Nicola Griffith (30 page)

“No. I didn’t want to see myself looking old and useless.”

He was old, and arthritic, and lonely—but his eyes were not heavy-lidded and ancient and used up, like Spanner’s; they weren’t dull and eaten-away and dead like the kitten’s. How did he watch the net for hours and keep eyes like that?

I wondered if he had seen the video of Chen’s kidnapping, of me; what he might do if he had recognized me and seen the reward posted; whether he would turn me in . . . and if I would blame him if he did. A quarter of a million would change his life.

He looked at me a long time when I handed him Gibbon’s leash. I met his eyes.
Not like Spanner’s at all.
I patted Gibbon. “The walk was a good idea,” I said.

I got to the plant a little before six. Magyar was waiting at the gates. Her relief was obvious.

“Was it you who called and hung up? Thought I wouldn’t show?” It had occurred to me while I dressed, sweating, remembering the look on Tom’s face, my own doubts. I didn’t want to tempt friends, or those who might become friends. I could have run, disappeared, just another tiny rodent in the undergrowth of the city . . . But if I ran I would be alone again, never knowing who I was when I bent to look at my reflection.

Being near Magyar made me feel known and understood.

We walked into the locker room very close but not quite touching. We caught a few slantwise glances, coming in together, and Kinnis even slapped me on the back, grinning hugely.

I wondered why I wasn’t telling them that their obvious assumption was wrong. I wondered why Magyar wasn’t, either.

“Later,” Magyar said, “at the break.”

We went our separate ways.

All through the first half of the shift, Cel kept watching me, raising her eyebrow at me when I caught her gaze. Annoyingly, I kept blushing.Five minutes before the break Magyar came to find me. I watched her striding toward me, loosening her mask, frowning. The different lights ran across her hair, which looked very clean and soft. When her right leg moved forward, the skinny pulled taut over her left breast. The plasthene would feel warm under my hands.

“Bird.”

“Magyar.”

“We need to talk.”

“Anywhere but the breakroom. I’m beginning to feel like a trophy wife.” I just blurted it out, and she blushed, which meant I did, too, imagining what she might be thinking, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips, which were very red. And then of course Cel was there, raising her eyebrow at us both.

Frowning ferociously, Magyar led me to the glass-walled office where we had faced off with Hepple. She went around the desk and sat in the comfortably upholstered chair. She was angry again. “Feels good. Want a try? No? Well, I suppose you’ve sat behind big desks a lot. You were probably used to chairs like these by the time you were seven.”

I thought we had gone through all this rich girl—poor girl stuff yesterday. “What’s bothering you?”

“Have you checked the police records yet?”

“No.” I should have. Of course I should have, but I had been sleeping, exhausted and confused.

“I did. Or my friend did. She works in the county records office. I called her this morning, asked her to check.”

“And?”

“And nothing. At least not from this part of the country.”

There was a large dry patch high up in my throat. “How about hospitals?”

“Also nothing.”

The dry patch was getting bigger. “I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I, frankly.”

I didn’t really want to ask her. “Do you believe me?”“I wonder if you’re telling me everything.”

“You’ve heard the high points. There are some things I don’t want to talk about. Some of them are a matter of public record,” like the net video, “some are things only I know about.” And Spanner. “But I haven’t lied to you. Except about my name.”

There was another chair on my side of the desk. I took it.

“So, what do we do from here?”

I didn’t have any suggestions. She was the one who didn’t trust me. I was tired of dancing to other people’s tunes. Somewhere below, water gushed loudly through a pipe. It was hot in the glass box.

Eventually, she sighed and put her feet up on the desk. “You’re a van de Oest. But you won’t go back to your family because your mother abused your sisters and might have abused you. And because you think you killed someone. But there’s no record of a dead body. No body, no murder, no crime. And if your mother did abuse anyone, it’s not your fault, so why should you suffer? Why not just go back and get her arrested?”

“She may already
be
arrested.” I told her about Tok and Oster, the strange appeal they had made two years ago. “But there’s more to it than that.”

Magyar folded her arms in satisfaction. “Thought there might be.”

“My ransom wasn’t paid for a long, long time. I thought the delay was deliberate.”

“Thought or think?”

“I don’t know.” Did the fact that it was Katerine and not Oster make a difference? No. “I was in that tent for weeks. The ransom demand was thirty million.” I ignored the way her pupils dilated. “They wouldn’t actually expect thirty million, of course. That’s just a negotiating tool. But they would expect about ten.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s the kind of thing you learn growing up.”“
You
might.”

I supposed it might seem odd, to grow up understanding the mechanics of abduction. “Ten million—even thirty million—means nothing to my family. Just on my own I’m worth more than that.” Talk of millions was doing what mention of my name yesterday had not. I could see the shutters start to come down in Magyar’s head. “Don’t. Damn you, Magyar, don’t go away, don’t pretend I’m not real. There’s nothing I can do about the money. It’s what I was brought up with. But I don’t have it now.”

“You could, though.”

“I could. But I won’t.”

“We’ll see.” But she smiled. It was just the corner of her mouth, but she was trying.

“At those prices, my release should have been negotiated within a week. Ten days at the most. I was in that tent six weeks. Why?”

“Bad communications?”

“No. They had excellent lines of communication. Think about it. Someone knew where to abduct me from. I’d been in Uruguay less than twenty-four hours, but they were ready: transport, masks, drugs. And they even knew I was allergic to subcutaneous spray injections. How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone told them. And the only people who knew were family members, and those close to the family.” I gave her a minute to absorb that. “So if my family, or someone close, set the whole thing up, the question has to be: Why? The family doesn’t need money, nor does the corporation.”

“Maybe it wasn’t money they were after.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe they just wanted me out of the way.”

“But why? And if it was the family, for family reasons, why the Chen kidnapping?”

“I don’t know.”Silence. “So you changed your name and hid.” I nodded. “Well.” She did not seem to know what to say.

She knew I had been in danger, maybe still was. She knew I was rich but would probably never claim the money. She knew I thought I had killed a man. “Magyar, will you help me?”

“Yes.”

Yes.
“Just like that?”

She lifted her feet off the desk, gave me a crooked smile. “Murder, money, high intrigue. It’s just getting interesting.”

Another silence, this time longer. “Magyar, why?”

“Why do you think?” she asked softly.

It was not a rhetorical question. But she had known what Kinnis and Cel and all those others had been thinking, and she hadn’t contradicted them. “Because . . . Damn it, Cherry, you know why.”

“Maybe I do. But I need to hear it. I don’t think I can take any more surprises from you.” She got up, came around to my side of the desk. We stood about twelve inches from each other. The hairs on my neck and the backs of my hands tried to rise. It was like being in a strong magnetic field. I felt very exposed in my skinny.

“I like you,” I said suddenly. Which was not quite what I had intended. “I like being near you. And I admire you. What you think matters to me.” And I had made myself vulnerable. She was the only person in the world apart from Spanner who knew who I was.

I could see every pore in her face, the way the creases around her eyes deepened when she smiled. “Why didn’t you start trusting me a bit earlier?” She moved closer, nine inches, six.

I could feel the heat of her body through the plasthene of my suit. Our hipbones were almost touching. I imagined the feel of her skin under my hands.

The end-of-break Klaxon sounded. Down below there was movement as the shift came back to the troughs.

“Shit.” I started to turn away.

She snagged my hand. Plasthene on plasthene. Safe and erotic. She did not seem to care about the glass walls. She moved her hand to my wrist, tugged until my arms came around her waist. She laid my palm against the small of her back, pressed it in place. My belly was an inch, half an inch, from hers. Heat swarmed up my legs, down my spine. “Is this what you want?”

I nodded.

“Say it.”

“Yes. This is what I want. You are who I want.”

What was between us swelled suddenly, and was almost tangible: ceramic and smooth, rounded as an egg.

We stepped apart by mutual consent. Magyar did not sit behind the desk again, but perched on one corner. I hovered uncertainly by the door. “We have a lot to do,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I’ll have to split my time between this”—she gestured at the space between us,
the possible murder,
she meant—“and the sabotage.”

“Yes.” I turned to go, got as far as touching the door handle, turned. “Magyar, were you ever loved by your family?”

“Yes.”

So sure. “I don’t know if I was. I know that no one else ever did. I’m not sure what love is, but I want . . . I want to be real.” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. “All the people I’ve slept with, none of them knew who I really was.” None of them had whispered my name, sent me love notes. Told me they couldn’t live without me. “I’ve never had any romance, ever. But how could I? I’ve been so many people, I never knew which ones were real. I want to find that out before you and I . . . before we go any further. I want to see what that’s like. Do you understand?”

“No,” she said softly, “but I’m trying.”

Good enough.

TWENTY-FOUR

The seven hours between lunch and dinner are the longest part of the day. She tries to stay fit by doing stretches and sit-ups and resistance exercises, but she does not have the strength to work out for more than thirty or forty minutes. The rest of the time drags. She weeps often: for herself, for Stella, for Tok. She wonders why her family has not ransomed her.

Something is different. Both men come into the tent together. She sits at the far end of the tent while they stand at the entrance. They fill the tent, breathe all her air. She must not look scared or they will know she is no longer drugged.

“Your family is stalling,” Crablegs says.

Lore looks from one to the other, not sure if she should say anything.

Fishface squats down until his hooded face is only a foot or so higher than Lore’s. “We’ve asked for thirty million,” he explains, “which isn’t much.”

“They say ten is all they’ll give. We think maybe they don’t care whether you live or die.”

Fishface stands. “If they don’t give us the money, we can’t give you back. You do understand that, don’t you?”

He sounds genuinely regretful. Lore wants to reach out and pat his arm, let him know she understands that he is really trying.

“Think about what you want to say to them, to persuade them to pay.” They leave without another word.

Ten million. What can she say that will make them pay if they don’t want to? And why wouldn’t they want to?

She thinks of Katerine, and Oster. Perhaps they are still competing for her.

Then why haven’t they paid?

When Crablegs brings the camera again, what will she say to convince her parents that she is worth thirty million?

Lore looks inside herself and finds only a vast space. Who is she? Her father would recognize the Lore who goes with him to count fish in the bay, and talk about the silliness of their ancestors. Katerine, on the other hand, knows and cares only for the Project Deputy, the efficient young woman who designs huge systems and suavely courts the Minister for This and the Commissar of That.

But what of the girl who would lie in Anne’s arms and swim with Sarah, the child who dreams of monsters and still sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to check the lock on her door? Who will recognize her? No one but herself. She has shared none of these things, told them to no one. She has been so alone.

TWENTY-FIVE

I was on the roof, nailing planks together to make a planter big enough for a tree, when my phone buzzed. I scrambled back in through the window, picked up a handset. “Yeah.”

“Meisener,” Magyar said.

“What?” I put my hammer down on the table.

“It was Meisener who sabotaged the plant. Had to be.”

“Hold on.” I climbed back through the window with the handset and sat down. The slates were cold through the thin material of my trousers. “Go on.”

“Four people with enough know-how to jam the glucose line and ready the emergency equipment started work at Hedon Road in the last three months: you, a day-shifter, and Paolo and Meisener.” She added dryly, “I assumed you didn’t count.”

“Thanks.”

“The day-shifter joined just the day before the spill. Not enough time to fix things.”

“No.”

“So that left Paolo and Meisener. And apart from the fact that Paolo left before it all happened, I don’t think he was capable, do you?”

Paolo had neither the knowledge nor the focus. “No.”

“Right. So I had a look at Meisener’s records—”

“Which will be false.”

“Yeah, they read like yours: plausible dates and places—names of plants and supervisors, family, even vacation dates—but something just doesn’t add up.”

“Go on.”

“Even if you only believe part of his records, he’s had enough experience to know what he’s doing.”

“Where was he when the spill came in?”

“I’m getting to that.” She sounded annoyed. “I backchecked with Incident Documentation. He was one of the first out.”

“Nothing incriminating about that.”

“No, but he apparently helped half a dozen people into EEBAs before leaving.”

“That’s significant?”

“
I
think it is,” Magyar said. “He already knew where everything was. Which means he was expecting something to happen.”

“It could.” It could also just mean he was an old hand, like me, like Magyar herself, and knew a badly run plant ready for an accident when he saw it. “If he’s guilty, he’ll be moving on soon.” To whatever his next job was, for whomever paid him. Meisener, the cheerful, bandy-legged little man.

“. . .little bastard.”

I was thinking, irrelevantly, of sea and sand and sitting on a log. Then of my last van de Oest project in the Kirghizi desert. Of a truck driving through a puddle, and Hepple. “What?”

“I said, I want to strangle the little bastard. He could have killed my people. All for money! But why? That’s what doesn’t make sense. Who benefits? The whole thing smacks of organization, which takes money. Even if we
had
shut down for several days and managers lost their profits, it doesn’t mean anyone else would have
made
money. Unless it was a matter of market share, and even then—”

Market share. Hepple. A tent, wind singing along the dunes outside. Marley, saying something about . . .

“—divided up among several rival plants, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”

Silence.

“Are you there?”

“Um? Yes. Sorry.” The wisp of memory faded.

“Well, what should we do? Apart from beat the bastard to pulp.”

“Watch and wait.” A dissatisfied, incredulous silence. “We need more information.” There was something missing. Something important.
Hepple. A truck. Tok. Marley.
I shook my head. “We don’t know for sure that he’s responsible.”

“True.” Grudging. “He might not even know we know it’s sabotage.”

“If it is him, he’ll know what the plant managers know.”

Her sigh was loud and long. “Meet me outside the plant at half five?”

“Yes.”

I picked up the hammer and a mouthful of nails and went back to building my planter—one of five. I was going to make an orchard. Me, the sky, some trees. Maybe bees would come up here after all.

The wood was new, still sappy and white against the silvery glint of the nails. Difficult to saw, but less expensive. On a water worker’s pay, I couldn’t afford any better.

But there’s that thirty thousand tucked away.

I tried not to think about that. If I didn’t spend the money I could pretend I hadn’t been in that bunker with Spanner. I could ignore that awful dead-bone smile she had given me, the things I had said. The things I knew because of what I had done.

I thought about Magyar’s words:
managers’ profits.
Hepple wouldn’t be getting any this quarter. His own fault. His greedy attempts to shave expenses could have cost people their lives.
Market share.

The hammer slipped and caught the edge of my thumb. I spat the nails out of my mouth and swore. Carpentry wasn’t my forte. Tok, now, he could have taken these bits of wood and banged them together in a second. Very practical and workmanlike. He was the kind of person who could take two twigs and a piece of string and make something interesting and sturdy. He had done; beautiful things made of found objects dotted the grounds at Ratnapida. He had never been able to just sit, empty-handed. And then he had gone to study music. So hidden, after all. Close-minded. I suppose it ran in the family.

We had shared things, though. And he had helped me. Like that time by the pond when he had told me to find something to do, something to use as a shield against our parents’ interest. I hammered the nail home, set another in place with a tap. That afternoon had been sunny, like most Ratnapida days I remembered. Throwing grass stems for the fish. I hammered the nail in. Set another. Smiled as I remembered Tok telling me about sneaking a look at Aunt Nadia’s files. Lifted the hammer.

It came out of nowhere, a metaphysical hammer blow between the rise and fall of the real tool:
Hepple. Market share. Jerome’s Boys.
And it all fell into place.

Magyar was waiting for me in the locker room. The shift would not change for half an hour and everything was quiet. We sat next to each other on the wooden bench, not too close. “Jerome’s Boys,” I told her. “They were a dirty-work team run directly by the van de Oest COO, forty years ago. They enforced the company monopolies, before the courts got around to it. Any means necessary. Which is why they were supposed to have been disbanded. Maybe they were, but someone’s had the same idea.” Magyar was staring at me as though I was crazy. “Look at when Meisener joined. Just a few days after Hepple started cost-cutting.”

“Hepple? This bunch of enforcers tried to wreck my plant because of that useless idiot?”

“No. Or, rather, yes: because of what Hepple
did
. In a way you were right. It’s about market share.”

“I’m trying very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what Hepple’s got to do with it.”

I started again. “My . . . the van de Oests originally made their money by genetically tailoring bacteria and then patenting them. Every time their bugs were used, they got a cut. Then they retailored the bugs so that they don’t work unless they’re supplied with special proprietary bug food—which is where they make their real profit these days. Treatment plants need the bugs, the bugs need the food. The van de Oests license people to supply both and earn a lot of money for doing nothing. They have a monopoly. When Hepple canceled the food order in favor of generics, he was breaking that monopoly. Someone stepped in to protect it.”

“They would risk all this, thousands of lives, to protect a monopoly?”

“They didn’t intend anyone to get hurt. Except in the pocket.” They wouldn’t risk another Caracas. “And even if people died, the van de Oests would have come out of it smelling of roses. It’s happened before. After all, they would say, if their instructions had been carried out and the proper food used, nothing would have gone wrong. The finger will point at Hepple, and the people who were stupid enough to hire him.”

“Which is what’s happened.”

“Yes.”

“So,” Magyar said slowly, “this group, Jerome’s Boys or whatever they’re called now, is responsible. But they’re illegal. They’re not supposed to exist. So where do they get their money?”

The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money,
Oster had said.
No funds, no operation.

Ridiculously, I felt too ashamed to tell her.
It’s not your fault,
I told myself, but they were my family. I shared the same genes, the same upbringing. I might have had the same values. “It . . . They. . .” I looked down at the floor, then back up again. “Kidnap is a great source of income.”

“Kidnap is . . . ?” She stared at me. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Someone assembles a group to protect the company. But they don’t have access to legitimate corporate funds. So they kidnap the heir, you, and get—how much, ten million?”

“Tax free.”

“—ten million tax free, to fund them. Their purpose is to insure corporate market share by doing things like illegal information gathering and plant sabotage. The point of insuring market share is to keep up van de Oest family income. . .” She shook her head.

“I know, it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make any
kind
of sense! Whoever’s in charge of these people has to have a mind like a corkscrew.”

“And access to everything that goes on.” Corporate records and strategy. Marketing. Research and development. Personal family records. “They had to know I was going to be in Uruguay. They had to know I was allergic to spray hypos. They had to have an organization. Just like the organization that sabotaged the plant. And look at who’s been kidnapped now: Lucas Chen, heir to another bioremediation family. The kind of person the dirty-work group would be collecting information on. Don’t you see? It makes perfect sense.” Someone in my family had had me kidnapped. Had put me through all that humiliation and fear and guilt. Had put me in a place where I might have killed somebody. Someone in my
family
. “Have you heard any more from your friend in county records?”

“More of the same: nothing, nothing, and nothing. She’ll keep checking, but either you didn’t kill him, or someone doesn’t want anyone to know that you did.”

She didn’t say:
Which is the same thing
. It wasn’t.

She stood up, looked at her watch. It was almost time for the shift change. I had a sudden picture of Magyar in my kitchen, making coffee, talking about nothing in particular. I wondered if it would ever happen.

“So, what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Help you watch Meisener.”

She made an impatient gesture. “Don’t you think you should tell someone what you know? You should take it to the police. You haven’t done anything wrong. Or at least call your father. The poor man thinks you’re dead.”

“I want it to stay that way for a while.”

“You’re punishing him for something you once thought he did. But he hasn’t done anything wrong, either.”

“He’s done plenty. Ignoring problems isn’t that far from creating them.”

“Yes, it is. Especially if he’s trying to fix things now.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand will not fix anything! And all it would have taken three years ago—three years ago!—was a single sentence. One sentence: ‘I won’t let your mother hurt you again.’ But he didn’t.”

“I don’t know whether he truly tried then or not. But I think he’s trying now. He’s trying to find you.”

“Well, I don’t want to be found.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m ashamed!” Because kittens should be round. Because still sometimes I felt as though I might cast three shadows in a bright light.

From down the corridor came the sound of voices. Some laughter. The sudden slush of a shower.

Magyar gave me a quick, hard hug. It was so fast I hardly realized what she was doing until she let go. “Just think about it. You can always phone in some anonymous information to the police. But you have to do something.”

“We’ll watch Meisener.”

The garden lay fallow. Lore only left the flat when Spanner forced her out to make money. Instead, every time a charity commercial came on the net, Lore downloaded it. After discarding the big, established organizations, she had twenty-three examples. She began to compare: the pitch, the age of the live spokesperson in relation to the charity, the vocabulary used, the background scenery.

She was sure she could create a short commercial at least as good as any of the ones she had seen. But she had no idea which were the most effective in terms of bringing in money.

After some thought, she accessed net archives, downloading charity commercials that were two or three years old. She analyzed them for the same trends she had spotted in the later adverts, then brought up the tax records of those organizations that were still alive enough to be filing.

“It
will
work,” Lore said, but Spanner was putting on her jacket. “It will,” she went on more calmly. “We have a few minutes before we have to be there. Just sit down and listen.” Spanner zipped up the jacket. She was pulling gloves out of the pockets while Lore talked fast. “Look, you’ve seen what I can do. And you’ve seen the commercials. They can’t afford anything more expensive than library shots with maybe one live head. No interactives. Nothing I can’t handle. True?”

“True.”

“Then all we need is a false account, and maybe twenty seconds break-in time.”

Spanner shook her head. “We can’t even replace our own PIDAs in this climate.”“We can get an account set up by getting Ruth’s help. She works at the morgue, remember.”

“I hadn’t forgotten. But she’s not likely to help us, not after the film.”

Lore swallowed. “Maybe if we explained. . .” And there was always that film, with the right head attached to the right body: there was always blackmail.

“And what about breaking into the net transmission? Ruth can’t help us there.”

“No.” Lore tried to smile. “Actually, I was hoping you would be able to think of a way to manage that.”

Spanner frowned. “I suppose . . . No. The equipment would be too expensive. It wouldn’t be cost-effective.”

“How expensive?”

“I don’t know. A lot.”

“Five hundred? Ten thousand?”

“More.” Spanner was still frowning, still thinking. “But maybe not that much more. It would be difficult to get hold of, though Hyn and Zimmer would be able to help. . .”