‘Sounds eminently reasonable to me,’ said the little security expert.
I drew in a deep breath, aware that I was comitting myself further than at any point since my arrival. But here, now, it had to be done. ‘You’re working for Reivich,’ I said. ‘Both of you.’
Pransky looked at Zebra. ‘He mentioned that name earlier. I don’t know who he means.’
‘It’s all right,’ Zebra said. ‘I do.’
I nodded, feeling a paradoxical sense of relief, resignation, I supposed. It didn’t greatly comfort me to find out that Zebra was working for the man I had been sent to assassinate — most especially now that she had captured me. But there was also a defeatist pleasure in seeing one particular mystery cleared up.
‘Reivich must have contacted you as soon as he got here,’ I said. ‘You’re — what — some kind of freelancer? A security specialist in your own right, like Pransky here? It would make sense. You knew how to handle a weapon, and you were a step ahead of Waverly’s people when they were hunting me down. The whole hunt sabotage story was just a screen. For all I know you play it every night with the best of them. There. How am I doing?’
‘It’s fascinating stuff,’ Zebra said. ‘Please continue.’
‘You were detailed by Reivich to find me. He had a suspicion someone had been sent from Sky’s Edge, so it was just a matter of putting your ears to the ground and listening. The musician was part of the operation as well — the front man who trailed me down from the Mendicant habitat.’
‘Who’s the musician?’ Pransky said. ‘First Reivich, now the musician. Do these people actually exist?’
‘Shut up,’ Zebra said. ‘And let Tanner continue.’
‘The musician was good,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure whether I gave him enough to go on; whether I allowed him to establish beyond any doubt that I was the man he wanted, and not just some innocent immigrant.’ I looked towards Zebra for confirmation, but since none was forthcoming, I continued, ‘Maybe all the musician could tell Reivich was that I was still a possibility. So you kept tabs on me. Somehow you had contacts in the hunt movement — maybe connections with a group of genuine saboteurs, for all I know. And via Waverly, you found out I’d been recuited as a victim.’
‘What is he talking about?’ Pransky said.
‘The truth, unfortunately,’ Zebra said, dispensing a withering look towards the security specialist, who was probably her subordinate, her understudy or dogsbody. ‘At least regarding the hunt. Tanner wandered into the wrong part of the Mulch and got himself captured. He put up a good fight, too, but they might have killed him if I hadn’t made it in time.’
‘She had to save me,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t anything noble about it, though. Zebra only wanted information. If I died, no one would be able to establish whether or not I’d really been the man sent to kill Reivich. That would put Reivich in an uncomfortable situation; he wouldn’t be able to relax for the rest of his life. There’d always be the danger that the real assassin was closing in. A lot of sleepless nights. That’s how it went, wasn’t it, Zebra?’
‘It might,’ she said. ‘If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.’
‘Then why did you save me, if it wasn’t to keep me alive and find out if I was really the man?’
‘For the same reasons I told you. Because I hate the hunt, and I wanted to help you live.’ She shook her head, almost apologetically. ‘Sorry, Tanner. Much as I’d love to help you with your particular paranoid construct, it doesn’t go any deeper than that. I’m who I said I was, and I acted for the reasons I said. And I’d be grateful if you restricted discussion of the sabs to an absolute minimum, even in Pransky’s esteemed company.’
‘But you just told me — him — you know who Reivich is.’
‘I do, now. But I didn’t then. Shall we continue? Maybe you ought to hear my side of things.’
‘I can’t wait.’
Zebra inhaled, looking interestedly around the doughlike acreage of the ceiling before her gaze snapped back to me. I had a feeling what she was about to say was not unrehearsed.
‘I rescued you from Waverly’s hunt clique,’ Zebra said. ‘Don’t fool yourself into imagining that you might have made it out alive yourself, Tanner. You’re good — that’s obvious — but no one’s that good.’
‘Maybe you just don’t know me well enough.’
‘I’m not sure I want to. May I continue?’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘You stole things from me. Not just clothes and money, but a weapon you shouldn’t have known how to use. I won’t even mention the cable-car. You could have stayed where you were until the implant stopped transmitting, but for some reason you thought you’d be safer on your own.’
I shrugged. ‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’
‘For the moment,’ Zebra conceded. ‘But Waverly isn’t, and he was one of the few allies we had at the core of the movement. I know you killed him, Tanner — the trail you left was so hot you might as well have sprinkled plutonium wherever you went.’ She strolled around the room, the stiletto heels of her boots clicking against the floor like a pair of matched metronomes. ‘That was unfortunate, you know.’
‘Waverly just got in the way. It’s not like the sadistic bastard was on my Christmas list.’
‘Why didn’t you wait?’
‘I had other business to attend to.’
‘Reivich, right? I expect you’re dying to know where I got that name from, and how I know what it means to you.’
‘I think you were in the process of telling me.’
‘After you ditched my car,’ Zebra said. ‘You showed up in Grand Central Station. It’s where you called me from.’
‘Go on.’
‘I was curious, Tanner. By then I already knew Waverly was dead, and that didn’t make sense. You should have been the dead man — even with the gun you stole from me. So I began to wonder just who it was I’d been sheltering. I had to find out.’ She stopped pacing; the clicking of her heels abated. ‘It wasn’t difficult. You were inordinately interested in finding out where the night’s Game was going to happen. So I told you. If you were there, I thought I’d be there myself.’
I thought back to what seemed like hundreds of hours earlier, but was in fact only the evening of the long night in which I was still immersed. ‘You were there, when I caught Chanterelle?’
‘It wasn’t what I was expecting.’
Of course not — how could it have been? I said, ‘Then what about Reivich? How does he come into it?’
‘Via a mutual acquaintance of ours by the name of Dominika.’ Zebra smiled, knowing she had surprised me with that.
‘You went to Dominika?’
‘It made sense. I had Pransky tail you to Escher Heights while I went to the bazaar and talked to the old woman. I knew you’d had the device removed, you see. And since you’d been at the bazaar earlier in the day, Dominika was bound to know who’d done the operation, if it wasn’t her. Which of course it was, which simplified matters enormously.’
‘Is there anyone in Chasm City she hasn’t deceived?’
‘Possibly, somewhere, but only as an extreme theoretical possibility. Actually, Dominika is a rather pure expression of our city’s driving paradigm, which is that there is nothing and no one who can’t be bought, given the right price.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘Only that you are a very interesting man, Tanner, and that you had a particular interest in locating a gentleman named Argent Reivich. A man who happened to have arrived in Escher Heights only a few days earlier. Now, isn’t that a coincidence, given that Pransky just happens to have followed you to that part of the Canopy?’
The svelte little security man felt it was his time to take over the narrative. ‘I tailed you for most of the night, Tanner. You really began to hit it off with Chanterelle Sammartini, didn’t you? Who’d have thought it — you and her.’ He shook his head, as if some basic physical law of the universe had been violated. ‘But you wandered around like old friends. I even saw you at the palanquin races.’
‘How tiresomely romantic,’ Zebra drawled, without interrupting Pransky’s flow.
‘I called Taryn and had her meet me,’ the man said. ‘Then we followed the two of you — discreetly, of course. You visited a boutique and came out looking a new man — or at least not quite your old self. Then you went to the Mixmaster. Now he was a tougher nut to crack. He wouldn’t tell me what you wanted in there and I’m
