Century Rain Part 8

"Verity Auger?" the woman asked.

"You know exactly who I am."

The woman flashed a badge in Auger's face, bright with foils and holographic inlays. Beneath the stars and stripes of the USNE, a picture of the woman's head and upper body rotated through 360. "Securities Board. I'm Agent Ringsted. My colleague is Agent Molinella. You're to come with us."

"I have another five days before the tribunal," Auger said.

"You have another five minutes," Ringsted said. "Is that enough time for you to get ready?"

"Wait," Auger said, standing her ground. "My tribunal is a matter for Antiquities. I may have screwed up down there-that isn't an admission, by the way-but even if I did, there's no way it's an issue for Securities. I thought your remit was protecting the interests of the entire community. Haven't you got anything better to do than waste your time making my life even more difficult?"

"Have you heard that Transgressions is on your case?" Ringsted asked. "Word is they want your head. They say procedures are getting too lax. People think they can just waltz around down on Earth as it suits them, without considering the consequences."

Molinella nodded in agreement. "Transgressions says that a criminal conviction and a robust punishment may be just the signal they need to send."

"By 'robust punishment,' do you mean the kind that ends in the obituary columns?" Augur enquired caustically.

"You get the idea," Ringsted said. "The point being, at this juncture you may prefer to deal with Securities rather than Transgressions."

"Aren't you supposed to be working for the same government?"

"Theoretically," Ringsted allowed, as if it was a concept that had only just occurred to her.

"This is too surreal. What am I supposed to do?"

"You're supposed to come with us," Ringsted said. "We have a s.h.i.+p waiting."

"One other thing," Molinella said. "Bring the maps."

The s.h.i.+p was a blunt, unmarked shuttle of businesslike design. It powered away from the docking port nearest to Auger's home, cutting through local traffic on the kind of express trajectory that required high-level government authorisation. Soon they were moving through outlying precincts, skimming perilously close to the exclusion zone around Earth. They were obviously taking a short cut to the other side of Tanglewood, rather than going the longer, more fuel-efficient way around.

When Auger was alone-the agents sat up front with the crew, leaving her by herself in the pa.s.senger compartment-she took out the one map that she had brought along for the ride. She had stuffed it into her jacket, still rolled inside the tube she had put it in. Some contrary impulse had made her refuse to bring the others after being told to do so, but there was something about this particular map-the last to arrive in the hopper, and the only one that she had examined properly-that tugged at her curiosity. It had felt like a goad before, but now she began to wonder if it served some other function. She examined the map again, to make sure that she had not been mistaken the first time. But there it was: the same subdued colours, the same absence of the Peripherique, the same copyright date of 1959 and the same puzzling sense that something else was not as it should have been. She stared at the map, turning it this way and that, hoping that the thing that was troubling her would become apparent. In the calm of her study, she might have identified the detail after a few minutes' patient examination. But as the shuttle veered and surged, her thoughts kept being derailed. She was at least as anxious to know where she was being taken as she was to solve the mystery of the map.

Presently the shuttle began what she recognised as a braking and final-approach manoeuvre. Large Tanglewood structures loomed through the narrow little portholes. She saw spoked wheels, partial wheels, spheres and cylinders, all joined together like symbols in some weird alien language. While the basic architecture was not unusual by Tanglewood standards, this was not a district she recognised. The habitats were very dark and very old, crusted with the scar tissue of many layers of enlargement and reorganisation. Only a faint spray of tiny golden windows suggested any kind of human presence at all. Auger tensed: what the place most resembled was some kind of maximum-security prison or psychiatric complex.

In a particularly dark section of one of the spheres a little door clammed open, bracketed by red and white approach lights, and the shuttle aimed itself for this tiny aperture. Auger's hands were sweaty on the map, the ink beginning to smudge and stain her fingers. She folded it and pushed it back inside her jacket, trying to stop her hands from trembling.

The shuttle docked and the agents escorted her through the airlock into a labyrinth of sterile black corridors, twisting and turning as they wormed their way deeper into the sphere.

"Where are we?" she asked. "What is this place?"

"You've heard of Securities," Molinella said. "Welcome to Contingencies-our older, rather more secretive and manipulative brother."

"It doesn't exist."

"That's precisely the idea."

They led her through a series of security checks, one of which featured a large Slasher-manufactured snake robot marked with the crossed-out "A" that meant it was most definitely not Asimov-compliant. Auger's neck tingled as the robot studied her.

Beyond the security area was a short corridor ending in a door that was open a few centimetres, spilling a fan of orange light across the grilled black decking of the floor. An armed and goggled guard standing in front of the door observed their progress down the corridor. Sounds came through the gap: high-pitched scratching and sc.r.a.ping noises that set her teeth on edge. There was a regularity and structure to the noises that Auger identified as music, although she could not say exactly which kind. She set her jaw against the unpleasant sound, determined not to let it unsettle her, as was undoubtedly the intention.

The guard stood aside, gesturing for her to step through the doorway. She noticed that he had earphones on beneath his helmet. Molinella and Ringsted stood back, letting her enter the room alone.

Auger pushed the door open, getting the full blast of the music, and stepped through. Inside was a windowless room about the size of her entire apartment, but furnished to a much higher degree of opulence. It looked, in fact, rather like a recreation of a drawing room from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the kind that might have belonged to some ardent scholar of the natural sciences. Behind an enormous desk stood an elderly-looking man who was engaged with fierce concentration in the business of making the music. He had his back to her; he was wearing a purple satin smoking jacket, his silver-white hair combed back from his forehead and falling over the collar. His hands worked the instrument that he held clamped under his chin. The fingers of one hand pressed on the strings, while the other sawed away with a long wooden bow. The man's entire body moved in sympathy with the sounds he was making.

They were awful. Auger felt a faint but rising tide of nausea, but forced herself to stand her ground. The man reminded her of someone, someone she knew well, but in a completely different context.

Then he turned around, sensing her presence, and abandoned the music, letting the bow slide to a sc.r.a.ping halt.

It was Thomas Caliskan: the Musician. The head of Antiquities, and the man of whom she had recently made a personal enemy by denying him academic credit on one of her papers.

Caliskan placed his viola on the desk. "h.e.l.lo, Verity. How good of you to come."

FIVE.

At the entrance to the railway station, a bespectacled young man in a greatcoat tried to push a mimeographed pamphlet into Floyd's hands.

"Read this, monsieur," he said, his French accent well educated. "Read this, and if you agree with our aims, join us at the demonstration next weekend. There's still a chance to do something about Chatelier."

The kid was eighteen or nineteen, the hairs on his chin as fine as peach fuzz. He might have been a medical student or a trainee lawyer. "Why would I want to do something about Chatelier?" Floyd asked.

"You're a foreigner. I hear it in your accent."

"The pa.s.sport in my pocket says I'm French."

"Very soon, that won't count for much."

"Meaning I should watch my back?"

"All of us should," the young man said. He forced the pamphlet into Floyd's hand. Floyd crumpled it and was about to throw it away when some moderating impulse made him push it into his pocket, safely out of sight.

"Thanks for the warning, chief," he said to the boy.

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Kid, when you've been around the block as many times as I have..." Floyd shook his head, knowing there was a gulf of understanding here that could never be explained, only experienced.

"It'll start with the usual hate figures," the young man said. "But it'll end with anyone they don't like the look of."

"Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference." Floyd flashed him a smile. "It won't last for ever."

"Monsieur..." the young man said, his voice trailing off as Floyd turned around and walked further into the station.

Gare de Lyon had begun the slow, drowsy decline into its nightly sleep. According to the clattering indicator boards, a few trains had yet to arrive and depart, but the evening rush hour was clearly long over. There was a chill in the air, blowing down through broken panes in the latticed metal roof that spanned the station. For the first time in months, Floyd remembered what winter felt like. It was an unwelcome memory that he'd kept boxed away, and he s.h.i.+vered.

He reached into his pocket for Greta's letter, and came out instead with the political pamphlet the kid had given him. Floyd glanced back, but there was no sign of the young man. He balled the pamphlet and threw it into the nearest wastepaper bin. He found the letter he had been reaching for and re-read it carefully, satisfying himself that there had been no error, and that he was still on time.

"Late as usual, Wendell," a woman said in heavily accented English.

Floyd snapped around at the instantly familiar voice behind him. "Greta?" he began, as if it could be anyone else. "I wasn't expecting-"

"I made an earlier connection. I've been waiting here for half an hour, foolishly imagining that you might actually arrive more than a minute ahead of schedule."

"Then that's not your train pulling in over there?"

"Your detective skills obviously haven't failed you." Greta posed elegantly in a black thigh-length fur coat, one hand resting against her hip and the other supporting a cigarette holder at face-level. She wore black shoes, black stockings, black gloves and a wide-brimmed black hat tipped to eyelevel. There was a black feather in the hatband and a black suitcase at her feet. She wore black lipstick and, today, black eyeliner.

Greta was fond of black. It had always made life easy for Floyd when it came to buying her presents.

"When exactly did my letter arrive?" she asked.

"I received it this afternoon."

"I posted it from Antibes on Friday. You should have had it by Monday at the very latest."

"Custine and I have been a little busy," Floyd said.

"That heavy case load of yours?" Greta indicated her luggage. "Help me with this, will you? Did you

come by car? I need to get to my aunt's, and I'd rather not waste good money on a taxi."

Floyd nodded towards the welcoming glow of Le Train Bleu, a cafe at the top of a short flight of iron-

railinged stairs. "Car's nearby, but I bet you haven't eaten anything all day, have you, stuck on that train?"

"I'd appreciate it if you would take me straight to my aunt."

Floyd bent down to collect the suitcase, remembering what Greta had put in her letter. "Does Marguerite

still live in Montparna.s.se?"

Greta nodded warily. "Yes."

"In that case, we've time for a drink first. Traffic's murder across the river-we're better off waiting

half an hour."

"I'm sure you'd have an equally plausible excuse if I'd told you she had moved to this side of the river."

Floyd smiled and began to lug the suitcase up the stairs. "I'll take that as a yes. What have you got in

here, by the way?"

"Bed sheets. n.o.body's used my aunt's spare room in years, not since I moved out."

"You could always stay at my apartment," Floyd said.

Greta's heels clicked on the stone steps. "Turf Custine out of his room, is that it? You treat that poor

man like dirt."

"I don't hear any complaints."

Greta pushed open the double doors leading into the cafe, pausing a moment on the threshold as if having her photograph taken. Inside, it was all smoke and mirrors and opulently painted ceiling: a miniature Sistine Chapel. A waiter turned to them with a look of blank refusal on his face, shaking his head once.

Floyd helped himself to the nearest table. "Two orange brandies, monsieur," he said in French. "And don't worry-we won't be staying long."

The waiter muttered something and turned away. Greta sat down opposite Floyd and removed her hat and gloves, placing them next to her on the zinc-topped table. She flicked the end of her cigarette into an ashtray and closed her eyes in deep resignation or deep weariness. In the light of the cafe, he realised that she was not wearing eyeliner at all, but was simply very tired.

"I'm sorry, Floyd," she said. "I'm not in the best of moods, as you might have noticed."

Floyd tapped the side of his nose. "Detective instinct again. Never lets me down."

"Not exactly made your fortune, though, has it?"

"Still waiting for the knock on the door."

She must have heard something in his voice: some crack of hope or expectation. Studying him for a moment, she reached into her purse for another cigarette and slid it into the holder. "I haven't come back for good, Floyd. When I said I was leaving Paris, I meant it."

The waiter brought them their brandies, slamming down Floyd's like a bad chess player conceding defeat.

"I didn't seriously think anything had changed," Floyd said. "In your letter you said you were coming back to visit your aunt while she was unwell-"

"While she dies," Greta corrected, lighting the cigarette.

The waiter was hovering. Floyd reached into his s.h.i.+rt pocket for a note, found what he thought was money and spilled it on to the table. It was the photograph of Susan White, taken at the horse races. It landed face-up, presenting itself to Greta.

Greta took a drag on her cigarette. "Your new girlfriend, Floyd? She's quite beautiful, I'll give her that."