But Garlande just shook her head. “Ask Malcolm, if you’re still talking to him. Or Ari if you can stand it.” She turned her back and ran off before Cordelia could shake out an explanation.
Suddenly apprehensive, she kept on down the corridor until she came to Malcolm’s office. The door was clogged with a crowd, all shouting and hissing and waving their hands.
“What are we supposed to do instead?” demanded the new tit singer—Mal’d brought on a contentious contralto after he sacked Thea. “What kind of act are you gonna slip in? We haven’t got anything.”
“Do you run this show?” Malcolm thundered, from the depths of his burrow. “No! So I’ll thank you to swallow your tongue. Choke on it if you like. Liesl!”
The conductor, at the edge of the mob, started and dove in. Whatever Malcolm had to say to her got lost in the hubbub.
One of the chorus dancers spotted Cordelia and went white. He elbowed his friend, who gaped, then turned to whisper into the ear of the mime. Within seconds, the whole lot of her cast mates had gone quiet and blanched as a bunch of boiled potatoes.
“What’s got all of you so pinched?” she asked, holding her purse to her chest. Something was dead wrong here. Bad wrong.
“Delia?” Malcolm’s voice sounded rough in the sudden silence, and there was a stuffy, nasal undertone that made her wonder if he’d been crying. “Get in here. The rest of you, clear off. If you don’t hear from me in half an hour … well, you’ll hear from me in half an hour. For now, keep on like we’re doing the show.”
“Aren’t we?” she asked, pushing through the rest of the cast as they left.
“Come in,” said Malcolm. “Shut the door.”
Ari was in Malcolm’s office, and Liesl, taking up the love seat and the extra chair, respectively. Cordelia reached for the stool under the coat hooks, the one Tory usually used. Malcolm looked pained. Ari coughed and made a little gesture with his hand, outside of Malcolm’s view. Cordelia left the stool and stood awkwardly in front of Malcolm’s desk. She felt like she was about to have her knuckles slapped by a school teacher.
“What’s wrong?” she snapped. “You all look like somebody died.”
Aristide closed his eyes and mouthed something that looked like a short prayer. Liesl ran her teeth over her lower lip. Malcolm’s face was indescribable.
Cordelia clutched her purse straps. “Who is it?” Then, remembering the reaction when she reached for Tory’s stool, she took a sharp breath and choked on it. “Mother and sons. He’s not—” She staggered and reached out. Liesl was beside her, suddenly, with a hand under her outflung arm. The conductor guided her to the love seat and settled her next to Ari.
“No,” said Liesl, “no, he’s not. Damnation, your hands are cold. Malcolm, you might have told her to sit down first.”
But Malcolm had the heels of his palms against his eyes, and didn’t apologize.
“He’s not dead,” said Aristide, staring at Malcolm. “But he’s very badly injured, and he hasn’t woken up. They aren’t sure that he will.”
“Where is he? What happened?”
“His performance last night was positively stinging,” said Ari. “You missed it—costume change, I think—but he’d never done better.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well he rubbed a couple cats the wrong way, didn’t he?” Malcolm let his fists fall to the top of his desk, rattling pens and empty glasses. “And they scratched.”
“What do you mean? What did he say?”
“He destroyed Acherby.” Malcolm laid a square of rolling paper out and added a pinch of tobacco. He tried, twice, to twist it up, then slashed it away with the flat of his hand. “Took him apart and dangled his bits up like a carnival sideshow. It was genius. Only, some of the punters got pinned about it and sang to the blackboots. Near as I can put together, he got about halfway home before they caught up with him. The ACPD picked him up around four a.m. and got him to Seagate Hospital, but by then he’d been lying in the gutter a couple hours.”
“Holy stones,” said Cordelia, reaching blindly with a shaking hand. “Has anybody got a straight?”
Aristide produced his case and offered it around. Malcolm accepted, gratefully. Liesl waved him away. When Cordelia put one of his cigarettes between her lips, Ari handed her a smudged book of matches with a few sticks missing. She lit up with shaking hands and took a deep, smoky breath. Exhaling, she asked, “So. Are you canceling?”
“That’s what we’re trying to decide.” Liesl’s expressive hands fidgeted on her knees. “The whole cast is having fits.”
“We’ve had fits before,” said Cordelia. “Mal, I know you ain’t gonna take that for an excuse.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But it ain’t just that. Without Tory…” He paused for a steadying drag on Ari’s gold-stamped straight. “Without Tory, there’s some gaps in the show that need filling. About fifteen minutes, all told. Three acts.”
“Drag out some old material,” said Aristide. “Two seasons old. No one will remember it.”
“Damnation, Makricosta, I know. You’ve said it twice. But—”
“But nothing,” said Ari, biting the “t” so sharply Cordelia could hear his teeth click. “Your friend’s in hospital. You’re shattered, I understand. But plague it all, Malcolm Sailer—” Malcolm winced, and Cordelia wondered whether it was because the northern curse called Tory to mind, or because Ari had used his full name. “—that stage will not stay empty tonight. If it does, they’ve won.”
“I didn’t realize you cared so much about politics,” said Malcolm, tapping a column of ash right onto the floor.
“Malcolm, this is your livelihood. At least pretend you understand the consequences of your actions.” Ari leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “If you cancel tonight’s show, you have given them everything. If you put on any act the Ospies don’t like, they’ll know they can attack your stagefolk on the street and close you down.”
“Well I can’t exactly run a show with my cast in hospital, can I?” Malcolm’s nicotine-stained snarl put Cordelia in mind of the yellow fangs of a cornered street dog. “Can’t imagine you’d be too thrilled to end up at the wrong end of a cosh, yourself.”
“No,” said Aristide. “But I’d like it far less if I knew it worked. Put on the show, Malcolm.”
Liesl nodded. “He’s right, Mr. Sailer. You’ve got to.”
Malcolm didn’t look at either of them. He stared straight at Cordelia. She stared back, into the familiar darkness rimmed with red. The skin under his eyes was soft and purple with exhaustion. She’d kissed him there, in the hollows above his cheekbones. She remembered the faint brush of his eyelashes against her nose.
Looking in his face now was like catching her reflection in a dark shop window. For a moment, she saw a stranger. Then, she saw her own aching need to be alone, to grieve. But when she spoke, despite his desperate eyes, all she said was, “Do it.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
There were riots, in the week after Taormino’s arrest. Not big ones, but enough to get the ACPD hopping in the fourth precinct. Students and theatricals—volatile types—and farther south, in Eel Town, all the Amberlinians who’d operated in the ample shadows of the old administration.
Cyril was insulated from most of it, mewed in an Ospie safe house in a northern suburb of the city, on Van der Joost’s orders. He couldn’t tell if they honestly wanted him out of harm’s way, or if they were just suspicious and keeping a close eye on him. He hoped it was the former. That meant he was valuable, and his work had done them good. And good work meant new IDs and permits and a ticket out, for him and for Ari: the point of the whole endeavor.
The flat’s small windows overlooked a narrow alley. Summer weather made it stuffy, so Cyril went around mostly in a cotton undershirt with his braces dangling, smoking perpetual cigarettes. Nita, the girl who brought his papers and correspondence, had also grudgingly delivered a carton of cheap straights. Offic
ially, the Ospies disapproved of Gedda’s booming tobacco trade because the majority of the leaves were imported. But some, mostly new temple Hearther types like Nita, objected on moral grounds—that it was a foreign, decadent habit.
Cyril put Nita at twenty or twenty-one years old, newly down from university. He hated her, but hid it with professional skill. During today’s visit, she had dropped off a pile of dispatches from his nascent network of traitorous police. It felt good to have informants, especially trapped here until the foxes trailing him could be dealt with. He was just finishing up his reading when the intercom from the front door buzzed. He tapped the button, dropping a fine spray of cigarette ash across the grille. “Yes?”
“A woman here to see you, sir.” The doorman was one of Van der Joost’s people. “Mr. Satzen brought her by.”
Cordelia. It had to be. And something must be wrong. The note in the bouquet of roses had said “for emergencies.” Inside was the exchange for Rudolf Satzen, an Ospie courier. He hadn’t meant for Rudy to bring her here, just to act as a messenger. But Cordelia probably always got what she wanted, in the end. “Send her up.”
He heard the lift mechanism wheeze behind the walls, and within a minute, footsteps in the corridor. He waited for her to knock, but instead, the door handle rattled. It was locked, but she kept at it. Then she knocked, like she was trying to hammer through. He ground his cigarette butt into the ashtray, stretched his braces back over his shoulders, and went to let her in.
Through the peephole, he caught her in profile, her hand to her mouth. When he turned the lock, her head snapped around and she nailed him with a glare straight through the glass. Suddenly, he worried he would need the help of the heavy across the hall, the bruiser set to guard him from anyone who made it this far with murder on their mind.
When he opened the door, she pushed past him wordlessly, but stopped just a few steps past the threshold.
“Have a seat,” he said. “Can I get you a drink? No gin, but there’s rye, and I think a bottle of sherry.”
“No.” She didn’t turn to face him.
“What’s wrong? Do you need help?”
“Not from you.” The line of her shoulders was tight and shaking. “That’s what I came to say.”
Damnation. “What can I do to change your mind?”
She whirled on him, and he realized she’d been crying. “I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes were sunken and crazed with red veins. She looked like she hadn’t slept in three days. “Can you raise the dead?”
A jolt of fear lanced through him. “Who?”
“Nobody you know.” Disgust twisted her mouth. “You thought it was Ari, didn’t you?”
He sat at his desk, heavily, unwilling to admit his relief.
“Stones, Cyril,” she said. “How do you keep this up?”
“How? I would think you of all people would understand. I keep it up because I do what’s necessary.”
“You’re nothing like me.”
“Whoring? Selling tar? You’ve done ugly things to survive.”
Her snort was eloquently derisive. “You ain’t surviving. Your heart’s beating, sure, but there’s nothing left inside it. Least I been honest about my ugliness. All these lies, they’re hollowing you out.”
“What lies?” He flung his hands up. “You know exactly who I am, what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t say you lied to me.” A curious softness came into her eyes, unbearably like pity. “Whatever they said to you, whatever they told you they’d do … There were other ways, Cyril.”
“Like what? Central couldn’t keep me safe in Tatié. You think they could keep me safe in a coup?”
“Ari would have hidden you in a second, sent you out of the country. He still would, if you asked him.”
“I don’t think so.” Anyway, he wouldn’t have to.
“Why not? Mother’s tits, Cyril, he loves you like pigs in slop.”
“Because he’s not an idiot. And because I’d never ask him to.”
“What, you’re too proud?” The pity in her eyes dissolved. “You’ve always gotta be the one pulling other people off the tracks, is that it? Well, Cyril DePaul, I can get my own ass out from under the train. So go help somebody who really needs you.”
She slammed the door so hard, his stack of dispatches jumped and began to slide off the desk. The papers went one at a time at first, then built to a cascade. He let them fall and spread in a white fan across the floor.
* * *
He was still reeling from Cordelia’s refusal when he got the call.
“Hebrides is dead,” said Van der Joost. No preamble.
Cyril pressed the receiver to his cheek. “What? How?”
“Heart attack.”
He’d envisioned assassination. Suicide. The truth caught him off guard. “Really?” But of course. Hebrides’s heart had always been tricky. Rich living in the last decade had made it worse, and impeachment wouldn’t have done him any favors. “What now?”
“Some arrests. The chain of succession, the first three links: Almstedt, Scott, Demotchka. Leave Koryon—he’s one of ours. And bring in Culpepper so we can get those agents off your scent.”
He said it casually, but Cyril was under no illusions. This was a test he couldn’t afford to fail. But he had to ask: “On what charge?”
Van der Joost’s pause was nearly imperceptible, but it spoke volumes of mistrust. “You have Müller in your hand. Do you need one?” He ended the call without waiting for an answer.
For a long while after, Cyril brooded over the last of a cheap bottle of rye, thinking about what Cordelia had said.
Aristide was smart and capable and sometimes—often—ruthless. Left to his own devices, could he have gotten himself out of this mess? Or would he have been overconfident, and left it too late? Was Cyril really doing good, or just showing off?
Maybe he should have said something to Aristide after all, about his bargain with Van der Joost. He almost had, in the Stevedore. But it wasn’t a surety, and Aristide would have torn him up and down for agreeing to the terms. But what terms would Aristide settle for? Only his own. And those might not get him out of Gedda safely.
Unless Cyril could convince him. Or bribe him. Or maybe, like Cordelia said, even just ask.
He picked up the telephone receiver. Pinching it between his shoulder and cheek, he used his free hand to turn the dial. He held his whiskey in the other, ready to douse any second thoughts.
“Sola’s Oyster Bar.” The woman on the other end of the line had a smoky, inviting voice. “What can I do for you tonight?”
“Reservation for two. Say, one o’clock? Have you got a private dining room open then?” They would let him out of the building, if he said it was for work. Maybe they’d send Rudy with him. That wouldn’t be a problem.
There was a quick pause as the maitre d’ checked her list. “I do. Whose name shall I put down?”
He gave her one. Not his own, obviously. “And if you don’t mind, will you ring my assistant with a reminder an hour or so before?”
“Absolutely. What exchange shall I use?”
He gave her the line for Culpepper’s office, and hung up.
* * *
When Memmediv entered the room, the strains of a crooner and big band came with him from the public bar. He paused for a beat on the threshold, eyeing Cyril warily.
“Close the door, please,” Cyril said.
Memmediv did, with careful movements. “You are not Karl Haven.”
“No one is, not even Van der Joost. He’s a fiction. And he was useful: Here you are.”
“Well played, Mr. DePaul.” Memmediv inclined his head. “Very well played.”
It was that dark, luscious dialect that should have set Cyril’s hackles up from the beginning. Memmediv wasn’t a disillusioned Tatien expatriate; he was furious. A state-loyal fanatic who’d kept his hatred of Amberlough so well hidden Culpepper had brought him right into the warmest part of the Foxhole.
&nbs
p; Years in the profession had given Cyril a keen sense of irony—espionage could be as good as tragic dramas. He hadn’t acted on facts, setting up this meeting, but on the sense that Memmediv as the Ospies’ mole was so bitterly perfect it had to be true. And he’d come running at the sound of Van der Joost’s work name. So that proved something.
“Have a seat,” said Cyril, gesturing to the empty chair across from him. There was no food on the table, but he’d ordered a bottle of dry white wine. Two glasses waited, empty. Cyril lifted the bottle. Memmediv let him pour, but didn’t pick up the glass when it was full.
They stared at each other. Cyril was keenly aware of the balance of power. Scant months ago, he’d outranked Memmediv by several leagues. After all, Cyril was—or had been—one of Culpepper’s best agents, and a division head, while Memmediv was just her secretary. But Memmediv had been spying for the unionists since … well, Cyril didn’t really know. And he’d blown Cyril’s cover as coolly as Cyril would have broken his. It was Memmediv’s fault Cyril was here, now, and needed a favor.
Turning his wineglass, Cyril breathed in the green, mineral nose, and sipped. Only then did he say to Memmediv, “How long?”
The other man blinked slowly, shuttering a cold, blank gaze.
“The Ospies, Vasily. How long?”
Memmediv’s lips pulled tight across his teeth. “Two years, give or take some weeks.”
Cyril had been in Tatié, when Memmediv turned. Not that he would’ve known, to stop it. “And Ada still doesn’t suspect anything?”
“Of me?” Memmediv’s crooked eyebrow telegraphed insult. “Of course not. You … have not been so careful, Cyrilak. The whole city knows whose side you’re on. You used to be better than this.”
Cyril bristled at the Tatien diminutive, and more, at the truth of Memmediv’s insult. But he tamped down his irritation and continued. “You still have access to her papers?”
“Not all,” he said, drawing his fingers in tantalizing arcs around the base of his wineglass. “Not officially.”
“Semantics,” said Cyril, dismissive.
The corner of Memmediv’s mouth curled up slowly, like burning paper. He lifted his wine and drank without comment.
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