Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  Chapter 25

  I was on the roof; nailing planks together to make a planter big enough for a tree, when my phone buzzed. I scrambled back in through the window, picked up a handset. “Yeah.”

  “Meisener,” Magyar said.

  “What?” I put my hammer down on the table.

  “It was Meisener who sabotaged the plant. Had to be.”

  “Hold on.” I climbed back through the window with the handset and sat down. The slates were cold through the thin material of my trousers. “Go on.”

  “Four people with enough know-how to jam the glucose line and ready the emergency equipment started work at Hedon Road in the last three months: you, a day-shifter, and Paolo and Meisener.” She added dryly, “I assumed you didn’t count.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The day-shifter joined just the day before the spill. Not enough time to fix things.”

  “No.”

  “So that left Paolo and Meisener. And apart from the fact that Paolo left before it all happened, I don’t think he was capable, do you?”

  Paolo had neither the knowledge nor the focus. “No.”

  “Right. So I had a look at Meisener’s records-”

  “Which will be false.”

  “Yeah, they read like yours: plausible dates and places—names of plants and supervisors, family, even vacation dates—but something just doesn’t add up.”

  “Go on.”

  “Even if you only believe part of his records, he’s had enough experience to know what he’s doing.”

  “Where was he when the spill came in?”

  “I’m getting to that.” She sounded annoyed. “I backchecked with Incident Documentation. He was one of the first out.”

  “Nothing incriminating about that.”

  “No, but he apparently helped half a dozen people into EEBAs before leaving.”

  “That’s significant?”

  “I think it is,” Magyar said. “He already knew where everything was. Which means he was expecting something to happen.”

  “It could.” It could also just mean he was an old hand, like me, like Magyar herself, and knew a badly run plant ready for an accident when he saw it. “If he’s guilty, he’ll be moving on soon.” To whatever his next job was, for whomever paid him. Meisener, the cheerful, bandy-legged little man.

  “… little bastard.”

  I was thinking, irrelevantly, of sea and sand and sitting on a log. Then of my last van de Oest project in the Kirghizi desert. Of a truck driving through a puddle, and Hepple.

  “What?”

  “I said, I want to strangle the little bastard. He could have killed my people. All for money! But why? That’s what doesn’t make sense. Who benefits? The whole thing smacks of organization, which takes money. Even if we had shut down for several days and managers lost their profits, it doesn’t mean anyone else would have made money. Unless it was a matter of market share, and even then-”

  Market share. Hepple. A tent, wind singing along the dunes outside. Marley, saying something about…

  “-divided up among several rival plants, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”

  Silence.

  “Are you there?”

  “Um? Yes. Sorry.” The wisp of memory faded.

  “Well, what should we do? Apart from beat the bastard to pulp.”

  “Watch and wait.” A dissatisfied, incredulous silence. “We need more information.” There was something missing. Something important. Hepple. A truck. Tok. Marley. I shook my head. “We don’t know for sure that he’s responsible.”

  “True.” Grudging. “He might not even know we know it’s sabotage.”

  “If it is him, he’ll know what the plant managers know.” Her sigh was loud and long. “Meet me outside the plant at half five?”

  “Yes.”

  I picked up the hammer and a mouthful of nails and went back to building my planter—one of five. I was going to make an orchard. Me, the sky, some trees. Maybe bees would come up here after all.

  The wood was new, still sappy and white against the silvery glint of the nails. Difficult to saw, but less expensive.

  On a water worker’s pay, I couldn’t afford any better.

  But there’s that thirty thousand tucked away. I tried not to think about that. If I didn’t spend the money I could pretend I hadn’t been in that bunker with Spanner.

  I could ignore that awful dead-bone smile she had given me, the things I had said. The things I knew because of what I had done.

  I thought about Magyar’s words: managers’ profits. Hepple wouldn’t be getting any this quarter. His own fault. His greedy attempts to shave expenses could have cost people their lives. Market share.

  The hammer slipped and caught the edge of my thumb. I spat the nails out of my mouth and swore. Carpentry wasn’t my forte. Tok, now, he could have taken these bits of wood and banged them together in a second. Very practical and workmanlike. He was the kind of person who could take two twigs and a piece of string and make something interesting and sturdy. He had done beautiful things made of found objects dotted the grounds at Ratnapida. He had never been able to just sit, empty-handed. And then he had gone to study music. So hidden, after all. Close-minded. I suppose it ran in the family.

  We had shared things, though. And he had helped me. Like that time by the pond when he had told me to find something to do, something to use as a shield against our parents’ interest. I hammered the nail home, set another in place with a tap. That afternoon had been sunny, like most Ratnapida days I remembered. Throwing grass stems for the fish. I hammered the nail in. Set another. Smiled as I remembered Tok telling me about sneaking a look at Aunt Nadia’s files. Lifted the hammer.

  It came out of nowhere, a metaphysical hammer blow between the rise and fall of the real tool: Hepple. Market share. Jerome’s Boys. And it all fell into place.

  Magyar was waiting for me in the locker room. The shift would not change for half an hour and everything was quiet. We sat next to each other on the wooden bench, not too close. “Jerome’s Boys,” I told her. “They were a dirty-work team run directly by the van de Oest COO, forty years ago.

  They enforced the company monopolies, before the courts got around to it. Any means necessary. Which is why they were supposed to have been disbanded. Maybe they were, but someone’s had the same idea.” Magyar was staring at me as though I was crazy. “Look at when Meisener joined. Just a few days after Hepple started cost-cutting.”

  “Hepple? This bunch of enforcers tried to wreck my plant because of that useless idiot?”

  “No. Or, rather, yes: because of what Hepple did. In a way you were right. It’s about market share.”

  “I’m trying very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what Hepple’s got to do with it.”

  I started again. “My… the van de Oests originally made their money by genetically tailoring bacteria and then patenting them. Every time their bugs were used, they got a cut. Then they retailored the bugs so that they don’t work unless they’re supplied with special proprietary bug food—which is where they make their real profit these days. Treatment plants need the bugs, the bugs need the food. The van de Oests license people to supply both and earn a lot of money for doing nothing. They have a monopoly. When Hepple canceled the food order in favor of generics, he was breaking that monopoly. Someone stepped in to protect it.”

  “They would risk all this, thousands of lives, to protect a monopoly?”

  “They didn’t intend anyone to get hurt. Except in the pocket.” They wouldn’t risk another Caracas. “And even if people died, the van de Oests would have come out of it smelling of roses. It’s happened before. After all, they would say, if their instructions had been carried out and the proper food used, nothing would have gone wrong. The finger will point at Hepple, and the people who were stupid enough to hire him.”

  “Which is what’s happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “So,” Magyar said slowly, “this group, Jerome�
��s Boys or whatever they’re called now, is responsible. But they’re illegal. They’re not supposed to exist. So where do they get their money?”

  The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money, Oster had said. No funds, no operation.

  Ridiculously, I felt too ashamed to tell her. It’s not your fault, I told myself, but they were my family. I shared the same genes, the same upbringing. I might have had the same values. “It… They…” I looked down at the floor, then back up again. “Kidnap is a great source of income.”

  “Kidnap is…?” She stared at me. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Someone assembles a group to protect the company. But they don’t have access to legitimate corporate funds. So they kidnap the heir, you, and get—how much, ten million?”

  “Tax free.”

  “-ten million tax free, to fund them. Their purpose is to insure corporate market share by doing things like illegal information gathering and plant sabotage. The point of insuring market share is to keep up van de Oest family income…” She shook her head.

  “I know, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t make any kind of sense! Whoever’s in charge of these people has to have a mind like a corkscrew.”

  “And access to everything that goes on.” Corporate records and strategy. Marketing. Research and development. Personal family records.

  “They had to know I was going to be in Uruguay. They had to know I was allergic to spray hypos. They had to have an organization. Just like the organization that sabotaged the plant. And look at who’s been kidnapped now: Lucas Chen, heir to another bioremediation family. The kind of person the dirty-work group would be collecting information on. Don’t you see? It makes perfect sense.” Someone in my family had had me kidnapped. Had put me through all that humiliation and fear and guilt. Had put me in a place where I might have killed somebody. Someone in my family. “Have you heard any more from your friend in county records?”

  “More of the same: nothing, nothing, and nothing. She’ll keep checking, but either you didn’t kill him, or someone doesn’t want anyone to know that you did.”

  She didn’t say: which is the same thing. It wasn’t.

  She stood up, looked at her watch. It was almost time for the shift change. I had a sudden picture of Magyar in my kitchen, making coffee, talking about nothing in particular. I wondered if it would ever happen.

  “So, what are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “Help you watch Meisener.”

  She made an impatient gesture. “Don’t you think you should tell someone what you know? You should take it to the police. You haven’t done anything wrong. Or at least call your father. The poor man thinks you’re dead.”

  “I want it to stay that way for a while.”

  “You’re punishing him for something you once thought he did. But he hasn’t done anything wrong, either.”

  “He’s done plenty. Ignoring problems isn’t that far from creating them.”

  “Yes, it is. Especially if he’s trying to fix things now.”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand will not fix anything! And all it would have taken three years ago—three years ago!—was a single sentence. One sentence: ‘I won’t let your mother hurt you again.’ But he didn’t.”

  “I don’t know whether he truly tried then or not. But I think he’s trying now. He’s trying to find you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be found.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m ashamed!” Because kittens should be round. Because still sometimes I felt as though I might cast three shadows in a bright light.

  From down the corridor came the sound of voices. Some laughter. The sudden slush of a shower.

  Magyar gave me a quick, hard hug. It was so fast I hardly realized what she was doing until she let go. “Just think about it. You can always phone in some anonymous information to the police. But you have to do something.”

  “We’ll watch Meisener.”

  * * *

  The garden lay fallow. Lore only left the flat when Spanner forced her out to make money. Instead, every time a charity commercial came on the net, Lore downloaded it. After discarding the big, established organizations, she had twenty-three examples. She began to compare: the pitch, the age of the live spokesperson in relation to the charity, the vocabulary used, the background scenery.

  She was sure she could create a short commercial at least as good as any of the ones she had seen. But she had no idea which were the most effective in terms of bringing in money.

  After some thought, she accessed net archives, downloading charity commercials that were two or three years old. She analyzed them for the same trends she had spotted in the later adverts, then brought up the tax records of those organizations that were still alive enough to be filing.

  “It will work,” Lore said, but Spanner was putting on her jacket. “It will,” she went on more calmly. “We have a few minutes before we have to be there. Just sit down and listen.” Spanner zipped up the jacket. She was pulling gloves out of the pockets while Lore talked fast. “Look, you’ve seen what I can do. And you’ve seen the commercials. They can’t afford anything more expensive than library shots with maybe one live head. No interactives. Nothing I can’t handle. True?”

  “True.”

  “Then all we need is a false account, and maybe twenty seconds break-in time.”

  Spanner shook her head. “We can’t even replace our own PIDAs in this climate.”

  “We can get an account set up by getting Ruth’s help. She works at the morgue, remember.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten. But she’s not likely to help us, not after the film.”

  Lore swallowed. “Maybe if we explained…” And there was always that film, with the right head attached to the right body: there was always blackmail.

  “And what about breaking into the net transmission? Ruth can’t help us there.”

  “No.” Lore tried to smile. “Actually, I was hoping you would be able to think of a way to manage that.”

  Spanner frowned. “I suppose… No. The equipment would be too expensive. It wouldn’t be cost-effective.”

  “How expensive?”

  “I don’t know. A lot.”

  “Five hundred? Ten thousand?”

  “More.” Spanner was still frowning, still thinking. “But maybe not that much more. It would be difficult to get hold of, though Hyn and Zimmer would be able to help…”

  “But we don’t know where-”

  “I can always find the old foxes. How much do you think we could make?”

  Lore thought about lying. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It depends how good my tape is. If I could count on ten seconds, say, then maybe… thirty thousand?”

  Spanner nodded. “We’d more than break even after the second run.”

  Assuming we don’t get caught after the first, Lore thought, but said nothing. She was feeling odd, almost excited, a little scared. It might work, it might. This might be a way out. She was finding it hard to breathe.

  Spanner pulled on her gloves and tapped her breast pocket where the vial nested. “Meanwhile, we still need money. Even more if we’re to get that equipment.”

  Spanner’s eyes were very blue, Lore thought, very beautiful. And there was no choice. They had to get their money from somewhere. For now. She nodded, and the motion spilled the tears that had been gathering in her eyes.

  Spanner took off one of her gloves and gently brushed at Lore’s cheek. “Don’t cry. We’ll just do this for a little while longer. Just until we have the money for the equipment. Then I’ll make everything all right. I promise.”

  She smiled, but Lore just cried harder. She had seen that half curl of the lip: Spanner was lying.

  After Lore had set out the cat’s food, she sat on the damp earth by the rookery she had made of broken bricks and lumps of concrete with the steel still stuck through it. The worst of winter was over. There were two snowdrops poking bravely from t
he scraggy grass. It had rained earlier; the earth smelled freshly turned. She felt utterly blank. She watched the sky, a beautiful, cold, clear blue that made her ache. It reminded her of the Netherlands, of being six, of being looked after, protected from the world.

  A faint mewling brought her back to the present. It came from under the bushes. She moved her head very slowly. Slight movement. Something—several somethings—small. She stayed very still, trying to breathe quietly, evenly. Heard it again, this time two thin squeaks. Kittens.

  Lore thought about the thin, pathetic thing she had buried just a few months ago, the kitten that had died of utter starvation. Nothing, probably, had improved for the feral mother, but she did not know the meaning of giving up. Giving up got you nowhere. Nowhere at all. She would keep trying, keep giving birth, until she had a soft, round kitten.

  * * *

  Meisener came in, talking to Cel, while I was wriggling into my skinny. I watched him covertly while he took off his coat, folded it up and bundled it into his locker, and unhooked his slate.

  His slate. It would be so simple. If I dealt with Spanner again. No. Not that. Not again. But you have to do something, Magyar had said, and she was right. Lucas Chen was strapped to a chair in a tent, somewhere, or shivering in a sleeping bag, naked and afraid. I had to do something. I worked through the first half of the shift, thinking, then ate my food at the break while staring unseeingly at the fish loop, still thinking. Near the end of the shift, I found Magyar. “Is there any way you can stay here after the end of the shift Pretend you need to do some office work, or something?”

  “I don’t need to pretend. There’s a lot to do.”

  “Would they notice if you uploaded Meisener’s records to me at home?”

  “I could find a way to disguise it. What do you have in mind?”

  “A records search. Between your official status and the things I’ve picked up in the last couple of years, we can learn a lot about Nathan Meisener.”

  The flat was cold when I got home, but I opened a link to Magyar before I even turned on the heat so that she could start uploading Meisener’s information. I asked her to also call each of the previous employers he had listed, and get from them several things: a picture, a DNA scan if available, biographical data—age, height, family and so on—and the references and employers he had listed.