Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [16]
Gazid was a wreck and an addict of most things going, who could not help going to any lengths to secure money for drugs; but this was not like any scam that Lin could imagine. There was no angle for him, unless there was indeed someone wealthy in New Crobuzon prepared to pay for her work, giving him a cut.
She had dragged him out of the bar, to catcalls and whoops and consternation, and had demanded to know what was going on. Gazid was circumspect at first, and seemed to rack his brains to think of what lies to spout. He realized quite quickly that he needed to tell her the truth.
“There’s a guy I buy some stuff from occasionally . . .” he started shiftily. “Anyway, I had the prints of your statues lying around . . . uh . . . on the shelf when he came round, and he loved them and wanted to take a couple away, and . . . uh . . . I said ‘yeah.’ And then a while later he told me that he showed them to the guy who supplies him with the stuff I sometimes buy, and that guy liked them, and took them away, and showed them to his boss, and then they got to the kind of top man, who’s huge into art—bought some of Alexandrine’s stuff last year—and he liked them and wants you to do a piece for him.”
Lin translated the evasive language.
Your drug dealer’s boss wants me to work for him??? she scrawled.
“Oh shit, Lin, it’s not like that . . . I mean, yeah, but . . .” Gazid paused. “Well, yeah,” he finished lamely. There was a pause. “Only . . . only . . . he wants to meet you. If you’re interested he has to actually meet you.”
Lin pondered.
It was certainly an exciting prospect. Judging by the card, this was not some minor hustler: this was a big player. Lin was not stupid. She knew that this would be dangerous. She was excited, she could not help it. It would be such an event in her art-life. She could drop hints about it. She could have a criminal patron. She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
And while she was deciding that she didn’t care, Gazid named the kinds of sums the mysterious buyer was quoting. Lin’s headlegs flexed in astonishment.
I have to talk to Alexandrine, she wrote, and went back inside.
Alex knew nothing. She milked the kudos of having sold canvases to a crime boss for what she could, but she had only ever met an at-best middle-ranking messenger, who had offered her enormous sums for two paintings that she had just finished. She had accepted, handed them over, and never heard anything again.
That was it. She had never even known the name of her buyer.
Lin decided that she could do better than that.
She had sent a message through Gazid, down the illicit conduit of communication that led fuck-knew-where, saying that yes, she was interested, and would be prepared to meet, but she really must have a name to write in her diary.
The New Crobuzon underworld digested her message, and made her wait a week, and then spat back an answer in the shape of another printed note, pushed under her door while she slept, giving her an address in Bonetown, a date, and a one-word name: Motley.
A frenetic snapping and clatter sifted into the corridor. Lin’s cactacae escort pushed open one dark door among the many, and stood aside.
Lin’s eyes adjusted to the light. She was looking into a typing pool. It was a large room with a high ceiling, painted black like everything in this troglodytic place, well-lit with gaslamps, and filled with perhaps forty desks; on each was a bulky typewriter, at each a secretary copying from reams of notes by their sides. Mostly human and mostly women, Lin also caught smell and sight of men and cactacae, even a pair of khepri, and a vodyanoi working at a typewriter with keys adapted for her huge hands.
Around the room Remade were stationed, mostly human, again, but of other races too, rare as xenian Remade were. Some were organically Remade, with claws and antlers and slabs of grafted muscle, but most were mech, and the heat from their boilers made the