Amberlough(64)

She pocketed it, and gave him a paper.

“I’ll have the rest back, if you don’t mind,” he said.

Scowling, she took his bill back out from her pouch and returned it. He admired her pluck—she was young for a quick change artist, and she’d picked a good hour to pull one over. People didn’t pay too much attention to their money this early in the morning.

Nor did cabbies venture forth to search for fares. Cyril tucked the paper under his arm and headed for the trolley stop at Mespaugh. Tucking himself into a corner of the shelter, he snapped the Clarion open across his knee.

The first time he read the headline, he did it with only passing interest. But a double-take turned his stomach acid.

Keeler heiress kidnapped. And the house burgled too. Jewelry and cash gone. The paper gave pictures of the suspects: an older Chuli woman and a thin young man with messy hair. Mab Cattayim and Taphir Emerson. He recognized them. The musicians from the pub: Sofie’s lovers.

He’d lay a heavy sum that this is what had got Culpepper on the ’phone to him. He wondered if she’d known before the papers went to press, or if it had caught her unawares. Must have been the latter. If it had been the former, he’d have been out of bed much earlier, or never got there in the first place.

*

Foyles was at his desk when Cyril came through the door. Did the man ever go home? Or did he sleep on a bed of racing forms, curled beneath his bank of telephones?

“Morning, Mr. DePaul. Skull’s waiting on you.”

“Thanks, Foyles. Sleep well?”

“Well as can be expected, sir: not at all.”

Though Foyles was in residence, the lift operator was not. Cyril shut himself in and cranked the lever to the fifth floor. The gate opened onto an empty hallway, lit by every third sconce. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he turned toward Culpepper’s office.

Memmediv, of course, was in. Cyril hadn’t seen him since being sent away to recover from his failure in Nuesklend. Not since suspicion slid into him like a straight pin slipping beneath a fingernail.

None of his Ospie contacts would confirm or deny—they might not even know. Cyril got the sense the mole inside Central reported straight to Van der Joost. And he couldn’t ask Memmediv to his face—he didn’t know how much Van der Joost had told him, or how loyal he was to the Ospies, or what he might give up to Culpepper.

Had espionage really seemed like a game to him, once? Now it felt like threads of piano wire tightening across his skin.

Memmediv, unaware of his internal struggle—or fully aware and secretly amused—nodded a silent greeting and depressed the button on his intercom.

“Mr. DePaul is here to see you.” His voice was deep and rough with the early hour, and his faint accent lingered over the rounder vowels. Stones, but why did he have to be fetching? It was just salt in the wound.

“Send him in, Vaz.” Even over the crackling intercom, Culpepper sounded tired.

Memmediv stood and held the door open for Cyril. Cyril’s greatcoat brushed Memmediv’s knees with a whisper of wool against wool. Cyril strained toward him as if physical proximity might give him a clue. No luck. The door fell shut behind him with a soft thud.

“It’s Sofie Keeler,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“Her mother’s one of Landseer’s correspondents, right? You met her, when you went west.”

“I did.”

“Does this have anything to do with us?”

“No,” said Cyril. “Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“As a keystone. The two kidnappers … they’re Sofie’s lovers. Her mother wasn’t in favor of their marriage. If you want my opinion, all three of them made a break for it together and burgled the old lady. Keeler’s implicated Cattayim and Emerson but not her daughter. Can you imagine the scandal, if the truth came out?”

“Bless her garters. I was thinking some rogue regionalist cell had pulled a stupid action. We’d look bad, if freelancers started kidnapping prominent citizens.”

“No.” Cyril dropped into the chair opposite Culpepper. Her desk was even messier than usual. “Sofie got herself into this trouble voluntarily. She’s a smart girl, though—she’ll probably manage to get herself out of it too.”

“Whether she does or not, I’m just glad it’s not our concern.”

“Was that all you wanted to see me about? You could have said on the telephone.”

Culpepper ran a hand over her scalp. Cyril heard the susurrus of millimeter hairs bending beneath her palm. “Safer to do it in person; I know my office isn’t wired. Anyway, I need to talk to you about contingencies.”

“Contingencies?”

“We might need the hounds to do a little dirty work,” she said. “Most of Josiah’s foibles are off the record, but have them go through and clean up their files; anything anybody ever said about him, I want it expunged. We can’t afford to have him pulled out of office.”

He gave her a limp-wristed salute and yawned, hugely.

Culpepper frowned. “I’m glad you take your job so seriously.”

Behind a lazy fa?ade, his brain was working. He’d have the off-record offenses restored, and maybe add some too. Müller could help him, if he could nail the man down. The problem would be Taormino’s people—the ones who liked where they stood under her governance. Unless Cyril could offer them something better. He’d have to squeeze money from the Ospies, and some promises, if Van der Joost wanted the city by midsummer.