“Then what is it a matter of?” her voice sharp and suspicious.
It was apparent to Titus that Glenna was about as trusting of him as he was of her. Each seemed ready for whatever curve the other threw them—perhaps over prepared. “While we are still here,” Pym thought he ought to throw the collective in there, “it will be necessary to maintain appearances. Tell me you are not doing that in Makati?”
“Don’t turn this back on me—if we,” he didn’t like the English she threw down on that, “are getting out, why do you bother to deal with the politics of the Fay at all?”
“If I do not, then Lander will take the Fay, and I wouldn’t last a day out of power.”
“Move in here full-time.”
“Not that simple. If I disappear from the Fay and the warehouse, Lander would have his crew, and anyone else attempting to curry favor, after me. With the resources at his disposal, he’d find me in no time. Then, of course, there is everyone else I’ve pissed off—Salazar, your father, the Cartel, and anyone else out there looking for me.” He didn’t want to go into what he’d run up against on the Beluga Fay or in the fish markets. These no one knew about, or at least not what they were really about, and he preferred to keep it that way.
“If we’re almost ready to leave...”
“There’s,” he interrupted, “no way to be certain what schedule Torres and the Wall are working off of. Soon for them may be a lifetime for us—me, specifically.”
She didn’t look convinced or happy with the answer as she played with the cup of mint tea in front of her. “When,” her voice tight and twisting her cup, “are we getting out?”
Pushing off from the sink where he’d been leaning desultorily staring into his own cup of tea, Titus sat across from Glenna. “That is not under my control.”
“Things are getting iffy in Makati.”
“In what way?”
“Father’s position has become precarious, and Chrislann’s business is even shakier.”
“What has happened?” He needed Glenna to believe he felt for her but wasn’t certain whether or not he was pulling this off.
Sighing, the woman continued turning the cup for a moment; then looked up, brushing back her long, black hair. “No one thing, but the government is under assault from every quarter in the city. However,” he knew this was coming straight for him, “since you’ve taken over the southern fish markets,” these were not the only ones in the city, but they were the major source of seafood, “the rest of the city has been strangled for food. Agriculture is not making up the difference, and you have not allowed anyone else access to the markets. As a result, starvation is being felt by the Cartel and all districts of the city—even Makati is experiencing shortages.”
“I had to feed the Fay and everyone that works for us—sorry.” He wasn’t, but this had to be said. Secretly he wasn’t upset by Salazar’s suffering, but he should have known it wouldn’t be a direct shot to personal Armageddon. On the way down, Henry was likely to take a lot of people with him.
Even before his demise, it would be likely that he would destroy all those he thought might be responsible for it. In all likelihood, Salazar would want to shift the blame to others in order to stretch out his tenure a few more months, weeks, days, or hours. What the Governor hoped to do with the time was unclear—Pym supposed they were hoping for a miracle or support from the Federals. But with the city sealed off from land and sea, there seemed little chance of that. Who’d want to enter a plague city with no chance of exit until it was over? As things were going, what would the chances be of anyone walking out of the city at the end of the Sweats? Bad to nonexistent, if what Titus had seen to date was anything to go by.
Slowly he came to realize he was being intently stared at. Looking up, he gave her a blank expression, not wanting to inspire an outburst—since it appeared she was looking for an excuse. Instead, the woman sighed and looked back down at the cup and table.
“I’m trying to stay out of the way as much as possible, but father and Chrislann are making that very difficult. If we don’t get out soon, I’m fearful of what Chrislann may do or say to save himself.”
“What’s going on with him?”
“His, our, company is being investigated for black economy activities and for trading with enemies of the State.”
“Enemies of the State—treason?”
“Yes. They’ve nothing conclusive, but that is no longer necessary. Suspicion is equal to guilt, and with the state of emergency, the Governor has been given sweeping powers. It is possible that my entire family could be expelled.”
“From Makati?”
Glenna shook her head without looking up. “To the Hill.”
There was a quiet fear in her voice that corkscrewed up the man’s spine. His situation was delicate at this point. The woman had just told him they were to be sent to a leper colony, and it may be all his fault. “Before that happens you should join me.”
“All of us?”
“Your brother, certainly.”
“What of father?”
“He’s too dangerous—the risk is, he may turn me in hoping to curry favor with Salazar.”
“I understand—but we’re not there yet.” They were very close, though, and this worried Pym.
This news represented a shift in goals and an exposure to danger her family had never known. Certainly she would want to pursue escape more than ever, and that was a good thing, but if this did not materialize soon, she would surrender him to Salazar in hope of maintaining her family’s position in Makati—even if the enclave was now more vulnerable than ever. “Then,” he spoke quietly, needing Glenna to believe him, “I will have to light a fire under Torres.” She smiled up hopefully, but Titus knew this was at best a short reprieve—the first serious shock from the Governor and he’d be offered up to her fear. “For now, let’s get some lunch.”
“Let me get a shower, first.”
The choice had been Glenna’s, but it gave Titus no peace—even with her reassurances. It was a nice place, but it was only a few blocks south of Makati and, thus, heavily patrolled by the police/militia columns. It had reached the point that Titus no longer could distinguish between police, military, militia, and Cartel forces. The amorphic mass appeared to suggest a metaphor for what was happening in the city generally and with the classes specifically. At the moment, however, he was more worried about being noticed for what he was. Though it was true, as far as he knew, he was unknown by appearance to the government and their troops. This seemed a foolish risk when alone and with a woman that he could no longer trust—not until he proved he could fulfill on his promises.
“Are you certain of this place?” rubbing a hand across the brilliant starched linen tablecloth.
“You’re perfectly safe with me.”
He looked askance at the woman, and she smiled at him. “You are, but maybe you know how I feel whenever I’m more than a kilometer away from Makati—especially in Timog.”
“Yes, but you’ve been making threatening comments.” Looking up, there appeared to be shock on Glenna’s face, but he’d seen how many faces she’d offered the public to believe this one.
“When did I do that—what I shared with you is how dangerous it has become for my family.”
“Bringing me here is as good as a threat.” She looked back down at her menu and smiled. He was not to have noticed the smile, but it was there.
“Look at the menu, what do you see?” Glenna spoke without looking up.
He did and sighed. “A lot of cancelled meals.”
“All of them seafood.”
“Yes, well I told you why.” He was glad she’d had them moved away from the rest of the lunch crowd—he supposed the restaurant and most in Makati had not learned of the investigation of her family’s business and maybe her father’s fitness for a Cabinet position. A part of him wondered if any of it was true. This had not occurred to Pym until now, and he tried to keep the observation to himself for fear of alerting Glenna to an
opinion that may not work in his favor—if anything from this moment could work in his favor.
“It will help you understand my position if you see this sort of thing is having a devastating impact on the psychology and wellbeing of the elites.”
“Breaks the heart.” Titus didn’t bother to keep the cynicism from his voice.
“Of things which are not helpful, to either of us, that attitude is first.”
“What do you expect? There are people in this city who are really starving—many of whom have lost their lives to hunger or a disease, which was a direct byproduct of their starvation.”
“But they do not have the ability to hurt a large number of people.” Leaning back in his seat, Pym looked at her and wondered whether restraint would be of any use here. Whether or not it would, he chose to forge ahead.
Choose? There is room for doubt as to whether this was a rational rather than an emotional response. Whatever the case, it came spilling out of him. “It is extremely doubtful whether or not you and yours have the ability to do much more than to flop about on your bedroom floors refusing to go to sleep.”
She lowered her menu stared at him. “What,” ice in the voice, “do you mean by that?”
“You could turn me over to your father and maybe buy yourself some more time.” He was in it now—even if he had wanted to, there’d be no turning back.
“I would...”
“That’s what you’ve been saying to me since we’ve met today—it’s been implicit in your litany of fears and concerns for your family. Well, if you were to hand me over, they’d find out everything I knew. However, what if you had me assassinated—I know the idea has occurred to you and yours. Then you had better hope you were successful—if you weren’t, I’d know I’m not getting out and would turn your plan over to Salazar. If you were successful in assassinating me, then how would you get past Torres? Do you know all the elements of the plan I do? Let’s face it; we are stuck with each other. I need you and your contacts; you need me and my ability to deal with Torres. Then there is what will happen on the other side of the Wall when you are all being hunted.”
“You too,” the woman’s voice hard, but near to breaking.
“Who knows of me? Who knows who I really am? Descriptions are vague and no real facts are known—not even by you.” Pym had gone a lot harder than he’d intended and tried to dial the edge in his voice back. Even as he had decided to do this, the first tear rolled from the inside of her left eye.
“I,” with a napkin to this, “never meant to threaten you.” There was no sense, at this time, in pretense any longer.
“You can dry your eyes—I’ve seen enough to know this is not you.”
She looked at him a long shocked moment and dropped the napkin beside her wine glass. “What now?” The frigidity in the voice triggered a tremor in the man’s coccyx.
“Just know that there are few outcomes which would be favorable to you and unfavorable to me—I may end up dead but so would you, or exposed at the very least.”
“So,” voice easing as though it realized how much it had just laid bare, “what do you need from us?”
“Be aware we need each other and will only get out if we work together. An adversarial relationship will only place us in a position in which we will all lose—if not lose, then it will seriously impede our success.”
“Our situation in Makati is becoming desperate—father is being investigated, my brother’s company is being investigated, and it will be only a matter of time before I will be investigated. We need to act quickly.”
“I realize that and am moving as fast as possible. For the moment, it appears we are at the last hurdle—it is just a matter of Colonel Torres finding a time that will be workable for those on the Wall, and perhaps the Federals.”
“Why the Federals?”
“There will be oversight the Colonel will have to deal with. I am not certain how much there will be, but it will be there.”
Glenna nodded and turned back to her menu. “Please, do not take too much longer. I know you have little, if any, control over the schedule, but you will have to find some. My people and I are exposed; that makes all of us nervous and seeking whatever we may to mitigate our situation if we are revealed to the Salazar government. You must understand this.”
“I do.” Pym understood her anxiety and that the woman had to keep the spoiled and privileged children of officials, industrialists, and old money feeling as safe as houses. This wouldn’t work—everything about the Wall screamed high risk. That risk, if extended longer than necessary, would destroy their resolve.
Titus supposed that part of what was being communicated here was the cabal’s fracturing nerve. Take much longer and this would implode. Not just that of Glenna and Chrislann, but all the others—which should he fear more? To Pym’s mind, the weakest link he was aware of was Chrislann—after the beating he took from Tomás’s men, he was never around. This suggested both fear and humiliation. Of the two, humiliation would be the most dangerous—but for whom? Certainly there would be hatred for Titus; Pym knew this, having witnessed the beating Glenna’s brother took, Chrislann would have lost, in his own mind if nowhere else, the respect and deference his position would normally trigger in all about him. Then there would have been his impotent rage concerning both Tomás and his guards. Chrislann was the most dangerous. Yet, Glenna could be far more so. She was intelligent, devious, calculating, immoral, and hard. Titus feared the woman far more than her brother. The others remained beyond his experience, but that did not mean he should ignore them.
The whole affair needed concluding, and quickly.
The meal, after the position of each had been made plain, continued pleasantly enough. Conversation veered away from the fears of Glenna and her group and toward more general comments on the quality of the chicken, the salad, and the agricultural plots north of the marina and how they’d turned some of the multi-storied buildings into greenhouses. They experimented with this in the past, before the Sweats, but then entrepreneurs had been experimenting with flowers the sub-tropical climate was unable to support. It had been a small success, but mostly with the residents of Makati. The cost of the flowers was such that only the rich and corporations could afford them.
Once the Sweats hit, the entrepreneurs, not managing to get out in time, had turned their spirit of innovation and greed to a more practical purpose. From this emerged the agricultural zone. Though the innovation rewarded them with a situation in Makati, their greed was not adequately slaked. The general rumor was that they had attempted to get more out of the zone than the government had been willing to part with, and the end result was that they remained a disgruntled, though important, minority in the city’s state economy. As long as the Wall remained intact and Salazar remained in power, they would have no recourse. This in itself made them dangerous—where both the Wall and the government prevented them from escape and a fair compensation for their efforts. Still, they had no power—power in the sense as it had become understood since the Sweats appeared.
Soft power, attraction, and co-opting, was replaced by coercion in little more than a political heartbeat. They should have seen this coming from a mile off, but it wasn’t seen; wasn’t predicted; wasn’t, even supposed. Pym had considered the possibility of leveraging the entrepreneurial classes when he’d first entered the Beluga Fay, but then he’d met up with Glenna Budiman and her band of sycophantic narcissists. If he didn’t trust her, though sometime Titus was almost prepared to, he didn’t know what to make of these. They wanted out, but they weren’t prepared to risk themselves and their comfort to any serious degree. What didn’t make sense to him was what they’d expected to find beyond the Wall. There was no talking to them, not even Glenna had had much success. What the woman used to keep them in line, he was guessing, was fear and coercion. Seemed she learned a great deal from Henry Salazar.
Eventually, with the meal in ruins, they had to decide what to do next. Titus had promised to take he
r to Makati, but after the confrontation over lunch, getting any closer to the Makati gates than was necessary seemed out of the question. This hadn’t put the woman’s mind at ease or blessed her with an easy manner. In the end, Pym and Glenna agreed that he would take her as far as one of the surrey taxis. These had sprung up first in the upper middle-class districts north of Makati then made their way west toward the Timog districts and environs. Once fuel rationing infiltrated the surrounding districts of Makati, they became almost sheik. Some were simple conversions of the horseless carriage and back to a horse drawn one. Others had taken their inspiration from the American surrey designs of the Nineteenth Century.
Glenna was looking for one of these when the first of the police patrols crossed the intersection north of them. With the police presence, both withdrew to Pym’s car. Titus wanted to go back because he was afraid what Glenna might do caught between the two of them, and Glenna—or so she said—was afraid what they might do if caught in Pym’s presence. It wasn’t that any had a clear idea of what he looked like, but her father was under investigation and, by extension, this meant her as well. Titus would raise eyebrows because he wasn’t part of Makati and had no ID papers that would stand up to serious investigation. So meeting up with the police would not be useful and could only trigger an event that would expose both of them.
Back in the car, they withdrew south, until there was what appeared to be a Militia/Military column. Swinging southwest and away from this, the pair got as far as the northern tip of the agricultural zone before they felt safe enough to find an abandoned house to holdup in. There weren’t too many of these between the zone and Makati, but there were a few. Normally these had For-Sale signs planted in their front yards—mostly stone gardens. It took a few of these before Titus was certain enough of the subterfuge that he was prepared to stash the car in the garage and hide, with Glenna, in the house.
“I’m sorry,” she said, nervously staring out between the slats of the closed blinds, “I didn’t think they’d be so close.”
Beluga Fay (Dragon Bone Hill) Page 19