Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,60
must have seen it several times, at least. Just below the proudly emblazoned name of the establishment, it depicted the same ancient stone building as Hayes’s bronze token. And yet somehow Sebastian hadn’t made the connection.
The baths had been open for business some six months. Prior to that, Mr. Abbasi had run the Hindu Kush Coffeehouse in George Street, serving a variety of curries and other authentic Indian dishes as well as providing hookahs and chilam tobacco. That establishment had not done well. Curries might have been popular with men who’d served in India with the British Army and the East India Company, but the taste was simply too exotic for most Londoners. And so Abbasi had closed his coffeehouse and opened the baths, which provided a hot room, a “shampooing” or massage room, a plunge bath, and a cooling and rest room.
Sebastian wondered if this venture was doing any better than the last.
He found the bathhouse’s foyer decorated in an ostentatiously Eastern theme, with lots of red silk and shiny brass and colorful mosaics. At his entrance, a man who looked like he’d be more at home in the craggy, snow-covered mountains of the Hindu Kush came from behind the counter and bowed. “May I help you?” He was tall and wiry, with a dark complexion, thick black hair, and merry black eyes. In age he could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five, with even white teeth that flashed in a wide smile.
The smile slipped when Sebastian laid the small bronze token on the countertop beside them and said, “This was in Nicholas Hayes’s pocket when he was found murdered up in Somer’s Town last Thursday.”
Abbasi held himself very still, in the manner of a man who senses danger but is as yet unsure of its nature. A silent, watchful boy of perhaps eight or nine came to stand in a nearby curtained doorway. His resemblance to Abbasi was unmistakable, but he was so much fairer than his father that Sebastian suspected the child must have an English mother.
When Abbasi remained silent, Sebastian said, “I’m not with Bow Street, if that’s what’s worrying you. The name is Devlin, and my only interest is in finding out who killed Hayes.”
One corner of the man’s mouth quirked up as if with an irrepressible bubble of amusement. “I must admit, you don’t look like anyone from Bow Street I’ve ever seen. In fact, you remind me of a cavalry captain I once knew. He was with the Nineteenth Light Dragoons.”
Sebastian found himself smiling in return. “I was with the Twenty-fifth. How could you tell?”
“I was a lieutenant with the East India Company. Long ago.”
“Not so long ago, surely.”
Abbasi laughed. “Long enough that I feel each old wound whenever a cold wind blows off the North Sea.” The amusement faded. “What is your interest in Nicholas?”
Nicholas, Sebastian noticed, not Hayes. “They say we owe the living respect, but the dead deserve the truth.”
Abbasi nodded, then quoted in perfect French, “‘On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.’” He glanced over at the half-grown boy who still hovered in the curtained doorway. “Take over for me, Baba.”
He led Sebastian to a small room covered from floor to ceiling with colorful Moroccan tiles and furnished with thick Persian carpets and piles of pillows. A shy, pretty little girl with black hair and huge brown eyes brought them thick Middle Eastern coffee as they sat cross-legged on the floor and talked of things common to military men all over the world, of brutal forced marches and the horses they’d known and fighting men they admired. Then Abbasi lit a hubble-bubble and said, “When I left the East India Company, I spent several years in Canton. It was there I came to know Nicholas.”
Sebastian drew the cool, fragrant smoke deep into his lungs. “How long ago was this?”
“I left nine—no, almost ten years ago now.”
“What was he like? I mean as a man.”
Abbasi sucked on the hubble-bubble, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “You’ve heard of his time in Botany Bay?”
“Some of it.”
Abbasi nodded. “He was a man who had once been a certain way—a gentleman’s son, heedless and gay and thinking little of tomorrow. Then he went through the worst kind of hell, and when he came out on the other side of it, he was inevitably . . . changed. Shattered. Hollowed out. But fate gave him a chance to remake himself into something else entirely, and so