Paige closes her Day Book, and I’m about to say something—maybe challenge her to tell me what she thinks might matter in all that we have found—when I hear the distinct sound of a door closing. Someone is emerging from the house. The capture ops swivel to catch the new arrival, and so does Paige, and so do I.
4.
“A cow has four stomachs.”
“A person has one.”
“These are facts.”
“These things are so.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Speculator?”
“Oh, you know,” I say. “Working.” I point to the patch of broken grass, splotched with blood and boot prints. “A guy fell off the roof.”
“So I heard.”
I shake hands with Captain Elena Tester and then, after a pause, we hug, very briefly. A small capture crew, two guys, has peeled off from the main scene to get us from additional angles. There’s a bank of audios out here too, planted along the edge where the lawn meets the driveway, pure-audio captures angling their motion-sensing bulbs toward us, silent observers in the grass.
“It’s nice to see you, Laszlo.”
“Yeah. You too.”
And it is nice to see her—of course it is. I mean, what am I going to do, lie? It’s nice to see her, and it also stings; it’s nice to see her, and it also brings me right back close to a whole bank of memories I spend a lot of time trying to look away from.
“So, what? Falls off the roof, right?” says Tester. “Dies on the ground?”
“That’s certainly what the flat facts suggest.”
She glances at the spot on the lawn, the bent green stalks, patches of red blood. The body is long gone, en route to the morgue, where the doctors will do their thing, gathering up any final facts from inside the dead man’s body before they put it underground.
“So who called you people?” she asks.
I adjust my pinhole. “You don’t know?”
“Why would I know?”
“What?”
We peer at each other, mutually bemused, and then we both start laughing at the same time. I like Elena well enough—not a lot, but I don’t really like anybody a lot. Elena Tester is a colleague, in that loose definition of the word that includes all law enforcement officers in the Golden State, or might even take in the whole government, depending on your definition of “colleague.” The Speculative Service and the regular police operate in different but frequently overlapping realms, and Elena and I have worked together a couple dozen times over the years. Mainly I know her personally.
“It’s been a while,” says Elena softly, and I nod, start to say “Yup,” and because I’m a hollow version of the sturdy old bear I think I am, my throat catches on the small flat word, so I just swallow it back and don’t say anything. Because of course I mainly know Elena through Silvie, and in the long declining curve of my marriage, I haven’t seen much of Silvie’s friends. Not lately.
It takes me a second to fight out of that little prison of a moment, and Tester allows me to take the time I need. She’s a pretty decent soul, Captain Tester, not that she shows it off too often. Short-haired and tight-featured and direct, she’s a tough nut, professional and severe, droll when she wants to be. Like all regular police, she wears an octagonal blue cap with a short brim and a pinhole capture in the center of it to gather up reality; right now it’s pointed at me as mine is pointed at her, our respective points of view entering simultaneously into the Record.
“You were going to tell me who called it in,” she says.
“It’s not clear,” I say. “Old Vasouvian got it as a tip from one of yours, some overeager officer of the law, and instead of tossing it in the junk heap as was most likely merited, Alvaro sent us along.”
“‘Us’? I thought you folks worked alone. You especially.”
“Oh, I do, Elena. Believe me, I prefer to.”
I tilt my head toward Ms. Paige. “I’m supervising someone. The, uh—” For some reason it’s embarrassing. I jut my big chin toward the trees. “Young lady over there.”
Officer Paige is diligently reinterviewing her way through the crowd of Crane’s coworkers, scribbling furiously in her gilded Day Book.
“Laszlo the teacher. Wise mentor. How’s that playing out?”
“Oh, you know. Fine. Although I did shout at her for no reason.”
“Laz.”
“Not no reason.” I cross my arms. “She tried to get ahead of the facts. Unwarranted speculation.” I scratch the heat on the back of my neck, feeling a fresh wave of self-recrimination. “It wasn’t a big deal, really. I guess I took a bit of a tone with her over it.”
“You did?” says Tester, wide-eyed. “I’m shocked.”
“Ha ha.”
She was not actually shocked, obviously. It was a joke, a fact clear from the context—not a lie but a distortion of truth for intentionally comedic effect, understood as false on its face by everyone present, not to mention anyone listening in the provisional office right now, or listening later for the Record. You know all this already; you know the rules. You are familiar with the Basic Law. Humor causes no oscillation in the So, any more than any other form of small social falsehood: comic generalizations, inoffensive teasing, plain flattery—the whole constellation of innocuous and lubricating half-truths.
“Okay. Well.” Elena shrugs. “Let me know, will you, if there’s anything to it.”
“To what?”
“To this. The—” She points at the lawn. “The matter at hand.”
“Sure.”
“Hey. Are you okay, Laszlo?”
I sigh. “No.”
“Is it Silvie?”
“For the most part.”
“You miss her?”
“Yes. Yes. I do.”
Tester nods. That’s all she’ll get out of me, and she knows it. No deeper forms of truth will reveal themselves upon further inquiry, and she knows well enough not to dig. A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That’s not me. Me, I’ll give you what’s precisely true and no more; I’ll answer your question and move right along.
“Captain Tester? What about you?”
“What?”
“What are you doing here?”
She furrows her brow, just for an instant, as if surprised by the question, and I don’t know if it’s my own state—exhausted, stuck in my own damn head, thinking suddenly and painfully of Silvie, frustrated by the limits of my own stubborn soul—but for whatever reason my attention goes keen around that momentary pause of hers. Suddenly the clean sunlit air is alive with drifting particles, flickers and flecks. I don’t know what.
“I caught it on the scanner,” Captain Tester tells me. “I live near here, you know? On Talmadge.” I’m watching her face. I don’t know what I look like to her, I don’t know if she can tell what I’m thinking, but she keeps talking. “Sometimes I like to stop by a scene. Sometimes these…” Another half second pause. “Anyway. As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner while the scene officers did their thing. Take something off their plate. You know the figure?”