Monday, May 24, 2010

Strike in the Shining City: Chapter III

In which our heroine does her job.

I always rose at dawn, no matter how late I lay back.

This was my routine: disentangle myself from my husband’s limbs and the sheets, splash myself with cold water, dress, and sit at the kitchen desk to write my missive to Prime Minister Lark. (Word had it that government-threatening scandal had been uncovered back east and she might not be the PM much longer, but oh yes, surely this was an exaggeration.) This done, I’d look it over, rewrite as needed before stuffing it in an envelope, and only then enjoyed a cup of tea and hunk of buttered bread.

The routine that day differed in two respects. One, the amount of disentangling I had to do from my husband – even the marijuana wasn’t enough to convince me to let him keep a houseguest and so he had to resort to more mercenary methods. Two, said houseguest woke up before I did.

I assumed he still slept on the chesterfield. He waited until I sat at the desk before he said, “You’re going to help me, you know.”

I looked down at the paper, fresh except for the respectful greeting to Lark. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You’ll change your mind.”

With the tip of the fountain pen applied to paper, the meat of the letter could begin. No, I really didn’t think so.

~

Later in the morning, about a half hour before I headed off to keep the streets of Lafontaine safe once again, my husband dressed for work, i.e., he slicked his hair back in addition to wearing the same sort of outfit he usually did. The odd thing was, it was Friday. One of his two days off. Harkley busily shimmied into one of Frederick’s outfits at the same time and it fit pretty well, except for the legs being too short.

“Union meeting,” said Frederick by way of explanation. He gave his bowtie a final tug. “I’ll do the shopping after.”

I tapped my fingers on the kitchen table and glared. “Since when do teachers have a union?”

“Since today.” He smiled. “We’re meeting up with the metalworks people. I’m sure they’ll have plenty of advice for us.”

My tapping stopped, out of surprise, and Frederick had the good sense not to say anything more. The metalworkers were currently on strike. Harkley was gussying himself up to go meet with them, the teachers, and likely others. Ilon Harkley. First cause of Elgin’s general strike and others. Who slept under my roof and who’d do so for many nights to come.

I had the good sense not to ask anything more. The less I knew, the less I’d tell. Or let slip. It meant the same thing in the end.

~

But the day wore on, as it usually does, and it found me striding alongside my comrade in the dry, windy heat.

Detective Walden Horace was the type of person who aged beyond his years out of spite. I knew for a damned fact that at the time this story is set, he numbered no more than thirty-five years. And yet there he was, hair as white as a snowdrift and a number of wrinkles to testify to his world-weariness. And his voice! Like gravel! And I knew he was a detective and all, and I appreciate the irony of me writing this, but did he have to be so cynical about everything?

Aside from that, he was an all right guy. Even if he did have a tendency to make unwelcome observations to people who weren’t suspects or witnesses.

“Witnesses say that you were chasing someone last night,” he said mildly, opening the last button on his shirt that professionalism would allow and folding the collar of his coat further back.

But there were ways of dealing with him. First, an understatement of the truth. “Bah, just some vagrant. He got away.” Second, a distraction. “But you’ll never believe what I found afterwards.” I told him of the chamber underneath Lark and Hammersmith. He never quite believed me about the intersection’s evening ritual, dismissing it as coincidence on the one time I dragged him out to see, but how could this fail to grab his attention?

“That’s interesting.” Oh, I could’ve punched him.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Don’t you want to see it?”

“It might’ve slipped your mind, but we’re in the middle of an investigation right now. It’ll have to wait,” he said. Then, in a quieter tone, “You haven’t told anyone else about this, have you?”

“Just my husband.” He swore and I gave him a light smack on the skull. And then we arrived at the apartment building.

The thing about a new, shiny, clean city is that it doesn’t keep that way without upkeep when it’s got a fair number of factories and one hell of a wind. Yes, sure, presumably, there having been a huge number of residences to lay claim to should’ve meant a great savings for the common folk, but that’s without taking into account property taxes. Which were high, no matter how you took care of your place. Which often wasn’t very well, if the property taxes (or the rent, if you were forced to it) bled you dry and you’d pay anything, anything to live in this wonderful city that feels more like home than home ever did.

This building filled up near the end of the time where residences were free to give away and you could tell why. Far from the city centre and the pillared, polished city hall. Near the train tracks, but far away from the station. The smell of stockyards, which was far worse than the factory smoke could ever be.
A tree, thin, scraggly and young, had snapped at the trunk, layed at rest through a park bench. The unmaintained yard was filled with wildflowers, which was the only charming thing about the place, aside from the building would have if it was given a good scrub down.

I took my place ahead of Horace – detectives are in shorter supply than constables – right hand on my sword hilt, left raised in a fist at the door with the looked-for number. I knocked. Shave and a haircut, two bits. “City Watch! Open up, if you please!” Then I counted to ten.

Several little crashes sounded on the other side of the door, like furniture, books, and other household stuff knocked over by an unbalanced body. On number seven, that body opened the door.

It was a ‘she’ – a shaking, unkempt, nervous wreck of a woman who smelt strongly of bad whiskey and with wide grey eyes that wouldn’t break contact with mine. She wore goggles. The same kind as Harkley’s and my old employer’s. A real chemist, then.

“Ms. Hero Toynbee, I presume?” I asked, not harshly, out of fear that she’d bolt like a rabbit. The woman nodded, jerkily, and choked out a noise that might have been a ‘yes’. “My name is Constable Calvin and I’m here with my colleague, Detective Horace. He’d like to ask you some questions.”

A near thing she didn’t bolt then. Her shaking became like a train’s vibrations, she pressed her upper teeth against her lower lip repeatedly, and her eyes kept flicking back and forth between Horace and I. She gulped once, loudly. Turning her back on us, she waved her bony hand in the air for us to follow her.

Debris, both salvageable and not, littered the hall. Nothing that could rot, thank gods, but other old things. Like a Montvert newspaper from five years ago. Dead flowers in a pot, the soil still moist. A mysterious box with a brass horn and a needle attached to an arm. Later in life, I’d realise that it was a prototypical phonograph. While Horace and I waded through with minimum damage, Toynbee kept walking into things, sending them tumbling.

Her sitting room wasn’t much better. Three chairs – she had us all sit in them, now keeping her eyes resolutely away from Horace and I – were crammed around a small table in one half of the room. A workbench took up the other half, covered with gadgets and doodads and who knows what. But no elixirs of any sort. She had the goggles, but not the hood... Oh, and there was the trapdoor in between the two. Odd place to get into the basement. But then, plenty of buildings in Lafontaine had their eccentricities. A window opening up into a hallway. A flight of stairs that stopped a foot short of the next floor. That sort of thing. Not all, not even most or half, but plenty.

“Ms. Toynbee,” said Horace, leaning forward with his hands in his lap, reminding me very much of my father when I did something to make him cross. I gave him a sharp look – was frightening the piss out of her really the right approach to use? – but if he noticed, he didn’t give indication of it. “Witnesses saw you enter Madam Clyde’s establishment last Friday, on the night of Clyde’s murder. They did not see you leave. We would like to know why and how.”

She reached for a whiskey bottle and an empty glass from a side table and attempted to pour the contents of one into the other, only to find the one was empty. She placed them back on the table, scrambling to keep the glass from falling when she placed it too close to the edge.

“If you’re looking for a murderer,” she said, trembling and small, with a slight accent that could’ve been Ursalian. “You’ll not find it here.”

“That may be so. What did you see that night, Ms. Toynbee, and how did you leave?”

“I knew this place was wrong. Felt all wrong, sounded too wrong.” Toynbee tried the bottle again, this time holding it right to her lips. It met with the same success as last time and she didn’t bother to replace it again. It just tumbled onto the floor with nary a crack.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I held up a finger to shush Horace.

Now, the fingernail chewing. This is an unkind observation, especially with Toynbee the way she was, but seeing people carry on that habit in front of me always made me want to smash their digits. I bit the corner of my lip to keep from saying anything.

She continued, “No place should’ve felt so nice. Not if I hadn’t even stepped outside of the train station. And I was headed somewhere, see, somewhere important...” Where? She shook her head. “Can’t even remember now. It’s all so fuzzy. Like I dreamed it all. Could’ve been born here, fully grown, two years ago on the platform. If I remember before at all, I remember... not being like this.”

Neither of us asked her what she meant by ‘like this’. “And there’s the tunnels.”

I’m sure my heart skipped. “Tunnels?” I asked.

The way her mouth looked when our gazes locked again could’ve been a smile, could’ve been the start of a snarl. “All underneath us. Not like sewers. There’s no smell, no smell at all. Just tunnels and rooms and locked doors.” I tried not to look too keen. But she dashed my hopes straightaways. “There’s no way to open those. Not that I found.”

“And there’s other things,” she said.

“What other things?” Horace asked.

But she stared away again, hugging herself, rocking back and forth. “I went to the brothel because I can’t find it anymore, not since coming to this city, and I was so lonely, but the tunnels, they go everywhere, even under the brothel, but I walked the streets instead, but somehow they must’ve followed me, and I didn’t kill the madam, but it means the same thing in the end, doesn’t it, and...” She broke down into a dry sobbing, her head at an angle.

Her eyes were now on that peculiar area between the chairs and the workbench.
I felt my mouth open and sound come out. “Ms. Toynbee. What’s under that trapdoor?”

~

Elsewhere in the city, a ginger-haired scoundrel addressed a crowd from behind a podium in a crowded hall. His fist punched the air. Cameras flashed. And the hall kept filling up to a point where even the most unflappable fire marshal would sweat.

Ilon Harkley made his Lafontaine debut.

2 comments:

  1. I really like this chapter. For the sake of feedback - and sorry it's not important plot-level feedback - the second paragraph seems to have some tense disagreement. Also, both sentences in the paragraph which is merged with another one (space-wise) are a little confusing The first begins with "A tree, thin, scraggly". The sentence has two endings. It's kind of neat actually. The sentence after may be correct, but it took a few reads to understand it.

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  2. Nice work Kelse, you've gotten better. Pacing for both stories is very good; characters in the 2nd and 3rd are very engaging whereas its almost abstract in the 1st one, a fairytale ubitiquity, intentional?

    Enjoyed them.

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