Amberlough(8)

“Acherby’s assistant campaign manager.”

“Courtesy title. He runs their intelligence operation.”

Cyril rested his chin on the back of his hand. A small kiss of heat bloomed on his cheek near the tip of his cigarette. “Engage with him?”

“You’ll have to.” She flipped her watch open and blanched. “Sacred arches, is it really? Look, I’ve got to dash.”

“We haven’t finished.” But Cyril’s protest was halfhearted. The longer he put off his full briefing, the longer he could maintain his denial.

“Come back tomorrow morning. Say half eight? I’ll have Hebrides in and all three of us can go over it. In the meantime, the Landseer letters.” She took a thick dossier from her desk drawer and flung it down. It hit the red leather with a smack and slid within Cyril’s reach. “Take a good look, when you get home. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Cross is back from Liso and I want to sit in on her debriefing.”

“Get a few scraps of news from the old country?” It was a joke, in poor taste. Culpepper had never been to her ancestral homeland. Her parents were political dissidents who had fled from Liso long before the Spice War wrenched the north out of the king’s strangling grasp. Her surname had always been Culpepper, never Kuleppah—changed to avoid retribution, even so far from home. Cyril had seen the file.

“I’ll scrap you,” she said. “Get out of here and do your job.”

*

He should have gone back to his flat and cracked the Landseer dossier, but thinking of it made him faintly ill. Instead, he stopped at a basement wine bar in Harbor Terrace and got pleasantly drunk on overpriced sherry, until the dinner rush pushed him up the narrow stairwell and into the wet dusk.

He really ought to go home and see to his post. Might even be able to trick himself into reading the Landseer letters, if he stuck them at the bottom of the pile. Swinging onto the next trolley headed up the Harbor line, he hung onto the railing until he could transfer north at Armament.

Near the edge of Loendler Park, a shudder of awareness ran along the rows. Heads turned; people murmured. The woman in front of Cyril cranked her window open, and he heard chanting. Whistles. Hundreds of human voices raised, dissonant. The trolley rounded a shallow bend in the road and shuddered to a halt.

The streetcars of Amberlough did not stop in the middle of their routes. Cyril was not alone when he got up from his seat to peer down the aisle.

He couldn’t see much, not around his fellow passengers, and so he sat back down and turned the hand crank to open his own window. The sound of voices was much louder now, and when he removed his trilby and put his head outside, he saw dozens of people standing in the street, bent close to one another, turned black and yellow by the streetlights. Farther up, the crowd thickened, packing Armament Avenue from footpath to footpath, pressed against shopfronts and night-locked market gateways. Residents crowded the balconies above, and hung over their windowsills. Lit cigarettes spangled the dusk.

The trolley driver stood and addressed his passengers. “Can’t go further, I’m afraid. You can either get off and walk, or ride back to Station Way.”

“What’s happening?” asked a woman near the front of the car. She held her straw hat to her chest, glass cherries bright against her white shirtfront.

The driver shrugged. “Probably just some of those artists causing mischief in the park again.”

A group of students had staged a rather tasteless piece of performance art in the bandstand last month, but the crowd hadn’t been nearly so big.

“What’ll it be?” the driver asked. “Walk or ride?”

Most of the passengers remained sitting, content to catch the Station Way transfer, but Cyril’s flat was only a few blocks away. He settled his hat back on his head, gathered his overcoat and briefcase, and pushed to the rear doors.

After the close, damp warmth of the streetcar, his first breath of outside air was refreshing. Then he shivered and paused to replace his overcoat and pull on his gloves, slotting his fingers together to push the leather into place. By the time he finished, the trolley was disappearing around the curve of the road.

He slipped into the gossiping crowd and tapped a young razor on the shoulder. She turned, spat a mouthful of tobacco, and cased him with an appraising eye. “Yeah?”

“What’s all this?” He waved vaguely at the people around them.

She shrugged. “Heard there was a march in the park. Some kind of political thing.”

“In aid of what?”

“How am I supposed to know?” she snapped. “Just trying to get to my old auntie’s flat, aren’t I? And now I’m stuck in this mess.”

Cyril tipped his hat and gave her his apologies, then pushed on, doling out “pardon me”s and dodging dirty looks as he maneuvered up the block toward Blossom Street.

“Can’t get through up there!” someone called after him. He ignored them and shouldered on until he found himself at the edge of the park, and face-to-chest with an imposing police officer—one in a long, unbroken line across the pavement.

“Sorry sir,” said the officer, through an impressive array of bristling facial hair. “Can’t let anyone past.”

“Why not?”

“Been an accident.” He had to raise his voice over a sudden swell of chanting from the park.