Amberlough(107)

Cyril took him up on it, spitting every foul word he knew until he broke down into helpless sobbing.





CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

Aristide had trouble on the train; his back ached, and the seats were hard. It had been too long since he did something uncomfortable: He had gotten soft. He promised himself five minutes of intense self-pity, then resolved to move on.

Once upon a time, he had been inured to indignity. With the boneless resignation of a dog, he had lain on hardwood floors, blanketless. He had slept his way through the ranks of producers and financiers it took to pay rent and earn a place onstage. He had cut throats and sold bad tar and done whatever it took to get ahead. Because he knew once he reached the top he would never have to do any of it again.

Yet here he was at forty-two or some odd years, crammed in third-class, headed back to the place he had done every demeaning thing on earth to escape.

He found five minutes of self-pity wouldn’t cover it.

When the train pulled into Farbourgh City, he stood and stretched and rubbed his dry eyes. He wanted nothing more than coffee and a newspaper, but he hadn’t the time. The local for Currin left in half an hour, and he still had to find his contact and give her instructions.

On the platform he pulled his collar up against the damp wind. The station here had a dark, flat roof that gave him no sense of the weather outside. Still, under the coal smoke he smelled rain. When he reached the doors of the station, it was indeed pissing down. A sea of black umbrellas ebbed and flowed in the open square, sifting around the stalls and carts of the Station Market.

Aristide had only seen this place once before, on his way out of Farbourgh. He remembered being astonished at the number of people, the goods on display. Now, it left him underwhelmed. Shabby merchants selling oily fried food and hard pasties … and there, just on the far side of the street from the station gates, a woman hunched underneath the awning of a fruit stall.

He browsed through her selection of pears, apples, and waxy oranges still green around the stems. Lifting a disappointing citrus, he said, “They’re fresher in Amberlough City.”

She looked up—not too sharply, but he had caught her attention.

“I get them straight off the boat,” she said. She had the velvet burr of an urban Farbourgere, colored with something foreign. “When they come up the river.”

“I know a man who can get you better,” he said.

“I got a man,” she said, irritated.

He let himself smile, slightly. “I know. You’ve got the best.”

She cocked her head, pinning him with a suspicious glance. Then, a faint dawn of comprehension. “They told me you’d come.”

She had no idea who he was, not really. She thought he was one of his own agents. So much the better. “Did they tell you what to do?”

She pulled a ragged brown envelope from beneath the grapes and handed it over. “Papers, and your ticket.”

He put it into his jacket, then handed her a folded bill. “Thank you. And the other thing?”

“The grease-paws at the garage have an auto ready for him.”

“He’ll be here soon,” said Ari. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe not for a week or so. He knows to look for you. He’ll make a gibe about the oranges; ask to see his scar.” He hadn’t prepped Cyril for that. Which meant no one else would be expecting it, if they turned up instead.

She made a face. “That’s a bit—”

“It will be right here.” Aristide drew a finger down his abdomen. “If he doesn’t have one, don’t tell him anything.”

A sharp whistle sliced the misty air. Aristide reached for his watch and realized he didn’t have one. He checked the clock above the station.

“Must run,” he told her. “Remember: the oranges, the scar.”

She gave him a sharp nod, and turned back to her wares.

*

The platform at Beckover was exactly as he remembered it, though the boards were newer: just a pallet set up by the tracks to keep travelers’ feet out of the mud. He was the only person disembarking. The train sighed steam and pulled away with a groan of steel on steel, leaving Aristide standing alone in the dusk. It came quickly in the Currin Pass, especially at the waning end of summer. As soon as the sun slipped behind the peaks of the Culthams, the temperature dropped and the air turned heavy with dew. Gentian light softened the edges of the crags and made the streams run black and spangled. A distant herd of sheep—pale smears in the gloom—trotted home over the tussocks of tangled grass that grew up the steep hillsides.

Time telescoped; he was a boy again, filled with the urgent despair of the young. He turned back to the tracks, but the train was gone. All that remained to him was the muddy road switchbacking up the mountain. He shouldered his bag and started up the path to his father’s house.

It was exactly as small as he remembered it, and even shabbier. The dirty thatch needed changing, and the whole structure sagged in the center like a swaybacked horse. The single step was splattered with bird droppings and lichen. Aristide took it like a gallows march and put his hands to the door, letting his forehead fall against the damp-slimed wood and chipping paint. The hinges squeaked, and he went forward into darkness.

Fumbling, he found an oil lamp on the table and lit it, with a match from the dwindling pack Cyril had sent from the Stevedore. He set the chimney over the wick and the flame leapt up, showing swathes of cobwebs. A bird stirred in the rafters.