Century Rain

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You can begin by thanking me. I got you out of a fix down there.”

  “That fix wasn’t any of your business. What were you doing, following me like that?”

  “I wasn’t following you,” Floyd said. “I just happened to see you in trouble.”

  “You just happened to see me. Of all the Métro stations in the city, you just happened to be passing the time of day in Cardinal Lemoine?”

  Floyd shrugged. “Well, not exactly.”

  Auger started walking away from him, raising her hand in the probably vain hope of catching a taxi. In her state, they were more likely to speed up than slow down.

  “Where are you going?” Floyd asked, his tone reasonable.

  “Anywhere but here. Anywhere I think there’s a chance I won’t be followed by a nosy man in a shabby raincoat.”

  “Is that how they teach you to show gratitude in Dakota?”

  She swung around, teetering a little on her heels. The pavement beneath her was slick and slate-coloured with rain. “I’m not ungrateful,” she said, glaring at him, “but my gratitude ends here. Now please walk away, or I’ll have to call the police.”

  “In your state? I’d like to see you try.”

  A taxi sped by, making a special point of sluicing her with dirty brown rainwater. “Just get away from me,” she said, screwing up her face as the water seeped into her shoes. “We concluded our business this morning. Or don’t you remember the nice termination fee I gave you?”

  “Some of that termination fee just bailed you out of trouble,” Floyd replied.

  “I wasn’t worried about him. I was handling things perfectly well until you barged in.”

  “He was right, though, wasn’t he?” Floyd looked at her with an amused expression. He had very deep wrinkles around his eyes. He was a man who either laughed a lot or cried a lot.

  “Right about what?”

  “You did go into that tunnel. There’s no point denying it—I had a tail on you from the moment you left my offices.”

  “I noticed her,” Auger said. “I hate to break the bad news, but she isn’t very good.”

  “She’s cheap. The point is that she saw you duck into that tunnel, the one our friend claimed you just came out of.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t following me.”

  “And I wasn’t. Not personally. But given what I’d learned, I wondered if it might be… informative to sit and wait in Cardinal Lemoine.”

  Gradually, she felt some of her anger abating, or perhaps being put away for later use. In a softer voice she said, “Why exactly did you help me? You had nothing to lose by letting that man hand me over to the authorities, which is most likely exactly what he would have done.”

  “Nothing to lose,” Floyd said, “except that they’d never have got to the bottom of whatever it is you’re up to.”

  “And you think you have a better chance of that?”

  “I’m halfway there,” he said.

  “Well, that makes two of us,” she said, sotto voce.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, Wendell, but I do know that this isn’t something you want to get involved in.”

  He narrowed one eye. “Now that’s hardly the kind of thing you should say if you want me off your case.”

  Another taxi made a concerted effort to drench her. She stepped away from the kerb, closer to Floyd. “But why are you on my case? I told you who I am. I explained all about my sister.”

  Floyd took out a narrow sliver of wood and placed it between his teeth. He bit down on it, making a dry cracking sound. “You did, and it sounded mighty plausible. For about thirty seconds.”

  “Then why did you let me walk out of your office with the tin?”

  Floyd winked at her. “Have a guess. And while you’re at it, why don’t I drive you somewhere you can get warm and dry and put some colour back into your cheeks?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll take my chances with the taxis. Failing that I’ll walk, or construct some sort of raft.”

  “My car’s just around this corner. I can take you to your hotel or to my office. Either option would offer you a change of clothes and some warm water.”

  “No,” she said, turning away from him again.

  Just at that moment, a heavy truck roared past pushing a tidal wave of toffee-coloured water along the road ahead of it. Auger let out a little shriek of exasperation as a filthy spray enveloped her from head to foot. As the truck veered past, the driver offered a consolatory wave of his hand, as if everything that had just happened was an act of divine fate far beyond his own control.

  “Take me to the hotel,” she said. “Please.”

  “At your service,” Floyd replied.

  From Cardinal Lemoine, Floyd took Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel boulevards, until he reached the nexus of intersecting streets around Montparnasse. The few patches of clear sky that had emerged a little while ago had shrivelled away again, as if deciding that the effort simply wasn’t worth it. The rain had stopped, but the entire city huddled under a swollen mass of ominous clouds that seethed and circulated overhead like so many prowling wolves.

  “You have to understand things from my point of view,” Floyd said, glancing at his passenger in the rear-view mirror. He seemed to be taking his chauffeur duties very seriously and had insisted that she ride in the back, where there was more room. “I was taken on to solve a case. It doesn’t matter to me that the man who hired me is now dead. Until the case is closed, I have a duty to find out what happened. All the more so now that my partner is under suspicion of murder.”

  “But I already told you—” she began.

  “You already told me a pack of lies designed to get me to hand over the box,” Floyd said. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

  “I’d keep your eyes on the road if I were you.”

  He ignored the remark. “Take this business about you and your sister coming from Dakota.”

  “What of it?”

  “You might have fooled Blanchard, but your accent isn’t anything I recognise. I’m not even sure you’re American.”

  “You obviously don’t know your own country very well.” Auger shifted in her seat, rearranging the damp folds of her coat. “By your own admission, you’ve been in Paris for twenty years. That’s easily long enough to have become out of touch.”

  “If you’re from Dakota, then I’m far more out of touch than I thought.”

  “I can hardly be blamed for your ignorance. Tanglewood is a very small community and we have our own way of doing things. Have you ever met Mennonites, or Amish, or Pennsylvania Dutch?”

  Floyd steered the car on to boulevard Edgar Quinet, skirting the huge cemetery at Montparnasse. “Not lately,” he said.

  “Well, then,” Auger said, as if this settled the matter conclusively.

  The play of cloud-filtered light across the cemetery illuminated a huddle of mourners taking turns to cast flowers into the open pit of a grave. Their umbrellas merged into a single black canopy, like a private thundercloud.

  “Well what?”

  “If you’d met any of those people, I’m sure you’d find their accents and manners just as out of the ordinary as my own. Small communities breed their own ways.”

  “Tanglewood must be very small indeed. Did I tell you I couldn’t find it in the gazetteer?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Anyway,” Floyd said, “I can’t begin to imagine what business a girl from a small town in Dakota would have in a Paris Métro tunnel. Or her sister, for that matter.” He met her eyes in the mirror. “The thing is, Susan White also had a thing about Cardinal Lemoine. She was observed entering the station with a heavy suitcase and leaving with a light one.”

  “If there’s a significance to that, I’m afraid it quite escapes me.”

  “According to the late Mister Blanchard, and judging by what I saw when he let me into her room, your sister had a mania for
collecting things. Her room was a holding area for huge numbers of books, magazines and newspapers, maps and telephone directories. It looked as if she collected just about anything she could get her hands on.” Floyd waited a beat. “Pretty odd behaviour for a tourist.”

  “She liked souvenirs.”

  “By the ton?”

  Auger leaned forward. He smelled her perfume: it made him think of roses and spring. “What exactly are you saying, Mister Floyd? Let’s get it out into the open, shall we?”

  He turned the car on to boulevard Pasteur, slowing down behind a bus carrying an advertisement for Kronenbourg beer. “Your sister’s actions simply don’t add up.”

  “I already told you she had mental problems.”

  “But Blanchard got to know her pretty well, and he never suspected that there was anything wrong with her head.”

  “Paranoiacs can be very manipulative.”

  “What if she wasn’t paranoid at all? What if all that was just a story you tried to sell me to throw me off the scent?”

  “You’re saying that my sister’s actions might have had some rational explanation?”

  “Miss Auger.” They were off first-name terms now. No more Verity, no more Wendell. “I just watched you crawl out of a Métro tunnel. Right now I’m about ready to believe anything, up to and including the possibility that the two of you were not sisters at all, but fellow spies.”

  “So now we’re getting to it,” she said, rolling her eyes in disbelief.

  “Let’s look at the facts, shall we?” Floyd continued, unperturbed. “Susan White obviously wasn’t acting alone. She must have had an accomplice whom she met with in Cardinal Lemoine. The accomplice made the suitcase switch, or emptied the one White was carrying and took the contents away. My guess is that the accomplice then made their way into that self-same tunnel you just came out of. There’s obviously something in there that means a great deal to you.”

  “Go on,” she said, her tone mocking. “Let’s hear the rest of your preposterous little theory.”

  “It isn’t a whole theory yet, just the start of one.”

  “I still want to hear what you think you’ve got.”

  “My partner found something odd in Susan White’s room. The wireless set had been altered, probably by Susan herself. It looks as if she was using it to receive instructions, or perhaps to tap into communications between rival spies.”

  “Ah. So now we’ve got two groups of spies? It gets better, it really does.”

  “Custine never did crack the code. Turns out his attempts were futile anyway: Susan was using an Enigma machine.”

  “I’m quite sure that means something to you, but—”

  “It’s a sophisticated enciphering machine. Which makes me think she was a spy. So what does that make you?”

  “You’re being totally absurd.”

  “Except I’m not the one who just crawled out of a Métro tunnel.”

  For a long while, Auger said nothing at all. Floyd took boulevard Garibaldi as far as place Cambronne and then steered on to Emile Zola, heading towards Auger’s hotel.

  “Look,” she said, “I can’t expect you to understand any of this, but everything I told you about my sister was the truth. However, it’s also true that she had some kind of fixation with Cardinal Lemoine station. I told you she believed forces were moving against her, didn’t I?”

  “Maybe you did,” he allowed.

  “I can’t explain the wireless, or that machine you mentioned… except to say that if you listen to the radio these days, there are a lot of odd transmissions. And who knows where she found that machine? I take it this is something you can buy, if you want one badly enough?”

  “Get to your point, Miss Auger.”

  “My point,” she continued, “is that it’s more than likely that my sister picked up one of these odd radio channels and absorbed it into her private conspiracy. As for the tunnel… well, I can’t deny that she thought there was something down there. She mentioned it more than once in her postcards. She also mentioned that she had hidden something valuable in there. Whether she had or not, I couldn’t say, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave Paris without finding out for myself.”

  “And this didn’t strike you as being just the slightest bit dangerous?”

  “Of course I knew it was dangerous. And of course I couldn’t very well tell the man in the station what I was doing.”

  Floyd’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So that’s all it was? Just tidying up some of your sister’s unfinished business?”

  “Yes,” she said emphatically.

  “It still doesn’t explain why there have been two deaths. Got a neat explanation for that as well, have you?”

  “As you already said yourself, Blanchard probably felt guilty about what had happened to Susan. Perhaps her death was an accident after all. Those low railings look unsafe to me.”

  Floyd slowed the car to a crawl as they neared the hotel, looking for a suitable parking spot. The bad weather had brought everyone out in their cars, with only a few brave souls chancing the sidewalks.

  “You know what?” he said. “I’m half-tempted to believe you. I’d like nothing more than to close this case with a clear conscience. Maybe you are exactly who you say you are, and all the suspicious circumstances I keep seeing are just red herrings left behind by your sister.”

  “Now you’re beginning to talk sense,” Auger said.

  “There’s a woman in my life who wants to leave France,” Floyd said. “She wants me to pack my bags and leave with her. A large part of me wants to go with her.”

  “Maybe you should listen to that large part.”

  “I’m listening,” Floyd said, “and right now the only thing that’s keeping me here is the thought that I might be turning my back on something big. That and the fact that my partner is in a lot of trouble with the police, and will be until this case is closed.”

  “Don’t get sucked into Susan’s games,” Auger said. Making an obvious effort to sound uninterested, she asked, “So who is this woman, anyway?”

  “You’ve met her.” Floyd had spotted a parking space. He crunched the Mathis into reverse and prepared to ease the massive car into an available space, thinking of the car as a coal barge and the space as a vacant berth. “She’s the woman who followed you from my office.”

  “The cleaning girl?”

  “The cleaning girl, yeah. Except she isn’t a cleaning girl. Her name’s Greta and she’s a jazz musician. Good at her job, too.”

  “She’s pretty. You should go with her.”

  “Easy as that, is it?”

  “There’s nothing to keep you in Paris, Wendell.”

  He looked at her. “We’re back on Wendell now, are we?”

  “I’ve seen the state of your office—business isn’t exactly booming. I’m sorry about your partner, but I assure you, there really isn’t a case to be investigated here.”

  The Mathis’s rear fender kissed the front fender of a dented Citroën behind them. Floyd slipped the car into first gear and was inching it forward when Auger suddenly lunged hard across the back seat, away from the side nearest the hotel. “Drive,” she said.

  Floyd looked back at her. “What?”

  “Get out of here. Fast.”

  “I can’t. I have to pick up Greta.”

  “Wendell—just drive.”

  Something in her voice made him obey her without further question. He lurched the Mathis out of the parking space, not minding that he scraped the car in front of him in the process. He just had time to glance towards the lobby of the hotel and see the small child standing on the steps immediately in front of the door, playing with a yo-yo. The child was male, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and shiny buckled shoes over white socks. But there was nothing boyish about the child’s face. Floyd would never have given the boy a moment’s attention had Auger not been so obviously alarmed, but now that he looked more closely, he saw that his face was wrinkled and cadave
rous: a withered parody of a child’s.

  The boy looked towards them and smiled.

  “The boy?”

  “Just get us out of here,” Auger said.

  Across the street, the glass door to a brasserie swung open. Greta rushed out with her coat bundled over one arm, a waiter following her with a tray in his hand and a bewildered look on his face. Greta turned around without stopping and threw some money towards him.

  Floyd hit the brakes.

  “What are we waiting for?” Auger asked, her alarm increasing. She leaned forward anxiously and grasped the back of Floyd’s seat, trying to see what was holding them up.

  Floyd leaned over and popped the front passenger-side door. “Make that ‘who,’ not ‘what.’ I had Greta watching the Royale in case I didn’t pick you up in Cardinal Lemoine.”

  Floyd’s attention darted back to the boy. He had reeled in his yo-yo and was taking slow, thoughtful steps towards the car. Behind the Mathis, a queue of vehicles was already making its impatience known.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” Auger said, her knuckles white on the seat back.

  Floyd signalled to Greta to move faster. She slipped behind the Mathis and slid in through the passenger-side door, pushing wet strands of black hair from her brow. Even before she had pulled the door shut, Floyd had the car moving again, picking up speed towards the Mirabeau bridge. At the intersection with the quayside road, he swung the car back north, towards the Eiffel Tower. The low clouds had snipped off the top of the structure, as if it had never been completed.

  “Would someone mind telling me what’s going on?” Greta asked, pushing her coat over the back of the seat.

  “I found Miss Auger.”

  Greta looked at the woman in the back of the car. “So I gathered. But why the sudden excitement?”

  “She told me to drive,” Floyd said. “She sounded as if she meant it.”

  “And you just do whatever she says?”

  Floyd caught Auger’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “Is it safe now?”

  “Just keep driving,” she said. “Since you made a point of not crossing the river, I presume you’re taking us back to your office?”

  “Unless you have a better idea,” he replied. “What happened back there? What made it unsafe for us to hang around?”