From author Lara Elena Donnelly, a debut spy thriller as a gay double-agent schemes to protect his smuggler lover during the rise of a fascist government coup.
Trust no one with anything – especially in Amberlough City.
Covert agent Cyril DePaul thinks he’s good at keeping secrets, especially from Aristide Makricosta. They suit each other: Aristide turns a blind eye to Cyril’s clandestine affairs, and Cyril keeps his lover’s moonlighting job as a smuggler under wraps.
Cyril participates on a mission that leads to disastrous results, leaving smoke from various political fires smoldering throughout the city. Shielding Aristide from the expected fallout isn’t easy, though, for he refuses to let anything – not the crooked city police or the mounting rage from radical conservatives – dictate his life.
Enter streetwise Cordelia Lehane, a top dancer at the Bumble Bee Cabaret and Aristide’s runner, who could be the key to Cyril’s plans—if she can be trusted. As the twinkling lights of nightclub marquees yield to the rising flames of a fascist revolution, these three will struggle to survive using whatever means — and people — necessary. Including each other.
The paperback of Amberlough is now available. Please enjoy this excerpt.
CHAPTER ONE
At the beginning of the workweek, most of Amberlough’s salaryfolk crawled reluctantly from their bed—or someone else’s—and let the trolleys tow them, hungover and half asleep, to the office. Amberlough City, eponymous capital of the larger state, was not home to many early risers.
In a second-story flat on the fashionable part of Baldwin Street—close enough to the river that the scent of money still perfumed the air, and close enough to the wharves for good street food and radical conversation—Cyril DePaul pulled himself from beneath a heavy duvet of moiré silk. The smell of coffee was strong outside his nest of blankets. An early spring storm freckled the bedroom windows with rain.
Though this was not his flat, Cyril slipped from bed and went directly to the washroom without hesitation. He ran a wet comb through his hair, brushed his teeth with cloying, violet-flavored toothpaste, and borrowed the dressing gown hanging on the bath rail. Despite Aristide’s penchant for over-warming his rooms, the last of winter lingered in the tiled floor. Cyril left the cold mosaic of the washroom behind and gratefully took to the plush carpet running the length of the hallway. Its tasseled end debouched onto the parlor, where he met the maid balancing an empty tray.
“He’s at the little table, Mr. DePaul,” she said, without so much as a blush.
“Thank you, Ilse.” She had charming dimples when she smiled.
At the far end of the parlor, where it joined with the dining room, the corridor belled outward into a breakfast nook bracketed by windows. An elegant, ochre-skinned man sat at his ease in one of the gilded chairs. Reading spectacles rested halfway down his dramatic nose—narrow at the top, wide at the base, deeply curved: as if a sculptor had put her thumb between his eyes and pulled firmly down. His thin lips were arranged in a pout practiced so often in the mirror it had become habitual.
He held the society pages of the Amberlough Clarion against one knee. The rest of the paper—all the crosswords done, and still damp from the storm—was scattered among a silver coffee service set out for two, and dainty plates of almond pastry. As Cyril sat down at the unattended coffee cup, Aristide snapped his paper and said, without looking up, “Finally. I was beginning to wonder if you’d d-d-died in your sleep.”
“And miss the pleasure of your company at breakfast? Never.” Cyril poured for himself, luxuriating in Aristide’s affected stutter, and the soundless slip of coffee against the shining glaze of his cup. “Are you finished with the front page?”
“Ages ago.”
Cyril reached for the paper and grimaced when the wet ink left streaks on his palm. “Been up long?” He asked the question casually, but over splotchy headlines he catalogued Aristide’s appearance with strict attention: satin pyjamas under a quilted dressing gown, the same set he’d—almost—worn to bed. His tumble of dark curls had been carefully brushed over one shoulder, but they still showed traces of damp. A flush lingered across his cheeks. He’d left the flat already this morning, but changed back out of his clothes. Something illicit, then, and Cyril was not supposed to notice. Obediently, he ignored it, just as Aristide ignored his scrutiny, and his question.
“Eat.” Aristide pushed one of the pastries across the table. “Or you’ll be late to work. I shiver to imagine C-C-Culpepper in a fury. She’s frightful enough as it is.”
“Ari—”
“I know, I know. I’m not supposed to know.” He reached two bony fingers into the breast pocket of his dressing gown and removed a slip of paper, folded in half. “And neither should she, right?” Without looking at Cyril, he handed over the cheque. “Discretion, as they say, is p-p-priceless.”
Cyril made the payoff disappear up his sleeve. “You don’t have to remind me.” The money was a symbolic gesture, allowing for plausible deniability. “But I’m glad when you do.” Ignoring the pastry, he drained his coffee cup and stood. “Clothes?”
“Ilse p-p-pressed them. They’re hanging in the wardrobe.”
Cyril dipped down to kiss Aristide on the top of his head. His hair smelled of rain, salt, and smoke. Somewhere on the wharves, then. Probably the southern end, near the Spits. Bad part of town—smugglers docked there, in the wee hours.
Aristide grabbed a fistful of Cyril’s fox fur lapel and pulled, forcing him to bend deeper, until they were face-to-face. “Cyril,” he purred, and there was menace behind it. “You haven’t got the t-t-time.”
“Ah,” said Cyril, “but don’t you wish I did?” He kissed Aristide again, on his pursed, displeased mouth. After half a moment’s resistance, Ari gave in and smiled.
The rain was done by the time the Baldwin Street trolley stopped at Talbert Row. Cyril disembarked and joined a bedraggled wave of late commuters all headed for the same transfer.
Wedged at the front end of the trolley car, between the driver’s partition and a dozing woman in a loud plaid suit, Cyril took the Clarion out from under his arm—he’d bought his own copy at the Heynsgate trolley stop—and propped it against his leg. The headliner was a story about a train station bombing in Totrajov, a disputed settlement on the border of Tatié.
Of the four nation-states in Gedda’s loose federation, Tatié was the most fractious. The only state to maintain a standing army, it had been locked in a bitter territorial conflict with the neighboring country of Tzieta for generations. Lucky for the rest of the country, federal funds and energy only went to mutually beneficial projects—infrastructure and foreign policy and, particularly relevant to Cyril, national security—so the decades-long skirmishing hadn’t drained the national treasury, just nearly bankrupted an economically precarious Tatié.
By and large, Amberlinians ignored their eastern sibling except as the subject of satire, and an occasional creeping nervousness vis-à-vis Tatien firepower. Though it wasn’t strictly good form, Amberlough’s covert operatives kept a close eye on Tatié. The best of navies was no good against a landlocked, militarized state, and they weren’t the most cordial of neighbors.
Tucked neatly under the gruesome account of the bombing was a smaller headline on the upcoming western election. Parliamentary elections were all offset by two years, and this year it was Nuesklend’s turn. In the accompanying picture, outgoing primary representative Annike Staetler stood next to a young woman with marcelled hair and deep-set eyes. The caption read Staetler endorses Secondary Kit Riedlions, South Gestraacht. Below that, another picture, of a pale, flat-faced man in rimless spectacles, looking down from a podium swagged with bunting. Caleb Acherby stands for the One State Party in Nuesklend.
Poor Staetler. She’d been good to her constituents, and they would have had her for another eight years if she’d let the state assembly dissolve Nuesklend’s term limits. Cyril hadn’t been at the luncheon where Director Culpepper and Amberlough’s primary parliamentary representative, Josiah Hebrides, went to work on her, but Culpepper had come back in a foul humor, filled with apocalyptic premonitions. Staetler was a staunch ally against encroaching Ospie influence in parliament. As long as regionalist Amberlough and Nuesklend stood against unionist Farbourgh and Tatié, things stayed at a deadlock. If Acherby took the primary’s seat … well, he’d always been the brains behind the Ospie cause. He’d had to wait through two election cycles, unable to run for office outside his birth state. Now it was his turn, and he’d have a long to-do list.
He’d probably calm things down in the east, and feed the starving orphans in Farbourgh, but at a crippling cost to Gedda as a whole. Acherby’s aim was unification: the loose federation into one tightly controlled entity. The manifold diversity of Gedda’s people into one homogenous culture.
Sighing, Cyril opened the paper to the center and folded it back on itself, hiding Acherby’s severe expression under layers of cheap newsprint.
He was deep in a conservative opinion piece in favor of further increasing domestic border tariffs—the same tariffs Aristide had been neatly avoiding in the small hours of the morning—when the trolley cables caught and the gripman bawled out “Station Way!”
Cyril disembarked to walk what was left of his commute. The gutters ran fast; bicyclists and motorcars splashed oily water across the footpath as they passed. Behind the marble edifice of the capitol, masts and smokestacks striped the sky above the harbor. Seabirds wheeled and shrieked, peppering the green copper dome of government with their droppings.
Amberlough’s branch of the Federal Office of Central Intelligence Services hid on the top three floors of an unassuming office building, just across Station Way from the capitol’s sloping gardens. Like everything in the FOCIS, the office had its own facetious nickname: the Foxhole.
“Morning, Mr. DePaul,” said Foyles, from behind his racing form. Foyles had presided over the lobby as long as Cyril had been working in the Foxhole, and probably twice again as long as that. Deep wrinkles creased his face, and the tight spirals of his hair stood out in striking white against his slate-dark skin.
Cyril half-waved at him and stepped into the lift, standing back while the attendant shut the grate. He didn’t need to tell her his floor.
The lift paused once, at three, where the clerks and auditors held court amidst the clamor of ringing lacquer telephones, heads bent over pencils and adding machines. Floors four and five were sleight of hand—espionage to ensure the security of the Federated States of Gedda—but three was where the true sorcery happened. The bursar’s team made eye-popping embezzlements into minor calculating errors. Bribes and payoffs disappeared into endless columns of numbers and names. Agents were paid in secretive exchanges, the intricacies of which could escape even authorizing division heads. The accountants were, to a person, discreet, clean-cut, and scrupulously polite. They terrified the rest of Central.
The attendant scissored the lift grate open and stepped back for a new passenger. A young man in a shabby suit got on, ducking his head of bright copper hair. He smiled at Cyril without making eye contact. Against his chest, he held a sheaf of papers under a fat leather datebook, arms crossed tightly over it all like a shield. Cyril ticked through his mental files, checking names against faces, stories against facts.
Low-level auditor. Been in the office two years. Uncommonly straight, for an Amberlinian: He’d never tried his hand at extortion. Painfully fair, with a winning tendency to blush when embarrassed. Embarrassed very easily. What was his name, again? Lourdes. That was it. Finn Lourdes.
They’d only spoken once or twice—Finn had visited Cyril, just out of hospital, to express Central’s sympathies, and deliver by hand a comfortable bonus and promise of promotion: Culpepper’s blood money.
They ran into each other sometimes in the halls, now that Cyril was settled behind a desk. And anyway, Cyril wouldn’t be working on the fifth floor if he didn’t have a mind for details.
Copyright © 2017 by Lara Elena Donnelly
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