Amberlough(99)

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“I can put you in a cell overnight—”

“You rotten think you will.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “They’re going to transfer you, all right? Into the city system. I can get you out on parole tomorrow. But you don’t want to get mixed up with the scullers coming in off the streets tonight. I’ll put you on your own, safe, and in the morning I’ll handle everything.”

She lowered her chin, chastened. “Thanks.”

He took her out into the hall and flagged down a junior officer. “Put her in one of the small cells. Alone. Have somebody splint that wrist, and get her a clean smock, too.”

The hound nodded and took Cordelia’s good arm. Before he could haul her off, she grabbed Müller’s sleeve.

“How come you’re doing this for me?” she asked.

“What, it’s not enough?” The line of his shoulders went taut. “You gotta ask questions?”

She shrugged her least-painful shoulder. “Just … you gave me that line about crooked hounds. And now this.”

“It’s like you said.” He took off his spectacles and wiped them clean with his handkerchief. “I’m not going to get what I want, so … I better do what I can.”

*

True to Müller’s word, Cordelia was out of the trap by morning, let free on parole she had no plans to obey.

The Station line took her straight from the DOC to Mosley Row, by way of the capitol. Crumbling gashes of bare earth marked the sloping green lawn. A unionist banner hung from the front of the building, but someone had set fire to a corner, and fingers of soot climbed the gray field to streak the quartered circle within a circle at its center.

When the trolley neared the river, she looked up at Bythesea Station. Dawn touched the white marble of the terminus and turned it crimson. As she watched, a pennant unfurled from the top of the station arch, its gray folds colored by the bloody light of sunrise.

The walk up Mosley nearly killed her. She hurt so bad she hardly noticed the sideways looks folk gave her on the footpath. Small wonder they did. When she reached her tenement and saw herself reflected in a ground-floor window, she looked like she’d been rumbled by an angry stevedore in the full swing of a boozy rage.

She realized she didn’t have her keys—the Ospies hadn’t given back her handbag—and she had to ring the buzzer for the landlady. The old woman opened the door a bare few inches and peered over the chain lock. When she saw Cordelia, all the blood went out of her face. “Mother and sons.”

“Got caught in the riots,” Cordelia said, but the old woman was already shaking her head.

“They come two nights ago and tossed your rooms. Girl, I don’t know what you been up to, but I can’t keep you around.”

“Miz Ess…” Cordelia held out her hands, cut up and splinted. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t wanna,” she said, eyes going round. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want nothing to do with it.”

“Can I at least come in and get my stuff?”

The old lady wrinkled her nose in consideration. “Fifteen minutes, all right? Then I don’t want to see your head nor tail no more.”

“Thank you.”

The door shut, and the chain rattled against the lintel. Ms. Ess opened up and stood back to let Cordelia pass.

She hauled herself up the four flights to the attic, pausing at each landing to suck painful breaths into her broken chest, knowing she ought to be lying down. In fact, when she got up to her flat—door broken down, or she wouldn’t have been able to get in—the first thing she did was collapse on her bed. Stuffing puffed out of gashes in the mattress. From her horizontal vantage point, she cased the damage.

Her little gas ring was trampled into bits. Her three chipped plates were broken, and her mugs and glasses. Clothes lay muddied and wrinkled across the bare wood floor. But they hadn’t found anything, because there was nothing in her flat to find.

She wondered what her dressing room at the Bee looked like. Probably about the same. Maybe worse. But there was nothing there either. She didn’t keep the hooky around long enough to store it, or the tar.

It wasn’t until Ms. Ess came clumping up the stairs and hammered on the remains of the door that Cordelia realized she’d dropped off. Her mouth tasted like she’d eaten something foul scraped out of an Eel Town gutter.

“I said fifteen minutes.” Ms. Ess came into the flat and moved to roust her out of bed. Cordelia jerked away from her touch, but the landlady was more careful than Cordelia would have given her credit for.

“It ain’t about you, hon.” The older woman picked through the mess on the floor until she came up with a crocheted grocery sack, and started cramming clothes into it. “You’ve always been an all-right tenant. But the last thing I need’s blackboots tearing up my building. You understand, don’t you?” She tucked a final pair of stockings into the string bag and handed it to Cordelia. “There. I’ll try and tidy it up once you’re gone. If you find you’re missing anything important you can always send a wire.”

Cordelia’s head sank to her chest. A wire. Stupid sow. She might as well invite Cordelia back into her house. But all she said was, “Thanks, Miz Ess.” Holding her string bag hooked over her elbow, she went down the stairs as slow and wincing as if she were an old lady herself.