The Pawnbroker King

Chapter Seven: The Keeper's Key

The key around Gideon's neck had never looked like much. It was plain black iron, a little longer than his finger, with a worn bow and three blunt teeth. Anyone who noticed it assumed it opened a garden shed.

It opened the iron door in the basement, and it opened something far more important beyond it. Deep in the Vault, behind a wall of stone with no handle, lay the innermost chamber, and only two keys in the world could unlock it. Amos had worn this one for forty years. He had never told Gideon where the other one was.

Gideon sat at the workbench behind the counter with the sign turned to CLOSED. Upstairs, Pippa's breakfast bowl was still in the sink. He had been sitting there for an hour.

One phone call would end this. He knew the numbers by heart. There was a general in the capital whose career rested in box 1640, a supreme court judge in 0912 and three police chiefs scattered through the third corridor. If he called in a single one of those tickets, every road out of Corran shipyard would be sealed within the hour, and men in body armor would be bringing Pippa home.

But Pippa was his own family, and that made her his own business. Never use the Vault for yourself. Amos had not meant it as advice. Under the Vault's oldest law, a Keeper who used it for his own ends became its debtor. He lost its protection, and his name went from the best-kept secret in the country to a line in every enemy's notebook by morning. Every family that had ever resented a box in that basement would know exactly where to find him, and exactly who he loved.

So he took a blank key from the tray, a set of jeweler's files and a pot of black lacquer, and he went to work.

By ten o'clock it was finished. It had the same length, the same worn bow and the same three blunt teeth. Under a dim lamp it would pass for the real thing. It would not pass under anything else.

Selene found him at the door with his coat on.

"I'm coming with you," she said.

"No."

"They have Pippa. I'm not going to sit in a leaking room and wait for..."

He took her hand, turned it palm up and pressed the real key into it. The iron was still warm from his skin, and Selene went silent.

"If I'm not back by dawn," Gideon said, "go downstairs, lock the iron door from the inside and stay in the Vault. Open it for no one. Not the police, not your father." He held her eyes. "Not even me."

She looked down at the key, then at the copy hanging from the cord around his neck. She had spent years across negotiating tables, and she knew what it meant to walk into a room with nothing in your hand.

"That one's fake," she said.

"Yes."

"Then you're walking in there with nothing."

"I'm walking in there to bring her home," Gideon said. "That's enough."

Her fingers closed around the key, and she didn't argue again.

Corran shipyard had been dead for fifteen years. Rusted cranes rose out of the fog along the waterfront like the skeletons of enormous birds, and the river beneath them was black and still. A few floodlights still worked on poles along the main dock, turning the fog into a glowing white wall. Iron mooring hooks lay coiled on the bollards where the last crews had left them, and a steel control box sat bolted to the base of the tallest crane.

Twenty men waited at the end of the dock. Each wore a strip of red cloth tied around his upper arm, and every one of them was armed. They watched Gideon walk out of the fog alone, and none of them moved.

Trent stood among them.

He was sweating despite the cold, his good suit rumpled and his eyes darting everywhere except at Gideon. Someone had promised him a clean slate, and he was clinging to that promise like a drowning man to a plank. Gideon understood then how they had gotten Pippa past a door he had told her never to open.

Then he looked up.

Pippa hung from the hook of the tallest crane, forty feet above the water. Her wrists and ankles were bound with rope, and tape covered her mouth. She turned slowly in the wind. When she saw Gideon, she stopped struggling and simply stared at him.

"Mr. Mercer." The voice came from the center of the group. "Thank you for being punctual."

The man who stepped forward was slight and soft-spoken, with thinning hair and a gray suit that fit him perfectly. He could have been an accountant or a funeral director. He held a small red notebook in one hand and a fountain pen in the other, and as Gideon watched, he drew a neat line through a name on the open page.

"They call me the Auditor," he said pleasantly. "I'd prefer that you did too. The key, please."

Gideon lifted the cord over his head and held it out. The Auditor took the key, turned it over in his slender fingers and raised it toward the floodlight. He studied the bow, then the teeth. Then he smiled, slowly and almost fondly.

"Your master tried this too," he said. "Two years ago, Amos Tobin stood on a dock much like this one and handed me a false key. A beautiful forgery, better than this one." He tucked the key into his breast pocket. "Then his heart stopped. It took a very long time."

The words hit Gideon like cold water.

Amos had died in his armchair above the shop. The doctor had called it a heart attack, and Gideon had believed it for two years. He had sat beside the old man's body that night and told himself that at least it had been quick.

It hadn't been quick. The Red Ledger had murdered him.

Beside the Auditor, Trent had gone completely white. His mouth opened and closed without a sound. He had sold the shop and then his own sister, and he had never known that the people buying had killed his grandfather.

The Auditor closed his notebook.

"A false key for a false key," he said softly. "I think that's fair."

He raised one hand.

High above them, the crane groaned. Its cable shuddered and ran loose, and Pippa dropped toward the black water.