He bowed once more. “Excellent. Thank you so much. Good evening to you.”
“Wait,” she said. “A fine man such as y’self won’t want to go there! That place is a damn snake pit! Antonin’s boys will chew you up and spit you out soon as look at you!”
“Thank you!” sang Gregor, and he strode off into the evening mist.
It had been three days since the waterfront fiasco. Three days since all of Gregor’s efforts to make a decent, functional, law-abiding civilian police force—the first of its kind in Tevanne—had quite literally gone up in smoke. There’d been a lot of finger pointing and accusations in that handful of days since, but only Gregor had had a mind to actually do some investigating.
What he’d found was that his initial instincts on the night of the fiasco had been correct: there had been a bad actor on the premises, they had indeed targeted the safes of the Waterwatch, and they’d even successfully stolen something. Specifically, a small, bland box from safe 23D had gone missing. How they’d managed to do that, Gregor couldn’t imagine—every safe was outfitted with a Miranda Brass tumbler lock, and Gregor himself changed the combinations on a fixed schedule. They must have been a master safe cracker to pull it off.
But a theft and a fire, on the same night? That was no coincidence. Whoever had done one had also done the other.
Gregor had checked the Waterwatch logs regarding the box, hoping that the owner might suggest the identity of the thief. But that had been a dead end—the owner’s name had been submitted just as “Berenice,” nothing more, with no contact information included. He could find nothing more about this Berenice, either.
But he was well acquainted with the criminal element in Tevanne. If he could find nothing about the box’s owner, then he would start making headway on potential thieves. And this evening, here in the south end of Foundryside, he could get started.
He stopped at one thoroughfare, squinting through the mist, which turned mottled colors from the lanterns hanging overhead. Then he saw his destination.
The sign hanging above the taverna door read THE PERCH AND LARK. He didn’t really need to see the sign, however—the large, scarred, threatening-looking men loitering outside the door were enough to tell him he was in the right place.
The Perch and Lark was base of operations for one of the most preeminent crime lords in Foundryside, if not all the Commons: Antonin di Nove. Gregor knew this because his own reforms at the waterfront had directly affected the economics of Antonin’s ventures, which had displeased Antonin to the point that he’d sent some hired steel out after Gregor—though Gregor had sent them back very quickly, with many broken fingers and one shattered jaw.
He had no doubt that Antonin still harbored lots of bad feelings about this. Which was why Gregor had brought five hundred duvots of his own money, and Whip, his scrived truncheon. Hopefully the duvots would entice Antonin into giving Gregor some information about what thief could have hit the waterfront. And hopefully Whip would keep Gregor alive long enough to ask.
He marched up to the four glowering heavies before the taverna entrance. “Good evening, gentlemen!” he said. “I’d like to see Mr. di Nove, please.”
The heavies glanced at each other, somewhat baffled by Gregor’s politeness. Then one—who was missing quite a lot of teeth—said, “Not with that, you aren’t.” He nodded at Whip, which was hanging by Gregor’s side.
“Certainly,” he said. He unbuckled Whip and held it out. One of them took it and tossed it into a box, where it had company with a simply staggering number of knives, rapiers, swords, and other, grislier armaments.
“May I enter now, please?” asked Gregor.
“Fifty duvots,” said the toothless heavy.
“I beg your pardon,” said Gregor. “Fifty?”
“Fifty if we haven’t seen your face afore. And I don’t know your face, sir.”
“I see. Well.” Gregor glanced at their weapons. Spears, knives, and one even had an espringal—a sort of mechanized, heavy crossbow that you had to crank—though its gears hadn’t been set correctly.
He made a note of it. Gregor always made a note of such things.
He reached into his satchel, took out a handful of duvots, and handed them over. “Now may I enter?”
The heavies exchanged another glance. “What’s your business with Antonin?” asked the toothless one.
“My business is both pressing and private,” said Gregor.
The toothless guard grinned at him. “Oh, very professional. We don’t see too many professional types here, do we, chaps? Not unless they’ve come down here to scrum the night lads, eh?” The others laughed.
Gregor waited calmly, meeting the man’s gaze.
“Fair enough,” said the toothless heavy. He opened the door. “Back table. But move slow.”
Gregor smiled curtly, said, “Thank you,” and walked inside.
Immediately inside was a short flight of steps. He bounced up the steps, and as he did the air got smokier, louder, and much, much more pungent. At the top of the steps was a blue drape, and he shoved it aside and walked into the taverna.
Gregor glanced around. “Hum,” he said.
As a former career soldier, Gregor was accustomed to tavernas, even ones as filthy as this. Reeking candles burned on all the tabletops. The floor was little more than a loose grid of wooden slats, so that if someone spilled anything—cane wine, grain alcohol, or any number of bodily fluids—it would drain right through to the mud below. Someone was playing a set of box pipes in the back, albeit very badly, and the music was loud enough to drown out most conversation.
But then, people did not come to tavernas like this for conversation. They came to fill their skulls up with so much cane wine that they forgot for one brief moment that they lived in shit-spattered, muddy ditches clinging to the clean white walls of the campos, that they shared their living quarters with animals, that they awoke every morning to fresh insect bites or shrieking monkeys or the putrid scent of rotting striper shells in the alleys—if they awoke at all, that is.
Gregor barely blinked at the sight. He had seen many horrors in war, and he did not count the sight of the impoverished among them. He himself had once been far more desperate than any of these people.
He glanced through the crowd, looking for Antonin’s men. He counted four straightaway, taking up positions at the edges of the taverna. All of them had rapiers, except for the one in the far corner, who was huge and thickset, and leaned against the wall with a threatening black ax strapped to his back.
A Daulo ax, Gregor saw. He’d seen many of their like in the Enlightenment Wars.
He crossed the taverna, spied a table in the back, and approached—slowly.
He could tell which one of them was Antonin right away, because the man’s clothes were clean, his skin unblemished, his thin hair combed neatly back, and he was hugely, hugely fat—a rarity in the Commons. He was also reading a book, something Gregor had never seen anyone do in such a place. Antonin had another guard sitting beside him, this one with two stilettos stuffed in his belt, and the guard tensed as Gregor neared.
Antonin’s brow furrowed slightly and he looked up from his book. He glanced at Gregor’s face, then his belt—which held no weapons—and then his sash. “Waterwatch,” he remarked aloud. “What’s Waterwatch doing in a place where the only waters to watch are wine and piss?” Then he peered closer at Gregor’s face. “Ahh…I know you. It’s Dandolo, isn’t it?”
“You are a knowledgeable man, sir,” said Gregor. He bowed slightly. “I am indeed Captain Gregor Dandolo of the Waterwatch, Mr. Antonin.”
“Mr. Antonin…” he echoed. Antonin laughed, showing off black teeth. “Such a well-mannered gent here among us! I’d have wiped myself better this morn if I’d known you’d deign to bless us with your presence. If I recall, I tried to have you killed once…Didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“Ahh. Here to return the favor?”
The thickset guard with the ax wandered over to take up a position behind Gregor.
“No, sir,” said Gregor. “I’ve come to ask you a question.”
“Huh.” His gaze lingered on Gregor’s Waterwatch sash. “I will assume your question has something to do with your waterfront disaster?”
Gregor smiled humorlessly. “It would, sir.”
“Yes. It would.” Antonin gestured to the seat across him with one pudgy finger. “Please. Do me the honor of sitting.”
Gregor bowed lightly and did so.
“Now—why would you come to me to ask about that?” said Antonin. “I gave up the waterfront a long time ago. Thanks to you, of course.” His black eyes glittered.
“Because it was an independent,” said Gregor. “And you know independents.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“They used an improvised sailing rig. They planted a construction scriving on one of the carriages—something used for adhesives and mortars—and this acted as a rudimentary arrangement to power their rig. It was shoddily made, and did not seem to work well.”