That was where I took my beer.
Every city has a different-colored sky. In Amsterdam, the only city I had known until I was five, it had been gray-blue, a particular low-country Protestant shade that spoke of cheeses and oil paintings and grassy dikes. On Ratnapida it had been like light, clear glass. This city’s sky made me ache. It could have been so beautifuclass="underline" full of reflected river light and that soft, clear ambience that you only get near a northern sea. But the city glow stained the atmosphere like a muddy footprint.
I propped myself up by the chimney stack and opened the first can. The beer tasted cold and bitter, like the winter-morning frost I used to scrape from the old iron railings outside the family home in Amsterdam. The night was very clear. It was freezing up here. I shuddered, forced myself to drink down more frost and iron. Halfway down the can, I started to warm up.
About five miles away I could see the twinkling night lights of the bridge—the largest single-span suspension bridge in the world. And the owners were still in debt, even thirty years after opening it to paying tragic. They always would be. There weren’t that many private cars anymore, and the local government had negotiated an annual fee for the slides that crossed and recrossed the river. The national government, of course, and ultimately the taxpayer were the big losers: the government had fronted the money, the contractors had spent it, and now the taxpayers were paying again, this time in local taxes for the slides.
I crumpled my can, opened another.
Corruption. It all stank of corruption. As did anything connected with any kind of government. There were layers upon layers upon layers. I thought about Kirghizia: the minister for labor and the commissar of the treasury whom I had wined and dined and eventually bought off. All so van de Oest Enterprises could make more money.
But that wasn’t strictly true. It would also benefit the Kirghizians in the end, They would have clean water again. I sucked at the can. It was empty already. The third one was difficult to open. My hands were cold. I looked out at the bridge. Maybe the builders had told themselves that the local people would benefit in the end—after all, they would now be free to travel straight across the huge river instead of detouring fifty miles or more. But no one had asked the people. It had all been decided by those who met over white linen and Hashing crystal, who chatted over the wine and shook hands over coffee And took home hundreds, thousands, millions. And probably slept tranquilly every night.
I remembered the woman, the city executive who had taken Spanner and me to her flat in her private car; the heat; the film; what we had done… Local government. She hadn’t been hurting for money. I wonder if she even knew how corrupt she was.
Did I know how corrupt I was? What did “corrupt” mean, anyways? I had never set out to hurt anyone, but I was wearing the PIDA of a dead woman. Bird was now nothing more than a plume of greasy smoke easing up into the night sky and being torn apart by the wind. I wondered what Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, had been like. Whether she had loved or been loved. If she liked her food, or smoked. What her favorite films had been. Whether she shouted out loud when she came. I wondered if anyone had grieved for Sal Bird.
I wondered if anyone had grieved for the man I had killed. I didn’t even know his name. And he had been kind to me, in his way. I remembered his eyes as he knew I was going to kill him. I pushed that thought away.
I wondered if anyone grieved for me.
So, was I corrupt? I had killed a man. I was hiding from my family and living a lie. And everyone I met shied away from me. Ruth. Now Magyar. Everyone except Spanner.
When I was finishing the fourth can, I realized I was standing at the edge of the roof. My toes poked over the gutter. One more step. No more Sal Bird, aged twenty-five. No more fear about being found out; no more worries about dangerous people coming looking for me or Spanner; no more responsibility, feeling like I was the thin human wall between an unsuspecting city and an accident waiting to happen. It could all just stop. Here. Now. After all, Frances Lorien van de Oest had died a long time ago.
Dawn was breaking.
I stepped carefully back from the edge.
Chapter 8
Lore is eight. One afternoon she sits with Oster in his office, watching patiently while he scrolls through several resumes. Her parents are just starting the cycle of argument and recrimination that will end in divorce a dozen years later, but Lore does not yet know this. All she knows is that her mother has accused her father of being out of touch with the workings of the vast organization of which he is the titular head, and her father has decided to take an interest in one of the van de Oest company’s new ventures—the commercial production of fuel-grade ethanol.
He is talking half to himself and half to Lore as he works. “Now, do I choose this woman, the gene splicer, or should I go with James here, who performed so well on our Australian project?” Lore cranes over his shoulder, trying hard to understand exactly what her father is getting at. “Or maybe Carmen Torini?” He smiles at Lore then. “Stop peering from behind me like that. Get your own chair. Pull it up.”
Lore does, feeling very grown-up at the sight of their two gray heads reflected side by side in the computer screen, like equals.
He pulls up the three resumes. “Here we have three people who might do. This one is a researcher. They think in a certain way. They like elegance, theories. For this project we need someone different, someone who can smile and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work. Let’s try again.’ So then we come to James. He can make people work beyond themselves—look at what he did in Bulgaria last year when what we thought would be a simple bioremediation of a phenol spill turned so complicated.” Lore loves it that he does not turn to her and ask if she knows what phenol is, or what bioremediation means. He trusts her to ask, or to look it up later. “But they were all tried-and-tested techniques, Nothing new or innovative there.”
Lore frowns. “But if what he did worked, why isn’t that good enough?”
“You could ask your mother that.” He shakes his head. “Sorry.” He taps the screen. “It’s not so much what he did, it’s what he didn’t do. No brilliant shortcuts. No new high-efficiency methods. No record of him even contemplating anything not already done.”
“Not everyone can think of new things.”
“No, and there’s a place for good, steady people like James. Our business is built on them. But the reason we’re a leader, the reason we’re so rich, little one, is that your grandmother, and your great-great-uncle before her, did think of new things, and were smart enough to patent them.” He smiles gently. “And I was smart enough to marry your mother.”
Lore says nothing to that. She senses that there is a great sadness in her.father, but she knows, somehow, that it is not something she can fix. She does not want to think about it. “Who’s Carmen?”
He pulls up a picture of a woman of about thirty: black curls, brown eyes, a touch of arrogance. The picture shifts to the corner of the screen and three text boxes appeared. “She hasn’t been with us long. Joined up from EnSyTec four years ago. Started as a quality control manager. Moved up to assistant project manager. Then your mother chose her to head that project in Caracas.” He frowns. “Lots of innovation there.”
Her father stares at the screen for a long time, Lore wonders what he is thinking about. He looks sad again.
He switches the terminal off abruptly and turns to face Lore. “I’m not like your mother. She always has to be doing, always in control. That’s good, in its way, but it’s not my way.”
Lore nods, wondering if he expects her to take sides. He sees her wariness.