Free Cape Hell by Loren D. Estleman Page B

closest competitors combined. You are aware of the importance of bones in the refining process?”
    â€œI hunted buffalo, and saw pickers collecting the bones. They sold them to manufacturers in Detroit, who ground them into powder and ran raw sugar through them to take out the impurities. The bottom fell out of that market with the buffalo.”
    â€œHe’s found a substitute; or another method every bit as good. His merchandise is sought after in all the best restaurants in Los Estados Unidos and as far away as Paris, France, so I am told. It is nearly as fine as flour, but superior in granule texture, refusing to clump under the most humid conditions. Master chefs in the tropical colonies have threatened to resign if their employers will not agree to pay thrice as much for what Childress produces. You have seen his label, perhaps? The armored head of a knight circumscribed by gold laurels?”
    Whereupon the son of a bitch turned his lapel, showing me a pin bearing the embossed emblem of the Knights of the Golden Circle. I kept my temper.
    â€œAnd his opium? Is the quality as good?”
    If I’d disappointed him by failing to rise to the bait, he didn’t show it; I’d have been disappointed myself if he had. He dropped the lapel back into place and continued sorting, calm as a stone in moonlight. I had his measure now. A poker face is only so good as the amount of pressure you applied to it. When it blew, it would shake the earth.
    â€œI, too, have heard this canard. It is without foundation; and even if it were, where is the crime? One can purchase it in any chemist’s shop, diluted with grain alcohol and labeled laudanum; good for the miseries of the lumbago and all other manner of complaint. Had I been born to a caste lower than my own, I’d have hired a wagon and gone town to town peddling it by the quart.”
    A lawyer to the bone, Monsieur Bonaparte. A client is always innocent; but if guilty, then of nothing unlawful.
    At length he squared away his stacks, palming the edges as even as bricks, and lifted one.
    â€œSince, as I believe, you insist upon pressing forward despite my friendly advice, perhaps you will be so kind as to deliver these to your proposed victim.”
    Given the cordiality of the exchange so far, it seemed bad manners to leave him holding the bundle he offered. I turned it over, reading the delicate script on the top envelope. Like the rest, it was pressed from pale rose deckle-edged vellum, the whole bound with matching ribbon. It was addressed to “ O. Childress .”
    â€œThey were sent by his fiancée in Virginia, an estimable woman by all accounts, and upon the evidence of her choice of husband, certainly. She has been waiting months for a reply.”
    â€œChildress has a fiancée?”
    â€œIs it so strange a great man may love in the corporeal sense?”
    â€œHe hasn’t been to Virginia in twenty years.”
    â€œThe relationship is all the sweeter for the absence. Had the women I married respected my privacy to such an extent, I should not be alone this day.”
    I brought the bundle to my nose, but whatever scent she might have sprinkled on the envelopes had long since evaporated in that climate. “I’ll do my best.” I slid the letters into a side pocket.
    â€œWhen you have finished reading them, please re-seal them as well as you can. He will not be fooled, but he will appreciate the gesture.”
    It was as bizarre a meeting as I’d attended, and I’d sat in on Indian tribal councils and armed truces during range wars in Wyoming. “Is that why you called me here, to tell me I’m a suicidal fool and ask me to deliver mail?”
    â€œNot entirely.” Felix Bonaparte returned the rest of the material to the folder and tied it securely. I wondered what it contained that he’d held back. “I doubt you welcome death, or you would not attend so to the weapon you carry. A man