Lillian could have given her a hint. Or several.
Why didn’t they cover the rallies at the university? When she woke the next morning she could hear them from the house. Hordes of students backing Saeger, screaming their lungs out over the accusations.
Of course, as Jinadh would remind her: there were more than ten pen-fencers in the city of Amberlough. The ones clustered outside the door of Coral Street just happened to have drawn her straw in that week’s editorial meeting.
The other reason they’d come back to the city—the obvious reason—was that Cyril had been locked away just at the edge of town. Shearan-Sterner Penitentiary, south of the city limits, would have been the more appropriate option, but it had been one of the Catwalk’s later targets. They’d steered clear of the cell blocks and mainly taken out the administrative wing. Denied bail but not yet arraigned, Cyril was being kept in the city jail attached to the Department of Corrections, and looked likely to remain there for some time.
So when Lillian awoke in the city to the sound of not-so-distant rhythmic chanting, her first order of business was to ring up Rinko Higata about the possibility of seeing her brother in prison.
* * *
In the badly lit visiting room, its walls painted an unattractive shade of green, Cyril looked not just pale but sick. She sat across from him and asked, “Are you all right? Your color isn’t good.”
He brushed her concern away with a wave of his hand. The knuckles were chapped. It was cold even here; the cells likely weren’t much better.
“Do you have any cigarettes?” he asked.
She turned to the guard who lurked in the corner and lifted her shoulders in a beseeching shrug. He rolled his eyes and looked pointedly in the other direction, so she opened the case she didn’t often use and picked two straights from inside of it. One of them, she supposed, could have secreted a lock pick, but Cyril leaned in for her to light his rather than stashing it on his person.
As if he could—he had no pockets now to fill with odds and ends. Only a drab green smock and loose trousers. He hadn’t shaved since his arrest, and the skin below his eyes hung empty and bruised as if something had drained from beneath it.
“We’ll need to clean you up a bit before your arraignment,” she said.
That got a laugh out of him, smoky and bitter. “I don’t think it’ll do much good.”
“It will make me feel better,” she said. “Will you at least consider that?”
He looked around for somewhere to tap off the spent end of his straight. Lillian, momentarily at a loss, fished a handkerchief from her pocket just in time. A spray of ash fell across the linen, obscuring the monogram and freckling the painted steel tabletop.
“Sorry,” he said, touching the rolled hem of the hankie. It put their hands close together. She almost covered his with her own.
“Do you think there’s going to be an arraignment?” he asked. “Or a trial? Or is this just the prelude to the wall and the squad and a hole through my head?”
She fought the urge to cover her mouth, controlling her nausea by force of will. “You were arrested for fraud, Cyril. That’s hardly a cause for summary execution.”
“No,” he said. “But treason might be. And who knows what other charges they’ll heap on when we get to the real reason I’m in here. You know the fraud is an excuse, Lil.”
“Do they let you read the news?”
“A day or two late,” he said. “But I’m keen enough to catch a whiff when something smells off.”
She wanted to tell him whose fault it really was: his arrest, the bombing. She wanted him to hate Makricosta as much as she did. But the guard in the corner had two ears and a mouth, and Lillian’s profession had taught her to be wary of spreading a story without intense analysis of the consequences. Instinct told her the effect would be destabilizing. She thought of the chanting students, Saeger’s forceful voice through the wireless, Frye’s newly revealed ruthlessness. Bombs, riots, anarchy.
Enough chasms had opened up beneath her lately; she needed solid earth to stand on or she’d never get anywhere she wanted to be.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. It could have meant any number of things, but Cyril only heard one.
“I think you’ve done about as much as you can. The smart thing would be to cut me loose like a dragging anchor.”
But anchors couldn’t drown. People could. “I’m already a traitor in my own right. By some folk’s definitions, anyway. Cutting you loose won’t change the choices I made.”
“You had Stephen,” he said. “You couldn’t have made a different choice. I could have.”
There had come a point in her life—some time during university, or perhaps just after graduation—when Cyril began to try her patience, as he had her parents’. His irrational passions, his self-obsession, his obstinance. Every conversation she had with him inevitably reached a point of exasperation. Neither time nor distance nor death nor resurrection made a difference.
Maybe she didn’t understand what he had been through. Maybe she never would. But neither would he understand what she had done or what it had cost her. “Why are the rest of us held to such a lower standard?” she demanded. “Why are you special?”
“What did I have to lose? Who would have suffered if I had said no? You all thought I was dead; I just would have gone sooner, and ruined less.”
“You aren’t Caleb Acherby,” she said, and saw the guard in the corner come to attention: either at the name, or at her tone of voice, which had gone acidic with vexation. “You did something reprehensible, yes, but Cyril … who didn’t?”
A beat, a heavy pause. Lillian knew what he was going to say half a breath before he said it.
“Cordelia.”
“A political martyr?” she asked. “The woman who toppled the Ospies? That’s a high bar to set for yourself.”
When he looked up from the ash on the tabletop, his eyes were bleak. “Is it? She was a stripper, Lillian. I don’t know if she ever finished school. As far as I know she didn’t own stockings. And she wore this awful rosewater perfume…” His voice wobbled, precarious. “But she didn’t fall in line, which is more than either of us can say.”
“I hardly think you can judge someone’s character by their stockings,” said Lillian. “Or lack thereof.”
“No,” said Cyril. “I guess you can’t.” He took a long drag on his straight, staring at the far wall as he inhaled.
The resultant cloud of smoke he sent over his shoulder, toward the guard, who cleared his throat and gestured at the clock with his truncheon. “Time’s nearly gone.”
“I’ll try to come again this week.” Lillian stood from the table.
Cyril gave no indication of having heard her. Smoke curled from his crooked nose. “How did she die?” he asked, still watching the green-painted brick.
“Door-to-door fighting.” Lillian looked down at her hands, watched their clasped stillness and imagined making fists. Then she looked up again, so she could deliver it professionally. “They tried to kill her quietly and she turned it into a brawl.”
When Cyril smiled, his dry lips split. “Yes. That sounds about right.”
* * *
Lillian let herself stop at Grafton’s before she went home. No one would grudge her a drink, after that. Surely.
The place was a Staunton Street institution. When her father was in the corps, and when he was at home, it was where he did his drinking and a fair amount of his diplomacy. There was no sign on the door—how anyone knew to call it Grafton’s was a mystery. Perhaps that wasn’t even its name. She didn’t know what it had been under the Ospies, but it was hardly worse for the wear. Unlike some things.
She was a little leery, going in, but the clientele was nothing if not discreet. If they wanted to judge her, they would do it silently as long as she was within earshot. And anyway, it would hardly be busy at this time. Grafton’s was strictly a lunch and after-hours haunt, and when she arrived the low sky was st
ill the color of white laundry washed accidentally with indigo. The days were growing discernibly longer, just.
Several serious drinkers in suits had their heads together over fans of paper spread where they could catch the last of the winter light through the large front windows. One woman, alone on a leather sofa, read an official-looking folio. Half a soggy sandwich sat forgotten in front of her. The place wasn’t well known for its food, but it often did in a pinch for the busiest residents of Embassy Row.
Homesickness gripped Lillian like a seizure. Absurd. She was less than half a mile from the house where she’d spent half her childhood. But suddenly Grafton’s seemed like the only thing that hadn’t changed beyond recognition. Lillian turned slowly to drink it in, heart wrung tight as a dish towel.
In the quiet, to the rhythm of a waltz on the wireless, the bartender polished glasses with a white cloth. Just past her working elbow, slouched over a martini, was Aristide Makricosta.
Lillian hadn’t seen him since he left Damesfort after Solstice, hadn’t spoken to him since she let the receiver fall back into its cradle still buzzing with his fury. Had hardly given him a second thought, except to curse his name each night before she went to bed, for bringing her brother back to Gedda wrapped in a nice neat cashmere package for the press and everyone to tear apart.
She paused inside the doorway, the bell still ringing behind her. No one looked up except the bartender, who gestured with the glass in her hand, leaving the empty seats to Lillian’s discretion.
She could choose any one of them: the small round table in the front window, with its padded bench seat and two curly stools. The armchair in the back corner, under a commercial calendar turned to a lurid advertisement for shirt collars. The straight-backed chair by the radio would afford her a good chance to listen to any news bulletins, if they came on. Even knowing she would hear nothing good, she still followed along obsessively. The hill up from habits, as Porachins said, was slippery.
There were many seats she could choose that were not next to Makricosta. But like Grafton’s, he was a relic. A piece of the world the rest of them had lost or been torn from. And their last conversation had been rudely interrupted by a bombing. So she sat down beside him and ordered an aquavit with vermouth.
“Aristide,” she said. “Trying to insinuate yourself into international politics again?”
He jumped when she spoke, but recovered quickly. “Good afternoon, Lillian.” The words bled into one another, and she realized he was drunker than he appeared at first glance.
“Really,” she said. “What are you doing drinking at Grafton’s?”
“It’s close to my hotel,” he said, and finished what was left in his glass. “I didn’t know it was your spot. I didn’t even know you were in town.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “My spot, I mean. Just near my house.” She hadn’t realized he was in the neighborhood. But then, had she ever asked where he was staying? She had been juggling so much, perhaps that particular piece of courtesy had fallen by the wayside.
“I’m surprised you’re speaking to me.” He winced, and pushed his empty glass away.
“If I weren’t speaking to you, how would I express my disappointment?” She sipped her cocktail without dropping her gaze. “I’ve just been to see Cyril.”
He closed his eyes, as if in pain. “I deserve your twisting that knife.”
“You’re lucky I don’t stick a real one in you,” she said, and heard that she was dangerously close to losing her control. She must be tired, if she hadn’t caught herself before speaking. “Cyril’s lawyer says I ought to be ready for a warrant. They’re looking for that passport. The one you said was—”
“And are they going to find it?”
She arranged her expression into a flawless mask and delivered the scripted line. “I never saw the thing. They’re welcome to search the house. Both houses. For all I know, he burned it.”
In fact, the pile of charred odds and ends in the hearth of the daisy room had not contained the remains of Cyril’s passport. The police and the federal investigators were welcome to sift through it if they liked, along with every other hearth and the spaces under the flagstones and floorboards. Their hopes would go unfulfilled. A family like the DePauls knew how to hide a safe.
Confusion crept into the wrinkle between Aristide’s eyebrows, followed by dawning realization. She watched, fascination almost overtaking anger. In their acquaintance, she had come to know him as a man whose internal workings were largely hidden: a meticulously constructed machine beneath a shining enamel cover. She had never had the opportunity to witness his mechanism at work.
How long had he been sitting at this bar?
Her anger wasn’t exactly doused by pity, but rather temporarily displaced by it. “You shouldn’t drink so much.”
“You needn’t scold me.” He lifted his empty glass, peered into it, and then put it back down on the copper bar with enough inept force she worried the stem might snap. “Daoud’s done enough of that.”
“How is he?” she asked. “Well, I hope.”
Aristide put his face into the tripod of his first two fingertips and thumb. “Queen’s cunt. Who knows?” Then, lifting his head and letting it swing toward her, he saw the abandoned aquavit. “Are you going to drink that?”
She swallowed the rest of it in one go and said, “Why don’t I walk you home?”
* * *
It was getting dark now, and bitterly cold. They headed west on Staunton, past gated chanceries with their colors struck for the evening. Their shoes crunched on ice pockmarked by scattered salt. Lights still burned in the buildings, many of them stately old homes that now housed diplomatic missions. Representatives of many nations were exiting to head for home, all swaddled into uniformity by mufflers, heavy coats, and hats pulled low against the wind. Naked tree branches rattled together over the quiet street. Saeger’s mobs of angry supporters had not penetrated this deep into the Central City’s heart.
When they had passed through a small gaggle of bundled-up diplomats and had the sidewalk to themselves, Lillian said, “I don’t suppose you have any other plans in your pockets?”
Aristide, sobered somewhat by the cold, still had to pick his way carefully between icy patches. Lillian found herself waiting for him to catch up before he answered. “None at present, no. Are you pleased?”
She let it lie, because she wasn’t sure of her honest answer, nor of her ability to answer dishonestly.
“I was sure it would work,” he said. Then, more quietly, “I wanted it to work.”
“And you’ve always gotten what you set after,” she said, shaking her head. “How old are you?”
He lifted his chin with affronted dignity that verged on satire.
“Fifty?” she asked, unaffected. “Fifty-five? It’s long past time you learned this lesson. Your hair is gray. Don’t act like a child.”
He stared at her, cold as the wind slicing through her coat, then pushed past. Surprised, she let him have a yard or two.
“I’m not the one acting like a child.” He threw the words over his shoulder, and she hurried over the treacherous pavement.
“Please don’t shout,” she said. “The last thing we need is this in the news as well.”
“You’re the fool,” he said, “for imagining anything like acquittal.”
“I’m not; Cyril’s lawyer was explicitly clear on that point. All I want is to keep him off the scaffold.”
Aristide gave a bark of laughter that caught somewhere inside his chest and tore, becoming an ugly cough. When he’d recovered, he said, “And how much is that costing you?”
“I don’t see how that matters.” She had only meant to see him back to his hotel. How had they fallen to fighting again?
“How much?” he demanded. “You only had three rooms open downstairs at that country house of yours. All the others were done up in dust sheets, except where you’d poached furniture. And a handful of people doing jobs fit for a full
set of fingers and toes. Have you sold your land to pay his lawyer? Hired out in Eel Town? Or is that next week, after you indenture your son?”
Sudden fury stuck her to the spot. “How dare you.”
“You’ll be bankrupt before he hangs.”
“Enough!” She put her hands to her ears, and realized they had both gone numb: there was more pressure than sensation against her skin. “Why should I hear this from you? What right do you have? You’ve barely even spoken to him since you dumped him in my lap. Just stuck me with him and then got on with your own life. Your own business. As if that were more important.”
“I put my business in the kitty for him,” said Aristide. “And I lost everything I bet! That was my tar in Frye’s warehouse.”
“And now it’s all of us in a kettle, ready to start shrieking. You gave Frye a scare and you gave Saeger a grievance. Now one of them’s mounted a tight defense and the other’s on the march, and neither of them are primed to play kindly with my brother.” Pettiness, which had been building at a steady boil, overspilled from her now and scorched in the flame of her anger. Why shouldn’t he hear what Cyril had made her listen to? “He doesn’t even want to be saved, Aristide. He’s going to let them put a noose around his neck and happily.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“What? You mean you don’t know? He didn’t say anything to you? Or maybe he hasn’t had a chance, since you haven’t bothered to speak to him since Solstice.”
He stopped walking, but kept his back to her. “Who said anything of the kind?”
The aquavit in her empty stomach made her unpleasantly dizzy, and she put a hand out to the iron fence of the—What? Cestinian embassy?—to keep her feet. “Nobody had to.”
She only caught the slight turn of his head because it put his spectacles at an angle to catch the stoplight up ahead. The signal blinked from red to green, eliding whatever expression he wore beneath the reflection. She didn’t have time to apologize before he stepped into the street and hailed a cab. But she had never intended to, anyway.
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