Oversaw a lot of important information being passed back and forth. Then one day Brightly calls me up and says, Hayes, my boy, we think there’s something amiss with our dear friend Teddy. In fact, we think he’s running something on the side. There’s a lot of Russian traffic up north along the coast, and there’s talk that someone in Telecommunications is going to pass some information about trade agreements on to them. Teddy’s our weak link, my boy, the chink in our armor. The likely spot, yes? So why don’t you look into Teddy and make sure everything’s tip-top. And of course I say sure, Larry. Sure thing.”
Hayes sat up and hunched over his glass, blond head crooked on his shoulders. “So I did. I did look into Teddy. I followed him for about a month. Spent a lot of time in empty rooms, staring out the window. Spent hours watching his family. He was a nice fellow, Teddy. Two kids, Honoria and Jessica. They liked the river market, I remember that. Nice wife. Sort of dull, though. Elizabeth, I think her name was. Liked horses. I told Evans that, said he’d get along with her. Jim’s a horseman, you see. And I keep following him and following him, and I keep telling Brightly that there’s nothing here. This man’s straight as an arrow. Pure as the driven snow. Waste of time. But he just tells me to keep sitting on him. So I do.
“Eventually it breaks. Teddy told friends and family he was going on some business trip overnight, but I had no record of it. Instead he went east. East to Dockland, suitcase in his hand. To a little building. Next to where the painted women walk, the daughters of joy. But there were no women in that place. I checked, you see, went inside once he had done his bit and left. No. No, they just had a line of little boys. About seven years old, I’d say. All lined up on the wall in nice clean smocks. Bare legs, hands clasped before them. Heads bowed like they were waiting for teacher. The man in the front told me I could take my pick.
“I left. Thought about it for a while. And told Brightly.”
He licked his lips. “Brightly seemed satisfied by this. Very satisfied. Said I did a good job, and thank you for your discretion. But I found out later that there was no Russian connection. No leak on Teddy’s part at all. I asked Brightly about it. He got all shirty with me. Said that didn’t matter. When or if the time came that Montrose’s devotion wavered, he said, well, they had the stuff to get him in line, and now fuck off and forget about it. So that was that. And I never heard more about it.
“We still have Teddy working for us. I don’t think he knows we know. And it’s not my job to care, I guess. After all, this is what we do for a living, you and I. It’s a dirty game, but it’s the winning game.”
Then Hayes looked at her, eyes thin. “But we have our own game, too. Some of the things we’ve dug up in the interviews are very valuable. There are things I need to keep to myself, or give to my contact in the police.”
“The police?”
“Yes. Favors are pretty important in my business. Your business, now. Are you all right with that?”
“What would you give them?”
“Those boys McClintock talked about. I have someone who’d like to know about them. A detective. And we’re not taking any action on them, so someone might as well give it a go. So is that all right, Sam?”
She thought about it. She didn’t feel it was appropriate to contact the police, but then it didn’t seem like their investigation had done much at all so far, nor was it going to. It had been a sad thing to record horrible crimes but never act on them, and she was secretly desperate for it to end. And after hearing what Hayes had said about the nature of their position, she wasn’t sure if their investigation had much to do with justice in any way.
She nodded.
“All right,” he said. Then they stood and walked out to the street. It was raining again, a cold, soft sting that tickled the neck.
“I was wrong about you,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t last, at first. But you might.”
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Because you’re not stupid. Not by a long shot. But this isn’t a desk job anymore, Miss Fairbanks. This isn’t an ordered world of archives and hierarchies, no matter what you’d like. We don’t live for the approval of our betters, no matter how happy it may make us feel. And the truth here is soft and runny. I know you’d like to stay in the back room, reading and writing and hunched over a desk, but that’s not the way now. See?”
“I see.” Then a thought came to her and her skin went cold. She peered at him and said, “Mr. Hayes, are you trying to turn me?”
“What? Turn you?”
“Yes. Like you do everyone else I’ve seen you speak to. Make them your friends, even though they hardly know you. Tell them whatever lies they need to hear. Is that what you’ve just tried to do, to me?”
He stared at her, and somehow he seemed to grow even smaller and older in his coat. “No, Sam,” he said softly. “No, I haven’t tried to do that with you. You’d know, wouldn’t you. Since you’ve seen me do it so often.”
She still watched him suspiciously. “Was anything you told me the truth?”
“Yes,” said Hayes. “It all was, actually.”
“Even Teddy Montrose?”
Hayes nodded.
“And he’s… he’s still working for us?”
“He’s climbed a few ladder rungs at Telecommunications now. Gone up a pay grade or two. But yes.”
She thought about that. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
He shrugged hopelessly. “Because they’re keeping things from us. From me, and from you. And because I don’t want Naylor and his boys to go unpunished or to do anything more, and I don’t think the unions will be spooked by the police nabbing a few thugs. I’ve seen organizations like theirs before, they’re too disparate. Their reactions are too slow.”
“Is that all?”
He stared at her for a moment longer. With his wet hair and soaking coat, he suddenly seemed like a lost child. “And because I want you to trust me, I suppose.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I just know you now, Sam.” Then he bid her good day, turned, and disappeared into the crowd.
CHAPTER TEN
Garvey paced up and down the canal bank, clambering over hills of soft wet loam and crumbling cement. He had been roving up and down the canal for four hours, scanning the water and the sludge. There were disturbances, plenty of them. Footprints and cigarette butts and strange scores in the mud. None of them were very distinctive and none of them told him anything. It had been too long.
Garvey eyed the half-finished structures of Construct in the distance, the skeletal tenements and cement pillars standing up like monstrous fenceposts. A many-segmented crane sat hunched in their center, a hibernating predator in a distant, alien land. Garvey knew that somewhere on the northern side of Construct were the foundations of the Lady of Industry, Evesden’s once-intended answer to the Statue of Liberty. She’d been meant to stand along the shore, holding up a great gear that would glow a soft pink at night, the luminescence visible for miles down the Strait. It’d generally been felt that the placement couldn’t have been better, since Construct was right next to the Kulahee Bridge, which reached all the way across to Victoria, so northern visitors to Evesden would have seen the rosy gear slowly cresting the horizon as they approached. But the planners had gotten only so far as casting her feet and putting up her supports when the troubles with Construct began, and they’d been forced to abandon her along with the rest of the project. Now two enormous gray feet sat out by the waters, the waves just licking the toes, as though some giant had gone diving into the sea and left its curiously anatomical slippers behind. Garvey had seen the pictures. They’d run in all the papers when Construct had first started sinking.
Garvey shook himself and returned to the work at hand. If they’d had a body in tow they would have gone through Construct, he decided. Almost certainly. Much of it was abandoned now, and there would be a thousand places for a quiet murder in Construct. Excavated basements and foundations, collapsing canals and office sheds. But they wouldn’t have lived there. They would have gone over the Royce Bridge, or somewhere nearby. It was the only dependable route.
Garvey climbed back into his car and drove to Royce Street and surveyed the shopkeepers and homes. He
