He slipped in beside her and nudged her with his foot. “Two parts rotten day, ain’t it? Shame to waste weather so fine.”
She jumped, her face slack with panic. She didn’t recognize him; good. Before she could run off, he grabbed her wrist and crouched down so they were face-to-face. “Darling,” he said, letting the curling rhythm of the central city come out once more. “It’s me. The gentleman from Baldwin Street. Remember? You brought me a matchbook. We made a deal.”
“I’d come meet you if Miz Kay told me, and only if she used the password.” She swallowed and looked around them at the crowd. “Damnation though mister, why today?”
“Because no one will see me hand you this.” He put his rucksack between his knees and pulled out the thin packet, sealed tight and tied with string. The paper seller reached for it.
“Ah-ah.” Aristide tugged it away. “Instructions first. The gentleman who gave you the matchbook. He buys his papers from you, yes?”
She nodded.
“Put this packet in tomorrow’s paper. Not when he buys it, understand. You must plan ahead. He’s being watched. Don’t be ostentatious.”
“What?”
“Don’t make a show out of it.”
“All right, but what if he don’t buy tomorrow’s paper?”
“Put it in the next day’s paper. And the next. And so on, until you’ve passed it to him.”
She crossed her arms. “What’s in it for me?”
He took out one of his white envelopes and stacked it on top of the packet. “There’s more in here than you’ll see the rest of your career, if you stick to selling papers.”
She reached out again, with a filthy hand. He jerked back. “What a wretched habit,” he said. “Why don’t you wait to be handed things?”
“Aren’t you in a hurry?” she snarled. “What else do you want?”
“Hit me.”
“What?”
“Hit me. Here.” He pointed to his right eye. “Careful, though. Don’t hurt yourself.” When he showed up at the train station to book his passage north, he wanted to present a bewildered bumpkin fed up with manic city life. This is really the last straw, sir, I tell ya. Besides, a black eye would further obscure his identity.
But the paper seller didn’t ask for reasons. Before he had a chance to brace for it, her bony knuckles landed an expert blow between his cheekbone and his eyebrow. He fell to his rear on the pavement.
“Very good,” he said, when he’d recovered the power of speech. It had been a long time since anyone struck him.
“Thumb on the outside,” she said, “and punch from the shoulder. I ain’t some kind of powder puff.”
“No one said you were.” He stood, clearing his weeping eye, and handed her the packet and the envelope of cash. “Go back home, or wherever it is you live. Get off the street until things clear up.”
She nodded, and was gone. He didn’t worry about whether she would follow orders. She was ambitious, and stupidly brave. The streets of Amberlough were peppered with children like her. He’d been one, once—a little older than the paper seller, but that just proved her precocity. Cyril would get his message.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
After Cordelia told them everything she knew, a doctor-type came to bandage her bleeding stumps—she’d lost two fingertips before she folded.
When the sawbones was done, he gave her a shot of something that knocked her out for a few hours. She was struggling to sit up, cursing at broken ribs and bruises, when the hinges of her door squealed. Flinching, she hissed at the pain.
“We’re transferring you.” It was a man she hadn’t seen before, and probably wouldn’t see again, the way things were going lately. A new face every time they sent for her, and none of them kind.
“Come on.” He waved her out the door. “I got more coming in every minute for questioning, with the mess outside. We need all the room we got.”
Blackboots thronged the corridors, jostling her until she went dizzy. From behind the placketed iron doors she could hear muffled shouts and pleading. She hobbled along like an old lady and hoped there was a lift. She couldn’t have managed stairs.
They put a hood over her face before they took her outside. Through the burlap, she got a good gulp of sea breeze, flavored with rancid garbage and … smoke.
“What’s burning?” she asked, but didn’t get an answer.
The bumpy ride in the back of the van took an age. Each time the tires struck a pothole, waves of nausea broke over her, from the drugs and the pain. The driver’s maneuvering slacked off the longer the ride went on. Shackled in the back of the transport van, she could hear raised voices from the driver’s compartment, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Something struck the side of the van, once. She startled away just as they took a sharp turn, and sprawled across the floor. Her broken ribs burned, but the lingering remnants of morphine kept her from caring much. The purple lump of her shattered wrist was beyond regular hurting by now. Everything from her shoulder down felt like she had molten metal on her bones. All she wanted was sleep. The smell of smoke followed them as they drove, growing stronger, then fading, but never leaving the air entirely.
It took so long to get where they were going, she was surprised when her minders opened the rear doors and she found they were still within the city limits. Outside the Department of Corrections, in fact. Then again, maybe the place they’d brought her from was somewhere out in the weald, or on the sea cliffs. They could have been keeping her anywhere.
“City’s gone crazy,” said one of her minders, talking over her head to his partner. “Brains leaking outta their ears, you’d think.”
Cordelia remembered the blow to the side of the van, the smell of smoke. She risked a look over her shoulder, back toward the central city, and saw the orange glow of fire against the night sky.
“Eyes front, copper top.” One of her minders shoved her forward.
Whatever was going on in Amberlough, she got a tiny glimpse of it inside the DOC. Uniformed officers scrambled around the corridors, screeching orders at one another. Telephones rang at desks and behind doors. She wanted to cover her ears and lie down, but her two guards moved her along, winding through crowded, noisy hallways until they found the proper office.
She didn’t have a good sense of what happened next, but it seemed whoever they needed was out, or busy. Time skipped oddly as exhaustion and agony overtook the drugs she’d been given earlier. Whenever she blinked she felt as if she’d missed whole minutes. Eventually, after a flutter of her eyelashes, she found herself sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair in a noisy corridor, cuffed to a cold radiator by her good wrist. Her severed fingertips throbbed with her heartbeat. Both her minders were gone.
A noisy group of officers came shoving down the center of the hall, scrabbling around one man like a litter of hungry pups. He held his shoulders as if he was sick of their assault, his hands up high to ward them off. Light from the overhead sconces flashed off his spectacles. She recognized that face, lean and hawklike, ashy with fatigue.
He’d already passed her, and was still walking. She had to grab the chance. “Commissioner!”
He stopped. She couldn’t see if he turned—he was hemmed in by flunkies. They started to move on again, and she shouted his name, more desperately this time, with less formality. “Alex!” Her voice broke on it. He’d never recognize her. Not after one night of drinks and flirting. Especially not with her face rammed in like this.
Dry, cool fingertips touched her jaw and she jerked back, not realizing she’d closed her eyes.
“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you all right?”
One of the hounds was tipping her face up to catch the light. She squinted, and saw the shine of Müller’s spectacles over his shoulder.
“Alex,” she said again. Müller tipped his head, staring at her with a wrinkle between his eyes. He didn’t remember. His flunkies started ushering him away. Cordelia stuck out her
foot and tripped him. One of the officers kicked at her ankle and she cried out.
“You.” Müller’s voice was cold. “Don’t you dare. Officers in this force do not strike prisoners. Not on my watch.”
Cordelia bit back a sob of gratitude.
Müller crouched at her feet. He took off his spectacles and looked at her, so close she could smell the bitter remnants of his aftershave.
“Ah,” he said. She looked into his eyes. “The Kelly Club. You drank a dry white, didn’t you?”
Cordelia, who couldn’t remember what she’d poured down her chute, nodded. “Yeah. You tried to slip your hand up my skirt under the table.”
A flush crept past his collar, and he glanced at his hangers-on like he was daring them to say something. None did. “Cordelia, right? What happened?”
“Whole mess of things.”
He ground his teeth, looked around at the people scuttling down the corridor, at the officers waiting for him to stand up, and said, “Let’s go someplace quiet, and we’ll get you sorted out.”
It sounded like a pickup, but she was miles beyond caring.
* * *
“I really can’t spare the time,” he said, shutting the door behind him as they ducked into a borrowed office. “Those daggers they were looking at me … all deserved.”
“What’s going on?” she asked, sinking gratefully into the leather chair behind some police captain’s desk. “Why all the ruckus?”
“You mean you don’t know? I’d have thought you’d been out in the worst of it, looking like you do.”
“I ain’t been out since … late last night?” she guessed. “Or maybe the night before? What day is it?”
He didn’t answer. “What’d they cart you in for, then, if you weren’t brawling?”
Rubbing her good wrist against her dress, trying to erase the memory of the steel cuff Müller’s deputy had cut away—and more, the thin, cold edge of Rehimov’s knife—she spoke to her knees instead of to him. “Some big stuff. I been—I don’t know where. The Ospies wanted to find out what I knew.”
A muscle in his jaw tensed, but he didn’t press her further.
“What are you doing at the DOC?” Her question sounded odd in the silence. “I thought this was just for stamping and stocking the criminal set. Getting ’em ready for the trap.”
“Headquarters was … compromised.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I told you. There’s rioting everywhere. Three of the primary representatives stepped down. Acherby’s assuming control of the whole country.”
“Mother and sons.” She let her head fall against the back of the chair. “He can’t.”
“He did. Nothing we can do about it.”
“Swineshit.” She sat straight again, breathless with the effort but filled with anger. Müller just looked at her with badly shuttered pity and she fell back, winded. “I don’t wanna believe that. Bet you don’t either.”
“You know what I want?” He sat on the corner of the desk and stared across the room, talking to a cork board pinned with notes and scraps of colored paper. “I want a force that isn’t sour through with crooked hounds. I want a state that works the way the law says it should.”
“And you think you’re gonna get it? Is this it?” She lifted her good hand—what a joke, good hand, when she was missing pieces off it—to indicate the chaos of the riots, then spread it wide to show her chopped-up fingers. Ragged spots of red showed through the cotton bandage. “Is this?”
Müller went green, finally figuring out her arrest hadn’t exactly been by the book. “Of course not. DePaul promised—”
“Oh I’m sure he did.” She spat. Strings of pink saliva slashed across the green leather desktop. Müller, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “If you believed all that, you’re gonna get what’s coming to you.”
He stared at her, fierce and unblinking. When she didn’t shrink, his face turned tired and he stood.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where?”
“I can put you in a cell overnight—”
“You rotten think you will.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “They’re going to transfer you, all right? Into the city system. I can get you out on parole tomorrow. But you don’t want to get mixed up with the scullers coming in off the streets tonight. I’ll put you on your own, safe, and in the morning I’ll handle everything.”
She lowered her chin, chastened. “Thanks.”
He took her out into the hall and flagged down a junior officer. “Put her in one of the small cells. Alone. Have somebody splint that wrist, and get her a clean smock, too.”
The hound nodded and took Cordelia’s good arm. Before he could haul her off, she grabbed Müller’s sleeve.
“How come you’re doing this for me?” she asked.
“What, it’s not enough?” The line of his shoulders went taut. “You gotta ask questions?”
She shrugged her least-painful shoulder. “Just … you gave me that line about crooked hounds. And now this.”
“It’s like you said.” He took off his spectacles and wiped them clean with his handkerchief. “I’m not going to get what I want, so … I better do what I can.”
* * *
True to Müller’s word, Cordelia was out of the trap by morning, let free on parole she had no plans to obey.
The Station line took her straight from the DOC to Mosley Row, by way of the capitol. Crumbling gashes of bare earth marked the sloping green lawn. A unionist banner hung from the front of the building, but someone had set fire to a corner, and fingers of soot climbed the gray field to streak the quartered circle within a circle at its center.
When the trolley neared the river, she looked up at Bythesea Station. Dawn touched the white marble of the terminus and turned it crimson. As she watched, a pennant unfurled from the top of the station arch, its gray folds colored by the bloody light of sunrise.
The walk up Mosley nearly killed her. She hurt so bad she hardly noticed the sideways looks folk gave her on the footpath. Small wonder they did. When she reached her tenement and saw herself reflected in a ground-floor window, she looked like she’d been rumbled by an angry stevedore in the full swing of a boozy rage.
She realized she didn’t have her keys—the Ospies hadn’t given back her handbag—and she had to ring the buzzer for the landlady. The old woman opened the door a bare few inches and peered over the chain lock. When she saw Cordelia, all the blood went out of her face. “Mother and sons.”
“Got caught in the riots,” Cordelia said, but the old woman was already shaking her head.
“They come two nights ago and tossed your rooms. Girl, I don’t know what you been up to, but I can’t keep you around.”
“Miz Ess…” Cordelia held out her hands, cut up and splinted. “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t wanna,” she said, eyes going round. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want nothing to do with it.”
“Can I at least come in and get my stuff?”
The old lady wrinkled her nose in consideration. “Fifteen minutes, all right? Then I don’t want to see your head nor tail no more.”
“Thank you.”
The door shut, and the chain rattled against the lintel. Ms. Ess opened up and stood back to let Cordelia pass.
She hauled herself up the four flights to the attic, pausing at each landing to suck painful breaths into her broken chest, knowing she ought to be lying down. In fact, when she got up to her flat—door broken down, or she wouldn’t have been able to get in—the first thing she did was collapse on her bed. Stuffing puffed out of gashes in the mattress. From her horizontal vantage point, she cased the damage.
Her little gas ring was trampled into bits. Her three chipped plates were broken, and her mugs and glasses. Clothes lay muddied and wrinkled across the bare wood floor. But they hadn’t found anything, because there was nothing in her flat to find.
She wondered what her dressing room at the Bee looked like. Proba
bly about the same. Maybe worse. But there was nothing there either. She didn’t keep the hooky around long enough to store it, or the tar.
It wasn’t until Ms. Ess came clumping up the stairs and hammered on the remains of the door that Cordelia realized she’d dropped off. Her mouth tasted like she’d eaten something foul scraped out of an Eel Town gutter.
“I said fifteen minutes.” Ms. Ess came into the flat and moved to roust her out of bed. Cordelia jerked away from her touch, but the landlady was more careful than Cordelia would have given her credit for.
“It ain’t about you, hon.” The older woman picked through the mess on the floor until she came up with a crocheted grocery sack, and started cramming clothes into it. “You’ve always been an all-right tenant. But the last thing I need’s blackboots tearing up my building. You understand, don’t you?” She tucked a final pair of stockings into the string bag and handed it to Cordelia. “There. I’ll try and tidy it up once you’re gone. If you find you’re missing anything important you can always send a wire.”
Cordelia’s head sank to her chest. A wire. Stupid sow. She might as well invite Cordelia back into her house. But all she said was, “Thanks, Miz Ess.” Holding her string bag hooked over her elbow, she went down the stairs as slow and wincing as if she were an old lady herself.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Van der Joost had the shades drawn in his office against the morning sunlight on the harbor. Despite the scorching weather, he wore his plain, dark suit like a uniform.
By contrast, Cyril’s blue seersucker was stained at the front with oil, dusted with jail dirt, and past the point where wrinkles added to its charm. He’d slept in it, on a hard bench in some suburban lockup, wondering why they hadn’t dragged him straight to the Warehouse. The ride down to the Foxhole through burnt and bloodied streets had given him some idea. He was almost glad they’d arrested him before the riots really got under way.
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