“Business,” he said. “I’m invested in a friend’s venture and he wants to talk in person.”
She nodded, uninterested, and turned the page to the physical description. She read it through, looked him up and down, and passed the papers back. “All looks fine to me. Let me just finish with the ticket and you’ll be on your way.”
Adrenaline pumped through his veins, making his limbs weak. She slid the ticket under her little window. He reached for it, thrilling. He’d done it. He’d absolutely—
In the reflection of the ticket counter’s glass, movement caught his eye. Half turning his head, already knowing what he would see, Cyril looked over his shoulder.
The man in the black bowler came through the revolving doors, flanked by two other men, much bigger. There was a tense moment, stretched thin and sharp as wire across the gold-flecked expanse of marble floor.
Cyril dropped the folder. When he ran, loose papers flapped behind him like startled birds.
*
Coal smoke burning in his lungs, Cyril took the stairs down to the platform three at a time, leaping the final distance to the tile. Travelers were few and the rails were bare—the five o’clock wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes. That left the end of the soaring glass enclosure, open onto the train yards. He jumped from the edge of the platform. A fraction of a second later, a shot rang out, and he heard ceramic shatter. A woman screamed.
He landed badly, slipping on the oil-stained concrete around the rails, but caught himself and leapt into a sprint. He tried to keep under the lip of the platform. Bullets cracked into the ground at his heels. A chip of concrete struck his calf, and he felt a sting and a trickle of hot blood tracking down toward his shoe. They were aiming to stop him, not to kill.
As he ran, he drew his pistol and rammed the slide back. No time for the suppressor now, and no need. There was an obvious answer here. The Ospies had clearly caught him. He’d be dragged back to the Warehouse and questioned. He wouldn’t survive it. So why not just …
He skidded to a halt, just short of the open end of the platform. A stiff breeze came up off the harbor, whistling through the aperture. He turned and saw his pursuers gaining. He had the gun half lifted—could already taste the steel and oil, faintly laced with his own sweat.
When he hit the ground, his own consciousness surprised him until, dizzily, he realized he had never put the pistol between his teeth. They already had him cuffed by then, the men who had come from behind, from the yards.
He cursed himself for stopping and turning, for not shooting while he ran.
“Swear all you like,” said one of his captors. “Won’t get you anywhere.”
Cyril took him up on it, spitting every foul word he knew until he broke down into helpless sobbing.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
Aristide had trouble on the train; his back ached, and the seats were hard. It had been too long since he did something uncomfortable: He had gotten soft. He promised himself five minutes of intense self-pity, then resolved to move on.
Once upon a time, he had been inured to indignity. With the boneless resignation of a dog, he had lain on hardwood floors, blanketless. He had slept his way through the ranks of producers and financiers it took to pay rent and earn a place onstage. He had cut throats and sold bad tar and done whatever it took to get ahead. Because he knew once he reached the top he would never have to do any of it again.
Yet here he was at forty-two or some odd years, crammed in third-class, headed back to the place he had done every demeaning thing on earth to escape.
He found five minutes of self-pity wouldn’t cover it.
When the train pulled into Farbourgh City, he stood and stretched and rubbed his dry eyes. He wanted nothing more than coffee and a newspaper, but he hadn’t the time. The local for Currin left in half an hour, and he still had to find his contact and give her instructions.
On the platform he pulled his collar up against the damp wind. The station here had a dark, flat roof that gave him no sense of the weather outside. Still, under the coal smoke he smelled rain. When he reached the doors of the station, it was indeed pissing down. A sea of black umbrellas ebbed and flowed in the open square, sifting around the stalls and carts of the Station Market.
Aristide had only seen this place once before, on his way out of Farbourgh. He remembered being astonished at the number of people, the goods on display. Now, it left him underwhelmed. Shabby merchants selling oily fried food and hard pasties … and there, just on the far side of the street from the station gates, a woman hunched underneath the awning of a fruit stall.
He browsed through her selection of pears, apples, and waxy oranges still green around the stems. Lifting a disappointing citrus, he said, “They’re fresher in Amberlough City.”
She looked up—not too sharply, but he had caught her attention.