Amnesty

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  “Not for the company,” said Daoud, still slightly sour. “But I think Mr. Makricosta would tell you a different story.”

  “Cheer up, Didi,” said Aristide. “You were never worried about me anyway. If I recall correctly, all your care was for Cross-Costa.”

  Jamila’s good humor began to drain at this exchange, replaced by suspicion. “What are you two jawing about?”

  “That bombing was not Catwalk,” said Daoud. “It was a cover-up.”

  “What for?” She put down the scrap of flatbread still in her hand and leaned in on her elbows.

  “Blackmail,” said Aristide, at the same time Daoud said, “Stupidity.”

  Jamila surveyed each of them, ran a thumb beneath her nose, and then sat back. “All right. Sick it up.”

  “This—” Daoud cast a withering glance in Aristide’s direction. His first few obscenities and aspersions were such technical Porashtu Aristide didn’t catch them, but he latched onto the sentence when Daoud levered himself back into Geddan with “dizzy, prick-led moron threatened Emmeline Frye with exposure. The results being, there is now no more tar to expose.”

  “Please don’t forget she was knocking her second-in-command,” said Aristide, too helpful, verging on sarcastic. “I would never have made such a pedestrian attempt as Daoud describes.”

  “Nor will I forget the cash-out,” said Daoud, rising to meet Aristide’s faux-pleasantry with a steel-edged smile. “All his shares, Jamila. And the money went to Frye’s campaign.”

  “You wanted a puppet,” she said, crossing her arms. “Why?”

  Aristide opened his mouth, but Daoud slipped in before he could say anything.

  “Cyril DePaul, infamous Ospie collaborator, and brand-new resident of some rat-infested jail in Amberlough. Haven’t you heard? Mr. Makricosta does not prefer a safe and comfortable love affair. He prefers to be dragged through shit in the gutters, whipped and spat on all the way.”

  “As you well know,” said Aristide, “I prefer to do the whipping.”

  Jamila sucked on this for a moment, much as she might have a piece of bone with particularly sticky marrow. Then she said, “That sculler on the radio? The one they arrested a while back?”

  Excruciatingly courteous, Aristide opened a hand to Daoud, inviting him to speak first. He was rewarded with festering silence and had to answer for himself. “The very same.”

  “Men.” Jamila shook her head. “Anything to shuck an oyster.”

  Neither of them deigned, or dared, reply.

  * * *

  Daoud rather conspicuously spent the rest of the day running errands. Aristide spent it with a bottle and a book, one of which got more attention than the other.

  He dwelt, drunkenly, on Cyril’s choked-off In the photo, you looked so … What? So happy? He had been numb or miserable for much of his time with Pulan. Forbidding? Surely not.

  But however he had looked, it sent Cyril into the depths of the Lisoan jungle, almost losing him forever. Twice would be too many times.

  Later that evening, rather deep in his cups, he got a call from the desk. Fumbling the receiver, he finally put it against his cheek and said, “Yes?”

  “Sir, there’s a woman here to see you. Jamila Osogurundi. Should I send her up or would you prefer to come down?”

  Aristide looked around the parlor: a room service tray, listlessly picked through. Dirty glasses. Him in a dressing gown open over rumpled, sweaty clothing.

  “I’ll come down,” he said. “Thank you.”

  When he picked his way to the bottom of the grand Y-staircase, freshly if somewhat sloppily dressed, Jamila was waiting in the lobby flipping through a magazine he couldn’t imagine she was interested in.

  “Ms. Osogurundi,” he said. “Will you join me in the bar?”

  She cased him over the magazine, one eyebrow raised. “You sure you need it?”

  He refused to look down at himself, but did wonder if he’d got his buttons off by one, or left his fly open.

  “I will order a coffee,” he said, enunciating carefully.

  Once they were settled in a booth, far at the back, she said, “I had that call with Cross.”

  Aristide reached for his watch, found he had left it upstairs, and said, “It was late in Rarom when we came to you.”

  “I woke her up.”

  Ah. This was not going to go well for him.

  “I ain’t even gonna roll this in sugar for you,” she said. “You’re out. With a boot print on your rear. You sold your shares, so Cross has the say-so, and she says so. I bet they picked her up on every receiver between here and Rarom. You’re lucky our insurance paid out, or she might be on her way across the ocean with a dull knife and some pliers.”

  Aristide sipped his coffee. Still too hot.

  “I don’t think she’d mind if you left town.” Jamila went on. “Maybe Gedda. Go somewhere slow and sit there quiet for a while, out of mind. She says, it’s about time you retired from the life.”

  “Does she really?”

  Jamila had never struck him as a squirmer, but she came close. “Qassan’s got an open invitation to stay on,” she said. “He’s a good worker. But if you want to take him with you…”

  His cup snapped back into the saucer with too much force. “I think we both know the answer to that question.”

  “Right.” Jamila wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “If that’s all—” he began, rising from his seat.

  But she shook her head. “Hang on, hang on. Listen.”

  “If it’s about Daoud, I’d rather put a hatpin through my ear.”

  He saw her press down annoyance and gather herself overtop of it. “No,” she said. “Sit back down.”

  “Please?”

  “Damnation, Makricosta, I’m trying to do you a good one and you’re making me regret it.”

  Slowly, he lowered himself back into the booth. “How so?”

  “How are you making me regret it? I don’t got enough fingers.”

  “Jamila.”

  She sighed heavily, dropping her shoulders and head into a weary slouch as though he’d placed a great burden on her. He thought this a trifle dramatic, as she was the one who had volunteered the favor. But he kept his mouth shut lest the situation escalate further into farce.

  “This muff of yours they got in lockup,” she said, voice low enough he had to lean in. “I asked around.”

  “Whom did you ask?” he asked. “And what about?”

  “The kind of folk with names you don’t just throw like seed,” she said. “My folk. You ought to know; I hear you used to have the same kind of people yourself, back then. When you caused the right kind of trouble.”

  Under the table, his swollen hands made aching fists.

  “They’re taking him to the courthouse in a couple days. Dunno what for; my man ain’t a lawyer. Point is, he knows when the transport leaves and he knows what route it takes.”

  The hairs on the back of Aristide’s neck prickled as they rose.

  “Now normally,” Jamila went on, “you’d be sunk—they’d take Station Way straight through, under the Queen’s eyes and everybody else’s. But there’s a big patch of trolley line still busted up where the Catwalk blew the Capitol transfer—where Armament meets Station. Concrete barriers, blocked-off intersections. They’ve got to go around.”

  Of course. He remembered the same situation on Temple Street, his cabbie cursing the drawn-out construction project.

  “I ain’t advocating anything, understand?” Jamila pulled out her billfold and thumbed thoughtfully through the cash therein. “Just saying, if you’re on your way out of Amberlough anyhow…” Licking her thumb, she peeled a bill from the clip and set it on the table by her empty beer glass. “That ought to cover yours and mine.”

  Faintly, he said, “They’ll charge it to the room.”

  Jamila smiled, like she knew what he was thinking. “I didn’t want to sack you and then make you pay.”

  “Please,” he s
aid, voice gathering strength. The surface of the money was slick beneath his fingers, and it slid across the table toward her as if greased. “One good turn deserves another.”

  * * *

  In better days, he would have fallen straight into the telephone, the details, the favors owed he could now call in. But there was barely time to consider all the details, and nobody in Amberlough owed him favors now.

  Besides, he was paralytically drunk.

  He put his carcass to bed, but hope and despair conspired to keep him from sleep. Horizontal in the darkness, at least his head didn’t spin so badly.

  Jamila had helped him, and might continue to do so, if he didn’t ask too much. He might get a few spare hands off her, as long as her name didn’t enter into things. He set that aside for the morning.

  If they came out the other side of the escape unscathed, they wouldn’t be able to stay in Gedda. He considered the options. Ports were bottlenecks and boats were traps. A land border would be better.

  The idea of Enselem made his chest tighten, an iron band of irrational panic that made him think again of the prescription for amyl nitrate that he’d hastily torn to bits. He didn’t like to think of himself as superstitious, but he wouldn’t plan on crossing those mountains again.

  Besides, he had friends in Tatié. Or, if not friends, the kind of contacts he no longer had in Amberlough. And in a war zone it was very easy to get lost.

  Going by car would afford them flexibility, but cars needed fuel, which meant stops along the way: opportunities to be spotted. He also didn’t currently have one. Nor did he have time to buy one tabletop or ready cash for anything illicit. Unfortunately, trains out of Gedda no longer stopped in Tatié, not unless you had a stack of papers as high as your head and months to wait around for clearance. And he didn’t feature flinging himself out of one at speed before they hit the Ibetian border.

  He lost track of the time making mental circles. The hour was very late when he heard the parlor door and the sound of boots toed off against the floor.

  “Didi?” he called out, gin and loneliness overcoming his better judgment.

  A long pause. He imagined Daoud standing, sock footed, considering his options. Maybe sighing. Then, “Aristide? You are still awake?”

  Aristide didn’t bother to answer. The bedroom door swung open, just wide enough to show a slender silhouette against the parlor lights. “Are you ill?”

  “I need you to make a phone call.”

  “Right now?”

  Aristide levered himself up and swallowed against a surge of nausea. “Yes. I know it’s late. Early. But…”

  “What is this?” asked Daoud, pushing the door open wider. Aristide blinked. Blind, he felt Daoud sit on the foot of the bed.

  “Call Lillian,” he said. Sacred arches, his head hurt.

  “Aristide, it’s half three.”

  “We’re both awake. Call her right rotten now.”

  “To ask her what, exactly?”

  “She knows Saeger. They’ve talked. Might know where to reach her.”

  “Absolutely not. What are you—?”

  He stopped abruptly, because Aristide had gripped his upper arm. Tightly. As tight as he never had when he really wanted to. Through the layers of Daoud’s coat he could feel the give of flesh, the stubbornness of bone.

  “Saeger was Catwalk,” said Aristide. “The Catwalk threw in with Tatié. I need to cross that border and she can help me.”

  “Why—? Aristide, please.” He tried to pull away. “Pulan could—”

  “She can’t. You can ring some other folk for me to make travel arrangements—from the office; make it sound like a business trip, maybe. I’ll write you out some notes for what I need.” The cruelty of it caught up with him a little late, and by then he was barreling on. “The Tatien border, though, I have to handle soonest, and I can’t be cabling back and forth with Porachis. That’s bound to put a hound or two on the scent we don’t want sniffing.”

  “Sniffing what? That hurts!”

  Aristide let go, hand aching, and the momentum of Daoud’s struggle pitched the younger man back.

  “I’m getting out of Gedda one more time,” he said. “And I won’t leave him behind.”

  Daoud, held up on one elbow and spread across the bed, blinked once before comprehension made him crumple, then stand up.

  “I will call,” he said. “But only so you get some sleep.”

  * * *

  “Lyle’s,” Daoud told him. “That’s what the majordomo said. He wouldn’t wake her, but he said there isn’t an exchange in her datebook. She has met Saeger once, at a barroom called Lyle’s just off Temple Street. That is all I can give you.”

  With that information in his possession, Aristide did not go back to bed.

  He arrived at the place just past closing, scared a few regulars off their barstools, and mustered all of his old self that he could. Not the man Malcolm Sailer had hired to make bawdy jokes. Rather, the man who’d haggled Zelda Peronides to the bone, brought honest hounds around to graft, and scared scullers’ guts clean if they even dreamed of cheating him.

  He brought it to bear on the bartender, who eventually yielded to the manager, who fell under the onslaught and gave up an address.

  By the time his cab pulled up out front of Saeger’s building, dawn was seeping into the eastern sky. He tipped lavishly, half wondering if he’d be able to do so in the future. He’d given a lot of money to Frye’s campaign for nothing, and didn’t look likely to earn much more in the near future. What he was planning now was bound to be expensive, too.

  A couple of bruisers, wearing Catwalk armbands and union pins, stood at either side of the stairs to Saeger’s second precinct tenement. The building was unremarkable, slotted between two more just like it on a street of dry cleaners, bookmakers, and a green grocer’s store. She hadn’t let fame go to her head, apparently. Or perhaps it just hadn’t reached her wallet.

  “Nobody goes in,” one of the bruisers said when he approached the steps. “’Cept when they’ve got a key to the building and we know their face.”

  “How much will it cost to give you knowledge of mine?”

  “Nah,” said his fellow. “We ain’t like that.”

  “Does the name Cordelia Lehane mean much to you?”

  “Much as it does to anyone. You ain’t special for knowing it.”

  “Oh, but I am. Go on. You can ask Saeger if you like. Tell her Aristide Makricosta wants to see her. I’ll wait down here.”

  And he did, until Saeger appeared on the doorstep in a sweater hastily thrown over pyjamas, rubbing sleep from her eyes and looking not in the least ministerial.

  “Makricosta,” she said. “I … not that it ain’t a pleasure to meet you, but…”

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” he said. “Or at least, I hope it will be.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.” she said.

  “We can get rid of him, if you want,” said a bruiser.

  Saeger shook her head, then chafed her arms. “Temple bells. It’s too cold to stand here jawing.”

  “Well then, I guess you’d better let me in,” said Aristide.

  Looking more bemused than aggravated, Saeger stood aside and waved him up the steps.

  * * *

  “The thing that you’re asking me to do,” said Saeger, a little while later, “it could ruin me.”

  She was in the kitchen, making coffee. Aristide sat at her dining room table, taking in the spare apartment with its single bed. From the scrubbed table and counters, the bare floors, and recently beaten rug, he guessed at any other time those rumpled sheets would have been folded tight, the quilt tucked in at the edges. But he had hauled her out from under the covers at an inexcusable hour. Of course she hadn’t made the bed for him.

  “Forgive me for saying so—ah, thank you.” The mug—enameled tin—nearly burnt his fingers. “But you’re already ruined. Frye as good as nailed a terrorist attack on you.”

  �
�That wasn’t my folk.”

  He bit down on I know. That wouldn’t get him anywhere he wanted to be.

  “Stones,” said Saeger. “‘My folk.’ They ain’t even that anymore. There ain’t a Catwalk. Those hatch marks are just a handy flag to wave.”

  “No Catwalk?” he said. “Really?”

  She shrugged. “Sure there’s folk who were Catwalk. But Gedda don’t need that now. And it ain’t like bombing trains gives me any right or sense to lead a country.” She blew on her coffee, staring despondently at the wall. “I ain’t just a fighter. I wish more people clocked that.”

  “I’m not asking you to fight,” he said.

  “No. But you’re asking me to take a few steps back toward it. Talk to those people. And a lot’s changed in Tatié since we were yoked together. It’s even odds or worse I could get ahold of someone who could help.”

  “But would you try?”

  “Why should I? ’Cause I ain’t got anything to lose? Stroll off. There’s plenty past the Cliff House they can still take away from me. This could see me thrown in prison. It could get spun up as sedition, treason, espionage. The folk you want me to talk to, they’re traitors to the nation of Gedda. I could be prosecuted.”

  “Then you’d better be very careful.”

  She put her cup down hard, so coffee sloshed across the scrubbed-raw surface of the table. “You got a lotta nerve. I ain’t even looked sideways at saying yes.”

  “Not even for Cordelia’s sake?”

  “Don’t bring her into this.”

  “She was brought into this eight years ago. She chose it. The person I need to get across the border was … was her friend. Like we were. And he didn’t have a choice.”

  She shook her head, not looking at him. “People always have a choice. And if you’re talking about who I think, he made the wrong one. She didn’t.”

  In the pause that followed, Aristide took a steadying breath. “Ms. Saeger—”