Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [43]
Clerks and doctors, lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of leisure . . . even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry. The main differences between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants, in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and the capacity they had not to get caught.
From the parlours and dining rooms there were cautious murmurings of interest.
In the heart of Parliament a debate was taking place about levels of business taxation. Mayor Rudgutter sat regally on his throne and nodded as his deputy, MontJohn Rescue, bellowed the Fat Sun party’s line, poking his finger aggressively across the enormous vaulted chamber. Rescue paused periodically to rearrange the thick scarf he wore around his neck, despite the warmth.
Councillors dozed quietly in a haze of dust motes.
Elsewhere in the vast building, through intricate corridors and passages that seemed designed to confuse, suited secretaries and messengers brushed busily past each other. Little tunnels and stairs of polished marble bristled from main thoroughfares. Many were unlit and unfrequented. An old man pulled a decrepit trolley along one such passage.
With the bustling noise of Parliament’s main entrance hall receding behind him, he dragged the trolley behind him up steep stairs. The corridor was barely wider than his trolley: it was a long, uncomfortable few minutes until he had reached the top. He stopped and wiped sweat from his forehead and around his mouth, then resumed his trudging plod along the ascending floor.
Ahead of him the air lightened, as sunlight tried to finger its way around a corner. He turned full into it, and his face was splashed with light and warmth. It gushed in from a skylight and, beyond that, from the windows of the doorless office at the corridor’s end.
“Morning, sir,” croaked the old man as he reached the entrance.
“Good morning to you,” came the reply from the man behind the desk.
The office was small and square, with narrow windows of smoked glass that looked out over Griss Fell and the arches of the Sud Line railway. One wall was flush with the looming dark bulk of Parliament’s main edifice. Set into that wall was a small sliding door. A pile of crates teetered in the corner.
The little room was one of the chambers that jutted from the main building, high over the surrounding city. The waters of the Gross Tar surged fifty feet below.
The delivery man unloaded his trolley of parcels and boxes in front of the pale middle-aged gentleman sitting before him.
“Not too many today, sir,” he murmured, rubbing his moaning bones. He went slowly back the way he came, his trolley jouncing lightly behind him.
The clerk sifted through the bundles and rattled out brief notes on his typewriter. He made entries in an enormous ledger labelled “ACQUISITIONS,” skimming the pages between sections and recording the date before each item. He opened up the packages and recorded the contents in a typewritten day-list and in the big book.
Militia reports: 17. Human knuckles: 3. Heliotypes (incriminating): 5.
He checked for which department each collection of items was bound, and he separated them into piles. When one pile had grown big enough, he put it in a crate and carried it over to the door in the wall. It was a four-by-four-foot square, which hissed with a rush of siphoned air and opened at the behest of some hidden piston when he tugged a lever. At its side was a little slot for a programme card.
Beyond it a wire cage dangled beneath Parliament’s obsidian skin, with one open side flush with the doorway. It was suspended above and on either side by chains that swung gently, rattled and disappeared into an eddying darkness that loomed off without remission in all directions that the clerk could see. The clerk lugged the crate up into the passageway and slid it along into the cage, which pitched a little under the weight.