“He made us look like fools.”
“We made ourselves look like fools.”
Black trees. Odd fruit. Pissed-off cat. Hallways that still squeaked from wax. The stairwell still collected darkness. But a silence had crept in, too. An emptiness that hadn’t been there before. No sounds of a mother and child. No smells of cooking.
On a hunch, Finch stopped at the fourth floor again. Knocked on the door of the man who had dressed up for Finch’s mild interrogation. Held his badge up to the peephole.
The door creaked open. A Partial stood there. Stockier than the one who had cataloged the crime scene. His face even paler. Red teeth. As if he’d been eating raw meat sloppily. Dressed in black dyed leather, but wore beige boots. Like he’d been caught trying on someone else’s clothes. In the belt around his gut, two holstered guns and a hammer, of all things.
Finch held the badge in front of him.
“I’m the detective on the case in apartment 525,” he said. “Where’s the old man who lives here?”
The Partial considered him for a moment. The glittering black eye was flickering madly. But the rest of him was like a chilled tortoise. Arms at his sides. Almost paralyzed.
“Gone,” he said slowly. Making the syllable linger.
“Gone where?” Finch asked.
“Gone somewhere else,” the Partial said with an effort.
Like you, my friend. Wondered if the flickering eye meant his attention was elsewhere. Reviewing not recording.
A new thought, horrifying him. “Are they all gone?”
The eye stopped flickering. Blinked twice. In a more normal voice the Partial said, “The building has been cleared.”
Cleared how? Escorted out and rehoused? Sent to the camps? Liquidated?
But he didn’t ask, just nodded. Smiled. Stepped back.
The Partial parroted the nod and receded from him into darkness. Shut the door.
Finch stood there a moment. This place was now a Partial stronghold. No witnesses.
He took the stairs to the fifth floor in leaps. As if running fast might prevent the crime that had brought him here. Bring back the old man in the too-tight suit.
The door. The gray cap symbol, glistening and obscene. The hallway. The bedroom, empty. The living room; no sign of the Partial.
The bodies.
Correction. Body.
The gray cap’s body had disappeared.
Finch stood there a moment, brought up short. Trying to process that sudden … lack. Then realized: Heretic must have removed the body. If not, they’d send Finch to the camps. Scapegoat. Returning: the chill that had come over him talking to the red-toothed Partial. It hit him as it hadn’t before. This case was a threat to his life. To the little security he had. His apartment. His relationship with Sintra.
But the man was still there, under a blanket someone had thrown over him. The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling. In the same position. The blue of the preservatives still stippling his features. The man laughed again. Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it.
Finch went over and pulled the blanket back from the man’s face. Sat on the couch, looking at the body. He would have to meet with Heretic soon. The thought unnerved him. Wished now he’d asked Wyte for the whole flask. Wished he could just go home. Find Sintra waiting for him.
“You know what those nonsense words mean,” Finch said to the man. “You know why it’s important.”
Peaceful. The man looked peaceful, to be so dead. How perfectly preserved in the light from the open window. Ignoring how that light changed as it was interrogated by the space between the twinned towers in the distance.
Finch got down on his knees. Searched the body again. Not the careful search of yesterday. Fuck the spore cameras. Fuck the Partial.
Roughly, he rolled the body over and went through the pockets. As if he’d killed the man himself.
There must be something else.
But, no, there wasn’t. Just lint in one pocket. A few bits of sand and gravel, maybe a grain of rice?, in the other.
He began to rip up the fabric. It tore easier than he would’ve thought. Hurting his hands. Red lines on his palms. Aching wrists. Still nothing. No hidden pockets. He forced himself to stop tearing.
The upturned corners of the man’s lips seemed to say, “You’ll never solve me.”
I’m not a detective.
But he would be judged as a detective. Convicted as a detective.
A desert fortress. The HFZ. A phrase. Never lost. Falling from a great height. A gray cap even the gray caps couldn’t identify. An operative from Stockton who was on the same trail. Another operative, probably from Morrow, attacked by Stockton spies and appearing in a dead man’s memories. Now disappeared.
Stark. Bosun. Bliss.
It would drive him mad, he realized. If he let it.
I need a better gun.
Looked at his watch.
5:20.
Time to leave.
Let the horror show begin.
5
Back at the station.
5:50.
No sign of Wyte. The other detectives had left, too, except for Gustat, who was frantically packing up his things. Finch looked at the smaller man with a kind of scorn. Gustat ignored him in his haste. Strange horselike footfalls across the carpet. The croaking bang of the door behind him.
Then it was just Finch.
Soon the curtains at the back of the room would part. Night would truly begin.
Wyte had placed a hasty typo-filled report on Finch’s desk about the situation in Bliss’s apartment. “John Finch” typed at the bottom. Brave of you, Wyte. A blotch of purple obscured a few words in the middle. A smudged green thumbprint on the left corner. Wyte had tried to wipe it away, which just made it worse.
Under it, another sheet, handwritten, with some crude facts about Stark.
“Stark is now the operational head of Stockton’s spy network.”
Stating the obvious. No one started liquidating the competition unless they were already secure in their position.
“He carries a sword.”
Who didn’t, these days? Thought about pulling his own sword out. As he did several times a week, when he thought the others weren’t looking.
“He has a taster for his food … He’s a psychopath … He’s been seen…” well, practically everywhere and nowhere, if Wyte’s information was correct.
Nothing solid. Nothing that linked Stark to the case except Bliss saying Stark had asked him about those words they’d found on the scrap of paper. Bellum omnium contra omnes. Wondered what Bliss would’ve said if he’d shown him the symbol too.
Finch kept a stack of cigars in his desk in a box converted to the purpose. He took one out. Trillian brand. Several years old. Common and popular in its day. A little dry now.
Nothing new in this city. Not whiskey. Not cigars. Not people.
The kind of thing his father used to say.
He cut the tip. Used his oil lamp to light it.
The ash was even. The burn slow. He puffed on it, waiting. The congregation will be here soon enough.
His thoughts went back to Wyte’s flask. In a flush of inspiration, Finch went over to Blakely’s desk, opened the top drawer. Sure enough. Something plum-colored in a bottle. Homemade cork. He pulled it off. Took a whiff. Rotgut, but good enough. Took a couple of swigs right from the bottle. His throat burned. His tongue felt numb.