Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  Accordion music always made Floyd feel seasick. He turned off the wireless.

  “There’s something I need to ask,” Custine said.

  “Say it.”

  “There’s a possibility we haven’t really discussed. It concerns the old man.”

  “Go on.”

  “Do you think it’s possible he killed her?”

  Floyd thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Makes no sense, André. If the police weren’t interested, why would he risk re-opening that can of worms?”

  “Human nature being what it is, anything’s possible. What if he has a secret need to be discovered? Once the police abandoned their inquiry, he’d have had no choice but to call in private detectives.”

  “All the evidence we’ve seen so far points away from Blanchard.”

  “But we know he had access to her rooms. He’s the one person who has keys for every room. What if she did have a lover, and Blanchard found out about it?”

  “Explain the wireless, or the smashed typewriter, or the box of papers.”

  “Perhaps he’s playing some kind of double-bluff game with us, strewing our path with misleading clues while hoping we have the sense to see through them and—”

  “Is this the way they teach you to think at the Quai?”

  “I’m just saying that we shouldn’t exclude the possibility. He seems like a nice enough old gentleman, but the worst ones generally do.”

  “I think you’ve been sitting in that room for too long, André.”

  “Perhaps,” Custine said. “Still, a little suspicion never goes amiss in this line of work.”

  Floyd turned the car on to boulevard Saint-Germain. “I agree that we can’t rule it out, all the other evidence notwithstanding. I’ll even admit that the thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But I still don’t believe he killed her. That said, if you feel you need to explore the possibility… well, I’m sure you can nose around the problem without being too tactless. Ask him again about the police not taking up the case. Ask him if he knew of anyone who might have been jealous of the time he spent with the girl.”

  “I’ll be the very model of discretion,” Custine said.

  “You’d better be. If he loses his temper and throws us off the case, we’re going to have to start looking for new premises in a less salubrious part of town.”

  “I didn’t think there was a less salubrious part of town.”

  “My point exactly,” Floyd replied.

  He parked the Mathis. Nothing new in his pigeonhole; no bills or mysterious letters from long-lost girlfriends. That, he supposed, had to count as a kind of good luck.

  But the elevator had broken down again, jammed somewhere up on the fourth floor. The engineer from the elevator company was sitting on the lowest flight of stairs, smoking a cigarette and studying the racing pages. He was a small, shrewlike man with pomaded hair who always smelled of carbolic soap. He nodded at Floyd and Custine as they tramped past.

  “Busy, Maurice?” Floyd asked.

  “Waiting for a new part from head office, Monsieur Floyd.” He shrugged expressively. “With the traffic the way it is today, could be hours before they get here.”

  “Don’t break a sweat,” Floyd said.

  Maurice saluted them and went back to his newspaper.

  Entering their office, Custine put away his tools, washed his face and hands and changed his shirt and then set about making tea. Floyd sat at his desk, pulled the telephone across and called the Paris operator to request an international call to Berlin. He gave her the number of Kaspar Metals, reading from the letter in the tin, and waited for the connection to be made.

  After a while, the operator’s voice came back on again. “I’m sorry, monsieur. That number must be wrong.”

  Floyd gave her the number again, but there had been no mistake. “You mean no one picks up the telephone?”

  “No,” she said. “The line is totally dead.”

  Floyd thanked her and returned the receiver to its cradle. One more dead lead, then. He drummed his fingers and then dialled Marguerite’s number in Montparnasse.

  “Floyd,” Greta said, answering.

  “How are things?”

  “She’s resting.”

  “Can I see you this evening?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Easy on the enthusiasm, kid.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry, Floyd. It’s just that I may not be in the best of moods.”

  “Then you could use some cheering up.”

  “And you’re the man for the job, I take it?”

  “Custine and I have been working hard on the case. I think we all need a treat tonight. How about I take the three of us out to dinner, and we finish off the evening in Le Perroquet Pourpre?”

  “I suppose I can make it,” she said, not sounding at all sure of herself. “Sophie’s in tonight, studying, so I could ask her to look after Marguerite—”

  “That’s the spirit. I’ll drive over in an hour. Spruce yourself up—we’re hitting the bright lights tonight.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said.

  Custine and Floyd drank tea and discussed the case, making sure they’d shared all the essential observations, comparing notes on their interviews with the tenants. While they talked, a scratchy old Bluebird pressing of Sidney Bechet playing “Blues in Thirds” spun on Floyd’s phonograph.

  “What we’re left with,” Custine concluded, “is an odd American woman who liked to mess around with wirelesses, assuming that she did that and not some previous tenant.”

  “We’re left with a bit more than that,” Floyd said. “We know she had an odd interest in a manufacturing contract in Berlin. We know that when she died, her typewriter died with her. We know she had a habit of accumulating books and things.”

  “Unusual observations collectively, but all perfectly explicable in and of themselves.”

  “But taken together—”

  “Not enough to make a convincing case that she was a spy.”

  “What about the children?”

  Custine gave Floyd a reproving look. “I was rather hoping you wouldn’t mention the children again.”

  “I still never got to speak to the one tenant who had a really good look at the girl.”

  “I’ll visit him again tomorrow, if it will make you happy. In the meantime, might I suggest that we restrict ourselves to firm leads?”

  Floyd thought for a moment, his mind adrift on the rise and fall of Bechet’s saxophone. The disc was scratched and ancient, the music almost buried in a surf of hisses and clicks. He could have replaced it with a cheap bootleg tomorrow, and the sound would have been as clear and clean as a tin whistle. But it wouldn’t have been the right kind of clarity. The knockoff might have fooled ninety-nine people out of a hundred, but there was something raw and truthful engraved into this damaged old shellac, something that cut through the noise and thirty years like a clarion.

  “The Berlin connection’s a dead end,” he said. “And we don’t know what she was doing with the books and magazines.”

  “And records,” Custine reminded him. “Except, of course, that we have Monsieur Blanchard’s sighting of her entering Cardinal Lemoine Métro station with the loaded suitcase, and her subsequent reappearance with an empty one.”

  “As if she’d exchanged the contents with another spy.”

  “Precisely. But again, it’s circumstantial. She could just as easily have handed the contents to a shipping agent.”

  “This is the bit that doesn’t make sense,” Floyd said. He anticipated the record sticking on a particular phrase, timing the stamp of his foot against the floorboards to coax the needle into the next groove. He did it so expertly that the jump was barely audible. “Whether or not it would ever stand up in court, we have more than enough evidence that she was engaged in some kind of espionage activity. But what was she doing with the books and things? Where did they fit in?”


  “Part of her cover story as a tourist?”

  “Perhaps. But in that case, why not behave like a respectable tourist instead of some cultural magpie, filling steamer trunk after steamer trunk with all that stuff?”

  “Unless there was something vital buried in all that material,” Custine said. “It’s a pity we don’t know what was in the suitcase.”

  “But we know what was left in her room, and there’s every reason to believe she would have continued shipping it out if she hadn’t been distracted.”

  “And yet nothing we saw looked in any way to be worth the attention of a spy. Books, magazines, newspapers, records… all of which could have been obtained in the United States, with varying degrees of difficulty.”

  “There was something about them that mattered to her,” Floyd said. “Here’s another thing: ‘silver rain.’ ”

  “Silver rain?”

  “Mean anything to you?”

  “I can’t say it does.”

  “Susan White made a point of underlining just those words on a postcard she never got round to sending.”

  “Could mean anything. Could mean nothing at all,” Custine said, shrugging.

  “Sounds like a codeword to me—a codeword for something unpleasant.”

  “It would,” Custine said, smiling at Floyd. “But that’s because you’ve got spies on the brain.”

  “There’s still the matter of the typewriter.”

  “Well, that’s a funny thing. I’ve been thinking about the typewriter, and there may be more to it than meets the eye. Do you remember Blanchard showing us the box it came in?”

  “He said it was a German model,” Floyd said.

  “Yes. And when he showed us the box—and mentioned the name—it made me think of something. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out how the two are related.”

  “What did it make you think of?”

  “A room in the Quai: a windowless cell in the section where the interrogations used to take place, lit by a single electric light. A cell with ceramic tiles on the walls—the kind you can clean easily. The problem is that I can’t quite see why there’d be a typewriter in that sort of room.”

  “To take down minutes?”

  “What went on in those rooms, Floyd, was very much not the kind of thing that made it into minutes.”

  “Then why the typewriter?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remember later, when my mind’s on something else.”

  They said no more as the Bechet record played out, and then for a long while they sat listening to the hiss and scratch of the needle in the run-out groove, as if hoping for a message in the scuffing noise, some whisper of a clue that would crack open the case. Nothing came.

  Floyd stood up and pulled the needle from the record. They left the office and walked down the stairs, stepping around the telephone engineer who was still sitting there with the racing pages, waiting for his replacement part to crawl across Paris. They drove to Montparnasse, Custine waiting in the Mathis while Floyd fetched Greta.

  She stepped out into the twilight air, thin and angular in black, like a sketch in Vogue. She wore a black fur stole and a black pillbox hat with a spotted veil, and when she stood under the lamplight she looked like a million dollars, until she was near him, and then she looked tired and sad and on the edge of something she couldn’t face.

  “Let’s go eat,” Floyd said gently. “And then let’s go hear some real music.”

  They drove to a little Spanish restaurant Floyd knew on the quai Saint-Michel. He ordered a good bottle of champagne, a 1926 Veuve Clicquot, waving aside the others’ objections that he couldn’t possibly afford it. It was true, technically, but Custine had worked hard and Greta deserved a good night out, a chance to forget about Marguerite for a few hours. The food was as good as Floyd remembered, and even the roving guitarist, Greta had to admit, was not as atrocious as some she’d heard. While Floyd settled the bill, Greta and the guitarist talked about tunings and fingerings. The handsome young man in a black shirt offered Greta his guitar and she played a few tentative notes before shaking her head with an embarrassed smile. The guitarist said something kind in return as he shrugged the guitar strap back over his shoulder. Floyd smiled, too: Greta had been holding back, not wanting to blow the kid away. He must have been new in town.

  After the meal they drove to Le Perroquet Pourpre, a club on rue Dauphine. Only a few years ago there had been six or seven like it a row, but most of its neighbours were gone now, boarded up or turned into cheap bars with jukeboxes and flickering altarlike television sets in the corner. Le Perroquet was still clinging to business, and was one of the few places still willing to let Floyd and Custine on to the bill without Greta. The walls were covered with photographs of jazz men, from Jelly Roll and Satchmo, through Duke and Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins and Django. Some of them had even played on rue Dauphine. The owner, an amiable, bearded Breton called Michel, spotted the three of them entering and waved them over to the bar. He asked Greta how her tour was going and listened as she told a white lie about leaving the band for a few days while her aunt was unwell. Floyd asked Michel if business was satisfactory, and Michel offered his usual pessimistic shrug, which hadn’t changed much in nineteen years.

  “The young people still have ears for good music,” he said. “The trouble is they don’t get a chance to hear it any more. Jazz is political music—always has been, always will be. That’s why some people would rather see it dead.”

  “Maybe they’ll get their way,” Floyd said.

  “Well, you’re always welcome here. I just wish I could afford to have you play more often.”

  “We take what we’re given,” Floyd said.

  “Are you available for the middle Saturday next month? We’ve just had a cancellation.”

  “I think we can probably squeeze you in.”

  “Greta?”

  “No,” she said, lowering eyes already obscured behind the veil. “I don’t think I’ll be able to make it.”

  “Pity. But Floyd and Custine always put on a good show… although perhaps you might consider hiring a temporary piano player?”

  “We’ll think about it.” Floyd said.

  “Just so long as you keep it nice and melodic, boys. And not so fast that the punters can’t tap a toe.” He eyed Custine warningly. “None of that difficult eight-beat stuff you keep sneaking in.”

  “Maybe the young people want to hear something new for a change,” Custine said.

  “They want something new, not something that sounds like a bull loose in a china shop.”

  “We’ll behave ourselves,” Floyd assured him, patting Custine consolingly on the arm.

  Michel set them up with drinks: beer for Greta and Custine, wine for Floyd, who needed a clear head for the drive back to Montparnasse. Leaning on the bar, occasionally breaking off to serve another customer, Michel fed them all the latest news on the local music scene: who was in, who was out, who was hot, who was not, who was sleeping with who. Floyd feigned a polite interest in it all. Although he didn’t much care for gossip, it was good to think about something other than the murder case and his own problems for a while. He noticed Custine and Greta starting to laugh more, which made him feel better, and before very long they were all enjoying the company and the music and Michel’s habit of keeping their glasses topped up. At eleven the band came on and stumbled through a dozen swing numbers, big-band productions stripped down for a four-piece, and while it wasn’t the worst thing Floyd had heard, it was a long way from being the best. It didn’t matter. He was with his friends, it was snug and smoky down in Le Perroquet, the greats seemed to be looking on benevolently from their photographs on the walls, and for a couple of hours all was right with the world.

  Skellsgard and Auger stooped along a dark, low-ceilinged tunnel of rough-hewn rock, doing their best not to get too filthy in the process. They had eaten and made some further refinements to their outfits. Auger’s brand-new handbag bulged with
maps and money, some of the latter counterfeit, some of it stolen. They had left the censor chamber via a heavily armoured metal door, accessing a dug-out passage that led off in either direction. Skellsgard had a torch, a fluted silver thing with a sliding switch, obviously manufactured in E2. Nervously she shone it up and down the shaft, as if half-expecting something, then set off to the right. She explained to Auger that excavation work in one direction had been abandoned as soon as the other end of the tunnel intersected an old works shaft put in by the Métro engineers.

  “Did you tunnel all this out yourselves?” Auger asked.

  “Most of it. It was easier after we hit the existing works shaft.”

  “It must still have been back-breaking work.”

  “It was, until we found we could get an air hose through the censor. We kept a compressor on our side, and then built a simple pneumatic drill that could be smuggled through as individual components. We reassembled it on this side and supplied it with air via the hose passing through the censor. That helped a bit, although the censor had a nasty habit of changing its mind now and then.”

  “What about electricity? Can you run that through as well?”

  “Yes,” Skellsgard said, “but we never managed to make anything work. Even a torch turned out to be too difficult to break down into simple components. The censor wouldn’t even let an incandescent bulb through in one piece. In the end we had to run gas through to light lamps, like nineteenth-century coal miners.”

  “It must have been hell.”

  “The only thing that kept us going was the rumble of the trains, which told us we were getting nearer to civilisation. None of the other exit points have any kind of artificial background noise. At least here we knew we only had a few dozen metres of earth to tunnel through before we hit the train tunnel.”

  “I’m expected to dodge trains now?”

  “Only in emergencies. We can trip the power by short-circuiting the electrified rails, but only for short periods. The station’s closed now, so the trains aren’t running.”