The Graveyard Game (20 page)

Nan wore a peacock-blue afternoon ensemble from the premier designer house in Senegal, with matching hat and veil, like a beautifully dressed doll. Her parasol threw a shadow of deeper blue.

Slowly they made their way along the old streets, in and out of the islands of shadow from the great palm trees, through arcaded quarters plastered and painted in all shades of white and blue. They spoke quietly together. That either of them could hear what the other said was remarkable, given the small mortal child who danced along behind them, following closely as though drawn on a string. He carried on his shoulder a SoundBox 3000 that screamed out the latest album by Little Fairuza: ten songs of love and longing in the teen world of Islam.

Every now and then a passerby frowned severely at the child. It wasn’t so much that the music’s content was objectionable—when has any culture approved of love and longing for the under-sixteen set?—but for such a big SoundBox the speakers were execrable, buzzing and roaring with distortion. The child danced along, oblivious.

The white man cast a dubious look over one shoulder as they walked slowly down Rue Meridien. “You’re quite sure this is necessary?”

“Yes. The generator renders our conversation unintelligible.”

Victor nodded, stroking his beard. “Well. Lunch alfresco? I seem to remember a place in the next street over that does a splendid b’stila.”

“I’d like that.” Nan took his arm, and they bore right through a winding maze of connected courtyards, emerging at last in a dim garden where a central fountain played. There a waiter served them from a cart, presenting them with two neat chlorilar plates of b’stila and uttering brief harsh words to the child, who hopped over the garden wall, turned up the volume, and busied himself with an exhibition of ape dancing for the edification of onlookers.

Nan and Victor set their plates on the wall and nibbled away tidily at their crispy pastries. Victor made sounds of dignified pleasure, lifting a forkful of savory filling to admire it.

“Of all the things one never thought one would miss,” he said, “I must say
chicken
is the most unlikely. Do you know it’s impossible to get over there at all, now?”

“Really?”

“Yes. Thanks to the Beast Liberation Party, chickens are no longer being bred. They’re very nearly extinct in England.”

“Extinct?” Nan looked astonished.

“Poor creatures were apparently too stupid to make use of the gift of civil liberty,” Victor said, carefully brushing confectioner’s sugar from his beard. “Wandering onto motorways or into the path of packs of feral dogs, who have made much better use of their civil liberty.”

Nan shook her head. “Why do all these attempts to stop cruelty result in greater cruelty?” she said.

“Cruelty is a natural element in the world, like sand,” Victor said, smiling thinly. “Mortals may shovel it out of one place, but it merely accumulates in a pile somewhere else. Clear your house and bury your neighbor’s. Yet the futile efforts persist.”

“As we do,” she said.

His smile faded, and he looked down at his plate again. “Have you had any success?”

“I haven’t found him, no. Though I wouldn’t say my efforts have met with complete failure.”

“May I hear what you’ve learned?” Victor asked, taking her empty plate on his and dropping them, with the forks, down the nearest fusion hopper. He then pulled off his soiled gloves and tucked them away in one pocket. From another pocket he produced a fresh pair and pulled them on. Nan waited patiently, setting her parasol on her shoulder again.

He offered her his arm, and they strolled from the garden. The mortal child took up his SoundBox and moved after them.

As they paced across the courtyard outside the university, Nan said, “I was able to break into his personnel file, but there isn’t much after 2083. Kalugin was at Kamchatka, he finished whatever he was doing there, he returned to Polar Base Two. He requested recreational leave, and then he was transferred to a location designated only by a number. After that his record simply stops.”

“Perhaps he’s still on duty at that site?” Victor suggested. “Involved in something classified.”

“He’d have sent me word, in all these years,” said Nan quietly. “You know that.”

Victor reflected that she was right, that violating a mandatory communications lockdown to talk to his wife was exactly the sort of thing Kalugin would have done. He didn’t say this, however. He simply watched Nan from under the brim of his hat and wondered,
for the thousandth time, what his life might have been like if Nan had not loved Vasilii Vasilievitch Kalugin.

“So he would have,” he said. “You’ve found nothing further, then?”

“I didn’t say that.” Nan glanced over her shoulder, and the mortal child walked nearer. She spoke in a measured, dispassionate way, as though she were discussing a subject of only mildly mutual interest. “It occurred to me to study the phenomenon of disappearance itself. Does it happen often? To whom, and why?”

“Sensible way to approach the problem,” Victor said.

“I accessed Company personnel files, traced them, cross-referenced them. Never mind how I obtained the codes. I learned that disappearance is not recent, not the result of our masters’ paranoia as we approach their time period.

“It has always happened. There are any number of files that simply stop, Victor. After a certain date they contain no entries. Sometimes it happens following injury.”

Victor nodded. “Pretty damned infrequently, I’d think.”

“More often than you’d think. An operative will be sent to a base for repair—and never released. Sometimes, it follows an arrest. An operative is sent to the nearest base for disciplinary action and counseling. After that, the operative is reassigned, but to a numbered location that cannot be traced in the Company files, regardless of what search parameters are used.”

“I see.” Victor smoothed his mustache uneasily.

Nan’s voice sharpened as she went on: “Then there are operatives who disappear simply because they were associated with operatives who also disappeared.” She let go of his arm and turned to face him abruptly. “They go to numbered sites too, Victor. Why? What did they witness? Do you know?”

Victor caught his breath at her fury, at her perfect lips drawn back from her white teeth. He raised his hands in a palms-up shrug, aware that the gloves made the gesture outrageously theatrical.

“I’m only a Facilitator, Nan. But we’re both old enough to know the Company has its ugly little secrets. Dr. Zeus may have found it convenient to lose some of us.”

“How can it just
lose
us?” Nan demanded. “I remember being told that I might sink under the polar ice, or be buried in an ocean of sand, and the Company would still be able to rescue me.”

Victor took her arm again. She let him. “If you never incur the wrath of all-seeing Zeus, you’ll be rescued. But certain persons . . . certain persons, madame, may have been careless.”

She looked at him without speaking, and for a moment he thought she was going to strike him. His pulse quickened, but she turned away. The little mortal behind them looked from one to the other and frowned.

“Forgive me,” said Victor.

Nan shook her head. “You were only telling the truth.”

“Not always a prudent thing to do.”

“And we mustn’t be imprudent, must we?” Her voice shook slightly. “It’s a mortal weakness.”

At the word
weakness
Victor thought of Kalugin. Nan, gazing out across Rue Atlas, was thinking of something else . . .

“No, that would be weak. I wouldn’t ever fall in love with anybody,” eight-year-old Mendoza had announced, chinning herself on the bar. She pulled herself along and dropped into the swing next to Nan’s. “Look at the stupid things mortals do when they’re in love.” She rolled her eyes to heaven and clasped her hands. “Ooh, darling, I can’t live without you! I burn for your kiss! I die!” She threw herself backward recklessly, almost falling out of the swing. Catching herself at the last moment, she added, “Would you ever want your life to depend on somebody else’s?”

“If I was really in love with somebody, it would be worth it,” Nan had insisted. “People need other people. I bet you start singing a different tune when we hit puberty.”

“Yuck! I bet I won’t,” Mendoza said, swinging faster now, punc
the next arc, hurtling into open air with outstretched arms.

Why take the risk?
thought Nan bitterly. She turned now to regard Victor, standing beside her with eyes downcast, lost in equally bitter memories.

“Will you do something for me, Victor dear?”

He looked up, startled, and his gloved hands flew to his heart. “Anything, madame! What may I do?”

“Do you know the Facilitator Joseph?”

She watched as his face changed, became cautious and closed. The mortal child watched too, and decided it was time to set down the SoundBox. He stepped between them, shaking a tiny fist, and angrily told the white man he’d better not insult the
refine noir
.

The SoundBox wailed on:

How can I tell my mother of our love?

How can we hide from my father and my brothers?

The world has a thousand eyes to spy on us!

Oh, why did the Almighty make me a teenager in love?

O
N HIS LUNCH HOUR
, Joseph strolled between the street vendors’ carts of Little Kobe, looking up between the carved and gilded beams where the fish banners flew. It was a tourist trap, but a great place to get a fast bowl of rice. There was the beef bowl home-style, gray ribbons of beef on brown rice with julienned carrots, or the beef bowl Mazatlän-style, brown shreds of beef on orange rice with cubed carrots. The taste depended on what sauce you poured over it.

His present posting was unobjectionable. He was a departmental supervisor in a civic office that granted permits to archaeologists, and all the Company needed him to do was ensure that certain permit requests were granted and others refused. He was allowed to keep the weekly salary he earned (another benefit of gradual retirement), which enabled him to live in a very nice little box in a high-rise not two blocks from his office. Sticking up twenty stories, the building looked like a soda straw by comparison with the surrounding adobes. The Japanese developers couldn’t seem to break themselves of the habit of conserving space, even in a country of sprawling deserts. The view from his one tiny window was fabulous, though.

Joseph finished his rice and dropped the paper bowl into a conveniently placed fusion hopper, where it vanished with a whoosh. Consulting an internal chronometer, he decided he had time to check
his mail before going back for the afternoon shift. He wandered up to the nearest public terminal and stood in line, waiting patiently for his turn. Then he stepped up to the keyboard and tapped in his communication code.

Yes, he had mail. Water bill, a public service announcement about Park Beautification Week, and a letter from Morocco. Well, well.

It was encrypted, like most personal correspondence. He shunted it into his tertiary consciousness undecrypted, paid his water bill, and stepped away, relinquishing the terminal to a harried-looking little abuela with a string bag full of groceries. Hands in his coat pockets, he wandered back to his office.

At his desk he was able to decrypt the message as he busied himself with inputting a monthly report. The letter was brief:

Victor would prefer to speak with you privately. He feels that

Regent’s Park in London is a suitable location. His

communication code is VdV@24Q83/09.

Very best wishes,

Nan D’Araignée

Joseph finished his report and leaned back from his keyboard, rubbing his neck. He closed his eyes and concentrated on draining the blood from his face, giving himself an unsightly pallor. A little careful work turned the skin under his eyes dark. He checked his reflection in a pocket mirror and hastily revised a little; he wanted to look sick, not dead. Then he got up and tottered into the manager’s department to explain that he’d apparently eaten a bad tuna roll and needed to go home early.

His color returned to normal as he hurried down the street to his building. In his room he paused only long enough to pack an overnight bag. Back out on Calle Nakamura, he found an unoccupied public terminal. There he purchased a ticket to London for a tenth of what he’d spent the last time he went there, and sent a message to a certain bookstore in Gower Street.

Stepping away from the terminal to let two small members of a soccer team log on, Joseph spotted an electric tram trundling toward its stop. He sprinted to catch the tram, and rode standing as it took him out to the airport. He made his suborbital with ten minutes to spare, settling back in his seat as the flight attendant offered him a chlorilar pouch of green tea.

F
ORTY-FIVE MINUTES
later Joseph stepped through the exit at London City Airport, having satisfied the customs officials that he was not a URL terrorist with a concealed explosive device. He boarded the Tube and exited at Gower Street, after shaking off the attentions of three desperates who wanted his overnight bag.

“What the hell have things come to in this country when a man has to fight for three pair of cotton socks and a shaving kit?” he growled as he strode into the small dark shop, redolent of moldy paper, where Lewis sat behind a counter.

“Oh, I’ll bet there are pajamas in there, too,” Lewis said. “You have no idea what flannel pajamas go for over here.”

“So, hi.” Joseph set down his bag. “Long time no see. I’m in town on business, and I thought I’d bunk at your place, okay?”
And I can bring you up to speed on what I’ve found out lately
.

“I’d love the company, though I’m afraid this isn’t nearly as nice as where I was last time,” Lewis said brightly.
I have rather a lot to tell you, too
.

“Hey, how bad can it be?” Joseph said, waving his hand dismissively.

“A rathole,” he remarked fifteen minutes later, in Lewis’s garret. “But
spacious.”

“Artistic and airy, too,” suggested Lewis. “All I need are a few half-finished canvases and a bong.”