“That’s only to hide it. Doesn’t work. At least not on me. Are you absolutely positive you didn’t detect anything? Not even when the coach crashed and Emily landed in your lap?”
“No.”
“That’s why I think it must be to do with being a trickster. It’s not my imagination. And there’s nothing else that…makes me unique. For some reason, the—the Wraith blood in me gives me…” Crispin hesitated for several moments, but when he continued, his voice was as flat as before. “A little daemonic knowledge. Like the Enclave kids, if they’d been taught about themselves, instead of about operatic theater. So.”
“So the Mimes…smell different to you?”
“It’s very distinctive. I think of it as…sharpgreen. Like when you break a dandelion stalk in half. But not really.”
The comparison meant nothing to Mickey, who’d spent his flowersniffing years on the city mountain, where square feet of garden were so rare nothing was allowed to grow in them except roses and ornamental fruit trees. He glanced at the wildflowers scattered along the edges of the track, but if there had been any dandelions, he wouldn’t have known. The noon sun had grown hot. He took his overcoat off and carried it bundled in a coil of his tail.
“You can smell it on their breath. 1 think it’s something they eat.”
“This is getting less and less plausible,” Mickey said.
“Don’t believe me then,” Crispin said inattentively.
“But why?” Mickey’s cry shimmered like a rainbow in the haze of his own disbelief, his yearning to believe. “Why? Why the fuck are they all after you? You’ve never told me! You’re so damn secretive!”
“You never asked,” Crispin said, unfairly.
“If you had any sort of decency, I wouldn’t have had to!”
“Well, then…” Crispin drew his gaze back from the distance and said with a straight face, “They’re cannibals. I’m sharpgreen. It’s like a deer hunt, see—good sport, then good eating.”
Mickey brayed so loudly his throat hurt.
“Keep your voice down.”
“I’m in just as much danger as you are. Do you think they’ll ask me nicely to move out of the way before they shoot you? As a matter of fact, I’m in more danger. At least you know what they want out of you!”
“They want me dead. Does knowing that make me any better off?”
“What did you do to them? The Tausseroys?”
“Nothing. I told you. Don’t let them get up your nose. They’re just running interference.”
“That wasn’t how it looked when they tried to garrotte us on the Abbatoir Road!”
“And here we are alive and well, thanks to Messrs. FN Browning and Company.”
The Karanda intruded on Mickey’s awareness like desire, like an erection strapped painfully tight against his torso. He wanted to fire it in the air and startle the Mimes from their hiding places. The immobile green chaos of the fields, the near-infinite capacity for concealment in the tall grass, overloaded his senses. He felt like a beetle on a vast floor, scurrying this way and that from an invisible stamping foot. Agoraphobia and distrust reacted vilely together. He wondered if he, too, smelled bad, like fear. “I want to know what the hell you did. It must have been pretty bad or these—these shapeshifters wouldn’t be chasing you all over the fucking continent. If you can’t tell me, even now, after everything we’ve been through together, I’ll have to conclude—”
“What, that I don’t love you?” Crispin jeered without much spite.
“That they’re government agents, which would mean there’s a secret contract between Significance and the Mim”—anger stimulated Mickey’s imagination—“and the Bureau of War Crimes is paying them to take care of the backlogged blacklist, which would mean it all goes back to the Raw, which presupposes that the occupying government hasn’t used the lists of Ferupian war criminals for kindling, and begs the conclusion that it’s all my fault for having got you to desert in the first place. I should’ve ignored my better instincts and let you go like a sheep to the slaughter. That was what you wanted, after all, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, Significance, Mick, that’s ancient history! But you’re partly right—these particular Mimes are government agents. In a way. I think.”
Mickey made himself wait.
“When I was in Lamaroon I worked for the Kirekuni governor. I told you that. Well, it wasn’t in an official capacity. He…ah…he had a sideline. A hobby, you could call it. His real passion. Exporting pharmaceuticals is like investing in the free market, except you don’t just sit back and watch your savings grow, you have your people out there every day. We had people scattered across the Likreky and southern Ferupe and southern Kirekune and Izte Kchebuk’ara and Cype. And we had middlemen whose job was to find out what everyone was doing and report back. One of those was me. That’s how I came to know Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista.”
Mickey winced at the name that he’d come to think of as code for his own gullibility.
“Later on, I stayed in Lamaroon and consulted the governor on internationalization projects. I always could pick up foreign languages; remember when you taught me Kirekuni?”
“Illegal pharmaceuticals, I suppose.”
“No, quinine!” Crispin rolled his eyes.
“I had the impression you were doing something for the civil service.”
“I was. Only, Okimachi didn’t know.”
“Sounds like plush. What on earth, I wonder, could have gone wrong?”
“Yamauchi—the governor—he’s something of a legend in the networks. That’s partly because he never gets his hands dirty. His political and international ambitions mean he has to keep an impeccable profile. That’s where I came in.”
“You were his hit man.”
“That’s putting it strongly. I usually delegated jobs. You want to get in as many buffers as possible, see—unless you’re greedy, like Tomichi Minami, who was secretary of the interior. He wanted a piece of the pie, and he was prepared to go to any lengths to get it. And what happened? He was executed in Jevanary for conspiracy to murder. If you’re smart, you give your target the rope and let him hang himself. Otherwise, you let your rivals do the job for you. You only put out a contract yourself in extreme circumstances. Are you following?” Crispin spoke abstractedly, as if this was all beside the point.
Mickey fumbled for his cigarettes.
“Well, I think Yamauchi considers this extreme circumstances.”
“What did you do,” Mickey said, striving for sarcasm, “abuse the stock in trade?”
“I don’t touch that shit. None of it.” Crispin continued in a flat, bored tone, as if he’d turned this all over in his head so many times it no longer held any interest for him. “Tomichi Minami was Yamauchi’s most immediate rival. Yamauchi fixed it so he’d be tried for killing an American businessman. I was the one who made the accusation, and then I had to testify at the trial. I lied my ass off. I had a few thugs to back me up, but they couldn’t keep their stories straight, so Minami was sentenced to death on the basis of my testimony. After that, of course, I was a risk to everyone. All Minami’s friends know perfectly well I lied—they could just kill me, or if they were smart, they could force me to spill the beans to Okimachi, and then bang would go Yamauchi’s pharmaceuticals business, his governorship, and all his ambitions. So you see how it was a toss-up who’d come after me first—the Minami faction or Yamauchi himself.”
Mickey exhaled a stream of smoke.
“After that Mime approached me at the fairgrounds, I thought it had to be the Minami faction. Minami didn’t have many connections in the areas I worked, but he did have one big asset—he’d managed to get in with the Japanese dealers. They operate in Asia, in competition with the Brits, and I don’t know how closely they’re tied to the government over there. It doesn’t matter. Point is, nowhere’s closer to Japan than the Mim. And…well, I wanted it to be the Minami faction, because I still believed in Yamauchi’s goodwill. Could I have one of
those?” Cigarette smoke was left behind in the still air as they walked. “I didn’t think he’d take precautions. At the most, I thought he’d let me go to ground and stay there for the rest of my life, scared to poke my head up. Besides, it just isn’t his style to put out contracts. But like I said, I suppose this constitutes an emergency. I know all about him, so he has to nobble me before Minami’s people do. Anyway, it has to be him—no one else’s network is deep enough to encompass a hunt like this. No one else has the funds. And what’s more, Yamauchi does business with Mimes, too. I didn’t think he knew it—but I can’t afford to underestimate him.”
“What I don’t understand is why you lied at that trial.” Disgusted and profoundly disappointed, Mickey failed to keep his voice level. “I never thought you would do something like that—Significance, perjury, that’s practically worse than murder—fox anyone! I know you wouldn’t do it for me! And this governor, this Yamauchi, he’s a dealer! Forgive me, but I seem to recall your saying after the Fire that dealers were responsible for everything, the cults, the plot to halt the advance, everything, that they weren’t fit to live. And this Yamauchi—he’s one of them—and you threw your life away for him. I won’t even ask why you were working for him in the first place. Maybe he was holding something over your head.” Mickey didn’t believe it for a minute. “I won’t say that that makes you one of them—”
“But it does.” Crispin didn’t go on the defensive. He just smiled into the air. “In the interests of fairness, though, Yamauchi’s not evil. Just egotistical. He made me rich. He bought me a house in the best part of Redeuiina, got my wife the entree to society…fucked her, too, but that’s beside the point…and the things I had to do for him, well, they were nothing I hadn’t done in the service of the Queen.”
Mickey refused to be deflected. “Egotistical doesn’t have to mean evil—you’re living proof.”
“Thanks, though I’m not sure you’re right.”
“But I swear, the dealers who turned my sister into a manic-depressive, nizhny-addicted compulsive shopper are evil, evil, evil.” He wouldn’t think about the fact that it had been he who first introduced Fumie to them. “Okimachi is crawling with them! I’ve tried to buy them off. I’ve tried public appeals to Greater Significance. I’ve even tried going after them myself. But all I’ve learned is that evil—evil, evil—has an unsurpassed ability to blend into the woodwork.”
“I learned early on not to make moral judgments about the job. It’s not as if I was out there myself, anyway. Like I said, I usually delegated.”
“That doesn’t make you any less a—”
“Oh, come on, Mick!” At last Crispin sounded annoyed. “Your indoctrination is showing! You served on the Raw, too, you’ve killed as many men as I have. Face-to-face or not, it doesn’t matter. Haven’t you learned by now that the individual life doesn’t make a shred of difference so long as it’s not yours?” He looked thoughtful. “Most of it was a service to society, in fact, looking at it one way or another.”
“If you could see Fumie now, you wouldn’t say that!”
“Are your domestic problems really our problem right now?”
Mickey was unable to speak for frustration. The track forked and they continued northwest. Crispin hummed a tune, glancing now and then at the sky. He seemed completely unperturbed. Bees snored around the early-flowering brambles that mantled the stone walls on either side of the track. Mickey bit his lip. Moment by moment, Crispin’s past seemed more like what he should have expected. It all fitted: the drift to the wrong side of the law—a far commoner exsoldier’s fate than the civil service—and the step over the line that put it all in jeopardy. In Mickey’s frame of reference, the retribution bearing down on them was extraordinary, and so he’d automatically assumed Crispin had committed a crime as esoteric, as stupendous as the penalty being exacted from him—a crime linked, perhaps, to his strange nightmares or his trickery. But after all, the Mimes were just unlicensed, homicidal versions of Daisuke.
Mickey had scarcely glimpsed the circuslike Significant under-world that Crispin must have entered after Swirling. He himself, beset by responsibilities, had obeyed orders for two years, hoping without hope that if he behaved, they would drag him no closer, show him no more of their teeth. But he’d seen enough in the process to know that the pharmaceuticals trade, in the chaotic aftermath of the victory and Significance’s decision to enter the international economy, had become the flagship of a vast realm of illegal and semilegal profiteering. And his own brushes with Greater Significance’s stinking underbelly, no matter how limited, had impressed upon him with cruel force that just doing your job always involved the possibility of drawing the short straw.
When that happened, attempted escape was de rigueur. Mickey had done it. Crispin had done it, too, and taken the formality too far, as he took everything too far.
But now he seemed resigned.
No, not resigned.
Just not particularly concerned.
As if, contradictory to his own analysis of the situation, he thought nothing was really going to happen.
With some idea of counteracting a fate that seemed to him inevitable, Mickey fumbled out another cigarette. Whatever the secret of Crispin’s detachment was, he didn’t have it. This wasn’t his tragedy! And yet, he, too, was going to be crushed in this stupid chain reaction set in motion by the death of an American businessman. Toppling dominoes, and he was standing under the last one in line. His vision wavered. He was at five thousand feet in enemy airspace with KEs closing out of all four quadrants of a cloudless noon. Crispin said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts, the way he’d used to be able to, “I really am sorry you had to get caught up in all this.”
“I may not have signed on at the beginning, but I came along of my own free will.” Mickey walked faster.
Crispin stopped him with a touch on the arm. “And I’m glad you did.” A small vertical furrow gathered his brows. “If you’d stayed in Kherouge—”
“Did you engineer it so I couldn’t stay in Kherouge?” As soon as the words were out, Mickey regretted them.
“You mean, did I get you arrested? Fuck! Is that what you think? I haven’t got those sort of connections. You got yourself arrested by trusting Sibelye-Enkhoupista with your life story.”
Mickey nodded shortly. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
“I didn’t realize you wanted to stay in Kherouge.”
“Didn’t you?”
They faced each other.
“Oh, no…Then I am sorry. I’m sorry I dragged you down to my level. But I’m still glad you’re here. I mean, you know.” Mickey watched him strain for the cliches, and finally shake his head in irritation. “We go back.”
“I can’t hold a grudge against you,” Mickey said deliberately.
“Don’t be so goddamn forgiving.”
“Just as long as it wasn’t you who got me arrested, you’ve no right to flatter yourself that it’s all your fault. I came because I wanted to. Because I had no choice.” Mickey put his finger against Crispin’s lips, then stepped forward and kissed him. Crispin’s eyes fluttered closed and Mickey had the gratification, as he pulled away, of seeing Crispin’s lips parting expectantly. He thrust his arm around the half-breed’s back, a real armful, something to grab hold of, this man. His stump quivering impotent at his side, he slid his good hand up and down Crispin’s spine, kissing his lips, cheeks, nose, chin, eyes. Paper crackled in Crispin’s inside jacket pocket. The letter from that Millsy character with whom Crispin was obsessed: the shadowy personality of their destination. Licking Crispin’s neck, producing a shiver—that always aroused him whether he wanted it or not (so juck you, Ferupe! Up yours, dandelions!)—Mickey thought: He doesn’t give a shit about the danger because he’s only planning as Jar ahead as reaching Millsy. The man with the answers. A professor? A trickster? Something to do with daemons. It does boil down to daemons. Nothing’s changed. Cris may not have a cageful of performing splinterons anymor
e, but he’s still obsessed. It’s eating him up. The Enclave…what did he learn there? He’s never going to tell me and I—he knew it in a blinding, humiliating moment of relief—I don’t have the courage to ask. He didn’t have the courage to be any more afraid. Not in this country. In the Raw, you’d had the option of buying into the lie that if you died, it would be for a venerable and worthy abstract. Mickey couldn’t bear the thought of closer acquaintance with the grubby nuts and bolts of Crispin’s dilemma.
“I love you, Mick,” Crispin breathed, with apparent passion.
“Oh, Significance, I love you. I love you, I love you…” Completely undone, Mickey kissed him harder, opening a button on his shirt meanwhile. He ducked down to worry a nipple, forcing his hand into the back of Crispin’s trousers. Crispin gasped. The sun warmed Mickey’s back. They were completely alone among the fields. He flicked aside an insect with his tail. The Karanda, shielded by his stump, dug into his abdomen. In their cabin on the Joy of Okimachi, darkness had precluded embarrassment; if you wanted sweetmeats at 3 a.m., a steward brought them when you rang the bell. He had to get Crispin’s attention. Picking a chest hair out of his mouth, he straightened up. As he’d suspected, Crispin’s eyes were open, his expression thoughtful. So faintly it must have been miles away, a town hall bell chimed the hour. It was two.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon…
The winds that will he howling at all hours
And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn…
—Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us”
Long-Legged Heart
10 Maia 1900 A.D. 7:00 A.M.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 32
