“Counselor,” she said, “does home know that you’ve taken Cattayim into custody?”
A tic in his lower eyelid made it twitch: once, twice. “Of course not. It is completely against policy.”
She almost didn’t catch the irony. “I see. This is white work.” That was what her brother had done—the things between the lines, the orders never written down. “If it comes out, it’s your neck in the noose. And if they haul you out of the chancery, your replacement will have a nasty surprise waiting for him, with Memmediv’s rotten networks and an arms deal percolating under his nose, ready to explode the Tzietan armistice. Nobody will thank you for that.”
“Astute.” His sourness verged on hydrochloric.
“You thought you had it all under your control,” she said, “but now it’s slipping.”
“It will not slip,” he said, diction clipped. “Not if you do as you’re told. And you will, or I will personally guarantee that your son forgets he ever had a mother.”
The creeping frost of fear killed her excitement.
“You couldn’t,” she said. “This story would destroy your career, your credibility.”
Flagg blinked, once, lizard-like. “I said personally. I do not require the government’s backing to make good on my threats.”
This was new, too, and far more worrying. Lillian had counted on Flagg’s promises because he valued order over chaos. He kept his pens in neat rows, his blotter at a right angle to his desk. He so valued order that he had gotten himself into this awful snarl to avoid any appearance of a mistake or misstep, any evidence of broken rules.
He was not a man from whom she would have expected that particular threat. He was becoming unpredictable, which meant that she could no longer rely on him to fulfill his end of their bargain. Flagg might not give her Stephen, no matter what she did.
But Memmediv claimed he could.
Now it was merely a matter of playing the odds.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to, Counselor.” She stood, knees threatening to give way as though she bore a great weight. “Just tell me what that is.”
He considered her for a moment with narrow, silver nitrate eyes. This time, his regard did freeze her. Did he know what she was considering?
Then he made a small sound with his tongue against the backs of his teeth and said, “You tell good stories, and you know the papers. Talk to her, make her think we’re considering. Find out who she gave the story to, at the Call, and give them something else. Discredit her. I don’t care what you tell them; just make it nasty. You know what journalists like.” The ghost of a leer hung about the angle of his eyebrow and the slight sideways pull of his lips.
It haunted her throughout her catch-up meeting with her staff, who had reams of dispatches, piles of newspapers, and shorthand notes on the week’s wireless broadcasts. The delegations in Dastya were on their third draft of a peace resolution; each side had walked out at least once. She didn’t envy the mediators. A family on the Lisoan border had been murdered in something the north painted as a blood feud and the south insisted was an act of republican aggression. Two children had died of dehydration in the Chuli internment camps. Gedda did not look good right now on the global stage.
Lillian had let things slip a little too far, playing these games, and now found she could hardly keep up. It was tempting not to try. Why struggle to put a good face on such hideousness? Especially given a stubborn bit of her brain insisted on replaying the conversation with Flagg, the flash of vulnerability he had shown her, the possibilities it opened up.
The fact that she was even considering them terrified her.
When the undersecretaries and assistants cleared out, she reached two fingers into the inner pocket of her jacket and felt the softening edges of Stephen’s letter. The paper, carried against the curve of her breast where she had held him when he was small, had lost its crisp folds and starchy stiffness and become more like cloth. A little like the ribbons Wind Worshippers carried pinned beneath their clothes. She certainly reached to it for comfort as often.
This time, though, she reached to it for courage.
* * *
Cordelia had heard the name Inaz Iligba bandied around, and seen a few of the posters framed in Pulan’s office. But the artists had softened her face, given her a halo of light she didn’t carry with her off the printed page or the screen.
She came by speedboat around dinnertime the day after Jinadh arrived, sweeping onto the terrace in a low-cut jumpsuit of palm-patterned satin, waving a cigarette in a long jet holder. She put it out when she saw the lit hookah, and held her hand out for a hose.
Under a jaunty captain’s hat—clever piece of costuming—her hair was tied into braids along her scalp. They were done up so tight they seemed to draw the skin of her face up, turn it haughty. Or, haughtier than it already was. Her eyebrows were plucked into razor arches above the dark mirrors of her sunglasses, and her lips—painted persimmon orange—seemed caught in a secret, side-heavy smirk.
She reminded Cordelia, strangely, of working on Temple Street. This was someone who hadn’t been born beautiful but had learned it to make tips. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear this peach had earned a living onstage before she went into the pictures, probably out of her clothes.
“Inaz,” said Pulan, blasting center-stage delight, and then went on in Porashtu. Inaz laughed and kissed her cheek, then did the same for Jinadh, leaning against the balustrade. Cordelia thought they might have met before, from the familiar way she touched his arm, the falsely modest smile Jinadh conjured up. It made sense: an actress, a writer for the gossip rags.
So she was the only stranger here.
“I have just told Ms. Iligba you will be choreographing her dances,” said Pulan, passing the hookah hose from Inaz to Cordelia.
“I see at least one problem here,” said Cordelia, plugging the pipe with her thumb. “I don’t speak Porashtu, and it don’t look like she speaks Geddan.”
“Jinadh can translate for you,” Pulan said. “It will get him out from under my shoe.”
Jinadh started, then shot Pulan a nasty little smile that flirted with a sneer. Inaz patted his rear end, kissed his cheek again, and said something that made him turn and simper.
Cordelia felt a pang of kinship. She’d turned that look on folk she had to please, who’d put their hands where she’d rather they hadn’t.
* * *
Pulan had a whole setup down the hill from her house: soundstages and recording rooms and anything you might need for shooting a picture. A whole passel of people, too—camerafolk and makeup artists and everything in between that walked on two legs and four. Despite her supposed job as assistant choreographer, Cordelia hadn’t been down until now.
The company was running something the morning she started with Inaz—she heard the music in the first studio she passed, the big one, and recognized it. Her feet went into the steps before she realized she’d auditioned on this number. What would that peach Chitra say if she poked her head in now? But she’d had enough trouble in the last day to fill her for a lifetime, and didn’t feel a powerful urge to find out.
Jinadh and Inaz had arrived before her and thrown the windows in the smaller dance studio open to catch the sea breeze. Gulls cried, barely audible over the whirring of fans.
“All right,” Cordelia said, surprising them both as she entered. “Let’s turn this heap of swineshit Pulan calls a picture into something passable.”
Jinadh turned to Inaz and said something in Porashtu, presumably repeating what Cordelia had just said. Inaz snorted, not particularly elegant, and replied.
Jinadh looked taken aback, and didn’t translate. Inaz rapped his arm with her knuckles and said something sharp.
“She says ‘It doesn’t have to be good, it only has to get us into Tzieta.’” He cocked his head at Cordelia. “You need to get to Tzieta?”
She wondered how much he knew about the picture, and its true purpose. “It’ll be better than thi
s steam bath, by a mile.”
Inaz bent forward in her chair, leaning to adjust the laces of her dance slippers. Her skimpy sports clothes showed surprisingly muscular legs, but then, hadn’t Cordelia wondered if she’d ever been onstage? This might not be too painful, if the lady could actually move.
“She know what she’s doing?” Cordelia asked Jinadh. He repeated it to Inaz, who laughed: a loud, single bark. She stretched out a hand, asked something, and Jinadh answered by producing a cigarette case and a sleek gold lighter inlaid with tiger’s eye. He sparked it to Inaz’s straight, and she inhaled, then said something he translated to Cordelia with a wry tone that perfectly matched Inaz’s harsh laughter.
“She’s been dancing since she was fourteen,” he said, “and the only difference now is nobody throws coins at her or tries to tug off her panties.”
“She ever try spirit gum?” Cordelia didn’t really mean for Jinadh to relate this, but he did, and this time Inaz’s laugh was less caustic. When she looked up from adjusting her shoes, there was a new light in her eyes: maybe respect, maybe just fellowship.
“You are a real dancer,” Jinadh translated.
“What did you think I was rotten doing here?” She was talking straight to Inaz now.
“You’re not one of—” Jinadh faltered, then asked Inaz a question. She opened her hands, palms up, and repeated whatever she’d told him.
“She says, ‘You’re not one of Memmediv’s people?’” He shook his head. “I didn’t know she was…” He looked at her, eyes narrow, and then turned back to Cordelia. “I didn’t know Inaz was mixed up in it.”
“Well, we’re just all learning loads about each other this week, aren’t we? Want to hear about my indigestion next?” Cordelia bent into a hamstring stretch, felt the muscles on either side of her spine pull tight straight to the base of her skull. “If she means a Tatien scrapper,” she told her kneecaps, “you can tell her that ain’t my bag. I got other birds to pluck.” Queen’s cunt, she hadn’t so much as tapped her feet since that ill-fated audition. And before that … It had been a while. This would be some kind of toil. “How’s she know about all this, anyhow? She in on the deal somehow?”
He turned back and asked her a question, which she answered with a pout and a heap of false modesty. Then, just as Jinadh had started to smile, she flung him another sentence with enough sass that Cordelia felt it on her skin like the sting of a wet rag snapped at speed. “What was that?”
Jinadh shook his head, but Cordelia leveled a glare at him. “She says she is charming and pretty and only a film star; she is invited to all the parties and people tell her stories that they shouldn’t. Asiyah often finds her useful.” He raised an eyebrow and added, “She says, also, I must know all about that sort of thing.”
“She’s in on it all right.” Cordelia said. “She’s some kind of fox. She know about the kid, too? Pulan tell her that?”
His eyes slid toward Inaz, but he said, “I think not. Pulan would not want to be embarrassed.” He took out a cigarette for himself, and lit it in the height of a sulk.
Cordelia went to flip through the records on the shelf by the turntable. Pulan had said there was a demo of the picture waiting for them, but all the labels were handwritten in Porashtu. Inaz rose from her chair, stretched, and sashayed to Cordelia’s side. She plucked a record from the shelf and slipped it from its sleeve. Looking straight at Cordelia, as if she were saying something comprehensible, carrying on a regular chat, she rattled off an airy string of words and dropped the record onto the spindle.
“She wants to know,” Jinadh said, “how under heaven they are supposed to get guns to your people, so deep in Ospie territory.”
“Holy stones, word travels fast around here.” She flexed her foot against the wall, stretching one screeching calf muscle.
Inaz’s smile made a pretty orange curve, lips full and lush, pink at the inner edges where the lipstick wouldn’t adhere to spit-slick skin. She said something else, still smiling. Cordelia heard Caleb Acherby’s name, in the midst of it.
Jinadh took a moment too long, and Inaz’s smile collapsed into a sneer. She rattled out an order, and a shadow of apprehension scudded across his face. “She says Asiyah will be happy to give you whatever you need. The more slop in Acherby’s bowl, the better. But she wants to know, also, what your … ah, Orodha? Your strays? What they hope to do with it all.”
“Blow things up,” said Cordelia. “What in damnation does she think we’re going to do with that much dynamite?”
As Jinadh translated, Inaz set the needle onto the record. Her smile tightened, as if she could tell Cordelia’s answer from her tone. Her reply was light, precise, in the same way a very sharp pin or a piece of glass might be.
“A few piddling bombs?” Jinadh’s translation was businesslike. “That is all? What do you hope that will accomplish?” He watched Cordelia over his cigarette, brows drawn together and eyes bright with worried concentration.
The first few bars of the opening number started to play: chimes and drums under a maddening nasal reed.
“Well, right now,” said Cordelia, cranking the valve shut on her steaming head of anger, bottling it up for later, “I aim to come up with some dance routines.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Lillian did not have the time to go up to Berer. And yet, she found herself on a train, working through a series of reports from her deputies on the increasing number of anti-Ospie columns in Porachis’s conservative media, and the royalist Lisoan sentiment cropping up to accompany them. There were several separate documents gauging the bellicosity of various journalists, talking heads, politicians, and publications, all flagged with analysis and notes on a suggested response.
The impression she got, once she had collated the reports, was not encouraging. As if she had expected anything different.
It was a longer ride from Myazbah to Berer than to Anadh, but because she had work to do, it went quickly. And, because she traveled alone this time, without Memmediv’s presence putting her on edge, or the looming onus of an unpleasant duty, she breathed a little more easily.
The meeting, arranged via discreet but official channels, was not nearly as cloak-and-dagger as any she had recently been a party to. Sofie Cattayim met her in the restaurant of her hotel, wearing a Geddan-style dress that Lillian suspected might be the only nice thing she owned. It was completely incorrect for the season and locale: black rayon unsuitable for Porachin heat. But it was cut very well, which made Lillian suspect it might have been something she owned when she was still a Keeler. Her shoes wanted a shine, but she had wound her hair into a neat chignon and wore small pearls in her ears that were likely also left over from better days. She had not put on any paint: her naked lips stood out pale in her suntanned face, stippled at the edges with freckles.
Lillian rose as she approached, and offered a hand. Sofie’s skin was burned several shades darker than hers, and though her nails had been scrubbed clean they had not been manicured, whereas Lillian’s were filed smooth and buffed so they shone like glass. Lillian’s fingers were bare. Sofie wore a wedding band, in the old style: a puzzle ring. One of the pieces had been removed, so that its pattern set unevenly below her knuckle, missing the whorls from one-third of its design.
They shook, then broke apart. Sofie settled into her chair with only the faintest air of self-consciousness, and took up the glass of water by her plate. She held the crystal without reverence.
She had been wealthy, once. Flagg had given Lillian a dossier to read. But she had fallen in love with the wrong people, at the worst time, and not had the sense to pinch the wick before the flame caught.
One sympathized. One felt slightly superior. But perhaps one also quashed the smallest twinge of envy.
“It’s very nice to meet you,” said Lillian. “I hope you had an easy time getting here.”
Sofie’s smile wasn’t exactly sad. Nor was it genuine. It was a smile that wanted very much to be some other
expression entirely: one that communicated disdain and disappointment born of misery, and fear. “You know,” she said, “the omnibus doesn’t stop anywhere near this neighborhood. But I suppose that wasn’t a consideration, for you.”
“I do apologize.”
Sofie shrugged, and took another sip of water. “I wouldn’t have considered it either, once.”
“They tell me the lamb shank is excellent.” Lillian raised her menu. “But I’ve just noticed there’s green fish curry, too, and that kind of thing is always so much better on the coast.”
Sofie’s eyes flickered down toward the embossed card laid across her plate, then back up to Lillian. “I really didn’t come to—”
“Order something,” said Lillian. “Please.” Because she knew Sofie couldn’t afford to eat here, and she was angling for a little goodwill. Or at least plates on the table; it would look odd to spend any amount of time in the restaurant without eating.
So when the waitress came and nodded at Lillian’s request for green fish curry, hot, Sofie asked for seared squab and okra. She managed it crisply, as though she had never considered going hungry, and then bestowed a tight, closed-lip smile on Lillian when she translated for the waitress.
“Now,” said Lillian, when the wine and olives had arrived. “This story you’re telling, the one about your wife—”
Ice clattered in Sofie’s glass—her grip had tightened, changing the angle of the water. “A story. Is that what you’re calling it?”
“May I ask, how did you come to contact Mr. Memmediv? And why him?”
“It is my understanding,” said Sofie, carefully placing her glass back onto the table, in the wet ring it had left on the linen, “that he works within a part of the embassy which is involved in…” Here, she turned the crystal with her fingertips, a precise ninety degrees. “Extralegal activities.”
“As the press attaché,” said Lillian, channeling the irony Flagg had turned on her the day before, “I must insist that none of the embassy’s activities are extralegal.”
In the ice bucket, the wine bottle shifted.
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