The Intelligencer Read online

  He turned to hail a cab, but Kate stepped forward, grabbed his arm, and twisted it, and him, back around. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Mazur scowled, struggling to shake free of her grip.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Kate said with feigned sincerity, slipping his razor blade into the limp hand she was still holding hostage. “Men like you need things like this to get the job done.”

  Embarrassment flickered across his face as the blade fell to the ground. Kate was pinching a nerve in his wrist and his fingers were useless.

  “Answer my question, and your friends on the force will never know you got made by a girl half your age.”

  With a jerk, Mazur wrenched his arm away and stepped back angrily. “Bitch, I don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re talking about…”

  But Kate had a final trick up her sleeve—another detail her colleague had relayed moments before via cell phone. “How’s your son doing at home on Carroll Street? I could send someone to check on him if you like.”

  Having no idea she would never harm a child, Mazur capitulated. “I don’t know who it was. Guy didn’t give me his name—just emailed the assignment a couple of hours ago. Named a drop for your bag, which I was supposed to take. He paid up front in cash. When I left my office, there was an unmarked envelope outside my door.”

  “Did he say what he wanted, specifically?”

  “Something about a book.”

  “His email address?” Kate asked, handing Mazur her notepad and a pen.

  He complied, then turned once more to find a taxi.

  “I’ll just let you know if I have any more questions,” Kate said to the back of his head.

  Then, reading what he’d written, she murmured to herself, “Guy calls himself Jade Dragon?”

  Opening her cell phone, Kate dialed Medina to let him know that someone was still after his manuscript, that the dead thief was, in all likelihood, a hired hand. She also warned him to be careful and offered him a bodyguard; it was probably an unnecessary precaution but a good idea all the same.

  Kate still considered her new case to be a low-risk mystery. Sure, there had been a couple of attempted thefts, but there couldn’t be any real danger involved. Not on account of some antique gossip and double-dealing.

  Two days would pass before she’d learn that her assumption was wrong.

  OXFORD, ENGLAND—11:02P.M.

  Rucksack slung over her shoulder, Vera Carstairs stepped out of the nearly empty Christ Church library. It was closing time, and as usual, she was among the last students to leave. Leaning against one of the massive Corinthian columns, she paused for a moment to press her sore eyes shut and enjoy the evening’s warm breeze.

  Then she gasped in alarm.

  Two boys carrying unidentifiable pink objects burst past her, kicking up dust as they raced across Peckwater Quad. Watching them weave and stumble, Vera decided it was safe to assumethey were not coming from a long, frustrating night of studying. They disappeared into Killcanon Passage, and Vera, heading in the same direction, heard drunken shouts echoing along the stone corridor. “Come on then, idiots! Get to your places!”

  “Good Lord, what is it this time?” she mumbled.

  Emerging from the passage, Vera entered Tom Quad and stopped short, squinting at the bizarre antics unfolding before her. Students stood facing each other with hands clasped above their heads, forming arches, through which other students, dressed in brown, were somersaulting, after having been swatted on the backside by…what are those?Vera put her glasses on.Plastic flamingos?

  With that, Vera realized she was watching a reenactment of a scene fromAlice in Wonderland. The queen’s croquet match. Though in the book the balls were hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the players the Queen of Hearts and her entourage. So where is she? Vera wondered. Where’s the queen? The answer was quickly apparent. A fat blond boy with a giant red heart lipsticked on his bare chest started jumping up and down, shouting, “Off with his head! Off with his head!” and the offender, in turn, dutifully tipped back his head, allowing another player to pour something from a plastic cup down his throat.

  Remembering that Lewis Carroll had been a math tutor at Christ Church, Vera figured it was some kind of tribute.Well, that’s what they’d call it, anyway.

  It was Vera’s first year at Oxford, but she’d figured out straightaway that her fellow students were particularly adept at inventing seemingly noble reasons to drink themselves silly and cavort like jackasses. Two hedgehogs, she noticed, were snogging in the far corner, and another had just crashed into one of the wickets, which teetered back and forth, ultimately collapsing in a heap of flailing limbs.

  At that moment, the king—a tall skinny boy named Will wearing a paper crown—approached her.

  Vera’s stomach fluttered. She’d been mad about him all term.

  “Wanna play?” he asked. “I need a ball.” Gesturing toward a boy in brown chasing a girl in a white swimsuit, he added, “My hedgehog is trying to shag the White Rabbit.”

  Vera nodded to a lit window atop a stone arch on the far side of the quad. “Actually, since he’s in, I was going to go see—”

  “Dr. Rutherford. I should have guessed.” Will rolled his eyes. “You know, all work and no play…”

  “Well, I still haven’t come up with the right hook for my essay,” Vera explained, “but this weekend, maybe…” She paused, hoping he’d ask her to do something.

  “Hi, Will,” another girl interrupted. She was wearing a black leotard and had whiskers painted on her face and velvet ears on her headband. “Feel like cheating on the queen tonight?”

  Vera tried not to scowl. Isabel Conrad was gorgeous, with breasts out to tomorrow, and whoever you liked, inevitably Isabel would steal him away, or rather distract him just enough that he lost interest in you. For some reason, Isabel needed to have every last boy in Christ Church panting after her.

  Ignoring Isabel’s question, Will turned back to Vera. “ ‘I don’t like the look of it at all…however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.’ ”

  Vera burst out laughing. The line was one of her favorites fromAlice in Wonderland. Then her smile faded. In the book, the Cheshire Cat declined the king’s invitation, but this one grabbed his hand, yanked him to the ground, and—to his delight—climbed on top of him.

  Sighing, Vera continued walking toward her tutor’s office. She was anxious to write an essay that would really impress him this week. Maybe even intrigue him, at least a little bit. He had taught her so much. Her sense of gratitude was sometimes overwhelming. She hoped he’d invite her in, and maybe, like last time, they’d chat over port, sipping late into the night from his two chipped black goblets.

  Climbing the spiral staircase to the third floor, Vera heard from the courtyard, “Out o’ vino? Bollocks! Leigh, Conrad, form a rear guard. To the pub! Troops, forward, march!”

  The croquet players’ shouts and laughter faded quickly as she neared her tutor’s door. She knocked softly. No answer.Must be on the telephone.

  She turned, but then her nose twitched. There was a funny smell. “Dr. Rutherford?” she called out timidly. “Dr. Rutherford?”

  Still no answer. He wouldn’t ignore her like this, Vera knew—not even if he were concentrating deeply on his new book. He was too kind. So had he gone home?Perhaps…but he never forgets to shut off his light when he leaves.

  The door was unlocked. Cautiously entering the room, she turned toward his desk. For a few seconds, her vision blurred and the scene before her went gray, as if obscured by dry-ice smoke—the kind that billows up from the stage in productions ofMacbeth. Disoriented, she shook her head and blinked.

  Finally her vision cleared. And once again she saw Dr. Rutherford slumped over his desk. On the back of his head, shaggy white hair was matted into clumps with a dark brownish substance, and that same substance had pooled on the floor and splattered across the far wall. Realizing it was blood, Vera screamed.

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  Alas, I am a scholar, how should I have gold?

  —RAMUS,in Marlowe’sThe Massacre at Paris

  SOUTHWARK—DUSK, MAY1593

  Pushing his way through the noisy, bustling crowds on the south bank of the Thames, Marlowe paused at London Bridge. More than a dozen severed heads impaled on pikes crowned the archway. He recognized the faces, had been seeing them up there for months. Some for nearly a year. Parboiled in salt water, they’d been fairly well preserved.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a slight bow. “Anyone for a game of dice?”

  A young prostitute with exposed breasts tugged Marlowe’s sleeve. He started to shake her dirty fingers loose, then frowned, noticing a crimson droplet perched upon her bare shoulder. Checking for a wound, he lifted her hair from her neck, but she appeared to be uninjured.

  Mistaking his gesture for the scrutiny of a potential customer, she closed her eyes and puckered her lips awkwardly.

  Marlowe touched the drop and brought his finger to her nose.

  “Your lips smell of copper,” she told him, her soft voice muffled by the cries of produce vendors, fishmongers, and two urchins cursing a foreign couple.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “My father was a blacksmith,” she announced, opening her eyes. “What was that?”

  “Blood.” He showed her the ruby smudge on his fingertip.

  Seeing her alarm, he added with a smile, “Don’t worry, miss, it’s not yours. Either an angel in the sky has scraped his knee or the city decorator is at work again.”

  She followed his eyes to the top of the archway. A freshly severed head was just being set in place. “Poor man,” she said, seeming genuinely sad. “I’ll pray for you.”

  Marlowe realized she must be new to the city. Most residents were immune to the grisly sight. As she walked off, he wondered how long it would take the streets of London to deaden her capacity for pity.

  Swatting aside the furtive hand of a pickpocket, he returned his gaze to the new head, the only one that still had its eyes. Some condemned traitors were merely beheaded. More often than not, those faces were calm, resigned. Others were not so lucky. This one had probably been castrated alive before the ax crashed down on his neck, Marlowe thought. The features were twisted in anguish, filling the air with silent screams.

  “Did you hide a priest beneath your floorboards, my friend?” he asked softly. “You look too smart to have plotted to kill the queen.” Someone bumped into him, and a gravelly voice cursed. Marlowe glanced at the water seller trudging past with a barrel yoked to his back, then looked up again. “But where are you now?”

  Passing beneath the arch, he stepped onto London Bridge. It was lined on each side with tall half-timbered houses owned by wealthy merchants who maintained upscale shops on the bridge’s ground level and lived in the floors above. Though the setting sun still shone, the narrow rutted passage was gloomy; the upper floors of each house jutted outward, almost merging overhead, and the laundry strung between blocked all but a few flickers of sky.

  Halfway across, he turned down a set of stairs leading to the water, stepped into a wooden boat headed east, and handed over three pennies. “Greenwich Palace,” he said, sinking into a cushion. The oarsman began slicing through the layer of brown sludge on the river’s surface. Elbows resting on the gunwale, Marlowe watched the spikes of London’s church steeples shrink in the distance.

  The tall buildings that had crammed the shore gave way to scattered wharves, trees, and fields as they left the filthy, plague-ridden city behind. A new assignment, he mused. Once again the world would become his secret theater—a stage upon which the drama was real, the danger palpable, the final scene unwritten.Act 1. Scene 1. Enter Marlowe.

  At Greenwich, the slight figure of Thomas Phelippes stood waiting upon the dock’s edge, watching Marlowe from behind small wire-rimmed spectacles. Phelippes’s dark yellow hair was tucked behind his ears, and his thin beard did little to hide the pronounced pockmarks covering his face.

  The oarsman looked questioningly at Phelippes, then at the sentry upon the shore. Both nodded. Thus authorized, Marlowe disembarked and followed Phelippes past the palace. The queen’s roving court was in residence, and the elegant turreted building overflowed with music, laughter, and raucous chatter. After being cleared by another sentry station, they were shadowed briefly by a mounted guard as they headed deep into the well-tended grounds, the sounds of the court’s evening revels fading behind.

  Marlowe trailed Phelippes quietly. He’d long since learned that the little man was not one for small talk. They’d met in 1585, when Marlowe was a student at Cambridge writingTamburlaine the Great, the wildly successful play that had ravished the London theater scene two years later. Phelippes had approached him one day that winter, asking if he’d heard of Sir Francis Walsingham, the secretary of state. Marlowe nodded. The university was rife with awed whispers about the infamous spymaster, a man whose clever machinations saved the queen from assassination time and time again.

  Introducing himself as Walsingham’s deputy, Phelippes informed Marlowe that he could make a good deal of money if he were willing to spy for Walsingham’s newly created secret service. Was he interested?Oh, yes.

  England’s Catholic enemies had an invisible presence at Cambridge, Phelippes explained. An invisible menace, he added with a hiss. There was a priest masquerading as a well-to-do Protestant student who was recruiting fellow students to defect to the Catholic seminary across the Channel in Rheims, France. And it was there at Rheims, the headquarters of English Catholic exiles, that the Duke of Guise was hatching a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, in order to allow his niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, to assume the English throne. English spies were already in place at the seminary in Rheims attempting to gather the details of the duke’s strategy. Walsingham wanted a student to infiltrate and expose the network of covert Catholics at Cambridge. Did Marlowe think he could do it?

  Does London reek in warm weather? Not only could he do it, Marlowe knew, it would be no effort at all. Growing up in Canterbury, he’d acted in a number of plays at the King’s School, but this task would require few of the skills he’d sharpened upon the stage. To play a rebellious malcontent, a Catholic sympathizer in an environment where defying the repressive government was fashionable—it was as though Phelippes were offering him money to wear his own shoes.

  Nodding thoughtfully, Marlowe said it was an exciting prospect but for one little thing. “My true, utter, and unflagging devotion to the Holy Father in Rome.”

  Having been warned that his new recruit had a penchant for telling jokes at the most inappropriate of moments, Phelippes smiled.

  Marlowe didn’t.

  There was silence, and Phelippes’s face darkened. At which point Marlowe broke into a grin and offered his hand. Phelippes shook it, and Marlowe’s secret life as an intelligencer began.

  Of course the money involved was tempting enough, as Marlowe, a cobbler’s son, was a poor scholarship student who’d given little thought to any profession other than writing poetry. And though confident in his ability, he knew that a mind full of well-turned verses did not tend to fill one’s pockets.

  He was also charmed by the prospect of fancying himself a secret knight, gallantly protecting his royal lady. He’d had a cynical outlook on the government for years—had seen half a dozen innocent men hang before he could spell—but he chose to indulge in the idealistic notion anyway. After all, what good was life without romantic dreams, in spite of their foolishness?

  Phelippes’s investment proved to be a sound one. Marlowe was able to infiltrate the university’s network of covert Catholics with ease, something a dozen other spies had failed to do. Word of his success quickly reached Walsingham’s ears, and to Marlowe’s unexpected delight, the old spymaster requested a meeting with his promising new recruit. In his London home overlooking the Thames, Walsingham praised Marlowe for his excellent service to their queen and country. Did he wish to continue whi
le he completed his degree?

  Marlowe nodded.

  “A wise choice,” Walsingham said. “Books, you see, are but dead letters. It is travel and experience—ferreting out the double-dealings of men here and abroad—that shall givethem life andyou true knowledge.”

  “As well as good plays,” Marlowe replied. “I’ve begun my second.”

  “Oh, yes, a Bankside poet…” Walsingham recalled, pouring them each a mug of fine Madeira. “That could prove useful.”

  Marlowe sipped with pleasure. It wasn’t every day that he was flattered and encouraged by one of England’s most powerful men.

  “To spend one’s life unearthing hidden secrets is a most noble pursuit,” Walsingham finished. “For such a searcher will always have power.”

  Inspired by those words, Marlowe’s commitment to his intelligence work deepened and ultimately almost cost him his master’s degree. His pose as a covert Catholic was so convincing that the university administration, suspecting Marlowe to be a traitor, prepared to expel him. The Privy Council quickly intervened, however, and he left Cambridge in 1587 with his degree, as well as his finishedTamburlaine.

  Phelippes stopped at a cluster of benches far enough from the palace to avoid drunken wanderers or couples in search of a spot for a breezy tryst. Taking a seat, Marlowe noticed that they were but a few feet from the so-called Queen’s Oak, the tree with a deep hollow in which Queen Elizabeth was said to have hidden as a child.

  “I’ve arranged for you to have a bed here tonight in the lodging house nearest the river,” Phelippes began. “And to get you started…” Reaching into a leather pouch, he withdrew several coins.

  Marlowe pocketed the pleasantly heavy handful, money he knew no longer came from Francis Walsingham. Walsingham had died three years before, and the queen had kept the position of secretary of state open ever since, a position that was tantamount to possessing a set of keys to the kingdom. England’s clever monarch loved to incite competition among her courtiers, and it was an effective strategy. Two arch rivals were jousting fiercely for the coveted title, and as a result, the parsimonious queen got first-rate intelligence from two competing networks with little financial investment on her part.