Pepper and his bag full of fake paper was just the beginning.
Ratesic went in to talk to the kid, and the five minutes grew into ten, and the ten into twenty. Alvaro paced outside the interrogation room, watching the live feed stitched from the room’s four-corner captures, smoking and pacing, more and more angry, until at last Ratesic emerged, grinning ear to ear.
He was right. He was always right.
Pepper did indeed have a conspirator. His name was Armond Kessler, and he ran a small Mid-City print shop whose clients included the Publishing Arm of the Golden State itself. This Kessler sonofabitch was using the State’s own templates to press fake identifications.
“Well done, Mr. Ratesic,” I told him. “Let’s go pick up this Kessler and see what he has to say.”
“You know what?” Charlie said, grinning. “There’s something else I wanna try.”
9.
“I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Ratesic. I thought it would be okay for me to use your desk.”
“I do mind, actually. As a matter of fact.”
I mind very much. I like my desk the way I like it, with my takeout menus in the pile where I keep them, arranged not alphabetically or by cuisine but in the order of the days in which I use them. I like my phone in the spot where I like it to be, and I especially like my chair without somebody else’s ass in it. And now here is Ms. Paige, pulled right up to the desk, staring at my screen, biting her lower lip in concentration, holding a pen angled to her Day Book, ready for action. She doesn’t turn around, even with me looming behind her. She keeps her eyes glued to what she’s watching.
“What are you looking at, anyway?”
“The stretches.”
“What stretches?”
Now she turns, and while she’s turning she says “Stop” and the playback stops.
“The stakeout stretches you asked me to retrieve. From Crane’s door?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. Why? They couldn’t put together the death scene yet, but they’re working on it. It’s a—what did he call it?”
“A tapestry.”
“Right. Yes. But these—” She gestures to the stretches, the neat stack she’s made of them on my desk, beside the screen. “He said these were easy. Static shot, front door. He pulled them for me, right away.”
“Who did? Stone?”
“Right. Mr. Stone. Woody—he said to call him Woody. He said—why—what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because…”
I trail off, examining the image frozen on the screen, as if I’m misunderstanding somehow, as if she were lying. But no, there it is, the drab gray courtyard at Ellendale Place where we were just walking three hours ago, that sad little fountain, the wilted chrysanthemums in their cracked clay pots. Crane’s front door. She’s gotten all angles on the doorway of Crane’s residence, exactly what I asked her to ask for, although never in a million years would I have suspected she’d get it so quickly.
“So you just—asked?”
“Well. I asked nicely.” Ms. Paige gives me a tentative smile. “I explained how it was important.”
I laugh. I actually laugh. Everybody who goes to the ninth tells Woody it’s important. It’s practically tautological: if you are going to the ninth floor, if you are asking for a piece of reality to be cued for review, then what you’re working on is important.
“You asked Woody to release two weeks of reality and he just said ‘Okay.’”
“Well, no.” She checks her Day Book. “He said ‘No problem.’”
“He said ‘No problem.’”
I mean, I am fucking flabbergasted here. Doesn’t matter how many capture feeds we’re talking about, or how few. When I ask, when most people ask, what happens is that Woody Stone with his big gut rises slowly, sighs heavily, makes a big show of searching his office for the right forms—as if it’s a serious and unwelcome imposition on his valuable time, as if responding to capture requests from the thirtieth floor isn’t 95% of the man’s job description. But Ms. Aysa Paige has got the first stretch already cued and the rest of them stacked up beside the screen, ready to go. No problem.
I’m feeling it strong now, feeling it despite myself, staring at Aysa where she sits at my desk, clearly anxious to reengage with the stretch. Envy. Red spirit. Unwelcome friend. I am conscious of the brittleness it puts in my voice.
“All right, Ms. Paige. Did you find anything?”
“Not yet, no. I’m going frame by frame.”
“As you should.”
“So it’s going to take some time.”
“Okay.”
She turns back to the work, says “Play” and then “Fast,” and I stand awkwardly behind her, arms crossed, watching her watch. On the screen, in the courtyard, minutes pass in speeded-up motion, a blur of minutes in which nothing happens: water sputters in the fountain, summer breeze riffles the glossy leaves of the potted plants. Aysa’s attention is steady on the screen, her whole body hunched at attention, her eyes narrowed like a bird’s, watching for prey, watching for any movement.
“Listen, Ms. Paige,” I say finally. “Aysa.”
She says “Stop” and turns around.
My voice is a bit different now; I’m speaking in a different key. “I spoke to Mr. Vasouvian about you. Just now. And he mentioned to me about—he gave me a bit of background. About your parents.”
“Yeah?” Her voice, too, is in a different key, and it’s not the same as mine. Her words are cold, hard, and flat. “What about them?”
“That they have been gone. Since you were young. I only wanted to say I was sorry to hear that. That can’t have been easy.”
“Respectfully, Mr. Ratesic? Fuck my parents.”
And she goes right back to it, sliding one stretch out of the slot on the side of the screen and replacing it with the next. “Play,” she says, and I watch her watching, not sure what to say, not sure what a good mentor does with Fuck my parents. What I’m thinking, though, is that we gather impressions of
