CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wren
Mrs. Ocampo asks no questions. She takes one look at me at midnight in a green cocktail dress and says, "Anak, have you eaten," and puts a plate in front of me, and that's it, that's the whole interrogation, and I nearly go to pieces over rice.
"She knows," Mari says later, in the dark, from the camp bed on the floor.
"She knows what?"
"Everything. She's known since 1974 and so has every woman on this street over sixty." A pause. "She salted the doorstep while you were in the shower."
"Does that do anything?"
"No idea. It made her feel better. Let her have it."
I lie there listening to a house with people in it, which I haven't done in a very long time, and after a while I say the thing I've been carrying since the vault.
"Thirty days."
"Yeah."
"And she gave me the door on purpose."
"Yeah, she did," Mari says. "That's the bit that's been bothering me since you told me.
She could've just said complete it or take the room.
Instead she gave you a month, a locked door, and a free pass out of the city.
" The camp bed creaks. "That's not mercy.
That's a test, mahal. She wants to see what you do with an open door. "
"Why?"
"Because if you run, you're a coward and a security risk and she'll have you picked up in Duluth. And if you stay—"
"Then it's real."
"Then it's real," Mari agrees, "and she's got an anchor in her city who chose it, and that's worth about nine hundred times more to her than one in a basement."
I lie awake for a long time.
At four in the morning, my phone lights up on the pillow.
CASSIUS ROOK 04:02 I am at the end of Ilana Street. I'm not coming any closer. Vespera's ruling was clear and I intend to keep to it.
CASSIUS ROOK 04:02 But there's a car parked on the corner of Ilana and Poole with a man in it who has been there since one o'clock, and I would like you to know that at 04:11 there will no longer be a car parked on the corner of Ilana and Poole.
CASSIUS ROOK 04:03 Go back to sleep.
I text back: were you going to tell me or was I meant to notice
Three dots.
CASSIUS ROOK 04:04 You notice everything. It's ruined your life.
I lie in the dark with my phone against my chest, grinning like an idiot at a ceiling with a boy band on it, and downstairs a woman who has known about vampires since 1974 has salted her own doorstep for me, and out on the corner of Ilana and Poole something is about to happen to a car.
Thirty days.
Oh, I am in so much trouble.
◆ ◆ ◆
On day six I do something extremely stupid, which is that I go to Lucien Ivo's club.
I don't tell Cassius. That's the stupid part — not the club, the not telling, and I know it while I'm doing it, and I do it anyway, because I have spent six days in a box room being managed and there is a thing I need to know and only one person who'll answer it without doing the vampire equivalent of a risk assessment.
The place is called Ossuary, which tells you everything, and it's on Vane Street in a converted bank, and there's a queue at half ten on a Wednesday.
I walk past the queue to the door and say to a man the size of a bus, "Tell him it's the cleaner."
He's about to laugh at me. I watch him get halfway into it. Then something happens in his earpiece and all the amusement goes out of his face like water out of a sink, and he unhooks the rope.
Lucien's office is up two flights, and it is not what I expect. No leather, no skulls, no art. It's a room with a filing cabinet, a decent desk, a jar of pens, and one enormous window onto the street below, and Lucien Ivo is standing at it with his hands behind his back watching the queue.
"You came here," he says, delighted. "On foot. Without him."
"Yep."
"Do you know that if I wanted to, I could—"
"You could," I agree, "and then about four hours later you'd be in a yard behind the Custom House explaining it to a woman with a cup of tea, so let's skip that bit, I've had a long week."
He turns round. He's grinning.
"Sit down," he says. "Please. Genuinely. This is the most interesting thing that's happened to me all month and I would like to enjoy it slowly."
I sit. He doesn't offer me a drink, which I appreciate more than I expect to.
"One question," I say. "Trevor Ansel."
"Ah."
"Somebody carved a Ferrow strike-mark under his table and got it backwards. That's a very specific mistake. You either know the mark and you're careless, or you don't know the mark and you copied it off something." I fold my hands. "Which was it?"
Lucien sits down on the edge of his own desk.
"You're asking me because you think I did it," he says.
"I'm asking you because you were the only one in that room who was enjoying himself," I say, "and people who are enjoying themselves talk."
That gets a real laugh out of him — short and surprised, nothing like the performance downstairs.
"I didn't kill Trevor Ansel," he says. "I liked Trevor Ansel.
He was a colossal bore about wine but he had a very good arrangement with three of us and he never once complained about anything except the parking.
" He picks a pen out of the jar and turns it over.
"But I'll tell you what I know, Miss Kelleher, and I'll tell you for free, and then I'm going to ask you for something and you're going to say no and we'll both feel we've done our jobs. "
"Go on."
"He's the fifth."
I go very still.
"Feeders," Lucien says. "There have been five dead in Ashmoor since March and the court has been told about two of them, because I have made absolutely certain that Vespera has spent the last nine months buried in border grievances with a family out east." He sets the pen down.
"There. That's my crime. That's the whole of it.
I've been hiding a murder count from the Matriarch. "
"Why?"
"Because the moment she knows the real number she declares an emergency, and an emergency means the court sits every night, and every night means all eleven of us in a room where I am the youngest, the least trusted, and the most easily blamed.
" His face has gone hard and young and honest. "I am one hundred and four.
Everybody in that vault was already old when the automobile happened.
Do you have the faintest idea what it is to be the boy for a century? "
"So you sat on five deaths."
"I sat on three," he says. "The other two I only found out about in September, because I've been buying a list off a locker at a bus station.
" He shrugs. "I am a nosy, frightened, extremely rich child, Miss Kelleher, and I have made a great many decisions I will be explaining to somebody eventually.
But I did not carve that mark. Somebody who has never seen a Ferrow do it carved that mark, off a drawing, in a hurry, and if you want my honest opinion — "
"I do."
"They wanted a cleaner to find it," Lucien says.
The room goes quiet. Down in the street the queue shuffles forward.
"That's not—"
"Think about it." He leans forward. "Under the table.
Not on the wall, not on the body, not anywhere a police photographer looks.
On the underside of a piece of furniture, in the one apartment in Ashmoor with a licensed remediation contract already in place, six hours before the contractors were due.
" His eyes are on mine. "That mark wasn't a signature and it wasn't a provocation.
It was left where exactly one kind of person would find it. Somebody was checking who came."
I have already worked this out. I worked it out in a van in a transfer station car park eleven days ago and I have not said it out loud to a single person, and hearing it in somebody else's mouth is so much worse than thinking it.
"And the fledgling on Cadger Row," I say.
"Ah, now, that one I don't like at all." Lucien's face does something.
"Because a fledgling can't be aimed. You can point it at a city and let go, and after that it's weather.
Whoever made that boy didn't care who he went through on the way to you, and there were four before he got to Mrs. Alaimo's son.
" He turns the pen over. "That's not a hunter, Miss Kelleher.
That's a man setting a fire on one side of a valley because he wants to see what runs out of the other. "
◆ ◆ ◆
"And now the thing I want," Lucien says brightly, standing up.
"No."
"You haven't heard it."
"You want to know what my blood does."
"I want," he says, "an hour. One hour, of the world, before I die. I've been grey since 1954 and I've got a garden I bought thirty-five years ago that I have never once been able to smell, and I would pay you — properly, the sort of money that ends this ridiculous business you're in—"
"No."
He looks at me for a long moment.
"You know he'll never ask you," Lucien says. "Cassius. He'll take what keeps you alive and he'll refuse the rest for four hundred years out of decency, and you'll both find it terribly romantic."
"Probably."
"That's all you've got? Probably?"
"Yeah." I stand up. "Because you asked me, Lucien, and he doesn't, and I want you to sit with the fact that the reason I'm saying no to you is that you're the only one who's had the nerve to say it out loud, and I still don't trust you an inch."
At the door he says, quite quietly, "Miss Kelleher."
I stop.
"Whoever's doing this hasn't finished," he says. "There were six names on the list I bought and five of them are dead. Do be careful."