Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(73)
I was rude. Brusque, at very least, and I caught the hurt in his eyes, so that I wondered for a moment if my suspicions about him were mistaken. But in one respect at least, it was too late.
“I don’t have the baby,” I said. “That’s what I came to say. I left it at an orphanage.” I had forced myself not to call her Kalla, as if that would make me seem more sure of my actions.
Mnenga looked stung, his big black eyes wide with shock, as if I had slapped him. “Orphanage?” he repeated.
“It’s a place where you take children, who…,” I began, angry that I was having to explain myself. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not my business anymore.”
“Anglet…,” he said, taking my hand, but I cut him off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Yes,” he said, letting go of my hand with slow deliberation as if he were releasing a bird. “I understand.”
He didn’t, of course. How could he? But I believed that he wanted me to feel better about the terrible thing I had done, and in that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had said to me in a long time.
Without thinking, I kissed him quickly on the cheek. His disappointed smile turned into something else entirely.
I fled, feeling guilty and harried.
As I walked, those feelings swelled till they seemed to trail behind me like the great anchor chains wrapped around the massive cleats of the dockside. I tried to shake them off, but the more I struggled, the tighter they became, so that in spite of my haste, I had to pause and be still.
I didn’t know why Mnenga’s care for me bothered me so much. I had liked him. I really had. And had trusted him, which was rare for me and exquisite as the ruby-petaled sunset flowers that sometimes grow from the fractured bricks atop Bar-Selehm’s tallest chimneys. But I didn’t trust him now. He was altogether too convenient, too supportive, too quick with his dreams and his kindness. They couldn’t be real, and if they were, I did not deserve them.
I began walking again, wondering about Sarah’s teasing hints so that for a moment I saw in my mind’s eye Willinghouse watching me shrewdly with his sharp green eyes.
*
THE BAR-SELEHM PUBLIC LIBRARY was one of the city’s gems, a domed and colonnaded monument to egalitarian principles the region remembered only partially. It had wide doors, and though from time to time, powerful people had tried to make them narrow, they had survived the attempt, rooted as they were in what had once been so obviously right that they had come to stand for both progress and tradition. It was, perhaps, the only place in the city where you might see whites, blacks, and Lani, irrespective of class or gender, in the same room.
They knew me in the library. Vestris had gotten me my first library card when I was seven, and my record was immaculate. No lost books. No fines. Nothing overdue. It was amazing how disciplined you could be when you knew that there was no one to bail you out of trouble. But my addiction was to novels, not history, and certainly not military records. I spent a long moment studying an unhelpful floor plan and then scanned for someone familiar.
Miss Fischer was an elderly white lady who had worked there longer than I could remember. She was thin, austere-looking, her hair in a tight silver bun, her eyes peering over gold-rimmed reading glasses that she wore on a chain around her neck. Her dress was vaguely funereal, and she was the kind of person you could not imagine anywhere but inside the library’s strictly maintained silence. She watched my approach with the stillness of a heron in the reeds where frogs abounded.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Miss Sutonga,” said Miss Fischer, taking in my slashed and bruised face, “so nice to see you are out of jail.” She said it without inflection, and I colored under her fixed gaze.
“You saw the paper,” I said. “They got the wrong end of the stick.”
“It would not be the first time,” said the librarian. “I assume you have come to read rather than practice your climbing.”
“Yes, Miss Fischer,” I said.
“And you were looking for a recommendation?”
“Actually,” I said, “I am looking for two things. First, where can I see details of recent real estate transactions?”
The heron stirred fractionally, as if something unexpected had swum into view. “We have listings of house sales by county—” she began, but I cut her off.
“I was thinking more of land outside the city,” I said.
The Mahweni didn’t want to go to war with the Grappoli, I reasoned, but that wasn’t all they were protesting. There were rumors of land deals, ancestral territory sold off to the highest bidder. But sold off to who? And was the Beacon somehow a factor in the trade? Were the Grappoli? I had been treating all these things as separate issues, but what if they weren’t? What if this was finally about something ordinary but important: something that fell squarely under the control of Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade? What if the Beacon was the center of something much larger, something people were prepared not just to commit murder over, but which would drive us to war and annihilation?
Again, Miss Fischer’s movement was fractional, a contracting of her eyebrows. She was intrigued but would not dream of asking.
“Fourth floor,” she said. “Cartography. What some of our less erudite visitors call ‘the map room.’ The Regional Transactions card catalog there cross lists sales by date and region.”