“How’d you get this?” I asked.
“Oh. Well. I don’t want to go into those details,” the host said, taking the paper from me.
The host and hostess were sharing looks again as if they regretted telling me. Not because they were ashamed or thought I was going to get them in trouble, but that pompous look of, “he shouldn’t know.”
I reached out, took hold of the host by the shoulder, and lifted him off the ground. I did my best not to break any bones.
“Where did you get that?”
The hostess covered her mouth with her hands.
“Garm stays in contact now and then,” the host cried.
I dropped him.
“Garm?” I asked, dumbfounded. Garm had completely cut me off, and she’s communicating with these people?
“How do you know it’s her?”
“We’ve been talking for years,” the hostess said. “But we only ever see her at City Hall.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Well, yes,” the host looked around and quite a number of people were watching our interaction. He leaned in to whisper to me.
“We weren’t supposed to tell you.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, and then grabbed his sore shoulder where I had held him.
“Ow. It’s just what she said. She only works through some families now. She said she leaves the running of the city to you.”
I was confused. Especially since I didn’t in any way “run” the city. I just put bandages on the biggest cuts.
“We guessed that her ticket was a kind of alternative to the extreme candidates who are running,” the hostess added.
“Dead is pretty extreme,” I countered. “How do you even vote for a dead person?”
“How do you vote for a live person?” the host asked.
I was about to grab him again when I realized he wasn’t being sarcastic. I had no concept of the mechanics of voting. How would you select anyone? Who gets to vote? How do they only vote once?
Ugh.
“Is everything fine, Supreme Kommilaire?” the hostess asked timidly.
I could see they were quite frightened. I looked around and saw the party had basically stopped and everyone was observing us.
I walked in between the couple and put my arms around them jovially. I then turned to the crowd.
“I’d like everyone to give a big round of applause for this most excellent night! This is the best party I’ve been to in maybe fifty years! Reminds me of Old Belvaille,” I said with gusto.
The aristocracy dutifully applauded. They were so good at faking praise you couldn’t even tell they were insincere.
CHAPTER 20
“Can you resurrect dead people?” I asked Delovoa at his place.
“Yes,” he said, while drinking his third glass of wine.
“You can? How?”
“Huh? Oh, I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”
I gave him a scowl.
“What?” he said. “Every time you come here you complain. Who do I get to complain to? You? I need a crapload of sulfur hexafluoride to fix our air scrubbers. If I can’t find it we’ll have to rotate them every few days or we’ll all pass out walking for five minutes. That’s me complaining. So what’s your advice on that?”
I sat there thumbing my sandwich.
“Exactly,” he said, slamming the rest of his drink.
“Have you talked to Garm?” I asked him.
“Garm? No. When would I ever talk to her?”
“She vanished, right?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged.
“But what if she’s still neck deep in things? Running it all from behind the scenes?”
“Then she’s doing a terrible job.”
“She makes the laws, though, and appoints judges.”
“That’s rare. How many laws do we have, really? Like ten?”
“I think about thirty.”
“You’re the Supreme Kommilaire and you don’t even know. That’s how important our laws are.”
I ate a few sandwiches as Delovoa rang for more alcohol and food. It was a different twink who delivered them. Where did he get them all?
Delovoa sighed.
“Garm took her money and retired. She always wanted the good life. And remember, her mutation was she didn’t sleep. That has to wreak havoc on a body after a while. Seventy years without sleep… not sure how healthy she is. I say just let her alone, if she wanted to talk she would.”
“What if she wants the city to be operating poorly?” I asked, after a moment. “I talked to some people and they said they were in contact with Garm. In person.”
“Why would she want the city to be running poorly? She owns it.”
“So no one challenges that ownership? I don’t know. Maybe she makes more money like that. The only reason I can think of why she would be talking to random people and not you or me is because we’ve changed.”
“I haven’t changed,” toothless Delovoa declared, reclining on his plush divan.
“I have. I’m a cop. I’m the city’s police captain. I used to be a gang negotiator. I broke people’s legs because I was paid to do it. I murdered people because I was paid to do it. Now I arrest people like that.”
“Let’s be serious here, you’re not exactly a great cop,” Delovoa purred. “You’re still doing gang negotiations and murdering people. You just wear a tacky uniform and blab your stupid trials on the loudspeakers when I’m trying to take a nap.”
“I didn’t say I was a super cop. But even a dishonest cop is really different than what I used to be. Garm’s not talking to me because she will never change. She is Quadrad. By birth, by death, she once said to me. She will always be an assassin and a grifter no matter how old she gets or how little sleep.”
“You don’t know. She may have fallen in love with someone else and wants to spare you. Or maybe she is ashamed of her appearance. Or maybe she’s found a really good book she hasn’t been able to put down for forty years. There are a million reasons she might have become anti-social and most of them have nothing to do with you. I swear, you date a woman for a month and you think she owes you her life? Who was doing who a favor on that one? Here’s a hint: look in the mirror.”
“Damn, man. Okay.”
I sulked and ate food.
“When’s the election?” Delovoa asked, as if he hadn’t just ripped me a new one.
“Not sure.”
“Hank’s Butt,” Delovoa said, using a common exclamation which he knew I found annoying, “if you don’t know, who does?”
CHAPTER 21
I looked through the one-way mirror and saw MTB and Valia interviewing the feral kid we had arrested a few days back. He looked good and hungry.
Valia hadn’t gone motherly like I asked. She looked like a prostitute. Which either meant she disobeyed me or she’d had an odd childhood.
I couldn’t hear them, but MTB was playing hard as nails as usual and Valia was trying to seduce this kid. It was comical how bad it was. I started pantomiming what they were saying.
“So, cutie, what brings you here?” I said in a fake Valia voice.
“I’m going to pull out your teeth, fasten them to a leather strap, and then flay your skin off with your own teeth!” I growled like MTB.
“Sounds sexy. Here, look at my leg on the table. Can you tell I don’t shave?”
Even if the feral kid wanted to talk, I think he was too confused by my Kommilaire to answer properly. He just sat there looking back and forth between them, wondering if non-feral people were all insane.