Aristide tapped the spoon to dislodge a drip. “I said hungry. He doesn’t sound it.”
“The program is only in its first few months, and likely to be taken off the air if he does not make it sell cigarettes, or what you like.”
“Better,” said Aristide, savoring the word before chasing it with gin. “Where can I find him?”
“He broadcasts from the Icepick every night at eight o’clock.”
Aristide glanced at the clock, downed his martini, and called a cab.
The Icepick had been the Keller Tower, not so long ago. Built by an Ospie industrialist eager to bring wireless technology to Gedda. For a long time the only radio listeners had been hobbyists—many of them Ospies—setting up hack networks here and there across the country. Leading up to Acherby’s coup, if you’d had an antenna to catch the signal, the air would have been buzzing with party music and opinions. Of course, Aristide hadn’t. He’d been of the mind that wireless was gauche and lacked artistic merit.
More fool him, for not keeping up with the times.
He was frankly amazed the Icepick had made it through the fall of the regime. Its façade was smeared with graffiti—Catwalk train tracks, filthy slogans, Spotlight Lives—but it still stood, all forty floors of it, complete with gargoyles, scalloped arches, and the eponymous blinking transmitter tower. Keller’s name had been chipped from the arch above the entrance; he had fled the country, and nobody wanted to remember him.
The lobby had not fared as well as the exterior—it smelled of stone dust, fresh paint, and plaster, but showed none of the benefit. Plywood blocked off most of the space, covering whatever ornamentation might have made the entryway more welcoming. A few mismatched folding chairs were strewn unevenly across the marble floor, which was badly pocked and, in one place, shattered.
“Can I help you?” The young man behind the desk was round-faced and plump, much tidier than the rest of the lobby. His dark skin didn’t show a cold-flush, but from his fingerless gloves and the hunch of his shoulders, the initial shock of warmth Aristide had felt upon entering the lobby was only relative compared to the outdoors.
“I’m here to see Laurie Kostos,” he said.
“He’s still broadcasting. But you can go up and wait. Oh, sign the book?”
Aristide did, with a flourish, and headed toward the single lift that stood free of plywood or scaffolding.
The studio was small, which surprised him, but it was also very high in the Icepick, where floor space was at a premium. According to the directory by the lift, the station offices occupied several floors below. The single receptionist looked up when he came in and almost moved to shush him, but just then the red recording light flashed to green. Moments later Kostos came out yawning. The receptionist jumped up and took his hat and coat from a rack in the corner, giving Aristide a curious look as she did.
“Thanks, Marlene,” said Kostos. “Who’s this?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but Aristide cut her off. “My name is Aristide Makri—”
“Oh, Makricosta, yeah. I clock you now. You were at that memorial ceremony a couple of weeks back. I broadcasted live from there, listened to your speech.” He shouldered into his coat. “Pretty good stuff. Who wrote it for you?”
Aristide let that strike him and pass through, ignoring the ache it left behind. “I had hoped you might have a minute to chat.”
“About?” Kostos looped his scarf around his neck. “’Night, Marlene.”
She bobbed a nod, alarmed and sparrowlike, and let them leave without a word.
Before Aristide could answer Kostos’s question, the elevator operator, still parked on their floor, levered the grate open. Kostos stepped on. Aristide did likewise.
As the doors closed them in together, Kostos said, “Does this have to do with DePaul?”
The elevator operator stiffened, fist tightening on the lever.
“No,” said Aristide. Although it was a lie, and the question wasn’t what he had been expecting, he did not hesitate in answering. If it came out a little snappish, could he be blamed?
Kostos put his hands up in surrender, hat facing out like a shield. “Tits, just asking. I did a little digging, when the family started cropping up in the news again. Only reason I could think you’d be here.”
Straightening the bar of one cuff link and sinking into the velvet-upholstered depths of a Central City drawl, Aristide said, “Then your imagination must be sadly lacking.”
They bumped to a stop back in the lobby. The young woman at the lever cranked the grate open. Aristide handed her a tip and waited until she met his eyes, then gave her his best flirtatious smile. Her hostile frown broke into confusion.
Rubbing the brim of his hat thoughtfully with his thumbs, Kostos stayed for a moment in the lift. He already had a canny face—a skeptical squint ironed in by years on whatever beat he’d covered to end up here—but a shadow of suspicion threw its planes and wrinkles into sharp relief. “What’s your angle?”
“I want to talk,” said Aristide. “And I want you to listen.”
“Usually I get to ask a couple of questions somewhere in there.”
“We may get to that,” said Aristide. “Let’s see how the evening treats us.”
* * *
Kostos took him to an all-night automat down the block, dead besides a group of drunken students, two prostitutes in laddered stockings passing a bottle in a paper bag, and a rag man smoking a scanty twist. A matted dog slept underneath his table.
Aristide had seen the seedy side of Amberlough, in his day. But this was something else; no energy crackled underneath the surface of this scene. The ponies kept quiet over their cheap liquor; even their makeup looked dull. Something had gone out in the city’s soul.
The students didn’t laugh, except once, cruelly and too loud. He noticed a few of them wore armbands, or cloths tied around their foreheads: ragged edges and different colors, but all painted or embroidered with the Catwalk’s train tracks. Saeger’s sigil. Had there been a rally in the city this evening? The sound of it hadn’t carried to his hotel.
“I told you it was my treat,” said Aristide as they settled at a table. Kostos had a cup of coffee and a slice of plum cake with an unpleasant sticky sheen on its surface. “And this is what you picked?”
Kostos held out his hand. “I’ll take whatever change you’ve got in your pocket, if you like.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a bribe,” said Aristide. “That comes later, if you’re interested.”
Kostos fished a crumpled pack of brown cigarillos from the pocket of his overcoat, which he had not removed. Under the harsh lights of the automat, he looked gray and old and Aristide almost pitied him before remembering he needed this man’s help. Then, he felt ashamed, and suddenly conscious of his own age and appearance. He forgot, often, that he was no longer in his prime.
“So what do you got for me?” asked Kostos, lighting up. “’Cause if it ain’t your half of the DePaul scoop, it better be rotten good.”
Aristide took his own case from his pocket and picked a straight from beneath the band. “Oh, it’s good. And lucky you; I hear you have to get your numbers up or it’s curtain call.”
Kostos poked a bent fork into his food. “Should have stuck to print. I ain’t got a radio voice. Or at least that’s what they’re telling me. But if Marlowe Flanders can reel folk in with that Eel Town drone of his, why can’t the city settle in with a little first-precinct sass?”
Something shifted behind Aristide’s ribs like broken glass, and it took him a moment to place the pain. It had been some time since he thought of Cordelia as a guttersnipe out of the bad end of the first precinct; that version of her had been eclipsed by the maimed and furious fighter, making arms deals with people she hated, far away from home. Still, her pragmatism had pulled through. And those flat vowels, the tongue held close to the roof of the mouth. The way Kostos spoke, he could have grown up down the street from her.
“How would you lik
e to tear up Emmeline Frye?” asked Aristide.
Kostos put his fork down, still heavy with uneaten cake.
“Not that I presume to understand your personal politics,” Aristide went on, pressing his memories down beneath banter. “But I used to tread the boards. I know a thing or two about drawing a crowd. However you plan to vote, you know this will have folk tuning in.”
Either pushing through his shock or shaking it off, Kostos finally bit into the plum cake. His next words came around a mouthful. “You got something that’ll scratch her?”
“Perhaps.”
He swallowed, wiped his mouth on a cheap paper napkin. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“It’s come to my attention,” said Aristide, “that Frye’s company is moving a large quantity of illegal narcotics, currently stored in one of their warehouses in Amberlough.”
Kostos took a long drag on his cigarillo and then set it on his saucer. Addressing the ash sprayed finely across the cheap ceramic, he said, “That’ll get her tied up in some nasty inquiries. I don’t see it taking her down. That company’s not under her name anymore.”
“No. But the woman whose name it is under is … under Frye, if you take my meaning.”
Kostos raised an eyebrow, then made a lewd gesture with his hand.
“Exactly,” said Aristide.
“You got proof?”
“I can tell you where the drugs are. I’m afraid the incriminating photographs will be up to you.”
Kostos exhaled smoke and licked his teeth, then picked a stray piece of tobacco from his tongue. It sat between his fingers, wet and black, the object of some scrutiny while he considered what Aristide had said. “What do you want for this? ’Cause it seems too easy.”
“I want you to sit on it,” said Aristide. “And not to breathe a word.”
Kostos made an abortive gesture, as though he would speak, before putting a knuckle to his teeth. It was another moment before he said, “You do know that I’m on the wireless, right? That I report the news? That’s why you came to me.”
“Of course,” said Aristide. “But I’m trying to blackmail someone. You’re my insurance policy, and you’re not worth anything if you pay out too soon.”
“How long do I gotta wait?”
“That depends. But I’ll make waiting worth your while. And when you do get to break the story—” because once Cyril was pardoned and they were out of the country, he was more than happy to detonate everything behind them—“I’m sure it will turn out you’ve got a voice for radio after all.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The marshal came to the front door of Damesfort in a fast black car, surprising Cyril. He’d thought they had at least until the election; the provisional government seemed happy to let the new crop of scullers crash through this particular bramble.
Maybe this was one of the candidates, afraid he’d scurry far and fast, making her move a little early to keep him where he sat. No good to make a fuss about hanging a villain if the villain vanished before you had a knot tied in the rope.
They needn’t have bothered. Still, it was almost reassuring to know things in Amberlough still worked like he remembered them: there was the letter of the law and there was the truth, which stood a little to the left of it. Someone was worried he might run while he was still a free agent, so they’d pulled some strings to tie him up ahead of his time. Leverage didn’t stand on ceremony.
Two Carmody police officers had come along for the show. Staring at them Cyril felt as though thirty years of his life had suddenly turned transparent, and through them he could see the officers who’d come up to the house when he and a couple of the village kids set a bucket of paint over the schoolmaster’s door, which not only stained his clothes but got him six stitches.
This encounter would lead to something more serious than scrubbing a doorstep and fetching and carrying for a concussed teacher.
“Those are Jem and Paley,” said Stephen, chin resting on his hands. They were up on the roof, where Cyril had spent several days teaching Stephen surveillance techniques.
“The hounds?” asked Cyril.
“Mm-hm.”
“How do you know them?”
“Slingshotting over the neighbor’s wall. Broke her window. They marched me back home like I was for the—” he stopped, sending a sidelong glance at Cyril. “They’re full of themselves, is all.”
“Small-town terriers,” said Cyril. They were probably hard as kitchen pokers right now, standing at attention to either side of the dour woman below. Proximity to power they had never dreamt of.
He couldn’t see her well from this angle, but she was older, with brown skin and her skull shaved bald so he couldn’t tell if her hair was silver or dark. If it hadn’t been for the pumps and stockings, he’d have sworn Ada Culpepper had come back for him, to see her own justice done.
“They’re here for you,” said Stephen. Cyril ignored the slight wobble on the last word—it might have been a question, to which the answer should have been obvious. If it wasn’t a question, it was something like fear or sorrow, and Cyril did not have the strength for that.
“I suppose I’d better go down then.” Cyril sat straight and brushed snow from his jacket.
Stephen sat as well, and regarded Cyril solemnly, working up to something. Cyril lit a cigarette while he waited, in no hurry to go to his fate.
“It’s stupid,” he said, finally, and in those two words was a world of grief, confusion, anger.
Cyril laughed. “Most things are.”
Stephen stayed on the roof, when he went down.
In the drawing room, the marshal sat in the wingback chair he had once thought of as his mother’s. She couldn’t have known how fitting her choice was. Cyril had received punishments from that chair too many times in his youth. The indiscretions had been somewhat smaller, then.
Her escorts, Jem and Paley, stood to each side of the fireplace. They turned at the sound of the opening door, and snapped to sloppy attention.
Jinadh sat forward on the sofa, back straight, at an angle to the woman who had come to take Cyril away. There was a silver pot between them, on a tray.
“Hello,” said the marshal, setting aside a steaming cup.
Of course Lillian had served her coffee.
His sister made an entrance then, trailing cold air on her open coat. “There you are,” she said. And then, to the marshal: “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Oh, for Queen’s sake,” said Cyril. “Let’s not do polite conversation.”
The marshal’s ironic smile made him almost like her. “Cyril DePaul,” she said, rising from the chair. His mother never had—all her edicts were issued from behind a paper, book, or brief. “I’m Marshal Sadie Yamitad, with the Interim Federal Commission for Justice, and I’m arresting you for willful misrepresentation.”
“What?” It came out before he could stop it. Then he caught up with himself. It was a stand-in charge, of course. They needed to nab him for something if they wanted him locked up tight until these proposed tribunals actually came together, under whoever’s government the people chose.
“Fraud, Mr. DePaul. You entered this country under a false name, with false documentation. That’s a crime, and I’m arresting you.”
“But,” said Lillian, hovering awkwardly between the threshold and the center of the room. “But I thought…?” She had not caught on yet to the utility of this accusation.
Jinadh stood and went to her, a sudden movement in the middle of a still tableau. It seemed to startle her back into herself, or the suit of armor she wore.
“Will handcuffs be necessary, Mr. DePaul?” asked Yamitad. “Or can I trust you to walk quietly to the car?”
He shook his head. “No cuffs.”
“I’ll telephone Rinko,” said Lillian. “And if there’s bail to pay, we’ll—”
“Lil,” he said, and shook his head again.
Her jaw turned stiff and her eyes hardened.
“We’ll do what we can.” He could hear the unspoken end of the sentence, haunting the air between them: Even if you don’t want it.
“Come on,” said Yamitad, angling her head in the direction of the hall. “It’s a long drive and I don’t want to make it in the dark.”
He went where she had indicated, and felt everyone else group behind him for the long trek through the front hall.
That was when they heard the bomb.
* * *
Cyril didn’t remember flinging himself to the ground. He remembered stepping into the hall, and then his cheek pressed against the cold marble floor.
He was the first one up, because when his brain started working again it told him that the bomb had not been large—the sound at least said that much. He could still hear. The front of the house had not been damaged, not that he could tell from inside.
Back on his feet, he ran to the front doors and hauled them open, the marshal shouting after him. Jem and Paley were slow to give chase, no doubt still shaking in their boots.
The car was in one piece, though barely. Its windows and windshield were gone and noxious smoke poured through the openings. The interior had been destroyed. From the state of the front steps, there had not been much shrapnel beyond the broken windows—the stone remained intact, not even pockmarked. It was not a bomb intended to kill or maim. It was a distraction; a point made.
Stephen was very wisely nowhere to be seen.
“Damnation, DePaul,” said Yamitad, coming up behind him. “I thought we said you wouldn’t need hand—mother’s tits.”
A change in the breeze blew cordite smoke in their direction.
“You’re lucky the tank didn’t blow,” he said.
“Officers,” barked Yamitad.
Jem and Paley, so stuffed up at the beginning of this affair, were white-faced and wide-eyed now, scurrying sheepishly up to flank the marshal. When they saw the car, one swore and one just let his jaw drop. Cyril wondered which was Paley and which was Jem.
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