Page 85 of The Art of Theft
She tensed.
“No talking in here, Poulaine, you know that,” said another man.
She looked back. This man was farther away from her than Poulaine, at the western end of the passage, his profile momentarily lit as his cigarette glowed with a pull of breath.
“Ah là là, Barre,” grumbled Poulaine, “talking to you is like pissing in a violin. Can you be any more of a stick-in-the-mud?”
All the same, he shut up.
Charlotte exhaled.
She walked carefully—it wasn’t easy to get around the camera stands with her paunch. When she reached the last camera stand, she unbuttoned her jacket, her waistcoat, and her shirt and reached into the great space created by her prosthetic stomach to pull out a large piece of thin woolen cloth. This she draped over the stand.
With Livia in the westernmost room in the corridor and Mrs. Watson and the maharani in the room just west of the linen closet, Barre and Poulaine were both west of the stone door and Charlotte had the eastern section of the passage to herself. She hoped that in the dark, with the distance, the draped camera stand would appear to the two men as the silhouette of a person with his eyes fixed to the camera
Then she tiptoed to the spot where Lord Ingram had hidden when Madame Desrosiers and Lady Ingram had come into the secret passage, behind what he’d thought to be a flue.
The passage was directly over a gallery Charlotte had visited on the night of the reception and there had indeed been a large fireplace at roughly this spot. And according to the pictures Mr. Marbleton had taken with his detective camera, there was a chimney on top of the roof also at this spot.
Except on the night of the reception, both arriving and leaving, Charlotte had not seen any smoke rising from that particular spot on the roof, when all the while a fire had burned merrily in that grate.
Whatever the contents of the safe, Moriarty wanted them. Charlotte could be sure then that Madame Desrosiers also wantedthem. And she would have searched the house thoroughly. Where could this safe be that she had likely not found it?
Charlotte did not consider hers a particularly good deduction—there was so much of the house they hadn’t seen. But it was worth a try.
She struck a match, to light a cigarette and to study the “flue.” Brick and mortar. Brick and mortar. The scalding heat at her fingertips forced her to extinguish the match. She used the lit cigarette to light another one, walked back to the camera stand, and placed one of the cigarettes next to the camera, away from the draped blanket so that it wouldn’t catch fire, but would be visible to the other men in the passage.
She hoped that it would be enough to disguise the second cigarette, which she would be putting to use behind the flue. But no matter how she prodded and pried, she couldn’t find any loose bricks.
The back of her head throbbed. Was she wrong about the location of the safe? About the existence of the safe altogether? She tried the “front” of the flue, even thought there was barely room for her to fit between the flue and the wall. Again nothing.
Surely Moriarty couldn’t have set the opening panel of the safe on the side facing the rest of the passage. Then again, if he’d never expected to be in here except by himself, then perhaps it made sense to have it open to the side where there was the most space for him to maneuver.
She put out the cigarette still in her hand and felt this side of the flue, examining the bricks row by row. At last, where it was almost too high for her to reach, a brick moved slightly at her touch. And it had just enough space around it for her to pull it out.
She set the brick down carefully. Standing on her toes, she put her hand through the space vacated by the brick and felt for the mechanism, activating it as gently as she could. She braced for a loud pop, but a part of the flue swung forward almost noiselessly.
She let out a breath, went to the camera stand, and used thecigarette there to light yet another one, taking care not to let anyone see two points of light. She adjusted the blanket she’d draped earlier over the camera stand. It should obscure the safe behind it.
When she was done, she sat down before the safe that had been revealed. It was twice as large as she’d anticipated. And the combination lock itself was massive, almost the size of a ship’s wheel.
The combination locks she’d seen in her lock-picking practice all had a wheel that went from zero to ninety-nine. But this one went up to one hundred ninety-nine.
Ah, now it made sense. The code had deciphered to be twelve digits, which was too many numbers for a three-number combination. But if she was dealing with a safe that had a four-number or five-number combination, some of them triple digits, then the total number of digits worked.
Which meant that the first number was either one, fourteen, or one hundred and forty-nine. Fortunately, she could put her ear to the safe and hear the tumbler pin fall into place. Still, trials lay ahead of her.
She set to work.
?Mrs. Watson felt as if she were in a dream. She knew that she was under surveillance. She knew that elsewhere in the château her companions were taking enormous risks. Yet here she and Sita Devi were, sitting on a sheepskin rug in their ballgowns, drinking wine and talking, while a fire crackled in the grate.
Were they young women again? Had time flown backward?
Sita Devi had described, in some detail, her yearlong pilgrimage to many of India’s holy sites—the trip might have been undertaken to avoid being her son’s adversary at court, but she’d come to appreciate the experience deeply.
Then she had made Mrs. Watson tell her all about her own years in India and Mrs. Watson had obliged.
“But I guess everything I experienced was from the colonial perspective,” she said after a while. Her husband had been, after all, anarmy physician. And his presence in India, and consequently her own, had been a direct expression of colonial power and control.
