Authors: Zachary Rawlins
She held out one hand, offering him help up.
Alex shook his head, smiling weakly.
“You’ll regret it, you know,” Eerie admonished him, obviously disappointed. “You will wish you had, Alex.”
She walked off to the dance floor without looking back at him.
I already do, Alex thought bitterly, brushing his hair away from his eyes and feeling bitter. I already do.
“I haven’t seen you in some time,
Alice. How have you been?”
Alice’s smile reminded Chris of the Cheshire Cat. Except much more frightening.
“A busy girl is a happy girl. But I’m certain that you’ve heard,” Alice cooed, sitting down across from him at the café table. “Unless you’ve lost your touch for these things?”
“Hardly,” Chris said, smiling back at her tiredly. “I’m afraid that there is still very little that goes on in our sordid underworld that I am not eventually made aware of. Word is that you’ve been working quite a bit these last few weeks. Saigon, Los Angeles, Manila, Paris… all operations targeting the Terrie Cartel, if I’m not mistaken.”
The waiter was clearly unnerved by Alice, and delivered the coffees Chris had already ordered in a hurried manner that made it abundantly clear that they would not be seeing the boy again. Alice seemed vaguely amused by this.
Chris had to admire their waiter’s keen sense of self preservation. Not everyone was so quick to spot Alice for what she was.
He’d first met Alice in Berlin, during the strange and exciting years after the First World War, not long before she’d started working as an Auditor. She didn’t appear to have changed much since – her hair was dyed black, now, and a faint white scar was etched along one cheekbone, but she didn’t seem to have aged at all. Even her clothes weren’t much different from the first time he’d met her, at a friend’s party in a flat in Fredericksburg, in a slinky black dress and high-laced shoes with pointed toes, though she’d ditched the dress and shoes in favor of tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. The coat she hung over the seatback was too heavy and long for the weather, so it had to be armor.
Chris liked to flatter himself by thinking that he looked much the same himself, except that his hair had faded to white a few decades ago. He dyed it for several years, before he’d lost interest in the pretense. Otherwise, like Alice, the body he inhabited appeared to be somewhere in its early thirties. Even the fantastically expensive cream-colored suit that he wore was fundamentally similar to the things he’d worn in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, though tailors had been better back then. One of the tragedies of the modern world.
“You aren’t mistaken, Chris.” Alice blew on her coffee, then set the cup back down, apparently deciding it was too hot. “But it’s more than the Terrie Cartel that I am dealing with. Witches, and Weir, and who knows what else.”
“I heard about some of that,” Chris said, idly stirring the coffee he’d ordered out of politeness. “Even for me, that’s a bit hard to swallow – Operators working with Witches. I thought your people were conditioned to make that kind of thing impossible?”
“We thought so, too.” Alice shrugged. “Not the first time Analytics has been wrong, you know.”
Chris nodded uncertainly, brushing an imaginary crumb from the front of his immaculate white blazer.
“Quite. Still, such a thing has never happened before. I would not have believed it to be possible, under normal circumstances.”
Alice shot Chris an inquisitive look.
“What, exactly, makes the current circumstances abnormal?” The question sounded innocent enough, but Chris knew better than to think that Alice would
ask
for anything. Alice took. It was what she did. “We’ve had rogue cartels before, after all. The Terrie Cartel is probably the biggest we’ve ever had to sanction, but it’s hardly a unique situation.”
Chris spread his hands innocently and put on the face that had sold more stories than he could count.
“I’m afraid that we’ll need to come to some sort of accommodation before we can discuss that any further,” he said, as if he regretted the necessity. “Of course, if it were up to me, I’d tell you gratis, but that would be bad for business, you understand.”
“I do, actually.” Alice blew on her coffee and sipped at it cautiously, then set the cup carefully back down in the chipped white saucer. “I appreciate your position. But, I wonder if you appreciate the significance of mine.”
Chris looked at Alice thoughtfully for a moment, and then gave her a tired smile.
“Believe me, I know that if you want to, you can force the information out of me,” Chris admitted. “I’m something of a coward when it comes to pain, after all, and I do intend on living a long, long time. While you do have a certain amount of leverage, give some thought to this, Alice – won’t you have questions you need answered, in the future? Who will you turn to, once you’ve used me up? Who else would talk to an Auditor?”
Alice sipped her coffee again, and then grinned at him over the cup.
“Don’t worry about it, Chris. For reasons I don’t understand, I have a certain misplaced affection for you. What is it going to cost me?”
“Well,” Chris hedged, “what do you need to know, exactly?”
“Everything,” Alice answered flatly. “I need to know everything that the Terrie Cartel has been doing for the past several years, what the Witches have to do with it, the Weir, everything. Gaul says that the store is open on this one.”
“He wants it that bad?” Chris asked, too stunned to hide his surprise. Gaul was notorious for his cheapness.
“He has a hard on for this like you wouldn’t believe,” Alice said glumly, setting her coffee aside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so worked up. I need to know anything I might need to know, alright? So, tell me what it is that you want.”
“Two things.” Chris considered his coffee, and then decided against it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t drink the stuff, but the last time he had, it had given him heartburn for days. “I want a favor from Central, and I want a favor from you.”
“Oh, Chris,” Alice said, putting one hand on her chest, and fluttering her eyelashes. “I’m here in a professional capacity…”
Chris did his best to look appalled, rather than hurt and saddened. He didn’t like to make Alice aware of the times when her memory failed her, even if it wounded him that she had forgotten the nights they’d been together; at the Russian embassy in Prague, on the porch outside a tiny cottage near Hamburg they had rented one balmy weekend in June, in a hotel in Copenhagen so expensive that they never even saw the employees – fresh towels and meals simply appeared, as if by some kind of domestic magic. Chris couldn’t imagine forgetting all of it, but that had always been the score with Alice.
“I’d never try and blackmail you into it, my dear,” he said with a pained grin. “I’m certain that eventually you’ll succumb to my charms. No, I think you’ll find that what I want you to do is more along your usual line.”
Alice shook her head in mock resignation.
“Your loss. But I can’t offer anything, until I know the particulars.”
“I want Central to assume total responsibility for Margot’s education and upbringing,” Chris said abruptly, moodily pushing his coffee away. “I did make promises to provide her with mentorship and financial support, but it has become quite a burden.”
Alice smiled at him.
“Times are hard all around then, Christopher?” Alice pursed her lips briefly. Chris knew from experience that meant she’d agree – reluctantly, of course. He’d seen that face during that bad business in Moscow in the ‘53, and then again, decades later in Serbia. Alice was extremely concerned about something, and he had a pretty good idea about what. “You’re gonna break that little vampire’s heart, if she finds out you are shifting the responsibility. And what do you want from me?”
Chris folded his hands in front of his face as if in prayer, and tried his best to look beneficent and thoughtful. Not that he could hope to fool Alice, who knew him well enough to spot an act, even without using the Inquisition Protocol she had access to as an Auditor. It was a habit that helped him feel more confident in his presentation.
“It will probably get heavy,” he admitted. “But, you know I wouldn’t bother you for anything that wasn’t.”
“I’d probably get bored with anything else,” Alice said, gradually shredding a discarded sugar packet into dull pink ribbons. “Get to the point, please, Chris.”
“I need you to watch my back on a job,” Chris said plainly. “It’s something personal, it isn’t Society business. I can’t use my normal channels to handle this thing.”
Alice leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the most open confusion he’d ever seen her express, already starting to morph into anger.
“And now I am supposed to say ‘Just like old times’, or something, right? I’m an Auditor, Chris, not a hired dog. I don’t do favors. I certainly don’t help you deal with your ‘personal business’.”
Chris held up his hands pleadingly.
“Credit me with a bit more intelligence than that, Alice. I know perfectly well who I’m talking to. I wouldn’t have bothered to make the request, but the fact is…”
Chris hesitated for a moment, then. It was like looking down off of a height, right before he jumped. It didn’t change anything, other than reminding him to be terrified. He still had no options other than a leap of faith.
“The fact is that this job pertains to your Audit, Alice, and I think you’ll be very interested in it.”
“I already am,” Alice said grimly, her smile suddenly gone. Chris wondered how he’d forgotten how much scarier she was without it. “Have you done something ill-advised, Chris?”
Chris shook his head and sighed.
“I wasn’t planning on trying to hide it,” he said guiltily. “We don’t have nice jobs, Alice, and they aren’t easy, either. I’ve made a mistake.”
Alice leaned forward even further, taking his ice-cold hand in her own. It was a friendly gesture, but with an underlying firmness. He knew better than to flinch from her touch.
“What did you do for the Terrie Cartel, Chris?”
He heard the edge in her voice, and knew that it could go either way, but Chris faced it down with the nerves of a life-long gambler.
“Remember, when I took the job, they were still a cartel in good standing!” Chris protested. “The suspension only came down a few weeks ago. This all started almost three years ago.”
When he realized that no reaction from Alice was forthcoming, Chris sighed again, more out of habit than anything.
“The Terrie Cartel approached us, the Society, wanting to buy all kinds of intelligence – anything at all on the Witch cults, those Anathema freaks in the Outer Dark, the movements of the Weir tribes and population estimates, that sort of thing.” Chris shook his head, and wished that he could take his hand out from under Alice’s. “It’s obvious to me, now, they were interested in how much we knew, and by extension, how much Central was likely to know, rather than the information itself.”
Alice nodded grimly, but she released his hand, much to Chris’s relief.
“You provided this information?”
Alice tapped her fingers on the table expectantly.
“Of course,” Chris acknowledged, feeling a bit foolish. “There was nothing proscribed, nothing outside the boundaries of the Agreement. We continued to provide intelligence for them up until we heard about the attacks. The arrangement was terminated before Central proscribed the Terrie cartel.”
Alice’s grin returned. Apparently she had caught the emphasis on the last part of the statement, the proactive termination of the relationship. Weeks could mean everything. Nothing was trivial when Alice Gallow was sitting across the table, and Chris wasn’t about to assume any more guilt than he had to.