The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  “What?” Doughan asked as Mena came to them through light and shadow. She wore dark slacks and a coral shirt, loose sleeves tight at her wrists, rough-woven fabric with a gleam in its threads when the light caught them.

  “That meant thank you,” Helt said. He smiled down at Mena. “We were discussing donkeys.”

  “They’re fine,” Mena said. “Come in.”

  She led them through the interior courtyard, past the tiers of wall plantings and the central fountain, into the sitting room at the back. It smelled of fresh coffee, black tea, white musk, and leather. Its walls were plastered in white and crowded with paintings. An icon of Saint Phocas, pruning sickle in hand, guarded the door into the kitchen.

  The icon was very old and very small, hauled up from Earth by Mena. The other paintings were gifts from a society of Greek antiquarians, meticulously imaged on Earth, meticulously 3-D printed on Kybele. A plethora of colored cushions were piled on divans and chairs. Helt knew from experience that all the seating was comfortable and that all of it was arranged to give a view of the courtyard. He hadn’t been here for years, and everything was the same, and everything was different because the time he’d spent here was over.

  He’d spent long, lazy hours in this room, with books and music, getting lost in idle cloud searches that came from shared words or random memories. He remembered those hours so well. The comfort of shared meals, shared touches, the comfort of caring and being cared for. Damn, he missed how that felt.

  A woman rose from a chair in the shadows near the back of the room. He thought he would be seeing a motherly figure, a clucking hen, perhaps. Not so, this woman was more of a shore wader, an egret or a heron. There was no softness in her flesh. She was as lean and ropy as a long-distance runner. As she stood, a cushion, patterned in the black and gold of some ancient shield, fell to the floor.

  Helt’s view of Susanna Jambekar was overlaid by what he thought Yves might see when he looked at her. She was taller than Mena by a head, but almost everyone was. Low, straight-line black eyebrows guarded her eyes. There was a hint of beak in her finely modeled nose. She was a native of Goa, but if there were traces of Portugal in her face he hadn’t seen them in captures and he didn’t see them here. Wary, guarded, and weary, she stood her ground. A caryatid, that might be what Yves would see, the weight of the Petra cliffs on her strong, uncomplaining shoulders.

  He looked for a resemblance to Elena. Other than black hair, nothing. Nothing in her face, and her eyes were much, much darker, deep cordovan brown.

  “Susanna, this is Wesley Doughan, and Helt Borresen from SysSu,” Mena said. Doughan and Helt nodded in turn. “Have you met before?”

  “Not in face-time.” Susanna looked from one to the other, and then back to Doughan.

  “Let’s begin. Please sit down,” Mena said. Her coffee table was loaded for company with coffee and tea and a tray of pastries that smelled of cinnamon and butter.

  “You know why we’re here,” Helt said.

  “I think so.” Susanna Jambekar gripped both arms of the chair and sat down slowly, cautiously, like an old woman. She lifted the cushion from the floor and wedged it into place beside her. Her fingers kneaded a portion of the gold braiding at its edge. She stared at a point somewhere between Helt and Doughan, through the window toward something out in the courtyard or at some unseen monster.

  “We’ll be asking questions,” Helt said.

  Susanna took a deep breath and sighed. “That’s what Mena told me.” Her voice was mid-range soprano, pleasantly pitched, but Helt imagined the potential edge of a knife in it. Susanna laid her interface on a cushion beside her. Its little lens would be set for voice activation and move from face to face.

  Mena poured for them, her brutal hands quiet on the mug of coffee she handed Helt, on the handle of the silver holder beneath the glass of steaming tea she filled for Doughan.

  Helt laid his interface on the arm of his chair. “We’ll have two records, then. That’s fine.” His audio picked up the clinking of Doughan’s spoon stirring cherry jam into his tea. Mena placed a glass of tea on the table in front of Susanna. Her pendant earrings gleamed coral and gold, moved forward as she leaned down, swung back to bring attention to the pure Attic curve of her throat as she straightened.

  Susanna looked at the tea as if she didn’t know what it was. “I—” She reached for the glass.

  Doughan cleared his throat, a sharp, harsh sound. Susanna’s hand jerked, a startle response quickly stifled.

  “You know Cash Ryan was murdered,” Helt said.

  “I didn’t know it until this morning.”

  “We’re combing every record we have to find people who knew him, talked to him, worked with him. The two of you got off the Petra train at the same time, several times.” Twice, they had ridden the same car at the same time. Twice wasn’t several. Let her think there were more captures, let her fears grow. There was so much he needed to know, so much he needed to learn about her, about who she was and what she was.

  Her future on Kybele was over, no matter what happened here. Mena would send her off-ship because of the Seed Banker money in her account and because Doughan wanted that to happen. Yves might leave with her, whether or not he’d helped her throw Cash Ryan off the tower.

  Helt didn’t want Yves hurt, but if this woman had killed Cash Ryan, or Yves had, then the searching, the suspicions, could stop.

  “Anything you could tell us about him, and I do mean anything, might help us find out who killed him.”

  He picked up his coffee, freshly ground, freshly made, medium roast, medium strong, richly fragrant. Mena brewed it for his American tongue. What she brewed for herself was thick and strong, a pharmaceutical-strength potion to be served in tiny cups.

  Helt let the silence lengthen. Mena had the ability to turn feral mother for her own but she showed no hint of doing that. She looked as compassionate as a carved Great Mother, and as stern. Doughan’s relaxed posture was that of a hunter in a duck blind, motionless in meditative, patient awareness, primed to move on the instant. Scary.

  “It was almost three years ago.”

  “Yes,” Helt said.

  Susanna looked at him and blinked. “The first time I saw him. I went to the Frontier with some people from the clinic for happy hour that one evening and Cash Ryan came up to say something to a woman he worked with.”

  Helt checked the NSS records for Cash’s coworkers. Zaida Krupin. She was a third-generation Russian spacer, an engineer trained in Germany. “Zaida?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “She invited him to sit down.”

  Happy hour at the Frontier was one of ship’s meet-and-greet places, where the world below and Level One Athens sought each other within the guidelines of an unstated contract. Like all contracts, it had rules and disclaimers. Zaida’s invitation meant “He’s available,” and implied “I’ve vetted him.”

  Helt pulled a security clip from the Frontier to his interface. The camera he was interested in was positioned to give a shoulder-level view of the tables, and its motion-capture function was set for wide gestures—impending fisticuffs or sudden departures. When it wasn’t alarmed, it panned back and forth from table to table in slow, lazy arcs.

  “Yes, she did. I see her, I think. Let’s look at this,” Helt said. “Mena, would you put this on a screen for us?”

  Mena gave him a curt nod and unrolled a screen to stand on the table. Doughan shifted his chair so he could get a view of it.

  Four women sat at one of the Frontier’s round tables. A man bent his head and said something to one of them. It was Cash, scrubbed down after a day shift, dressed in a gray chambray shirt and new jeans. That must be Zaida, black curls clipped close to her skull. Human voices buzzed, but individual words were hard to catch. The drone of voices was interspersed with bangs from the kitchen, metallic rattles of cutlery, footsteps of the waitstaff coming and going. Helt hadn’t realized how noisy the place actually was.

  Susanna leaned forw
ard a little and stared at the screen. Helt watched her eyes widen. She was beginning to realize how closely NSS had looked at her. He circled the curly-haired woman’s face with a pointer. “Is that Zaida?”

  “Yes,” Susanna said.

  Zaida shrugged and indicated an empty chair. The camera panned away to other tables and showed an inevitable student lost in contemplation of his screen, a booth where a couple shared a single platter of pasta, a bridge game with its aura of studied nonchalance that fooled no one, certainly not the players.

  When the view drifted back to Susanna’s table, Cash was seated but Zaida was on her feet. She picked up her rucksack and left.

  “She didn’t stay long,” Helt said.

  “She told us Cash Ryan was a newbie. She introduced him, and then she left,” Susanna said. Zaida’s face implied that she worked with him but he wasn’t her thing.

  He glanced again at Zaida’s name on his list. Her hour was cleared and Severo had talked to her, but her store of information might not be exhausted.

  “What did you talk about?” Helt asked.

  “It’s hard to remember,” Susanna said.

  Helt doubted that. “Chief Mares tells me a lot of businesses set their audios so that normal conversation sounds blurred, but shouts or screeches come in clearly. It’s a privacy thing for their customers, and it makes the records easier to review if anyone needs to review them. I don’t need word for word, just your impressions of the conversation.”

  Susanna Jambekar stiffened in her chair and gripped her right knee with both hands. She lifted her chin and closed her eyes for a moment, and then blinked them open. “Before he came, we were laughing about Dr. Calloway. He had a bruise on his lip and he wouldn’t tell us how he got it, so we made up theories that got pretty wild.

  “And then they started talking about a historical drama, the one set in Greenland before the melt.”

  “Did you like the film?” Helt asked.

  “I hadn’t seen it. I don’t have much time for movies,” Susanna said.

  “Then Cash Ryan showed up,” Helt prompted.

  “He listened to the chatter about the film and said some of the music was by—I thought he said Cigaruss? And that they were from Iceland, and that was probably okay, but that the outdoor shots were from New Zealand.”

  Sigur Rós, warrior rose; sad, weird music; the Icelandic group had been a passing fancy of its time. Helt remembered Archer’s theatrical wince when someone had played a clip of the sounds of a bowed guitar.

  “He seemed angry about that, because he thought they should have combed the cloud for archival footage of the old island. But he didn’t say much, really.”

  “Was there more?” Helt asked.

  “He—we didn’t talk much longer after he came there. He was new, so we were polite, but he wasn’t one of us, and…”

  They waited her out.

  “And I didn’t like him. We were all women, that day at the table, and he looked at us like we were…”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Go on,” Helt said.

  “He was disdainful. Cold. That was the impression I had of him.”

  “He left when you did,” Helt said.

  “I told him I was going home. He said he was, too. We rode the same train to Petra.”

  Helt showed the captures of them leaving the Athens station, getting off at Petra.

  “Did he sit next to you?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “Do you know where he lived?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “He lived in Athens. Do you know if any of the other women who met him that night became friends with him?”

  “If they did, I haven’t heard about it. When we get together, we talk about the people in our lives, women, and men, too.”

  Helt nodded. “Susanna, if they had other contacts with him, you can’t protect them. We’ll be questioning them, anyway, because of this first meeting.”

  “I told you the truth! His name just didn’t come up again! Are you going to bother everyone on this ship?”

  “Yes, if we must,” Helt said. “Let’s look at this.”

  On a different date, Susanna Jambekar and Cash Ryan stepped into the Athens train, got off at the Petra station. “This was a year later.”

  “I remember,” Susanna said.

  “Tell us.”

  Doughan and Mena sat like statues, saying nothing, watching everything.

  “He just appeared beside me. He sat down beside me on the train. He asked if I remembered him, and I said I did. He said he was not a colonist, he had no chance of that, but that before he left he wanted to get to know me. Sometimes you can get an ‘ugh’ reaction from that if it’s just a clumsy way to ask for sex. This wasn’t that feeling. It seemed like an honest request for a friendship. This time he just seemed shy. I asked, why me? And he said because I reminded him of someone who had been very special to him.”

  “Who?” Mena asked.

  Unexpected, Mena’s question gave Helt a quick jolt of irritation. He had a plan for what he wanted to hear from Susanna. He didn’t want her to talk about Elena, and he wanted to steer her away from mentioning Yves, if he could. Susanna turned her head to look at Mena. Surely I’m not abandoned to these wolves, the midwife must be thinking. My boss is here. She’ll protect me. “That’s what I wanted to ask him, Mena. Who?”

  Helt could hear the relief in Susanna’s voice, the slight lessening of tension that came from believing she had an ally in the room. “And what he said was, ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to protect her, and you. It won’t come up again. I hope I haven’t disturbed your evening.’ Those were the words he used. At least they’re very close to what he said.”

  To Helt’s ears, the meaning of Cash’s words was far too clear. He knew who the her was that Cash wanted to protect. The expanded search that would show Cash trailing Elena wasn’t done. He had to look at it as soon as this interview was over. Had to.

  “What was your response to that?” Helt asked.

  “I didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to get away from him. I said something, told him I wasn’t disturbed, even though I was. I looked around to see if there was anyone on the train I recognized but I didn’t see anyone. If I had, I would have gotten up to sit by them. I was sitting next to the window, and he would have had to get up to let me leave.…

  “I didn’t want to risk that he wouldn’t move. I told him I was meeting Yves for dinner.”

  “Yves?” Doughan asked.

  Okay, Yves was in play. That his name would come up had probably been inevitable. “Yves Copani. He’s in Navigation,” Helt said. Not now, Doughan. Later. Please.

  Susanna looked away from Mena, back to Helt. He watched her process the realization that Helt knew about Yves, knew about their relationship. And if he knew that, then he knew about the Seed Banker money. Or she feared that he did. Her pupils grew in size. All her attention was on him; she would read threat or promise in what he said, she would do her best to decipher the subtexts that might lurk in his voice, his muscles.

  The Scots engineer, Halkett, had not been frightened of Helt when they talked. That was before the rumors of murder swept through the ship. That was when Ryan’s death seemed a suicide, unfortunate, but in no way connected with Kelly Halkett. The man had become uneasy as the questions continued, but Susanna’s fear was different, a primal fear kept at bay by the trappings of civilization in this room, by her own expectations of how she should act. So this was the power inherent in the inquisitor’s robe. It was not Helt’s power, but his to use for now.

  He looked away from Susanna, looked at Doughan and Mena to see if their silence, their acquiescence to what he was doing, came from set and setting, or from an unfamiliar script, the arousal of hunter-prey roles that were no longer considered decent in civilized behavior. Except for war, and perhaps this was one.

  Doughan seemed to be trying to hide in a cave made by the curve of his own shoulders. Helt felt him peering o
ut of it, evaluating, considering, reconsidering. Mena was watching Helt’s face with a fascination that didn’t seem to be fear. More the full attention she might offer a test subject that was exhibiting unusual behaviors.

  “‘I wanted to protect her, and you.’ What do you think Cash Ryan meant by that, Susanna?”

  “I thought it was a threat. I thought if he ever came close to me again, I would speak to NSS about it.”

  “Did you have any conversations with him after that? Ever?”

  “I never saw the man again until the announcement of his suicide.” Her voice clipped off each word. “Now you say it was a murder.”

  “Cash Ryan left none of the warnings, the indicators, that usually precede a suicide. NSS began to treat this as a murder within hours of the death, and now it’s certain that the man was killed,” Helt said. “Did you tell Yves about this … encounter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I had a disturbing conversation with someone on the train. I went through what the Ryan man had said, and I told Yves I knew I was making too much of how I’d felt about the interchange. He looked at me for a moment and didn’t say anything. We talked about something else.”

  She forced her eyes away from Helt’s face with what seemed to be deliberate effort. She stared down at her hands.

  “I hadn’t known Yves very long then. Now I would know to worry if he went silent like that about something.”

  “Because…” Helt said.

  “Because when he doesn’t say anything, that means he’s really, really angry.” Susanna smiled, a fond little smile that vanished quickly.

  “I want you to see this.” Helt played the clips he’d found when he’d increased the time window around the appearance of Susanna Jambekar on public cameras. Susanna going into a hairdresser’s shop, Cash Ryan on the street outside. Susanna leaving the Athens clinic in her lab coat, Cash Ryan walking by its door minutes later. Cash Ryan leaving the Stonehenge station on the train before Susanna, Cash Ryan stepping into the train just as Susanna left it. This was new information for Doughan, for Mena. Doughan spread the fingers of his right hand, made a fist, opened his hand again. Mena took a deep breath. Her nostrils flared.