Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [68]
“Yeah, well, when somebody tries to kill your partner, that kind of changes the game. Gregorian is going to pay for this. I’ll see that he does.” She wheeled sharply away, and stepped on a crab. “Shit!” She kicked the mutilated body away. “What a fucking glorious day.”
“Say.” The bureaucrat peered around. “Where’s Mintouchian?”
“Gone,” Chu said. She stood on one foot, wiping the sole of her shoe with a handkerchief. Then she threw the cloth into the weeds. “He took your briefcase with him too.”
“What?”
“It was the damnedest thing. Soon as the crabs dwindled, he fired up the truck, snatched the briefcase, and lit off like his ass was on fire.” Chu shook her head. “That was when I started honking the horn here, trying to call you back.”
“Didn’t he know that my briefcase will come back to me?”
“Obviously not.”
* * *
It took the briefcase half an hour to find its way back to him. Chu had already made arrangements with the Lion Heart’s driver, and had gone off to view the corpse of her impersonator. “Oughta be good for a few laughs,” she said grimly. “Maybe I’ll cut off an ear for a souvenir.”
The briefcase daintily picked its way down the road. When it reached the bureaucrat, it set itself down and retracted its legs. He picked it up. “Hard time getting away?”
“No. Mintouchian didn’t even bother strapping me down. I waited until he’d gone a couple of miles downriver and was feeling confident, then rolled down the window and jumped.”
“Hum.” The bureaucrat was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We’ll be here a few hours more than planned. There’s been a touch of violence, and we still have to deal with the nationals. Probably have to make a statement, maybe file a field report.”
The briefcase, familiar with his moods, said nothing.
The bureaucrat thought about Gregorian, of the magician’s abrupt shift from a distant mocking disdain to outright enmity. He’d almost died just now. He thought about Mintouchian, and about Dr. Orphelin’s warning that he had a traitor with him. Everything was changed, horribly changed. “Did Mintouchian look surprised when you jumped?”
“He looked like he’d swallowed a toad. You should’ve been there—it would’ve made you laugh.”
“I suppose.”
But he doubted it. The bureaucrat didn’t feel like laughing. He didn’t feel like laughing at all.
10
A Service for the Dead
That morning, the doctor wind swept a swarm of barnacle flies inland, and when the bureaucrat awoke, the houseboat was encrusted with their shells. He had to lean on the door to break it open. The salt smell of Ocean was everywhere, like the scent of a lover who has visited in the night and is gone, leaving only this ambiguous promise of return.
He scowled and spat over the houseboat’s edge.
The bottom tread of his stoop was missing. The bureaucrat hopped down onto the bare patch worn into the black earth beneath. He began to thread his way through the scattered hulks of the boats’ graveyard.
“Hey!”
He looked up. A golden-haired boy stood naked atop a cradled yacht with a stove-in bow, pissing into the rosebushes. One of the gang of scavengers who lived there. He waved with his free hand. The census bracelet glittered dully on his wrist. “That thing you were looking for? We found a whole pile of them. Come on over and take your pick.”
Five minutes later the bureaucrat had stowed a tightly bound bundle in his room, and was off again to Clay Bank. A sour church bell clanged in the distance, calling the faithful to meditation. The sky was overcast and gray. A light, almost imperceptible drizzle fell.
* * *
This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff.