“Personnel,” I said. “Current and recently discharged.”
“Some of that would make the papers,” said Sarah. “Officers, war heroes, men who go on to become politicians or public servants. But the list would be incomplete. You might be better in the regimental museum.”
I raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“There’s always a regimental museum,” she said. “Usually in a castle or training facility.”
“And for the Glorious Third?”
“It was at the Old Red Fort,” said Sarah, gazing through the trees toward the minarets of Old Town, “but it was dismantled when the garrison moved out. It is currently in storage facilities at the public library pending the identification of a suitable future home. It is not, at this time, open to the general public, and all correspondence concerning requests to view materials should be addressed to the office of Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade.”
I stared at her, unnerved as before by the command of her recall and the way it seemed to shelve her personality as it worked. She blinked and frowned, as if just now processing what she had said.
“As Secretary of Trade,” I said, “would Mandel know Willinghouse?”
“For sure,” said Sarah, “though they are on opposite sides of the aisle. They may not be friends, but they work in the same area. What?”
I shrugged.
“Willinghouse has never mentioned him,” I said.
“Should he have?”
“Probably not,” I conceded. “But then there’s a lot of things he hasn’t mentioned.”
“Is he just naturally taciturn?” asked Sarah. “One of the strong, silent types?”
I gave her a sharp look. She was grinning at me.
“He’s my employer,” I said. “I don’t spend much time thinking about his personality.”
“Oh,” she answered, still grinning. “I see.”
I blinked, pushing away the thought of whatever she was implying. For a moment, I felt a strange and swelling sense of vertigo, as if I had put a foot wrong and was a heartbeat away from falling off a tall chimney.
“Does Willinghouse have ties to the Glorious Third?” I asked, my face carefully neutral.
“Not that I ever heard,” she answered. “And if he had a military background, I doubt it would be with them.”
A flicker of something in her manner caught my attention. “Why?” I asked.
“You said he’s mixed, right? Racially, I mean.”
“His grandmother is Lani,” I said, “though you might not know that to look at him. Does it make a difference?”
“To the Glorious Third? I’d say so.”
I gave her a quizzical look.
She munched on her pasty for a moment, then shrugged. “Every Feldesland regiment was racially integrated within forty years of the Settlement War.”
“So?”
“Not the Glorious Third,” she said. “It took them another one hundred and fifty, and when they did, it was through the creation of a colored company—Lani and Mahweni—that was kept separate from the rest of the regiment. Effectively, they were a separate unit created to appease the tribal council and the likes of your boss man’s father.”
“Willinghouse?”
“Willinghouse senior, yes. Led the charge to break up the region’s last whites-only regiment after reports of racially motivated beatings and imprisonments during citywide police actions.”
There it was again, that sense of the girl accessing some unthinking storage region of her brain. But it was different this time. Her voice was edged with bitterness.
“This was all in the papers?” I said.
She shook her head. “Bits of it, cleaned and polished for polite society reading, perhaps, but the guts of it, no.”
“So how do you—?”
“My uncle was one of the first enlisted into the colored unit,” she said, framing the word in a way both snide and a little sad. “Thought he was doing his part for Bar-Selehm’s race relations.”
“And?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “Equal parts discretion, pride, and fear, I’d say. But I’ll tell you this: they made his life a misery. I don’t know the details. I think my mum knew more, but she wouldn’t say anything.”
“Could I talk to him?” I asked.
“You got some special Lani way of crossing over the River of Souls for a cup of chai and a chat?” she asked.
“He’s dead?”
“Two years now,” she said. “Took a head wound during—wait for it—peacekeeping operations during a Mahweni protest over food prices. One of his own people threw a paving stone at him. Didn’t seem bad at the time. Had it all bandaged up, and he was walking around. Making jokes about it. Two days later, he collapsed. Never regained consciousness.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“To the stars we are as flies, and they do not note our fall,” she intoned, one of the bleaker Mahweni phrases. She smiled mirthlessly and turned to watch a vervet monkey squabbling with the ibis. “Well,” she concluded, “this was cheerful.”