Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(30)

How often does a newborn feed?

I had no idea.

You can’t do this. You don’t know where to start.

Reading to her did not help at all, so I put her in the tool satchel along with the habbit and everything I owned, save my books, and made the descent from the clock tower to the street.

On my way to the Atembe underground station, the baby’s screaming drawing every eye my way, I thought of the blank high windows and implacable iron gates of the Pancaris orphanage.

Leave her on the steps now, and all this goes away. The nuns will raise her. The nuns know what they are doing.

But I didn’t. There was no principled decision, no careful thought process or moral choice. I just didn’t because I knew what the place was. I should never have gone. It had wasted time I could have spent doing my new job, and now leaving the child there would be harder. I tried to soothe her, but she wouldn’t stop crying. Even without the hostile stares of my fellow passengers, it was a terrible thing to be responsible for that awful, frantic bawling. I let my hair fall in front of my face and kept my eyes down.

At Rahvey’s house, I was greeted with outrage and incredulity at my lateness and incompetence, so I fled to the temple graveyard till the feeding was done. The child had quieted the moment Rahvey pressed it to her breast, and the silence bellowed the extent of my failure.

As night fell, however, I grew scared of the cemetery’s silence and its deep shadows, and when the hippos began roaring, I couldn’t stand it any longer and returned to Rahvey’s hut.

Sinchon wasn’t pleased. “The baby is feeding,” he said, as if I had no other business being there.

“Again?” I asked.

“Babies are always hungry,” said Sinchon, staring off toward the river, where a family of warthogs was trotting by, their tails in the air. “Always.”

I wrapped myself in a threadbare blanket and slept on their porch for a few hours till Rahvey had performed yet another feeding. I took the child without a word and made my way back into the city, realizing once more that a part of me was hunting for the missing Beacon in the darkness of the rooftops and chimneys.





CHAPTER

11

AT FIRST LIGHT I made the baby as safe and comfortable as possible, then with almost paralyzing reluctance, left her sleeping. She did not cry when I crawled out through the shutter, but her silence rang in my head like an accusation.

I double-checked the address against what the newspaper girl had given me and considered the photograph above Ansveld’s obituary. He looked austere and professional, half his face lost in carefully groomed but slightly ridiculous side whiskers.

I had never been inside any of the luxorite vendors’ shops on Crommerty Street but I knew the area, having spent a week rigging scaffolding for the roofers on Trimble Avenue the previous summer. A colony of green storks nested along the ridgeline.

It was a wealthy district. Externally, the shops all looked the same—cream-colored stone with formal, expensive trim—and dark inside: all wood paneling and merchandise in glass cases. They were the sort of stores where only certain kinds of people were welcome.

I was not one of them. I brushed the worst of the dirt from my clothes and tried to smooth my hair.

As soon as the bell over the door tinkled, a man looked up from his place behind the counter and gave me an inquisitorial stare. He was perhaps thirty, a pair of the heavily smoked goggles luxorite traders always used pushed back on his forehead. He had a pen in his hand that he held suspended above his notebook, as if caught composing poetry. A vast typewriter sat on the counter, and he had to lean round it to see me.

“We’re not hiring, thank you,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking an awkward step into the shop, “I’m not looking for employment.”

His brow wrinkled.

I pressed on. “I wondered if you could tell me a little about Mr. Ansveld,” I said.

His face darkened, and he got quickly to his feet. “I’ve told you reporter types before—” he began.

“I’m not press,” I said.

“And you’re not police,” he returned, staring me down.

“I’m here in my capacity as a private investigator serving a prominent client—”

He did not allow me to finish the sentence. “Out!” he said, his voice rising and his face flushing. “You think my family’s tragedy is entertainment? You think I want to discuss my father’s doings with guttersnipes and vagrants?”

“I am neither a—” I began, but he was coming toward me now, his anger reaching a rapid boil. I moved for the door, but he kept coming, faster now.

“I said get out!” he yelled.

I ducked out of the shop, and he followed, slamming the door shut as soon as I was through it. When I turned, muttering explanations and apologies, he snatched the blind down and stalked back into the dark recesses of the shop. I considered the name above the door, carefully painted in gold cursive on a glossy black background. ANSVELD AND SONS.

My father’s doings …

I sighed, cursing my clumsiness, and considered the street, with its white ladies in crinolines and its suited men on their way to work. I felt conspicuous, outclassed, and stupid.

Another failure, I thought.

I was almost out of the street when I glimpsed a familiar face. He was white, a boy about my own age, wearing a tweed jacket over a collared shirt with a necktie. The shirt was carefully laundered, and the jacket had been mended several times, but if you didn’t look too closely at his boots, he might almost pass for gentry.