Our Lady of the Ice (6 page)

“Juan’s from the mainland,” Maria said. “Of course he’d say that.”

Essie gave her a dirty look.

“What?” Maria leaned back in her chair. “Am I wrong, little Miss
AFF
?”

“I’m
not
part of the
AFF
, and you know it.”

Maria laughed. She was just teasing, Eliana knew. Even Essie wasn’t so radical as to get involved with the
AFF
. She’d say Independence wasn’t about killing people, it was about reaping the benefits of the atomic power they risked their lives manufacturing out here, selling the energy themselves and using the profits to make a home of their own in the ice. Reviving the glory of old Hope City, when it had been the most advanced city of its time. A nice idea, but Eliana would still rather live on the mainland. Her mother used to tell her that was real freedom.

The variety show came back on, and Eliana switched off the television set. An afterimage of Lady Luna’s bright smile seared into her head.

She wondered again what those missing documents could be.

*  *  *  *

Eliana pulled Essie’s car up to the curb and turned off the engine. It had taken another fifteen dollars to convince Essie to let her borrow it, but Eliana knew she might need a quick escape. And the city trains weren’t going to cut it.

Sala’s neighborhood was exactly the sort of place you’d expect a Hope City bureaucrat to live. The houses here were tall and narrow and pressed close together, with small patchwork yards full of cheap grass and stunted Hope City trees. No one was out, despite the warmth on the air. Space-heater warm, almost. Eliana shrugged out of her coat and tossed it into the backseat of Essie’s car.

She walked the three blocks to Sala’s house.

It was nine thirty in the morning. Eliana had selected the time because she knew most of the people living in this neighborhood would be at work. Specifically, she figured Sala would be at work, hunched over his fancy atomic-powered robots. And she needed his house empty.

Breaking and entering wasn’t much of a crime for a girl who had grown up in the smokestack district, even though she knew it could get her license revoked and land her in jail for a few months. And normally she would have waited, just like Mr. Vasquez had taught her, biding her time and asking questions. But Lady Luna was paying her for speed as well as discretion, and so Eliana slipped back into her favorite secondary-school hobby.

Sala’s house looked like all the other houses, only his yard didn’t have any trees in it, just some patchy grass and a couple of empty flowerpots. Eliana walked around to the side of the house as if she lived there. A metal gate led into the back garden. It wasn’t locked. She stepped through the gate, letting it click shut behind her. The back garden was small and cramped and overgrown. Still nicer than Eliana’s crappy tenement apartment.

At the back door, Eliana slipped the metal file out of her purse. After a second or two of fumbling, the motions came back to her: insert, twist, flick your wrist. The lock snapped. Eliana pushed the door open and stepped inside, pocketing the file. At least she was wearing a pair of her mother’s cotton gloves. More than she’d ever remembered to do when she was younger.

The house was darkened, the air still. Not a lot of clutter. Eliana scanned the narrow living room, the dining room, and the kitchen and didn’t find anything. She went upstairs. A bedroom, an office, a bathroom. She went through the office first, shuffling through the
papers stacked on the desk—mostly bank notices and check stubs from the city and a few memos about phone calls. Eliana looked at each memo closely.
Juanita Villarreal, Hector Cabo.
Phone numbers were scrawled across the bottom.

Something caught her eye.

Eliana tossed the memos aside. A matchbook lay on the desk, crammed up next to a cup of pens. Black background, a flame-colored flower twisting across the surface. It was the same design as the one on the sign at the Florencia, that popular bar on the edge of the docks.

A bar owned by Ignacio Cabrera.

Eliana flipped the matchbook over. Opened it. She didn’t find anything.

She was numb. Christ, if Cabrera already had the documents, Eliana would never be able to get them back. Not unless she asked Diego, and she knew what he would say—

Downstairs, a door slammed.

Eliana froze. All the breath poured out of her body. Footsteps echoed across the bottom floor.

Get out,
she thought.

She slipped out of the office. The footsteps were still downstairs. She took a deep breath, trying to calm the rattle of her nerves. She’d done this before, been inside a house when the owner came home. A couple of times she’d even managed to escape.

She crept down the stairs, pressing her feet against the baseboards so they wouldn’t squeak. She went a couple of steps and stopped to listen. Silence. She went two more and stopped again. This time she heard the murmur of a voice. One voice. The occasional pause. Maybe he was on the telephone.

Eliana crept the rest of the way down. Nothing was waiting for her at the landing except a clear two-meter shot to the front door. She peered around the banister. Didn’t see anybody. But she could hear the voice more clearly now.

“—on the list today? . . . Listen, it’s imperative I hand it over directly. . . . No, I won’t tell you what it says. It’s for his eyes only—”

For a moment Eliana was torn. She knew she needed to get the
fuck out of the house, but part of her wanted to linger, listen in on the conversation, see what she could learn.

Somewhere off to the side, a floorboard creaked.

Eliana’s whole body went cold. But the conversation hadn’t ended.

“I did all the work! I want the credit!”

Decision made. Eliana stepped off the last stair and walked quickly to the door, pulled it open, eased it shut.

The neighborhood was as empty as before.

The only difference was a car parked in the drive, small and cheap, the paint rubbed off in spots. Looked like a bureaucrat’s car.

Eliana walked down the pathway, her heart pounding in her ears. She went four houses down and then broke into a run, racing to the place where she’d left Essie’s car. She’d never moved so fast, jamming the key into the lock and then into the ignition. The engine roared. She gunned forward, pulling around to Sala’s house.

The car was still there.

She let out a long, adrenaline-fueled sigh of relief and slumped against her seat. She parked the car two houses down, next to a scrubby little oak tree. Switched off the engine. She had a clear enough view of Sala’s front door.

This, Mr. Vasquez had taught her to do.

Eliana regained her breath, and then she regained her thoughts. No documents in the house, but that conversation sounded like Sala had
something
. She supposed it could have been some city matter, but then why was he taking the phone call from home?

Sala’s front door banged open.

Eliana was seized with a brief, residual panic. For a moment she forgot what she was supposed to do and she just watched as a fussy, faded man locked the house door, pocketed his keys, and wound down the pathway. But he didn’t get into his car. He just stood by the gate, squinting down the street. Not in her direction.

Eliana took a deep breath and turned on the car engine. The faded man glanced at her, glanced away, uninterested.

Tucked under his arm was a slim brown envelope.

Documents,
Eliana thought.

The distant whine of a car engine drifted around the corner. Eliana tried to melt into her seat. The faded man perked up, straightened his coat. Eliana was almost afraid to breathe.

At the end of the street, a car appeared. Long and sleek and low to the ground. A black paint job, dark tinted windows.

Eliana’s stomach clenched.

Cabrera. He controlled those cars, a whole fleet of them, Diego had told her, as ubiquitous as his reprogrammed robots. You saw one of those cars, you knew Cabrera’s men were up to something.

The car pulled up to the curb. The faded man stepped in. As soon as the door shut, the car flew past Eliana, exhaling white clouds of exhaust. She watched it go, her breath coming short and fast.

She didn’t think they’d noticed her.

She shifted her car into gear and turned around in the house’s driveway and followed them.

Eliana had never actually tailed anyone before. Mr. Vasquez had advised her against it, saying the city didn’t have enough vehicles on its roads to disguise you. And he was right. Eliana puttered along in Essie’s shambling little car, pressing on the brakes every time the black car loomed in her vision. At one point, the engine died, and the black car slid out of view.

“Fuck!” Eliana jostled the keys, pushed on the clutch. She’d never really gotten the hang of driving. Essie would kill her if she’d broken her car.

Better Essie than Cabrera,
Eliana thought, although the words were in Diego’s voice.

The engine rattled to life. Eliana took a deep breath and moved forward along the empty street, then turned where the black car had turned. But it was gone.

The Florencia.

Of course. Where else would Cabrera do business?

Eliana pulled up to a stop sign. She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel, her palms slick with sweat. Her heart beat so fast, she thought she was going to be sick. But if Sala was headed to the Florencia, with that brown envelope in one hand—

Eliana thought about the money Lady Luna had laid out on her office desk. Enough to set aside twice what she usually did toward her savings to leave Hope City, even after she’d paid Maria and Essie. And that was just from her retainer.

The crossroad cleared. Eliana took a deep breath and shot forward into the intersection. She’d never driven to the Florencia before, but she knew its general location. And some city man had helpfully hung signs pointing her that way.

Ten minutes later, she was there.

Eliana parked in one of the paid lots, climbed out, locked the car. The wind whipped across her face, cold and damp. Real wind, blowing in through the entrances at the docks.

She stood for a moment, considering. Then she unlocked the car, pulled open the glove compartment. Her gun was tucked inside there, waiting. Bullets in it and everything. She pulled it out and stuck it into her purse.

The Florencia was located on a narrow side street lined with empty storefronts. Eliana knew the way from here, since Maria liked to dance at the Florencia now and then. Eliana was used to looking for it at night, though, when the name was lit up in garish neon and people spilled out onto the street, drunk and laughing. But during the day, you’d think the Florencia was as abandoned as its neighboring establishments, because of the barred-over windows and the cheap, peeling paint on the facade.

Friday and Saturday night might have been enough to turn this place respectable. Tuesday morning wasn’t.

The wind gusted as Eliana made her way down the street, moving closer toward the entrance, and she tucked her face into her scarf and listened to her breath and to her footsteps as she walked. Both echoed in the stillness.

A black car was parked in front of the bar. Eliana stopped and stared at it. She was aware of the weight of the gun in her purse. Not that she’d ever shot the thing at anything other than the targets at her licensing class.

She could still turn back. Call up Lady Luna, tell her Cabrera had her documents after all, Lady Luna would have to find someone
else. But that would mean losing a hell of a lot of mainland money, and Sala was in the Florencia. Right now. Sala, and those damned documents.

Eliana reached into her purse and jerked back the safety on her gun. Then she pulled out her red lipstick and put it on. She needed to disguise herself as one of Cabrera’s girls.

No one guarded the Florencia door. Eliana pulled on the handle, expecting (hoping) it to be locked, surprising herself when it swung open with a long, low creak. Music tumbled out, a sad, dark drone. She stepped in. Most of the lights were off, the tables lit with little red candles. A girl danced up onstage, half her clothes spilled around her feet. She had more of an audience than Eliana would have expected.

“Can I help you?”

Eliana startled at the voice. She looked over and found a well-styled little man standing beside a stack of menus.

“Um, I’m meeting somebody.” Eliana scanned the dining room. It was too dark to see, and she hadn’t gotten that good a look at Sala’s face. “I see him. There.” She pointed in a noncommittal direction.

The man blinked at him. “Would you like a menu?”

“Sure.”

The man handed her one from the stack, and Eliana took it. She strode away, still scanning for Sala. She could feel the man near the door staring at her, but she shook it off, sliding between the tables. Lights bounced off the stage. The music bore into her. She passed a pair of old men with cups of coffee; she passed a young man in a business suit scratching something on a pad of paper.

And then she found Sala.

He didn’t see her. He was sitting at a table at the edge of the room, staring up at the dancing girl and smoking. He had a bottle of wine with him, and he topped off his glass, not taking his eyes off the stage. The envelope lay on the table, his hand pressed on it like an act of protection.

Eliana walked over and sat down at his table.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Someone told me about you.” Eliana tilted her head, smiled. “Said you like to have fun.”

He drew the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled smoke. His hand was shaking.

“Who,” he said, “are you?”

“Just one of Cabrera’s girls. Is it true? You like to have fun?”

“No.” He turned away, took a long drink of his wine. In the dim light it looked like blood. “Go bother somebody else.”

“What you got there?” She laid her fingertips on the edge of the envelope.

Sala went still. Onstage, the girl twirled around and around, her skirt flaring out from her hips. Then that skirt was flying through the air and landing in a sparkling heap at the edge of the stage. Someone off to the side applauded.