#mcole

[thatmansplayinggalaga]

[aandrezel]

Jan joined Madame Vice Chairman for coffee in the library the next morning. Captain Smith sat at the writing desk in the corner of the room. Helena was ensconced on the large divan before the window, with Collier in an armchair facing out into the Border sunshine. “Good morning, Mr. Collier,” Helena said. Her German was still quite deliberate, but she rarely made mistakes.

“The pleasure is all mine, Madame Vice Chairman,” Jan said. “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

The Italian heiress studied Collier, the corners of her eyes squinting ever so slightly in the bright contrast of the morning sun. Their previous meetings had been mostly in passing, and it was the first chance she had to really observe the infamous dandy up close. “The Captain tells me that you are an actor, Mr. Collier,” Helena said, smiling as she drank her coffee. Except for the tiny lines around her eyes, the skin of Madame Vice Chairman’s face was completely smooth. It radiated a light that rivaled the one beating in through the glass. “I have lived long enough in Edena to recognize that there is value in that.”

“Is there a particular role you were hoping for?” Jan asked. If it had been the Vice Chairman sitting across from him, there would have been a poison barb of sarcasm to the words, but with Helena, Collier found the bitterness unwarranted. She was a direct manner of person, and Jan felt a duty to deal with her in kind. The silent grin on Captain Smith’s face, where she worked away at her notes on the far side of the room, indicated that the exception had not been lost on her.

“I would like to help you with your work in Amsterdam,” Madame Vice Chairman continued. “—You tell me which lines to expect, and I will do my best in the supporting role.” She stirred cream into her cup.

“I assume that either the Captain or His Excellency has told you that a part of my job is to relay information about the Archtrustees’ intentions?” Jan asked.

Madame Vice Chairman nodded. “Mr. de Leeuw also seems fond of you,” she observed.

Collier laughed. It was always a pleasure to find a sharp wit, shrouded by a sublime face. “Do you mind if I smoke, Your Excellency?” He asked.

“Not at all,” she said, taking her own silver case from a deftly hidden pocket. She leaned forward, cigarette awaiting Jan’s light. Collier ignited Helena’s smoke, then his own.

Madame Vice Chairman leaned her weight back against the divan and took a long drag. She was, Jan could tell, the type of person for whom the cigarette was a prop, a kind of amulet into which her nervous energy could be channeled. The endless hours of dull smiles and empty hands at Standard Tower must have been hell for her. “If I could pass information directly to Your Excellency,” Collier continued, “That would make my life much simpler. Otherwise,” he smiled, “I’m afraid the Captain will have me making dead drops at midnight or watching for chalk lines on benches in the park or whatever other dreary nonsense passes for fastidiousness in her business.”

“Something tells me that I won’t be able to save you from that entirely,” Helena sympathized. “But I will do my best.”

Jan smiled. “I’m very grateful,” he said.

Helena warmed her coffee with a fresh hit from the pot. “How is your Italian, Mr. Collier?” She asked.

“Not much better than passable, I’m afraid,” Collier admitted.

“Would you understand me?” The Vice Chairman’s wife wondered.

Jan nodded. Helena took a steady drag. “Then let’s move forward on a little more even footing, shall we?” She continued, switching to her native tongue. “I imagine you’ve spoken German all your life. Is that a fair guess, Mr. Collier?”

The financier’s son summoned his best Roman accent. “It is a language of,” he paused, “How do you say… compliance?”

Madame Vice Chairman laughed. “City,” she remarked, “You’re charming.”

“Only professionally,” Jan replied, tapping ashes from his cigarette and returning to Edena high-German.

“I don’t share your talents, Mr. Collier,” Helena sighed, stirring her coffee. “And so, naturally, I’m a little nervous. But, if I’m to seem enamored for an audience, I’d find it tremendously helpful to be at least friendly in the wings.”

Heaven help the Three Cities when she’d mastered reflexive verbs and relative clauses, Jan thought. “That’s very reasonable, Your Excellency,” Collier agreed. He took a drag, brow furrowed ever so slightly. “—But in all honesty, I couldn’t tell you the last time I made a friend. I think I must be terribly out of practice.”

“Well,” Madame Vice Chairman said, putting on her impression of a brave face, “We shall just have to do our best. Tell me, Mr. Collier, what is it about people that you find so fascinating?”

“Do I find people fascinating?” Jan answered with a laugh. “This is news to me, Your Excellency.”

Helena tapped her cigarette into the ash tray. “They’re your occupation,” she observed. “I suppose I’d hoped, for your sake, that something about them appealed.”

For a moment, Collier wanted desperately to tell her the truth. She wielded warmth and honesty as dangerously as the Captain did her facts and sums and strategies. It would be very easy to yield to her without warning.

“Oh, Your Excellency,” Jan said, the edge in his voice reappearing, unbidden, “—Unless you plan on exhausting yourself on a lost cause, I’d squash the habit of hoping for Jan Collier.”

Madame Vice Chairman set down her coffee cup. “So,” she remarked, “That’s what brings up the guard. No one’s allowed to to be crueler to Mr. Collier than Mr. Collier is to himself?”

Jan didn’t flush, but he could feel it.

“I’m impressed, Your Excellency,” he said. “I’m not usually such an easy mark.”

“The Captain told me you were uncomfortable with kindness,” she confessed, “—I wanted to see if the opposite were also true.”

“Whoever thought they were getting a puppet in Madame Vice Chairman is going to be disappointed,” Jan replied.

“Captain Smith also said there was no better flatterer in the Three Cities,” Helena added, smiling into her coffee, “You recognize people’s insecurities very well, Mr. Collier.”

“God’s Eye,” the financier’s son said, turning over his shoulder to address Mary. “You really care about her, don’t you?”

Captain Smith looked up from her ledger. “Her Excellency is a very quick student,” Mary said. “I need both of you at your best.”

Jan shook his head and took a drag.

“I suppose I enjoy pinpointing the illusion,” he said, pouring himself a coffee at last.

“Pardon?” Helena wondered.

“The thing that fascinates me about people,” Collier confessed. The coffee was very hot. “First there is the fantasy,” he explained, fingers trembling around his cigarette. “—The intoxicating possibility of another human being, that fragile hope: maybe this is the one that’s solid—top to bottom!” The financier’s son raised his brows in mock anticipation. “But the second act, Madame Vice Chairman,” he said with finality, “—Is always reality. You could say that I’ve grown tired of waiting for the curtain to come down. I like to skip ahead; to read the other man’s lines a while. Like Madame Vice Chairman said: an actor. But why should I give them the satisfaction of breaking my heart, when I do it so elegantly myself?” He laughed. “—Anyway, that’s practice for you. I suppose it’s even amusing, once you get a taste for it.”

“Well, I could never pull it off,” Helena said, reaching across the table, wrapping her slender fingers around Jan’s idle hand. “But I think, perhaps, we’ll make a complimentary partnership.”

“Is there any liquor, Captain?” Jan asked, “If there is, I’d drink to that.”

Madame Vice Chairman smoked her cigarette, patting the financier’s leg as she rose from the divan.

“There’s always liquor, Mr. Collier,” she said. “This is civilization, after all.”

Helena took two glasses from the cabinet and filled them with cognac from the decanter that Jordanah kept by the gramophone.

“Hear, hear,” Jan agreed, accepting his spirits.

They drank.

“God’s Eye,” Madame Vice Chairman said, resting her empty glass on the coffee table as she returned to her seat, “—That’s rather early for me.”

“A complimentary partnership, indeed,” Jan said. He smiled in spite of himself.

[aandrezel]

Ferdinand sat down beside his foster brother and borrowed a large drink of his whiskey. The soft lights of the courtyard swayed in the breeze.

“Captain Smith is fucking Madame Vice Chairman,” he said dully.

Wittberg was in stitches.

“City! Really?” The Ambassador demanded.

Jordanah poured the Vice Chairman a whiskey of his own.

“Are you absolutely certain?” The heiress of Geneva asked.

“Helena told me herself,” Ferdinand replied. “It’s not as if it’s anything dishonorable. I’ll be as happy for her as I can.”

The Vice Chairman let his attention wander across the courtyard. His head was feeling very light, like when he’d had too much champagne as a child. It had been a long day, but that wasn’t it at all. Ferdinand thought of all the cool evenings above the dry expanse of the Farm, and their little society of outcasts. It was in that dusty drawing room, with the murmur of the wireless arriving—as if from another life—that he had learned to cherish his wife as the rarest of comrades. And there, too, he thought with a sigh, that he had allowed Jordan under his skin. That had taken longer to see, but Ferdinand knew it was the truth.

“Madame Vice Chairman will do alright,” Konrad chuckled.

“You’re right about that,” the Vice Chairman seconded, taking the liquor Jordan handed him. “And even the Captain’s intentions seem honorable enough.”

Mademoiselle Cole pulled up a chair beside her conspirators. The flash of her antique lighter drew another cigarette into life. Ferdinand watched as she brought it to her lips. He could tell by the tremble in her fingers that tonight was a bad night, and would be spent curled in the closet.

“Everyone has a weakness, I suppose,” the Ambassador said. “That Captain Smith’s happens to be shy Italians is too perfect for words.”

“I can see it,” Jordan observed, letting the smoke rise from the corner of her mouth. “And she certainly has no interest in brash half-Anglos.”

“Helena has made up her mind to help run Collier in Amsterdam,” Ferdinand admitted, the worry palpable in his voice. Why couldn’t he just accept that the risk wasn’t his to manage?

Mademoiselle Strauß-Cole tapped ashes from the end of her cigarette.

“She’ll be good at that,” said the heiress to Geneva.

The Vice Chairman rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t disagree,” Ferdinand replied. “And I’m glad for something to take her mind off of the prison she endures in Edena.”

“But?” Wittberg wondered.

“But it makes all this madness very real, doesn’t it?” the Vice Chairman said angrily, only realizing at that moment what had been bothering him.

Jordan shook her head.

“You’re past that, Your Excellency,” she said.

Ferdinand took a drink.

“Old habits die hard, I suppose,” he replied. “Indecision is the great luxury of an anxious mind.”

“You are but mad north-northwest,” Mademoiselle Strauß-Cole chided the Vice Chairman. “That excuse has no currency in present company.”

Ferdinand rose in annoyance and paced the ground between his friends.

“And what is my alternative?” He demanded, more upset with himself than anything. “Am I to be callous with my intimate associates, or deaf to the demands of my age?”

“If Your Excellency is squeamish of a sacrifice,” Wittberg laughed, “Look around you. Fate made an offering of this wretched fellowship long before you had a say in the matter.”

“So you’ve told me,” Ferdinand said.

“And so you resist,” his foster brother rejoined.

Jordan shook her head.

“I doubt Madame Vice Chairman asked your permission to risk herself for Amsterdam,” she said. “And the people of the Wild Isles resist the Chairman’s designs, ignorant even of our plots and schemes. Perhaps less hangs on the outcome of your great moral struggle than your guilt would have you believe.”

Ferdinand’s posture straightened.

“Then why, Mademoiselle,” he demanded, “Are you so eager to die for it?”

Jordanah’s eyes flashed.

“Well,” she said, “I should die for something, shouldn’t I?”

“—Oh, sweet Konstantin,” Jan Collier’s voice interrupted them, “If the three of you could hear yourselves.”

———-

I followed the financier’s son into the courtyard, where the Company heirs had turned to face the source of the interruption.

“Mr. Collier,” Konrad said, “You’re looking refreshed.”

“Let’s not be cliche,” Jan said. “I’m too tired.”

Hypatia scowled.

“If the moneylender was so exhausted, he should have gone to sleep,” she observed.

“Quiet,” I told her. “Personally, I’d like to see how he does.”

The Vice Chairman produced Collier a drink.

“I’m tired as well,” Ferdinand said. “Can we agree to be civil, just for the duration?”

Jan sat beside Mademoiselle Strauß. I stood under the olive tree, smoking silently.

[aandrezel]

Jan was in the shower, considering his situation.

The financier’s son had almost forgotten the unspeakable pleasure Rainer Jøberg could give him, when he tried. In those rare moments that his touch was not part of a game, when Rainer simply allowed himself to want Collier, and to act on that desire—he had an intensity unmatched by anyone Jan had ever known.

Even the sunshield was not so bad when Collier had a moment of quiet to hold onto, a bright light and a still breath, with the weight of Jøberg’s body pressing down against him. If he could just focus on that silence, he might actually be able to sleep.

When he got out of the shower, Rainer was already gone, buried in the soft expanse of smooth sheets and lost to the dreams of a man more accustomed to tile floors and threadbare mattresses. Jan lay beside him for a moment, but his limbs were restless. After a few minutes he rose, put on a shirt and trousers, and wandered into the hall.

Jordanah Strauß-Cole’s home was not unlike his parents’. The tall corridor was packed from chair rail to skylight with antique paintings, staring out from gilded frames along the time-worn rug. His footsteps were completely muffled as he made his way down the hallway, looking back into the gazes of the glorious dead, those oil-streaked spirits and their expressions of eternal boredom. Some of these, he knew, had never even been in the ground—or not the rubble, at least—but still its shadow clung to their skin like a grimy veil. Someday—he thought with a shudder—his portrait would offer the same vacant expression, set inside its lacquer cage; lording, unopposed, above the dining room and—beyond it, the sweeping green of des Marais Park. He could smell the linseed on his skin already.

Jan’s train of thought was interrupted by the sound of a door opening behind him. He turned to see Captain Smith, exiting the Vice Chairman’s room. She fastened the highest button of her collar.

“Good evening, Captain,” the financier’s son said, savoring the opportunity to surprise the professional operative. She did not even flinch.

“Mr. Collier,” the Anglo replied. Her eyes considered him a moment, noting the wet hair and the fresh change of clothes. “I see we’re both doing our best to confirm their expectations.”

Jan offered her a cigarette, aware she would decline. He lit it for himself, gaze wandering back to the gallery of paintings. City take the whole rotten lot of it.

“Well, it’s not what I expected,” Collier said with a laugh, “—I didn’t think this was your style, Captain.”

He watched her closely. Mary Smith was dangerous, but this was Jan’s field of advantage. It was not unreasonable to hope for a misstep.

She only shrugged and lit a cigarette of her own.

“Is Madame Vice Chairman using you,” Jan continued, “Or will you have it the other way around? I take it,” he added with a grin, “—That the Vice Chairman is not behind that door.”

“You’d like her,” Mary said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth and releasing a long trail of smoke. “She wants to meet with you, actually, before we go again in the morning. Do you think you could be awake before noon?”

“So, Helena-Francesca is in on the plot,” Collier said, ignoring the insult that was never really meant to affect him, merely to acknowledge the rules of the game. “—Another comrade for the poor little rich boy in Amsterdam.” He took a drag, smiling against the exhaustion that was working its way back into his limbs. “Still,” Jan laughed, “—It’s unlikely she’ll be as much fun to bait as the Trustee-General.”

“Any help we can get,” Captain Smith said.

Jan leaned against the wall beside her, smoking his cigarette.

“Are you really serious about making me your pupil?” He asked, gaze following the smoke toward the ceiling.

“I’m serious about staying out of prison,” Smith replied. “For the moment, Mr. Collier, that means I’m serious about you.”

The financier’s son laughed.

“City save us,” he said, “If I’m the great line of defense.” Jan took a long drag, pondering a more challenging question.

“Would you really sell them out to the Securities Desk?” He wondered aloud, blowing more smoke into the haze. “I know the Turners have always had their claws in the Anglo branch, but they’d never believe you any further up the chain. No,” he concluded, “—You’ve got some other angle.”

“What if I want them to succeed?” Mary hypothesized, laughing at the absurdity of the proposition.

“If you do,” Jan shook his head, “You’re even more self-destructive than I am.”

[aandrezel]

Ferdinand took a drink from his whiskey. Jordan, he noted, had been very quiet. She had preferred that they wait for Marcus’s return, but the Vice Chairman was glad they hadn’t. Between them, Jøberg and Mary might have alarmed him.

“How do you intend to convince these contacts to cooperate, Captain Smith?” The Vice Chairman asked.

Mary leaned her weight back in her chair.

“I’ll approach them as an agent of the Securities Desk,” the Captain explained. “As far as they know, they’ll be working under cover for the Company.”

The room fell quiet. Ferdinand made silent eye contact with Konrad, smoking smugly across the room. The Ambassador had warned him that Smith would not take the Vice Chairman’s duplicity lightly, and here it was—the Anglo’s counterstrike.

“Are you an agent of the Securities Desk, Captain?” The heir to civilization inquired.

“Of course not,” Mary replied, disgust palpable in her voice. “But would it matter if I were? I thought you’d already made up your mind that my only allegiance was to myself.”

Ferdinand laughed. She had a right to her assurances. He was the one who’d paraded the Chancellor into the room, after all. The Vice Chairman had chosen one side, forcing Smith to take the other. She didn’t need to pose as a Company agent for that much to be obvious. If her position were threatened, she would not hesitate to bring what she knew to the Chairman’s spies.

“Your point is taken, Captain,” he said. “Balance is restored to our arrangement.”

“Think of it as protection for the Trustee-General,” Mary continued. “—Should Your Excellency’s intentions be discovered, I assume you’d rather not leave Amsterdam in the hands of Levarlet and Wittlin. This way, all Gorenin has authorized is a sting operation.”

“Never mind that it you can claim the same, Captain,” Collier remarked.

“It’s not too late for you to approach the Chancellor with a similar offer,” the Anglo replied.

Ferdinand watched her eyes as she tested the financier’s son—they didn’t flinch. The Captain had been adamant that Collier not be brought in on the secret of Uncle Gerald’s involvement. Was she observing Jan’s reaction for its own sake, or to see if the Vice Chairman had kept his word? Did it matter?

Collier only laughed.

“I’ll be sure to keep that option open,” the financier’s son said, dragging his cigarette. Jøberg smiled, watching his pet with amusement. Ferdinand saw what Mary had meant when she’d said Jan would never have come to him—that it had been Jøberg or nothing. How could such a clever man stand to drink and fuck and sedate himself into this passive state? There was no cause worth that waste. But if Collier ever saw the light—the Vice Chairman prayed privately—let it be after their plot had run its course.

“Of all of us,” Captain Smith said, “Mr. Collier has the greatest freedom of movement in Amsterdam. After I’ve laid the groundwork for the cells, it’ll be up to him to feed them information. That, of course, and keep up his current responsibilities. The Majority West will be more open with him than with the Trustee-General.”

“Mr. Collier, would it be fair to say that you should have no trouble keeping us up to speed on the Archtrustees’ intentions?” The Vice Chairman asked.

Jøberg answered for him.

“Jan is extremely reliable in the drawing rooms of Paris,” the leader of the Free Sky League laughed. “—That’s what comes from years of practice.”

Collier smoked and tried his best to feel nothing. City, if they knew.

“And liaising with the cells?” Ferdinand pressed.

“I’m afraid the kind of thing Your Excellency is suggesting in Amsterdam is a little further from my expertise,” Jan said, avoiding eye contact, tapping ashes from his cigarette. “Consider how easily the Captain had me watched.”

Captain Smith interjected.

“Between us, Mr. Jøberg and I can arrange the broad strokes,” she explained. “With a little guidance, Collier should be able to manage the details.”

“Your confidence is flattering,” Jan replied. “But I’m no spy. A liar, a provocateur, a courtesan—certainly. But Rainer has only showed me the ways my natural talents might be channeled toward a higher purpose. City knows I never asked for more.”

“Now is the time to learn,” the Captain said.

“And if I’m a poor student?” Jan demanded. He was growing tired.

“Madame Vice Chairman's work will often take her to Amsterdam,” Mary said. “You’ll have me as a handler.”

Collier closed his eyes. Fucking City, they were digging their own graves.

“And the tradecraft?” the financier’s son wondered, knowing what the answer would be. “Who’ll teach me that? The soldier, or Logan Turner’s heir?”

Mary, whose hands had until that moment rested quietly, folded in front of her on the table, opened a red foil package of Turkish tobacco and lit a cigarette.

“I offer you the secrets of Mann, Mr. Collier,” she said. “—Do you really intend to decline?”

Jan desperately needed a dose of sunshield.

“Captain,” the financier’s son replied, “Let’s not pretend that any so-called choice I’m offered in present company is really a choice. But don’t worry—I won’t make a scene.” He smiled, intent on evaporation. “Conjuring enthusiasm for the things one wants the least is a cornerstone of my trade.”

Rainer chuckled.

“My associate is feeling particularly petulant today,” he apologized. “But don’t let that fool you. It’s all part of the game; we should count ourselves fortunate, merely to observe such an artist at work.”

Captain Smith shook her head.

“I’ll be with you in Amsterdam when I can,” she insisted. “—And you’ll have access to the Trustee-General whenever you need it. You will manage just fine.”

Ferdinand considered his conspirators.

“One more question, Mr. Collier,” The Vice Chairman said, settling his thoughts on the breadth of the affair. “If we are to rely on the captive poet, I’d like to know his intentions are sincere.” The heir to civilization looked Jan squarely in the eyes. “Can you swear to me that Vichot has no connection to the League?” He demanded.

“Why ask me?” Jan laughed. “Jøberg is sitting right in front of you.”

Ferdinand smiled. The smoke from his cigarette drifted lazily into the haze gathering above their heads.

“Because I don’t trust a word your master says, Mr. Collier,” the Vice Chairman replied.

The financier's son laughed.

“Whereas I am no more trustworthy,” Jan observed, “But only half the liar?”

“Well?” Mademoiselle Strauss demanded, “What is Vichot's connection with the League?”

“There is none,” Collier said. He did not even drag his cigarette, but let it smolder between his fingers where they rested against the table.

[aandrezel]

Jan and Rainer smoked on the balcony overlooking Mademoiselle Strauß’s courtyard.

“Well,” Jøberg asked, leaning close to Collier, “Did you forget that you didn’t need to act like a fool, or is the habit just more comfortable now than the truth?”

“Go away,” Jan replied, turning his head.

Rainer put his hand on Collier’s chin, drawing the financier’s son’s gaze back to his own.

“Don’t be a child,” Jøberg said. “That is beneath your dignity.”

Jan flicked the single tear from his eye and took a drag.

“I suppose you’re about to tell me to make the pain worthwhile,” he countered. “To have a little conviction?”

“I was going to say you needed some rest,” Rainer said. He ran a hand through the hair at the back of Collier’s neck. “You must be exhausted.”

Jan took a drag, closing his eyes for a moment.

“I’m fine,” the financier’s son replied, pulling his composure around himself like a shield. “There’s work to be done. —I noticed that the Vice Chairman is very comfortable with his brother’s lover.”

Jøberg shrugged.

“If you see it,” the older man admitted, “I don’t doubt it’s there. Do you think it could be useful?”

Jan considered the question seriously.

“The Vice Chairman has always kept his affairs to himself,” he reasoned. “The ‘proper thing’ is of very real consideration to him. City—since we were children. I think he’d die before he acted on a passion as foolish as that.”

“Then the Ambassador?” Rainer wondered. He looked down at where the others were gathering under the warm lights of the courtyard. Konrad Wittberg drank whiskey with Mademoiselle Strauß. The Vice Chairman was nowhere to be seen.

Collier nodded.

“If I can see it, Konrad can see it,” Jan said. “Not that I think that miserable man will push things to a confrontation, either. But it will keep the tension between them high. That can be managed to our advantage, I suppose.”

“How well do you know him?” Jøberg asked.

“Much better than I do the Vice Chairman,” Collier explained. He laughed. “Not much good it will do us, though. Intimacy has not led to fondness.”

Jøberg smiled.

“From what I’ve seen of the Ambassador,” the older man agreed, “I can’t imagine he’s ever approved of you.”

Jan dragged his cigarette, running his free hand along Rainer’s arm. He could make Jøberg want him; he still had that power, at least. Never mind what it cost.

“Mr. Wittberg is serious, and important,” Collier said. “Serious people suffer in silence, you know. They have pride. How could a gentleman like that stand to be in the same room with a frivolous thing like me, parading his brokenness for all the world to see?”

Rainer kissed him, and Jan was rewarded by the shudder at his lover’s back, even after so much time. The bitter inevitability of it all was twisted for a moment—and one moment only—to Collier’s desire.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather rest?” Jøberg wondered. It was a meaningless question.

“What would be the point?” Jan laughed. He took a drag, savoring the breeze against his face. “—The sunshield would only take me, anyway.”

“They’ll be wondering where you’ve gone,” Rainer smiled, leading Collier inside.

The financier’s son poured himself a drink.

“Don’t you think I’ve earned a better lie than that?” Jan asked. “They can hold themselves in whatever regard they like—they’re no different than the rest. If they think of me at all, they’ll know where I am.”

[aandrezel]

The warm Greifswald sun beat down on Mademoiselle Strauss’s courtyard. They had enjoyed a late breakfast, reading the papers and commenting mildly on the weather. The contrarian attitude of Geneva’s exiled heir suited Jan, a fact that had been discovered—to both of their amusement—over the card table the previous evening.

“Mr. Collier is an unskilled gambler,” she’d commented. “—How tragic!” With her slender arms and dazzling smile, the gilded martyr was not unlike Elsa Wittlin.

“Mademoiselle Strauss was throwing her hand,” the financier's son had replied, “I thought it would be unseemly not to do the same.”

Jan had been desperate to see Rainer. He had been on his knees as soon as the door was closed to Jøberg’s room. It had been over a month since they had been together in Edena. Collier needed his council, but more than that, he needed the touch of anyone other than Levarlet. [...]

The real bed had been something of a shock. Jan wondered how long it had been since Jøberg had had him anywhere other than an alley or a basement or the floor of some freezing safe house. Sheets and four posts and hands that offered something other than violence were an unheard of luxury. Add to that a hot breakfast and a coffee under the Border sun, and Collier was certain he had stumbled into someone else’s life. But the empty vial of sunshield on Rainer’s bedside table had brought him back to the truth.

The Captain arrived a little before noon with the Vice Chairman.

Ferdinand-Kristoff left his hat on the hallway table with the ease of a man who felt completely at home in his surroundings. Add to that the casual brush of his hand against the small of Mademoiselle Strauss's back as they passed in the salon, and Jan knew that the Vice Chairman was no stranger to the heiress's company. There would be time to discuss that with Jøberg later.

Mary Smith had been in her new position in Madame Vice Chairman’s household for almost a month. She knew how to press a military uniform, Jan thought. The Captain looked particularly dangerous in starched navy blue.

“The Greifswald sunshine suits you,” she said to Jøberg as she pulled up her seat around the ladies’ card table. There was still a bowl of sweets at the centerpiece from Jordanah’s last gathering.

“You have my gratitude, Captain,” Rainer replied, “For arranging such agreeable accommodations.”

Mademoiselle Strauss and the Vice Chairman took their seats across from Mary. Wittberg lounged on the sofa beside the empty fireplace. The Captain turned from Jøberg, inquiring after Jan.

“Things seem to be quiet in Amsterdam, for the moment,” she said. “Is that a fair assessment, Mr. Collier?”

Jan lit a cigarette.

“The Trustee-General will appease the people as long as he can,” the financier’s son explained, “But the Archtrustees have no intention of honoring their commitments. It cost them nothing to resist after the accord; they have even less incentive to comply now.”

“Before you leave Greifswald, Mr. Collier,” Jordanah said, “You should have a conversation with Marcus. I’m sure he’d appreciate your insight from the ground.”

Jan looked around the room.

“Where is the lesser Wohlhändler cousin this afternoon?” He asked.

“Marcus is in Prague, filing the paperwork for his candidacy,” the Vice Chairman said. “He’ll be back early tomorrow morning.”

“And is Wohlhändler's election really as much of a formality as you say?” Collier asked. He tapped his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Marcus will be Senator by an easy margin,” Ferdinand assured the financier’s son. “The difficulty lies in what comes after that.”

“Is Your Excellency more concerned with the Bundesrat, or the Wild Isles?” Jan wondered.

The Vice Chairman frowned.

“Leave Edena to Marcus and me,” the heir to civilization said. “As for Amsterdam,” he added, “I’m as curious to hear the Captain’s assessment as you are.”

[thatmansplayinggalaga]