Spin State - Chris Moriarty [88]
She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
They smoked in silence. Someone opened the door, set three beers on the table, and came around the table to sit beside Daahl. As he sat down, the lamp on the table shone full in his face, and Li recognized the young labor rep from the news spin that Haas had gotten so hot under the collar about. “What is this?” she asked. “Interrogation by committee?”
“This is Leo Ramirez, the IWW rep in town. He’s just going to sit in on our talk. If you don’t object, that is.”
“Sure, what do I care? Invite the Trotskyites. Hang up a picture of Antonio fucking Gramsci.”
Ramirez grinned, dark eyes sparkling in his handsome face. “I didn’t think you people were allowed to know who Gramsci was.”
“‘You people’?” Li muttered under her breath and rolled her eyes.
Daahl just smiled and kept smoking.
When he had finished precisely half of the cigarette Li had given him, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, put out the half-smoked butt, wrapped it carefully in the handkerchief, and tucked it back into his pocket.
This operation took Daahl’s full attention for a good quarter of a minute, and when he finally spoke his voice was as steady as if they were discussing the weather. “Why did you make Haas drain the glory hole?”
Li shrugged. “I thought he was hiding something about the fire. I wanted to get to the bottom of it before he sent anyone else down.”
“That’s altruistic of you,” Ramirez said.
“Oh, sure. I’m a real hero.”
“Why did the Secretariat really send you?” Daahl asked.
Li took a sip of her beer, stalling, and winced as the liquid hit the raw nerve where her tooth had been. “To fill in for Voyt and handle the accident follow-up. If there was another reason, they didn’t let me in on it. And anyway, I thought the idea here was that you were going to tell me something.”
“We’ll get there. But first I want some answers.”
“I may not have the answers you want, Daahl.”
“Of course you do. You just haven’t thought about it enough to realize you have them. So. Why did the UN send you?”
Li shrugged. “Sharifi was famous. When someone like her dies, people want to see heads roll. I’m the axe man.”
Ramirez stifled a laugh. Daahl just kept watching her with his pale sharp eyes. “If someone—let’s say a friend of ours—were to possess information that helped you do that job, what would you be willing to give for it?”
“If you mean am I prepared to buy information from you, the answer is no.”
“Not buy.” Daahl stood and walked across the room to the single small window. The shutter cast bars of rain-green light across his face and lit up his thinning hair like a halo. “Money would be simple compared to what we want. And we’d have to know you were the right person to do business with. We’d have to have . . . assurances.”
Ramirez seemed to have dropped out of the conversation, and when Li glanced over at him he was leaning forward on his stool staring at the two of them like a rat blinded by a miner’s lamp. He might know the geography down here, she realized, but in this room he was the odd man out. This was miners’ territory, soldiers’ territory. Blood-bargaining territory.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re charging,” she told Daahl. “Then I’ll know if I can pay it.”
“Two things. First, if what you find out about the fire explains anyone else’s death besides Sharifi’s, we want to know about it.”
“You want me to pass information on an ongoing investigation to you? I could lose my job for that.”
“We don’t necessarily need the information ourselves,” Daahl said. “We just need it made public.”
“You mean included in the investigation report?”
“Included in anything that’s public record. We can figure out how to use it from there. Right, Leo?”
Ramirez nodded. “We really just need you to bring the accident reports up to date.”
“AMC’s accident reports? I can’t believe you have to go to me under the table to get that,” Li said.