City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(71)
The attendant bows like a spring toy. “Certainly.”
“Snails?” says Shara.
“Are you fine gentlemen”—Vohannes turns to the Saypuri guards—“in need of any refreshments?”
One opens his mouth to respond, glances at Shara, rethinks his answer, and shakes his head.
“As you wish. Please.” Vohannes gestures to the chair next to him with a flourish. “Sit. So glad you could make it. You must be terribly busy.”
“You have picked an interesting venue for our meeting. I believe a leper would have received a more cordial welcome.”
“Well, I figured that if I meet you at your place of work, you might as well meet me at mine. … For though this place may look like a lecherous din of old fogies, Miss Thivani, I guarantee you, here is where Bulikovian commerce lives and dies. If one could see all the flow of finance, envisioning it as a golden river hanging above our heads, here—right here, among all this smoke and all the crass jokes, all the boiled beef and bald heads—would be where it forms its densest, most impenetrable, most inextricable knot. I invite you to look and reflect upon the rickety, shit-spattered ship that carries Bulikov’s commerce forward into the seas of prosperity.”
“I get the strangest sense,” says Shara, “that you do not enjoy working here. …”
“I have no choice,” says Vohannes. “It is what it is. And though it may look like one building, it’s actually several. Any house in Bulikov is a house divided, and this house is cut to ribbons, my battle-ax. Each booth could be color-coded for its party allegiances. You could draw lines on the floor—if the warped floorboards would allow it—highlighting barriers some club members would dare never cross. But recently, this club—like Bulikov—is beginning to align itself around two main groups. My group, and, well …”
He slaps his paper in her lap. A smallish article has been circled: wiclov takes stand against embassy.
“You’ve been accumulating some ink, my dear,” says Vohannes.
Shara eyes the article. “Yes,” she says. “I have been notified of this. What do you care about it?”
“Well, I have been ruminating on ways I could help you.”
“Oh, dear.”
“And I can help you quite a lot with Wiclov.”
A waiter materializes out of the smog with a bottle of white plum wine. He proffers the bottle to Vohannes; Vohannes glances at the label, nods, and lazily extends a hand, which is promptly filled with a brimming crystal glass. The waiter looks doubtfully between them, as if to say, And do you really want me to serve her, as well? Vohannes nods angrily, and the waiter, exasperated, gives Shara a perfunctory version of the same ceremony.
“Cheeky shit,” says Vohannes as the waiter leaves. “Do you get a lot of that sort of thing?”
“What are you proposing, Vo?”
“What I am proposing, is that I can get you somewhere on Wiclov. And I would do this out of the godly goodness of my own heart … provided you also bury that fat bastard.”
Shara sips her wine, but does nothing more. She sees there is a suitcase sitting beside Vohannes, as white and velvet and ridiculous as his gloves. By the seas. Have I honestly enlisted a clown as an operative? But, she notes, there’s a second suitcase on his opposite side. Were the contents of the safety deposit box that extensive?
“How would you get us somewhere on Wiclov?”
“Well, that’s the tricky bit. … I’m not the sort for sneaky, underhanded political machinations, despite what is happening, ah, right now. My style is much more”—he twirls a slender finger, thinking—“grand idealist. I win support specifically because I don’t dirty myself.”
“But now you are willing to do so.”
“If that fly-ridden turd of a human being is genuinely, really connected to the people who attacked us, who killed Pangyui, it would not grieve my heart excessively to see him removed from the political theater, no. But while I can’t plant the dagger in his back, perhaps I could pass the dagger along to someone more talented in its use.”
The waiter pounces back out of the reeking mist with a large, flat stone covered in small holes. The stone swims with butter, and the holes appear to be stuffed with tiny beige buttons.
“What are you saying, Vo?” she asks again.
Vohannes sniffs and picks up a fork the size of a needle. “I have a friend in Wiclov’s trading house. That’s how he made himself, you know—Wiclov is one of the few old-guard icons to actually dabble in trade. Made his living with potatoes. Seems appropriate for him, somehow. Something that grows in the mud, away from the sun. …” He spears a snail, pops it in his mouth, grunts, and says around it, “Haat. Mm.” He maneuvers the little ball of flesh onto his teeth, breathes, and swallows. “Very hot. Anyways. I have convinced this contact within Wiclov’s trading house to pass along all investments and purchases Wiclov has made in the past year.” He smiles triumphantly and taps the second suitcase beside his chair. “I am sure there is something very rotten going on under his robes, let’s say. Probably nothing smutty, unfortunately—once a Kolkashtani, always a Kolkashtani, and Wiclov is about as Kolkashtani as they get—but something. And I would love for you to find out.”
Shara cuts to the point: “Is he funding the Restorationists?”