by Anthology
“Just outside the Vineyard,” he said. “Obviously, the chief wants you to take a look at this as quickly and quietly as possible. It could be nothing.” The edge in his voice suggested this was too much to hope for. Little crime occurred near the Vineyard, and for a good reason. It was home to the whitenails, the most powerful men and women in the city, and the only thing more formidable than their wealth was their mercenary sense of justice. Any criminal in that neighborhood would only hope for the Municipals to catch him first.
To Malone, the Vineyard was even worse than the factory districts. If something had gone wrong beneath those pristine marble verandas, it would in no way be a simple matter.
As if reading her thoughts, Richards looked down at the patterns his boots had scraped into the grit. “There’s something else,” he said. “The victim is named Cahill. He’s a historian. Was a historian.”
Malone stalked out of the alley, her coat swishing against her black slacks and knee-high boots. Within a quarter of an hour, she had left the factory districts for the straight, broad surface avenues that most Recolettans knew. As if aging in reverse, the crumbling ruins gave way to towering structures marking various residences and businesses, whole and austere and gleaming blue in the moonlight. It was a wonder they had been so carefully crafted, particularly when city-dwellers spent most of their time underground. Pressed against one another in the fashion of a crowded metropolis, the monuments took on the character of gruff, mustachioed old men, huddled together in their dress coats and frowning upon passersby.
Malone found a hansom cab at the corner and showed her inspector’s seal to the driver, giving him an address just beyond her destination. If discretion was imperative, it wouldn’t do to travel too close to the Vineyard in the wee hours with a chatty cabbie watching.
As the carriage clattered from the less impressive zones toward the Vineyard, the old men lining the cobbled streets evolved, growing in stature and spreading their arms over tiled avenues. Whether they opened their arms to welcome or to snatch depended entirely upon one’s relationship to them.
Recoletta, like all modern cities, had been constructed around the two values that society prized most: security and privacy. Even hundreds of years after the Catastrophe, people still lived underground. Crude shelters had developed into shining palaces and rudimentary tunnels into yawning halls lit by fire and mirrors. Ornate verandas declared the locations and the prestige of their owners in the flashiest manner affordable. Even the larger structures, some of which could easily house several families, never functioned as actual living or workspaces. The real business went on below, hidden from common scrutiny.
This observation became truer as one traveled from stone to marble.
The hansom came to a halt, and Malone walked half a dozen blocks further to a neighborhood seemingly hewn from fine, veined stone. She found herself alone in the surface streets, grateful that the neighbors were too wealthy to be out at this hour. Malone stopped in front of a tall, narrow building of jet-black with a single elevator cage inside. Whereas the neighboring edifices were polished to a sheen that flashed in the moonlight, the one in front of Malone was worn rough and mottled with lichen. Three steps led to a rusty black gate. It was bowed outward, she noticed, and shards of glass and metal trickled from the upper steps to the perfectly aligned cobblestones below.
Boots stomped in the street behind her with dull, crunchy thumps. She turned to the older man trudging toward her. He also wore Municipal black, but his coat was frayed at the edges and faded at his elbows and shoulders. Inspector Carlyle glowered up at her from beneath thick eyebrows.
“I was wondering when our ghost inspector would appear,” he said through sagging cheeks.
“Richards sent you,” Malone said. She wasn’t surprised that Richards had neglected to mention this.
“Over an hour ago. Someone had to keep an eye on things while you were running around.” He pushed a lantern into her hands.
Malone caught a whiff of whiskey sourness on his breath. “Smells like you had company.” Stepping over the debris, she lit the lantern and called the elevator to the main residence. Carlyle followed close behind. They squeezed into the elevator cage together, and his breath filled the space for the eleven seconds of their descent.
The elevator settled into the bottom of the shaft, presenting them with a wooden door still hanging ajar. Malone took a grateful breath of fresh air. Her pulse slowed ever so slightly as she stepped into the darkened entryway. Dust motes swirled in front of her lantern, and a faint illumination flickered further down the hall.
“You know, this would be a lot easier if you’d flip the gaslights on,” Carlyle said.
Malone kept her gaze trained down the hall. “Were they on when you showed up?”
He grumbled something indistinct.
Malone followed the winking light and a wine-colored carpet to a study, a musty affair of bookshelves and worn leather.
It was almost a relief to see the crime confined to one small room. Four books were massed near the door of the study in an assortment of positions, fanned pages folded beneath the weight of their covers. A lone candle resting on a desk in the far corner lit a crumpled corpse slumped next to one shelf and the pile of fallen books at its feet.
Carlyle stood in the doorway while Malone crossed the study.
The shivering light animated the broken body as if it were still struggling to live, and the man’s hand, still warm and limp, also suggested a tenuous grasp on life. Bending over the dead man, Malone could just make out the shadow of a bruise at the base of his skull.
“Messy old bastard,” Carlyle said. “I thought these fancy folk were supposed to be well kept.”
“Does he look like a whitenail to you?”
“Not much I can see without the damn lights.”
The deceased was fully dressed in stained and rumpled clothes that he must have worn for several days, unusual for a member of high society, though not for an eccentric workaholic.
The study yielded further evidence that the victim had been less of the former and more of the latter. The patterned wool rugs, though obviously expensive, were threadbare in places and compounded with dirt and spills that had never been cleaned. Some of the volumes lining the walls appeared to be falling apart, and a coating of dust blanketed everything but the books.
Carlyle sneezed. “This guy ever heard of a broom?”
“Looks like he was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Malone hovered over the lit candle. By the substantial pool of warm wax at the base, she guessed it had burned all night. The lid had been removed from the inkpot, and the wet and balding quill lay discarded on the desk, which was otherwise clear. There was every appearance of serious business having taken place throughout the night, but no evidence of the finished product.
She pushed past Carlyle, ignoring his sigh when she finally flipped on the gaslights, and poked around the rest of the house. She might as well have searched in the dark for all the good it did her. A thorough survey of the rest of the house uncovered no other clues: no upturned furniture, no ransacked closets, and there was money and a few valuables left in plain sight.
Malone returned to the study and knelt by the victim. She pulled from his pocket a wallet that, like everything else he owned, appeared well used and ill cared for.
The doorjamb creaked as Carlyle leaned against it. “Any money left in there, Inspector?”
She found his credentials on coffee-stained cardstock that felt soft with age. Werner Thomas Cahill, seventy years old, Doctorate of History. As rare as they were, Malone had never met a historian, but with his disheveled attire and unkempt gray hair, Cahill looked much as she would have expected.
“Any connections?”
“Directorate of Preservation,” Malone said, reading from Cahill’s papers.
“Obviously. Who else can hire historians?”
“T
he Quadrivium.” Malone held up an ID card from Recoletta’s premier university.
Carlyle threw his hands up and turned halfway into the hall as if demonstrating his exasperation to an imaginary audience. “This guy was a couple of blocks from the richest quarter in the city, he worked at two of the top institutions, and yet he lived like a tradesman.”
Malone’s eyes flicked up to the shelves. “Not everyone likes pretty manners and parties.”
Carlyle shivered and tried to cover it by shoving his hands violently into his pockets. “Rich weirdos. You tell me what a history-reading geezer does like. More importantly, tell me when you’re done.” He marched back into the hall, and moments later couch springs sighed in the parlor.
For all of the luxuries Cahill lacked, he’d owned more than a few things that even the Vineyard dwellers would never have, and they all sat on his bookshelf. As she skimmed the spines of the books lining the room, her heart jumped. She raised her lantern and squinted at the shelves. Nestled among the ancient and modern fiction classics were a handful of titles concerned with history, or at least theories about it. Most historical records had been lost or destroyed in the period immediately following the Catastrophe. The Council restricted the serious study of antebellum history, and any archives and accounts were guarded within the vaults of the Directorate of Preservation.
Seeing history books on display sent Malone’s gut roiling. Cahill must have been important to have permission to keep history books at his home. Surely he had permission? Even as she wanted to hide the volumes, to push them deeper into the shelf, she caught her hand creeping toward them, her fingers itching. Perhaps, she thought, they might reveal something about Dr Cahill’s mysterious work. She considered this even as she listened for Carlyle’s return.
Malone stopped herself. Had these books been relevant to the crime, the assassin would have taken them, too. And if they weren’t relevant, then there was no professional reason for her to open them. Fingers tingling in midair, she dropped her hand and stepped back from the shelf. Even a scholar such as Dr Cahill would not keep history books of real danger in his home, and if he did, well, such matters were not among the concerns of the Municipal Police.
She let her gaze wander to the other books on the shelves. Beside and beneath their titles were familiar, reassuring words: Novel. The Collected Poetry of…Essays and Anecdotes. Short Stories. These were the kinds of books that appeared in schoolhouses, public libraries, and the salons of the cultured. Censorship didn’t feel as bad when you kept the sweetness and light. History and the darker vignettes, on the other hand, remained under the lock and key of trusted authority, like some virulent epidemic. Above all, such powers feared releasing into the air whatever secrets had nearly destroyed the world so many centuries ago.
Malone turned her back to the bookshelves. For all her searching, Cahill’s desk was still empty, and she had no way yet of knowing what had filled it a few hours before. Carlyle snored in the next room. It was nearly seven when she blew out the candle and returned to the parlor.
She coughed, and Carlyle jerked awake.
“What now?” he said.
“I go back to the station.”
“And me?”
“You wait here for the morgue cart.” Malone headed back to the elevator.
Sunlight barely reached the elevator shaft from the veranda’s tall windows above. As Malone stepped into the cage, she noticed a faint glimmer between her feet. She reached between the bars of the bottom grating and dug into a crumbling line of mortar in the stone flooring, retrieving a layer of grime and a small key just before the elevator began its ascent. As Malone turned the key between her fingers, her mind spun in quick, concentric circles.
Upon reaching the surface, she tested the key on the gate and found a match. Malone noticed for the second time that the inside of the building was clean, with all of the broken glass on the steps and the avenue just outside. She tucked the key into her pocket, reached her conclusion, and made her way to the station downtown.
***
Halfway across the city, in more modest quarters, warm, astringent water licked at Jane Lin’s elbows as she searched the washbasin. One black pearl button the size of her thumbnail; that was all she needed to save her job. Work with the whitenails would dry up if word got out that she was a butterfingers, or, worse, a thief.
A wool frock coat hung against the opposite wall, its empty buttonhole glaring back at her. She had steamed it to crisp perfection and spot-cleaned it with a toothbrush, yet this somehow made the button’s absence even more conspicuous. Now, as she picked through the linen garments in the basin with exaggerated delicacy, trying to find a small, dark button amidst the soapsuds felt like trying to find a thimble on a crowded railcar. Assuming it was there at all.
A knock at the door brought her to her feet with a swift, startled jump. Wiping her hands on the front of her skirt like a kitchen thief, she unlatched the door for a dour, balding man whose expression suggested that he had just caught a whiff of something awful.
“Mr Fredrick Anders?” he said, his eyes fixed on some point over her head.
“Jane Lin, actually,” she said, suddenly conscious of her damp, wrinkled skirt and the drooping bun into which she had tied her dark hair. She straightened, shifting to block his view of the coat hanging against the far wall. “Mr Anders lives one over. Number 2C.”
The impeccably dressed man twitched, appearing unaccustomed to anything like a rebuff. “Thank you,” he managed. Jane shut the door and turned back to the washbasin in the middle of the floor, where it sat ringed by puddles and suds. She began twirling the clothes inside with a pronged wooden dolly, finally accepting that the priceless button, wherever it might be, wasn’t in the basin.
About ninety seconds later came another knock, this one rapid and irregular. Before she could start toward the door, a tall, wiry man bounded in without preamble.
“Jane, what on earth are you doing? Haven’t you heard?” he said, breathless. “There’s been a murder!”
The way he said it, as if announcing a grotesque exhibit at a street fair, surprised her more than what he said. “A what?” The dolly’s wooden handle slipped from her fingers. “When, Freddie? And where?”
“Only last night,” he said, a little calmer, “just outside of the Vineyard.” His eyes twinkled as he waited for her reaction.
“That’s impossible. How…”
“No one knows yet, but trust me, you’ll be the first to know when I get word.”
Jane mopped a few stray locks away from her forehead. Leaning against the washbasin, the dolly suddenly looked sharp and sinister. “Do you know who died?”
“The Municipals aren’t saying much, but it looks like some shriveled government scholar was choked with his own mothballs.”
“That’s terrible, Freddie.” She frowned, pausing for decency before the necessary follow up. “Did you get the assignment?”
His buoyant expression fell, and he ruffled his sandy-brown hair with one hand. “Blocked again by Chiang, the editor with a vengeance.” He balled a wad of paper from his pocket and flicked it through an imaginary target and into the fireplace behind Jane. “Or maybe just out-bribed by Burgevich. But I will be covering the grand society ball next week! Take a look at this pair of shoe-shiners.” His green eyes sparkled again as he brandished two sheets of vellum adorned with flowing calligraphy.
“Sounds like one of your editors likes you.” Jane rubbed the smooth material between thumb and forefinger. “Hardly seems fair that those go to you, though. I’m in that part of town every day of the week.” Though short of a miracle, that would soon change.
Fredrick beamed again as Jane grabbed the dolly and returned to her wash. “One of the many perks of career journalism. That’s actually what I came by to tell you.” He rolled the sheets and tucked them back into his coat. “That, and to invite you along, of course.”
Jane stopped mid-press, her fingers tight around the handle. “That�
�s very kind,” she said.
Fredrick laughed. “You know me, I’m not doing it to be kind. I can’t suffer through all those speeches on my own.” He watched her slow, methodical strokes in the basin. “Don’t tell me you already have plans.”
She stared into the filmy water. “Of course not.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll clean up fine in whatever you put together.”
Jane straightened her back and rested a hand on her hip. “Freddie, I fix clothes for a living. That’s the least of my worries.”
“Then whatever the hell is it?” Freddie had circled around her and now stood just a few feet from the damaged frock coat.
Jane’s eyes flicked from the coat to Freddie. “No offense, but you. My clients will be there. And I’ll be there with you, a reporter. I don’t want to give any of them the wrong idea.” It was true, and it was easier to explain than the missing pearl. The last thing she wanted right now was to add Fredrick’s hysteria to her own worries.
Fredrick rocked forward and threw his head back. “Oh, Jane, you and your precious reputation.”
“And my precious commissions.”
Fredrick held up his hands, but his voice carried the tone of an argument already won. “Look, no snooping at the party. Just straight reporting. Besides, most of your clients don’t even know what you look like. Unless all the Vineyard housemaids are there, your good name and your good jobs will be fine.”
Jane looked down at the linens, unwilling to refute him. “It would be nice to visit the Vineyard without my laundry cart.”
“Not to mention without looking like a servant.”
“I’m not a servant,” she said in a quick monotone. Not yet, anyway. “But I’d like to see whitenails at one of their fancy parties, with all their coattails and ball gowns and gentility.” Washing fine clothes for Recoletta’s upper crust engendered the desire to see people actually wear them.