointe to value the real Queen of Hearts, so his word wouldn't be challenged.”

She turned slowly, still somehow incredibly feminine despite wearing a black woolen sweater, dark knickers, socks, and slippers. “If Trent hadn't thought to bring LaPointe, you would have demanded, as a point of honor, his coming to verify things?”

“Trent would have thought it was his idea.”

“And LaPointe worked with you because?”

“Money. And an incident in the Sudan, when I was with Somerset.”

Virginia brought him a glass of champagne. “You give back the necklace, proving it's worthless. Trent's bosses believe in your manufacturing process. Wanting to beat a market collapse, they will divest themselves of jewelry and gem businesses. Prices will crash. Lot of money to be made buying what they sell off.”

“Clever girl. Might want to invest there, too.”

She slowly lowered herself into his lap, straddling his thighs. “These men, they must have hurt you terribly. More than I did in Bremen?”

“You hurt me. They
murdered
me.”

She touched her flute to his. “To evil men reaping what they have sown; and a penitent woman making amends.”

Chance nodded and drank.

Virginia set her flute aside and lowered her face to his. “I will earn your forgiveness, Chance.”

Her breath warm on his face, her scent filling his head, made Chance smile. He circled his arms around her waist and drew her to him. She slid forward along his thighs, her hands firmly on the chair's back. She kissed him, lips parted. The tip of her tongue danced quickly against his lips.

His arms tightened, crushing her against his chest. He sucked her tongue into his mouth. One hand rose to her head, loosening thick copper curls. His other hand slipped beneath her sweater's hem, sliding up along soft, warm flesh, exposing her belly.

She raised her arms, letting him free her from the garment. She sank her fingers into his hair, jerking his head back. She dipped forward, licking up along his jugular until her lips brushed his ear. “Yes,” she whispered, “I will earn forgiveness, no matter how long it takes. And you will enjoy every second of it.”

L
aPointe smiled at Chance over demitasse at an outdoor cafe the next morning. “It was as you suggested,
Monsieur
.
Mademoiselle
Greene had a woman pose as herself and board the
Vesuvius
. She then made her way to the railway station and is bound on a coach for Paris. You are certain the rest of your plan will work?”

“Nothing's certain, but all looks good.” Chance added another sugar cube to his coffee and stirred. “You create the paste Queen and substitute it for the real one when you appraise it. I use the real one to convince Virginia and Trent that I can manufacture gems. I give Trent back the fake, then Virginia drugs me, steals Trent's Queen, and leaves the real one in its place. She'll contact you as a go-between with the owners, since you can authenticate it and already have the contacts to broker a deal.”

“And the narcotic she gave you? It has left you with no ill effects?”

“Mild headache. I didn't drink much.” Chance tapped his left eye. “Sees in the ultraviolet wavelength. The champagne in my glass glowed eerily. After a while I slowly fell asleep.”

“But not too soon, as your smile suggests.”

“A gentleman does not kiss and tell.” Chance's smile broadened. “Neither do I.”

LaPointe set his cup down. “I do not understand, however, how you were able to draw a nine when you needed it.”

“Magnets. The card decks were specially printed. The nines were done in a separate run, printed with an ink containing a high concentration of iron. As the automaton shuffled, it retained the nines in a stack. When I needed a nine, the manager touched the automaton's shoulder. That turned off an electromagnet. The nines dropped on top of the deck.” Chance shrugged. “That was insurance only. Had Virginia won, Trent would have demanded the necklace. She would have managed to swap the two of them, and the result would have been the same.”

The jeweler smiled. “And your enemies will fear for their fortunes.”

“Most of them, yes.” Chance nodded. The others—his most powerful enemies—upon hearing how Chance claimed to have made diamonds would understand he'd actually developed a new weapon: a magnetically driven linear accelerator. Krups, Springfield, Colt, and every other man who profited from war would see the value of their weapons evaporate. They'd pour money into research and development of their own linear accelerators. They'd ruin themselves trying to duplicate a device for which Chance had only scribbled some rudimentary diagrams.

The jeweler shivered. “That smile, my friend, is a terrible thing. No mirth and no mercy.”

“Don't worry, it's not for you.” Chance raised his cup in a salute. “It's for the evil men who destroyed my life ten years ago. They'll rue the day they failed to finish the job.”

“And for the woman, for her you have another smile?” LaPointe sat poised with cup and saucer in hand. “Would it not be better to abandon revenge and instead go to Paris?”

“It would, except for one thing.” Chance nodded slowly, focusing his good eye distantly. “All this revenge is
because
of a woman.”

The Frenchman smiled. “Unfinished business . . .”

“Exactly. And a debt to be collected in blood.”

J
ameson Watts, deep in thought as he usually was, failed to notice the bullet that whizzed past. He mistook it for a large insect, and shook his unkempt gray hair as he waved a hand by his ear. The middle-aged archaeologist stood at the rail of the
SS Evangeline,
flagship of his family's steamboat fleet, an unseen figure in a lavender bustle melted into the shadows behind him.

Jameson fished into the pocket of his stained lab coat and slid out a large watch, its fob a shiny golden ankh; it always reminded him of his first expedition to Egypt when he was still a teenager. There he'd discovered a small straw-colored scarab beetle carved from desert glass. He'd kept it with him ever since, superstitious that the talisman protected him. During the many decades since that first adventure to the Valley of the Kings, he'd unearthed, liberated, studied, and cataloged countless treasures from dusty dark tombs. But the beetle was his favorite piece; it was the symbol of the rising sun, the source of all life.

It dangled from a chain around his neck and he absent-mindedly stroked it as he mulled over his life's project. Ever since he had opened the tomb where his first discoveries were made, Jameson had felt that a strange aura surround him—some sort of electromagnetic force that not only seemed to keep him out of harm's way but coaxed him back to the desert time after time.

He flicked open the back of the large watch, and there on the indigo surface ciphers whirled, forming stick figures and ancient symbols. Against the dark blue glow small silver markings produced blinking hieroglyphs. With a slight shake of his head he snapped the gadget shut, mumbling, “Cap'n Keel worries too much.”

The state of the river was what Jameson worried about this morning as he strolled back to his cabin's laboratory. Muffled sounds of a train whistle could be heard through the dissipating morning fog. The river had become wider and shallower from years of clear cutting trees along the banks. Steamships consumed wood—and lots of it—and this resulted in increased flooding, making the waterway more treacherous and requiring the use of added river pilots for navigation. What was happening to the river due to all the traffic and commerce festered in his bones.