“What exactly was your evidence?”
“I got identified as the expert on official records because of my job for the court. The clerk in charge of the fishery records came to me. The ownership files of three of the boats were missing. But I found the retired clerk who originally recorded them, and she had a great memory. Companies controlled by the Dutchman own them, charter them out to Captain Fletcher. If you want to bring in very large objects, you need to use boats. I joined night patrols for a few weeks. On four different occasions boats came in before dawn, met those heavy ice wagons. I told the governor they unloaded no ice, took no fish to the plant. I suggested that Fletcher needed to know we were watching, just to discourage him. Maybe tell him we had grounds to perform an audit.” She halted, frowned, and cast a sidelong glance at him. She had not intended to confide so much.
Hadrian considered her words. He knelt at the box of spoons, lifting several. “This is the best your mastermind can do?” he asked as he dropped them back inside. “A few pounds of spoons and spices? I could find a dozen caches of contraband better than this one.”
The sergeant studied him a moment, trying to understand. “Not worth being killed over, you mean?” She gazed around the room. “What’s left?”
He pointed to the bed, custom-made of heavy timber, with a bulky headboard. It covered much of the wall at that end of the room. They struggled to move it, sliding it inches at a time until they glimpsed a new structure behind the headboard. With one last shove they pushed the bed clear, revealing a small hatch built into the wall, its plank door locked with another padlock. Hadrian gazed at the sergeant, expecting her to stop and summon help.
But she kept staring at the padlock. “The streets were nearly empty during the fire, so someone whipping a cart horse toward the waterfront got noticed. The harbormaster said Kenton just demanded one of his dinghies, then ordered him to go help with the fire.” She did not wait for Hadrian to respond but simply retrieved the hammer and smashed the lock away.
The low, long space was lined with birch planks, keeping it dry and strangely luminescent. When he brought back the lantern from the kitchen the sergeant was already inside, kneeling by a crate of whiskey bottles.
“Worth their weight in copper,” he observed.
There was only one other container in the hidden chamber, a wooden crate made as carefully as a cabinet, with handles on each side and a lid that slid back in carefully shaped grooves like a giant candle box.
Inside were more than two hundred little cylinders inserted into racks that had been drilled to accommodate two dozen apiece. Jori lifted one of the stubby cylinders by its brass base and cast him a quizzical glance.
“Shotgun shells,” he explained as he lifted out the top rack and pulled a cylinder from the rack below it. “I haven’t seen so much ammunition since . . . in all these years. One of these can kill a man. Two or three, if they’re standing close together.”
The shell in Jori’s hand was old, its plastic casing familiar to Hadrian from long-ago hunting trips. But the one in his hand was new, the old brass cap fitted with a waxed, brown-speckled pasteboard casing. Someone wasn’t just hoarding ammunition. They were illegally making it.
“The governor claims he has enough guns for almost all his police now,” Hadrian observed. “But they must be random. Different calibers, different types, with the only ammunition probably what was found in the magazines.”
“There’s barely enough ammunition to load each gun,” Waller admitted. Fear was entering her eyes. She seemed to understand. Their motley store of weapons offered little protection against shotguns with unlimited ammunition.
Hadrian sat back against the wall and pulled out one of the irreplaceable bottles of whiskey, broke its seal and took a swallow. He had been ready for a surprise in the apartment of the dead scout, but nothing like this. Buchanan had said the government’s small inventory of shotguns had disappeared. His foreboding was like a cold, living thing worming up his spine.
“With these,” he said, “someone could start a war.”
CHAPTER Five
THE JAILERS WERE so accustomed to seeing Hadrian marched through the prison doors they barely looked up as Sergeant Waller shoved him into the entry, arms manacled behind him.
“I need a quiet cell,” she declared as she lifted a long truncheon from a rack by the door. “A special project for the governor. And I do not want to be disturbed in my work.”
The senior guard, a white-haired survivor, looked up from his gin rummy. “Boone.” He uttered Hadrian’s name like a curse. “The best for interrogation is the far corner on the second floor, but that’s reserved for our slag guests. Next door to it should do though I can’t guarantee the quiet. That bitch likes to sing. Sounds like an old cat in heat.” He gestured toward a ring of keys on a peg and waved them through. The sergeant shoved Hadrian again, drawing a laugh from a passing guard. They climbed the central stairway and went straight to the corner cell.
The man and woman inside were not asleep rather only halfconscious. The interrogation of the exiles had not been gentle. The sergeant unlocked Hadrian’s manacles, and he gently lifted the bald woman into a sitting position against the wall. Her face was bruised, her lips cracked and swollen.
“Nelly,” Hadrian whispered, reaching inside his shirt. “I brought apples. And bread.”
The woman’s eyes fluttered open, and she made an effort at a grin as she recognized Hadrian. “You damned fool,” she said. “You know that even on a good day I can’t do much chewing.” The radiation Nelly had fled from had destroyed not only her hair follicles but also nearly all her teeth.
She accepted the mug of water he pressed to her lips, drank thirstily, and passed out.
“She knows you?” Waller asked in a perplexed tone.
Hadrian looked up and saw the revulsion on the sergeant’s face. “She arrived in Carthage during the first months. We’d been building the colony together for nearly three years before the vote was taken to expel them.”
“Slags lived here?”
If there had been a mirror nearby Hadrian would have told the woman to look at herself. She seemed to have forgotten the disfigurement of her own skin. “A lot of them worked in the hospital. Nelly was there, served as a delivery-room nurse. She was probably in charge of the nursery when you were an infant. She would sing, like no one else could. People said what the wars took away from the rest of her they put back into her voice. There was never a baby who didn’t stop crying when Nelly sang. She was our angel.”
Waller’s awkward laugh brought heat to Hadrian’s face. “Or the closest to an angel we’re allowed in this particular world. Now break up some of that bread so she can soften it in the water when she wakes.” The sergeant quieted and did as she was told.
Hadrian turned to the other inmate, a compact, muscular man with a bony, scarred face. He wore a red wool cap that Hadrian knew covered curly black hair, kept long to cover the bare patches where follicles had died. Hadrian could not place his name but recalled that he’d been a small child when the worlds shifted, a boy whose parents had died in the first winter after their exile. Hadrian had seen him before in the camps, one of the few men strong enough to chop and carry timber from the forest. There was hatred in his eyes as he stared at the newcomers.
“My name is Hadrian.”
“Hadrian Boone,” the man growled. His face was sullen. “One of the founding dictators.” Hadrian just stared at him expectantly.
“Shenker.” The prisoner grudgingly offered his name.
“You upstaged the governor at the funeral, Shenker. A rotten idea.”
“Once Nelly declared she was going to sing for Jonah no one was about to stop her.”
“And you came along for the fun?”
Shenker slowly shook his head. “I came along to protect her.”
Hadrian was familiar with his type among the new generation at the camps. Iron hard and filled with self-loathing but with one or two soft spots that
defined their lives. “The governor means to hang you.”
“So we have been led to believe,” Shenker said. He turned his head to let Hadrian see the deep bruising on the left side of his face. Beside him on a cloth lay a bloody molar. Eyeing the sergeant, he pulled in his legs as if armoring himself against another attack.
“The police are going to claim you were in town the night Jonah died. They will produce witnesses who will say they saw you at the library. Help me find evidence that says otherwise.”
Hadrian did not understand the perverse grin that rose on Shenker’s face.
“But we were,” the exile declared.
“Were what?”
“In town, by the library.”
Hadrian stared in disbelief. “You were in Carthage that night?”
“It’s a free world.”
“No it’s not. Not in Carthage, not for a member of the camps.”
Shenker sneered. “Member of the camps? Don’t bullshit us. Say it. Sla—aagg.” He drew the word out. “Though I hear some of you older Punic pricks prefer the term tent niggers. Is that what you call us behind our backs?”
“Did you kill Jonah?” Hadrian demanded.
“Nelly loved him like an older brother.”
“Then help me help you, Shenker. Otherwise you both will hang.”
“Buchanan’s bluffing.”
“The governor has already ordered the gallows built, at the edge of the cemetery,” the sergeant put in. She was leaning against the door, studying the prisoners with an unsettled eye. “He wants it conspicuous, for the watchers on the ridge. He’ll hang you just to spite them.” She studied the two men a moment. “He met with all the senior officers yesterday,” she explained hesitantly. “He told us he was done being patient, that now we have proof that the colony cannot survive without more order, without removing its enemies.”
From behind them Nelly stirred. “Our crops failed this summer, Hadrian,” she said softly. “Blight in the potatoes, rust in the wheat. Do you have any idea what that means this winter? Slow death for a quarter of us at least.”
“There’s food here,” Hadrian said. “Our silos will soon be full.” He paused, remembering his last conversation with Jonah, when the old man had spoken of taking wagons of wheat to the camps. He’d known about the crop failures.
“We don’t need your damned help,” Shenker snapped. “Or that of your dappled girlfriend.”
Waller abruptly shifted from Nelly’s side, took a single long stride, and kicked Shenker in the ribs. Despite his obvious pain, Shenker grinned. “Lose a couple clumps of hair, beautiful, and you’re just another slag.”
Hadrian stepped between the two. “How did you get to town?” he demanded. “Where did you hide? Two exiles don’t stay in town for three days without help.”
Shenker only kept grinning.
Waller bent over Nelly as the woman shifted, offering the water again. “Our interrogators have been asking that ever since they were arrested,” the sergeant said. “The owner of that house whose roof they were on was detained today. The governor decided to brush off an old law. Anyone found to have aided exiles may be exiled himself.”
“We’re not your enemy, Shenker,” Hadrian said.
“You’ve had us pinned under the heel of your boot so long you don’t even notice us in the mud anymore,” the exile spat.
“For an oppressor, Shenker,” Nelly broke in, “Hadrian knows a lot about swimming in mud.”
She offered a contrite smile as Hadrian turned to her. “I’m sorry, Hadrian,” Nelly said. “My protector recently salvaged a collection of essays by Marx and Mao. It almost makes me believe in censorship.” She offered a grateful nod as she dipped a piece of bread in the water and chewed it.
Hadrian cast a quick, pointed glance at the sergeant. Nelly hesitated, then nodded her acknowledgement. The exile camps had their own governing council, called the Tribunal, of which Nelly was the longest-serving member. Nelly understood he wished Jori Waller to remain unaware of the fact.
“Nelly, if you don’t think Buchanan will hang you, you don’t understand how much he has changed.”
The exile woman lifted another morsel of bread and stared at it. “Did you know Jonah kept a tattered map of the moon pinned to one of the walls in his cabin? Once he told me the names of its largest craters and lunar seas. Early in his career, you know, he helped with some of the explorations there.”
A ragged laugh escaped the sergeant’s lips. “On the moon?” she asked sardonically.
“A hundred years ago men were walking on the moon, you stupid bitch,” Shenker snapped.
Waller looked at Hadrian, her old schoolmaster, as if he should correct Shenker. When he did not she looked strangely hurt.
Nelly seemed not to notice the exchange. “There were craters that only had numbers,” she continued. “Jonah said Carthage and the camps should form a joint commission, to christen them with real names.”
Hadrian fought a sudden melancholy that was so intense it seemed to paralyze him. He felt a pressure on his hand. Nelly pulled him down to sit beside her. As she broke off some of the bread for him she began to hum a low song without words, using her throat as her instrument. It was a sound all her own, one she had developed after the breaking of the world. He closed his eyes, letting the song work its calming magic. After nearly a minute he pulled out his pocketknife and sliced the apple. Waller nervously lingered at the door, as if to encourage Hadrian to leave. She had taken a big risk in agreeing to Hadrian’s request to secretly take him to the exile prisoners. Now she stared at Nelly with a confusion that bordered on fear. The police sergeant was glimpsing a world she had never seen before.
“Nelly, I just want to get you home,” Hadrian said, handing her an apple slice.
“You haven’t seen our home lately,” she said wryly.
He stepped to the window, clenching the bars for a moment. “Why did he have to die?” he questioned the shadowed trees.
“Jonah knew more than anyone in all the world,” came her cryptic answer.
“Why were you going to see him?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Hadrian gazed with despair into his hands. “So now you don’t even trust me with the truth.”
“It is the truth,” Shenker growled. He inched closer to Nelly, as if he would have to protect her. “She got an urgent message from Jonah saying he had to see her. We don’t know why.”
“What were the exact words?”
Shenker’s fists clenched. “I told you. Interrogation is over. Get out or I’ll—” his protest was choked away by a hand on his knee. Nelly had leaned forward to calm her fiery companion. With her other hand she reached inside her tunic and offered up a tattered slip of paper.
Hadrian’s mouth went dry as he read it. Come at once, it said in Jonah’s familiar hand. If the world is going to shift let us be the reason.
He allowed himself be pulled by the sergeant out of the cell, Shenker lifting the note from his hand as he left. “If they come again,” Hadrian instructed the exiles, “pretend to be unconscious.” He extracted his arm from Waller. “Put me in the next cell,” he said to her.
“You’re not a prisoner.” Conflicting emotions swirled over her face.
“I need sleep. And you need to assert your authority.” He stopped halfway into the open door of the next cell.
“I’m sorry?” She did not see the group of men approaching behind her.
“Hit me.”
“I’m not another—”
“You really are just another slag bitch at heart, aren’t you?”
Hadrian had seen the fast, powerful reaction following Shenker’s gibe. Her hand came up in a blur, swinging back and hammering his jaw.
He stared at her and smiled as the blood welled up in his mouth and dripped down his chin.
“Excellent, Sergeant!” boomed the deep voice behind her. “The long quick arm of the law at work!” said Lucas Buchanan.
Hadrian
retreated into the cell as the governor stepped beside Waller, with Kenton, Bjorn, and a prison guard a step behind him.
“Did you know Sergeant Waller was once a young star in the lacrosse league, lieutenant?” the governor asked Kenton. The sport was one of the few old world traditions of the region he had allowed to continue. “Don’t get inside her elbows. They’re deadly.” All the police laughed, except Waller. She stared with cool resentment at Hadrian.
“The others?” Buchanan asked.
“Nursing their injuries,” the sergeant reported in a wooden voice. “Not much good for talking right now.”
Buchanan frowned. “And citizen Boone’s project? The evidence on the events at the library will need to be—” he searched for a word, “refocused.”
“We are making progress,” Waller replied.
Hadrian hung his head, scrubbing at the blood on his chin.
Kenton muttered something to one of the guards, who stepped to the next cell. Hadrian heard the heavy door creak open, watched the shadow of the guard as Buchanan stepped past him into the cell. Bjorn lit a cigarette, one of the Booksticks brand—tobacco rolled in an old book page—that had become so popular in the colony. The governor emerged a moment later, wearing an air of satisfaction.
“The owner of the house has changed his mind,” Kenton reported. “The slags forced their way into his dwelling before the murder, leaving him gagged and bound to a chair. He agrees now that their clothes may have been singed upon their return the night of the fire.”
Buchanan fixed Hadrian with a venomous stare, as if defying Hadrian to challenge him. “Write it up,” he ordered Kenton.
Kenton wore a gloating smile as he pushed Hadrian into the empty cell and locked the door.
Retreating to the small window at the rear, Hadrian studied the landscape, revisiting in his mind the many escape scenarios imagined during other long nights in the prison, and how he might free the two exiles. There was no outside wire, not even guards patrolling the grounds, nothing but the window bars, recast from railroad iron. He twisted his hands around the bars, futilely pounding them with his fists.
Ashes of the Earth Page 11
