CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cassius
Vespera finds out about the list on day thirteen, and she finds out because I tell her, which is the only reason I'm still standing at the end of it.
"Six names," I say. "Four crossed out when I took it off Hallwood on the Wednesday before the court. Ansel is the fifth. The sixth is a woman on Cadger Row who has been on a bus to Rochester since the second."
The vault is empty except for the two of us and a grey man at a small table who does not look up.
Vespera does not move for a long time.
"Wednesday before the court," she says.
"Yes."
"That is eleven days ago."
"Yes."
"You had a document establishing a serial predation on this city's feeders," she says, in exactly the same voice she uses to ask about the weather, "and you sat in this room on the Friday and let me spend forty minutes on a claim."
"Yes."
"Why?"
And here it is. I have had eleven days to build a good answer and I haven't got one, so I give her the real one.
"Because you'd have declared an emergency," I say. "And an emergency means the court sits every night, and an anchor in a city with a nightly court is an anchor in a room by the second week. I chose her over the city. I'd like it minuted."
Behind us the pen scratches.
Vespera Thorne stands up.
She is five foot nothing and a hundred and ninety years old and she has not raised her voice in my presence since the Wilson administration, and she does not raise it now, which is significantly worse.
"You are the knife," she says. "You are not a party. You have never once been a party, in a hundred and forty years, and the entire structure of what I have built in this city rests on the fact that when I send you at something you go, and you do not have an opinion about who lives."
"I know."
"Four of my feeders are dead."
"Five."
"Five," she says, "and I have been sitting in this chair for nine months being managed by a hundred-and-four-year-old and lied to by the only person here I have never had to check.
" She turns away. Comes back. "Do you understand what you've done to me?
I can't use you. I have a predation on my city and a man in Salem I can't think about without needing to sit down, and the instrument I would ordinarily point at all of it is personally involved. "
"Then don't point me at it," I say. "Point me at Rimebrook. She's asked to go north when the thirty days are up and I'd rather it was sanctioned than not."
"That is not a concession, Cassius, that is you asking for something else."
"Yes."
She laughs. It's a horrible sound; there's no humour anywhere in it.
"You've been dead four hundred years," she says, "and you've spent every one of them being the most reliable object in whatever room you were standing in, and now you're thirty days into something and you're negotiating with me."
◆ ◆ ◆
She gives me the thing anyway, at the end, which is why she has been Matriarch for a hundred and ninety years.
"Locker 114," she says. "Greyhound station, Corvin Street. Hallwood makes the drop on the fourteenth of the month and it's collected inside six hours and he has never seen who takes it." She sits back down and picks up her tea. "That's the fourteenth. Which is a Friday. Which is the Friday."
"That's not a coincidence."
"No. Whoever runs that locker has known about the court calendar for nineteen months." Her eyes come up. "Take somebody with you. Not Ravensdale, he's Ferrow and this is being dressed as Ferrow. Take Halloway."
I stop.
"Halloway's useless," I say.
"Halloway was made in 1806, he was in that cellar, and he has spent two hundred years being the most boring man in North America, which as you know is the finest possible disguise.
" Vespera's eyes come up over the cup. "And he asked me on Tuesday, in a very casual way, whether it was true that the Rook had found an anchor.
Nobody else in this city has been casual with me in ninety years. "
The bottom goes out of the room.
I turn round.
The small table at the back is empty. The minute book is closed and squared to the corner and the pen is capped and laid across it at an angle of exactly ninety degrees, and there is no one in the chair, and I did not hear him go.
"How long has he been out of the room?" I say.
Vespera Thorne looks at the empty table for a long moment.
"I have no idea," she says.
◆ ◆ ◆
I go to the records room afterwards, because it is on my way out and because I have been in that building for two hours and have not once been able to make myself look at the empty chair in the vault.
The door isn't locked. It has never been locked.
Desk. Blotter. Fountain pen laid across a closed minute book at exactly ninety degrees. A wooden tray of index cards squared to the corner. The steel cabinet behind, with three books in it that go back to 1802 and a shipping list that goes back further.
And in the tray, on top, faced up, set apart from the rest by about an inch:
OCAMPO, S. — entered city 11.74, presented by ship's agent, unclaimed, no maker recorded. Fed under supervision 11.74–03.76. No Covenant breaches. Left city 03.76, destination not recorded. NOT KILLED.
I stand in a dead man's office and hold a card in my hand for a long time.
I asked him for this in the second week of the thirty days. I asked him for it standing in that doorway, in about eleven words, because a small woman with a machete made me promise, and he said nobody has ever asked me for it and I said thank you and I have not thought about it once since.
He found it. He pulled it out of a cabinet and set it in the tray and left it faced up, so that whenever I came back for it, it would be there.
And then he went out and paid four thousand dollars to have a woman taken off Fennick Lane.
There is a version of Thaddeus Halloway available to me at this moment where those two things are not a contradiction, and I can very nearly get to it, and I am going to spend a great deal of the next year not quite getting there.
I put the card in my coat.
On the way out I look at the desk again, and the thing I notice — the thing that keeps me on that threshold for another minute and a half — is that the blotter is clean.
Two hundred and twenty years of a man writing with a fountain pen at that desk, and there is not one mark on the blotter, because he changed it, before he left, and squared the new one to the corner.
He tidied up.