CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Aristide could have humbled himself, to find out from Lillian where they were holding Cyril, and how to go about visiting. But that was asking quite a bit after their last interaction. After their last series of interactions.
So he got Daoud to do it for him.
This won him no admiration; in fact it earned him scorn, but that was nothing new. And gin repelled scorn like wax did water.
“The city jail,” said Daoud, when he got off the telephone. Aristide had heard Jinadh’s voice on the other end, and from what little of the quick and colloquial Porashtu he could catch, the conversation had been at least partly social. “Apparently Cordelia’s people caused some trouble at the nearest appropriate prison.”
“And who do I have to bribe to get in?”
“You are on the approved list already.”
That tripped him up. “Really? Why?”
Daoud shrugged, and it was not exactly all ignorance; at least one quarter had been given over to sarcasm. “Who knows. I certainly would not want you visiting me in prison.”
“That’s because you’ve never been.”
“Have you?”
Aristide had nothing to offer against that. He had never been caught. The thought of it curled his toes, and he drew his feet up onto the sofa. Drafts had penetrated even the steam-heated atmosphere of Sykes House, which for all its bad food and harassed service had at least started out pleasantly warm.
“Twist that valve, will you?” he asked Daoud, burrowing more deeply into the white fox collar of his dressing gown. “It’s freezing in here.”
Daoud glared at him, but knelt on the floor to do as he was asked. His flannel trousers, loose when standing, pulled tight across his rear. While he was facing the radiator, rather than Aristide, he asked, “When do you plan to go?”
“This afternoon, I suppose.”
“Will you want me?”
He heard it first as a carnal question, depressingly practical and resigned: a courtesan’s question to his keeper. It was only after Daoud stood, brushed his hands together, and repeated his question that Aristide realized he meant at the prison, as a secretary. He could have hit himself.
“No,” he said, and it was true on both counts. Shame had killed whatever erotic interest the spectacle of tight trousers had aroused. Lady’s name, how had he burrowed so far down into the midden? They had started fresh, at first: arriving in Liso as partners in a venture, nothing more. It was only repeated, demoralizing failure that had pushed Aristide back into something he had always known wasn’t good for either of them, and of which he felt faintly ashamed. Now it was less the affair he felt ashamed of than himself.
“Didi,” he said.
“Hm?” Having moved on from the radiator to neatening the piles of paper on Aristide’s desk, Daoud glanced up from a drift of letters in need of replies. He seemed distracted, beard due for a trim, utterly unaware of Aristide’s assumption and subsequent disgust. “You needed something else?”
“No,” said Aristide. “No, I only … oh, never mind.”
Looking skeptical, Daoud turned back to tidying.
“What will you do?” asked Aristide, the question out of him before he had time to consider it. Gin would do that, as well.
“Pay bills,” Daoud said. “Balance the accounts. Perhaps pick up the dry cleaning, if it does not snow. The walk would be nice.”
“No, not … not while I’m out. I mean, after…” Aristide waved a vague hand and felt his cheeks grow warm with frustration and embarrassment.
Straightening from his busywork, Daoud stared. “After what, Aristide?”
The vague hand fell into his lap, shot down like a game bird.
“No, I am curious. After what? This tribunal Frye has promised? After whatever your next scheme may be? What am I waiting for, Aristide? And will it ever happen?”
Aristide felt cool air on his tongue, and realized that his mouth was open. No words were forthcoming. He wasn’t sure Daoud wanted answers, really. His questions had grown introspective at the end.
As if he had realized this, Daoud shook his head. The motion faded into a drop of the chin, a glance at his watch, and a look out the window. “Perhaps I will go to the cleaner’s now,” he said. “While the weather is still good.”
* * *
“Gentleman caller for you,” said the warden, slouching against the bars of Cyril’s cell. “Hope you wore your lacey things today.”
“I save those for you, Markert,” said Cyril, sitting up. The mattress hadn’t gotten any better, but he’d slept on worse. That didn’t mean he liked it.
He didn’t ask who the gentleman was; there was only one it might have been. Stephen was on the list, but he’d likely only come with his mother, and Markert would hardly call him a gentleman.
Cyril lifted a hand to smooth his hair. The last shear he’d had in the jungle had grown out slowly, but it had grown, and without the guiding hand of a barber. Now it had a tendency to flop in his eyes and stick out at strange angles. There was nothing in the cell he could use as a looking glass—the windows were too high, and they certainly hadn’t given him a mirror.
As if it mattered. Hand-combing his uneven mop wasn’t going to make him look any less a prisoner.
Maybe he would ask Rinko about getting cleaned up a little before they hauled him into a courtroom. When she came next—was that tomorrow? Would he have asked her sooner if he expected to get gentleman callers?
“Let’s go,” said Markert, banging his truncheon on the bars. So Cyril went.
A fine scrim of smoke already hung in the still air of the visiting room. Its source was a slim turquoise straight, gold-banded, held in Ari’s kid-gloved hand. Purple kid, too: the color of heavy red wine. Under the smoke, Cyril smelled a faint trace of white flowers and an animalic base. Had Padgett and Sons made it through and carried on selling perfume? He wondered if any Ospies had been partial to vanilla musk.
Aristide wore a mink coat with the collar turned up, fur thick enough to sink into. A mauve ascot embroidered with metallic thread was tucked not-quite-neatly into his open silk collar, and there might have been a touch of rouge on his cheeks.
Even older, out of makeup and offstage, he carried the sweep of the spotlight with him, the echo of applause.
Without breaking eye contact, he took a long drag on the ridiculous straight and said, “We have got to stop meeting like this.”
Cyril dropped into the opposite chair and said, “You never gave me a chance to come see you.”
“You didn’t try very hard to catch me, or I might have.”
“Careful,” said Cyril. “What’s the statute of limitations on … oh, I don’t know, pick something. What didn’t you do?”
“Nothing so bad as you.”
It punctured the soap bubbles of their banter. Aristide looked away first, though he was the one who had said it. Once he’d recovered, he asked, “Would you like a cigarette?”
“More than anything. Even if they are … what, green?”
“There are pink ones, too. Or purple, if you’d rather.” Aristide flipped his case open.
“Hey,” said Markert.
“Relax,” said Aristide. “I’ve paid your little sop, and I mean to get something out of it. Stand there if you must, but please be silent.”
Cyril took a straight, and as Aristide lit it for him he glanced at Markert to see how he’d taken that drubbing. Not well; he’d gone a shade of purple not so different from Aristide’s ascot.
“Thanks,” said Cyril, knowing it wouldn’t go easy with him later. “He never does that for me.”
“And it’s rubbing off, I see. You’re much chattier now than you were at Solstice.”
That brought him up short, like looking down midway across a chasm. To be reminded he was … making conversation? Flirting? It spiked him where he stood.
“Dear, dear,” said Aristide. “Hit a sore spot, have I?”
Cy
ril inhaled smoke and let it sit too long, so that he was dizzy when he said, “Maybe I’ve been a little lonely.”
“With me to keep you company?” asked Markert. “Sure you have.”
Rage looked better on Aristide now than it ever had, and it had always looked good. A length of iron rod rose up his spine, and his chin flicked to a haughty angle that made light flash across his spectacles. One stiff kid-gloved finger pointed at the door. In withering tones he said, “Get out. And send someone who’s less inclined to be snotty.”
After a piano wire pause, to Cyril’s great surprise, Markert did as he was told. There was a brief exchange with someone in the office—with the door open and his eyes still on Aristide and Cyril—and then he traded places with his colleague Dorfner, a taciturn man who appeared perpetually worried.
How much money had Aristide parted with, on his way in? And what did he have to say, that was worth such a sum?
“Why don’t you stutter anymore?” asked Cyril, because it was an easier question than any others banging around inside his skull.
Aristide gave him a curious look that said he understood exactly the tactic Cyril had just deployed. “I am well aware that with increasing age comes the potential for absurdity. Therefore, I have … dampened my affectations, somewhat. I shouldn’t like to be taken for a clown.” Despite the rouge and pastel cigarettes, he said it without irony. There was none to be had: His presence did not admit of it.
“It never made you sound like that. You were never that.”
Aristide shrugged: a liquid motion beneath his mink. “It was my character, then.”
“I always liked it.”
“I know you did. But do you see a stage?”
“You never needed a stage,” said Cyril. “Would you do it for me now?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What do you want me to say?”
If it was an opening, it was one he didn’t know how to take. “A bit of one of your routines, maybe. From the Bee.”
It was the wrong thing. “Cyril, I—”
But suddenly, presented with this glittering apparition from a life he’d left far behind, that was what he desperately wanted. A moment of escape; thirty seconds of the past. “They’re going to hang me, Ari. Tell me one of your rotten jokes.”
“They aren’t going to hang you.” He suddenly looked tired. “Fraud isn’t a capital offense.”
Cyril tapped his straight into the ashtray at the center of the table. Another luxury Aristide’s cash had bought. “We both know exactly why I’m here.”
It put a peculiar look on Ari’s face that piqued Cyril’s curiosity. An atrophied muscle, that, and it ached like one. “Ari?”
But he shook the question off, and shed the strange expression that had crept across his face. “I read an interview with your attorney,” he said. “In which she wondered why the nation felt the need to punish a man who already suffered agonies of guilt every waking day. Is that true?”
Cyril flicked his burnt-down straight into the ashtray and sat back, arms crossed. “What do you think?”
There was a pause before he said, “I hardly know.” And then another. “Lillian says you don’t want to be saved.”
“If Frye’s judges don’t put me on the scaffold, it’ll be at least twenty-five years. Probably life. Do you think that’s what they want from me?” He waved a hand as if to indicate a mob of angry citizens. “They don’t want a gavel and a sentence. They want a corpse.”
“And you want to give them one.”
“They deserve it. And I don’t want to spend my life in prison.” He said it casually, but perhaps that was the very reason Aristide reacted as he did.
“This is nothing but a lazy suicide,” he snarled, grinding his cigarette savagely into the tray. “You’ll ruin your sister, and you’ll ruin me. Why don’t you save us all the trouble and expense and end it now?”
Cyril looked up, shocked at Ari’s anger, his suggestion. “Don’t think I haven’t stood on that ledge a thousand times.”
“Then why haven’t you jumped?” And now Cyril could hear it, underneath the fury: pain, and pleading. “Surely if you haven’t killed yourself by now, you have some reason. What’s kept you from pulling that trigger?”
Not much. Not nearly enough. And yet, “I don’t get that luxury. I owe too much. If they hang me, at least my death’s a kind of payment.”
“Swineshit. Who’s better off once you’re at the end of that rope? This whole circus isn’t selfless; it’s selfish. You can’t even do the deed yourself.”
Something in him, which had been bending beneath a great weight for too long, finally snapped. He stood so suddenly his chair fell backward. “Would you rather I did? Do you want me to?”
Dorfner was shouting, had his hands on Cyril’s arms. When had he crossed the room? Cyril let himself be pressed roughly back into his seat.
“Thank you,” said Aristide. “That’s enough.”
Dorfner retreated to his corner.
“Of course not.” Ari’s fists were tight enough that the leather of his gloves puckered at the joints. He pressed them hard against the ugly yellow tabletop and addressed them solely when he spoke. “But you’re making the people who love you pay to see you killed.”
The pieces of Cyril’s pride fell to the ground, hardly clattering, and he sagged against the sharp metal frame of his chair.
Aristide rose, gathering his mink about him. “Perhaps I should go.”
It took too long for Cyril to work out what he ought to say, and in the end he just pushed out whatever words were on top, to keep Aristide from walking out the door. “I knew you were alive.”
He didn’t come back to his chair, or turn. Or even speak. But neither did he leave.
“I saw you in a newspaper,” said Cyril, and it sounded like begging. “Probably a month after it went to print, but I saw your face. I knew you were alive.”
Silence, still.
“You want to know why I never looked for you?” He paused but got no answer, and so blundered ahead. “I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed?” Aristide’s voice was tight as a trip wire.
“Of course,” said Cyril. “You got out, you made your way. In the photo, you looked so … How could I come to you, after all I did? After I—stones.” He let his head drop, so his fist in his own hair was the only thing that held his face off the table. “I made such a mess of things.” The words strangled on unshed tears.
“You should have known better.”
It stung enough that Cyril pulled himself together and looked up, grateful for his anger. “Oh? You’d have wanted me? Even then, crawling back and cringing?”
A light kindled in the depths of Aristide’s eyes, an ember catching a draft. “Of course,” he said, and even his voice had grown warmer. “Haven’t I always liked you on your knees?”
Whatever filled Cyril’s heart, it hurt like blood rushing past a loosened tourniquet.
Higata had told him that his life was his punishment. That it wasn’t worth their time to kill him because he’d suffer a thousand times worse if he lived. But now he saw the truth of it. The instant before death would be worse than another thirty, forty, fifty years of guilt because in that instant an infinity of failures would unfurl before him: all the things he might have done and would now never do. All the opportunities to do better that he would turn away, in paying a symbolic price for past wrongdoing.
If he lived, at least he could limit his errors to the logical progression of his own decisions. And if he was lucky, temper them with a success or two. If he was very, very lucky, he could make amends.
Cordelia was dead, put up on a plaque and made into a symbol. He could die and be the same: her opposite number, like Ari used to be onstage. Pathetic traitor to her keen and clever saint. But if he lived …
He could not fix all the wrong that he had done; too many of those doors were shut. But this one—the one that led to Aristide—might at least stand ajar.
A shame
that it was far too late to see what lay on the other side.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The bombing of a warehouse full of merchandise was, of course, cause for a company meeting.
Cross being in Liso, she sent a telegram that Aristide and Jamila should handle things and arrange a radio call only if necessary.
So although he had many other things on his mind—Cyril looked sick in prison greens; Cyril had lost weight he could ill afford; as soon as the election was over, Cyril would become a spectacle and then a corpse—Aristide found himself climbing out of a cab with Daoud at the unremarkable offices of Cross-Costa Imports once again.
«You are going to tell her what I did,» said Aristide, shoulders hunched more in misery than against the wind.
«Of course I am.» Daoud went ahead of him, and didn’t hold the door.
Jamila welcomed them with open arms, jollier than anyone Aristide had interacted with in the recent past. She wore a smile and a napkin tucked into her collar. A paper plate of flatbread and curried peanut lamb sat steaming on her desk.
“Boys!” she said, slapping the blotter on either side of her lunch. The two clerks jumped, one of them starting so violently he struck the carriage return. “Have a seat. You two—” this to the clerks, “—stroll off.”
They ran like startled hares.
“You are in a very good mood, considering.” Daoud sat sulkily across from her.
She laughed. «Respected little brother—» there was an ironic tinge to the diminutive Porashtu honorific “—this may look bad, but the gods saw fit to gift us with a blessing called insurance.” She scooped up a bite of curry and, still chewing, said, “The payout’s the value of the goods we shipped on paper, which I was clever enough to pitch high. Not because I expected a disaster, see, but because I always like to be prepared. And!” She finally swallowed, then paused for a belch. “It’s risk-free now. No tar sitting around for any hounds to find. No moving it, no distribution. A pain for all the folk who would have made money on it selling, but for us? It doesn’t hurt near as bad as it looks.”
Amnesty Page 23