A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  I shook off my daze and watched, amazed, as he ventured out onto one of the long girders. It could be no more than two inches wide, and he spread his arms like a high-wire artist as he took a step out over the void.

  He was mad.

  But even as I thought it, I found my feet were following him, along the gantry by the theater wall, then up to the same impossibly narrow beam that led out and across the stage so far below. On either side were ropes and cables, some weighted with what looked like sandbags, moored to cleats set into the roofing struts, but they were all impossibly far away. The only way after him was the way he had gone.

  I glanced down and saw them now, the upturned, horrified faces of the actors, dreamlike in their makeup. The masked man was already halfway across, perfectly poised, head level. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew they were set on some fixed point in front of him. That’s what you do when you are up high. You pick a spot and focus on it as if you’ve anchored cable there.…

  I put my right foot onto the girder, wishing to all the gods that I were wearing my own work boots and not those wretched heels. Then my left. I extended my arms as he had done and took my first step out into space.

  I heard a groan from below, and movement, as if other people were coming onstage now to see what was going on above them, but I could not look down. He was in front of me, blocking the fixed point I would have focused on, and for a second, I felt the unfamiliar swell of vertigo, a dizzying sickness in my head and stomach. I wobbled, instinctively taking another step, and another.

  The movement restored my equilibrium, but he had reached the end of the girder now, and as he leapt clear, he paused to look back. He raised his hand, two fingers raised this time.

  A second chance?

  I focused on them, wondering what he meant, but then his other hand came up and I saw the dull gleam of a pistol. He lowered one finger so that only the index was raised, and wagged it back and forth.

  No second chance. You should have known.

  I flinched as the shot was fired, catching the flash of the thing before the plume of smoke, even before the bang. It missed me, but the shock had distracted me, and now I was falling. Slowly at first, just tipping to the side, but the movement was unstoppable.

  One of the ropes hung just above my head. With what little momentum I could manage, I leapt straight up, grabbing wildly for the rope, reaching back as I failed to compensate for my lean.

  The rope’s knotted end brushed my forearm and swung agonizingly away. I started to drop just as it swung back. I grabbed it. The jolt threatened to tear my shoulder from its socket, but I hung there. Just for a second. Then rusted staples were popping from the beam above and the rope tore free.

  Someone below screamed, and I plummeted toward the stage.

  CHAPTER

  19

  BUT I DIDN’T JUST fall. Halfway down, all the slack went out of the rope. The abrupt halt in my momentum almost tore it from my hands. I felt my palms burn, but I clung on, eyes watering, body shrieking its defiance. And then I was dropping to earth once more, my weight insufficient to match the sandbag counterbalance that shot up the far wall toward the pulley in the roof.

  I hit the stage hard, but landed feet first, knees bent and rolling out of the impact. The shock was immense, a juddering crash that ran through every joint and left me breathless, but I thanked the gods I had landed on the sprung timber of the stage and not on concrete or cobbles.

  For a long moment, I just lay there, not unconscious, but processing the pain in my legs and shoulder, unwilling even to try to move till I was sure nothing was broken.

  Around me, it was chaos: screaming and shouting coming from all over the theater. The ring immediately around me was all actors in their finery and surreal, painted faces. I stayed where I was, cautiously testing each muscle and bone with fractional flexes, managing to focus so precisely that I was oblivious to what those peering at me were saying.

  Then a man in uniform pushed his way through the crowd. Firm hands seized my arms and dragged me roughly up from the stage. I tried to protest, but his voice silenced me.

  “I’m arresting you for the theft of a necklace, property of the Dowager Lady Hamilton.”

  * * *

  I WAS SITTING ON the wooden bench on which I had spent the night, my ankles chained together, my feet bare. The brick cell was painted in off-white gloss and smelled of sawdust, urine, and vomit. There was a single narrow window high in the wall, barred. The blue door was reinforced with steel bands and plates. At head height was a hatch, about six inches long. It opened and someone looked in.

  “Remain seated as we enter,” said a man’s voice, “or you will be subdued.”

  I drew the solitary blanket tight about me but otherwise did not move a single, aching muscle as the lock clunked over and, with a juddering thud, the door swung heavily open.

  The speaker was a uniformed white officer with a barrel chest and a broad mustache. He was perspiring heavily. As he stepped to the side, two more white men came in, both in suits. One was, I assumed, another policeman. The other was Willinghouse. His scarred face, always unsettling, was rigid, and I felt his anger. He did not look at me.

  The plainclothes officer addressed me. “I am Detective Sergeant Andrews. You are Anglet Sutonga, former steeplejack?”

  “Yes,” I managed. The look on Willinghouse’s face had hit me with the full weight of my predicament.

  “And you are in the employ of Dahria Willinghouse as a maidservant?” said Andrews.

  I started to look at Willinghouse in surprise but caught myself. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And can you explain what you were doing in the opera house this evening?”

  I thought fast. Insofar as I had prepared a defense, it was predicated on telling the truth, something Willinghouse apparently did not want me to do.

  “I went with Lady Dahria to the opera,” I began cautiously. “I had to go to the bathroom. When I got there, I found a lady. She said she had been attacked. Robbed. The man was getting away. I went after him. I couldn’t catch up with him and fell.”

  “So you went to the rest facilities with no sense that the Dowager Lady Hamilton would be there?” said Andrews. He was hawkish, with keen eyes and an almost unnatural stillness.

  “That was the lady on the bathroom floor?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” I said. “I just…”

  “Needed to use the facilities,” said Andrews.

  “Well, partly,” I said.

  Andrews leaned forward. “Yes?” he prompted.

  “I’d never been to an opera before,” I confided. “I was kind of bored. Needed a break.”

  A tense watchfulness in his face seemed to unwind, and he took a breath. “I see,” he said, drawing a fold of paper from his pocket. “So you have never seen this before?” He handed it to me.

  It was not written by hand, but typed on one of those machines like the one in Ansveld’s shop. It read,

  Lady Hamilton,

  We have your nefew, Arnold. If you want to see his safe return, go to the end stall in the lady’s toilets half an hour after the opera has begun. Bring your necklace. Tell no one and come alone or the consiquences will be dyre.

  I looked up.

  “Well?” said Andrews. “What can you tell me about this?”

  “It’s badly spelled?” I said.

  “I mean,” he persisted, with an effort at composure, “did you write it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen it before or heard anyone refer to it?”

  “No.”

  He stared me down for another second, then glanced at Willinghouse. My employer, if he still was that, said nothing. “The man you pursued,” said Andrews. “Did he say or do anything that might suggest he was … foreign?”

  “Are you asking if he was black?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  “He’s asking
if he was Grappoli,” said Willinghouse. He sounded annoyed.

  I shook my head. “He never spoke,” I said.

  Andrews frowned. “What happened to the necklace?” he asked.

  “I didn’t see it,” I answered.

  “Not at all?”

  “It was gone when I got there,” I said.

  “And you didn’t see it on the person of the man you say took it?”

  “Well, he wasn’t wearing it, if that’s what you mean,” I said, looking up for the first time.

  “Well, no,” he said, irritated. “But you didn’t see him pocket it or something?”

  “He could have had it in his hand the whole time and I wouldn’t have seen it.”

  “You saw no sign of its light?”

  “Light?”

  “It had a luxorite stone in it,” he said, clearly disappointed.

  “No. Where is my mistress?” I asked, trying to sound concerned. “Is she angry with me?”

  “Well,” said Willinghouse, his voice low and hard, his eyes flashing green fire. “At very least, you disrupted a major society event, causing her great personal embarrassment and leading to her being escorted from the building—in front of Bar-Selehm’s elite—in the company of a police officer. Whether you stole anything or not, your conduct was rash and unseemly.”

  “Will she—?” I began, then retooled the question, acutely aware of sitting in no more than a blanket and borrowed underwear. “Am I to be dismissed? From her service, I mean.”

  Willinghouse pursed his lips. His scarred cheek flexed as he clamped his teeth together for a moment, as if he was seriously considering the possibility; then he breathed out and shook his head briefly. “Not this time,” he said.

  I relaxed—doubly so when, after a nod from Andrews, the uniformed officer squatted at my feet and unlocked my shackles.

  “The lady’s nephew,” I said. “Is he all right?”

  “Always was,” said Andrews. “There was no kidnapping. The young man lives in Harrisberg. Officers were dispatched on the first available train and found him enjoying a champagne breakfast at home with friends. A simple ruse, but an effective one.”

  * * *

  WILLINGHOUSE MARCHED ME OUT of the station without a word, waiting until we were a block away before turning on me. I was dressed in my own—freshly laundered—clothes and boots, which he had brought from the house, and felt, insofar as was possible, more like my old self.

  “Do you understand the meaning of the word ‘discretion’?” he snapped. “This will make the papers. Apart from the embarrassment you have caused my family, the professional difficulties I will face at work, you have blown any secrecy surrounding our investigation wide open!”

  “Our investigation?” I replied. I had just tied my hair back as if I were going to work on a chimney, and the action made me feel confident, defiant. “What has your contribution been to this investigation so far?”

  “Other than getting you out of jail, you mean?” he returned. “Without me, you would be languishing in there for days. Weeks, maybe.”

  “And without me, you would have learned nothing!”

  “And what, pray, have we learned from your being arrested?” he demanded.

  I raised a single finger. If I didn’t talk, I would hit him.

  “First,” I said. “We know that Berrit had access to luxorite before the theft of the Beacon and that he tried to sell it to Ansveld. I don’t know what the connection between them was, but there was one, and that was why he died.” I raised another finger. “Second, we know that the source of that luxorite was unknown to the trading community, and that when a piece found its way into the Dowager Hamilton’s necklace, the people responsible were determined to get it back. Third, we know that those people were connected to Ansveld through more than the boy. They almost certainly used his typewriter to print up the letter claiming to have abducted the dowager’s nephew.”

  “Anything else?” he demanded, still defiant.

  “Yes,” I said, raising a fourth finger. “We know that whoever stole the dowager’s necklace needed no help from an inexperienced apprentice steeplejack to steal the Beacon. He climbs as well as me. Maybe better.”

  The admission deflated us both a little, and for a moment, we just stood there as the city’s morning began around us. Though I saw my investigation into Berrit’s death as a personal mission rather than a professional engagement, I needed Willinghouse’s money and protection. If there was more to it than that, if I also needed his respect, his admiration, I chose not to think about that too closely.

  “I have to go to Parliament,” he said, glancing into the street for a cab. “This business over the Grappoli ambassador is escalating badly. If the Beacon isn’t found soon, we could be looking at a major international incident.”

  “What kind of incident?” I asked. The chatter I had heard about the diplomatic breakdown had been little more than rumor and jokes at the Grappoli’s oversensitivity.

  “There are powerful people in Bar-Selehm who would like nothing more than open war with the Grappoli,” said Willinghouse. “There was a rally last night in Morgessa. What they call a ‘demonstration.’” He said the word like it tasted foul. “The second of the week. Except that this time there was fighting: blacks on one side, whites on the other.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged the question off. “Because it’s what happens in Bar-Selehm when tensions run high. Everyone wants someone to blame.”

  “This is what you meant when you said we were on the brink of disaster,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not quite. But we are getting there. I don’t really know how or why, but we are.”

  “Surely it can’t be that bad,” I said, scared of his earnestness.

  He glowered into the street, then gave me a searching look. “If a shred of evidence, however flimsy, however dubious, links the Grappoli to the theft of the Beacon, the people who want war will get their wish. Do you know what that would do to this city?”

  I shook my head.

  “Pray to whatever gods you worship that you never do,” he said.

  * * *

  IF I HAD THOUGHT that was the end of the matter, I was sorely mistaken, as I discovered the moment I entered the Drowning. A girl, perhaps Tanish’s age, paused in her laundry to give me a long look, after which she hurried inside the tent she called home. A few minutes later, as I strode to Rahvey’s hut, I found I had accumulated a straggling tail of onlookers, not all of them children.

  Florihn intercepted me before I could reach my sister. “Did you think we wouldn’t know?” she yelled, stomping up the dirt track with her head lowered like a one-horn. “Did you think we were too unsophisticated to find out what you had done?” She slapped a newspaper into my hands.

  I took the paper and flipped it open. I had made the front page, and the paper was particularly shrill on the scandal of my falling to the stage in my underwear. It was almost laughable, but not quite. There was no picture, and the headline called me only a former steeplejack, but my name was in the small print. So were Dahria’s and Willinghouse’s. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to lock out Florihn’s babbling outrage.

  “And you with a child to raise!” she sputtered.

  I stared at her, feeling once more the rising anger that had led to my smashing the statue of Cenu. “It was a misunderstanding!” I gasped. “The police already released me. It has no bearing on my ability to look after the child.”

  I marched away before she could say anything else, my face hot, arms trembling. At Rahvey’s hut, I took the child without speaking, ignoring her indignant questions, feeling stupid, furious, and above all, lost.

  “Don’t come back till two o’clock,” she said.

  “She’ll need to eat before then.”

  “Two o’clock,” Rahvey repeated. “Not a moment earlier.”

  And she went to work.

  * * *

  IN NEED OF CALM and a chance to pla
n my next move, I took the child to the temple yard and performed the Kathahry exercises under the vague eyes of the nameless baby and a ring-tailed genet that watched from the branches of a coral tree. I had just finished and was sponging my arms and face when I saw the Mahweni boy I had met on the night of Berrit’s funeral. Mnenga.

  “Anglet,” he said, beaming. “I am glad you came. I brought you something.”

  I was taken aback. My thoughts had been too crowded for me to reflect much on our last meeting, and I was surprised to find how much his reappearance pleased me.

  From behind his back he produced two corked earthenware bottles.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Milk,” he answered, proud. “And look.”

  From the pouch around his neck he produced a rubbery object, which he proceeded to squeeze onto the mouth of one of the bottles. It was an artificial nipple.

  “For the little girl,” he said in a comic stage whisper.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, marveling.

  “We carry them for the young nbezu. Sometimes their mothers do not feed them, and we have to do it by hand. I have cleaned it.”

  “And the milk is…”

  “From the nbezu, yes. It is very rich and sweet. Good for human babies.”

  “She’s actually just eaten,” I said, “but thank you. I will try it.”

  He made no move to go. “I am very good at this,” he said. “I can help.”

  He took the bottle and placed the rubber nipple against the baby’s mouth. At first, the child did not respond, but when he teased her lips open, she began to suck.

  “She’s taking it!” I exclaimed, delighted.

  Mnenga chuckled happily. “What is her name?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “We have not had the naming yet,” I said.

  He looked troubled. Naming had even more potent associations for the Mahweni than it did for the Lani. A child with no name was like a ghost or an animal, a soul without proper human form.