Jade legacy, p.61
Jade Legacy, page 61
The Espenian press portrayed Art Wyles as a devoutly Truthbearing self-made man who had come from a poor family in a tough neighborhood of Port Massy and risen to wealth and power through business acumen and savvy investments. Lula, who had out of necessity done her homework on the man, was surprised that Espenians wished to believe this fairy tale, or at least conveniently ignore whispers and evidence to the contrary.
Kekonese people know that no man rises without patronage and protection. The oligarch Wyles owed his early success to the Baker Street Crew—the largest, wealthiest, most politically well-connected organized crime outfit in the Republic of Espenia. Ayt Mada hadn’t known this for certain when she first found Lula and placed her in the foreigner’s path—but the courtesan’s discoveries had not surprised her. Obtaining enough recorded proof to make this knowledge useful, however, had taken years.
Lula’s hand shook, rattling the ice cubes in the glass as she drank down the cool tea, trying to drown the anxiety curled in her stomach. Each time she’d come to Ayt’s mansion to make her report, she’d left with the Pillar’s words dragging down her steps. “We don’t have what we need yet. You’ll have to go back and get us more.”
So she had. Over and over again, to be the foreigner’s mistress. She took his cock into her mouth, her pussy, her ass. She pretended to love it, to love him. She learned to lie fluently in Espenian, to whisper that he was the best lover she’d ever had, that she was so lucky and grateful he’d noticed her and made her his woman, given her such nice things and treated her so well. She accompanied a man forty years older than her on business trips and stayed with him in five-star hotels. She planted bugs in his houses in Marcucuo and Karandi—but not Espenia, because he had a wife and family there, and another mistress, so she could not be seen in that country. She pretended to convert to the Church of One Truth and went to services with Wyles, mouthing the foreign words of worship to a foreign God and Seer. She coaxed him into talking about his friends, his businesses, his political ambitions. She pretended to struggle with Espenian, to not understand all the things he spoke of, so he talked about them freely, with the sense of safety a person feels around their cat.
When Wyles was away from Kekon, Lula could pretend she was free. She could take singing lessons and dream about going to college and one day having a real career as a music teacher. She could be with Sumi and imagine a future together. Sumi wept over the trap they were in and vowed she would wait, but Lula knew no one’s resolve was infinite. Every time the phone rang and it was the foreigner summoning her back to his house, their fragile illusions of happiness were snuffed out.
She asked the question she’d been dreading. “Do you have enough, Ayt-jen?”
Ayt Mada considered the stack of evidence in front of her, one of the many that Lula had provided for her over the years. “Do I have enough?” The Pillar gazed out across the perfectly still pools and carefully arranged rocks of her garden, her expression thoughtful and distant. “Is it ever enough?” Her eyes drifted back to Lula and lingered on her as if she were a mildly interesting sculpture. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four, Ayt-jen.” She’d been seventeen when Wyles had discovered her.
An expression Lula did not fully understand passed like a shadow across the Pillar’s face. Nostalgia? Pity? “You’re still a young woman,” Ayt said. “Enjoy it while you can.”
It was the closest thing to an acknowledgment of her sacrifice the Pillar had ever made. Lula had given up seven years of her youth to be a foreigner’s whore, a White Rat for the Mountain clan. She suspected she was the only one of the clan’s many rats to report to Ayt directly, a great honor, surely. She was grateful for what the clan had provided to her family. And she hated the Pillar with the quiet and resigned hatred a rabbit has for its captors.
Ayt Mada motioned one of her Green Bone bodyguards over and asked him to bring her a phone. “You’ve done well, Lula,” she said. “I have what I need. Go home to your family. You won’t need to worry about the foreigner calling for you again.”
Lula dropped from the bench onto her knees and pressed her forehead to the wooden decking of the gazebo. “Thank you, Ayt-jen,” she choked out through tears. She sat up and saluted with trembling hands. “May the gods shine favor on you.”
The bodyguard returned and passed the handset of a cordless phone to the Pillar. Ayt was no longer looking at the other woman. She was flipping through a small book of notes as she dialed. The weeping courtesan might as well not exist anymore. As Lula rose to her feet and backed out of the gazebo for the last time, she heard Ayt speaking into the receiver. “Iwe-jen,” said the Pillar, “it’s time we made those arrangements we’ve been planning.”
CHAPTER
52
A Search Ended
the twenty-sixth year, fifth month
Niko entered the slum house in Coinwash and wrinkled his nose at the smell of urine in the stairwell. The poorest parts of Janloon were not as bad as some of the most desperate places he’d seen in his worldly travels, but they were still the sort of place nearly everyone would avoid, including Green Bones. Too dark to see green, as the saying went—literally in this case, as the lights were burned-out in the hallway.
The two Green Bone bodyguards that the Pillar had assigned to him followed close behind Niko up to the second floor, where he found the unit he was looking for and knocked. There was no answer, but he could sense someone inside. He knocked again. “Go away,” came a muffled voice from the other side. There was no lock on the door, so Niko pushed open the flimsy barrier and stepped into the room.
A middle-aged man in shorts and a stained T-shirt was slumped on the threadbare carpet in front of a dilapidated sofa, watching a small tube television that rested on top of an upside-down wooden crate. The smell of mold and stale beer pervaded the windowless space. Several empty liquor bottles lay discarded on the floor. The man glanced up at Niko with incurious hostility.
“Are you Betin Rotonodun?” Niko asked.
The drunk grimaced with one-half of his face. The other half remained slack. “No one calls me that,” he snorted. He looked away and took a swallow from the bottle of beer in his hand. “Who the fuck are you? Are you from the government?”
“I’m from the No Peak clan,” Niko said, “and I have some questions to ask you.”
That got the man’s attention. He jerked up straight and stared at Niko alertly now, his bloodshot eyes bulging to the size of lychees as they came to rest on the long string of jade beads around the visitor’s neck.
“You’re…” The man blinked twice and wet his lips. “You’re one of the Kauls.”
Niko motioned for his bodyguards to remain in the hall. He walked across the tiny room and turned off the television. Noticing a step stool against the wall, he moved it before sitting down on it, facing his interviewee, who remained where he was on the floor, still staring with disbelief. “You weren’t an easy person to find, Mr. Betin,” Niko said.
“Bero,” the man corrected sharply. “I never use that other name, and I don’t owe anything to the bastard who gave it to me. How do you know it?” His heart rate had shot up, even Niko could Perceive that, though he didn’t seem frightened, exactly. Unnerved. Perhaps excited. “Do you know who I am?”
Niko nodded. He took a digital voice recorder from his pocket and placed it on the edge of the crate next to the television. “You’re Catfish. You were a spy for the Espenian military who fed them information on the Clanless Future Movement for several years up until the Janloon bombing. After that, you disappeared from any records, so I assume you were whisked away with a new identity. But you used your legal name to apply for government assistance, so I knew you were back in Janloon.”
Bero gaped at him. Niko couldn’t blame him for being astonished. The Janloon bombing had been twelve years ago. The Clanless Future Movement still existed but had been ground down to dregs. The decades-long Slow War had exacted a staggering cost in money and lives in wars all around the world, but if it wasn’t quite coming to a decisive resolution, at least it was going into a state of dormancy, with Ygutanian retrenchment and negotiated bilateral withdrawal from overseas conflicts. The former spy probably figured no one would try to find him. Even the Espenian government seemed to tacitly agree with that assessment, since it had declassified most of its documents over ten years old.
The No Peak clan, however, had a long memory and longer grudges. Niko’s aunt Shae had given him an unusual assignment: Use newly declassified information that the clan had obtained to track down firsthand accounts of the ROE’s secret activities in Kekon prior to and immediately after the Janloon bombing. She’d assigned a couple of people to help him with the project, which they both knew would involve chasing a lot of dead ends. Niko was aware that the Weather Man was testing him, but that didn’t bother him. Time-consuming, methodical detective work far out of the spotlight suited him fine.
Unfortunately, after six months, Niko still didn’t have enough concrete evidence of the ROE’s activities to help the Weather Man substantiate her suspicions. The two retired military intelligence operatives he tracked down refused to talk to the fake reporter he sent their way. The ROE used code names for its informers; sometimes he could determine their identities, but most of them could not be found. The file on Catfish had come with a copy of an arrest record for anti-clan vandalism, which could be cross-referenced with the Janloon police database, but it was sheer luck that Bero’s legal name had shown up again recently in the government’s system, and only, it appeared, because the man was a destitute alcoholic surviving on social welfare.
“I want to know about your previous work for the Espenians,” Niko said. “In as much detail as possible.”
Bero was silent for nearly a full minute. Then he laughed out loud, a raspy bark of incredulous delight. “That’s it?”
“You’ll be paid for it, if that’s what you’re asking.” Niko took an envelope out of his breast pocket and set it down near the recorder. It seemed a waste of clan money; he was confident the man would spend every last dien on liquor.
Bero looked at the envelope and then at Niko. A strange expression suffused his crooked face, a faintly deranged eagerness as he sat forward and let out a foul-smelling sigh of satisfaction. “Sure, keke, sure. I’ll tell you everything.”
“Good.” Niko turned on the recorder. “Did you know a man named Vastik eya Molovni?”
Upon his return to Janloon, Niko hadn’t expected to be welcomed or forgiven by the clan. Indeed, he hadn’t been. Plenty of naysayers, inside and outside of No Peak, speculated unkindly and sometimes outrageously that he’d come back because he’d run out of money, that he was a foreign agent who would betray his family again, that he had a secret lover and couldn’t marry until he restored his position in the clan, among other theories.
Niko could do nothing about the harsh gossip except endure it and try not to let it affect him. He performed the most painful penance he could think of, worse than cutting off his ear, as far as he was concerned: He agreed to television, radio, and newspaper interviews where he spoke candidly about his decision to leave and to return. Over and over again, he apologized humbly and publicly for having hurt and disappointed his family and his clan, and promised that he would do his best to prove himself a worthy son and potential heir from now on.
His grieving parents hadn’t been of much support at first. The Pillar officially accepted his return to the clan, but was otherwise withdrawn, and Niko didn’t expect his mother to ever forgive him, not when he hadn’t been there to protect Ru when it mattered.
Niko soldiered on regardless. Over time, the doubters’ angry grumblings would fade, so long as he put his head down and proved he could back up his intentions with action. He’d done as Ru had once suggested, attending Jan Royal university part-time and progressing steadily toward a joint degree in economics and organizational management. For two years, he worked evenings on the military side of the clan. Ironically, all the training and experience he’d gained during his employment with GSI had improved his martial confidence, and his motivations were different now. He was promoted to Fist in six months, laying to rest the question of whether his previously unremarkable performance had been an issue of ability.
With his aunt Shae’s blessing, he began shadowing Terun Bin, the clan’s Master Luckbringer, to learn about the Ship Street side of the clan. Soon after, the Weather Man began to give him work to do on his own time, including this project of chasing down old breadcrumbs. Recently, he’d begun attending and observing his aunt’s meetings with Lantern Men and other clan stakeholders.
In the three years that had passed since his return to Janloon, Niko had determinedly done everything that could be expected of him and more.
“You used to be so stuck-up, always wanting to ignore the rules and do your own thing. Now you’re a worker ant who doesn’t seem to sleep,” Jaya said, in an unexpected moment of sisterly concern for him. “What happened to you?”
“I’m not a moody teenager anymore. I grew up and gained perspective, Jaya. That’s all.”
It was a shallow answer when the truth was more complicated, not something he was sure he could ever explain. He’d left Kekon in search of the indefinable. A sense of who he was, independent of the clan. An answer to the nagging question of who he could’ve been, if his uncle hadn’t taken him from his birth mother and made him the first son of the Kaul family. When he’d joined GSI, he’d imagined that the foreigners were right—the world of Green Bones was brutal and outdated, nothing like the rest of the world.
Now he knew better. There was jade and blood and cruelty everywhere.
After leaving GSI, he’d wandered without any destination in mind, chased wherever he went by guilty memories and the vague dread that he was tainted for breaking aisho and could never return home for fear of bringing disfavor back with him. Instead, he traveled east across the Orius continent and spent two months in Lybon, Stepenland, hoping to awaken some revelatory connection to the city of his birth. It was a pleasant place, utterly foreign, rarely a Kekonese person in sight. He felt nothing there.
He left and crossed the ocean to Karandi, then went on to the Spenius continent, then south to Alusius. Along the way he worked menial jobs for cash, more to do something with himself than any real need for money. He cut wood and stacked boxes, cleaned tables and mopped floors. He wore his jade hidden, like a thief.
He’d been living in a motel room across from a pleasantly quiet beach on the Alusian side of the Mesumian Sea when he received a phone call from Teije Inno, one of the few people he’d kept in touch with after leaving GSI and who knew where he was. Over the phone, Teije apologized. For the whole time they’d known each other and been friends, he’d been a White Rat for the No Peak clan. Now Teije was calling on behalf of the Horn, to give Niko the news that his brother had been killed.
When Bero was done speaking, Niko nodded and turned off the recorder. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote on the envelope that he’d left beside the television. “The money in the envelope is yours, but I’m also giving you a phone number in the Weather Man’s office. If you call tomorrow morning, and say who you are, they’ll have orders from me to find you a place to live that’s better than this dump. Three months of rent will be paid for. You can use that time to get sober and find a job and maybe improve your life. Or you can spend the money to drink yourself to death in slightly nicer surroundings. The offer is there for tomorrow only. It’s up to you.” He stood to go.
“You’re done?” His interviewee sounded disappointed, almost angry. As Niko reached the door, Bero called after him. “Hey, wait! You asked me plenty of questions, so I get to ask you a question too. That’s only fair, right?”
Niko turned around. Bero was climbing to his feet, bloodshot eyes fixed in a reckless stare. “That’s a really nice necklace you’re wearing. Really distinctive looking. Tell me something. How did you get that jade?”
Niko brought a hand up to the string of beads around his neck, each stone identical and flawless, separated with black spacers on a silver chain. “It belonged to my father,” Niko said. “I earned it, piece by piece, by proving myself in the clan.”
Bero gave a strange giggle. “Your father was Kaul Lan, the Pillar of No Peak. You’re his son.”
“That’s generally how it works, yes,” Niko said impatiently.
The man pointed to him. “I’d recognize that jade anywhere, because it used to be on my neck.” He jabbed a finger proudly toward his own chest. “I was more than just a tool for the foreigners, you know. Before that, I was a smuggler and a thief, a grave robber, and most of all, I was a killer. Everyone around me ends up feeding worms. I’m a fucking demigod of death, keke. I’ve probably killed more people than most Green Bones. More people that you have, I bet.”
Bero’s grin was the leer of a bleached skull. “Long ago, the Mountain sent me after your da. I did it for the jade. That jade. I found him at the Docks and I pulled the trigger. I started the clan war all those years ago. I’m the reason you’re an orphan. And here we are.” He laughed like an injured hyena. “Finally, the gods are tying up their sick comedy act.”
When Niko had walked into the room, the man on the floor had been a tired, huddled figure wrapped in sour apathy. Now he was standing straight, his thinning hair drooping over dark eyes that shone down into the bottomless well of rage and despair that came from staring too long into an abyss and seeing nothing. His sweating face bore the mad stamp of a man holding a knife to his own throat and shouting, desperate for recognition at the end of it all.
