Season of Ashes Ch. 01-02

Authors' notes:

Asymmetric: This story was born of a writing collaboration, and as such contains intertwined threads from two alternating points of view. These will be denoted per character to hopefully clarify the narrative flow.

Any eloquent turns of phrase are undoubtedly due to my lovely co-author. I alone bear the blame for clumsy mistakes.

CONTENT WARNING: Violence, purple prose.

Chapter One

Milicent

THE TICK and the tock of the Mulberry Clock had become a grand nuisance to any guests unlucky enough to venture within earshot. At the Impérial — that shining beacon of French hoteldom — extravagance was the ultimate rubric and tedium the only fault; but even in the rarified air of so luxurious a hotel, Monsieur Mûre — as the veteran staff affectionately called it — stood out like an incongruous fossil, a grandfather clock long past its glorious prime. Built to suit the gargantuan appetites of a long-dead restaurateur, the clock commanded an entire corner of the Impérial's ground-floor café. Once upon a time, spectators may have ogled at its colossal dimensions, pressed tentative fingers across its intricate marquetry, and squinted at the precise filigree that wreathed its face in a pattern of miniscule mulberries, leaves, even shy little silkworms. Now people preferred to give it a wide berth. In the end, no amount of artisanship or sensibility could salvage the clock's chief geriatric failing: it was far too loud. The finest clockmakers in the continent couldn't seem to diminish its volume. Countdowns were an unwelcome spectre to the hotel's holidaymakers, yet Monsieur Mûre insisted on playing the part of a doomsayer, announcing each second with its echoing mechanical heartbeat. Tick. Tock. The end is nigh.

Milicent Harris-Vogue sat by a boulevard-facing window of the café, her mind quite immune to any eschatalogical implications emanating from Monsieur Mûre in the distant corner. Her blonde hair was bound in an elegant chignon. A white cocktail dress hugged her figure, its neckline a round scoop which framed her décolleté with a halter strap. Her thumbs, gleaming with obsidian nail polish, traced the gold-trimmed lip of her cup while ribbons of steam curled from the brown drink contained within. The ring on her right hand occasionally tapped the saucer. She stared outside, eyes glazed. It was a blurry evening: cloudy skies wreaked havoc with time, accelerating the darkness. Rain had left a shiny lacquer on the streets, an ink-black mirror that reflected streaks of light and colour from the surroundings. It was a scene ripped from van Gogh's palette, a wet-slick medley of forlorn hues. She pretended to enjoy the view; a faint smile tugged at the corner of her ruby lips.

The café was suspended in a pleasant cloud of inertia, a casual ambience that contrasted starkly with its peak hours. Servers leaned against the walls, crossed their arms, relaxed their postures. Most of the other patrons settled along the bar, where the coffee was cheaper and the service more immediate. The door to the kitchen was ajar; a fusillade of rapid French trickled out. Milicent caught a few choice phrases — enough to learn that several café-goers had suffered digestive upsets in the previous week, a revelation that made her grateful for her prescient decision not to order something more filling.

Tick. Tock. She stared at Monsieur Mûre: it was half past the hour. Her eyes narrowed. Her brain steamed in a clockwork frenzy of calculations. A twenty-minute drive to the theatre, a four-and-a-half-minute walk to the box, a fourteen-minute window before the house lights dimmed and the doors sealed until intermission. The curtains would soon part — but what if he changed his mind? A twenty-minute drive back to the hotel...unless he opted for another source of leisure. Dinner? A museum? Milicent paused her train of thought with a blink. She knew better than to hold herself hostage to contingency. Always better to assume that everything is going according to plan — right until everything falls apart.

Tick. Tock. It was thirty-two minutes past the hour. Steam no longer rose from the coffee. Milicent hooked a finger around the ear of her cup, raised it to her lips, and spilled espresso over the white canvas of her bodice.

"Mademoiselle!" A server materialised next to her, his pianist fingers offering a cloth napkin.

The cup clattered to a rest on its saucer. A side-fringe of silken hair crested diagonally across Milicent's temple as she looked down, feigning shock at the sight of the stain: a growing splatter of warm brown that tingled against her skin. Thanking the server with a grateful smile, she accepted the napkin and began blotting the mess with lukewarm strokes. The server lingered. A moment later, Milicent sighed in defeat and waved the napkin like a white flag, turning to the server with a resigned shrug.

"La vie en blanc," she said.

❦

It was thirty-five minutes past the hour when Milicent Harris-Vogue marched to the lobby of the Impérial and usurped the attention of a bewildered clerk at the front desk. By then, her tears had left glistening trails over her cheeks and her chin had fixed itself into a petulant tremble. She carried with her a dark storm — a violent flurry of emotion that manifested in outpourings of half-coherent English sentences. The clerk struggled to follow along.

"—and just left without me! I mean—"

"—please, madame, I—"

"—as if I don't even matter—"

"—I would like to h—"

"—Five minutes! That's all I asked for! Five minutes to change—"

"—if I can—"

"—eight years of marriage! I mean — eight years!" Milicent was warming to her theme. She raised her left hand, displaying the ring that had formerly adorned her other hand. "And this — this is what it amounts to? I come in second place to Swan fucking Lake?"

"I'm very sorry, madame." The clerk's eyes veered nervously past her, no doubt noting the distant guests in the lounge whose heads were turning owl-like in the direction of the theatrics. Observing that Milicent had momentarily exhausted herself of complaints, he risked speaking again. "Do you have your key?"

Milicent's nostrils flared. "No. I just told you. My husband took off—" Her voice faltered. She whimpered as though she were stifling a sob. "Why," she began, adjusting her hair with trembling fingers, "won't anyone help me?" Her tone was growing more shrill, adopting the speech pattern of a practised harpy.

The clerk recognised the telltale sign of an imminent eruption. Widening his eyes, he murmured, "Please. I am helping. Can you give me your name?"

"Newland." She sniffled. "Mrs. Edward Newland."

"Newland...Newland..." The clerk thumbed through a dusty ledger — the Impérial insisted on its own obsolescence by adhering tenaciously to old-fashioned methods. "Ah, yes. Right here." He tapped his finger on the page. "The Grisaille Suite."

Milicent nodded. She was calmer now, clutching her own shoulders as though she wanted to retreat into herself.

"Just one moment, madame. I will get a second key."

For the first time, Milicent's mouth broke into a brilliant grin, one that made her tear-stained eyes sparkle. "Thank you," she said, relief palpable in her voice. "Merci," — she amateurised her pronunciation, rendering the French with an English prosody — "Merci beaucoup."

❦

It was fifty-two minutes past the hour when Milicent Harris-Vogue, alone in the carriage of an ascending elevator, remembered that she was, strictly speaking, on holiday. A laugh warbled past her lips. No rest for the wicked, she thought. Only days ago, she had been reviewing her original itinerary. Two nights in Nice, two nights in Cannes, a week in Saint-Tropez. The French Riviera had called her name for months.

Now, all those plans had fallen by the wayside. Through the murky, tangled grapevine that tethered all the ghosts and phantoms of the global intelligence community to one another, Milicent had found herself in the sightline of a new client and on the precipice of a partnership more lucrative than anything she could expect in her day-to-day career. She was accustomed to extreme compartmentalisation at the agency, so it didn't entirely bother her that the client spoke through an intermediary and supplied her with the vaguest details: track the vacationing American executive, search through his personal effects, document any schematics.

What the mission lacked in particulars, it made up for in reward. If she could just pull this off properly, she wouldn't have to regret any more spoiled vacations: the rest of her life would be one long retirement, an endless carousel of compounding freedoms and pleasures. The anticipation made her mouth water.

None of her colleagues knew about this, not even her longtime case officer. France wasn't part of her remit. She couldn't rely on any of her typical tools of the trade — no unimpeachable bona fides, no lockpicking snap guns, no safecracking autodialers, no performance-enhancing drugs, no last-resort blood chits, nothing she could extract from the agency without raising suspicion. She was, in the parlance of espionage, utterly naked.

It was exhilarating.

Relying on one's wits and guts and social wherewithal was a sloppy, haphazard process, but the finality of the mission inspired its own special genre of confidence. She could throw caution to the wind, let the world burn if need be. This was her last ride; she didn't mind spoiling it for others.

The elevator creaked to a halt with a ding. The panels yawned and Milicent stepped out, her pearlescent heels inconspicuous in the carpet-hush. Following the blueprint in her mind's eye, she wandered down the network of hallways until she spotted the distinctive silver fretwork marking the doors to the Grisaille Suite. She squeezed her hand in a fist, feeling the blade of the hard-won key — another Impérial testament to obsolescence — press into her palm. Mr. Edward Newland was surely kilometres away, relaxing in a cushioned seat and enjoying Act I while his suite lay empty. She took a fortifying breath, then walked onward. Her heart skipped a beat like a neglected clock.

It was fifty-eight minutes past the hour. It was time to begin.

Dominik

The name he wore now was dull and unimaginative, perfectly matched with the man's sullen expression and hunched posture. Theodore Mullins — Ted to everyone except his mother — slumped against the wall in a filthy alleyway, taking a pull on a cigarette that smelt more of diesel than tobacco. He grimaced as he did, dragging on the cigarette as if he were trying to extract every cent that he'd paid from it, letting the smoke curl from the corner of his mouth. He tugged the lapel of his waistcoat as he fixed the world outside the alley with an accusing stare. Ted had clearly seen a hard life, and it had left his marks in the lines of his face and the calluses on his fingers.

It wasn't the first name he'd worn, nor the second — or even the twentieth. In his line of work, names were as malleable as the stroke of a pen and the shuffle of bills. Ted Mullins had a passport, a driver's license, a rickety room fit for a starving artist in Montmartre; everything that marked him as a day labourer trying to make his way amidst the bustle of Paris. The coat he wore was hard-worn and oft-mended, with the inelegant stitching of someone who took up a needle out of necessity rather than trade. His shirt, though starched and pressed with care, was just a little too old to be properly white, as if the blue smoke of his cigarettes had left a stain on something deeper than the fabric itself. In short, Ted was everything that a bellhop at the Impérial should have been.

Ted Mullins was the name he wore today. Tomorrow, he'd go back to Dominik Fujiwara — a name with a provenance as confused as his own.

He spat the butt of the cigarette onto the pavement, grinding it out with the heel of his boot as the door to the kitchens opened and a harried dishwasher stepped out, cursing in broken English. It was the lingua franca of the staff in the hotel despite the disapproving gazes of the managers — there were far too many tongues spoken to rely on French, and any misunderstandings were easy enough to clear up with more volume.

Ted didn't bother to look up. He hadn't made many friends of his fellow staff, and didn't need to. Few of them were determined to make a career out of pushing trolleys at the Impérial. Instead, he shouldered his way past the door and let the din of the busy kitchen wash over him.

It was a realm of barely controlled chaos. The brigade were constantly shouting over clattering pans and sizzling food, and the dishwashers told off-colour jokes over the steaming sinks, scrubbing dishes with industrial-strength bleach. Their hands were raw and angry from the caustic chemicals, but they worked in good spirits. They could be out on the streets, after all.

He pressed his back against the wall as a cart piled high with soiled dishes was propelled past him with reckless abandon, silverware clattering as a barely-pubescent teen wheeled it by. His scowl deepened and the older man growled in its wake, the rough burr of a Scottish accent thickening his words. "Watch where you're fuckin' goin'."

It was inaudible over the noise of the kitchen, but that didn't matter. Ted Mullins spent a lot of his time muttering curses under his breath when there were no guests to see.

He pushed through the double doors to the relative solace of the hotel's ornate corridors, his boots squeaking on the marble floor. His gait was slouching and laconic, each step visibly requiring thought and attention to its placement, as if his limbs needed to be steered individually. Nobody would accuse the large man of being graceful or refined, but he took guests' bags without complaint, and was always punctual.

Two steps into the lobby and Mullins was intercepted by the floor manager, a greasy man with hair slicked back with too much pomade, and a goatee that failed to draw attention away from his weak chin.

"You there — Mullins." The man managed to sneer each word, carving them out of a block of rightful indignation at having to speak to someone so far below his station. "We have a guest in salle 240 who wishes assistance with their bags. Immédiatement! They have been waiting for two minutes already!"

Mullins didn't reply beyond a resigned nod, turning on his heel toward the lifts. The guests in room 240 would have to wait — there had been a newspaper tucked underneath one of the cosy chairs of the lobby, discarded with the corner folded over on itself. Discarded like the name of Mullins was soon to be.

❦

The lift was slow. Too slow. It had been a long time since he felt the jitters of a job get to him, but Fujiwara still got the itch on the back of his neck whenever the moment arrived. Grab the papers, and get out. That was all he needed to do, and then he was several hundred thousand dollars richer. A careful observer might have noticed the change in his posture as the doors of the lift slid closed and he rested a hand casually on the luggage trolley. Gone were the stooped shoulders and perpetual scowl, replaced with icy eyes and a ramrod-straight spine. Mullins was a plodder, but Fujiwara was a professional. He had a reputation to uphold.

Even in the slightly worn gold trim of the hotel's bellhop uniform, the man in the lift exuded dangerous competence. His bearing was taut, a coiled spring ready to loose. He didn't have any weapons beyond the knife tucked underneath his waistcoat, but he was confident that he wouldn't need more. He rarely did.

The lift chimed. The door slid open. The cart trundled out, a wheel squeaking cheerily as he tugged it along behind him. Fujiwara could hear the blood rushing in his ears as ice flowed through his veins, the familiar buzz of adrenaline making itself known. He suppressed the flutters of anxiety in his gut — he'd done this before, and this job was no more dangerous than any of them. Halfway down the hall Fujiwara stopped before a door and knocked, though his gaze remained fixed on the suite at the end of the corridor.

"Service de chambre, puis-je entrer?" The French he spoke now bore only a hint of an accent, a far cry from the burr of Mullins. He didn't wait for a reply. There wasn't going to be one. Instead, Fujiwara walked swiftly to the ornate doors at the end of the hall, gleaming with polished silver. He slipped his key from inside his waistcoat —

— and froze as the handle turned from the weight of his hand upon it. Newland should have been out. He'd seen the signal. Had the man forgotten to lock his door? That was unlikely, especially given the value of the documents he reportedly carried. Fujiwara didn't know precisely what they were, but someone was willing to pay for them, and that sort of price tag didn't lend itself to absentmindedness.

Slowly, a hair's breadth at a time, he eased the door open. His ears were on edge for any sign of life inside the suite, and he slipped the key back into his pocket. His other hand reached for the knife tucked inside his waistband, beneath the coat.

Milicent

With a short twist of the key in the socket of the brass lock, Milicent coaxed open the ornate doors, unveiling the interior's sumptuous delights to her wolfish gaze. The architects of yore had proportioned the interconnected chambers of the Grisaille to match the dizzying heights of vanity they expected to witness in the behavior of the suite's intended inhabitants — a quirk of design that was immediately apparent to anyone who walked into the main room. Even from the dim of the imposing entryway, Milicent could see glints of polished metal and wood across the minefield of jewelled furniture and antique cabinetry. Oriental carpets strategically littered the parquet floor, their designs inscrutable in the darkness.

She noticed she was holding her breath; a fractured exhale issued from her lips, gale-loud compared to the amniotic quiet surrounding her. This was the sort of silence that exaggerated inconsequential notes, transforming even a soft footfall into pronounced clatter. Good thing she was alone.

She took a slow, deep breath, wishing she could slow the progress of the clock by controlling her respiration, and began weaving through the labyrinth of furnishings, ears pricked for any sign of activity in the chamber apart from the steady drum of her own heart.

Shethought of needles and haystacks. The enormity of the task was dawning upon her. In theory, she had plenty of time. In reality, the rooms were large and overstuffed with nooks and crannies. Never had she felt such a profound distaste for the eclectic whims of Second Empire style. Maximalist ornamentation prevailed. Vases, flowerpots, busts, paintings, and bookshelves lined the walls; decorative moulding garnished the toile wallpaper with strips of marble; the chairs sported silks and brocades bearing the distinctive touch of Prelle; the sofas were trimmed with fine tassels and bullion fringes fashioned by Declerq Passementiers. The overall effect was a study in sensory overload. There were too many features to parse, too many possibilities to entertain.

Worst still, Milicent's pattern-prone brain conjured wraiths out of the darkness: once or twice, she froze with a start, wondering if there was a human expression peering at her from some unlit corner, only to realise it was a trick of the imagination, an unfortunate confluence of shadows that produced demonic visages out of cartouches and rosettes.