Reciprocity

by Sean M Locke

  The Vrijdag sphere was a delicate assembly of magnets and gyroscopes around a precisely placed chunk of spraystone. Fiddling with the position, direction, and spin of the magnets changed the magnetic field inside the sphere, screwing with the spraystone’s idea of “up,” and pushing the whole craft in whatever direction you liked. It wasn’t easy, but you could control an airship’s speed, pitch, elevation, and everything else with a handful of levers and dials. A pebble-sized bit of spraystone could make a fast, nimble ornithopter if you had the scratch to pay for it. Someone with Josef’s money could afford a damn fine one.

  The thing about an ornithopter was that it didn’t have to follow the same traffic rules a taxi did. In clear skies, it could outrun a car any day of the week. In the Lower Terrace, it risked getting fouled up on a clothesline, guy wire, or aerostat cable if the pilot wasn’t careful. There was a chance—a piss-poor chance—that I could catch up with Josef after all and see what he was up to.

  I barked at the driver a couple times to take this turn and that turn, all while keeping my eyes on the sky. The driver knew his business, and the promise of a healthy tip kept his tiny foot and his makeshift stilt mashed to the gas pedal.

  “Mevrouw, you can be honest with me,” the driver called, swinging the heap left around a stalled streetcar, and then right around a newsstand. “Have you literally lost your mind? I just want to be able to tell the cops something if they stop me.”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied, shouting over the wind. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  “I like your optimism.” Then, under his breath, I thought I heard him say, “Chasing a gods-damned flyer.”

  “Turn left here!”

  Another three blocks, and I’d lost sight of Josef. I could hear the whirring of his engine, but couldn’t tell its direction over the taxi’s racket and the wind in my ears.

  This part of town started to look a little too familiar, and I slid back into my seat.

  “Slow down,” I said. I slunk low in the seat, keeping my eyes above the window casing.

  “Mevrouw?”

  “It’s a graveyard, man. Have some respect.”

  The cemetery of St. Gridra the Immaculate rolled past, quiet and overgrown. Trees kept me from seeing too much, but there weren’t any birds sitting in them, either. Maybe something loud and noisy had just landed and scared them off, or maybe it hadn’t, but it gave me a hunch anyway.

  “Drop me a block past this pawn shop, all right?”

  He nodded without a word, the grimace on his face telling me he was glad to get rid of me. The fare was three and a half guilders, and I gave him the ten-spot, plus one more for his silence. With any luck, I’d get what I paid for.

  * * *

  I walked a fast block to the graveyard, taking the long way around to avoid Piet’s pawn shop. When I hopped the low stone wall and made my way through the foliage, I didn’t really expect to see Josef and his airship, but I moved quiet, anyway. On the off chance he was still there, meeting with whoever he was meeting with, I didn’t need to announce to the world where I was.

  I didn’t need to worry about stumbling into Josef. In the center of the cemetery, I found a three-meter-wide circle where the grass was blown flat, and scattered mounds of discarded cloth dotted the area. A couple of rotted headstones had crumbled and toppled, and no moss grew where the stones were broken. The acrid stink of burned distillate fuel lingered, but I only noticed it because I was looking for it. Mostly what I smelled was blood and unwashed bodies.

  One of the cloth mounds groaned and shifted, and a blood-slick hand pulled at the grass. All the rest of the limpets I’d seen before in the church alley lay scattered within the circle of flattened grass and fallen stone. I noticed then that a few of the shapeless lumps of rags moved and made small noises, but most of them didn’t.

  The man pulled himself forward with one good arm, aimless and bleeding. I crouched by his shoulder. His lanky black hair was streaked with gray where it wasn’t missing in patches, and it covered his hollow cheeks and milky eyes. Blood dripped from his lips, and his breathing came ragged and labored. He whispered something to himself over and over, something I couldn’t hear. When I touched him on the shoulder, he stopped moving.

  “What happened here, old man?”

  “He has it.” I leaned closer to him, ignoring the stench, and strained to hear better. “He has it, and I want it. He has it, and I want it. I want it, I . . .”

  He trailed off and coughed up a thick, dark stream of blood. A punctured lung, maybe. He didn’t have long.

  “Who was here, man? Who did this to you? How many?”

  “Little weasel man and a big sharp man. Little weasel man had the blue, and I wanted it, and we came for it. But then he gave it to the sharp man, the flying man, the whirling man. They traded for it, and they had mean words, and we tried to get it from the sharp man,” he said, and then dissolved into ragged coughs. “He whirled in circles and cut us and cut us, and we fell down, and he went away with the wind.”

  “Panic and perdition,” I whispered.

  “I almost had it.” The man opened his hand as if remembering, and a plaid scrap of cloth dangled from his fingers, stuck fast with tacky blood. It reminded me of the valise I rejected from Piet’s earlier that morning.

  “He killed all of you,” I muttered. “He didn’t have to do that.”

  “He has it, but he is far, far away. You don’t have it, you don’t, but you have money. I can smell it.” He grabbed my wrist, his grip surprisingly strong, his white-clouded eyes suddenly wide and manic. “Can I have it? I need to get more blue. I want it. I . . .”

  The limpet’s face fell slack, and he rested his head in the graveyard grass. Something rattled inside him, and he exhaled for the last time.

  Chapter 8

  I kept a small, dingy apartment on the third floor of an old tenement on Pioneer Boulevard, and I went there now to get myself cleaned up, stopping only to get an ice block and a couple bottles from the corner store. The flop was just far enough away from the Exedra Arms to be an inconvenient walk, and in a neighborhood that neither family bothered exploiting. I didn’t stay there much and only really used it when I had business that Lange didn’t necessarily need to know about.

  The place was L-shaped, with peeling wallpaper that hadn’t been in fashion twenty years ago, a desk with a chair, and a bed, currently folded into the wall. The kitchenette only got the name on account of the electric hot plate and leaky icebox. The shower was barely big enough for one person, but two could fit if you got creative about it. It was the sort of dive no up-and-coming Lange would touch unless they had to, and that was why I liked it.

  I dumped the ice into the icebox and started the shower. Since it took a little longer than a lifetime for the water to warm up, I stripped down and consulted with a lager. I made myself not do any serious thinking, not until I had a bottle in me, and lukewarm water dribbled over my head.

  Forty minutes and two decisions later, I was back on the street, hailing a cab in my second-best suit—a double-breasted navy blue number with a lavender tie. I might be walking straight into an open grave, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t look good doing it.

  At the Exedra Arms, I overheard some of the guys say Josef had been out on his own business somewhere the whole afternoon. I didn’t bother enlightening anyone as to what kind of bloody business he’d been on. Henriette and Kasper had retired to Kasper’s suite about an hour before. The Boss and Ludo were in conference and weren’t to be disturbed, which was fine with me.

  I had an hour or so before I needed to be at Hotel Mercure, so I headed upstairs. Visiting Donatella in her rooftop garden every three days or so wasn’t the most fun thing I did, but that was all right. She deserved my respect, and anyway, no one else was going to do it unless they were told to. When the elevator doors clattered open on the tenth floor, a nurse was standing in the small anteroom, waiting for the car.

  I leaned against the frame of the elevator
door, blocking the nurse’s way and giving her a slow sort of smile. I took my time plucking a cigarette out of the case and set it between my lips. “’Lo, Dolores.”

  Dolores set her hands on her hips and tilted her head at me. The starched white uniform concealed more than it revealed, but that was all right. Mysteries could be fun, too.

  “Kaeri Hawen, honestly.” She sighed like she was exasperated at me, but I knew better. “You turn on the charm every time I see you, and I keep telling you I’m not that sort of girl.”

  I shrugged and spoke around the cigarette. “Maybe, but you can’t blame me for trying. Besides, I’ve seen you smack a fella across the face for trying his luck with you. You haven’t smacked me yet.”

  She made a thinking face at me for a few seconds, looking at me with a cute little moue. Then she surprised me by closing the distance between us. Dolores loomed, a good handspan taller than me. I began to think it was my lucky day after all.

  She plucked the cigarette from my lips and pushed her face into mine. “There’s no smoking in here.”

  “Sorry,” I said, not at all sorry. “Guess I forgot.”

  “I’m sure.” With delicate fingers, she tucked the cigarette behind her ear. “Anyway, I thought you quit?”

  “I guess I forgot that, too. What is it about you that makes me forget everything?”

  “You kidder.” She stepped around me, letting her shoulder brush against mine as she stepped into the elevator car. “You know, it’s nice that you visit Mevrouw Lange. Hardly anyone does.”

  “She was good to me when I was in a rough spot. I like to pay my respects.”

  “You’re sweet. Anyway, she’s in the solarium. Turn her head to the west before you go. I think she likes to watch the sunset.”

  “Sure, you bet.”

  “Gerda should be in at ten o’clock to see to her.” Dolores shot her hip out a little and pursed her lips at me. “Say, do you flirt as shamelessly with her as you do with me?”

  “Gerda is about three hundred years old and is shorter than me, which is saying something.” I made a show of giving Dolores the once-over, from the stiff white nurse’s cap with the red double-moon logo down to her sensible white leather flats and back up again. “I like my women a little taller.”

  Dolores gave me a smirk and accordioned the door shut. “You’re the worst.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets and watched the car descend, my eyes locked on hers. When the car dropped out of sight, I wiped the grin off my face and turned to look at the door that led to Donatella’s garden.

  The penthouse apartments had the close, musty air of a place that didn’t see a lot of people. A few trusted nurses, a housekeeper, a mechanic, and a gardener came in here regular, but anyone could tell it wasn’t a place to speak too loud or sit too comfortable. Floral wallpaper peeled in a few places, but Hendrik didn’t see fit to spend money to fix that up. Who would see it, anyway? It was only after I nudged the doctor in the right direction that Hendrik saw the sense in having the housekeeping staff keep the place tidy and dust-free. Just the way Donatella liked it.

  I opened the glass doors to the solarium, and a wave of damp heat washed over me. High windows and a glass ceiling made the little rooftop room into a greenhouse, and all the greenery kept it jungle muggy. Titan orchids and goddess lilies dominated the pocket landscape, and the smell of them stopped me in my tracks, like it always did. The doctors were convinced that a warm, humid environment filled with familiar odors and sounds would give Donatella the best chance for snapping out of her coma. I didn’t know about that, but the smell of the place did a bang-up job of reminding me of lessons learned at Donatella’s feet. Not that there was a lot of time for reminiscing. I would need to tell the old lady what she needed to hear and do it fast, because the odds were good I wouldn’t get another chance.

  As Dolores promised, Donatella was reclined in her bed, staring up into the arched bowers of titan orchids. Bars of late-afternoon sunlight stretched through the vines, and motes of dust danced in them. I stood at her bedside awhile and looked at her gray, familiar face. Once it had been bright and alive with more passion than a dozen women half her age. It was still stately, with high cheekbones and strong jaw, but the pale flesh had sunk into her bones, and her watery eyes didn’t shine like they used to. I must have made some noise, because her breathing got a little quicker. I stayed out of her line of sight and didn’t say anything. It was cruel to keep her waiting, but I needed a minute to get my head on right.

  A year and two months ago, Donatella Lange had had a stroke. She was sixty-two at the time, and those things happened, I guessed, but it seemed impossible that something as small as a clot of blood would take down a living legend. The stroke didn’t leave her a crippled wreck like it did some people, and it wasn’t kind enough to kill her outright. All her senses worked, near as anyone could tell, but she couldn’t move a muscle on her own, couldn’t talk. Her heart and lungs still worked, but just barely. She blinked regularly, but that was an automatic thing. It was like the stroke took all the best parts of her—her vicious wit, her frightening intelligence, her unwavering loyalty—and locked them up inside the uncrackable safe of her skull. That locked-in state was a one-in-a-million thing, and Donatella was certainly a one-in-a-million lady.

  And so for the last fourteen months, the lioness had been lying in her sickbed, kept alive by nurses and machines at exorbitant cost. An array of brass trumpets ringed her head like a halo; they emitted occasional puffs of medicinal vapor. Pressurized iron tanks, sighing leather bellows, and a labyrinth of copper pipes made up most of her bed; the mattress and blankets were an afterthought. The bed sat on tracks that wound throughout the solarium, and a small electric motor helped the nurses move the whole contraption from place to place.

  I couldn’t imagine how much all this cost to install and maintain, the salaries of all the people who kept poor Donatella alive. Hendrik couldn’t have been happy to pay it, but he also couldn’t have just let Donatella die from neglect. I thought he would have slowly cut off funds for her care after the first six months, when things started to look hopeless. Something kept Hendrik’s wallet open, kept Donatella alive. I’d never thought to ask him, and he kept his own counsel.

  I sat on the chair next to Donatella’s bed and took her hand. Her skin was as dry as paper, and light as spun sugar. “Donatella, I’m here.”

  Her breathing slowed into an easy rhythm as I started through the routine of things I talked to her about. I asked her how she was feeling, told her the date and time, told her in general terms that Hendrik and Kasper were healthy. I asked her whether the nurses were treating her right, and if they weren’t, then she ought to snap out of it and tell me so I could knock some heads together. I told her I thought I was getting a little closer to sealing the deal with Dolores.

  All of my joking felt hollow in my ears, but I told myself that Donatella liked to hear this sort of thing. We couldn’t do small talk before turning to serious matters like regular people did, so we did this instead.

  A machine hissed and thumped, blowing a puff of atomized medicine over Donatella’s face.

  “Listen, Donatella, we gotta talk. You know I’m loyal to you, right? I’ve proven it. I was loyal to you when I didn’t even know you.”

  A knot of grief swelled in my throat, and I swallowed it. I’d told myself I was finished crying about Prospera. I’d told myself about a million times.

  We’d just picked the wrong godsdamned afternoon, that was all. I didn’t want to remember it again, but there it was anyway.

  * * *

  That icy, drizzling winter ten years back, the headmaster’s daughter had decided she liked me, too, and we’d snuck out to have a day outside of cloistered walls, away from watchful nuns.

  The two of us, arm in arm, pressed close together for warmth, laughing and wondering why the man in front of the theater had a gelato cart instead of hot cocoa, because who would buy gelato on a day like that?

&n
bsp; I looked up from the gelato cart to see the matinee letting out, and a wedge of dark suits, silently clearing a path for a younger, more vital Donatella Lange and her sulking teenaged grandson Kasper. All the suits had odd bulges in their coats. Prospera whispered in my ear what I already knew from rumors—who Donatella was, how she’d donated so much to the school, how she’d built the new wing. She said something about getting an autograph. I said something about getting in trouble, but I couldn’t get it all out of my mouth because she was dragging me toward the dark suits and our school’s silent benefactor. The suits watched us like raptors but let us through.

  We were close enough to touch her when some cars screeched to a halt on the curb. Heads jerked up at the sound of angry voices and metallic clacks. Over my shoulder, I saw the loud open mouths and open gun barrels of the men leaning out of the cars, and then the world detonated in noise and screaming and enraged wasps zipping by overhead.

  Two of Donatella’s dark suits fell. The rest swarmed on Donatella, protecting her and the boy with their bodies, some pulling their own guns out and hemming us into their circle. A short, hard crack split my eardrums, louder than gunshots, and I saw a star-shaped smudge of soot on the staircase below me. A broken, bleeding Lange woman dragged herself away from it, her mouth open in a silent scream. Both cars had men standing up through holes in the roof, throwing black iron spheres the size of cricket balls at the theater. Each sphere trailed a sizzling firefly. More explosions, all making a great deal of noise and smoke. One of the bombs struck the gelato man right in the chest, but by some dumb luck it fell into the iron cart and exploded in there, sending a gout of ice and gelato skyward.

  Donatella cursed and dropped her white wallfox muff to reveal a tiny, pearl-handled gun with four barrels, each hardly wider than the shaft of a pen. She fired at the cars, the shots sounding like cheerful little firecrackers compared to the heavy booming of the shotguns and the malignant cracks of revolvers.