Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  “Archibald Mandel?” I said. “The former secretary for trade and industry?”

  “The very man,” said Ansveld, bleakly. “He was, you might recall, an acquaintance of several here on Crommerty Street, including my occasionally misguided father, and was—I’m sure of it—up to his eyes in that business at the Red Fort. Managed to slip his snakish neck out of the noose at the last moment, though, did he not? Very much a fixture at Heritage party gatherings, these days, is Colonel Mandel. You want to watch out for him, Miss Sutonga. If he is in any way connected to what you are investigating, I think you should proceed with extreme caution.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  KEPAHLER’S LINK TO HERITAGE was proof of nothing, but it was a link, and one that made a kind of sense. It felt indirect, however, a vague and minimal step forward, and I found myself thinking both of Willinghouse languishing in his cell and Rahvey’s children, steadily worsening while I inched my way through a mystery that had nothing to do with them. I needed to approach the matter from a new angle.

  I found Tanish at the Evensteps Candle Factory, where the gang were finishing a day doing some routine repairs and painting, inside and out. The area smelled of the slight sourness of the river, but here that was almost masked by the warm, honey-sweet beeswax aroma of the candle vats.

  “You feeling all right?” I asked him.

  “Never better, why?”

  “When was the last time you were in the Drowning?”

  “Two, three weeks, why?”

  “What about your schoolwork?”

  Tanish had been sitting in on Bertha’s classes. He rubbed his face and looked guiltily away.

  “Tanish?” I pressed.

  “Been busy,” he said. “Work. Can’t just keep walking out on the gang, can I? Need the money. And when’s the likes of me going to need reading and math?”

  “Is that your opinion, or Sarn’s?”

  He shrugged. “Both, maybe.”

  “Tanish!” I sighed. “You don’t want to do this kind of work all your life. It’s too dangerous, and it pays next to nothing.”

  “Like you’d know,” he muttered, looking away.

  “Meaning what?”

  “We don’t all have rich blokes who fancy us,” he said. He regretted it immediately and looked chastened.

  “Willinghouse doesn’t fancy me,” I said. “It’s good work. Useful work. You know that more than anyone.”

  He glanced down, then nodded quickly.

  “Rahvey’s girls are sick,” I said.

  He looked up again, concern in his young face chasing away all the adolescent pretense. “What’s wrong?”

  “Not sure yet. Maybe malaria.”

  Tanish’s lower jaw fell, but he said nothing. He didn’t need to. Malaria was the city’s biggest killer.

  “Who’s sick?” he managed.

  “Not Kalla, but Jadary and Radesh. Aab too. Most of the girls in the Drowning.”

  “Should I visit?” he said.

  “I think they’d like to see you, but don’t get too close.”

  “Why is it just the girls?” he said.

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Good question,” I said. “I’m sure the doctor is wondering the same thing, but I’ll ask when I see him. Thank you. And I have another job for you. Worth a few shillings if you can help me out.”

  He recovered something of his former nonchalance. “Yeah?” he said. “What do you need?”

  “A cove called Kepahler,” I said. “One of the luxorite merchants on Crommerty Street.”

  Tanish raised his eyebrows. This was higher-end stuff than he was used to from me.

  “What about him?” he said.

  “I want to know where he goes and who he talks to,” I said. “I don’t need a strict schedule, but if he is visiting places other than his shop and his house, I want to know about it. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said. “This about Willinghouse?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “They’re saying—”

  “Trial hasn’t begun yet,” I said, cutting him off. I didn’t need to hear the gang’s speculations on how long it would be before my employer was hanged as a traitor.

  “Might not be a trial,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He flipped open the evening edition of the Clarion, pushed it toward me, and tapped the lead story with his finger.

  MUHAPI DETAINED, said the headline. I read hurriedly, anxiously, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. “After addressing a crowd in Ruetta Park this afternoon, Aaron Muhapi, black activist, was detained by security forces in accord with new provisions to the Laws and Ordinances of the City of Bar-Selehm passed by the coalition government. At the time of going to press, it was not clear how long Muhapi and similar revolutionary elements could be held.”

  I looked up, dazed by what felt like a shift in the earth beneath my feet.

  “You want to watch yourself,” said Tanish. “I don’t think your powerful connections are going to help if you get in trouble. The opposite, in fact.”

  He looked worried, doubtful, so I nodded and managed a smile.

  “I’ll watch my step,” I said.

  “Right,” he agreed quickly. “And, Ang?”

  “What?”

  “Your sister’s kids. Aab, Radesh, Jadary, and the rest. They going to be all right?”

  “They have a good doctor looking after them, so, yeah, I hope so.”

  He nodded, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, as if he knew we were both sidestepping what might yet be a very dark reality.

  * * *

  I WOULD HAVE GONE back to the Drowning even without the conversation with Tanish, but now the need to see my sister’s children again burned hot within me. I didn’t really want to spend money on the underground, not knowing if my income from Willinghouse would ever restart, but the lamplighters were already out, and I didn’t fancy walking through the west end of town alone after dark. The city had an urgent, manic feel, as if things that had been simmering unsaid and unacted upon for years were now coming to the surface. Richter’s ascent to the highest office in the land had unleashed something foul that had been too ashamed to show itself before. Now there was scrawl in chalk and paint all over the town: WHITES FIRST, LANI OUT, BLACKS GO HOME. And worse, of course. Much worse. I used to fear pickpockets and deviants, drunks, gangs, and traffickers above the snakes and spiders that were always around. I still did, but now I got to add the fine, upstanding white citizens who saw the rise of Heritage as a cue to stop pretending that blacks and coloreds were real people.

  I was safer on the train. I counted the coins in my purse to be sure I could make it back and wondered how awkward it would be to ask Dahria for money.

  Pretty awkward, I decided, but I may have to swallow my pride and do it anyway. It might even amuse her, which not much else had done lately. I smiled to myself, then remembered where I was going and why.

  It was dark by the time I reached the Drowning. That slowed me down, since there were no street lamps out there, and I didn’t want to step on anything lethal. Inside the first makeshift huts and tents, a ring-tailed genet went skittering over a corrugated iron roof, the sound so loud and echoing that for a moment I thought it was something much larger, like a baboon or even a weancat.

  The sick tent was dark and quiet. Rahvey came to meet me, looking flustered.

  “Where’s the doctor?” I asked.

  “He went for more medicine.”

  “Quinine?” I said. “Is it helping?”

  She shook her head, and I saw something in her face that was more than grief and worry. She looked gray and hollow.

  “You’re sick,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I have to stay with the girls.”

  “Why is it just girls?” I asked, remembering Tanish’s remark.

  She scowled and shook her head, as if I were being willfully irrele
vant.

  “It just is. Girls are weaker, I suppose,” she said.

  “Not in my experience,” I remarked. “Men just like you to think that.”

  “Don’t start,” she said.

  “No,” I replied. “I’m sorry. I just … The boys don’t attend Bertha’s classes, right?”

  “No. They work. Why? You think they caught something off her?”

  I gave her a quick look, and it was her turn to look abashed.

  “I didn’t mean…” she began, but abandoned the thought, looking suddenly weary and desperately sad.

  “The classes still happen down by the river, yes?” I said.

  “You think it’s something they caught down there? Something in the water, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “No,” she said, not unkindly. “No one does. But it is getting worse. Three more children today, and one of the women who has been bringing them food.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “The doctor said we shouldn’t let anyone go in who doesn’t need to be there. Not till he knows how you catch it.”

  I hung my head, eyes squeezed shut, feeling defeated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Not your fault.”

  I wasn’t sure she really thought that. If Bertha or the classes were at the heart of this, then maybe it was my fault. Those had been my idea. I had set them up to try and improve the girls’ chances later in life.

  Nicely done, I thought, bitterly.

  “Your friend is here to see you,” she said. “I told him to wait at the temple. You know, for safety.”

  “Tanish?”

  “No, the Mahweni.”

  “Mnenga?” I said, astonished. “He’s here?”

  “Came for you. A few of them. Not sure it’s good, having them around the Drowning. Not what with everything that’s happening in the city. People might not understand.”

  She avoided my eyes, her tone caught between shame and defiance.

  “I’ll find him,” I said, my heart a little lighter at the prospect. “I’ll come back soon.”

  “I know,” she said. “What they are saying about Willinghouse—”

  “It’s not true,” I said.

  “No. I thought not. Will that matter?”

  I wanted to sweep the question away with something certain about truth and justice, but the words stuck in my throat.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She nodded thoughtfully, as if this was no more than she had suspected. “Funny,” she said, with a bleak smile. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but I suppose he really is a Lani after all.”

  With that she returned to the heart of the tent where one of the little bodies was retching into a bowl in the dark.

  * * *

  I FOUND MNENGA IN exactly the spot I had known he would be, the place only yards from Papa’s memorial stone, where I had first met him. He was not alone, but he embraced me as if he were, beaming and whispering his pleasure at seeing me as I clung to him, tears running down my face. I wasn’t sure why I was weeping. I suppose I felt safe with him, even with others watching warily, and all the feelings I had been holding back, the rising sense of failure and calamity burst out as soon as he folded me in his arms.

  I had expected the others to be his herder brothers, but they were not, and though it was too late for self-consciousness, I stepped away from him with a sense of having stumbled into something wholly unexpected. There were two older women and another man, all in their sixties; a striking, high-cheekboned woman in her late twenties; and a boy about my own age. They were all black and wore the woven colorful skirts of the Unassimilated Tribes with rich collars, belts, and necklaces of beads. The women were bare-breasted and had their hair piled in narrow basket-weave towers on their heads. The young man carried a hide shield and long assegai spear, while Mnenga himself had three of the shorter kind they called iklwa. They regarded me with frank interest but absolute composure and dignity, so that I was embarrassed, as if I had inadvertently stepped into the presence of royalty. Perhaps I had.

  They were sitting formally and incongruously on what I first took to be a pair of long couches, but then saw were trunks not unlike the tea chest by which the assassin had been smuggled into the Parliament House. Behind them, steaming softly, were a pair of oxen with horns a yard or more across, and the cart they pulled. This was not simply a visit from a friend who missed me. This was a delegation.

  “These are from my village,” he said, indicating two of the three elders and rattling off their names so quickly that I did not catch them, “and these are from another village. She is a kind of princess,” he said, nodding to the younger woman.

  “And the young man?” I asked.

  “He is a guard. Not important,” said Mnenga, promptly grinning and translating for the others. The boy laughed, but the others’ smiles were small, restrained. “He is my cousin.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “We came to talk. To many people. But we wanted to see you first.”

  “Why me?”

  “We have something to show you.”

  He turned and spoke to the others in his own language, and they rose and led me in sad and silent procession to the oxcart where another long box lay. Between them, they lifted it down, saying nothing, their manner and dress lending the whole a stately and formal quality that unnerved me a little. I gave Mnenga a sharp look.

  “What is it?” I asked, not sure that I wanted to see inside.

  “We found him in the mountains.”

  “Him?” I said. “Who?”

  The other man had worked the buckles free of the straps that held the box closed, and now he raised the long lid. The man inside was white, casually but respectably suited, and in his forties. His body had been decked with wildflowers, presumably by them.

  I did not know him. He was dead, and there was a small rusty stain in the center of his breast where the shirt had a straight cut perhaps an inch across.

  “Shot?” I asked.

  “I do not think so,” said Mnenga. “Look.”

  He made a gesture, as if asking the corpse for permission, and then unfastened the two shirt buttons closest to the stain. The blood was crusted around a slit-like hole that matched the cut in the shirt. It was thicker than a conventional knife blade, and the dark discoloration around it looked like a bruise. There was no scorching, no powder burns, and no cauterization, such as might have been caused by a hot bullet.

  “A spear?” I asked, nodding toward the one he carried.

  He shook his head fervently, and I began to guess why they had come to me. They did not want to be blamed for a white man’s death.

  “Spear tip is wider,” he said, knowing what I was thinking.

  I nodded, then turned the hands. The fingertips of the right were blackened with something like ink, and the palms had no calluses.

  A professional man, then, not a laborer or farmer. But not a businessman or politician either, judging by the suit. His shoes were solidly made but not designed for bush walking, and their soles were badly worn. A city man, but not a rich one. I touched his cold cheek and felt stubble: not beard, exactly, but what a man gets when he does not shave for several days.

  “Where did you find him?” I asked.

  “Near my village,” he said. “If we had not found him, the hyenas would have taken him.”

  I nodded, trying to look grateful but wondering why this was my problem. I had enough to think about.

  “My people are afraid of your police,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. Did he have anything with him? A bag? Suitcase?”

  Mnenga shook his head.

  “That makes no sense,” I muttered, knowing that I was being sucked into the mystery of the thing. “A city bloke out in the brush with no luggage? Did you check his pockets?”

  “Yes. Nothing,” said Mnenga, apologetic. They were all watching me ea
rnestly as if I was about to do something remarkable that would somehow make this all right.

  “That means robbery, or suicide,” I said. “No weapon found with him, though, so robbery. No signs of wear on his trousers that suggest he was riding, and again the shoes would be wrong. So he was out in the bush on foot. Who would…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. Instead I opened the flap of his jacket and felt inside, first one side, then the other. The interior pockets were, as Mnenga said, empty, but I felt the glossy fabric of the lining, working around the back and trying to ignore the face of the dead man.

  “Lift him,” I said.

  Mnenga and the young man half rolled the corpse, and I quickly smoothed my hands over the inside of the jacket till I found the bulge I was looking for. I drew my knife and slit the silky material just enough to peel it back and produce a slim packet sown into the lining of the jacket for emergencies. I opened it and found what I had expected: a few pound notes, a single gold sovereign, and a carefully folded paper. It was the personal credentials of a man identified as Arthur Besland, and the top of the paper was embossed with a familiar masthead, which read Bar-Selehm Standard.

  I had found Sureyna’s missing foreign correspondent.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE NEXT MORNING, I went to see Andrews at the police station by myself. Mnenga’s companions clearly did not wish to enter the city, which came as something of a relief. I did not want to have to explain to the women that they would have to cover up or be arrested for indecency. Even in the Drowning, people would stare. I told them that a police ambulance would come to take the body to the morgue and then I left them. I suspected that they would stand watch over the coffin until the police were in sight, but that the officers would find the body of Arthur Besland alone.

  I did not speak to the inspector, but left a note for him saying exactly where to go and included the journalist’s papers. That task complete, I went on foot via Javisha to Szenga Square and the ornamented facade of the Standard’s offices. I met Sureyna in the lobby, loaded down, with her reticule over her shoulder so she could manhandle a large cardboard box of books and papers, writing utensils, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces. Her face already matched my mood. I had been thinking all the way over how to say it, worrying my approach, since I did not know how well my friend had known the dead man, but now that it came to it, I could think of nothing to present but the unvarnished truth.