Crispin leaned back. The interview had started out as a formality and degenerated into something he didn’t want to deal with. He had been up all night, it was now late afternoon, and for several hours he had been following Tallwood around Naftha from safe house to safe house in the blazing sun, to the tune of jangling keys and rattling pockets, dead bolts screeching, tumblers falling, vault doors slamming, voices echoing in cellars whose staved-off walls threatened to collapse at any minute and let in the swamp. His patience had frayed as he waited for Tallwood to finish congratulating himself on the immense variety and value of his black-market merchandise. When the redhead ushered him beyond the last, grandest set of locks into this privately owned flat, he’d breathed a sigh of relief, knowing it was the last stop. He had an assassination to farm out before midnight. The apartment had wall-to-wall carpeting three inches deep that held in the day’s heat like insulation, and the small rooms were stuffed with so much furniture, so many paintings and rare books Crispin wondered if Tallwood used the place for an overflow depot. But at least he’d got to sit down. Tallwood brimmed up over an enormous desk as scarred as his face, the only piece of furniture in the apartment that looked used. He smelled of perspiration and onions, but not quite onions, a greener scent, like when you pulled a fresh vegetable out of the earth—carrots, Crispin thought, and smiled.
“Significant, man, you’re not being rational,” he said with every bit of wheedle he could muster. “I’m backdoor, I’m as undeclared as the fucking exports. I’m not network, I’m liaison. I’m an interpreter. That’s my job description. A relationship with the Disciples is the last thing I need. In fact that’s my job description—staying as far away from the Disciples as I can, and making sure my cargoes stay far away from them, too.”
Instead of softening, Tallwood’s eyes stayed stony, and Crispin realized he’d been wrong to defend himself. The man was a paranoid egomaniac, and now, in his mind, he had Crispin on the run. “An interpreter. What languages do you speak?” Grinning, curious, admiring, he hitched himself farther across the desk on his elbows. Crispin breathed sharpgreen and decided the redhead wasn’t going to be the only one who got to parade his accomplishments.
“Ferupian, obviously. Kirekuni: Okimachi dialect, a smattering of Chadou dialect. A little Old Cypean, for the inland networks there. English: I’m practically fluent. Japanese, Mandarin, German: enough to get by in all three. Lamaroon: Redeuiina dialect, the patois of the interior, and Myrhhe dialect. How many is that? Eleven, on top of my native tongue”—the capper and the only falsehood—“Mimetic. I’m a Mime; you were wondering. I was born in the western islands but I—”
Tallwood interrupted him, saying something incomprehensible.
“What?”
Something else. It sounded like—
ggrlzshhh-ch’hkkk-’staborrrrr, hahhhhgg, zlshchsssshkk—
“Pardon?” Crispin frowned.
Tallwood lunged across the desk wide-armed, upsetting both of their cognacs, nearly grabbing Crispin by the throat before Crispin threw himself out of his chair and back across the carpet, whacking his elbow on a freestanding wardrobe, dropping to a fighting crouch. Tallwood wasn’t coming after him. He straightened up slowly. Tallwood stood behind the desk, rubbing his hands together, looking embarrassed. His gaze was fixed on Crispin’s torso. “What the fuck,” Crispin said softly.
“Eh-heh, eh-heh.”
“Look at me, you bastard. What the fuck?”
“Eh-eh-heh. Would you—would you mind putting—that—away?”
Crispin took the risk of glancing down. He saw his 26 Nen Shiki Kenju in his hand, safety off, trained on Tallwood’s heart. He let the barrel fall but didn’t holster it, nor did he sit down again, though Tallwood was making anxious little gestures at the chair. “Now,” Crispin said, keeping his voice low and even, “I wonder if you’d mind explaining yourself.”
“Eh-heh.” Staring shyly at the desktop, dry-washing his hands in front of his gut, Tallwood murmured, “I apologize. I do. Sincerely.” He looked up and to Crispin’s astonishment, for the first time he did seem sincere. “It’s only that”—he looked down again—“I do get enraged when I hear such effrontery. I come across it more often than you might think. Of course, there are few who can pass for a Mime; but of those, a surprising percentage try it on. I suppose they think they will be feared and respected?”
So that was it! Somehow, Tallwood knew that Crispin wasn’t a Mime! He was looking at Crispin as if he genuinely expected an answer, and, to his own surprise, Crispin found himself essaying one. “More likely it’s just the most convenient way certain people can explain their faces. Would you want to go around telling people your Ferupian father raped your Lamaroon mother in order to account for yourself? Being a Mime is a lie that takes less back-story than most of the other lies. In my own case, however, it’s just that in Lamaroon, people know a half-breed when they see one, and half-breeds don’t live on the hill or visit the Little Governor, so I had to be something else. In Ferupe and Cype, too, I’ve learned that Mimes get over easier than anyone else who hasn’t got a tail. Maybe there’s something in your theory.” Recovering, he weighted his words with sarcasm. “If I’ve trespassed on forbidden territory, my apologies, certainly.”
Tallwood shook his head. He appeared to be thinking. “Your features are a little wrong—the lips too full, the brow ridge too pronounced—but on the whole you’ll do. Even, I imagine, someone who associates with real Mimes would be fooled. But you are one of the better approximations: most of the pretenders could only ever pass in the backward, provincial cities where they stage their deceptions. It makes me laugh. I’ve heard a man the color of hazelnuts declare with a straight face…” He shook his head. “Fifty years ago, maybe—but we are getting lighter-complected all the time. In ten years you won’t be able to pass anymore.”
“Seems to me you’re a good fifty years ahead of your time then,” Crispin said, offended by Tallwood’s casual evaluation.
“Me?” Tallwood laughed. He spread his arms wide and turned his face up to the ceiling, exposing a stubby white underjaw like a peeled potato. “Let me tell you a secret, Mr. Kateralbin,” he said to the ceiling. “Whenever you encounter, outside the Mim, a Mime who looks like a Mime, be assured he is traveling for pleasure. Even if he has business concerns, no matter how much money is involved, to him it is footling. I, on the other hand”—he looked back at Crispin, and the eyes had turned jade again—“am working. I like Naftha; it is where I choose to live, for now; it is where I work; and for somewhat the same reasons as yourself, I find it politic to pretend to be other than what I am.”
Crispin started to think Tallwood was crazy. Where on earth had Yamauchi turned him up? Why hadn’t he been checked out better? He had merchandise all right, but his famed network might not even exist! A nibbling, desperate curiosity kept Crispin from turning and leaving, but he kept hold of the 26 Nen Shiki Kenju.
Tallwood laughed in his face, and said, “I can’t resist. I’ve never done this before, but these are unique circumstances: I, after all, have as much on you as you do on me. You must promise not to shoot me, that’s all.”
“Listen, you stinking big-bellied self-congratulating madman,” Crispin said, and then stopped.
Tallwood had bowed his head. He looked as if he were concentrating on a difficult mathematical problem.
Crispin had trouble looking at him: nothing more embarrassing than watching someone else embarrass himself. What the hell was supposed to happen now? He holstered his revolver, glanced around the apartment, reached under his shirt, and gauged the sweat trickling down his back. He remembered his banged elbow and rolled up his shirtsleeve to check for a bruise. Nothing yet, but the tenderness presaged a juicy purple one, a real plum. He glanced back at Tallwood, decided the man was completely uninteresting, and weighed the ease of finding a path through the furniture to get out of the window. It was hotter here even than on the street, he’d be willing to bet.
He�
��d just leave. Tell Yamauchi that Tallwood was a walking, talking hoax and a screaming bore to boot.
He opened his mouth to deliver his exit warn-off and realized all at once that he wasn’t just having trouble looking at Tallwood: he found it physically impossible to do so. Something stood behind the desk. It might have been man-shaped. But he couldn’t see what it was. Every time he tried to focus on that blur, his eyes hurt so much they slid away of their own accord. It was like trying to watch the tip of your own nose, or something so far away it might have been there or might not. Sweat broke out anew all over his body. He was streaming, breathing as hard as a sprinter with the effort of trying to look at the spot behind the desk. He took a hesitant step forward, then another—if it couldn’t be watched maybe it could be touched—but the closer he got, the worse became the spatial dislocation until he couldn’t focus on anything, not the desk, not his own hand. He wheeled, thinking to approach backwards, and a wave of relief washed over him: the furniture filling the room greeted his eyes like a surprise party of old friends, stout, solid, colorful, visible…
Tallwood said behind him, “You can look now.”
Crispin wheeled.
Tallwood had vanished. In his place, the fingertips of one hand resting casually between the stains of cognac on the desk, stood a slender man with pale brown skin. He had curly brown hair to his shoulders. He had Tallwood’s eyes. Despite the deep gouges creasing his face, he appeared to be in his thirties, about ten years younger than Crispin had judged the redhead. Tallwood’s gaudy, ostentatious coat hung on him as if he’d draped a bedspread around himself. Tallwood’s hose bagged around his thighs.
“This is me,” he said in Tallwood’s fluent (but now that Crispin thought about it slightly accented) Ferupian. “A rarely seen treasure. Special viewings only.”
“Shit,” Crispin said. He flopped into his chair. He didn’t mean to; his legs had given way. “I believe—I believe I’d like another round.”
“And would you like some back-story, as you put it, with that?” the stranger asked cordially, retrieving their glasses from the floor and pouring.
“There are your eyes,” Crispin exclaimed as he looked up. “I mean. You really are you.”
“As I seem to recall telling you. And that, Mr. Kateralbin, is the extent of my explanation. Believe me: you’ve already seen something that—well, the other non-Mimes I know of who’ve seen it could be counted on the fingers of two hands.”
“What did you want to go showing me for then?”
Crispin realized he had been privy to a very nearly incomprehensible revelation. The idea made him feel sick. After making their revelations, people always wanted something back.
The cognac rolled down his throat to his stomach like a slow trickle of fire.
Tallwood shrugged, thin shoulders moving under the oversize coat. “Our interview had taken an unfortunate turn, had it not? In truth, I don’t care whether you are really Yamauchi’s man or a halfbreed hustler from Kingsburg. What I care about is your cargo. I’ve seen that, and I know I want to do business with you. A shared secret tends to ensure mutual trust.”
“You didn’t have to show me that to ensure that!”
Tallwood gave him wide, innocent eyes. “Also, you explained why some pretenders pass themselves off as Mimes. No one ever had the courage or presence of mind to explain that to me before. And your openness with regard to your own motivation engaged me.”
“If I hadn’t been open with you, you would have killed me, right?”
“Probably.”
The arrogant, cocksure little fuck. I would have blown his head off before he even got close. Crispin started to relax. Finishing his cognac, accepting a refill despite the heat, he thought that all in all he’d been right: Tallwood was a paranoiac, and even more of an egomaniac than Crispin had given him credit for. He had two different bodies, could have more for all Crispin knew, but only one personality.
Tallwood placed his hands flat on the desk, leaned forward, and entreated, threat in his eyes: “I want you to think about what I’m showing you. There aren’t very many of us, all told; but like the Disciples, we are everywhere that matters. It is just a matter of time until every position of power, all over the world, is held by a Mime. And none of us like foreigners who pass themselves off as members of our race, giving us unwonted publicity, and in most cases a bad name. So if you have the nerve, Mr. Kateralbin, to continue proclaiming yourself one of us in the circles you move in—you deserve whatever benefits you get from the deception!” He laughed, tinnily.
“Next you’ll tell me the Lizard Significant changes into a Mime at night,” Crispin said absently, thinking: But I know how to recognize you now. It’s that smell.
Tallwood laughed again. He sounded desperately put out that Crispin’s eyes hadn’t bulged at the implications. “You never know!” Then he remembered his redhead persona. “This goes no farther?” he pleaded. “As I said, special viewings only!”
Crispin smiled with difficulty. Tiredness was encroaching again. He set down his glass and leaned forward.
“Well, this has all been very pleasant and instructive, but we’re wasting time, Mr. Tallwood. Let’s do business. Tell me about your network. I want to know numbers of people and how much product they move. Range. Dead-drop and depot locations. Processing facilities. Handover mechanisms. Security. The details.”
23 Fessiery 1900 A.D.: Cype: Kherouge: the present
Night had tried to fall but the street lamps held it off somewhere around the level of the third-floor windows. Rae sat with one heel tucked under her, drinking her ninth or tenth cup of tea and fingering the black leather case she’d retrieved from under her chair. Crispin stared through her, thinking furiously.
He’d continued to do business with Tallwood, aka Harrish Acanaguan, for a good many months. The Mime had apparently developed a paternalistic fondness for Crispin; or maybe he just enjoyed baiting him. He told Crispin not only his real name, but the origin of the sharpgreen scent and several more of his people’s secrets. Crispin ended up forgetting most of these confidences—he didn’t want to know in the first place, and his brain took its own precautions to preserve sanity. In any case, before long, Tallwood’s ambitions outgrew Southern Ferupe and he vanished from Crispin’s circuit, though not from the ken of Yamauchi’s network. His code name still took shipments now and then, each time citing a different address, each one farther north than the last. On top of being paranoid, greedy, and egotistical, he was as restless as a butterfly. Crispin hoped he was riding for a fall but thought glumly that he probably wasn’t. His character flaws amounted to a recipe for success in occupied Kingsburg, where desperate aristocrats and former monopolists whose finances lay in ruins jockeyed for the Kirekunis’ favor in a welter of corruption, homicide, and epidemic disease, while opportunists who’d crawled out of every rathole in the continent gnawed at their ankles.
And regardless of the warnings Tallwood had reiterated before he went north, Crispin continued to pass himself off as a Mime in Redeuiina, Naftha, Leondze, Kherouge, Dumanna’ah, and Sjintang. He never again ran into trouble. He wondered if the other Mimes in deep cover across Oceania had keener senses of humor than Tallwood—or if they didn’t exist. Tallwood could be a wild card, a knave on the loose. Twice since the redheaded man had gone north, Crispin had been convinced he smelled sharpgreen (at a reception for Sjintang’s lesser nobility, at a village inn in coastal Ferupe). But he wasn’t about to call anyone out on it. The last thing he wanted was incontrovertible proof of Tallwood’s assertions. Mr. Nakunatta’s master plan had manifested itself to him again in the form of dreams; interconnection was closing in; and as Yamauchi said, truth lay in the details. The details remained blessedly unsubstantiated. Crispin wanted to keep them that way.
Yet now the details were forcing themselves on him, as concrete as the minutiae of an existence without a future. The candle flames that all leaned in the same direction when he awoke. The soft-soled footsteps he he
ard behind him late at night, usually accompanied by a dripping or a tapping noise. The news, when he returned to one of his former lodging houses, that a man had been asking for “the tall half-Lamaroon gentleman.” On Mesyleme Boulevard, a car of which he’d dreamed, a long, distinctive silhouette painted black with bright green detailing, a model which hadn’t been mass-manufactured at that time, but which he now learned was an Exupresa. Foreigners rode in it. Rae’s reluctance to see him. Her refusal—wordless yet definite—to renew their love affair.
Crispin knew too much about too many people, that was his problem in a nutshell. The survivors of the Minami network were his main worry, but Yamauchi could have decided to tie off loose ends, in which case the stalker was a trained assassin. Yleini he discounted, but not her family, who’d incorporated as Scaamediin Ltd., primary suppliers with a distribution contract at stake and a daughter to avenge. Tallwood and Tallwood’s unknown compatriots—they and Crispin’s own former contacts might be one and the same, two sets of grudges rolled into one, and against the Mimes he’d have no chance. His stalker might even be someone he’d forgotten; out of everyone in Yamauchi’s business, Crispin had got his hands dirty the most often. And he couldn’t forget the possibility of hit men sent by the American government to avenge Ted Macpherson, or by the Japanese to avenge Minami.
How foolhardy he’d been to think he could hide!
Yet he felt unable to move on. He’d been in Kherouge too long. And there was Rae. Her hands wrapped around her teacup. Her hands that had developed a dry grain from her years of sewing and cooking and cleaning and child care. Her thumbs patted each other with an absent arrhythmia. Her hair enclouded her like black mist clinging to the shoulders of a mountain. The bone structure revealed in her thin face, which he’d previously not had the courage to scrutinize, looked sharp and thin as slate ridges. She had weathered the years, and yet she hadn’t been worn down. She was still breakable. He loved her for it.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 15