By the time she arrived at Southern Office she was disoriented and somewhat sweaty, but still forty minutes early for her meeting. She stopped in a small cafe to collect herself, ordered a small cup of coffee that was too hot to sip, and then began to carefully make the proper corrections to her map. She was not sure if it was at all possible to make an accurate map of Evesden, as all those available seemed misinformed to at least some degree, but she was willing to try anyway.
It had been a strange trip here to Infield, but the journey to Evesden had been even stranger and longer. Samantha had never expected to be here, even under these circumstances. When she had been a child following her father from military base to military base in the East she’d heard of this wondrous city out on the edge of the ocean, but it’d never actually been real to her, at least no more real than Heaven or Fairyland. Then when she’d begun serving in the hospitals it had slowly become more present. Officers and engineers she had met in the service began getting bought out by the famous McNaughton Corporation, forever extending its grasp. “Turning company,” they’d called it, and it was always “the company,” never just “McNaughton.” There simply wasn’t another kind. And then when one once-corporal had mentioned in friendly conversation that she seemed to have a solid head on her shoulders and they could use her sort in the company, she’d found herself agreeing to a position and suddenly she was receiving communications from this mysterious jewel on the other side of the world.
When she’d been given her new assignment and transferred to Evesden she hadn’t been sure what to expect. To Samantha, McNaughton was synonymous with order and institution. She’d found her true calling in the arms of the company, trawling through their labyrinthine files and setting their information to rights, and they’d greatly appreciated her work. So she had expected the home city to be something new, a place ruled with intelligence, perception, and efficiency, a paragon of the ideals McNaughton valued and rewarded. Yet she’d found something very different. Evesden was the most confusing city she’d seen yet. You couldn’t walk a block and stay on the same street. Not even the maps made any sense. And how disappointed she’d been to find McNaughton treated rude, shabby little men as if they were the most important employees in the world, for no reason she could see.
Samantha sketched out her latest route but stopped as she questioned one adjustment. Then as she glanced around the cafe she noticed a blond, rumpled figure slouching in a booth by the windows. It was Hayes himself, a mountain of cigarette butts in the ashtray before him and an entire pot of coffee cooling beside it. He wore a curious pair of small blue spectacles that he kept pushing farther and farther up his nose. Stacks of files sat in a heap on the table and in the booth, one open in his lap. She recognized them as the ones she had prepared the day before for their first set of interview subjects.
Sighing inwardly, she stood and walked over to him and said, “Good morning, Mr. Hayes.”
He nodded slowly without taking his eyes off the file. He did not seem at all surprised to see her.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Still he did nothing. One of his eyebrows may have twitched a bit, she wasn’t sure. Then he reached forward and salvaged one cigarette from the graveyard on the table and took a smoldering drag. He vanished behind a cloud of foul smoke. Samantha turned her head away as it drifted toward her.
He said, “These are very good.”
“Pardon?” she said.
“These are very good. These files.”
“Thank you.”
“Very thorough. They’ll make my job a lot easier.”
“I’m surprised you got them so quickly,” she said. “I sent them late last night.”
“Mm.”
“You must have gotten up early to get them.”
“I never went to bed,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, startled.
“Your coffee’s getting cold.”
“I’m sorry?”
He nodded at the other side of the cafe. “Your coffee. At that table over there.”
“Oh, yes. May I sit with you?”
“If you can find space.”
She went and got her cup and made a small clearing across from him and sat.
“How’d you get these so quick?” he asked. “I mean, I learned who we’re supposed to be interviewing just today.”
“They gave me a day’s head start,” she said.
“And you managed to pull… what was that, doctors’ records in a day?”
“Yes. They should be valuable, too.”
“Doctors’ records? In what way?”
“In many ways, if you’re, well. Creative.”
Hayes smirked. “I’ll try my best. But let’s hedge our bets. Please enlighten me.”
“Well, for example, Mr. McClintock is an alcohol addict.”
“So? Are we going to tempt him with gin?”
“Nothing so grotesque,” she said, sliding out the relevant file and flipping it open. “I have him scheduled to be redirected here as soon as he gets in to work, which I think should be about nine, if his time cards are anything to go by.”
“So he’ll be too exhausted and half-drunk to be much of a liar,” said Hayes. His smirk turned into a smile.
“That’s the idea. And for tomorrow, Mr. Vanterwerp has significant digestive problems, so-”
“So I’m going to guess that you have him penciled in right after lunch.”
“Yes.”
“That’s pretty dirty pool.”
“It’ll work.”
“I have no doubt.” He went back to the pile, shaking out one sheaf. Samantha frowned as several papers slid off the table into the opposite booth, but said nothing. Hayes read in silence. As he did she noticed he was wearing the same clothes from the last time she’d seen him. One cuff was trapped far up in his coat sleeve and his tie was barely hanging on. A serious stubble was collecting on the line of his jaw and clouds of black hovered below each red-rimmed eye.
“Who do you think is the most likely?” she asked.
“The most likely for what?” he said.
“To be working for the union. To be a saboteur.”
He smirked. “None.”
“What?”
“None of them are working for the union.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, I don’t, for sure. But I can say that these are foremen and overseers with rather high-paying jobs in comparison to others below them. They’ve been working for twenty years to get this sort of security. They don’t want to lose it. Their men, on the other hand, have no security at all,” said Hayes, and flipped over a page. “They work relatively unskilled labor for shit wages, wages that have been undercut twice in the past three months. So it’s their boys who are trouble, and the foremen, as men with much to lose, will probably give a few of them up. Even the alky. What’s his name again?”
“McClintock.”
“Right,” he said. “Have some more coffee.”
At seven they walked down to Southern Office with the mass of files stuffed under Hayes’s arm. The building was very utilitarian, not half as lavish as the Nail. Its cement walls were hastily painted and naked bulbs flickered in the ceiling. Workmen, not clerks, sauntered through the halls, eyeing them suspiciously. Hayes spoke to the front receptionist, a greasy little man named Neal who had half his shirt unbuttoned. Hayes passed the reins over to Samantha, who began scheduling all the interviews at an hour apiece.
“No,” said Hayes. “Three hours.”
“Three hours? You’re sure this will take three hours?” she asked.
“Yes. Three. Apiece.”
She frowned but then rescheduled them with Neal, who was none too pleased to take orders from a fancy downtown woman, but did it anyway.