Page 46 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

B y the time he left Gibson’s surgery, the drizzle had turned into a downpour, and Sebastian found his tiger walking the chestnuts up and down Tower Hill to keep them warm.

“This blasted weather,” said Sebastian, leaping up to take the reins as the boy scrambled back to his perch. Except then, rather than driving off, Sebastian sat for a moment, his gaze fixed unseeingly on the looming, soot-stained ancient battlements of the Tower of London.

“What is it, gov’nor?” asked Tom, watching him.

Sebastian gathered the reins. “I think I need to pay a visit to Seven Dials.”

Tom stared at him . “Seven Dials?”

Sebastian smiled and gave his horses the office to start. “Seven Dials.”

Lying at the heart of St. Giles’s notorious warren of narrow, filthy streets, mean, dilapidated courts, and noisome, urine-drenched alleyways, the area known as Seven Dials took its name from an elaborate sundial that once stood where seven streets converged together to form a star. It was a wretched, dangerous place crowded with impoverished Irish immigrants, formerly enslaved Africans, mutilated beggars, thieves, pickpockets, whores, and murderers. But because of the potent symbolism of the streets’ layout, the area was also popular with various practitioners of the occult arts, from astrologers and alchemists to cartomancers and mesmerizers. And none of them observed the laws against Sunday trading so fiercely protected by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Buttoning his greatcoat against the cold drizzle that was still falling, Sebastian started on Little Earl Street and methodically set about going into one eerie, dimly lit shop after the other.

“I’m looking for a tarot deck,” he told the young dark-haired woman he found reading a massive leather-bound tome behind the first shop’s strangely carved wooden counter. Bunches of musty dried herbs dangled from heavy overhead beams, and everything from ancient copper bowls and yellowing parchment rolls to dirt-stained, grinning skulls filled the surrounding shelves, so that the place looked and smelled like a cross between a centuries-old tea emporium and half-robbed tomb.

A sly smile spread across the woman’s face as she set aside her heavy book. She was quite pretty, and she obviously both knew it and was accustomed to using it. “We have many different decks, monsieur .”

“The one I’m looking for was produced in 1813 or 1814 by the Milanese press of Ferdinando Gumppenberg from a set of engravings by Giorgio Bassano. Do you have it?”

“Bien s?r,” she said smoothly, reaching beneath the counter to come up with a deck she laid face up on the scarred wooden surface between them. “Here it is.”

The top card, the ace of Denari , or coins, bore a neat inscription that read Regia Fabbrica di Milano. Fabbricatore Gumppenberg. A twenty-five centesimi tax stamp from the vanished Napoleonic-era “Kingdom of Italy” was prominently displayed below that. But when Sebastian picked up the deck and fanned it open, he found himself looking at a succession of exquisitely rendered neoclassical figures, and when he turned the deck over, the pattern of dots and dashes on the back was a geometric swirl of blues and yellows.

“This isn’t it,” he said, handing the cards back to her. “The deck I’m looking for is by an artist named Giorgio Bassano. The figures are in Renaissance dress, and the pattern on the back of the cards is green, white, and red.”

The woman—a Creole from Louisiana, he’d decided—tapped one long fingernail on the top card. “These are the work of Bassano.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not the right deck.”

“There is no other by Bassano.” She picked up the cards to fan them open again, turning them toward him. “The images are very beautiful, yes?”

“Yes. But it’s still not the right deck.”

She shrugged and reached for her book.

He tried another shop, then another, his tall, well-dressed figure attracting more attention than he would have liked in the dirty, crowded, decaying streets. Some of the shopkeepers he spoke to tried to pass off a different deck as the one he was looking for; others swore that such a deck didn’t exist. But finally, in a bizarre little shop crowded with incense sticks, Chinese jade carvings, delicate prisms, strange concoctions in dark bottles, and small, deadly-looking packets of mysterious potions, he found an aged, white-haired woman in a traditionally embroidered Palestinian gown such as he’d seen years before in Gaza, who listened carefully to his description, then said in a clear, rarefied accent that wouldn’t have been out of place in a lecture hall in Cambridge or Oxford, “I have heard of this deck, but you won’t find one for sale anywhere in England. In Italy, perhaps. But even there you might have difficulty finding one.”

“Why?”

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “You can thank the Austrians for that.”

“The Austrians?”

“Well, them and a bad choice of colors for the pattern on the deck’s back.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ever hear of the Bandiera d’Italia ?”

“No.”

“It was the war flag of the Lombard Legion of Milan, back in the days of the Cispadane Republic. Green, white, and red, it was. And what does Gumppenberg do but put those colors on the back of his new tarot deck: green, white, and red. Then he runs his first printing in May of 1814, just days before an Austrian army under Field Marshal Heinrich von Bellegarde drives the French out of Milan. Von Bellegarde takes one look at the green, white, and red pattern on the back of Gumppenberg’s new tarot deck, decides it must be some defiant reference to the Italian Republic’s tricolor flag, and orders not only the finished decks but all the uncut sheets and even the plates themselves destroyed.” She whispered something he couldn’t quite catch under her breath, then said more clearly, “Barbarians.”

“But there are some Bassano decks in England.”

“I know of two. Before the Austrians took over, Gumppenberg managed to send one of the decks off to a cartomancer in Golden Square and another to that nasty Turkish astrologer over by Cross Lane. But I can guarantee you, neither will sell you their deck.”

“What nasty Turkish astrologer over by Cross Lane?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then said, “There is only one.”

The astrologer’s name was Rasim Ataman, and he cast his charts from the ground floor of a dilapidated seventeenth-century building just off Cross Lane.

Pushing open a warped, weather-swollen door, Sebastian found himself in a cramped, oak-paneled room dimly lit by a single branch of flickering candles that sent eerie waves of light and shadow dancing over soaring walls hung with everything from smoke-darkened Russian icons and medieval Spanish santos to strange, colorful Chinese mandalas and a large, beautiful diagram of the relationship between body parts and the signs of the zodiac. In a series of cases across the back, everything from a bain-marie, astrolabes of varying antiquity, and a kerotakis jostled for space with various mineral specimens, a small Roman statue of the god Mercury, and row after row of ancient and modern volumes, their spines bearing titles in German, Italian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and languages Sebastian couldn’t even identify.

Beside the cases, at a dark, heavy desk half-buried beneath piles of rolled parchments and more books, sat a man dressed in the kind of faded, slightly worn silk and woolen robes that might once have belonged to Nostradamus or Jabir ibn Hayyan. He was younger than Sebastian had expected him to be—much younger, probably no more than thirty-five or thirty-six, a handsome man with thick black hair, long-lashed green eyes, and high, prominent cheekbones.

“Found your way here, did you?” said the man in lightly accented English, leaning back in his chair. “Took you long enough.”

Sebastian pushed the warped door closed behind him with some difficulty. “I beg your pardon?”

“There can’t be that many tall, well-dressed gentlemen brave enough to walk the streets of St. Giles.” The man set aside the pen he’d been holding, but stayed seated. “I understand you’re looking to buy a copy of Bassano’s Renaissance tarot.”

Sebastian used the back of one gloved fist to wipe the rain from his face. “Word travels fast around here.”

“You are rather conspicuous.” The man studied Sebastian in silence a moment, then folded his hands and rested them together on his desktop. “I draw up natal charts, you know. I don’t sell tarot cards.”

“So you still have the Bassano deck?”

“Of course I still have it.”

“Are you quite certain?” Reaching into his coat, Sebastian drew Gibson’s green, white, and red–backed card from his pocket and held it up so that the devil seemed to dance in the shimmering candlelight. “Because this was found on the body of a murdered woman someone dumped in the middle of the Strand early this morning. I assume you recognize it?”

Ataman stared at the card in silence for a long moment before saying, “I wonder, do you know what it means?”

“Not really.”

“It stands for temptation, addiction, excess, vice…” The astrologer paused, then added, “And evil,” in a vaguely sinister way that rolled the final word slowly off his tongue.

Sebastian said, “Another card from the same deck, the Tower, was left on the body of a man found hanging in Swallow Street six days ago.”

Something flared in the astrologer’s dark green eyes, but his expression remained stoic and unreadable. “I had nothing to do with either of those deaths.”

“No? Then let me see your deck.”

Sebastian thought for a moment the man meant to refuse. But the astrologer was no fool; as a foreigner, his position was precarious, and he knew it. A muscle jumped along his clenched jaw. He said, “Wait here,” then stood up and disappeared through a curtain at the rear of the room.

He was gone long enough for Sebastian to begin to wonder if the man had decided to try to flee the country when Ataman came back. “Look at them if you like,” he said, tossing a familiar green, white, and red-backed deck amidst the clutter of papers, books, and scrolls on his desk. “They’re all there.”

Wordlessly, Sebastian picked up the deck and went through it, card by card.

Ataman stood woodenly, watching him. “You see?” he said when Sebastian had finished. “Not a card missing. I have nothing to do with these killings. Do you understand that? Nothing.”

Sebastian held up the Bassano Devil card he’d brought with him. “So where did this come from?”

“I have no idea.”

“No? How did you come to have this deck, anyway? I’m told most of them were destroyed by the Austrians over two years ago.”

The man shrugged. “I knew Bassano’s work. He did a neoclassical deck for Gumppenberg five—no, six years ago now—that I admire. So when I heard Gumppenberg had commissioned another set of engravings from him, I wrote and reserved a deck. He sent me one from the first printing.”

“Is that sort of arrangement common?”

“Common? I don’t know if I’d say it’s common. But it is done, yes.”

“Who else is likely to have ordered one of these decks from Gumppenberg?”

“How would I know?”

“I think you might.”

Ataman reached for the deck, only instead of picking it up, he pushed the pile of cards toward Sebastian. “You still want it? Fifty pounds and it’s yours.”

“I thought it wasn’t for sale.”

“It wasn’t. It’s a beautiful, rare deck, but I don’t need this trouble.” From you or from Bow Street. The words didn’t need to be said to be understood. He gave the deck another shove. “Take it.”

Sebastian counted out fifty pounds. It was a steep price, but Ataman was right: The deck was both beautiful and rare, and Sebastian had no desire to take advantage of a man far from home, a stranger in a hostile land.

He tucked the deck into an inner pocket of his greatcoat as he turned, and had almost reached the door when Ataman said, “The hour of your birth: Do you know it?”

Sebastian looked back at him. “No,” he lied.

A strange, unexpected smile of genuine amusement curled the astrologer’s lips. “I think you do. But it doesn’t matter; I can find out.”

Half an hour later, Sebastian arrived back at Brook Street to find Hero out on one of her interviews and a note from Paul Gibson awaiting him.

Bow Street has identified the woman found strangled in the Strand as an abbess who was released from the Tothill Fields Bridewell just yesterday morning. Does the name Letitia Lamont mean anything to you?