by William Ray
Gus didn’t believe a word of it but nodded knowingly as if it were a wise move on the boss’s part to think of such things. They stepped into Ulm’s office, which provided a lovely vantage on the rest of the city, including a sliver of Embassy Park, which was visible just down the street. The room was nearly as elaborately cluttered as Richard Saucier’s home had been, although the artwork on the walls had been restricted to more classical pieces suitable to an office—stern looking predecessors, bowls of fruit, that sort of thing.
Closing the door, Ulm stepped over towards the window and peered at the street below as he said, “Shame about Doctor Phand! I do hope he’s alright. Did you have any news about him?”
Gus joined him by the window, glancing down and suddenly recalling he had never been inside a building this tall before. From this southern vantage, he could see over the closest buildings, picking out the edges of Khanom’s sooty girdle, and even see past the seemingly endless rows of Thomas’s stockyard to the broad river that meandered through the lowlands beyond and rolled out beyond the horizon.
Looking straight down at the gleaming white streets below, as Ulm did, made Gus’s stomach roil. He goggled a moment at the vertiginous perspective and then stepped back, but Ulm remained there, staring down at the streets far below.
It occurred to Gus that as Ulm was surely used to this by now, the man’s lack of eye contact was studied, rather than truly distracted. Not sure what that intentional remove meant, Gus simply said, “Not yet, but I’m sure he’ll turn up. I’m looking into his business dealings here in town. You know him?”
Ulm hesitated, then replied, “We’ve met. I don’t know him well, but I’ve been a great admirer of his work. I’d hoped to draw his firm in to do something here in town.” As far as Gus knew, Ulm had no reason to think he was from the Crossing, like Thomas did, which made him wonder why such a busy man would indulge the interview.
“Something like that tower?” Gus asked, gesturing out towards the sliver of park visible below, where the tower would soar above the surroundings.
“Well, like it, perhaps, but not that, obviously. I’ve always opposed it.” Ulm lied so smoothly that Gus was momentarily tempted to believe him. “So few cities have the blessing of much green at their heart, and I’ve long said we should keep those open. I really think it will lend an air of respectable civility as people pass between exhibit halls on the electric trams.”
“Didn’t you vote in favor of the tower at first?” Gus patted at his jacket as if looking for his notes. He had none, but people seldom waited for him to find them when it seemed like they were about to be caught in a lie.
“Oh, no! No, of course not. As I said, I’m a great admirer of Phand & Saucier’s work in other cities, and admittedly I pushed to have them present something for our Exposition, but that tower was never suitable.” He shook his head, looking out to where it would sit, “A hideous, industrial spike of iron, here of all places? Inappropriate.” Frowning, his eyes grew distant as if troubled by something he could not quite remember.
“So what did you want to bring him in to do? Seems like Khanom’s already set for bridges and such.” Gus had no idea if that was true but felt confident Ulm would quickly correct him if not, and if it was, Ulm would be forced to come up with some more complicated explanation. Ulm gave an eager grin at the question, and Gus briefly wondered which it would be, but then Ulm went to his desk, pulling out a map that he rolled out over the surface.
“Well, I’ve got several factories down below, but I just acquired this one here,” he jabbed his finger at an intersection as if Gus should know it, “An old Knox works, where they made shotguns or something. Now, as you can see, it’s not far from my new electrical plant, here, which offers a perfect opportunity to leverage my production there by using it to enhance the plant here.”
“Electric shotguns?”
Ulm frowned at him and looked away as if to consider the idea, then shook his head. “No, just a factory with lights or maybe even running some of the machines electrically.”
“What is it you do, exactly?”
Sandal Ulm seemed taken aback by the question and replied in a mystified tone, “I’m a businessman, Mister Baston. The company, you mean? It started as furniture making, but then to streamline it, I bought up a lot of the local logging operations and started investing in futures on—well, the point is, we do all sorts of things now. This new building I bought to turn into a factory for manufacturing matches. More uses for the wood our other operations produce that can’t go into furniture.”
“But you’re putting in electric lights? There’s a bit of irony, using the electric lights for making matches.”
Ulm laughed and nodded. “Well, it will be a diminishing market, sure, but it’s not as if everyone will switch to electric overnight. Besides, furnaces aren’t electric, and people need heat. And of course, people will always smoke, and you can’t light a cigarette with electricity.”
They laughed at that together, and Gus let that brief moment of camaraderie linger while he tried to think of how to get more information from the man. Something was off with Ulm, and uncertain how to find it, he just went back to his question about the votes. “So from the beginning, it was just you and Miss Aliyah Gale opposing the tower, right?”
The change in topic seemed to startle Ulm, but he nodded and said, “Well, mostly just me. She abstained. The others were all for it though, so we would have lost the vote against even if she’d held firm.”
“But that was on the second vote.”
Ulm just ignored Gus’s comment and looked back down at his map, his eyes sliding from down below towards the upper city, where the Exposition would be. His voice grew distant and he said, “It’s not as if we’d need the tower, anyway. It would just be an eyesore. Inappropriate, here of all places.”
He quickly shook off that distracted air, grinned up at Gus and said, “It will be a cultural touchstone for the world. We’ll have artists and exhibits from every corner of the globe! Dancers, singers, even a complete goblin burrow people can visit!”
That last part threw Gus for a loop and momentarily distracted him from sorting through Ulm’s odd demeanor about the tower. Salka had mentioned a Rakhasin exhibit, but Gus had just assumed he meant it related to the human colony on the surface. “Visit? Like, underground?”
In the army, Gus had spent several years fighting savage tribes of gobs in Rakhasin, even if now all anyone else remembered about his service was the year in Gedlund. With their diminutive height and keen eyesight, the gobs made their tunnels small and dark. The idea of tourists crawling through the darkness seemed absurd, and seeing his reaction, Ulm’s face split into a keen grin.
“We have a tribe that will come in and dig out tunnels, making a whole burrow but with windows peeking in and a few dim lights inside so that people can see what goes on. The gobs will live there year-round and perform shows up top—staging, doing little tribal dances, that sort of thing.”
“Singing creepy songs and killing the local farmers. Yeah, I’m familiar with ‘em.”
Ulm laughed and shook his head, “No, no, they’ll be quite tame, I assure you. We’ve had one as a prominent entertainer in the community. The Honeyfugler. Amazing voice, which I’m sure he’ll be lending to the Exposition as well. They’re a very musical people, and not all their songs are about killing farmers. The Exposition will show that and so much more! It will amaze and educate the world.”
Gus chuckled at the gob’s nickname; he supposed that had to be the one he had met this morning. Something about the spark in Ulm’s eyes when talking about the Exposition seemed more sincere than the rest. More honest. Hoping to leverage that sincerity, Gus tried to tie it back to his inquiry. “So you don’t think you’ll need Phand’s tower to draw attention to it?”
“The tower? It would just be a hideous industrial spike of iron. Inappropriate. Especially here, of all places.”
Gus narrowed hi
s eyes at that response and studied Ulm’s face, trying to make sense of the man. “Why is it inappropriate here, of all places?”
“A hideous, industrial spike of iron, rising from the heart of the city, where once the queen’s palace stood?” He seemed incredulous that Gus could even ask such a thing, then frowned and said simply, “Inappropriate.”
Ulm seemed on the edge of outrage at the very idea, and not wanting to incite him over it, Gus just nodded slowly and said, “I suppose so.” That seemed to mollify Ulm a bit, so Gus changed the topic, saying, “We may be looking at the work of some sort of secret society. Are you familiar with any in town? Particularly one that wears green?”
Ulm frowned again, but then his face took to a more practiced-seeming stern expression, like a mask he put on to cover the frown. The man shook his head, then walked back from the map at his desk and gripped Gus by the shoulder. “No, Mister Baston. There are no secret societies in Khanom. That’s something from back west, where people are idle enough for such pursuits. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other appointments.”
His words were firm, authoritative punctuations as he pressed Gus towards the door of his office, calling a definite end to the interview. It was such an odd change that Gus briefly considered changing his own tone to match—digging in his heels and demanding to know what was happening. That might lead to questions about his actual authority though, which wouldn’t end well for him.
That tactic would likely just result in another trip to jail, and without Parland here to get him out again, he’d have trouble tracking down either Doctor Phand or Louis’s killer, so instead he just smiled and said, “Of course, of course, I’m sure you’re quite busy. Thanks for your time, sir.”
Ulm stopped herding him forward once it seemed like Gus would see himself out, and free of his grasp, Gus slowed to a more comfortable gait and took a moment to smile down at the women in Ulm’s typing pool as he passed. Their boss frowned at him from the doorway to his office and stood watch until his visitor had passed into the reception area.
Once out in the foyer, Gus put on an embarrassed smile, turned to the receptionist, and said, “Sorry, Lana, right? I’m supposed to meet up with Mister Ulm at an event, and I’ve already forgotten when it is. Do you keep his schedule?”
She nodded with such earnest sympathy that he even felt a glimmer of guilt for deceiving her. Pulling a book out from under her desk, she flipped it open and asked, “What was the event?”
“Club meeting. I thought it was this week.” He leaned over to peer down at the schedule as she scanned down the list of appointments but found his eyes drifting to the neckline of her dress instead.
“Well, there’s the Civic Alliance in a few days, and the KBBB this weekend. Oh, and a Wardens’ dinner tomorrow night. That looks like all for this week though. Are you sure it was this week?”
Gus’s smile froze at the name, absolutely shocked to hear it so bluntly delivered. She was young, perhaps a decade his junior, but that level of glib ignorance was astonishing. Perhaps Ulm had smoothed over the natural revulsion already.
That was the problem with involving prominent entrepreneurs in a secret society though—they couldn’t handle simple things like scheduling appointments for themselves. Marshalling his reaction, Gus said, “Yeah, Wardens is the one. Did he tell you where we’re meeting?”
She giggled a little at that question, and he nodded in faux approval. “Good, good. Can’t let you know all our secrets.” Leaving her with a wink and his most charming smile, he hurried out before Ulm came to make sure he’d really left.
Ringing for the elevator, he whistled a few bars of Easiest War until it arrived, he stepped in, and the doors closed. Once they had, he dropped the tune and said, “Gah!”
The elevator operator smirked at that but kept his eyes studiously ahead upon the controls, entirely too professional. Gus fought the urge to pace back and forth, not sure how that might impact things as they descended from over a dozen stories up. Pacing was never his style anyway, and what he really felt he needed was a drink.
Wardens. There it was. Ulm was almost certainly involved then, but thinking it over, Gus doubted he was the brains behind the kidnapping. The mind that thought up hiring Gus as a stalking horse would surely be a cannier liar than Ulm had been in discussing his vote. It felt like someone had fed Ulm the lines that he so faithfully kept repeating, but who?
With the Elves gone, who else would dare start a new group of Wardens? Anarchists and socialists held few charms for a successful businessman like Ulm. Colonial nationalists were a thing that came up in Rakhasin, but he’d never heard of any outcry for Aelfuan independence. It had to be a sham—or a bad joke.
There was no way to be sure without seeing for himself.
~
“Treason Charged!”
Welshie Bolmar, of 28 Bantham Street, NW Lower, was brought before the Hon. Augustus Ingram, at the Marjorie Street Police Court on Tuesday, charged with treason-felony, to which the original charge of feloniously dealing with Government rifles had been altered since the first hearing of the case last week at Cloudmill.
Evidence was given connecting the prisoner with the storage of the arms found in Southland Road, with treasonable intent, and also with having used a stable for similar purposes at a previous period in Hamesville. Sufficient evidence being held to move forward, a full trial will be arranged for the next circuit appearance in three months’ time.
– Khanom Daily Converser, 13 Tal. 389
~
- CHAPTER 18 -
It was early in the afternoon still, and since he had already met Sylvester, that left only one of the Exposition councilors to meet. He had wanted to ask Ulm more about Miss Aliyah Gale, but he doubted Ulm would make himself available for further inquiries. When the elevator reached the ground, Gus gave the operator a friendly nod, made his way back to the street, and hailed a cab.
The slight incline as they drove south was barely noticeable, but the mountain loomed larger and larger over everything as they drew near, and for the first time he wondered what it was called, probably something unpronounceable in Elven.
Miss Aliyah Gale’s building lay just a few blocks from the far end of the upper city, where the mountain loomed even more steeply. A plethora of large homes skirted the steeper slopes, apparently the dwellings of the sort of people whose faces were depicted in all those industrial murals. The only structures higher up the mountain than those appeared to be waypoints for the mines.
Her building overlooked the park more directly than Ulm’s had, and Gus supposed she would have an excellent view of the Exposition once it started. The building looked a fair bit older than most of Khanom’s towers as well, although if he had to guess, it wasn’t much more than a decade old. Perhaps this was the tower that inspired the others.
Although the marble flooring and staid Pylian columns were perfectly elegant, they lacked the bombastic flair that seemed the favored style in Khanom. The lobby stood empty, and judging by the signage, most of the first floor was apparently taken up by Khanom Water Supply.
A directory was posted alongside the elevator doors, and upon looking it over, Gus saw that the building’s tenants all had similarly uncreative names like Khanom Gas Works, Khanom Housing Design, Khanom Brickworks (sales), Khanom Cabinetry, and so forth.
Reviewing the list by floor, he realized their offices were all organized primarily by function: architects adjacent to engineers, construction companies next to related contractors, and so forth. To Gus, that convenient arrangement hinted that rather than being over a dozen separate entities, they were all simply branches of the same tree.
Judging by their names, all of the businesses here related to construction. With Miss Aliyah Gale so involved in construction, Gus wondered if perhaps she had objected to Phand’s tower because some firm that wasn’t hers had won the contract to build it.
Miss Aliyah Gale was listed as the sole occupant of the
12th floor, so Gus rang the bell for the elevator. The attendant was a man of similar cloth to the one in Ulm’s building. He nodded politely and asked his floor but otherwise held a stiff dedication to duty that Gus imagined Saucier’s man Garnick would have found refreshingly acceptable.
When the elevator doors opened on Miss Aliyah Gale’s offices, it seemed for a moment that they had somehow taken him into a different building altogether. The blandly pragmatic lobby below gave no hint of the exotic opulence that lurked above it. Awash in deep reds and golds, it seemed the entire floor was one large room, filled with luxurious furnishings in polished woods and gilt.
Miss Aliyah Gale’s office was furnished more like a private parlor than a place of business, and Easternist artwork layered the place in fantastic serpents and mist-covered scenes of strangely shaped mountains and unfamiliar animals that Gus found entirely unnatural looking. Several plush couches lounged about, and an enormous desk, intricately carved, sat back in one corner and was the only bit of furniture that seemed appropriate for an office. On the other hand, there was no bed or dresser or similar furniture in view that would mark this as a dwelling.
As he stared around in surprise, an older man in valet’s livery approached and coughed softly, to loosen the Gus’s attention from the surroundings. “I’m afraid you are not expected, sir, and Miss Aliyah Gale is not presently available.”
Despite the inordinate wealth on display in the rest of the room, the valet looked out of place even in livery—his grimly weathered face seemed more suited to an aging brawler than a refined servant. He held out a small silver tray as if expecting a tip, and it took Gus several seconds to realize it was intended for his calling card.
Rummaging around in his pockets, Gus found a battered card with his name on it, and a bit more searching produced a pen, with which he jotted down Rondel’s, so she would know where to find him.