Amberlough(3)

“Morning, Mr. DePaul,” said Foyles, from behind his racing form. Foyles had presided over the lobby as long as Cyril had been working in the Foxhole, and probably twice again as long as that. Deep wrinkles creased his face, and the tight spirals of his hair stood out in striking white against his slate-dark skin.

Cyril half-waved at him and stepped into the lift, standing back while the attendant shut the grate. He didn’t need to tell her his floor.

The lift paused once, at three, where the clerks and auditors held court amidst the clamor of ringing lacquer telephones, heads bent over pencils and adding machines. Floors four and five were sleight of hand—espionage to ensure the security of the Federated States of Gedda—but three was where the true sorcery happened. The bursar’s team made eye-popping embezzlements into minor calculating errors. Bribes and payoffs disappeared into endless columns of numbers and names. Agents were paid in secretive exchanges, the intricacies of which could escape even authorizing division heads. The accountants were, to a person, discreet, clean-cut, and scrupulously polite. They terrified the rest of Central.

The attendant scissored the lift grate open and stepped back for a new passenger. A young man in a shabby suit got on, ducking his head of bright copper hair. He smiled at Cyril without making eye contact. Against his chest, he held a sheaf of papers under a fat leather datebook, arms crossed tightly over it all like a shield. Cyril ticked through his mental files, checking names against faces, stories against facts.

Low-level auditor. Been in the office two years. Uncommonly straight, for an Amberlinian: He’d never tried his hand at extortion. Painfully fair, with a winning tendency to blush when embarrassed. Embarrassed very easily. What was his name, again? Lourdes. That was it. Finn Lourdes.

They’d only spoken once or twice—Finn had visited Cyril, just out of hospital, to express Central’s sympathies, and deliver by hand a comfortable bonus and promise of promotion: Culpepper’s blood money.

They ran into each other sometimes in the halls, now that Cyril was settled behind a desk. And anyway, Cyril wouldn’t be working on the fifth floor if he didn’t have a mind for details.





CHAPTER

TWO

Across town, near the train yards, a few thin rays of morning sun burned through the clouds and fell through an open window, warming the freckled arms of Cordelia Lehane.

She pushed her hands through Malcolm’s hair. He normally kept it slicked back in a ducktail, but now it stuck up at all angles. Last night’s pomade greased her already-sticky fingers. He turned his face, swarthy against her winter-pale skin, and his stubble rubbed her belly. Sunlight struck threads of gray at his temple. Cordelia traced one strand, her finger sliding through the sweat gathered at his hairline.

“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in an age,” he said.

She half-smiled and shoved his face away. “Go on,” she said. “I ain’t.”

He pressed his face into the softness of her, between hip bone and navel. The pressure made her bladder ache, but she didn’t tell him to stop. The pain mingled with the tingling comedown of sex.

“I’ll prove it,” he said, and pushed her thighs apart.

“Mal.”

He didn’t lift his head. She grabbed his hair and pulled his face up. “I’m dying for the toilet,” she said. “Give me half a minute.”

He laughed and let her go, rolling over onto his back to fill the space she’d left. “You’re a treasure,” he said.

“Even treasures gotta piss sometimes.”

When she went to flush, the pipes groaned and shuddered. “Queen’s sake. Ring round a plumber once in a while, why don’t you?” She rinsed her hands in water that came out reddish brown with rust.

“Can’t afford to. The washrooms at the theatre’ve got to be done over this month.”

“Maybe you ought to move in there.” She came back to bed and flung herself across the sheets. A breeze, fresh with high tide brine, rolled through the room. Cordelia shivered and moved into the warm curve of Malcolm’s body.

“You don’t take care of yourself,” she said, but she didn’t put much into it. Half a shake of the head, a rueful smile. “You’d sell your own ma if it’d bring in a bigger crowd.”

Malcolm cuffed her gently on the side of the head. “My old man, maybe. But never Ma. She was—”

“The jewel of the peninsula, I know.” She rested her face on the hard curve of his bicep, staring up at his seamed, stubbled face. “The finest dancer in Hyrosia.”

“She would’ve loved to see you,” he said, drawing a calloused hand through her hair. It caught, but she didn’t complain. Malcolm’s eyes changed when he talked about his mother: The flint went out of them. “My mother would’ve loved you,” was as close as he ever got to “I love you.”

But everybody knew—especially Cordelia—that Malcolm only loved the Bee.

His mother had given up her stage career to come north and marry. And it had gotten her nothing but accounting books and two sons dead at sea, killed by Lisoan pirates somewhere south of her home country. Her youngest, Malcolm, she’d kept at home despite her husband’s squalling. Malcolm heard all her stories, saw all her tintypes and mementos. Promised her she’d have a stage to walk again.