“No, I mean you really look sick. Can I get you something?”
“Just water. Water will do me fine.”
“Water? Your usual breakfast menu includes a beer or two, if I recall.”
“No,” said Hayes, and closed his eyes.
“No?”
“No, Garv. I won’t have a beer. I won’t be having a beer for some time, I should say.” He tilted his head away from the window and smiled wanly at Garvey. “I’m giving it another go, you see, Garv. Trying to dry out once more.”
Garvey raised his eyebrows. “Again?”
“Yes. Again.”
“That makes this, what? Attempt number five?”
“Something like that,” said Hayes. He sank lower in his seat.
“What’s the occasion? Have another binge you regret? I can’t imagine it’d be worse than the time you fell off the trolley.”
“I suppose it’s something of a special occasion,” said Hayes. “But this is more professionally motivated.”
Garvey looked surprised. “Really? The company’s leaning on you to quit?”
“It’s all very unspoken. Everything’s done in subtleties. Courting a church girl is easier, I swear. Or at least I’d imagine it’d be, having never personally tried.”
“How’s it going?”
“How do you think?” Hayes snapped. “It’s fucking awful. It feels like there’s an army of nails trying to dig their way out of my head. How about you get me that water before I die right here in this booth, eh? Then you’ll have another fucking body to deal with.”
Garvey allowed himself a small smile, then nodded and left.
Hayes turned back to the window. Outside a chilly cement world tumbled by, filled with columns of steam and window-lined canyons and the colorless faces of crowds. He watched as people threaded through the alleys and the lanes to the waterfront streets. The Arch Street airship cradle was just a block or two down, its spire covered in glittering cables and panels, all tilting and shifting to correspond with incoming airships. Below that he saw the immense dark curve of the Brennan Bridge, the inner recesses of its arch lost to shadow. At the top two men sat dangling their feet through the railing and sharing some small meal. Their bodies steamed slightly in the morning air as though burning.
Garvey returned with a glistening plate of eggs and sausage and rolls. He put down a mug of water and pushed it over to Hayes, who lifted it up and maneuvered it through the lapels of his coat to his mouth. He sipped it once, then sipped again, deeper. “Ah,” he said. “That’s better. That’s just what I needed.”
Garvey carefully watched as Hayes placed the mug of water back on the tabletop.
“What?” said Hayes.
“So,” said Garvey. “You’ve quit drinking but you’re still hitting up the tearooms.”
“Well. Yes,” said Hayes, nettled. “I can’t give up everything at once. I need a few vices. Just to function. Just to keep my head on.”
“How long have you been dry?”
“Centuries, it feels like,” he moaned. “Ages. Ages and ages and ages. Civilizations have risen and fallen in the time I’ve been dry. But I would guess a month, really. Two, at most.”
“That’s pretty good, for you.”
“Mornings are the hardest. Mornings like this, especially. I need a little fire in my belly to stay on my feet.”
“What’d you think of it, anyways? This morning?”
“I don’t know,” Hayes said, turning back to the window. “Do you want me to be honest, Garv?”
“Sure.”
“I won’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
Garvey nodded, sawing through a sausage with slow, silent care. Grease poured from its mealy cross-section to pool around the eggs.
Hayes waited a moment. Then he said, “If you want me to be completely frank, Garvey, I think you’re fucked. Very fucked. I don’t have any tricks to play here.”
Garvey stopped sawing. “You can’t at least check and see if he’s one of yours?”
“If you can get a name, sure. I can check him against the factory rolls. But that’s if you get a name, which I’ve got to think is pretty unlikely. Even though he wasn’t dressed, he didn’t exactly seem like a socialite. Not a well-known out-and-about-town sort. And even if you do get a name, there’s been a lot of flux among the loaders and workers since the whole union business started. It’s less organized than ever. It’d be… Well. It’d be impossible to nail it down.”
Garvey’s grimace subtly hardened. His limited range of facial expressions bordered on an inside joke among his fellow detectives in the Evesden Police Department. To the unobservant his face would seem to never move at all, his words just barely escaping his slight frown, yet to those who knew him the slightest twitch of his broad, craggy forehead spoke volumes. Garvey could tell you if he thought a body would file just by slowly lifting an eyebrow or pursing his lips. But his eyes never moved, permanently buried in the shadow of his brow. They were eyes that plainly said they had seen it all, or at least enough of it to feel they didn’t really need to see the rest.
“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Like I said, it’s nothing you don’t already know,” Hayes said. “I’m sorry you caught it.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“You sure he’s union, though?” Garvey asked, half-hopeful.
“Probably. You do, too, you just don’t want to admit it. I mean, come on, Garv, you can’t tell me you just fished a man who looks like a worker out of a Construct canal and haven’t thought it has something to do with the lefties rattling around.”
“No. Goddamn, I wish it didn’t, though.”
“So. How many does that make?” Hayes said.
“Make?”
“Yes. Union deaths in all. I’d expect you’re all keeping tally marks over the morgue doors by now.”
“Hm. Four,” said Garvey reluctantly. “Four in the past five months. And that’s not counting the beatings and other pointless violence that’s been going on. I don’t know how many we’ve had due to that.”
“But four murders? Four genuine union murders?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm,” Hayes said. “Things are heating up.”
“No doubt,” said Garvey. He began speaking in the toneless cadence of work-speech: “All four were found very, very murdered, all in different but discreet areas of the city. Docks. Vagrants’ cemetery, found one out there, pretty vicious. Most recent one was a union buster. He was found in a canal, like today. No one’s getting anywhere with any of them. Now Collins has us all taking anything that even smells like union and making it high concern. ‘Prioritization,’ they’re calling it. We’re probably going to junk those four, though. I don’t think there’s any headway to make with them. Not with fresh ones coming in today, like this one.”
“Goodness,” said Hayes. “Your statistics must be terrible.”
“Yeah. Four hundred and eighty-six. Jesus.” Garvey shook his head. “Last month marked the highest yearly total of the century. The papers were all over it. The mayor’s office is having daily panic attacks.”
“Well. Nineteen-twenty can’t come soon enough, I’d say. Happy new year, Garv.”
Garvey muttered his agreement and turned back to his plate, sometimes shooting Hayes sullen looks as though he had personally engineered the foul morning, or possibly the bad year. Hayes ignored him, content to make his water vanish in little swallows.
Hayes was not, despite the beliefs of several scene-side cops and minor criminals, a policeman. He was often seen with the police or the district attorney’s office and other civil servants, and a lot of the time he acted like a cop, with his constant questions and presumptuous manner, though he did seem to grin more than most. The one thing that really marked him as different was his English accent. But he had no badge, no gun, no pension, and no allegiance to the city or any jurisdiction. Those rare few who concluded that he wasn’t police often wondered why he was tolerated among them, or why he wanted to be there at all.
Figuring out exactly who Hayes worked for would have been difficult for anyone. At the moment his paycheck came from a minor canning factory on the wharf-front, partially managed by a San Francisco shipping firm, which was owned by a prominent Chicago real estate corporation, which was in turn owned by a high-powered merchant bank overseas whose primary stockholder was, at the end, the famous McNaughton Corporation, linchpin of the city of Evesden and, according to some, the world. Hayes made sure to route how McNaughton paid him every once in a while, just to check. If he had done his work right, they changed its path once every six months.