Reciprocity

by Sean M Locke

  “Yeah,” Wolfgang said, stolid. “That should be all right.”

  “But how should I trust you?” Maria asked.

  Wolfgang tilted his head forward and narrowed his eyes at her. “I took your word for it that you wouldn’t shoot me tonight. You can take my word for it that we’ll do what we say we’re gonna do. That good enough for you?”

  Felix held up placating hands. “Listen, it’s late, and we’re all irritable. We’ve made some progress tonight, and this is a good stopping place. Why don’t you two get some rest. We’ll pick things up in the morning and solution a way of getting the carbine back from Lange with a minimum of fuss. Can you meet us for a late breakfast tomorrow? Say, Drie Appels, ten o’clock?”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “There are still some things we need to know from you two,” Wolfgang rumbled. “But I’ll give you something for free—we will activate our asset within the Lange organization. I’ll let you guess who it is.”

  “Boss,” Felix said, his voice a warning.

  “Easy, Felix. Remember, one of those goons got away, and he’ll remember seeing Kaeri here. By the morning, the story will get messed up, and Kasper will be hearing that Kaeri was shooting at Lange soldaten. Doesn’t matter that she didn’t have a gun on her—all that mook will remember was that Kaeri was here, and didn’t exactly help him. He’ll remember it like we ambushed them, and that’s how Kasper is going to hear it. If Kaeri is as smart as she thinks she is, she isn’t going back to Exedra Arms any time real soon. Kasper and Hendrik won’t know we have an inside man until it’s too late.” He turned to face us. “So yeah. Ten o’clock, Drie Appels. Be there and be ready to talk.”

  Felix smiled, but his eyes squinted like he was reading the fine print. It took him a few seconds to translate for Wolfgang. “Which is to say . . . our mutual interests will both be served by your presence and cooperation at tomorrow’s meeting. Both of you.”

  Chapter 12

  Felix had one of the bulls drive us to the Mercure in a squad car. It was near one o’clock now, and this part of the city was quiet and well-lit. I looked past Maria to see the glitter of the Spray to the south—the arc of orbiting rocks and ice shone brilliantly in the clear night sky. The smaller moon Arodd hung high overhead, a razor-sharp sickle, and full Kaiaa peeked coyly over the edge of the Spray. The lights of Archuleta Heights and elsewhere were redundant, unnecessary. A beautiful night, and it would have been nice to enjoy it.

  We didn’t speak on the way back to her hotel. I knew that anything we said would go straight into Wolfgang’s ears, and Maria seemed to know it too. She looked pale and sick; worry tugged her lips and brows down, and I couldn’t blame her. I had my own worries, of course, and I couldn’t do one hell of a lot about any of them. A nice night, a quiet driver, empty streets, and good company. All of that, and there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about.

  The bull dropped us off at the Mercure and tipped his hat to us. The lobby was deserted apart from the night man dozing lightly at the front desk, and I could see a couple sitting in the corner of the hotel bar, heads together and talking. We kept not saying things to each other as Maria led me to the elevator. A lot of things needed saying. I could feel the sand under my eyelids—I would either need coffee or a drink to keep going, or a nice long nap. The memory of that huge, canopied bed taunted me.

  We passed several doors on the fourth floor; Maria was walking swiftly but softly. She stopped at number 413 and gave me a small sort of smile, and I thought I saw a blush in her cheeks

  She touched the lock with the key, and the door creaked open a few centimeters. Maria stopped cold and stared at the doorknob.

  “The door was locked when I left,” she said distantly. “I always lock the door.”

  “Maybe housekeeping,” I said, not believing it even as I said it.

  Maria shook her head. She brushed her fingertips on the butt of her pistol, as if to reassure herself that it was still there.

  I touched her elbow and moved past her to stand in the doorway. It was patently stupid to stand in front of her when she had the gun, but I’d already proved I was pretty good at doing stupid things. I nudged the door open with my foot and kept my hands loose and open.

  Every light in the suite was on, and the stench of piss and gin lay thick in the air. The mirror in the bathroom was broken, and all the bed linens and what looked like drapes were crammed into the toilet and bathtub.

  The room itself was thoroughly tossed. Dresses and skirts and other clothing were slashed to ribbons and thrown into piles, reeking with gin. That mattress in the four-poster mahogany frame had several score holes and slashes in it, like how you might do if you had a couple of knives and some time on your hands. Springs and stuffing stuck out all over the place. The yellow, platter-sized stain in the middle said enough about what ended up happening there. The bedside tables had the drawers pulled out, and I didn’t see anything interesting there.

  My shoes squelched on the carpets as I walked in. The iron icebox in the corner sat on its side, and several liters of melted ice soaked the carpets. The leftovers she’d had in there went rancid in the evening heat, and that just added to the overall garden of delightful smells.

  A balding fellow in a sad, slouching suit of brown and darker brown stood in the middle of the room, writing something in a notepad. He turned at my approach, and a tin badge glinted from his breast pocket. The Mercure’s house detective looked me up and down, recognizing me from earlier. His eyes hardened. He thumbed open his suit jacket, and let his hand rest on the wrapped leather handle of a come-along. I nodded at him, and let my hands rest open and visible. He nodded wearily back at me in recognition. His face told me he’d been doing this work too long, and he said nothing.

  “Kaeri?” Maria called from the hall.

  “You might as well come in.” She didn’t come in, but she didn’t say anything either. “It’s not going to get any better if you wait out there.”

  She came in slowly, taking in the suite in small chunks. Her cries of dismay grew more insistent, and ramped up to an impressive string of unprintable blasphemies until she finally saw the balding man with the tin badge and the come-along.

  “Oh, thank the gods. You are part of the security staff, are you not?” Maria advanced on the house dick, pointing a finger in the man’s face. “Do you know who did this to my room? To my belongings?”

  The detective poked Maria in the ribs with the gentle end of the come-along. Maria gave an indignant squeak and backed up a step, one hand rubbing her abdomen. The look on her face would have been hilarious on any other noble.

  “Mind not getting too close, milady? For our mutual safety.”

  “Why, I never!”

  “You ought to give it a try. Are you and your, uh … guest just getting in?” He looked from Maria to me and back again, holstered his come-along into a loop on his belt. Where a lot of other men might have leered, he merely looked tired.

  “Yes. How could that possibly matter? I must insist on an answer. What has happened?”

  “About an hour ago, the guests in 313 complained about water dripping into their suite. Housekeeping came up here and saw all this.” He gestured to the room with his pen without looking up from his notebook. “You’ll notice that your icebox is tipped over, and what looked like yesterday’s leftovers rotting in the corner. Anyway, you see the rest. Near as I can tell, a couple guys with a grudge came in here and trashed your room. Likely stole some of your stuff, but who can tell. Take a look around. See what’s missing.”

  Maria stomped about the ruined room, kicking over steamer trunks and pawing through ruined dresses and other folderol. I waded through all of her cursing and picked out the salient facts: Her father’s cavalry saber was missing, as was the lacquered teak case for her pistol and a box of spare ammunition—forty cartridges, all told.

  She went on for a little while this way, stamping around the room, her heels squishing and splashing in the wet carpeting. If the
room wasn’t so thoroughly wrecked already, I thought she might have done the job herself. The missing sword and ammunition got her blood up something terrible, far more than the torn up clothes and trashed room did.

  “The nerve, the bald nerve of whoever did this! I will have justice, Kaeri, justice I say. I will ruin whoever did this to me; I will take them for every cent and every guilder, see if I don’t. I’ll have blood, by the absent gods and the Invisible Hand, I will! I —”

  The house dick cleared his throat. He finished writing something in his notepad, and put it in his inside pocket. “A sword, a wooden pistol case, and some ammunition. Got it. Right, next steps, my lady: see if you can salvage anything in here, and then be on your way.”

  “On … on my way? Do you mean to a new suite?”

  The detective folded his hands in front of his waist and smiled sadly at me. “She’s a sweet kid.”

  “He means that they’re kicking you out, Maria.” I sighed. “Sorry.”

  “Kicking … he cannot be serious.” She looked at the detective, her body quivering with restrained rage. “You cannot be serious.”

  “Can’t have a disruptive presence on premises, my lady. Disturbs the guests.”

  “But.” Maria looked from the house dick to me and back again, her fists clenched at her hips. “But I have paid through to the end of next week.”

  The detective sighed and looked up at me through bushy eyebrows. I sighed and shoved my hands into my pockets.

  “Maria, look,” I said, gesturing to the room—anything to keep her eyes off me. “It’s a lot of damage. Whatever you paid for a deposit won’t cover it, but the next couple days’ rent might. Even if you had a hat box full of money to hand over right now, they still wouldn’t want you here.”

  “But this isn’t my fault, Kaeri. Dear sir, I have been out this whole evening. I am as surprised and dismayed as you are at this vandalism. More so, as precious family heirlooms have—”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me, milady. Whatever your troubles are, they’ve followed you here, and it’s my job to keep trouble out.” He watched as Maria’s face crumbled in resignation, tears brimming. “Maybe you can just go home, kid. Go back to the Middle. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

  * * *

  The night was still warm and thick, and the Spray still a gorgeous girdle of diamonds around the planet. The Oster Terminus Aerodromes were due east, and our path took us skirting north around the Pennygrub neighborhood, through a manufacturing district. Noisy textile mills hummed with activity, even at this hour. Leemte never slept.

  There was no hope of getting a cab at this hour, so we hoofed it. A sad, desperate laugh escaped Maria’s lips.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” She sighed and held my forearm a little tighter. “Sometimes the best answer to a loathsome situation is to laugh.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” I kicked at a pebble as we walked, and watched it skitter down the sidewalk.

  “You said you had a place we could go,” Maria said, like a question. She stared up into the Spray.

  “Yeah, I’ve got an apartment. It’s not too close and it’s not too pretty, but it’s better than a kick in the teeth.”

  We walked in silence for a hundred meters or so.

  “Have you truly betrayed your masters?”

  Her grip relaxed, and I pulled away a little. The look in her eye said she actually gave a damn about it.

  “Hendrik and Kasper don’t agree with me on some things. They would call what I’m doing a betrayal, and will probably try to put me out of the way very soon. But the true mistress of the Lange family is . . . absent. Alive, but unreachable. I know her, and she wouldn’t like what they’re up to right now.

  “If Donatella were healthy, she would never have allowed things to get this way. If she had this carbine in her hands, she would have seen what it meant for the city, and would have destroyed it. She would have sent your brother and sister home, and never mind Henriette’s attachment to Kasper.” I sighed hard and felt something heavy lift from my gut. “I am not betraying my mistress, Maria. I’m loyal. Right to the end.”

  We walked for awhile in silence, sometimes arm in arm like old friends, sometimes with our hands free and loose whenever we came across a gaggle of limpets or anyone else.

  As we passed one such band, Maria said, “Those three in the drawing room, earlier—you knew them.”

  “Yes. We’re colleagues, of a sort.”

  “The one called Jeanne. Was she a bit closer than a colleague?”

  I shrugged. “You could say that. Things didn’t really work out with us.”

  “Ah.”

  “The other two . . . Milan is a son of a bitch, but he’s good to have with you in a fight. He was the one who dove out the window. Who knows what kind of story he’s told Kasper and Hendrik by now.”

  “Nothing good, I am sure. And the dead man?”

  “Bart.” I shook my head. I wasn’t precisely sorry that he was dead, but I wasn’t thrilled about it either. “Bart was all right. Good with his hands, bought a round sometimes, laughed at my jokes. Not too much finesse, though. He always used a crowbar when stern words would do. And ain’t that the sorriest eulogy you ever heard?”

  Maria was quiet for a moment. “This may be of no comfort to you, but I did not kill him. I did hit Jeanne, though, like she said, and I ruined her hand. I think I grazed Milan just before he fled. If I had known those three were friends of yours —”

  “You would have hesitated, and now you would be dead.” I shook my head. “I could be sore at you for shooting Jeanne and Milan, but I’m not. These things happen.”

  “These things happen?” she asked, incredulous and tired.

  I laughed, and it sounded a little bitter in my ears. “No. No, I guess they don’t. But still, I’m not angry.”

  “Why ever not? Surely you had some affection for them.”

  “I still do, I guess. But when I decided to break from Lange, I knew that it would come down to blood between me and the soldaten, people like Jeanne and Bart and Milan. I just didn’t . . .” I shrugged. “I didn’t think it’d be this soon. I thought maybe I’d be dodging ‘accidents’ a week or two out from now, after you’d gone home with your carbine.”

  Maria tapped her lips with a finger. “Those soldaten were using the house after a raid on Rademaker interests, yes?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Kasper’s real keen to get a piece of the aker trade, and Hendrik is keen to see his son take strategic interest in the family business. Up until recently, Kasper’d only been interested in the drinking and carousing parts of a gangster’s life. So Kasper gets wind of when Rademaker moves aker and money, and he cooks up the plans to get at it, and Hendrik blesses those plans. Kasper has been doing a surprisingly good job with this project.”

  “The proceeds from tonight’s raid were impressive.”

  “Two hundred and fifty grand plus ten thousand doses of that filth.” I shook my head and sighed. “Biggest haul I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Wouldn’t it be unwise to reappropriate quite so much at one time?” Maria had a brain in her head, that was for sure. I liked it. “Smaller amounts might annoy Rademaker, but a large acquisition like that would force them to act decisively.”

  “Exactly right. Rademaker is going to want blood for this. I’m glad I won’t be part of that war.”

  “And Lange’s acquisition of the carbine,” she said, trailing off in thought. “It makes sense now, why they want to move so quickly to reproduce the weapon. It would prepare them for the coming escalation of conflict with Rademaker. But, Kaeri?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Lange doesn’t have that windfall of aker and money anymore; nor do they have a critical component of the weapon. The trade regulators have all of it. What will this mean?”

  “It means Kasper and Hendrik are going to be desperate and very, very angry. Rademaker too. Just because neither of them ca
n use the carbine right now doesn’t mean they don’t have the means to set this city on fire. But none of that is our business. We just gotta get some sleep, and then link up with Wolfgang and Felix in the morning. We’ll get a plan together, get your carbine back.”

  Maria nodded at this. “That sounds lovely; I’m absolutely shattered. But one more question about the aker?”

  “Okay.”

  “Where does Kasper get his intelligence? It seems that he would be nowhere if he didn’t ‘get wind’ of Rademaker movements.”

  I sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t come around to asking that, because you’re not going to like the answer.”

  When I didn’t say anything for a little while, she said, “You should just tell me. I may not like the answer, but I like waiting for it even less.”

  “Hell, just don’t shoot me.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and wished desperately for a drink. “It’s your brother. Josef is trading this information to pay for Henriette’s gambling debts.”

  Maria stopped in her tracks. “It’s impossible.”

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t pretty sure.” Once I started saying it, I started talking fast so I couldn’t, wouldn’t stop. “It goes like this: Josef would give Lange what he knows about Rademaker’s drug and cash movements, and would continue developing his sources on that end. Once Josef discovers the ultimate source of aker, he’ll share it with Lange, and Lange will forgive Henriette’s debts. After that’s done, Josef and Henriette and, presumably, the gun walk away from Lange forever. That’s what Josef believes about his arrangement with Hendrik, anyway.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I’ve put some pieces together, and made a few jumps too. You remember all the aker in Piet’s storage?” Maria nodded. “I followed Josef out to Piet’s just yesterday, and learned that they’d met.” That poor bastard limpet, dying in my arms. Little weasel man and the big sharp man. “The limpets we met in the graveyard, they came after Josef and Piet. The limpets, they … weren’t successful. I saw a scrap of cloth in the graveyard, an awful looking plaid from the same carpetbag Bart was carrying around.”