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Jesper makes it back home at three in the morning. He sighs, pulling the Sharpshooter mask off his head, dragging fingers through his hair to pull it back to normalcy.
He loves being Sharpshooter, but boy, he wishes he made a better mask when he first started out. It's too late to change it now, but he's always sweaty and sticky when he gets home.
He tugs his shoes off as he pads further into the apartment, risking turning the lights on as he goes. None of his flatmates will care enough to leave their bedrooms.
The artificial lighting is so bright it takes his eyes a second to adjust, and when he does he has to muffle a scream.
"Sharpshooter," says Dirtyhands, somehow seated on the couch Jesper shares with three university students in crappy Ketterdam lodging.
"The fuck," Jesper says.
Dirtyhands tilts his head, crow-like mask eerily similar to the crow-topped cane he holds in his black-gloved hands. Jesper had last seen him not ten minutes ago, when they had teamed up to take down a group of men who had decided it was a good idea to rob a young girl in the Barrel.
"Jesper Fahey," Dirtyhands says, and Jesper flinches. No one is meant to know his real name. That's the point of being Sharpshooter, afterall. Vigilantes are only as safe as their identities. Sure, Dirtyhands has saved Jesper more times than he can count, somehow always there in the nick of time, but Jesper's not sure he's ready to trust him with his identity.
"Why are you here," Jesper says, trying not to panic. His hands are on the pistols at his waist. He knows he won't be able to get off more than one shot before Dirtyhands will be gone. He doesn't think he wants to risk it - if he fires, here, now, he won't see the light of day ever again.
Ketterdam has more than her fair share of vigilantes. None of them are quite as dangerous as Dirtyhands. None of them tip as close to being a villain as Dirtyhands. Perhaps that's what makes Dirtyhands so good at what he does. No one, not even Jesper, has as many successful takedowns per night as Dirtyhands.
Well. As Dirtyhands and the Wraith. No one really knows if they work together, or if they just coincidentally pick the same battles, but it's always hard to tell if it's Dirtyhands or the Wraith who defeats the criminal of the hour. Sometimes, Jesper even hears rumours about how maybe the Wraith is just something Dirtyhands created to do dirty work for him. Jesper disagrees. Dirtyhands does his own dirty work. It's in the name, in the nature.
Jesper's done some collabs too, in the past, mostly with a twiggy vigilante who calls himself Merchling and stutters when Jesper flirts, but nothing they could do together comes close to Dirtyhands and the Wraith.
"I have a job for you," Dirtyhands says.
Jesper starts, trying to remember the question he asked. "Right," he says. "Yeah, no."
Dirtyhands wears a blank mask. You can't see his facial expressions. Still, Jesper gets the feeling he's raising an eyebrow. "No?"
"Are you blackmailing me?" Jesper asks, incredulously.
"No, Jesper Fahey," Dirtyhands says. "I simply thought you would like to hear the details."
Jesper blinks. He does, damn it. He really does. "Fine. What're the details?"
"Jan Van Eck has a painting I want," Dirtyhands says.
Jesper hates him. That explains nothing. "And? I don't commit crimes for no reason, you know. There has to be something in it for, you know, the greater good."
Dirtyhands dips his head. "Very well," he says. "Tell me if you change your mind."
With that, he stands, heads to Jesper's open window, and jumps out. Jesper rushes to the window, looking out, but there's no sign of him, and no thud indicates where he's landed.
Jesper sighs. He closes his window, locks it from the inside.
He's not going to turn to a life of crime just because he's curious.
He's not!
The conviction lasts him through a shower, a few hours of sleep, and one 9am lecture before it fails.
What painting is Dirtyhands talking about? What value does it have? Was it wrongfully stolen?
Dirtyhands isn't a criminal by Jesper's definition of the word, he's pretty sure.
Well. He hopes. He really has no idea.
Still… if he's involved, maybe he can keep an eye on Dirtyhands, find out if he's pure vigilante or pure criminal, solve the mystery once and for all.
During the break he has before his noon lecture, he glares up at the sun. "Fine!" he says, bitterly. "I'll do it!"
When Jesper gets back home, it's to Dirtyhands standing in his kitchen. He's more surprised by the fact that he's here in daylight than that he's here at all, which is in itself a concerning thought.
"I heard you changed your mind," Dirtyhands says.
That makes Jesper pause. "How?"
"I have ears everywhere," Dirtyhands says. His voice is amused. There's some inside joke here, one that Jesper doesn't know. "The Wraith is everywhere, always."
That makes Jesper relax, just a little. The Wraith, for all her involvement with Dirtyhands, is known for being kind. She's always the one to guide children back to their parents, to hand women back their purses, to offer a jacket to someone who just had their clothes torn. She deals with the cleanup. Jesper's too twitchy for that, Dirtyhands too cruel. The Wraith is one of the best of them. If the Wraith is involved in this job, then it can't be too bad.
And, apparently, the Wraith has been eavesdropping on Jesper. He's not sure how to fit that into his worldview.
"Wait," he says, struck by sudden thought. "You two work together?"
Dirtyhands doesn't answer.
"Is that how you knew where I live?" Jesper presses.
Dirtyhands doesn't answer that either.
"I won't discuss the details of the job with you here," he says, instead, completely ignoring Jesper. "Meet us at the Crow Club at one in the morning on Thursday."
It's Tuesday. "Why not tomorrow morning?" Jesper questions. "Wait, who's us?"
"You have an exam tomorrow at 8am," Dirtyhands says. "I thought you would appreciate the time to study and sleep."
"I do?" Jesper says, and his confusion lasts long enough for Dirtyhands to leave again, this time through a different window to the last. Jesper could swear he locked them all.
He does have an exam tomorrow. Fuck. He'd forgotten entirely about that.
He crams all night, skipping patrolling, but he manages to get to the exam on time and everything.
It's only halfway through question fifteen that he realises. "How does Dirtyhands know my schedule?" he hisses, under his breath, and then tries to go back to writing out the mechanism for nucleophilic substitution.
After the exam, he sits himself down in the courtyard, tips his head back against the stone walls, and groans into the dim sunlight. It hurts his eyes, but it's also warm, and he is so, so tired.
"Not your best exam?" says a familiar voice.
Jesper blinks his eyes open. Wylan.
"Nope," Jesper says. "I think I'll pass though."
"Good," Wylan says.
"How'd you go?"
Wylan shrugs. He's carrying a pencil in one hand and his flute case in the other. "It could have been worse," he says, diplomatically. "The helper they gave me for this exam kept getting annoyed at me for asking her to read the question. It's like… if I could do it myself, I would be. I made it through the entire exam, though, so it's okay."
Jesper frowns. "They shouldn't do that."
"I'm lucky I even get a helper," Wylan says. "My father -"
He never goes any further than that. It's fair enough, Jesper knows. You don't spill your family secrets to someone you've only known for one semester.
"Anyway," Wylan says. "I've got a flute exam now. I'll see you around?"
"Yeah," Jesper says, gears spinning in his mind. Wylan's surname is Van Eck.
He no longer needs to look for a reason to rob the guy, it seems.
Jesper gets home at noon and sleeps for a solid twelve hours, waking up just in time to pull on some fresh clothing and rush out of the apartment, making it in the doors of the Crow Club just as the bell tolls for one. He didn't bother with the Sharpshooter get-up - Dirtyhands already knows who he is, so there's not much point, and also it's hardly conspicuous.
He saunters around the floor for a bit, eyeing the shiny coinage on the table and the shining bodies on the dance floor. He's almost about to slide into a seat at the bar when there's a tug at his wrist.
"Hello," says the Wraith.
Jesper jumps about a foot in the air. "Where did you come from," he hisses.
The Wraith smiles, her mouth barely visible beneath the shadow of her cowl. Her mask, unlike Jesper's and Dirtyhands', only covers the top half of her face. You'd think she would be out of place in a club, but it's the Crow Club, which makes all the difference. Almost everyone here is in black, and most of them have some sort of weapon concealed under their clothing. At the Crow Club, the allure is not in the lack of clothing and the music and the drinks. At the Crow Club, the allure is in the danger.
That's not to say the music and the drinks aren't good, Jesper thinks, as the Wraith slides him one. It goes down smoothly, sweet like fire.
"What was that?" he asks appreciatively, and when the bartender, themselves cloaked head to foot in black fabric, tells him, he winces. That's more expensive than he could ever afford. That's a solid year's rent for his apartment.
"Who owns this place, and what do you have over them?" he asks, half joking.
The Wraith smiles again. "A wannabe merch called Kaz Brekker," she says. "As for the second part, you'll have to ask Dirtyhands."
"You two really do work together," Jesper marvels.
There's a distinctly confused tilt to the Wraith's head at that. "Of course," she says. "He's my partner."
Well, putting aside the implications of that for a moment, it seems like the Wraith is more happy to answer questions than her partner.
"How did you know where I live?" Jesper asks
The Wraith smiles again. "I followed you," she says, like it's that simple, like Jesper doesn't make at least three wrong turns and go through at least two secret passageways each time he goes home in the Sharpshooter get up. Maybe, Jesper realises, to her, it really is that simple.
"And how did you know that I agreed?" he asks. He'd been in the middle of the university, after all.
"I was in the area," the Wraith says, vaguely, and he remembers that she's as much of a danger as Dirtyhands is. She'll answer him, but she won't tell him anything.
Two sides of the same coin, he thinks, except if the coin was a knife and it had definitely killed a man before.
"Would you like another drink?" the Wraith asks.
Jesper is sorely tempted, he is, but he really should be sober if they're going to be discussing a job. "So," he says. "What's the job Dirtyhands was talking about?"
The Wraith looks around. The only reason he knows is that he can see the flicker of her dark eyes. Her head doesn't so much as twitch. "Not here," she says. "Follow me."
Jesper feels vaguely like he's being pulled along on a wild goose chase. Not his apartment, meet at the Crow Club. Not the Crow Club, meet at… wherever they were going next.
Regardless, it's too late to back out now, so he follows the Wraith as she leaves the building. They go down the alleyway a little bit, and then the Wraith scales a building, quick as a flash. Jesper groans, then follows, glad that he's not wearing his tightest pants.
They walk along the rooftops for a few minutes. The Wraith moves like a shadow, silent and inconspicuous, nearly blending into the cracks of the roofing. Jesper feels like an elephant in comparison, trundling around, each footfall loud in the stillness of the night.
They take several lefts, then a right, and then they slip through a window into a different club. The Wraith leads Jesper through several dance floors, through a mirrored room where he loses all sense of direction, then out through a window the female bathroom. He's entirely disoriented when they get out, and he can't see a single Ketterdam landmark to remind him of where he is.
That, he thinks, might have been the point.
They descend to street level, and slip through an alley lined with sleeping bodies. There's a sharp smell to the air.
The Wraith notices his curiosity. "It's Jurda Parem," she says. "A new street drug."
"Oh," Jesper says. He's endlessly glad that no matter what else he's thrown himself headfirst into without thinking, he's managed to keep away from drug use. He gets too easily hooked on things.
The Wraith cracks open a grate in the floor, and slips in. Jesper stares at her, and then sighs and follows. He's already gone this far, and he's so curious that it would haunt him forever if he turned back now.
They walk through a dark underground passageway for a while, until Jespers' lost all track of location and also time. Then the Wraith turns left and opens a hidden door. They step through.
"Welcome to the Slats," the Wraith says, and then starts climbing the stairs.
They go up four stories, five, six, then stop. They're at the top of the staircase.
The Wraith knocks, once, twice, three times on the brick wall, and it grinds open.
Dirtyhands' beaked mask stares back at them. "You're back faster than I thought you'd be, Wraith," he drawls, voice as gravelled as ever, and moves aside to let them through.
"He lost track of where we were around Mirrorball. I took some shortcuts from the planned route," the Wraith says.
Jesper blinks. If that was a shortened version… "Look," he sighs, "directions and time are not Jesper specialities. Where are we?"
The Wraith moves into the small kitchenette off to the left. Looking around, Jesper notes that all the windows have heavy curtains covering them. There are two internal doors to the right, and one locked and double-bolted door on the other side of the living room from him that clearly leads to the more conventional entrance.
"Our apartment," the Wraith says, setting water to boil. "Tea?"
Jesper's jaw drops so quickly he's surprised he doesn't strain something. "You live together?"
"Rent's cheaper that way," Dirtyhands says. The Wraith laughs.
Eventually, Jesper gets over the fact that he's in the apartment of two vigilantes he's worked with for a while - alright, two vigilantes he's admired forever - and accepts the mug of tea the Wraith hands him.
"What's the job?" he asks.
They end up sitting around the tiny kitchen table. It's almost cosy, to his surprise. Neither the Wraith or Dirtyhands feel like people who should be cosy. He supposes that they are just people under their masks, just like he is.
Well. The Wraith certainly is. The jury's still out on Dirtyhands.
"Jan Van Eck has a painting I want," Dirtyhands says. "It's a DeKappel, called The Fold."
"Alright," Jesper says. "Why did Van Eck want it?"
Jesper can't see his face, but he'd bet anything that Dirtyhand's smile is terrifying.
"Because it's very expensive," Dirtyhands says, "and I'm not a fan of where Van Eck's money has been coming from, of late. If I can separate him from something he paid a lot for, I will."
"Where has Van Eck's money been coming from?"
Jesper's not going to kid himself. He deals with the low level criminal stuff. He stops muggers and creeps and murderers. He doesn't deal with anything higher than that. He'd thought all the vigilantes were the same. Not Dirtyhands, apparently. Not the Wraith. It's not a huge surprise. If it was going to be anyone, it was going to be them.
The Wraith sets her mug down with a click. "Jurda Parem," she says.
Jesper remembers the alleyway full of dazed drug addicts and shudders.
"It kills," the Wraith says. "We won't have it in our city."
"Alright," Jesper says. He gets the feeling that this is only the first step of the plan, but he's not going to push. He's not that stupid. Dirtyhands and the Wraith have decided to trust him with this much. He won't make them reveal anything more. "I'm in."
"Thank you," says the Wraith.
Dirtyhands doesn't even acknowledge Jesper's declaration, as if it had been foregone. Perhaps, to him, it had been. He creeps Jesper out a little bit, if Jesper's being honest.
"The plan is this," Dirtyhands says. "We need someone to sneak in and take out the guards, and someone to pick the lock of the safe the painting is held in and get the painting out. It's held on a suspension system, weighted. Any change in weight or position of the painting will cause an alarm to go off."
Jesper nods, slowly. He might be studying chemical engineering, but he took the same introductory courses as all the other engineers. That protection system is a true feat of engineering. He can't see a way around it. But… "Neither of those sound like roles for Sharpshooter."
Dirtyhands gives him a single sharp nod. "We also need a distraction."
"A distraction is a Sharpshooter specialty," Jesper crows. "I can do that!"
"The alarm will go off," Dirtyhands tells him. "It will go off when I want it to. And when you hear it go off, I want you to shoot out every window in the place that you can possibly reach."
Jesper grins. It's a great diversion. There will be shattering glass everywhere, muddying the floor, muddying the soundscape, muddying the escape.
"How will you get out?" he asks.
The Wraith looks at Dirtyhands and smiles. "Not through the windows."
Jesper nods, slowly. "When?"
"Tomorrow night," Dirtyhands says. "In the dark, they won't be able to tell who's attacking. You won't get any bad press as Sharpshooter, if it goes well."
Jesper hadn't even thought of that. "Works for me," he says.
"We meet at the Crow Club at 10pm," Dirtyhands confirms. "We'll go over it again quickly then."
Dirtyhands levers himself to his feet with his cane. The Wraith stands too, collecting Jesper's mug and taking it to the kitchen. Jesper takes that as his cue, walking with Dirtyhands to the concealed entrance.
"Does the guy who owns the Crow Club know it's being used as the base for vigilante activity?" Jesper asks, suddenly struck by the realisation that it is Dirtyhands' favourite place to meet. "Kaz Brekker, or whoever?"
Dirtyhands snorts, the least dignified sound he's ever made in Jesper's presence. It's startling, after only having seen him as cold and calculated. "Kaz Brekker is a fool," Dirtyhands says. "Will you be able to get home from here?"
"Uhhh," Jesper says. He absolutely will not be able to. "Sure."
He makes it down the stairs and into the underground passageway before he's lost, which is an achievement. He finds an exit to the passageway, but he's certain it's not the one he followed the Wraith in through.
Still, he's out in the open air. He tilts his head up, taking in a lungful of air. It's not clean, exactly, but it is the familiar air of Ketterdam, and not the dank air of the underground. "Why am I so bad at directions," he grumbles.
There's a soft laugh from behind him. He whips around.
It's the Wraith.
"When did you get here?" he asks, trying to calm his panicking heartbeat. "How do you do that?"
"I'm the Wraith," she says. "Would you like me to show you the way home?"
"Please," Jesper says, heartfelt. "That would be amazing."
It's only a five minute walk. He feels scammed.
"I'll see you on Thursday," the Wraith says. "At the Crow Club."
"At the Crow Club," Jesper confirms. "I'll be there."
He gets to the Crow Club five minutes early, which is an achievement and he's proud of it. He barely has to look to find the Wraith and Dirtyhands, either; they're brooding obviously in a booth near the bar.
He slips in to join then, only a little self-conscious of his mask.
"Sharpshooter," the Wraith greets. Dirtyhands just gives him a single nod.
They sit there, silent, for a minute, before going over the plan again, whispers hidden beneath the throbbing bass music.
Then, Dirtyhands stands. "Are we all ready?"
"Yep," Jesper says, trying to sound like he's not about to vibrate out of his skin any moment now. "Ready to go!"
"Yes," the Wraith says.
"We leave one by one," Dirtyhands reminds them, and then he's gone, stalking across the club, sticking close to the walls, his cane somehow not disturbing any of the drunken dancers.
"He's pretty cool," Jesper says. "Do you like working with him?"
"Of course," the Wraith says, sounding almost surprised. "He's my partner."
Jesper looks down at the table, tapping a tattoo against the hilt of one of his guns. "You keep saying that," he mutters. "What do you mean?"
There's no response.
When he looks up, the Wraith is gone. There's nothing to show that she was even there - even the bench where she was resting is cool.
Jesper shudders. "Creepy," he says, and then waits a few minutes before heading out himself, strolling casually around for a bit before slipping out one of the staff exists Dirtyhands had assured him would be there.
The walk to the Van Eck mansion is lonely but not silent. Every so often, Jesper goes past another club, and the roar of the music and the people put another jump into his step. He knows how he looks as he goes - dangerous, a vigilante in fitted leather and two guns, pearl hilts shining, belted to his waist. He likes it.
He's thinking about it so much that he almost overshoots the Van Eck mansion, and has to make a sharp right into the building opposite it. It's a pub, which Van Eck must hate, but Jesper knows it's good for his purposes tonight. He orders a beer, wincing at the cost, and is very glad that the room full of people is too drunk to notice that he's in vigilante get-up. It's eleven at night, by now, and people are too aware that the pub closes in two hours.
At eleven thirty, Jesper moves himself to a balcony seat.
He hates waiting. He's so bad at it. He passes the time by flirting with anyone who walks past, but none of them stay long enough to become a true distraction.
He watches the clock tick past. Surely Dirtyhands and the Wraith are inside by now.
At midnight, Jesper sighs and uses the noise of the pub to hide the scuffling sounds that result from him trying to pull himself up onto the roof. Once up there, he can abandon pretence. He settles into a marksman's wait, a pistol loose in each hand, eyes focused on his target.
He sees a blur, somewhere around half past midnight. It's the Wraith, he realises after a few minutes, but she might as well be the movement of the shadows of trees. It's only because he's looking for her dark, swift form that he notices.
The patrol of guards slowly trickles to none. No alarm has been raised, not yet. Jesper grins, savagely. The Wraith is good. The Wraith is really good.
The Wraith vanishes back into the mansion. All Jesper has to do from here is wait. He's hidden in the darkness, which means he can see the Van Eck mansion clearly because it is lit internally.
Jesper blinks awake to the blaring of alarms.
"Shit!" he says, tightening his grip around his pistols. It's a small miracle that he hadn't dropped them when he dozed off.
Jesper starts shooting, the adrenaline suddenly coursing through his veins enough to wake him fully.
Windows start shattering. He starts with one on the left, then one on the right, and then back and forth, a starburst pattern he's kind of proud of.
After a few reloads, he gets bored, and changes the pattern up. By this point, more than half of the windows he can see have holes through them, and some are completely shattered in their frames.
He's kind of impressed, actually. Not bad for having just woken up.
Jesper keeps shooting until all the windows on the front are blown out. Some of them took a few shots before they collapsed out of their frames. The entire front of the mansion is a hazard, now.
Jesper's pretty good at being a distraction, if he may say so himself.
He admires his work. It's going to take so long to clean up. There'll be glass everywhere.
He's feeling pretty proud of himself until Jan Van Eck, clearly given courage by the fact that the rain of bullets and glass has finally ceased, runs out of the mansion's front doors. He's wearing dress shoes and a bathrobe. Jesper snorts.
Jan Van Eck points at the pub. "He must be there! Get him!"
Ah.
Yep.
That's the step of the plan Jesper had forgotten: get the fuck away.
He scrabbles to holster his precious pistols, then he climbs the short peak of the roof. There must be a moment where his silhouette can be seen as he crests the roof, as there's a shout from down on the street, and then Jesper lets go and slides down the slope.
The leather of his pants prevents him from any burn, and it is, overall, a pretty fast way of getting down. What's not fun is how he's accelerated towards the street on the opposite side of the pub.
At the last second, he grabs the gutter. His hands burn as his body swings around and crashes through the window below him.
It's somewhere near three in the morning - the pub is completely deserted. Jesper slinks around, as close to the ground as he can get. He can hear the champing of the metal of the Stadwatch as they pull up to the pub. When they can't find him on the street, they'll figure he went into the pub.
He just hopes Dirtyhands was right about the passageway.
He descends one set of stairs, then another, then ducks behind the counter and into the cellar, then pulls open a trapdoor, and…
Well. There's no guarantee that it's a way out, but it sure is something, right where Dirtyhands said.
Jesper stops thinking and jumps down.
He lands with a bit of a twinge in his ankle, which isn't ideal, but he can still walk on it, so he takes off running, the slapping of his feet incredibly loud in the tunnel. The longer it goes on for, the more hopeful he gets.
He runs into the wall at one point, and has to feel along to realise it takes a sharp turn left, which is the direction of the canal, if he has any idea where he is.
Okay, that works.
He follows it, moving slower now. There's no sign that the Stadwatch have worked out where he went.
The end of the tunnel is, it seems, a manhole cover. Jesper shoves it aside with all of his strength, and finds himself standing in the alleyway behind the Crow Club. He blinks.
What.
Well, that's as good an alibi as any. He removes his mask, tucks it into his jacket, fluffs his hair, and slips into the Crow Club through the back entrance. There's an enforcer by it, but he just nods. "Brekker said to expect you."
Jesper blinks. "Brekker?"
The enforcer just nods. "He's manning the bar tonight."
Jesper thanks him and heads to the bar.
He immediately knows which of the bartenders is Brekker. He's wearing a suit, far more mercher-like than any of the other staff. He's got a garish ruby-red pin in his tie, and he keeps spilling customers' drinks.
"Oops!" he says, giggling, and then he turns to face Jesper. "Oh, a new face!" he calls, as if he hadn't told his bouncers to let Jesper in. "I've heard so much about you, Fahey!"
Ah. Dirtyhands at work again.
"I heard there was some trouble at the pub I own across the town - did you happen to hear anything about that? The runner they sent to me seemed quite distressed, poor thing!"
Jesper shakes his head. Brekker owns both establishments? That makes the pathway between them more understandable. Dirtyhands probably bribed or blackmailed him into it. "I'm afraid I haven't been anywhere other than the Slats at all tonight," he lies, smoothly. "I believe I may have friends here looking for me?"
"Ah, yes," Brekker says, pouring Jesper a drink, unasked for. Somehow, he manages to pour this one right, all of the golden liquid landing in the shot glass. A ring flashes on his pale hands and he slips the bottle away. It's silver, on his ring finger, Jesper notes as Brekker hands him the shot. He's married?
Jesper tips it back. It's the same as the one the Wraith gave him the first time he met her at the Crow Club. A strange coincidence, or maybe it's the drink that he gives to all of Dirtyhands' friends.
"I'll take you to your friends, Fahey," Brekker says. He's still smiling. It even reaches his eyes. There's still something unsettling about it. Jesper can't quite lay a finger on it.
Jesper blinks, and when he looks again, there's nothing unsettling at all about Brekker's open, smiling face. Jesper almost feels sorry for the man, being so far under Dirtyhand's fist. "Thanks," he says, instead of any of that.
He follows Brekker out from behind the bar, then up a long staircase. Brekker has a slight limp, almost unnoticeable. It feels vaguely familiar.
There's an office at the top of the staircase, tucked away in a corner, suspended above the seating area between two dance floors. Jesper whistles appreciatively.
Brekker grabs a cane from where it rests beside the office door, and swings the door open, gesturing Jesper in.
Jesper steps in. His jaw drops before his eyes can even adjust to the brighter lights of the room in contrast to the darkness of the club.
The DeKappel is huge. It takes up one full wall, roughly five metres in length, two or three high. It's still in its frame.
The Wraith, settled in a chair in the corner, looks up at Jesper's gasp.
"How did you even get it in here?" Jesper asks. "How did it fit through the door? How on Earth did you get it out of the Van Eck mansion?"
"That's for me to know and you to wonder," says Dirtyhand's gravel voice from behind him.
Jesper spins around.
Brekker smirks, crow-headed cane spinning and tapping in his hands. "That was fun," he says, in Dirtyhands' voice.
The Wraith hands him his mask. Brekker fits it on, and suddenly he is Dirtyhands, posture shifting slightly, resting a bit more on his cane, a little bit more sharp and alert. A lot more dangerous.
"What the fuck," Jesper says.
"I'm a good actor," Dirtyhands growls. Jesper can't stop looking at how pale his hands are. They're the one difference between this Dirtyhands and the one Jesper has been working with - Dirtyhands is always, always gloved.
As he's thinking it, Dirtyhands pulls a pair of gloves out of his waistcoat and slips them on, then removes the mask.
"You own the Crow Club," Jesper says, slowly.
"And the pub across from the Van Eck mansion," Dirtyhands says. "Nothing is a coincidence, Jesper."
"I realise that now," Jesper says. He's a little mad he didn't see it earlier. He also knows that this is a massive statement of trust.
"This," Dirtyhands says, gesturing to the painting, "and the damage to the Van Eck property, are just the beginning. Are you ready for the next steps? I will not suffer having Jurda Parem in Ketterdam for any longer than I have to."
"Ready to roll," Jesper says, grinning.
Jesper whistles as he walks to uni the next morning. He's got an 8AM class, and he hasn't slept yet, but he's feeling great. He downs another mouthful of his hot drink - he's not even sure what it is, but the vender at the wafflehouse had assured him it would wake him up - and tries not to wince at how bitter it is. He should have added more sugar.
He promptly spits out his mouthful as he goes past a news stand.
There, on the front page, it reads:
UNKNOWN CRIMINALS STEAL VAN EKK DEKAPPEL, REPLACE WITH CRUDE DRAWING.
The associated picture is blurred out, but very clearly a rough painting of a middle finger being held up to the viewer. It takes up the full wall of the office, presumably exactly the same size as the DeKappel.
Jesper snorts. He has no idea how the two of them managed it.