The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [41]
Valentine arrived at the Coroner’s Office in Raithower plaza around noon. He was wearing a new coat; it was charcoal grey like everything the Coroners were meant to wear, but with two lines of silver buttons and a fancy black braid looped at the right arm. Skinner and Beckett’s secretary, Karine, were the only two people in the main office, which had once been Albrecht Vie-Gorgon’s parlor.
Karine was in her own office, adjacent to the main. She’d been hired partly at Beckett’s insistence; after years of frustration in his attempts to investigate heresy in Trowth, the old coroner had stumbled on a novel idea: he’d demanded an entire staff of workers whose sole job was to collect and read broadsheets. Stories about murders, which were plentiful, were clipped out and filed away by date. Stories about people were clipped and filed away according to their names. If a story was about more than one person, or in the case of the murders, a tag was placed in the file for the sake of cross-referencing. The secretarial department would also collect reports from the Imperial Guard and all the local gendarmeries about every single arrest they’d made every day. Few of the gendarmeries were consistent about reporting arrests, and hardly ever noted the freelance beatings they administered, but the Guard was fairly reliable.
Beckett had gone to Mr. Stitch and demanded a secretarial staff. Stitch, in turn, managed to secure enough funding to pay Karine. She was a conscientious and thorough worker, and Beckett had been trying to get her fired since day one. Karine was an indige, and her people had phlogiston in their blood. They were virtually immune to the cold, and they refused to dress properly. Karine wore low-cut blouses, dresses without underskirts or petticoats or bustles, and sometimes with slits in them that went as high as her hip. It was all to the purpose of displaying the silvery tattoos all over her blue-black skin, and was scandalous by modern standards. For Beckett, whose sense of propriety had been established thirty years earlier, seeing Karine come to work “practically naked” was enough to give him apoplexy.
Stitch had refused to fire her. She was, after all, an excellent worker, and Stitch was interested neither in social mores nor in racial tension. Valentine caught a glimpse of the indige secretary through her open office door. He smiled and winked, but didn’t think she noticed.
“Valentine?” Skinner snapped, as soon as she heard the young man’s footsteps. “Is that you? Where the hell have you been?” She wrinkled her nose. “Augh, you smell like piss.”
“I’ve been . . . well, it’s a long story. I need to talk to Beckett right away. He’s in his office?” Valentine opened the door without waiting for a response, only to find the room empty.
“No. He didn’t come to work today.”
“Is…”
“He’s not at home either,” Skinner went on. “We don’t know where he is. I told Stitch, but we’ve got no one to spare right now.”
“Well, where is he?”
“I don’t know, Valentine,” Skinner was practically snarling. “In the mean time, where were you? You know Public Safety took the Zindel bodies?”
“What? They what?”
“That’s right, Valentine. I’m not sure how. They must have snuck right past you and your cordon. You know, the one that you were supposed to set up to make sure no one got in and disturbed the scene?”
The young man stuttered. “I. Well, look, it’s . . . the thing of it was…”
Skinner shook her head. “I don’t want to hear it. Tell it to Beckett when we find him. All I can say is, it’d better be fucking good.”
Valentine groaned and sank into a chair.
“Ms. Skinner?” Karine came out of her office, and pointedly refused to look at Valentine. “I think I know where Mr. Beckett is?”
Skinner cocked her head. “And…?”
Karine held up a bit of paper. “It’s the report from the Imperial Guard in Old Bank.” She passed it to Valentine, still without looking at him.
“Aw, no,” Valentine muttered, reading the report.