Read Chapter 5: The Price of Passage

The banker’s townhouse sat on the Rue de la Paix, a limestone monument to a world that no longer existed. Étienne stood in the freezing drizzle for a full minute before knocking, watching his breath cloud in the gaslight from the streetlamp. The façade was scarred by a recent shell strike, a black bloom of soot and shattered brick cutting across the second-floor windows. Inside, the Germans would be at the gates of the city soon enough. Time was short, and time was money—the banker knew that better than anyone.

The door opened before his fist could fall a second time. A servant in a threadbare but meticulously pressed coat regarded him with the flat gaze of a man who had stopped being surprised months ago.

“Monsieur Vautrin,” the servant said. Not a question. Étienne’s face was known in certain circles, and his balloon was a fixture in the sky above Paris like a wounded bird too stubborn to die. “Monsieur Rothschild is in his study. He has been expecting you.”

Étienne stepped inside. The house smelled of candle wax and old leather, and the chill in the air suggested Rosenfeld had long since given up heating the upper floors. The servant led him through a foyer lined with paintings—most of them gone, leaving pale rectangles on the wallpaper where the frames had been pried off and stashed in the cellar before the Prussians could take them. The war had made hoarders of everyone, even the richest men in France.

Rothschild was not sitting at a desk when Étienne entered the study. He was standing at the window, watching the rain carve rivulets through the grime on the glass. He was a small man, balding, with a neat gray beard and the quiet, coiled intensity of a fox.

“Étienne,” he said, turning. “Come in. Close the door. You look like a man who’s walked through an artillery barrage.”

“Something like that,” Étienne said. He did not sit. The banker gestured to a chair and, when Étienne remained standing, gave a thin smile.

“Straight to business, then. Good. We’re all running short on time and patience.” Rothschild crossed to a mahogany sideboard and poured two glasses of brandy. He offered one to Étienne, who shook his head. “Suit yourself. Now—what do you need?”

“Ripstop canvas. Silk, if you can find it. A roll of rivets the width of three centimetres. Shellac and rubber solution for leak patches.” Étienne paused. “And a coil of new guide rope. Forty yards.”

Rothschild raised an eyebrow. “That’s a balloon repair kit, not a shopping list.”

“It is.”

“And you’re asking me. Not the military, not the depot at the Tuileries, not the aeronautic workshops in the Rue de Babylone.”

Étienne said nothing. The silence stretched between them, heavy as wet wool. Rothschild took a slow sip of his brandy, watching him over the rim of the glass.

“My records say you flew three registered mail sorties in the past month,” the banker said. “Your last flight was logged at the Tuileries two nights ago. But I have a friend at the telegraph office, and he tells me the postal route only ever reaches one destination—Chartres, or thereabouts, where they transfer overland to Tours. Night flights, short hops. Safe, predictable. The Government of National Defense pays well for letters that reach the provinces. They pay even better for balloons that come back.”

Étienne felt a muscle tighten in his jaw. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that you’ve been logging flights that don’t match the wind reports.” Rothschild set his glass down with a soft click. “The wind two nights ago was south-southwest. You filed a route to Chartres. But a man I know at the Observatory, a man who watches the sky with a telescope because he has nothing better to do—he tells me he saw a balloon climbing north that night. North, Étienne. Toward the Prussian lines. And then it disappeared.”

The floor of the study felt suddenly unsteady. Étienne kept his face still, but his hands remembered the cold grip of the envelope he’d been handed at the Tuileries—unregistered, unsigned, carrying orders to meet a foreign agent at the Gare du Nord.

“I’m a banker,” Rothschild said. “I weigh risks. I know when a long shot is a sure thing, and I know when a sure thing is a lie. You’ve been flying unregistered missions. Maybe for the government, maybe for someone else. I don’t care. But you need materials, and the only reason you’ve come to me is that you can’t go through official channels without drawing attention to the fact that you’ve been lying to them.”

Étienne’s voice came out rougher than he intended. “Are you threatening me?”

“I’m making you an offer.” Rothschild walked to his desk, unlocked a drawer, and withdrew a small parcel wrapped in oilcloth. It was roughly the size of a thick novel, heavy enough that the banker’s hand dipped slightly when he held it out. “I need this to leave Paris. I need it to reach a man in Brussels. He’ll know what to do with it when it arrives.”

Étienne didn’t move. A parcel that left Paris by balloon had to cross the Prussian lines, and anything crossing the Prussian lines was inspected—or shot down. The only reason to send something by balloon rather than by courier was that the sender trusted the pilot more than the Prussian censors.

Or that the sender had no other option.

“What’s inside?” Étienne asked.

Rothschild’s smile thinned. “That doesn’t concern you.”

“It does when I’m the one holding it over open ground at three thousand feet with Prussian rifles below.”

“Fair enough.” Rothschild set the parcel down on the desk between them. “It’s a detonator. A compact one—a design from a workshop in Saint-Denis. Inside is a capsule of fulminate of mercury, machined to a set of specifications that are, I’m told, quite inventive. It didn’t belong to me originally. It belonged to a munitions engineer who is now dead, denied his final payment by a French officer who objected to his methods.”

Étienne stared at the parcel. The oilcloth seemed to pulse with the weight of what it contained. A detonator. One detonator—machined to specifications meant to pair with some other thing, some mechanism waiting in a city beyond the Prussian lines, ready to be triggered the moment this parcel arrived.

“You want me to fly a bomb part across the lines.”

“I want you to carry a machine-tooled component to a contact in Brussels,” Rothschild corrected. “It’s not a bomb until it’s attached to something else, and what it gets attached to is none of my concern. Nor is it yours.”

“And the alternative?”

Rothschild spread his hands. The gesture was almost apologetic. “The alternative is that I inform the Ministry of War that one of their registered mail pilots has been running false manifests. The ministry is nervous, Étienne. They see traitors and spies under every bed. A man with your history—your brother’s death at Sedan, the unanswered questions about his letters—they’d take a very personal interest in you. They’d ground you, interrogate you, and probably hang you for treason, just to make an example. Does that seem worth a roll of canvas?”

Étienne’s hands were fists at his sides. The veins in his neck had gone tight, and he could feel the pulse in his own temple beating like a drum. He thought of Lucien’s locket, still warm against his chest. He thought of the artillery map, drawn in a hand he knew better than his own, waiting in the safehouse under Valeux’s watch.

Lucien had been drawing Prussian maps for the French. If that ever came out—if the ministry got their hands on Étienne’s flight records, his unregistered missions, his ragged trail of unanswered questions—

They wouldn’t hang him for treason. They’d hang him for the truth.

Étienne reached out and took the parcel. It weighed more than it should have. The oilcloth was cold and damp under his fingers.

“Where in Brussels?” he asked.

“The Café du Nord, near the Gare du Midi.” Rothschild produced a small card from his jacket and set it beside the parcel. “Ask for the man who orders a glass of port with his morning coffee. Give him the parcel. Say nothing else.”

Étienne pocketed the card and tucked the parcel under his arm. The detonator pressed against his ribs, a hard reminder of what he was carrying.

“Your materials will be delivered to the Pont de Bercy at dawn,” Rothschild said. “Ripstop canvas, rivets, rubber solution. And the guide rope—I had to pay a dismantler twice its weight in gold to pull it off a mast in the harbor at Saint-Cloud, but it’s yours. Don’t get shot down. I’m a poor loser.”

Étienne turned toward the door, then stopped. He looked back at the banker, who had already returned to his brandy, watching the rain fall over a city starving and besieged.

“One more thing,” Étienne said. “If I’m carrying this parcel to Brussels, I’m not carrying it alone. I’ve got a passenger. He’s not registered either.”

Rothschild’s expression flickered—a moment of genuine surprise before the banker’s mask slid back into place. “Then I suppose you’d better hope he’s worth the altitude.”

Étienne walked out into the rain, the parcel weighing against his chest like a stolen heart. The detonator felt different from the artillery map. The map was bait, meant to draw a spy into Prussian hands. But the detonator—the detonator was meant to blow something up.

And he had no idea where it was going.