“Now,” he said, as Rehimov pinned Cordelia’s hand to the table. “You have ten fingers, and each finger has three joints. That’s … well, it’s thirty, technically, but the last joint of the thumb is always difficult, or so Rehimov tells me. So let’s say twenty-eight. I thought we’d start with your good hand, and only move on to the broken one if we have to.”
Cordelia realized what he was getting at, and tried to stand. Rehimov sat in her lap, pinning her to the chair, her arm lodged against his ribs. She could feel the grain of the wooden tabletop under her palm, and scrabbled at it, breaking more nails. Rehimov put his own hand over hers, stretching her pinky finger flat. A cold, thin weight came down on her first knuckle.
“Twenty-eight joints,” Van der Joost repeated. “That’s twenty-eight chances to answer one simple question. Who gave you those papers?”
She reeled back, gathering momentum, and slammed her head into Rehimov’s spine. He grunted and gave, but not enough. She was trapped.
“Miss Lehane,” said Van der Joost, irritation creeping into his voice at last. “Patience is not one of my strongest suits. If you think I am toying with you, I suggest you revisit that assumption.”
She couldn’t see Van der Joost nod, or give his silent order, but she felt Rehimov tense, saw his shoulders move. The tip of his knife slid into her knuckle, separating the bones and cutting neatly through the tendons. He did it so quickly, the first of her twenty-eight chances was gone before she even started screaming.
When she subsided into sobs, her cheek resting between Rehimov’s shoulder blades, her tears soaking through his shirt, Van der Joost cleared his throat. He had mastered his irritation, and spoke as calmly as he had before. “So, Miss Lehane,” he said. “Tell me: Who gave you those papers?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY
As he prepared to leave, Aristide opened his tall glass parlor doors onto the balcony so he could listen to the city’s anger. He had friends down there. Lovers. Associates. As he made his final circuit of the flat, he stopped and stared at Baldwin Street.
The crowd had not begun as a riot; it had started with puppets, costumes, songs. Students and artists and actors, the denizens of Baldwin Street and the theatre district, giddy and frightened, acting out. But the comical effigies they had burned earlier were at the bottom of heaped bonfires now, beneath smoldering mattresses and motorcars. Aristide stood at the back of the balcony, listening to the chanting and catcalls. Across the street, a woman in lace knickers and a defaced Ospie jacket—how had she gotten ahold of that?—hefted a gray-and-white banner and hurled it across a pile of burning detritus. A rock careened out of the crowd and smashed the windows of the dress shop behind the conflagration.
Aristide was on the second story, near enough that the protestors could throw things if they wanted: a fact he was counting on.
“Mr. Makricosta?” He turned and saw Ilse lingering at the parlor door. Her face had a sick green tinge around the lips. “Sir, there’s some folk come to the service entrance with a … well … they asked for you.”
“Ah. Yes. Go to the kitchen, Ilse, and stay there. I’ll take care of it.”
She nodded and fled.
Two men with shipyard muscles waited at the bottom of the service stair. Between them, they carried a laundry basket. From the way their arms were straining, it weighed nearly as much as either of them.
“Come in,” said Aristide. “Can I help you carry?”
The three of them got their burden up the stairs and into Aristide’s flat with no small amount of cursing. He directed them with jerks of his chin to the parlor, where they set the basket down.
“Did you have any trouble,” panted Aristide, “getting here from Pellu’s?”
“Did we?” One of the men wiped his forehead with a striped kerchief. He had a cut over his eye. “Had to fight our way through like it were a war.”
“Thank you,” said Aristide. “Wait here for just a moment.” He went to his office and came back with two fat envelopes. “You were never here, understand?”
“We know the routine.” The second workman tucked his payment into his canvas jacket. “In, out, and nobody the wiser. Good luck with ’im, whatever you’re planning.”
Together, they wrestled the linen-wrapped contents of the laundry basket onto the sofa. Then, the two men left and Aristide was alone with … well. He pulled back the sheet and stared into a face almost like his own, slack with death.
About a week ago, a friend in the Royal Arms Paupers’ Hospital had tipped him off to an anonymous Chuli corpse, which he’d claimed and passed on to a colluding undertaker, one Mr. Pellu. The dead man matched Aristide’s height and weight, roughly, and his bone structure was similar. Charred beyond recognition, that was all they’d need. He didn’t have the same charming gap in his teeth, but Aristide’s dental records were not on file anywhere the Ospies would find them, and neither Amberlough’s coroner nor her assistants had intimate experience with his smile.