More silence. Then, “I’d have to talk to the desk.”
“And how long will that take?” she asked.
“Department meeting’s early next week.”
“What if you aired your conversation with Daoud tomorrow, and used it as proof of concept? It would give you some numbers to go on.”
“Won’t hurt you none, either,” Kostos said, “eating up the airwaves with this shock and awe. It’ll put lesser concerns—like escaped convicts—out of people’s heads.”
“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration.” Lillian brought them around the end of the block. Black water spread out below. A distant buoy blinked, and the lighthouse at the end of the spits spun slowly, casting its beacon into the dark.
The pop of a match filled the car with sulfur stink, and Kostos lit a cigarette. “It ain’t a bad idea for a show.”
“So you’ll do it?” asked Daoud.
“I might. But that’s just one interview. What about the night after that, and the next one, and the next? Who am I supposed to talk to then?”
Lillian made the mistake of looking into the mirror again, and found him staring straight at her, eyes lit by the ember of his straight.
“Give-and-take,” said Kostos. “I’ll put him on air if you come after him. And, get your brother’s lawyer on to talk.”
“That’s not quite fair,” she said. “Two for one?”
“I don’t know,” said Kostos. “That’s supply and demand, ain’t it? How badly do you want me to air this interview?”
This was why she hated to show her hand. People were never kind about it; they played to win the kitty. “All right, fine. You can put me on the air.”
“And Higata?”
She willed down the part of her that wanted to cry, to slam the heel of her hand hard on the steering wheel. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything. I’m not sure what sort of terms we’re on, at present.” When Kostos didn’t reply, she said, “Does that suit you?”
He exhaled a thread of smoke and shrugged. “Ain’t like a tailor, but it’ll do for now.”
* * *
They barely made the convoy, scrambling into a truck bed sometime after the sun had set. Engines coughed and rumbled. Diesel smoke made the cold air noxious.
If Cyril had stopped to think about it, touching Aristide would have felt strange. But the cold and the late hour and the tight space meant that Cyril found himself curled against the other man, wedged between crates of ammunition and barely sheltered from the wind. He halfway slept, and halfway woke with dawn.
Shell craters and barbed-wire barricades across the road took him back to his first days in the Foxhole. Bombing sales in stores with shattered windows, smoky bars where contractors and correspondents drank their way through nights full of gunfire.
The convoy came to a halt as the sun hauled itself over the horizon. Aristide blinked and cursed and unfolded from their knot. Not so far away, mortars began to fall.
“Morning,” said one of the soldiers, unlatching the gate at the back of the truck. The jolt of jumping down resonated through every one of Cyril’s bones. He felt a thousand years old.
Aristide looked like he felt worse, and Cyril remembered the difference in their ages, remembered the wet and hacking cough that had been on occasional display during Solstice.
“You’re all right,” he said. He couldn’t bear to make it a question.
Aristide nodded, cleared his throat, scrubbed sleep from his eyes.
“Any thoughts on … improvisation? Thank you.” This last to a spotty enlisted man, barely over sixteen, who offered him a steaming paper cup of coffee. Scorched, but warm. The heat made his hands prickle.
Aristide took the second cup the boy offered up, and then stopped him leaving. “How far is it to Dastya from the front?” It ended in a cough. Coffee sloshed across his knuckles.
“Too far to walk,” said the boy.
Cyril saw Aristide bite back a sharp retort, but sarcasm still larded his “Thank you.”
“How could we get there?” Cyril asked, speaking across the top of his cup. Steam collected on his nose and cooled in the wind.
“Can’t,” said the soldier.
Cyril swallowed frustration and the accompanying irrational tears. “You can’t sell me that. I’ve been in worse than this, and there’s always a way. Aid convoys. Ambulances. Someone selling drugs or skin, or moving spies. And everybody knows, but nobody will say out loud.”
The soldier hesitated for a moment, nose dripping, and then sighed and leaned in closer. “Henson.”
“I need a little more than that.”
“Contractor. Works for the Teezees on paper. She can get you what you want. Markup’s mean, but if you need something bad enough, you’ll pay. She’s usually through once a day, on a little detour from her route, but no guarantee when. She might have already gone.”
“Thank you,” said Cyril, less caustically than Ari had. “Where do we find her?”
The scrawny private sighed, then said, “I’ll draw you a map.”
* * *
By the time they reached the bend in the road marked on the hastily scrawled directions, Cyril had grown and obliterated a series of blisters. Aristide looked strangely gray. It was daytime, fully, though the sun hid behind a low pall of leaden clouds. A rocky outcropping kept off the worst of the wind, but it certainly wasn’t warm.
Aristide lowered himself onto a lichen-covered boulder and produced a matchbook and a pack of straights from one pocket. He lit up and inhaled, then burst into painful hacking.
Cyril took the straight from him and smoked it, standing close without touching. Aristide’s breath came unevenly for a while, and then began to grow steadier.
“Thank you,” said Cyril, flicking ash into the scrub at his feet.
“Pardon?” Ari’s voice was another man’s, raw and crackling with phlegm.
“For all this.” Cyril gestured with the butt of his straight, then took one last drag and pitched it. “Thank you.”
“Save your gratitude until we’re out of the elements, or you might be thanking me for hypothermia.”
“Well, I’ll die free at least,” said Cyril. Then, not letting himself think, “With you.”
Aristide paused. Just as he turned on the rock, about to speak, a truck came around the bend. Then another, and a third, and suddenly Ari was standing in the middle of the road, one arm thrown up to halt the oncoming caravan. Then it was haggling and hustling and the distribution of cash. Aristide hopped into the back of a van. Cyril climbed into the cab of the rear truck. He spent the ride squeezed between the driver and a woman holding an E4 Hoare submachine gun, the same model the border guards and soldiers had carried. Vintage, but kept in fine trim. The sort of thing Gedda had used in the Spice War, in his grandmother’s time. The stock banged him in the ribs every time they hit a pothole.
An hour outside Dastya the convoy nearly took a mortar—the western suburbs of the city were fortified with artillery against Tatien incursion.
“Jumpy,” remarked the gunner, and that was the only comment anyone made.
After that, adrenaline ate the time up, and suddenly they were at the checkpoint outside the city. Adam Wallis presented himself looking suitably battered for a man who had just made his way through an insurgency, and told them he was a war correspondent with Siebenthal’s. He had no luggage to speak of—the cardboard suitcase had disappeared somewhere along the way, he hoped with nothing valuable inside of it.
“Lost my bag somewhere between Eré and Kareniv,” he said. “Along with my driver. They wanted the car, and he went along. Setup. Should have known. They took my press credentials, too, and my letter of transit. Managed to keep my passport, though it’s in a bit of a state.”
Henson’s convoy had arrived in the middle of some kind of dust-up with a group of refugees, and the document’s streaky illegibility seemed low on the list of the soldier’s concerns. She gave it a cursory glance. �
��You’re lucky you didn’t lose your head along with the rest of it. Luckier still you ran into Henson. She’s a treasure. Staying long?”
“Only long enough to book passage. No offense meant, but I think I’ve had enough of this bit of the world for a while.”
She snapped his passport shut so hard the pages slapped, and told him, “Have a swift trip,” rather than a pleasant one.
* * *
It was late by the time Lillian got home. She had offered to drop Kostos at his flat, and then Daoud at his hotel. Magnusson was there to let her in, and offered to pour a whiskey. Remembering the empty decanter from the other night, she declined until he assured her there was half a case in the pantry. Money, or lack thereof, was never mentioned. He was simply smart enough to know her mind.
“I’ve got to make a call,” she said. “But you can go on to bed. I won’t need you anymore tonight.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and left her alone.
She twisted the dial, picking out Rinko’s home exchange. It was past any kind of polite time to call, but time was another thing she was short on. She didn’t want Kostos changing his mind, deciding she hadn’t held up her end of the bargain. She wanted insurance. And she wanted to talk to a friend.
“Hello?” Disembodied, without the distraction of her immaculate presence, Rinko’s voice sounded tired. Lillian glanced at the clock on her desk and cringed.
“Rinko,” said Lillian. “It’s me. I—”
“Lillian?” She was angry. Of course she was.
“I’m so sorry I haven’t called. Or sent a check. I’ve been—”
“Busy of course, but you’re all right?”
“Sorry?” She kept her voice low, conscious of Jinadh and Stephen asleep upstairs.
“I hadn’t heard from you. And I was worried you’d been … oh, who knows. I don’t know what I thought.”
That she had disappeared into a cell, warrantless. Or something along those lines. “I’m fine. Or, not fine, but … I’m making my way.” She picked at a loose upholstery tack on the seat of her chair. “I thought you might be cross with me.”
The laughter on the other end of the line was more a sigh. “You didn’t jump out the back of a prison transport and leave me standing like a fool in front of the judge.”
“No, but I did put you in the situation to begin with. And I should have been in the courtroom with you.” The first part was the truth; the second part was not. She had been glad not to stand there, waiting for Aristide to succeed or fail.
“I am a grown woman with a license to practice law. I agreed to take this case. And now I will tackle the consequences.”
“Will you be all right? I mean, with the federal investigators, and the police, and whoever else?”
“Will you? It’s a game of wait and see now, I think. They look into it, and then they come around.”
“My favorite thing.” Lillian put her face into her free hand. “Waiting on other people.”
“Yes,” said Rinko. “You are more the type to implement a plan, not to be caught up in someone else’s.”
A sharp edge on the sentence told Lillian it was an unasked question, something Rinko didn’t want to say over the telephone. That was wise; Lillian certainly didn’t trust her own line. And if she didn’t want to say it, Lillian knew what it was and was equally unable to answer.
“Less and less these days,” she said, instead of pleading innocence. “Lately I seem to find myself caught in the cross fire of other people’s machinations more than I would like.”
“Really?” Rinko didn’t sound like she believed it.
“Well, I suppose I agreed to go on Laurie Kostos’s After Dinner Hour of my own volition.”
“What?” From the surprise in Rinko’s voice, Lillian’s tactic had worked—a distraction to move them away from a dangerous conversation toward one that might yield results.
“He asked me on to talk about recent events and I said yes. And then he … he asked if I might extend an invitation to you.”
A long pause took years from whatever life she had left. She could almost hear the click of abacus beads as Rinko made calculations on the other end of the line. Finally, Rinko said, “You’re really going to do this?”
“I have … significant stock invested in the interview.” Lillian picked her way around the facts like they were bear traps. “Doing it of my own volition doesn’t mean I’m doing it out of altruism.”
“You didn’t promise me to him, did you?”
“I said I’d do my best.”
“You still owe me for those consultation fees.”
Heat spread across Lillian’s cheeks. “I know. I’m sorry. But this is … it’s about…” She hated what she was about to say, and said it anyway. “Justice. Of a sort. The future of Gedda, if you want to be dramatic.”
“Playing to my convictions?”
“No. Just telling the truth.”
“I know what kind of truths you tell, Lillian. Exactly the same kind I do.”
“The kind that require a convincing argument?”
Now Rinko’s laugh made a real appearance, loud enough the line distorted it. “Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow and you can talk me around in person? Come to mine. That way perhaps we can avoid the cameras. I look awful in candid photographs.”
“I can help you with that,” said Lillian.
“You’ll be helping me with a lot of things until your fortunes change. I’m flexible about payment, but I don’t forgive a debt. Even for a friend.”
“Nor should you,” said Lillian. Then, timidly, “We are, still? Friends?”
“I should hope so,” said Rinko. “You’re in dire need of them.”
* * *
When Lillian rang off, it took her a moment to realize she wasn’t alone. When she did, it took her another moment to parse the man lurking in the shadows of the doorway as her husband.
“Mother and sons,” she said, hand over her pounding heart. “Jinadh, you scared me.”
“And you woke me up.” He came into her office and looked around for a lamp to light, which there wasn’t. The overhead sconce would have been too bright, so he left them in the gloaming of distant streetlights and the city glare reflected from the clouds.
“Sorry.” She swept fly-aways out of her face, wondering when her hair had begun to escape from its pins.
«I heard the last half,» he told her, settling on a corner of the desk. “Justice? The future of Gedda? And you are going on the wireless with Laurie Kostos.” He grew more accusatory as he spoke. «Lillian, what are you up to? And when were you going to tell me about all this? Before or after you went on the radio?»
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. Things are just happening so fast…”
«Daoud was here yesterday, Lillian. And you and I sleep in the same bed. You had time. I’m not a fool; I know that wasn’t a social visit. And I’ve begun to think you left me in that courtroom knowing what would happen. What’s going on?»
She sighed and put her face into her hands, unable to look at him. «You are not going to like it.»
«I didn’t think I would. But I still want to know.»
Before she spoke, she made herself lift her head. «I had some idea what they were planning. Aristide and Cyril. But I was not involved. I only did not want to be here, when … »
«I see,» he said. «And the wireless?»
«We’re breaking the story about Frye. And the tar, and the bomb at the warehouse. On Kostos’s show. Tomorrow night.»
Closing his eyes, Jinadh took a deep breath and swallowed whatever he had been going to say. After a moment, he composed himself and asked, «We?»
«Qassan, really. My interview—and Rinko’s, if she’ll do it—that’s just Kostos getting what he wants from me, because he knows how much I want this.»
«Why do you?» asked Jinadh. «Want it? Just revenge? Or has Saeger promised you something?»
«No promises. Her consideration, at most.»
>
Jinadh’s smile finally made an appearance, only slightly tinged with rue. «Don’t tell me my wife has suddenly developed a conscience.»
“If Saeger is elected,” said Lillian, “maybe it will come in handy. A conscience, I mean.”
Fondly, Jinadh tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. “You had some mail today.”
“Magnusson didn’t mention it.”
“I said I would give it to you. From the look of the envelope … I thought it would be something we should discuss together.”
Apprehension crept up the back of her neck. “The look of the envelope?”
“It looks … financial.” He reached into the inner pocket of his dressing gown and produced a creamy envelope with an elegant gold stamp over the seal. “Or possibly legal.”
She looked at it, then looked at him, and considered that it had been in his pocket all this time. “I didn’t wake you. You were waiting up for me.”
He shrugged. «It’s hard for me to fall asleep when you aren’t here. Especially when I know you’re up to mischief. Open it.»
There had been a pearl-handled letter opener in this office once, but that was long gone, so she tore the envelope open with one finger and withdrew a folded sheaf of paper.
The letterhead gave her no clue—no bank or lawyer she had ever worked with. And the packet of papers was thicker than a simple invoice or angry letter would have been. She barely skimmed the body, turning instead to the next page: a table of figures.
“Securities,” she said. “Apparently we now own significant shares in Lisoan real estate.”
“I assume you have not been playing the markets without telling me.”
“I didn’t do this,” she said, staring at the ledger of quarterly interest statements. The numbers wouldn’t stay steady on the page. “I didn’t.”
“Then who?”
She knew before he finished the question. “Makricosta. Who else?” Blood money, reparations, some strange kind of dowry? What was this supposed to be?
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