Nicola Griffith (9 page)

No one was about to ask her questions when she was in this kind of mood.

“Well, then. I’ll expect you back on shift, with masks, in exactly—” She looked at her watch. “—forty-two minutes.”

On her way out, she gave me a tight, matte-eyed nod. It was impossible to mistake the direct challenge. Cel noticed, and turned, puzzled. I managed to shrug and look surprised, but underneath my skinny I was slippery with sweat.

“Why’s she got it in for you?” Kinnis asked, but he looked wary, as though wondering if talking to me was a mistake.

“No idea.” My heart felt cold and dense and suddenly I wondered if my accent sounded right, if the quick, liquid syllables were thickening, if just by listening to me everyone would know who I was. I felt dizzy and horribly exposed. At least Magyar hadn’t actually checked my records yet, or I wouldn’t still be here. But it was only a matter of time. I had to get Spanner to speed things up. I fumbled my way to my locker and took out my food, trying to seem unconcerned. My hands were shaking. I needed to sit down.

Paolo was already sitting near the fish screen. I sat next to him, but not too close. I said nothing for a moment, not trusting my voice. He sat quietly, watching the screen. He was not eating.

“Here.” I held out half my food, then remembered and put it on the table next to him instead. “You can bring enough for two tomorrow.”

“I thought. . .”

“There is a cafeteria, but you have to scrub down and change before they’ll let you in. And the food takes a long time and costs a lot. And it’s full of executives and supervisors who’ll stare at you like you’re a bug.”

“Thank you.” He bit into the sandwich hungrily. I made a mental note to bring food tomorrow, anyway. He looked as though he needed to eat as much as he could afford to buy.

Kinnis and Meisener sat down opposite us. They must have decided it was safe to talk to me, after all. “So, Paolo, where’re you from?”

“I’ve lived here since I was two years old.” The words themselves were neutral enough, but I could hear the tension behind them. He didn’t want to say any more.

Kinnis opened his mouth to ask another question, but Meisener was already talking.

“I was born here, but I’ve not spent much time in the city the last twenty years,” he said. “Been all over the world. Army for a while, then mechanic for EnSyTec. Went everywhere. Then I got fed up of traveling, wanted to settle down, have kids. Took a job in Sarajevo, working the sewage lines. Got married.”

“You have any kids, then?” Kinnis asked, forgetting Paolo.

“Two.” And then they were pulling out pictures, talking about their children.

Paolo seemed to enjoy being included in their conversation without having to contribute. I was left to wonder how to deal with Magyar.

When I got home that night the message light was blinking on my screen. I hit play before I took my jacket off; maybe it was Ruth and Ellen, inviting me round.

It was Spanner. “Hyn and Zimmer will be at the Polar Bear tomorrow night. Meet me there.”

It turned itself off. I had not realized how much I’d been hoping for Ruth to call. I sat by the blank screen for a long time, listening to the deep, three-in-the-morning quiet.

I woke several times during the night, my heart beating too fast, wondering whether I should call the regional Health and Safety Council about Hedon Road.

Lore followed Spanner down the dark stairwell and into the warm night. She kept her eyes down, fixed on Spanner’s feet, refusing to look at the emptiness of outside. The wet asphalt sparkled in the sodium streetlights. She managed to get to the bar across the road without sweating too much.

The Polar Bear was dim and warm and no one looked up when they entered.

Lore had never been in a place like it. The casual bars and open-air cafés of Europe, the restaurants of Australia and tea rooms of India had not prepared her for this fecund, dark place, rich with the fruity scents of beer and layered with muted conversation. The wooden floors and bar surface were highly polished; the bar itself bellied out in biscuit-colored porcelain molded with grapes and leaves and bottles.

“It looks pregnant,” she said, fascinated, wanting to go up and touch it, but Spanner was walking toward a table in the corner, and she followed.

An elderly couple were already seated. Spanner pulled out a chair. “This is Lore.”

“I’m Hyn and he’s Zimmer, but don’t worry if you get us mixed up, a lot of people do.”

Spanner went to the bar to get the drinks and Lore was left at the table with a man and a woman who looked like dried tobacco leaves with berries for eyes. Hyn and Zimmer. These were the people who knew something about locks.

They seemed utterly at home in this setting, but Lore suspected they might blend as easily with the woods as this urban nightscape. She wondered if they were brother and sister, or whether they had just grown to resemble each other in the bizarre way of some couples. She searched for something to say. Her early training, the endless meetings with local and national dignitaries, took over. “It’s an unusual name, the Polar Bear.”

“Legend has it that a polar bear escaped from the zoo three hundred years ago, and was shot on this site.” Zimmer sipped his dark brown beer. They seemed to find her amusing.

“What do you do?”

Zimmer laughed, a robust bouncing laugh that surprised Lore. “We’re fences, my dear. And very good ones. And you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry. Spanner will soon fix that.”

Spanner will fix that . . .
She looked at her tiny, faraway image in the mirror behind the bar and touched her red hair.

Spanner came back with beer. “Make it last. After this we’re heading uptown. You’ll need a clear head. Time to start paying me back.”

Lore discovered that they worked well as a team. One would smile and take a drink to a table near a small group. The other watched from the bar. The rich, confident people found in the bars Spanner chose could not resist a woman on her own, whether from bad intent or the best of motives.

“Come sit with us,” one would say, if it was Lore’s turn to sit by them, and offer her a drink, which she always took. And she would talk, and then maybe get hysterical with laughter, or cry, whichever would get the most attention, and perhaps spin them a story about being down on her luck, which was easy to do, with her accent and her bearing, and then Spanner would slide up behind them while they were fussing with handkerchiefs or orders for more drinks, and take one slate, or two. Rich people, Spanner said—and it seemed to be true—always left their slates in their jacket pockets, jackets that they hung over the backs of their chairs as though no one would dare to steal anything of theirs. Which, probably, no one had before. After all, what good was a slate to someone else? And after a while Lore would recover, and thank them decorously, and leave. She and Spanner would leap on the nearest slide or, if it was after two or three in the morning, swing onto the carapace of a beetling freighter, clutching hold of the emergency door release with their right hands—keeping their left hands, their PIDAs, shielded from the antenna on the top, because if the tiny beetle brain of a freighter sensed a human aboard, it would stop dead in its tracks. Freighters could be dangerous, but Spanner—and, soon, Lore—knew all the routes, all the stops, all the timetables.

Sometimes they would giggle uproariously, especially when it had been Spanner doing the poor-wee-thing-all-alone, because as they slid through the deserted city she would recount at the top of her lungs the outrageous stories she had spun for the rich and gullible victims. Sometimes, if it had been dangerous work, or the alarm had gone out just minutes after they had left the bar and they had had to run, leap from one freighter to another, they would open a bottle of champagne at home and watch the pale liquid fizz like their adrenaline-rushing blood, and they would laugh again, and drink, and tear off each other’s clothes and fuck like wild animals on a pile of slippery gray slates.

It seemed to Lore on nights like this that she had had no other life before right now, here, every pore open to the wild night’s feel, every follicle attuned to changes in the air, every taste bud and nerve cell hot and fluttering. She knew that sometimes Spanner made money from other people’s suffering, but she did not have to see that, and she had suffered, too. Everyone suffered. It was just a question of making sure she was using them, and not the other way around. She would not be fooled again, not the way Oster had fooled her. Never again. And in the middle of sex she would look up at Spanner moving over her and wonder if those half-closed eyes were laying the newstank images of a naked, weeping Lore on top of the real Lore.

On nights like that, too, when Lore slept she often dreamed of being back in the bar, only now when she cried for these strangers it was for good reason, and she would wake up sweating in the hollow of the brightly colored quilt, remembering Tok, or Crablegs; her mother; Stella screaming in the fountain; and she would wonder which parts of her life were real.

Sometimes, Spanner still went out on her own. Lore pressed her face against the glass, watching until Spanner was out of sight, and wondered where she went. Although it was getting easier to go out with Spanner at night, she still did not have the courage to do it on her own. And when they were out, it was Spanner who dealt with the world. Lore hid behind her: not literally, of course, but behind a cloud of aloof silence. It had always worked when she was a child, a van de Oest. It never occurred to her that it might not work now, when no one knew or cared who she was. Spanner had snapped at her a couple of times to not stand up so bloody straight, she was drawing attention. So she learned how to move like Spanner, alert and upright, but withdrawn, ready and wary. She learned how to slide together the beginning and ending of her words, to cut out the crystal pronunciation of her childhood. She gradually learned to become someone else, someone who recognized the thin, hungry face in the mirror, the red hair and naked vulva. But she still never went out into the open on her own.

There was nothing specific of which she was afraid, just . . . everything, as though the world were a gelatinous beast that would fall upon her and suffocate her. The open spaces, the feeling that her back was naked, that people could see through her clothes; that someone would recognize her as that heiress who was kidnapped three or four months ago. And her heart would kick under her ribs, and the muscles behind her jaw and in her throat would tighten as though someone had a thick, soft ribbon around her neck and was pulling very, very slowly.

On good days, she managed to get out into the garden. The hard part was getting past the front door. She would put her hand to the wood, and suddenly think,
Have I got my gloves?
And so she would check her coat pockets. Yes. She had her gloves. She would open the door a crack, think,
Are my roots showing?
and have to close it again, go to the bathroom and check her hair. And then she would have to stand by the door, breathing deep, telling herself it was
only a few seconds
on the street.
Only a few seconds.
Sometimes she hated herself for this fear. But then, if it was a good day, she would rip open the door in a rush and shut it and run down the steps, into the passageway, through the wooden gate that now had a new, shiny lock and a bolt she could push from the inside, and she would be safe.

Sometimes she spent hours in the garden, breaking concrete with a pick, hauling it into the barrow, sorting the bricks by hand into two piles: one to throw away, one to keep to make a raised flower bed. Many of the weeds she left alone. They had fought to be there; she wasn’t going to be the one to pull them out. Besides, they were green and growing, and most of them would flower in spring and summer.

Today she took a spade and started turning over the hard dirt. She leaned her weight into the spade, enjoying the way the steel bit into the black dirt, trying hard not to slice any worms.

Something rustled in the undergrowth by the west wall.

Lore went still. Listened. Nothing. She must have imagined it. She bent to her digging. Heard it again.

She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.

They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.

Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.

The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore. She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward, made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.

She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the cat again that afternoon.

When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.

She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing. She scanned the business then environmental sections—still nothing. It did not make sense.