Mr Impossible Read Online Free PDF

clearly: a
red-haired woman, naked but for a golden collar about her neck, her
arms stretched toward the heavens.

    Naked would be
good. His experienced eye told him the mortal lady’s figure
might well be as extraordinary as her face.

    Rather like a
temperamental goddess, she pulled off the gloomy headdress and flung
it down.

    Leena hurried in.
“They have disappeared!” she cried. “All of them!”

    “ Really?”
Rupert said. “That’s interesting.”

    He turned to the
widow. Her face was chalk white. Devil take it, was she going to
faint? The only feminine habit he feared and hated more than weeping
was fainting.

    “ We all
thought your brother was lost in a brothel,” he said. “But
this news makes me think, maybe not”

    A flush overspread
her too-pale countenance, and her green eyes sparked. “A
brothel?”

    “ A house of
ill repute,” he explained. “Where men hire women to do
what most women won’t do unless you marry them, and oftentimes
not even then.”

    “ I know what
a brothel is,” she said.

    “ Apparently,
theCairobrothels make theParisones look like Quaker nurseries,”
he said. “Not that I speak with absolute certainty. The truth
is, my recollections ofParisare hazy at best.”

    Her eyes narrowed.
“What you do or do not remember ofParisis of no relevance
whatsoever at present,” she said.

    “ I only
wanted to point out how immense a temptation it is,” he said.
“Only a saint—like one of my brothers—could resist
it. So naturally, not knowing how saintly your own brother was—”

    “ You and your
associates simply assumed that Miles was cavorting with prostitutes
and dancing girls.”

    “ And what
with the hashish and opium and whatnot, we supposed he’d lost
all sense of time.”

    “ I see,”
she said. “And so you were assigned to keep me occupied until
Miles came or was carried home.”

    “ Yes, that’s
how it was all explained to me,” he said. “It seemed
simple enough. A brother missing—we can put it down to drugs
and women. But now we’ve lost a papyrus, not to mention the
servants. Matters grow complicated.”

    “ I do not
understand how bad people could come here,” Leena said. “The
doorkeeper Wadid was in his place when we came. He said nothing of
any disturbance.”

    “ That fellow
sitting on the stone bench near the gate?”

    Rupert said. “He
seemed to be praying. He certainly paid me no heed.”

    The mistress and
the maid exchanged glances.

    “ I will go to
Wadid,” Leena said.

    She went out.

    The widow turned
away from Rupert and returned to the ransacked table. She knelt and
moved a book to the left. She shook sand off a paper and set it under
the book. She picked up pens from the floor and set them back on the
inkstand. The angry spark was gone from her eyes, and the flush had
faded, leaving her face dead white, which made the smudges under her
eyes appear darker than ever.

    Rupert wasn’t
sure what made him think of it, but he had a vivid picture in his
mind of a long-ago time: his little cousin Maria weeping over her
dolls after Rupert and her brothers had used them for target
practice.

    He didn’t
have any sisters, and wasn’t used to girls crying, and it made
him frantic. When he offered to try to glue the dolls’ mangled
parts back together, little Maria whacked him with one of the larger
mutilated corpses and blackened his eye. What a relief that was! He
vastly preferred physical punishment to the other thing: the nasty
stew of emotion.

    The dark smudges
under Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes and the cold white of her face
affected him much as his cousin’s tears had done. But he hadn’t
broken any dolls. He hadn’t hurt this lady’s
brother—wasn’t sure, in fact, he’d ever clapped
eyes on the fellow. Rupert certainly hadn’t touched her
precious papyrus. There was no reason for him to feel… wrong.

    Maybe it was
something he’d eaten. The prison swill, perhaps. Or maybe it
was a touch of plague.

    “ The