So he visited a lawyer in the southwest quarter, a discreet, squirrel-faced woman who specialized in inheritance law. Aristide had never sent so much as a postcard home after leaving Currin. But he’d been an only child—there was no one else to take the farm after his father died. Which he had done, according to the records, almost five years ago. The waiting period was nearly run out, but not quite; the state of Farbourgh hadn’t claimed the farm as abandoned property. It still belonged to Aristide. Or, more accurately, to Erikh Prosser.
Along with the deed, the lawyer procured a copy of Aristide’s birth certificate. After all, he couldn’t identify himself as the beneficiary of his father’s will under his stage name. The lawyer labored under the misapprehension that Aristide was acting as a factotum for an ill and absent friend. He did not disabuse her.
At home, he buried the papers under a pile of books on his bedside table and traded his town clothes for a jersey robe and slippers. Shoulders hunched around his ears, he went to pour himself a very stiff drink indeed. Though he was not in a habit of drunkenness, this was a special occasion.
He was happily on his way to forgetting who he really was when Ilse knocked on the parlor door and announced Finn had arrived. “Show him in,” said Aristide, rising unsteadily to pour another glass of brandy. His limbs moved half a beat more slowly than his brain. Liquor splashed across the bar.
“Ari?”
“Finn, darling. Do come in.” The brightness of his own voice pained him.
“I’ve got a message from Cross.” Even Finn’s frown managed to be endearing. He was like some kind of spaniel puppy, all liquid eyes and sweetness.
“I’m sure it’s nothing good.” Probably it would be the last. She wouldn’t stick around the Foxhole after this. “B-B-Brandy?”
“Ari, are you drunk?”
He tried to stopper the decanter and missed by half an inch. Cork squeaked against crystal. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“You’re slurring a bit.” Finn took one of the glasses from the bar and sipped. “This is too good to waste on you in your state. Come on. Let’s get you to bed.”
“Oh, please,” said Aristide, desperate for distraction. “Let’s.”
* * *
Finn was briskly nursemaidish, despite Aristide’s amorous attentions. As the consequences of several large brandies in quick succession made themselves apparent, those attentions lapsed into idle fingers and occasional kisses. Aristide’s eyelids felt heavy. The room was very warm.
“Would you like to see Cross’s dispatch?” asked Finn.
“Lady’s sake, no.” Aristide put his hand across his eyes. “Not until I’m sober. I look abysmal when I weep.”
“I can go, if you want to sleep it off.”
He curled his fist around the hem of Finn’s waistcoat. “No. Stay. I want you to stay.”
Finn sighed. “Well, would you like me to read to you?” He shifted, reaching for the pile of books on the bedside table.
“Oh,” said Aristide, remembering what was beneath them. “No, no please—”
But it was too late. “Who’s Erikh Prosser?” Finn’s pronunciation of the tricky given name was flawless: the high “i” at the front of the mouth, with the pharyngeal consonant at the finish. Most people, even northerners, would have gone for plain “Eric.”
“Client of mine,” Aristide extemporized. “Owns some land up north where I have … interests.”
“Good luck to him, hanging on to it.”
“What do you mean?” Aristide peeled his eyes open and looked up at Finn, who was scanning the deed to a rocky scrap of meadow in the Currin Pass.
“Erikh’s a Chuli name. You think the Ospies are going to let the Chuli hold onto any of their assets? Won’t even let them stay in Gedda, most like. Push them across the border to Enselem, who don’t want them either.”
“Well, nobody’s exactly t-t … treated them with kindness,” said Aristide. Weighted with brandy, his tongue bungled the false stutter. “The Chuli. Don’t see why they ought to expect any different now.”
“I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you?”
“Pardon?” He rolled heavily onto his back. Finn had set aside the paperwork and was watching him.
“I clocked you long ago.” Finn drew his fingers through Aristide’s loose curls. “You’re an half-caste, aren’t you?”
“Mmm.” It wasn’t meant as an answer—he didn’t want to talk about it. But Finn went on.
“You can pass for Hyrosian, under your stage name. But your skin’s a little too tawny, and you’ve got a Chuli nose.” He traced the feature of interest with a fingertip. “And sometimes those northern curses slip out. When you’re upset. Or…” He turned pink. “Other times.”
Aristide gritted his teeth, furious to have years of reinvention stripped away. Suddenly, his verbal affectations—the conscious stutter and retroflex consonants, the aspirated glides—seemed glaring: clear markers of the work he’d put into eliding his native burr.
When he put on his performer’s smile, it felt like baring his teeth. “Darling.” He reached up and patted Finn’s cheek. “You are absolutely wasted in the bursar.”
Finn turned his head and kissed Aristide’s knuckles. “I always did toy with the idea of applying for a transfer. Can I use you for a reference?”
“Feel free,” said Aristide, sourly. “Though I doubt it’ll do you any good.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” Finn wrapped his arms around Aristide’s shoulders and didn’t seem to notice how stiff they’d gone. “When they sack me, I’ll come work for you.”
* * *
Finn left a manila envelope on the bedside table, overtop the property deeds. When his head stopped spinning, Aristide slit the seal and pulled out a copy of Cross’s latest expense report. Applying the key got him three terse lines.
reps gone tmrw. blown but im out. dont ask favors.
He crumpled the paper and climbed out of bed holding it in his fist. The grate in the bedroom was cold, and in the parlor. He stalked to the kitchen, where Ilse was putting together a plate of smoked salmon and sliced pears—a late lunch before Aristide went down to the Bee.
“Peckish?” she asked, winking.
“Peevish,” he corrected. “I need to use the range.”
She stepped aside. He turned on the gas and let it hiss for a moment, then lit the burner. Cross’s code withered into flame-edged, blackened curls. Aristide let the scraps fall onto the stovetop.
“Oh, that’s all right.” Ilse side-eyed him over her cutting board. “I need to clean it anyway.”
“Sorry.” Cowed, he swept the ashes into his cupped palm and dropped them in the wastebasket.
She handed him his plate. “Go on. Get out before you muck the whole place up.”
As he ate, he turned Cross’s message over in his mind. This piece of news—reps gone tmrw—meant it was time for him to leave as well. Tonight would be his last night at the Bee. It was, perhaps, foolish to take to the boards with so much at stake. But if he was going to say goodbye to Amberlough, he was going to do it right.
He made a vital telephone call, to one of the Clarion’s distributors, and passed on a code word. Then, with lunch dispatched, he dressed and went to catch the Temple line. He wasn’t wild about the prospect of his commute. Over the last month, he’d been squeezed between blackboots on the trolleys one too many times, suffering snide comments and derision and, on one memorable occasion, an Ospie pissing on his shoe.
Temple Street was pasted from Baldwin to the bay with ugly propaganda posters. A few of the storefronts had gray-and-white bunting over the doors, or the quartered circle within a circle, white on a field of slate. Several of these had suffered vandalism. One was burnt black, the windows burst into sparkling shards across the footpath.
Repairs on the Bumble Bee had the marquee looking even sharper than before. Aristide didn’t know what Malcolm had paid, or if he could afford it, but suspected that the answers were “too much,
” and “no.”
He went through the front of the house. Malcolm didn’t like them to, but Aristide had never cared. When the black-and-gold weight of the doors swung shut behind him, he stood for a moment in the dark foyer, breathing stale smoke and the scent of mingled perfumes—the smell of the audience. His audience.
In the theatre proper, he tipped his boater to Ytzak behind the bar. Then he retreated to his dressing room to prep and warm up.
Sitting at the mirror, haloed by a half-circle of brilliant lights, Aristide stared at his reflection. His mother’s Chuli nose. His father’s jaw. He looked harder, putting his face closer to the glass. A loose curl, falling past his chin. Plum lipstick over a practiced, gap-toothed smile. Faint laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, earned rather than inherited.
Finn had stripped away every artifice of Aristide’s constructed self, tearing through the ribbon and tissue like a child opening his Solstice presents. It left Aristide raw and furious. Cyril had always treated the package with more deference—never even shaken it. Perhaps because he already knew what lay inside, didn’t care, and respected—preferred?—the character Aristide chose to present.
This man in the mirror was the man Aristide wanted to be. A man he’d made. A man who would be gone tomorrow, and not to some breezy foreign clime with red sand beaches.
He lifted an ivory comb from the cluttered makeup table and swept his hair down over one shoulder. Glossy curls twined between the teeth, dark as chestnut cases. Avocado oil every night, the careful teasing out of knots … He worked hard to keep it soft. And still, no gray. As he wound each pin curl and fixed it into place, he drew the coils through his fingers and tried to fix the sensation in his memory. It had taken years to grow it out. If it got this long again, he doubted it would be as thick and dark and free of silver.
Once his stocking cap was fixed in place, he opened a tube of white grease paint and slicked it over the contours of his face. Then powder, to set it. Talcum rose in ghostly tendrils from the pouf. Thin, black eyebrows drawn over the angles of his own. Rouge, high on his cheekbones. Red paint in a perfect bow to accentuate thin lips—long practice let him shape his moue with little effort.
As he pressed the corner of his second set of feathered lashes into place, he heard a distant shout. A crash. The thin walls of his dressing room bucked and shuddered. Wiping tacky fingers on a tissue, he stood and took a step toward the door. It flew open just before he touched it, and he staggered back.
“Raid!” Liesl’s knuckles were white on the door frame. “They’re looking for ballast, but they’ll take anyone they want. Go, now.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Liesl peeled away and ran down the corridor, hammering on doors and flinging the chorus from their communal makeup table. As the chaos swelled, Aristide shucked his dressing gown in favor of the sweaty black jersey he wore for dance rehearsals. The straw boater covered his stocking cap and shadowed his painted face. He jabbed a pin through the hat to hold it in place, and to use as a weapon in a pinch.
Cast and crew buffeted him from one side of the corridor to the other until he started throwing elbows. They didn’t have nearly what he did to lose. There’d be hounds at the stage door and the front of the house. That left one option. He took the stairs to the costume loft three at a time, hauling himself up by the bannister. It was dark up here, and stuffy. The ceiling sloped to a row of long, grimy windows below the eaves. They were open onto the alley to catch the sea breeze.
Aristide had cased the Bee long ago for good escape routes—his sideline had never been a safe one, even at the best of times—and these windows were his insurance against capture.
He was halfway out and hanging onto the gutter when the hounds burst into the backstage corridor. He couldn’t see it, but he heard it. As the whistles shrieked and the stagefolk screamed, Aristide bellied onto the scorching tiles of the roof.
* * *
He came down to the street near the Heyn, jumping the last few yards from the bottom of a fire escape off Waxworks Road. Across the river, he stopped in a rickety teahouse to wash his face and make a few telephone calls.
The proprietress, an Asunan woman with a seamy face, knew Aristide by sight, but it was her nephew with whom he’d made his arrangements. Said nephew was absent, and it took several minutes of frustrated mime to make her understand that he needed the telephone.
After he hung up on his final factotum, he found a steaming cup of honeyed white tea at his elbow. Redolent with ginger, it cleared his head and sinuses.
When the telephone rang with a return call, he snatched it with the speed of a striking viper. “Yes?”
“They’re on the up-and-up,” said the man on the other end. He was a mid-level bureaucrat with connections to the ACPD. “Really looking for ballast; word is the Ospies tried to buy Sailer out but he wouldn’t take the money. So they got him another way.”
“Damnation.”
“They’re not onto you yet,” his contact continued. “Not as far as I know.”
Relief poured down his neck and back, uncoiling knotted muscles. Cordelia was still holding out. “Thank you. Excellent. Good work.”
“Don’t mention it. But listen, if the blackboots have Lehane and she breaks, they might act without me hearing.”
“I understand.” But it wasn’t enough to tense him up, not yet.
Waiting for his second call, Aristide had a leisurely game of mahjong with the old auntie. They used his bobby pins as betting sticks. She trounced him, and he ended the game with his hair springing wildly around his head. They split a second pot of tea. The telephone rang. This time, Aristide’s pace was less frenetic. He levered himself up from the brass-topped table and went behind the beaded kitchen curtain to answer. “Did you get him?”
“Sure did.” The woman sounded pleased with herself. “But his bail was pretty dear.”
“You’ll be reimbursed. Did you take him to mine?”
“Yeah. The maid didn’t seem too pleased.”
“I’m sure she isn’t. Thank you, darling. You’ve been a treasure.” This time, he hung up first. Before he left, his hostess served him jellied plums. He thanked her—it was the only Asunan he knew, outside “hello,” “goodbye,” and a few choice curses. They bowed to each other in the doorway and he left her as the moon rose above the Heyn, turning its currents to chrome.
* * *
Hunched in Aristide’s wingback chair, Malcolm Sailer clashed with the decor. He had a split lip and a bruise blooming high on one cheek. A tuft of black thread showed where one of his buttons had been torn away.
“So these are your digs,” he said. “I was startin’ to wonder who’d bailed me out.”
Aristide swept across the parlor to the bar. “B-B-Brandy?”
“Yeah.” Malcolm held out his hand for the snifter.
Aristide obliged him. “Drink that down. I’m just going to go and ch-ch-change.” He ditched the jersey in his bedroom. It was grimy from his cross-town adventures, and would need a wash. Or would have, if he ever planned to wear it again. When he returned to the parlor, it was in belled silk culottes and a smoking jacket.
“Fancy.” Malcolm’s efforts had lowered the level of his drink considerably. “Fit right in with your surroundings now. Like one of them bugs that look like sticks.”
“I think I’ll choose to interpret that as a c-c-compliment.”
Malcolm set his brandy on the coffee table and put his head in his hands. “I’m scratched, Ari.”
“So they found the ballast?”
“You don’t even know the worst of it yet.”
“They tried to b-b-buy you out,” said Aristide. “I heard.” He sat on the sofa and tucked his feet up. “You should have taken the money. Shall I ring for some supper? To be honest, I’m absolutely famished.”
Malcolm’s face went pale, but he swallowed his shock. “I don’t remember the last time I ate.” He picked his brandy up again—considered it. “Not a real meal, anyhow. I thin
k Delia put a couple eggs in me … yesterday? Say, you ain’t seen her, have you? She was running late to the show tonight, and then the raid … You don’t think she got drug in, do you?”
Aristide fanned his nails across the upholstery and examined his manicure. “Malcolm…”
“Only, I know she was doing errands for you here and there, and if they caught her with anything I don’t wanna think about what might have happened.”
Aristide took a deep breath through his nose. “Malcolm, Cordelia … well, she was moving more than tar, this last week or two.”
Malcolm looked up from his knees. “What do you mean?”
“She’d started carrying messages, and a few other things. Since T-T-Tory died.”
“And?”
“She was caught ferrying sensitive documents between two of my contacts. She’s been in custody since late last night.”
The stillness that crept across Malcolm’s brawny shoulders was a warning. Seconds later, the snifter popped between his hands and he started bleeding on the carpet. Aristide shook out the handkerchief from the pocket of his smoking jacket and handed it over.
“Where is she?” His fists clenched around the cloth and turned it red. “Get her out.”
“I can’t,” said Aristide. “I don’t know the right people anymore, Malcolm.”
“You got me out.”
“That’s d-d-different and you know it. That was money. This is statecraft.”
Malcolm let his head fall back. His dark hair left an oil stain on the upholstery. “Mother’s tits. Everything. They’re taking everything.”
“Like I said: You should have j-j-jumped on the buyout when they offered it.”
“You think I haven’t figured that out by now?” Blood seeped between Malcolm’s fingers and dripped onto his trousers, disappearing into the weave of the dark wool. “But Ari, that’s my life’s work. Don’t you understand?”
“Believe me,” said Aristide, suddenly immensely tired. “I do.”
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