“Who’s this Yamauchi?” Sluizhe growled, spidering in his seat.
“The Governor of Lamaroon, and also a near monopolist in the lucrative business of exporting pharmaceuticals from the Likreky. I distributed, bartered, and sold shipments of dazeflower and cocaine.”
“That you had delivered to Emily!” Sluizhe snarled. “If I had known what was in those parcels—stupefying—illegal—you must have deceived her. She would never have agreed else.”
“She said, and I quote, ‘Oh, goody, Harrish, I’ve always wanted to try getting high, but none of my friends here know any dealers,’” Azekawa retorted. “And now I myself am to be reduced once more to the scuttling, footling existence of a dealer.” Suppressed fury escaped from between his teeth like steam from a boiler. He attempted to turn the hiss into a sigh. “Shed a tear for Ambition, who lies fallen! That is, if Crispin and Yamauchi will have me back again!”
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the proof of the pudding is under the crust,” Crispin said in Burns’s style. “Don’t worry. You weren’t a bad operator.”
Azekawa twisted one wrist a little, as if checking his watch. Crispin’s blood froze. He remembered that Azekawa’s mind was probably running along entirely different lines, running for dear life, out on thin ice with Sluizhe’s fury and Kuroi’s shadowy vengeance following him like wildfire. The Mime’s head was bowed, but Crispin could see his eyes: they were hard green marbles of determination. Crispin glanced at the windows. Sunlight fell through them yellowly. The smoking room and the dayroom upstairs were on opposite sides of the house, but it was afternoon and the sun had started its westward plunge. A carriage clattered swiftly past in the street at the front of the house. A child laughed and a woman shouted. The inside of the house was silent. The servants had learned long ago to keep out of the way when their mistresses engaged in a screaming match.
Mistresses? One mistress, perhaps. And one—? The gender of Belinda’s true self put a whole different spin on things.
He’s a gawky toad. But when did that ever stop a beautiful girl? She’s two beautiful girls rolled into one, and he’s got the package all wrapped up.
“It really is a pity,” Azekawa insisted mournfully, overplaying his hand. “Perhaps 1 shall send Emily a present from the south, in plain wrapping.”
“Wait a minute,” Burns said suddenly. “If you drop out of sight, what’s going to happen to me? I haven’t been told shit.”
Mickey chose that moment to try the cigar. Blue, thick smoke puffed from his nose, and he sagged over the sofa arm, coughing. Azekawa mustered a beaming smile. “My dear David. We have worked together so long and so fruitfully. What a pity that our partnership has to end.” He reached over the arm of the throne, making a grab for Burns’s hands, but Burns danced away, as Crispin had seen him dance away in bar brawls at The Dolphin, as he had danced away on the tenth, on the steps. “But how wonderful it is that I have a successor ready and waiting, panting even, to step into my shoes!”
“You gotta be joking,” Burns said.
“Come now, David. Neither of us has forgotten the third-story balcony of the old fortress. And we both know that my successor has to be either you or Spitz—”
“Spitz?” Burns snorted. “He might as well be a uniform. Crackling and popping with original ideas, that’s our Spitz!”
Azekawa smiled, and spite seethed in his regretful tone. “Then I will go to the underground fortress tonight and name him as my successor. However, I am afraid Kuroi does not share your high opinion of him. I am afraid that, in addition, whatever recommendation I make he will instantly countermand. And I greatly fear that his own choice is you. Never forget that he considers himself a judge of character!”
Burns wheeled around and around, baring his teeth in amazement. His hands roamed like rats through the air, scampering along invisible shelves, fingers working as if they might close at any moment on the death-dealing Sword of the Shadows, of whose existence his mother had told him, which Burns had mentioned to Crispin only to point out that he didn’t believe in it—but as soon as Crispin heard the fable, he knew it described what the Wraith-blooded man wanted more than anything else in the world. Rather than wealth and leisure, Burns would have the ultimate weapon, the ultimate power to raze. Then perhaps the fire burning inside him would die down. Guns weren’t enough for him. He was still burning, spitting words out like sparks. “How dare you do this to me, Hideo? Twice! Two of you! I’ll starve before I take your fucking job like a hand-me-down—I’ll hide in Xerenoche for the rest of my life before I get executed on suspicion of just knowing you!”
“It’s me they’re going to come after, David!” Azekawa pleaded. “Me and no one else! You are all safe! They have no idea where I—
“Then why,” Mickey said suddenly, “did you get here this morning late and out of breath? And you didn’t drive. You walked. I heard no engine or horses.”
“Charlotte Goldtoes my ass!” Burns shouted.
“I thought to myself even at the time,” Mickey gasped, “that’s how a man looks when he’s had a hard time losing a tail.”
“Wait, David.” Crispin was still intent on setting things to rights. High on the updraft of Yamauchi’s weeks-old news, he felt he could see the solution to everyone’s problems laid out below like a landscape, like light green daze fields scattered through the jungle. It had the crazy, freehand logic of a nightmare. “You don’t have to take his job. You and Dolph are ideally set up for distribution!”
“I’m with Mick on that. I’m not touching that shit.”
“You’ll come around!” Crispin laughed. “When you see me drinking Goldschlager at The Dolphin and paying with the real stuff, two, maybe three months from—”
“I always knew you were a bootlicker, Kateralbin. And I wouldn’t stick my hand up the asses you’re fist-fucking now, not for all the titles our friend the Lesser has in his Significant ring-book! You can keep your Lamaroon governors, your—”
“Good Lord, old chap, I do believe you’ve gone soft in the head!” Crispin said furiously in English. “I used to think you were ambitious!”
Burns stared at him, uncomprehending. “I wasn’t told shit.”
“And that is why I am trying to tell you now how I came to be in this sorry pass!” Azekawa pleaded.
“And 1 maintain that when the Disciples are at our door, you will still be trying to justify your foolishness!” Sluizhe cartwheeled out of his chair. Azekawa scrambled to his feet to get away from the older Mime. “You have clearly researched Hosoke’s past in creditable detail. A pity you paid less attention to his personality. You have once again attempted to impersonate a man whose character is to yours as day is to night. And this time, he was the General Prosecutor of the Bureau of War Crimes! Did that glamorous title blind you to the fact that where he was retiring, you are boastful? That where he held himself in humble esteem, you are the most arrogant creature ever to be born Mime?” Sluizhe’s voice scaled up into Belinda’s falsetto. The high mellifluous tones sounded eerie, emerging from that gangly, paunchy, deformed young man, as the note of a flute might sound emerging from a quaking hole in the ground. Around and around the daemonskin-upholstered throne the two Mimes circled, Azekawa skittering back to stay out of the reach of Sluizhe’s poking finger as the apoplectic frog tumbled toward him, crackling.
Azekawa yelped, “But I had good reason to—Azekawa had just been demoted when I replaced him! Obviously his grief for his wife had worked on him, like a cancer, and started to affect his professional competence! Any change in his personality would naturally be attributed either to that, or to the strains of his new position.”
“—thought he—you—he—I thought he asked to be transferred to the Bureau,” Burns broke in. “War crimes investigation would have suited the Hideo Azekawa I knew down to the ground. He detested Ferupe. He detested all Ferupians. He would’ve liked to round up every man who’d ever stolen a biscuit from the quartermaster and put the lot of us against the wall.
I bet he would’ve done, too.” He snapped his fingers, grinning. Crispin had seldom seen his eyes angrier. “And Kuroi would’ve given him the go-ahead. Kuroi was waiting to give you the go-ahead! Kuroi thought you would conduct an all-out inquisition—and instead we’ve been investigating ‘interesting’ cases at the rate of two or three a week! I knew you—he—I knew you’d softened up! I knew something was wrong!”
“I don’t think ‘softened up’ is a fair evaluation. I hired you, as I’d promised,” Azekawa protested feebly. Crispin realized that the Mime was getting his real self and his Azekawa role hopelessly mixed up. “Was that ‘softening up’?”
“Hell yeah!” Burns kept grinning. “If you hadn’t hired me, Harrish, you’d be dead now. I was so pissed off at Azekawa I was planning to stage a reprise. Davey the Pistol-Packing Wraith Part Two. I know my way around the fortress like the back of my hand—there’s not many Kirekunis even who can say that—” He laughed crazily. “You’d have suffocated!”
Azekawa checked his watch again—as if he were timing Burns’s rant, Crispin thought in disbelief. “They will be here in an hour!” he cried wretchedly. “I have been trying to tell you!”
“Stupid,” Sluizhe grunted. “Stupid. Out. Harrish. Stupid. Out. Stupid—”
There was no telling how long he would have gone on; whether, at last, he would have spontaneously exploded, spattering red gobbets all over the museum-worthy decor, or simply subsided. Crispin stood up, stuffing Yamauchi’s letter into his pocket. “Azekawa—Harrish—whatever you want to be called now, you’re a bloody fool. You’ve put all of our lives—and Emily’s, too—at risk just because you didn’t know your own limits, and wanted a chance to justify fucking up. There’s no justifying it. Still, it does you credit that you’ve left us some room to maneuver. Has anybody left any letters around? Personal belongings? No? Then all of us who don’t belong here had better clear the hell out.”
“That means all of you,” Sluizhe spat, eyes bulging. He seemed unaware that in the scheme of things, he had no more right to be in this house than Crispin or any of them did. He made shooing movements and ran pale hands through his jet-black shock of hair. “I’m too old to be strip-searched.” Was he, too, losing track of his selves? “Damn you, Harrish. Stupid. Just think of the mess they’ll leave behind them. They always do. And what are the neighbors going to say?”
“Bit late to worry about that now, Belinda,” Crispin said. “Azekawa—Tallwood—Harrish—I don’t care where you go. You can come with Mickey and me if you want, but you’d better change back to—” He blinked. In those few seconds, Azekawa had already changed. He emerged bashfully from behind the daemonskin throne, where Crispin hadn’t seen him hide: a cumulonimbus giant of regrettable solidity, his hair flaming no brighter than his cheeks. Azekawa’s neat, shabby suit hung off him in rags that barely concealed his genitals in their orange nest.
“That’s no bloody good,” Crispin said, breathing sharpgreen.
Tallwood scowled and stamped back behind the chair. “I haven’t any clothes! They’re all at the fortress! Don’t anyone look!”
“See if I don’t,” Burns said apropos of nothing, violently, “see if I don’t go for his job after all, and do it better than he ever did. I couldn’t have topped the real Azekawa, I’ll admit that, but now what does Kuroi think of Azekawa? He thinks he’s a dithering dilettante. And how about after he vanishes in suspicious circumstances? See if I don’t put his memory to shame. General Prosecutor Burns! A hundred years from now, they won’t be able to talk about the War Crimes Bureau without talking about me.”
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Crispin said with heartfelt impatience. “What would Dolph say to Mickey’s paying us a visit? My emergency funds should reach me in—” Belatedly, he remembered that any monies Yamauchi sent would be directed to Azekawa at the underground fortress. If they were confiscated and their provenance investigated, it could lead to the worst scandal in Kirekune’s long, blood-spotted history as a colonial power. Damn you, Tallwood * * * He’d have to do it himself, preempt the funds before they reached the occupation’s thinking men, a bit of the old squeeze-and-slither should do the trick, and if not he’d have to start from ground zero, without Yamauchi. In his mind’s eye, he saw a chain of depots as vigilantly secured and lavishly stocked as Tallwood’s safe houses in Naftha, and his, all his. The prospect made him almost cheerful. Who said Mr. Nakunatta never allowed you a second crack at fame and fortune? “Just for a few days, David!” he wheedled.
“What, are you fucking crazy? You think The Dolphin is a hospital? I’m off. I’ve got my future prospects to consider.”
“Many thanks for your gracious hospitality,” Mickey said sarcastically.
Burns halted at the door.
“Significance, Mick!”
“Leave me alone. I wouldn’t set foot inside your grubby little gambling den if you begged me.” Mickey thrust himself to his feet, pushing Crispin away. He frowned horribly but managed to stand erect. “I’ve had enough of sitting here like a dutiful son.”
Burns’s eyes looked like black boreholes.
“Stupidout! Stupid. Out.” Over by the window, Sluizhe had started his litany again.
“This isn’t what I envision as the rest of my life. I’m starting for Okimachi. Crispin, if you’ll just come with me to the staging post on the—”
“Tonight? You’ll never get a seat at such short notice. The stagecoaches are overpriced bonebreakers, anyway, and most of the coachmen are in with the bandits,” Burns said instantly. “It’ll be your death warrant. Can’t you afford a car?”
“I can’t afford the risk of traveling on the trunk road. Not with the military roadblocks.”
“I keep forgetting you’re on the outs with the blackcoats, too.” Burns made an explosive noise of annoyance. “All right, fuck it, you can stay with me until the fuss dies down, then you can get on a steamer.”
Mickey shut his eyes and shuddered, whether with relief or distaste at the thought of staying with Burns—or possibly, Crispin thought, horror at the prospect of sailing on the Joy of Okimachi again, retracing their journey backwards after everything that had happened, picking out the stitches, opening the seams or snarling them into an inoperable cat’s cradle.
“Here’s my offer,” he said to Crispin. “Once I get home, I’ll write to David. If you’re still in Kingsburg, he can give it to you. If not, I trust the two of you will still be in contact.”
“That’s for sure,” Crispin and Burns said almost simultaneously.
Mickey nearly smiled. “Then, if you still want, if the gig’s still on, and if you calculate that it’ll be profitable, feel free to start sending me shipments. I’ll handle the Okimachi distribution; that’s all. I won’t expand into the country. Okimachi is what I know, Okimachi is where I have contacts.” His tail was twitching. He addressed Crispin directly. A tic jumped at the corner of his mouth. “Does that seem fair?”
“No one’s press-ganging you into the network, Mick,” threatened a familiar voice. Crispin turned and saw the lean, brown-skinned man with curly hair like his own, the real Harrish Acanaguan, leaning insouciantly against the daemonskin chair. He wore a supercilious smile and the rags to which Tallwood’s brief occupancy had reduced Azekawa’s clothes. On him, they looked very nearly fashionable. “Absolutely not. No suggestion of brute force. None whatsoever.”
“There’ll be more than a suggestion if we don’t stop gabbing and leg it!” shouted Burns, edging toward the door again. His resolve seemed to veer between heroism and self-preservation as quickly as the altimeter of a light aircraft in combat.
“Who mentioned force?” Mickey said. “I’m volunteering. Signing on. It’ll be my pleasure. I’ve had occasion for dispute with the local dealers in my district—I’ll be positively overjoyed to put them out of business. You can ship nizhny to me, can’t you? That’s a popular favorite around where I live.”
Crispin found his voice. “As much of it as you can move. According
to Yamauchi, fifteen more diins have started producing since I left.”
Mickey nodded. He still held the chewed butt of Burns’s cigar. He tossed it across the room and spoke with a smile in his voice. “Besides, I think a connection to Crispin’s employer may be of some use in an area where I’ve, well, previously lacked leverage. If I can pull that off—let’s just say I’ll sell my Dragyonne Street premises and go into distribution full-time. That’s a promise.”
“Mick—” Crispin started.
“And by all means, we wish you the luck you’ll need to be able to keep that promise!” Harrish guffawed dismissively. “However, this is taking on shades of carousing while Rome burns.” He shouldered the muttering Sluizhe out of his way and made for the door. “I fear that as far as I am concerned, it is adieu for now. Two Mimes fleeing on foot through Rotterys would be somewhat conspicuous, would they not, Kateralbin? And what if they thought I was you? Perish the thought. Don’t worry, I know where to find you. All of—”
The front door slammed. Windows must have shivered at both ends of the street. In the hall: Nadine’s soft voice. Footsteps approached from the front of the house. “Too late now!” Burns groaned. Mickey gasped. His tail lashed once and he collapsed on the carpet. His ragged breathing echoed in Crispin’s ears like a taunt straight out of the void. The footsteps came down the hall as fast as automatic rifle fire.
“Oh, dear,” Harrish said. He whirled and flung himself at the window. He wrestled with the sash, then gave up and elbowed the panes one after another. Glass shattered. Harrish wiped bloodied hands on the curtains and started wrenching out the pane frames. His eyes had darkened from icy green to the color of pine forests flecked with snow. This, Crispin realized, was what the Mime thought of as an adventure.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 41
