“No thank you.”
I feel myself bristle, I don’t know why. I light my cigarette, inhale deeply, and then exhale slowly. We’re still on Ellendale, standing beside the car, across the street from the courtyard building, looking up at Crane’s window, the same window we were looking out of a half hour ago. What if we could see ourselves? Look out on us from the window, while looking up at ourselves from out here?
“All right, look. Ms. Paige.”
“Yes?”
She looks up. Something is different in my voice. Or I hope it is. I’m trying to put it there. I’m trying to give her a softer surface. For the time being, anyway.
“Ms. Paige. First of all, you don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay? I’m just like you. All of this, the junior-senior Speculator stuff, it’s just what they do.” I take a second drag. I feel smoldering, cratered, like a volcano. Like a fire creature breathing smoke. “But rank within the Service is not important, okay? Not to people who matter. So you can call me Mr. Ratesic, or”—I’ve come this far, right?—“Laszlo.”
“Okay.”
“Or Laz. I don’t fucking care.”
“Okay.”
I glare at her.
“Okay, Mr. Ratesic.”
I laugh, just a little, a quiet rasp. “I’ll take it.” I indulge another drag, studying Crane’s windows, wondering if he ever stood there and took a long moment like this, contemplating the street. I’m guessing not. I hold smoke in my mouth, enjoy the way it feels on the back of my throat.
“What I’m saying is, you might find that it helps. The smoking, I mean. When your throat hurts.”
“It doesn’t.” I look at her. She shrugs. “I don’t actually get that.”
I scratch my neck, take another drag. “You don’t get what?”
“The throat. The eyes. Uh, coughing. And so on.”
“You don’t get any of it?”
“No.”
“No symptoms of any kind?”
“No.”
“When you’re seeing lies, when you’re feeling them? You don’t feel any physical—any reactionary effects at all?”
“I don’t, Mr. Ratesic.” She gives me a small apologetic smile. “I really don’t.”
“No shit?” I murmur, the words coming out soft with the smoke, like the memory of old words.
“No, sir.” She winces. “Sorry. No, Laszlo.”
I’m catching a chill off that information, as crazy as that sounds. It’s ninety degrees out here, I’m in my long black coat, and still the chill shudders up my spine like a ghost on feet. The chill of Charlie’s presence, out here leaning against the car with us, Charlie making himself known. She really is just like him.
She’s looking at me, curious. “I know that you do—that a lot of people, a lot of Specs, do get sort of a… how would you describe it?”
I shrug. “It’s like an allergy. A sensitivity. Not every time, and not always bad. Not usually bad at all. But most of the time, after exposure, you feel it a little bit, that’s all. Your body feels the work.” I finish the cigarette and consider starting a second one. “And especially after speculating.”
“Right. Yeah. I don’t get that.”
I smoke in silence, contemplating my new partner. I don’t get that, she says, like it’s not a big deal. But that’s how it works. The gift and the burden. You do the work, you feel it, that’s all. We all get it—all of us, apparently, except for Aysa. She is at another level. She is in another place.
The lack of symptomatology is one thing, but for some reason this revelation about my young charge registers in me as a kind of grief. I don’t know much about her yet, and I don’t like her because I don’t like anybody, but I can see that she is good. She’s kind and attentive and just fucking dying to do well in the world, to do good and do well. She’s too good to be carrying all of this: the gifts of discernment, of speculation—the “gift”—the burden of it, the responsibility to her fellow citizens, all of it.
“Ms. Paige, are you—”
“Yes?”
“Involved with anyone?”
Her eyes widen as she realizes what I’m asking. “You mean—like—”
“Yeah.” I gesture vaguely with one thick hand, searching the air for appropriate terminology. “Like a—sweetheart.”
Ms. Paige looks genuinely confused. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Because—I don’t know.”
Because I want to protect her, all of a sudden. I want to point her away from all of this work, from the dullness and the danger, from me in my dark clothes and dark spirit, point her away from the danger and the dullness of the whole preposterous enterprise and out toward the rest of our good and golden world, toward the Venice Beach skate park and the clear blue sky, toward her sweetheart and her future.
I say none of that. I just say, “We’re partners, right? We need to know each other.”
She is looking at me, confused, no doubt recalling the Laszlo of an hour and a half ago, in the car on the way to the scene of death, abruptly shutting down her earnest efforts to spill her whole history. She’s trying to make sense of me, and I should tell her she’s not the first person, and it’s not worth it.
“Alison,” she says softly, with the happy wisp of a smile. “I do have a sweetheart. Her name is Alison.”
“Oh.”
“So—should we head back to the office?”
The moment is already passing—it has passed—and I let it go.
Arlo gave me to Charlie for a shadow, and he was none too excited about it.
“Are you fucking kidding me, old man?” is what Charlie said, as a matter of Record—Charlie outraged and incredulous, never mind that I was standing right there. “I’m a solo operator. Lone wolf. You know that.”
“I think for a brief period you might open your heart to show what you know to Mr. Ratesic the younger.”
Me standing there in gray, hands stuffed in my pockets, examining the floor. Charlie wasn’t worried about hurting my feelings; of all the half-hidden facts he could discern without trying, one was surely that I would worship him under any circumstance.
And I did worship him. By the end of that first day’s training I worshipped him more than I ever had before, although my worship was tinged with the dawning realization that though I had followed him into Service, I would never in a million years live up to his reputation or abilities.
It was a slow day, my first day of speculation. Watching Charlie, standing back while he reconciled petty anomalies, testified in the Small Infelicities, helped a pair of impossibly dense regular policemen make sense of a bicycle theft.
But then, we’re on the way home, we’re turning right onto Westwood Boulevard, and he jumps the car up onto the curb, slams into park, and yells, “Come on! Come on!”
I run behind him into this little gas station convenience store, and the shopkeeper and the customer spin around at the sight of us: two big men in black and gray, tromping in together, me thinking with a burst of wild pride, We’re here! The Service has arrived!
Not that I knew what the fuck we were doing there. But Charlie does—Charlie has a hunch and Charlie is right. Charlie is always right.
“Hands up, friends,” he says, speaking to the room, smiling and moving slowly across the crowded aisles, grabbing a bag of chips for later. He puts out his hand for the customer’s wallet, and the guy tries to make a break for it, and Charlie snags him quick, slams him down, yanks it from his pocket, and riffles the cash till he finds it.