He nails me with it. I had no idea Alan had a sense of humor, let alone a wit. The shock's good for a guffaw, and then I settle down to a nice, long, loud laugh that's total overkill for the funniness of the joke.
But, God, it's been a long day.
Dinner is strained, quickly finished. General Frye doesn't show up. Neither does Min-xue; since Captain Wu isn't there and neither is his escort — that is to say, guard — I assume Min-xue is eating with the captain in his room. It's really too noisy down here for the Chinese pilot, anyway. His wiring's wound tight enough to make mine look like a placeholder.
Riel keeps her eyes on her plate and seems to find the china coffee cups an annoyingly scant measure. She doesn't touch her wine. Fred pours Patty half a glass, and Patty drinks it as if it's a duty, some grown-up ritual she doesn't like or understand, but is willing to play along with. The plates are barely off the table when she excuses herself to get ready to testify. She doesn't even finish her dessert.
“Come on,” Riel says. “Let's go to the lounge.” She makes a little business of pushing her chair back from the table and smoothing the white linen tablecloth afterward, pouring herself another scant cup of coffee from the carafe, and lifting the translucent bone china cup and saucer to take with her.
Fred gestures me to precede him. I wait, and notice it takes him a little more effort than it should to get out of his chair.
He's moving like his shoulder hurts. The cold's gotten into his bones. I remember what that felt like.
It's been a long year for the both of us. I don't ask and I don't wait for permission. I just grab him by the elbow on my way past and hoist. It's always a shock that he doesn't flinch away from my hand. He knows better than most what I'm capable of doing with it. “Thanks. None of us are getting any younger, are we?”
And then he grins, lines forming across his perpetually flushed cheeks, because that's not true — in some very odd ways, I am getting younger. And it's as much his fault as my metal hand and my prosthetic eye and the fact that I'm walking at all, let alone standing up straight and free of pain.
He doesn't take his coffee cup and I don't take mine. I might just have a glass of brandy later. “You're welcome, Fred.” I don't return his smile, and his doesn't fade at all.
Yeah, we understand each other.
The heavy cherrywood door is barely shut behind us when Riel rounds on me. She's drawn like a wire, plucked vibrating, thinner and hollower, and the strands of steel in her bobbed dark hair are maturing into racing stripes. The gray might even look good on her, but her olive skin's faded to sallow, and she's curiously… displaced against the rich leather furniture and patterned carpets and wallpaper. As if she were a hologram, or half a step into another dimension.
She looks at me, and her mouth works, and she sets her cup down on the sideboard without looking. She shakes her head and says, “You could have warned me, Jen.”
“It's not the sort of thing that usually comes up in casual conversation.” Most people don't ask if you have a criminal record as part of the standard litany that goes with ascertaining your pigeonhole in society — job, marital status, kids. It might be funny if they did. Nah, I got picked up for possession and soliciting when I was a teenager, but I never did any time. Counseling. Suspended sentence. You know how it goes. So how do you like your job at the auto mall? “Besides, if the Chinese can find out, how could I have been expected to know you wouldn't?”
Fred's leaned back against the wall a few feet away from me, watching with his head cocked to one side. If he were ten years younger I bet he'd have his ankles crossed and an insouciant smirk on his lips. His shoes gleam with polish and he's picking at the edge of his finger with his thumbnail, as if absentmindedly. Meanwhile, Riel paces, coyote in a cage, wearing a path between the window and the barrister's bookcases ranged along the back wall. She stops and pulls the curtain aside, staring out on spotlit bricks. “The Chinese shouldn't have found out. Those are sealed records.” It pains her to admit that. “Nobody should have been able to get at those.”
Oh, fuck me raw. “Nobody had to.”
“What?”
I have to shake my head and close both hands very tight to remember not to put the left one through the wall. I'm sure that paneling's expensive. “Barb knew.”
Fred looks up from his intensive survey of his fingernails. His eyes widen, and then narrow. “Your sister never said anything to me about it, Casey.”
“That's because she wasn't working for you, Fred. No matter what you thought when you signed her paychecks. She was working for Alberta Holmes.”
“Touché,” he says. “And if Alberta knew about your record—”
“Then Tobias Hardy sure as hell knows about it now.” Riel nods, a gesture like a gavel coming down. I've seen that decisiveness before. It worries me. “I'll patch up what I can in my testimony. It… well, you did well today, Jen.” It's grudging, and she can't look me in the eye when she says it. “Have you ever thought of going into politics?”
“And now you know why not.”
She snorts, a choked-off laugh that lifts her shoulders and sets her back a fraction of a step. “It doesn't matter. The cat and the bag and the horse we rode in on and all that other stuff. We'll deal with it the only way we can: by taking it on the chin. You were right not to lie.”
“Thank you.” A funny little twist that I hadn't even known was there unwinds in my belly.
“And anyway, we have other problems.”
Exasperation may be my least favorite emotion in the world. “Merci à Dieu. What now?”
Riel has a lot of personality flaws, but taking joy in keeping people guessing isn't one of them. “Janet Frye has had some documents registered as evidence, but I haven't been able to find out what was on them. Yet. I'm working on it.”
“Don't they have to provide you with copies?”
“It's not a trial,” Riel said, disgustedly. “It's a ‘discovery hearing.' The fiction is that we're not adversaries, but all trying to get at the truth.”
“Ostie de tabernac—”
“My sentiments exactly.”
Fred straightens up and steps away from the wall, looking like he grew an inch — and all of it composed of pure cold mean. “She didn't… she wasn't involved until after the attack, and then she more or less took credit for Canada having the capability to respond. Now that I think about it, what would she have to testify about?”
I shake my head. My years in America left me a little behind on commonwealth politics, even the strictly Canadian ones. “Have a little mercy, Fred.”
Riel shrugs and casts as if trying to remember where she left her coffee cup. I move to one side so she can see it on the sideboard; she beelines for it and drinks before she speaks, making a face at finding it cold. “The Home party likes to bill itself as the defense party, Jen. They supported the space program — including the black budget — when I was still fighting tooth and nail to get that money for health care and famine relief.” She shrugs again, a very Gallic one this time. “Sometimes you guess wrong.”
Yeah, I know. And sometimes there's just not enough paint to cover the whole house, so you do the sides that show. Money is not infinitely elastic, and that's as true for governments as it is for single moms. “So if she doesn't have anything to testify, what the hell does she plan to testify to?”
The look Fred shoots me is unalloyed pity. He raises one hand, wincing, and rubs at the back of his neck. I try not to feel sympathy. “Whatever the hell she and Hardy have cooked up to discredit us completely, of course. Hardy hands her the keys to Canada, she hands him the keys to the Huang Di, the Vancouver, and the Montreal, and everybody goes home happy. Except us, and Richard. And China — assuming Hardy and the opposition aren't in cahoots with some PanChinese faction or another.”