She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (34 page)

‘Break it down for me.’

‘A few minutes after you left, a man matching the description you gave me of Director Egmont walked out.’

‘By himself?’

Wren nodded. ‘No back.’

‘Continue.’

‘He messed around the Old City for a while, ducking into shops and whatnot.’

‘Did he spot you?’

‘There’s no reason to be rude.’

Vanity, vanity. ‘You figure he was just being careful?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What then?’

‘He disappeared into a merchant house off Aniseed Park. One of the smaller ones, you wouldn’t have heard of it. I got dinner at a cafe across the street, with a good view of the front exit. You owe me three copper, by the way.’

‘I’ll deduct it from this month’s rent. Continue.’

‘Your man split after about an hour. I let him go, like you said. Closing time saw a mass exodus of worker bees, but nothing that rang out as suspicious.’ Wren wiggled his glass for another shot. I refilled it dutifully. He was enjoying having me on the hook, liked feeding out bits to my growing sense of anticipation.

‘Until?’ I asked.

‘About an hour after the rest of the building left, two out-of-uniform Steps escorted a woman to a guesthouse a few blocks past.’

‘You sure they were Steps?’

‘They walked like they needed to shit but couldn’t find a chamberpot.’

I finished what little remained in my glass.

‘So what was the point of all that?’ Wren asked.

‘Egmont’s getting help from Nestrian intelligence. Money, advice. I figured I’d shake him up, see if he wouldn’t lead us to his contact.’

‘Correspondence with a foreign agent – sounds illegal.’

‘I imagine Black House would be extremely interested in the address you just gave me.’

‘You going to tell them?’

I shrugged, poured myself some more whiskey. Wren did the same, sipped at it for a while. ‘You’ve never told me why they threw you out of Black House.’

‘You’ve never asked.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Smart boy.’

‘But I asked Adolphus, years ago.’

‘And?’

‘He told me that you were betrayed by a woman.’

‘I was betrayed by my own stupidity,’ I said. ‘The woman was the agent by which the daevas brought me low.’

‘Albertine?’

‘Now that you mention it, yes – I think her name was Albertine.’

‘I’ve never known you to get out of your head over a piece of tail.’

‘Once bitten.’

‘Adolphus told me that she was back in Rigus – that part of the game you set up with the Steps is to get back at her.’

‘Adolphus should learn to keep his mouth shut,’ I said.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘If you had to take a guess whether or not I wanted to talk about it – what would you think my answer would be?’

‘Probably you don’t.’

‘Smart boy, like I said.’ But after a few more fingers of whiskey I found my mouth opening against itself. ‘How did she look?’

‘She was tall, blonde. Pretty I guess, if you like them old.’

I went silent again for a while, sifting through lost memories, trying to find them, trying to hide them once I’d found them.

‘What was she like?’ Wren asked.

‘You ever swallow a razor blade?’

‘No.’

‘That’s a good policy. I’d go ahead and stick to it.’

‘She must have been something special, if she had enough to hook you.’

‘I guess I thought so at the time.’

‘You must have really loved her.’

‘Love,’ I repeated, taking my time over the word, stretching the single syllable till it fit a sentence. ‘Don’t ever fall in love, boy. Don’t ever love nobody. The balladeers and poets are lying to fill their purse. It makes you weak, and it makes you stupid.’

‘You love Adolphus.’

‘I tolerate him.’

‘More than that.’

‘I’m far from perfect, as I’d assumed you’d picked up on by this point.’

‘This … philosophy you claim to follow seems like a recipe for an awfully pointless existence.’

‘It’s extraordinary, the depth of understanding you’ve acquired at the tender age of eighteen.’

‘All right.’

‘Absolutely unprecedented. Precocious, that’s how they’d describe it, this insight of yours.’

‘I just did you a favor – you ought to watch how you repay me.’

‘You did your job,’ I said. ‘You don’t get a pat on the head for it. In fact, isn’t now about the time you should be shadowing Captain Ascletin, rather than sitting in a bar and pissing me off?’

‘Suits me fine,’ Wren said, standing. ‘You want to wallow, you can do it on your own.’

‘My preference as well.’

The place was starting to fill up, young businessmen and their wives or lovers or paid accompaniment, well-dressed, happy or at least competently faking it. I felt distinctly out of place, or would have if I’d cared at all what these people thought of me. I stayed around longer than I wanted to, just to shaft it to the server. But after a while the pleasure started to seem awfully petty, and I paid my tab and split.

I hadn’t told Wren what I’d wanted to tell him, hadn’t made the warning stick. Because it’s a lit fuse, love – you light it yourself, and you stand around the powder keg afterward, grinning from ear to ear.

C
rispin was late in arriving, which was rare for him. He was scrupulously punctual. He was pretty much just scrupulous period. I liked him in spite of it.

At that particular moment, I was happy for his uncharacteristic tardiness. It had been one of those weeks where sleep was hard to find and uneasy when it came. The Minister of War, a quiet, corrupt figure we’d long had in our pocket, had made the sudden and unexpected decision to buck the company line, backed a bill to re-arm against the Dren. We figured the Nestrians were behind it, had something on him that we didn’t. I’d spent three days trying to figure out what it was, then three more trying unsuccessfully to bury it. Point being I was happy to spend a few minutes in the back corner of a quiet bar, with a warm fire not too distant, and a pull of good strong stout even closer at hand.

He came in eventually, and I was half regretful for the interruption to my repose. Crispin was handsome, dignified and decent, all things I wasn’t. He looked good in the ice gray we both wore, striking, maybe even noble. I looked dangerous, and despite my best efforts otherwise, faintly disheveled.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, setting his coat on a hook next to the booth and dropping in across from me.

I waved away his apology, and signaled to the bartender for two more. When they came we drank them in happy silence, and if that’s not friendship, I’m unfamiliar with the term.

Ours was an unlikely thing – Crispin was about half a count, would be the whole thing once an uncle he strongly disliked found his way into the next life. You could see affluence rolling off of him in waves – if he’d ever have come to Low Town out of uniform someone would have rolled him before he’d walked five blocks. Someone would have tried anyways, though they might have found that for all his airs and fine speech, Crispin was a bad man to set upon in an alleyway. I didn’t like the fact that he’d been born in nominal ownership of more land than all the city south of the Palace, but he didn’t rub your nose in it. And he’d served in the war; really served, not just pushed papers across a desk. That could forgive a lot. And back then I hadn’t entirely acquired the loathing for the upper classes I later would. In fact, at the time I’d been mostly concerned with joining their ranks.

We’d been partnered up with each other straight out of the Academy. I knew little, and he knew less – but we were smart, and anxious to learn, and having spent most of the prior five years in the trenches this new gig seemed like a fair slice of heaven. And it was easier then, you had a clear sense of what you were aimed at. A body would show up somewhere where it usually didn’t, we’d head over and try to figure out who put it there. Sometimes we failed, but not often – we were smart, like I said. After a while we got detailed to looking in on the syndicates, making sure none of the players got big enough to eat another, crumpling up the particularly brutal or stupid ones.

But a while back I’d transferred into Special Operations, reward for betraying an old friend, and since then we hadn’t seen much of each other. We’d both been busy, I told myself, and it wasn’t a lie but it wasn’t really the truth either.

‘How you been?’

‘All right,’ Crispin said, though he didn’t look it.

‘Working a case?’

‘Yeah, a doozy. You know Big Noel, the Rouender kingpin?’

‘You know this real bright thing in the sky, they call it the sun?’

‘We caught one of his top lieutenants at a brothel near the Isthmus.’

‘Stop the presses.’

‘One specializing in young girls.’

I whistled through my teeth. Even by the syndicate’s reprobate standards, that was pushing it.

‘We got him stashed in a safe house outside the city, been working him over since Monday. Think he’s about ready to flip. I mean what other choice does he have? We let him back out on the street, he’ll be sporting a second grin before sun up.’

‘Black House – making the world safe for pedophiles.’

‘I’m far from thrilled with it myself – but the man’s a gold mine. With what we’ll get from him, we can roll up Noel’s whole operation, top to bottom.’

I clicked my glass against his. ‘Good luck to you.’

Course, luck had nothing to do with it. The lower you are on the pole, the more events seem to be governed by chance. Climb up a few steps and you realize that there’s an order to the whole thing, the dice are loaded and the cards well marked.

Rumor in Low Town had long been that Big Noel had support from Black House, but even the most jaded conspiracy theorist wouldn’t have had any idea of just how high it went. The gang was, in effect, a lever of the Old Man. Their nominal leader, Crispin’s nemesis, was in no greater control of his destiny than a marionette. He pounced on who we told him to pounce on, moved what we told him to move where we told him to move it, and in return we assuaged any of the legal concerns which might be expected to occupy a man in his position. I didn’t have the heart to tell Crispin, but his informant wouldn’t make it to next week, let alone see the inside of a courtroom. Crispin might not know what the other hand was doing, so to speak, but I would put an ochre down against the promise of copper that somewhere on his team there was an agent who took orders straight from the head of Black House. All supposition of course, I was concerned with foreign affairs, the syndicates weren’t in my balliwick anymore – but a well-informed hypothesis all the same.

‘You hear about this business with the Minister of War?’ Crispin asked.

‘I might have.’

‘Madness. Doesn’t seem like he’ll be around much longer.’

‘You never know,’ I said, though I did.

‘Figure he’ll retire?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I very much do not expect him to retire.’ Because about two hours ago the Old Man and I decided things would go smoother for all of us if the Minister, overcome with remorse at a lifetime of poor decisions, drank a thimble-full of widow’s milk. There had been some debate, in fact – I wanted to turn him, figure out who’d set him against us, maybe get an eye in the foreign camp. But the whole thing had already started to bleed, and in the end it seemed safer to tie it off.

‘How are things on your end?’ Crispin asked.

‘Not bad,’ I said. Prolixity was little encouraged in Special Operations.

‘Nothing exciting to report?’

‘I got a tooth pulled last week.’

Crispin reached over to his coat and took out his tobacco pouch. He started on a cigarette. His fingernails were clean, and his motions sharp. ‘Not much leaks out of your end of the shop, but all the same I’ve been … hearing things.’

‘Nothing bad, I hope?’

‘Depends on how you look at it.’ He patted his pockets for a match.

I found one in mine, leaned over and lit his smoke. ‘And how do you look at it?’

‘They say you walk in the Old Man’s footsteps. That you’re waiting with a handkerchief when he blows his nose.’

I laughed. I’d never been liked in Black House, not when I was coming up in the ranks, not now that I’d reached the top. That was fine – I didn’t care particularly about being liked. Respect was what I aimed at, or at the very least fear. ‘And?’

‘And they say it quietly, because beyond having the Old Man’s ear, you’re known as a person that it’s unwise to cross.’

‘Does that sound like me?’

‘What’s it like working with him?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Learning a lot?’

‘You can quit riding me whenever you feel like it. I know you thought it was a mistake, me getting in with Special Ops.’

‘I did. I still do.’

‘But it’s my hand to play. Thus far I’ve managed things well enough.’

‘Thus far,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t trust the Old Man.’

‘I don’t trust him. I trust that he’s good at his job. And I trust that he knows I’m good at mine. The Old Man and I … we understand each other.’

It shames me now, to think how true that was.

We had pretty much this exact conversation every time we saw each other, which was likely the reason that neither of us had made much of a point of staying in contact. I’d done what I’d done, there was no going back.

Our dialogue trailed listlessly for a while, asking over people neither of us cared about, shared acquaintances and not quite friends. And then she walked in the door, and I stopped listening to him entirely.

The streets of Low Town were not an environment which encouraged a sense of romance. I’d had my first woman at twelve, mainly so the other neighborhood toughs would quit ragging on me. A whore of course, unwashed and more than plump, though tender. It had been my introduction to what the saps called lovemaking, and I admit it might have given me something of a mercenary attitude towards the whole endeavor. Sex was a necessary bodily function, like shitting, to be completed briskly, without guilt or fuss. There was no point in imbuing it with any special meaning.

Five years on the front lines had reaffirmed the lesson. Anyone who’d come into the trenches thinking they’d stay true to their sweetheart back home stopped thinking that right quick. There wasn’t much point in getting hung up on monogamy when the morrow would likely as not see your lifeblood running into your boots, your woman half a world away, bored, young and lonely. Nor had my time in Black House done much to convince me as to the merits of true love. We got half our intelligence from the paramours of powerful men, pulling information between bed sheets, rifling through drawers once their mark was safely asleep.