The Eternal Prison (27 page)

 

Faliero stepped in and a tall, slightly younger man shouldered his way into the bar, sending the whole place rocking as he added his weight. He was expensively dressed in a shiny black suit that glistened as he moved and a sumptuous leather topcoat that seemed to repel the rainwater away from him. His arms looked like tiny little oak trees inside the coat, and his hands looked like two hands each. I looked down at him, though, and he glared at me with the pissed-off stare of the man born short.

 

I sniffed the air. “You brought me a fucking Pig, Faliero?”

 

Kill him!
Squalor suddenly shrieked, making me flinch.

 

Gall,
Marin said musingly.
I never understood why he wastes his time on shit jobs like this. Yen, I suppose.

 

Faliero’s grin leaped back onto his face. “Oh, call me Mari, Mr. Rusbridge. Everyone does. And Major Gall here, while, yes, an officer in the fine System Security Force, is, for tonight, here as my bodyguard.”

 

Gall reached up and removed a metal toothpick from his mouth. “Calm down, old man. I won’t run you for outstandings.” He leaned against the bar, keeping me in a line of sight clear of his employer, and made a big show of cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick.

 

“Okay?” Faliero said, wagging his bushy eyebrows at me, mustache wriggling as words magically appeared in the air. “Cops make you nervous?”

 

“Nauseous,” I corrected. Gall glanced at me and then back at his fingers, and I felt better. A major. I’d never met one of the demigods of the SSF before. It was disappointing. “Aren’t you assholes busy with the fucking civil war?”

 

Gall appeared engrossed in something he’d discovered under his thumbnail. “That shit’s being taken care of, no worries, Mr.
Rusbridge.
”

 

“Now, Mr. Rusbridge,” Faliero said, looking closely at me. “You do not look well.”

 

I nodded. “Boats do not agree with me, apparently. No matter how old I get, Mr. Faliero, I never stop learning something new about myself.”

 

Faliero’s eyebrows, which were impressive, shot up. “You traveled here by…
boat?
You can actually do that?”

 

“During time of war, when getting an intercontinental hover might as well be getting a hover to the fucking moon, yeah, they do that. Neither the army nor the SSF is checking the water, yet.”

 

“Yet,” Gall murmured.

 

“
The Goose,
” I added. “Out of Galveston, Texas. Sixty-five thousand yen for a berth, which was a wooden pen in the hold, a jar of n-tabs, and free rein to piss or puke over the side any time I wanted. Took me to Liverpool, and I’ve been hitching rides on boats ever since. I fucking
hate
boats.”

 

“Yes. This is…” He trailed off and looked back at me. “Should I continue to call you Mr. Rusbridge? Guy
is
dead, isn’t he?”

 

We all are dead.

 

I glanced at Gall again, but this time the cop didn’t react. His coat hung open and I could see two holsters, one under his shoulder and one on his hip. A fucking cowboy. I made a mental note to run first and worry about him later if things got sticky. Then I nodded, looking back at Faliero. “Yes.”

 

“Did you kill him, Mr…. Cates?”

 

I smiled, heart pounding. Being famous was a tremendous pain in the ass. I turned back to the bar and retrieved my drink, determined to act like it was the best-tasting swill I’d ever had. I took a deep pull and nodded, turning and leaning back against the bar. “Not on purpose.”

 

“Ah.” Faliero nodded, looking amused. He looked down at his shiny shoes. His pants were gathered a few inches above the ankle and tied off with extravagant ribbons. When he looked down like that, his whole face disappeared, becoming two eyebrows and a mustache. “But you have control of Guy’s identity and accounts. As you contacted me under his secure account. You have access to his funds?” He looked up, and there was no more smile. For a second it was a very hard, unhappy man looking at me. “Much of which are
my
funds, you understand?”

 

I drained my drink, which immediately tried a jailbreak. I swallowed with effort, squinting through sudden tears. “I understand that Guy managed funds for people. I understand some of his clients were heavy hitters—police, politicians.” I winked. “Anonymous men of means. Men who make their living keeping their ear to the ground and profiting from information. Mr. Faliero, information is what I’m looking for, and you’re the local expert—at least the only expert I found in Guy’s address book.”

 

He nodded his head like I’d given him a compliment.

 

Prick,
Marin snorted.
He
looks
like a prick, doesn’t he?

 

“Poor Guy had an experience that didn’t agree with him —”

 

I will never get that image out of my head,
Salgado said quietly as someone unknown hummed tunelessly in my head.
Disgusting, and so
cruel.

 

“— And—and—I happened to be on hand, and we’d developed a sort of bond. Plus, I was the only other person alive within a hundred miles, so Guy didn’t have too many choices. I also understand that when Guy was arrested, he was in the midst of a major transaction for you, and his disappearance has left a large amount of your yen outside your control.” I smiled. “And you’d like it back.”

 

“Yes,” Faliero said, looking up again and smiling. “You understand everything. You can understand my joy when I received a message from Guy. You can understand my continuing interest even when it became clear that the person contacting me was
not
Guy. And thus you can understand why I would think to bring Major Gall here.” He looked around the place again. “Well. Shall we repair someplace more appropriate? I have a boat waiting.” He frowned. “The smell in this place, Mr. Cates, will settle into my clothes and I will have to destroy them.”

 

I considered. On the one hand, my murder would be tempting to Mr. Faliero, I was certain—I’d met enough men just like him, rich and ruthless, and they were usually hiring me to kill someone. On the other hand, he didn’t know how I had access to Guy’s information, and he wouldn’t take any chances until he knew more. It wouldn’t preclude him from grabbing me by the ankles and shaking me until something interesting fell out of my pockets, though. I’d survived a lot of cops in my time, but they still scared the shit out of me. Even the human ones.

 

“Okay,” I said.

 

“It’s all about money,” Faliero said as we made for the door. I hung back, encouraging Gall to step in front of me, and he did so with a knowing half grin, rolling the pick around his mouth again. “You know how many people are still in this shithole?”

 

He paused outside the bar, letting me look past him at Venice, a shallow spot in the ocean with a few dozen tops of buildings jutting up, mossy and crumbling. Most of the city was underwater these days. Bridges going from rooftop to rooftop had been thrown together decades ago and left to rot; some had already sagged back into the water. In the near distance, a tower still thrust up a few dozen feet over everything else. A huge Vid screen had been attached to it, silently beaming cold light out onto the water. The whole place smelled like piss.

 

Some of the buildings had additions built onto their old roofs, shiny modern boxes strapped onto these rotting old buildings, and some of the folks had tugged big floating platforms next to their buildings and built on
those.
Weak, wet lights flickered everywhere, like tiny nearby stars. It all looked ready to be washed away.

 

“About twenty thousand,” Faliero said, answering his own question. “It costs. Pumps, boats, manpower, importing supplies. You live here, my friend, you need
yen.
And Guy managed my yen.” He turned and started walking down the plank toward the pier. “Ever since those cocksuckers invaded fucking
Russia
—Russia! If there’s a short list of places you do not bother to invade, Russia is fucking top three, no? Does no one read history? My yen is worth half of what it was a month ago. And dropping. The funds you have under your thumb, they are
necessary.
”

 

As I stepped onto the pier behind them, there was a painfully loud roar behind me and then a punishing, hot wind pushing against me, making me stumble as it shoved me this way and that. The whole night lit up, and a second later there was a crazy rhythm of hollow drumbeats as chunks of debris rained down from the night sky. I twisted around, squinting. The bar was a fiery wreck, black smoke billowing up from what was left of its floating base.

 

Well, shit,
I thought.
That’s fucking strange.

 

“It’ll sink, fast,” Gall said conversationally.

 

“Perhaps I forgot to mention,” Faliero said with a sigh. “Mr. Cates, rumor has it that someone has bought a contract on you.”

 

 

 

 

XXIII

YOU’RE GONNA NEED THE HAND

 

 

 

 

The sun had come out, and I deeply regretted it.

 

The sky was cloudless and immaculate, a sheet of blue over our heads that took sunlight bounced off the dark, dirty water and sent it right back at you. I could feel my skin getting red and purple, blistering, my brain baking inside my soggy clothes, sending stinking steam into the air around me. For two days I’d been living with Faliero while he and Gall tried to gather up my price for release of Faliero’s money: information on Michaleen Garda, his present location, and anything else they could give me. Two days of queasy, rolling life, the whole world bobbing up and down around me. Everything damp, everything smelling like sewage, the rotten water getting everywhere and hanging in the air heavily, soaking into you. And me reluctant to take off my coat, to sever ties with my lucky charm, so I kept bloating with stink and damp, soaking it up and turning into one walking rash. Faliero said it took yen to live in a place like this, and I believed him. I just didn’t understand why you’d
want
to.

 

Faliero’s place was opulent enough, in its way. The platform on top was just a landing point and outdoor space; below there was one whole floor—huge, fifteen rooms and each one bigger than any apartment or crash pad I’d ever lived in—and below
that
were two floors. The first floor, above water, was relatively comfortable. Below that everything was dark, lit by harsh white light, and
damp.
And I mean fucking
damp.
I woke up in my little room—watched, of course, on closed-circuit video that had been inexpertly hidden behind a mirror—in a puddle of myself every morning.

 

I leaned over the railing and stared down at the inky ocean. For a few feet you could see the city beneath us, the crumbling stone facades from centuries ago, old shit. It was being eaten up by algae and seaweed, disappearing into theory and speculation maybe four or five feet down, the cloudy sea its own atmosphere.

 

Touma was supposed to do something about this twenty-five years ago,
Salgado muttered darkly.
Incompetent piker. Twenty-five years ago there were options to salvage Venice.

 

Why in the world would we
save
it?
Marin snickered.
Because it is
old?
Dolores, I expect a higher level of thinking from you. I’ve got sixty million people starving to death because of you jackasses from the Joint Council, and you want me to spend one hundred seventy trillion yen to stop this pile of shit from sinking?

 

No, it’s much better spent turning us all into monsters.

 

I pushed them away, opening my eyes and blinking. I heard steps and glanced at Gall just as Faliero joined me at the railing. The cop looked fresh and comfortable, wearing a new suit of deep purple fabric that looked like it breathed well. He was smoking a real cigarette, making a show of paying me no attention, and I longed for a gust of breeze to send some smoke over to me.

 

“Do not be fooled, Mr. Cates,” Faliero said. He spoke perfect English with no hint of an accent, which meant it was probably the second or third language he knew. “As I said, it takes money to live here, now. A few years ago the Joint Council decided not enough people remained here for it to be a maintained System Subdepartment. The bribes we paid to forestall that! You would be impressed.” I felt his eyes on me for a moment, and then he turned away. “Then again, perhaps nothing impresses you. Those who are bored, it is said, are boring.”

 

I ignored this. He was standing inches away and if I’d wanted I could flip him over the railing. He’d probably clip the stonework of the original building his new complex had been built on top of—an impressive thing, from what I could see, one of the few buildings that managed to rise a little above the waterline—and then smack into the water painfully. The trick was to pull your limbs in close and stay aerodynamic, and Faliero looked like a guy who hadn’t had to think physically in years. It was always good to know where you were, to imagine scenarios.