The Cinderwick Job · novelette
4The Second Thief
There are three ways into any building: the way it was built, the way it was mended, and the way it forgot. The first is on the drawings. The second is in the mortar, if you can read it. The third is the one that gets you hanged, because nobody knows it’s there, including you, until you’re standing in it.
The Cage had no first way and no second, and I had five days to find the third.
I did the sensible thing, which for a finder means the expensive thing: I went for the drawings.
Every building in Cinderwick that was raised with the Ordinal’s money was raised twice — once in brick and once on paper — and the paper goes into the Surveyors’ Registry on Alder Street and stays there, and the Registry does not sell, does not lend, and does not, on any account, permit copies. Which is why there is a man in the Understair called the Draughtsman who has, over thirty patient years, permitted copies of practically everything in it.
You go down to him through a chandler’s cellar off Gallow Row. It’s four flights and then it isn’t flights any more, it’s the old town under the new one, the Understair proper, wet brick and gaslight and the sound of the river doing something it shouldn’t three walls away. His room is warm and dry and smells of chalk. There are drawings from floor to ceiling — the Exchange, the pumping station, half the good houses on Cage Hill, every one of them rolled and tagged and sitting in its pigeonhole like a bottle of wine, waiting for the year it comes good.
The Draughtsman is ninety if he’s a day. He looked at me over the top of his spectacles and he said, before I had my coat off:
“You’ve come for the auction house.”
“I’ve come for a drink and a chat.”
“You’ve come for the auction house,” he said, comfortable as a cat, “and you’re the second one this week, and I’ve only ever had the one set.”
And that, if you want it, is the sound of the floor going out from under a job.
I made him say it four different ways and it came out the same every time.
Sunday last. A young man, well-spoken, hat in his hand, very pleasant. Paid in gold and did not haggle, which the Draughtsman found suspicious and pocketed anyway. Took the Cage — the whole roll, foundation to lantern, the 1809 build and the two mendings — and took it away with him, which the Draughtsman does not permit, and permitted, because of the gold.
“Did he give a name?”
“He gave three.” The old man wheezed happily. “Enjoyed himself. Settled on Sorrel.”
“What was he like?”
The Draughtsman thought about it, and pulled his blanket up his knees, and said the worst possible thing:
“He was like you, dear, twelve years ago and pleased about it.”
I want to put down plainly what I understood on the stairs back up to Gallow Row, because I don’t want any credit later for cleverness I only had in hindsight.
Two thieves, one bird. That happens. The Reach is full of finders and Cinderwick is a small town and if a curio is worth having, someone else is having a look at it too. It isn’t news. It’s Tuesday.
But he’d been in the Draughtsman’s room on Sunday. Pell put the job to me on the Monday. Crane sat me in front of lot forty-one on the Thursday and told me he’d been looking forward to it for two years.
Sorrel was hired before I was.
You do not hire a second finder before you hire the first unless you never wanted a bird stolen at all — unless what you wanted was two clever people in one city with the same impossible errand and five days to trip over each other.
Crane hadn’t hired a rival for me.
He’d hired me a partner, and he’d been careful, and considerate, and thorough about it, and he had not asked either of us whether we cared for the arrangement.
I found him on Monday, which sounds like work and wasn’t. He was not hiding. He was the opposite of hiding; he was practically an advertisement.
A young man matching the Draughtsman’s description had spent the weekend making friends of every porter, potman and pickpocket on Cage Hill, and standing drinks, and losing at cards with great good humour, and asking absolutely no questions about the auction house, which in a street where the auction house is the only subject is a silence you can hear from Coldharbour Lane. I put four questions to three people and had him by noon: the Fetters, a gin shop halfway down the hill, back room, the good chair by the fire.
He was about twenty-six. Fair, unshaven, a coat that had been very good about four owners ago, and a smile he kept loaded and cocked. He had one boot up on the fender and the Cage’s own drawings — mine, the ones I had gone four flights under Gallow Row for — spread across the table in front of him where any fool in the room could see them, weighted at the corners with a gin glass, a knife, a salt cellar and his hat.
“Miss Vale,” he said, without looking up. “Sit down, you’re blocking the fire.”
I did not sit down.
“You’ve been three days on the north wall,” he said, “and two mornings in the coffee-house with a shaving-glass, which is a lovely trick and I’ve stolen it, and on Thursday you walked in the front door of the Cage as somebody’s agent and came out with your chin up and your hand shut, and I have been dying to meet you ever since.” He looked up. He had a stupid, honest, delighted face and I did not believe one line of it. “Kit Sorrel. I’m the other one.”
“There isn’t an other one.”
“There’s always another one.” He kicked out the chair opposite. “The interesting question is who told you so, and when, and whether they told you before or after they told me. Sit down, Vale. You’ve got a face like the end of the world and it’s putting the potman off.”
Here’s the thing about Kit Sorrel that I got in the first ten minutes, and it is the only reason I am alive to be writing any of this.
He was good. He was better than a man his age has any business being — he’d read the drawings properly, which most finders can’t, and he’d read the mendings, which almost nobody can, and he had already found the thing I’d have needed two more days and a bribe to find, which is that the vault under the auction floor is not the original vault. The 1809 build has a strongroom in the cellar with a door in the north wall. The 1847 mending took that door out, filled the passage, and sank a new stair down through the middle of the auction floor — one way in, straight up into the lamplight and three hundred witnesses — which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you have decided that being seen is a better lock than being shut.
He had all that. He laid it out for me on the table with a finger, quick and clean, the way you’d deal cards to someone you liked.
And then he told me that the filled passage in the north wall was still there, under the mortar, about nine feet behind the consignment window, and that he had already been in the brick box with the clerk in it and put his knuckles on the back wall and heard it come back hollow, and I believed him, and my whole chest went hot with the joy of it, and that was the moment I stopped trusting him entirely.
Because that’s my knock. That’s my trick — the knuckle on the wall, the listening — and it is not a trick you use in a room with a clerk in it unless you are certain, absolutely certain, that nothing you do in that room will be reported.
I said, mildly, “The clerk didn’t mind?”
“The clerk was at his dinner.”
“The clerk doesn’t get a dinner,” I said. “I watched that window three days. He eats at the desk out of a cloth so he doesn’t have to leave the box, because the box doesn’t unlock from the inside, and he goes home at eight when a porter comes to let him out.”
The smile stayed exactly where it was. That’s how I knew. A liar’s smile goes; a professional’s smile stays, because he’s already three moves along and choosing which face to keep.
“Well,” Kit Sorrel said. “That’s awkward.”
“Isn’t it.”
“Are you going to shout?”
“I’m going to ask you,” I said, “for your chit.”
He didn’t pretend not to understand, and I’ve thought about that a good deal since. He could have. He was quick enough. But he sat there in the good chair by the fire with the fire going in his eyes and he looked at me for a long moment with something that was almost relief, the way a man looks when the part he’s been dreading arrives at last and turns out to be smaller than he’d feared — and then he reached inside the very good coat of four owners ago and took out a square of pasteboard and put it on the drawings between us.
Grey card. Black ink. The Ordinal’s little iron bird in the corner.
Two-fifteen.
I took mine out of my glove and laid it next to his and we both looked down at them, side by side on the drawings of the building we had each been sent to burgle.
Two-fourteen. Two-fifteen.
Printed together. Same sheet, same ink, same careful hand, on the same quiet afternoon in the same office with the green lamp — and then carried out into the same small city and put down at opposite ends of it, the way you drop two dogs in a yard and go in to your dinner and shut the window so you don’t have to hear.
“When did he give you yours?” I said.
“Saturday.” Kit had stopped smiling, and without it he looked exactly as young as he was. “Man never raised his voice. Told me there was a woman in this town who could find anything, and that I’d enjoy her, and that I was not on any account to tell her I was coming.” He turned his chit around with one finger so the number faced me. “He didn’t tell me not to show her, though. I’ve been sitting in this chair for two days with the drawings out on a table in a public house, Vale. What do you suppose I’ve been waiting for?”
And I stood in the back room of a gin shop on Cage Hill with the fire too hot on one side of me, and I did the sum.
Crane had bought him. Crane had bought me, or tried. Crane had printed our numbers on one sheet and built a job neither of us could do alone and set us loose to find each other, and now that we’d found each other we were going to do exactly what he had paid for us to do, which was to sit down together at this table and be useful.
There is no move in that. You cannot out-clever a man who has already accounted for you being clever. Every road out of that room was a road he’d paved.
Except one.
He was afraid of the bird.
I had that off his own face, in his own house, and it is the only thing in this entire business that Magister Crane did not hand to me himself — and I could not get to the bird alone, and now, sitting in the Fetters with his boot on the fender and his ruin all over the table, was a reckless, charming, bought-and-paid-for liar who could hear a hollow wall through nine feet of brick.
I have worked alone for eleven years. I have a rule about it. The rule is that a plan with a second person in it is a plan with a second person’s fear in it, and fear is the one lock I’ve never learned to pick.
I sat down.
“The passage in the north wall,” I said. “Nine feet behind the clerk. You didn’t knock on it, because you couldn’t have. Somebody told you it was there.”
“Somebody did.”
“Then somebody wants it opened,” I said, “and it will be open on Wednesday night whether we go through it or not, and I would rather be the one holding the lamp.” I pulled the drawings round to face me. “I’ll tell you three things I know that you don’t, and you’ll tell me three you have that I haven’t, and neither of us will tell the truth about the fourth, and we’ll both know it, and we’ll work anyway. That’s the offer. Take it or get out of my city.”
Kit Sorrel looked at me for a second, and then he laughed — a real one, sudden and awful and glad, the laugh of a young man who has been holding his breath since Saturday — and he stuck his hand across the table over the plans of the Cage.
“God, he was right about you,” he said.
I shook it.
I want it on the record that I knew. Every particular of it, I knew: whose hand had put that hand in front of me, and what it was for, and how it would end, and that I was walking into a room built for me by a man who had spent two years learning my measurements.
The trouble with a trap you can see is that it is still, in every respect that matters, a door.
And on the other side of it there was a small brass creature in the dark, three floors down, that knew what Magister Crane sounded like when he wasn’t being polite.