A hesitation. Then, «I’m interested.»
«Come to my house at half eight, then. Around the back; the front is going to be a pack of vultures. I will explain, and then you can decide.»
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
Between the fish and the dirty laundry, Cyril vastly preferred the latter. It was a little rank, but at least it was warm. In the half hour he’d been crammed amongst the crates of ice, hiding under a string bag filled with clams, every extremity had gone numb. His suit was soaked through, and even his socks were wet. Hauled out to change vehicles at a way station he hardly registered, he stumbled when he hit the ground and had to be lifted bodily into his next conveyance.
The doors on this one were more substantial, too. The canvas had let in a draft, and street noise including police sirens. These grew more frequent, and then less so, the farther they got from the site of the … rescue? Kidnapping? Prison break?
All of the above, perhaps.
When he finally dared emerge from his cocoon of dirty linens, he saw the sky outside the van’s rear windows had gone dark. They had been driving for hours, and the quality of the road had deteriorated in the last few miles.
The bins of laundry rattled on their wheels, frames creaking, as the tires took on some rough terrain. Then the whole cargo, Cyril included, lurched forward once and settled when the truck came to a halt.
The cab door opened and then shut, shaking the van on its axles. Cyril burrowed back into the sheets, still leery. The rear doors creaked open and a frigid wind blew in.
“Are ye back there, darling?” asked the driver, in a northern burr so thick it almost obscured the words.
Cyril stretched tentatively. A savage cramp dug claws into his shoulders, but in spite of it he raised his head above the linens again and said, “Darling?” He hadn’t exactly expected endearments.
In the smothering black of countryside night, he couldn’t make out the man’s expression. Not even his face. Couldn’t be sure it was really Ari.
Not until he said, “Oh, sorry, that en’t your name anymore. It’s van Weill now. Or, say rather, Wallis.”
“What?” he struggled out of the bin, shoes squelching. “Who’s Wallis? Ari, is that you?”
“Perdition,” said Aristide, before he dropped the act. “And here I thought I could still manage Currin if I put my mind to it. How are you feeling?”
“Like someone peeled me off their shoe.”
“You look it, too.” He held out a hand, which Cyril took as he stepped down from the bumper. Frost and gravel crunched beneath his shoes.
“Where are we?” A violent shiver chased the words. Once he started shivering and couldn’t stop.
“Here,” said Aristide, and handed him a cardboard suitcase. Inside were thick tweeds and a scratchy three-color sweater. “Your shoes will do all right, I think. But there are warmer socks in there. And dry.”
Sitting on the bumper of the van, Cyril struggled out of his cashmere trousers and into the tweed ones. He couldn’t get much colder, even bare-skinned. The double-breasted chalk-stripe he pitched in with the rest of the soiled laundry. His teeth were still chattering. “Where’d it come from?”
“Never you mind.” A hint of the burr came back with that, and Ari shook his head as if to clear it.
Cyril pulled the sweater over his head and the jacket over that, but it did no good. “Mother’s tits, it’s rotten freezing.”
“I don’t recall that you swore this much.” Aristide reached into his own jacket and produced a battered steel-and-leather flask. “Brandy?”
Cyril got down half the stuff in one swallow and began to feel better at once.
“You can polish it off if you like,” said Aristide. “I have more in my rucksack.”
“You’re carrying a rucksack?” He couldn’t picture it.
“Well, I wasn’t going to drag all my luggage through the countryside in the back of a laundry van. It’s been sent ahead.”
“To where?”
“Dastya.”
Cyril choked on his second pull of brandy, and had to clear his throat. “Aristide, that’s a war zone.”
“Nonsense. It’s just on the other side of one. Tatié lost it to the Tzietans months ago. East of Kareniv, we’ll be fine. There’s a Cestinian postal ship due in Dastya three days from now. If we scurry, we’ll be just in time to join my steamer trunks and sundries for the next leg of our journey.”
“What about the border?” asked Cyril. “Borders. I’ll be shocked if we can cross into Tatié at all, let alone from Tatié into Tzieta.”
“Luckily, we’ll be traveling to Ibet, at least on paper, with only a stop for document checks at the Tatien border.”
Cyril swore. “Passports.”
“Mine is for Erikh Prosser, my mother’s son.”
“But I don’t even have one.”
Ari smiled. “Check your pocket.”
Cyril put a hand inside the lapel of his jacket and found the inner lining stiff. He withdrew the relevant document, its cardboard covers warped with a dried spill.
“I’m afraid to look,” he said, but did so. “Ambrose Adam … Wallis, I suppose. What in damnation happened here?”
“You spilled your gin on it.”
“Wallis is a gin drinker, is he?” Cyril pulled a face. “Is this how I live out the rest of my days?” The truth of it struck him then, and he began to shake. “I suppose I should be grateful that I get to. But mother and sons, Ari. This’ll hold wine about as well as a sieve.”
“You aren’t frightened, are you?” Ari sent a flirtatious glance sideways beneath the brim of his flat cap, and suddenly his disguise had the air of a stage costume. Cyril remembered watching him strip, peeling away the layers of his character in unexpected ways, becoming something different with each item he removed.
He swallowed against a feeling that wasn’t quite arousal; there was too much sadness in it, and too much nostalgia. “I suppose it won’t be any worse than Liso.”
“Fewer botflies, anyway. Hop back in the van.”
“It’s not a bit conspicuous?”
“We’re going to dump it in a couple of miles and walk to Tarbycliff Station.”
“The train?” asked Cyril, incredulous.
“Of course,” said Aristide. “Who would think to look for a DePaul in third class?”
* * *
The laundry truck lay hidden at the bottom of a deep ditch off a lane, its front bumper sunk in the mud. New growth forest had crept close, and at least in the dark it would be hard to spot the abandoned van from the road. Cyril wondered if anyone lived in the house at the other end of the drive.
The moon was new. That would help them go unnoticed. In the countryside quiet, he could hear the rill of the little stream along the road: some unnamed tributary to the Heyn. He wondered what time it was, and when the first train left.
It all felt horribly familiar. He could almost smell the gunpowder on his hands, the remnants of a hasty assassination. Briefly, he thought of Finn Lourdes dead in his bathtub, of the guards shot to the ground this afternoon. How many more people lay ruined in his wake?
“Let’s stroll,” said Aristide, and started down the lane. Cyril did not follow him.
His conscience had been left behind in the back of the prison van when the prospect of freedom presented itself so nakedly. Now it had suddenly caught up with him, and hooked the back of his collar so he choked on it.
“Don’t you feel guilty?” he asked.
Aristide paused on the footbridge to the road. “What for?”
“Whisking me away like this? What about everything I did? I’m going to disappear and leave that all lying on the ground behind me for other people to pick up.”
“Gedda hates you,” said Aristide, turning so they faced one another across the plank bridge, water running between them. “Neither prison nor a hanging will change that.”
“It isn’t about whether they hate me.” He could hear the pa
thetic note in his own voice, the flatness of his platitudes. That kind of thing would never stand up against Ari.
“Isn’t it?”
“No, it’s—”
“Please.” Aristide took a step closer, back toward the road, one sturdy boot on the half-rotten wood. “Don’t you dare say justice.”
Even Cyril heard the answer in his silence.
“What’s that supposed to be, then? It’s just some way of salving hurts that we can never truly heal. If a murderer is hanged, what good does it do the victim?” He took another step, coming half across the bridge. “They wouldn’t have forgiven you in death. I’d rather you learned to live with your guilt. Perhaps that’s selfish, but I seem to have fewer scruples than you do, these days.”
“Hard-earned.” Cyril had come closer to Aristide, somehow. He didn’t remember leaving the safety of the verge.
“I wish you hadn’t. Earned them. We’d have been on our way five minutes ago.” Aristide came back to the near bank and considered Cyril for a long moment. When he spoke next, his diction lost the crisp edge of argument, and his blasé tone dropped into a different register: softer and more somber. The last of his Central City drawl fell away. Cyril remembered when he used to stutter, and the times the stutter faltered, fled. When he was very serious, or very scared.
“What’s keeping you here?” said Ari, and Cyril realized he was standing not two feet away: as close as he had come since Liso, when Cyril startled underneath the razor and drew blood.
“I just want—” But his thoughts fled, shying away, refusing order and exposure. To speak aloud was to commit himself to a course of action, or at least the promise of one. Indecision ached in his gut as badly as a boot.
“Cyril,” said Aristide. Horribly, he sounded … querulous. Almost afraid. At his sides, his hands curled into fists. “Cyril, don’t—”
“I want to do the right thing,” he said, all in a rush. “For once. And I thought … in prison I thought it was you. I thought you were the only thing that I could fix. Cordelia’s dead and the country’s in ruins, but you’re still here, and so am I.”
“Yes.” Breathless now, all pride gone.
Cyril couldn’t bear to look at him. “Is this the right thing?”
A shaky inhalation. “Is that rhetorical? Or would you really like my answer?”
“Really,” said Cyril. “I need someone to tell me.”
Moonless shadows shifted at his feet, and he saw the toes of Ari’s boots in the mud and melting snow. “I think the only justice in this world is what you make yourself. So do better this time. We’ll both do better.”
The words plucked a string in his memory. “Small lies.”
Aristide made a soft, pained sound, as though he had been stabbed, and suddenly his arms were around Cyril, who this time didn’t tense or shy or try to block a knife. He held Aristide so tightly that his biceps ached, and the muscles in his palms cramped from making fists at Ari’s back, the nape of his neck.
“Cyril,” he said, too soon. “We don’t have the time.”
Taking a deep breath, smelling Aristide’s throat, the fold of his collar, no perfume or greasepaint to cut the scent of him, Cyril pushed back and nodded once. “All right.”
Aristide crossed the bridge in three strides, then turned and held a hand out: to steady Cyril. Or perhaps, to make sure that he followed.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
«You want me to do what?» Daoud nearly dropped his coffee cup.
Lillian checked the clock; she had perhaps ten minutes to convince him, and that was if she drove quickly and hit all the signals green. «I want you to help me destroy Emmeline Frye.»
He shook his head. «You want me to destroy Cross-Costa.»
«Cross-Costa smuggles narcotics,» she countered. «They are not saints or heroes.»
«Good people work there. I work there. What am I supposed to do once I am … » He made a face, pivoted into Geddan, and said “out on my rear?”
“Anything you want. What was the last thing you decided to pursue? What was the last turning you took that was all your own choice, and no one else’s?”
Daoud sipped his coffee and refused to meet her eyes. “Would this be mine?” he asked, the base of his cup grating softly on the saucer as he set it back down. “If I agree, is it for me, or you?”
“I can’t answer that,” she said. “I’m just saying, it’s a bold move. A challenging one.”
«I don’t need to impress Aristide Makricosta,» he said. «I don’t need his approval. If he’s smart, I’ll never see him again. And you had better hope he’s smart, for your brother’s sake.»
“Of course,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply—”
«Yes you did.»
She bit the inside of her cheek, as was her habit when repressing unwise words. He knew her angle to the half degree.
«Daoud,» she said. «I married a Porachin man. I know it can be hard to see beyond those rules, beyond your duty. The … the fences you grew up inside.»
«You married a nobleman. I’m Belqati, and turned. It’s different.»
«But none of it matters,» she said. «You are not in Porachis anymore. Not you, and not Jinadh. You do not have to please anyone you do not want to.»
«Moon-eyes!» As though summoned, Jinadh’s voice echoed down the hall from the dining room. «I’m leaving.»
“In the library,” she called.
Soon after, he appeared in the doorway, hatted and wrapped in a muffler, briefcase banging his knee. «I thought you had an appointment soon. Good morning, Mr. Qassan.»
“I do.” Lillian looked at Daoud. “We do. I think.”
He didn’t answer her unspoken question. He was looking at Jinadh, carefully, as if cataloguing details. Lillian tried to put herself behind his eyes, to see what he might. Purpose? Professionalism? Fatherhood? Marriage? Or maybe just a well-cut coat, ordered under better circumstances.
Jinadh took this scrutiny gracefully, with a hint of amusement, given he was on his way out the door. Finally, Daoud asked, «Are you happy that you left Porachis?»
Jinadh considered his answer for a moment, then said, «No.» Lillian swallowed hurt and waited for him to go on. This was not her conversation.
«Would you go back?» asked Daoud.
Tilting his head, Jinadh sent a sidelong glance at Lillian. She gave him nothing; she didn’t know what Daoud wanted him to say. Was he really asking about Porachis, or was this something else?
«If I knew I could do what I wanted,» said Jinadh. «Be who I wanted, and still have all the things I loved … I would be there between this heartbeat and the next. But some paths cannot be pursued without appalling compromise.»
«What if all paths lead to compromise?»
«Inevitable.» Jinadh looked past him to Lillian and smiled. «Life is a series of compromises. But a wise man will make his own, instead of accepting other people’s.»
«Semantics,» said Daoud.
Jinadh shrugged and straightened his hat. «If they get you through the day.»
* * *
The neon sign over Lyle’s wasn’t on. Lillian parked awkwardly at the curb and checked the street. An old woman sweeping the footpath. A shopkeep rolling up her grate. In the doorway on the other side of the street, a rag lady stirred beneath her blankets and her cardboard.
Daoud got out of the passenger’s side. «Glamorous.»
«We have not put her in the Cliff House yet. You cannot ask for a red carpet and a limousine.» Lillian scanned the street again, to make sure they had shed every reporter who chased after the car, and any other nasty thing they might have picked up on the way. «Down the stairs.»
Daoud trotted to the subterranean door and knocked. Lillian followed, stepping down just as the door came open on six feet of sinister-looking muscle.
“We’re here to see Opal,” she said, standing her ground. In heels she was nearly as tall.
The bruiser cased her, then Daoud, then s
hut the door on them.
«A lot of fuss for nothing,» said Daoud. But before he could get much else out, the door opened again on the same man, now nodding his head.
“Come on in,” he said.
Only a few of the lights were on. Saeger was embedded at the same table where Lillian had met with her before, a thousand years ago. No beer this time. She sat with her arms crossed, staring nakedly.
“Good morning,” Lillian said. “May I introduce Daoud Qassan?”
“A pleasure to meet you,” said Daoud, extending a hand to shake.
Saeger took it—her hand was bigger than his, but he didn’t flinch. Lillian wondered if her grip was gentle, or his mask was on.
“I’m getting the strangest visitors lately,” Saeger said, and looked at Lillian like they shared some kind of joke. Lillian experienced an emotion that only usually arose in her nightmares. She had no idea what she was supposed to say or do, or why.
“Eli,” said Saeger. “Watch the door? From the outside, if you don’t mind.”
The heavy made himself scarce. Saeger sighed and settled back into her chair. “So. You know who blew the warehouse.”
“I do,” said Lillian. She and Daoud took the seats opposite. All the other chairs in the place were up on tables, legs in the air.
Saeger opened her hands, inviting the rest of it. Lillian remembered she had been a gaffer in the theatres before the Ospies, and imagined her turning a spotlight to catch someone at center stage.
“Frye’s people.” Lillian eschewed elegance for brevity. “She did it herself.”
That elicited a grunt and half a smile. “You got proof?”
Lillian looked to Daoud.
“Not precisely,” he said, and Saeger’s face closed up. “Not in the manner that police will ask for. But testimony is evidence, and there is my word as an employee of Cross-Costa, as well as boxes and boxes of paperwork that tells the truth of what was in Frye’s warehouse. Or rather, that tells a lie, which becomes apparent if one knows how to read it. To be plain: poppy tar. A great deal of it.”
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