Bancroft smiled without much humour. “The police and I have a perspective problem.”
“Perspective?”
“That’s right.” He moved along the balcony. “Come here, I’ll show you what I mean.”
I followed him along the rail, catching the telescope with my arm as I did and knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. I paused to watch the thing realign itself. The fingermarks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.
Bancroft had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.
“Yours?” I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.
“Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the Colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.”
He was losing me. I brought him back to reality. “Perspective?” I reminded him gently.
“Perspective.” He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. “You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.”
I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.
“That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked him.”
Bancroft turned to make sure his point was getting across.
“You see, Mr. Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to bother him. He had no respect.”
“So you’re the tree.”
“Just so,” said Bancroft equably. “I am the tree. The police would like to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they have no respect.”
I went back to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’ve seen this kind of thing from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you.
And then you make up some of your own.
Bancroft stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve this line of inquiry for a while.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Tuesday 14th August,” he said promptly. “Going to bed at about midnight.”
“That was the last remote update.”
“Yes, the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.”
“So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”
“I’m afraid so.”
Optimally bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again, wondering absently how it had got there.
“And there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you.”
Bancroft was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.
“Did I say something amusing?”
He had the grace to come back to his seat.
“No, Mr. Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.”
This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.
“Had any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them. Ms. Prescott handles that for me.”
“You don’t consider death threats worth your attention?”
“Mr. Kovacs, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.
“Very convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe neither you nor the police have consulted Ms. Prescott’s files.”
Bancroft waved a hand. “Of course, the police conducted their own cursory inquiry. Oumou Prescott told them exactly what she had already told me. That nothing out of the ordinary had been received in the last six months. I have enough faith in her not to need to check beyond that. You’ll probably want to look at the files yourself, though.”
The thought of scrolling through hundreds of metres of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me. I mastered it with an effort worthy of Virginia Vidaura’s approval.
“Well, I’ll certainly need to talk to Oumou Prescott, anyway.”
“I’ll make the appointment immediately.” Bancroft’s eyes took on the inward glaze of someone consulting internal hardware. “What time would suit you?”
I held up a hand. “Probably better if I do that myself. Just let her know I’ll be in touch. And I’ll need to see the re-sleeving facility at PsychaSec.”
“Certainly. In fact, I’ll get Prescott to take you there. She knows the director. Anything else?”
“A line of credit.”
“Of course. My bank have already allocated a DNA-coded account to you. I understand they have the same system on Harlan’s World.”
I licked my thumb and held it up queryingly. Bancroft nodded.
“Just the same here. You will find there are areas of Bay City where cash is still the only negotiable currency. Hopefully you won’t have to spend much time in those parts, but if you do you can draw actual currency against your account at any bank outlet. Will you require a weapon?”
“Not at the moment, no.” One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot ‘em up carnival.
“Well.” Bancroft seemed almost perplexed by my response. He had been on the point of reaching into his shirt pocket, and now he completed the action, awkwardly. He held out an inscribed card to me. “This is my gunmaker. I’ve told them to expect you.”
I took the card and looked at it. The ornate script read Larkin & Green—Armourers since 2203. Quaint. Below was a single string of numbers. I pocketed the card.
“This might be useful later on,” I admitted. “But for the moment I want to make a soft landing. Sit back and wait for the dust to settle. I think you can appreciate the need for that.”
“Yes, of course. Whatever you think best. I trust your judgement.” Bancroft caught my gaze and held it. “You’ll bear in mind the terms of our agreement, though. I am paying for a service. I don’t react well to abuse of trust, Mr. Kovacs.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do,” I said tiredly. I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies any more, punishment can only come through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory. “For what it’s worth, the line the Corps fed you about me is so much shit on a prick. My word’s as good as it ever was.”