Our Lady of the Ice, Page 3

  “I won’t judge you at all. Go on.” Eliana wrote andie on the notepad. She’d never seen one before, although she remembered her father talking about them—complaining about them, really, calling them unnatural. As far as Eliana knew, most of them had been dismantled since the park’s closing, and the ones left behind weren’t supposed to leave the old center of the city. She supposed if you had the sort of money the Lunas did, exceptions were made.

  “I only mention it because he’s better equipped than you or I to notice intruders. And he heard and saw nothing last night.”

  “Didn’t get shut off, did he?”

  Lady Luna gave her a strange look, hard and glittering like Antarctic ice. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to shut off an android, Miss Gomez?”

  Eliana’s cheeks burned. “Look, I’m just covering my bases here. I’ve never seen one before, so I have no idea how they work.”

  Lady Luna shook her head. “He wasn’t shut off. I’m certain of it. I found the safe myself this morning, around eight o’clock. It was after I had dressed and eaten breakfast. I take care of my corres­pondence in the library every morning, and when I came in, I found the safe hanging open, empty.” Her voice died away, and she sat trembling in the worn-out leather chair. She possessed a fragile sort of loveliness that intensified with her anxiety. Eliana imagined this routine worked wonders on men.

  “Do you have any idea who might have taken the documents?” Eliana asked.

  Lady Luna hesitated.

  “If you don’t answer me truthfully, I won’t be able to help you.”

  The air in the room was silent and cold and unmoving. Lady Luna studied Eliana for a moment, then reached into her glossy little handbag and pulled out a stack of bills. She laid them on the desk. Eliana didn’t have to count them to know they added up to payment for far more days than she’d actually need to solve the case. And it was all up front.

  A visa to the mainland, acquired legally, cost nearly three thousand dollars. An illegal one cost even more, and neither would get you a ticket for the reinforced ships sailing back and forth across stormy Drake Passage, which could cost as much as a thousand, depending on the time of year. She’d been saving idly for a visa and a ticket ever since her parents had died, but with this kind of money she might actually start to make headway.

  “I realize that you’re professionally obligated to report criminal activity,” Lady Luna said softly. “But I hope your discretion can extend a bit further than you’re used to.”

  Eliana shoved the notepad aside. Now the case was getting interesting. “What is it? You in trouble, Lady Luna?”

  Her eyes were luminous. “It’s not me,” she said. “It was my husband. But I don’t want word to get out, you understand. He passed away six months ago, and I would hate for all this to come out now—”

  “I won’t go to the cops. But if you want your documents back, you’ve got to tell me.”

  Lady Luna drew herself up, her spine as straight as a doll’s. As an andie’s. “He occasionally did business with Ignacio Cabrera.”

  The words rang out against the cold of the room. But Eliana had been seeing Diego for the last year. She wasn’t exactly shocked by people’s involvement with Cabrera.

  “A bit more scandalous than owning a mechanical butler,” Lady Luna said. “I hope this won’t sully our arrangement, Miss Gomez. I never had dealings with the man myself, barely even spoke to him, but I knew about my husband’s arrangement, and I—” She looked off to the corner of the room.

  Eliana’s chest twinged. She realized she actually felt sorry for Lady Luna, even if the woman was rich and beautiful and could get out of this city in a heartbeat if she wanted to. Lady Luna took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling, and Eliana knew it was time to remind Lady Luna that she wasn’t hiring just any private investigator.

  Eliana stood up, walked around the desk, and sat down in the empty chair beside Lady Luna. She rested her hand on top of Lady Luna’s, the glove soft and velvety against her fingers. Lady Luna looked at their hands, unmoving.

  “I’m not going to take you to the cops,” Eliana said. “I know you can’t help what he did. But anything you can tell me about Cabrera, about your husband’s involvement—”

  “I don’t know.” Lady Luna tilted her head down, a strand of hair falling across her eyes. “Well, I don’t know the details. It wasn’t something we—discussed.”

  “But you did know about it. Before he died.”

  “A little. It involved the winter supply ships. Bringing in drugs from the mainland.” She shrugged. “I didn’t want to tell you. I debated back and forth. But it was Cabrera, wasn’t it, who stole the documents? I don’t know why—”

  Eliana bet she knew why. Nothing would put Cabrera out of the smuggling business more quickly than agricultural domes that actually produced agriculture. The documents probably protected Lady Luna from city censure if Cabrera exposed her connection to him—that would explain why she didn’t want to go to the police too. Probably he was going to hold them over her head as leverage. Eliana had a hard time believing that Lady Luna couldn’t figure all that out on her own, but she didn’t say anything about it. That was a lot of money on the desk.

  “Look.” Eliana pushed her chair around so she could look Lady Luna in the eye. “I may seem like I’m new to this whole investigation scene, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I’m used to dealing with Cabrera.” This wasn’t entirely true, but Eliana was willing to count her dalliances with Diego. “So no worries there. You gave me that big stack of cash”—she pointed at the desk—“to get your documents back. I’ll get ’em back. Maybe that’s all I’ll do for you, but I’ll get them back without peeking and without letting them leak. Sound fair?”

  Lady Luna nodded and drew a forefinger across the underside of her right eye, as if to wipe away a tear. Her makeup didn’t smear at all. “Thank you, Miss Gomez.”

  “I’ll come by your house this afternoon, take a look around, maybe talk to the robot. It does, uh, talk, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good.” Eliana leaned back. “Was there anyone else at the house last night?”

  “Oh, no.” Lady Luna shook her head. “The android is the only staff I have.”

  Eliana nodded, although she didn’t say anything. That was a bit eccentric.

  “I let my human staff go when my husband died,” Lady Luna said. “Things were—easier that way.”

  Eliana smiled politely. Excitement sparked in her blood. The first case of the winter. Mr. Vasquez had warned her about the winter cases. They were trickier, he said. Dangerous. She should expect to run into Cabrera.

  Eliana wasn’t worried. She had Diego. And the money on the desk was a lot to add to her visa funds.

  Lady Luna stood up, smoothing out her skirt, rearranging the fur around her shoulders. “I look forward to working with you,” she said. She had collected herself and was back to being the woman on television. “That money is only your retainer, of course. I’ll pay you the rest when my documents are returned to me. Would you like me to write down the name of my house?”

  At first, Eliana only registered the question about the house. She ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed it to Lady Luna along with a pen. As Lady Luna wrote in elegant, practiced strokes, Eliana glanced down at the money on the desk. Lady Luna’s voice echoed in her head. I’ll pay you the rest. That wasn’t all of it.

  Eliana wondered what the hell those documents could be.

  * * * *

  That afternoon, Eliana took the Sunlight Express, the train that left from the docks. She’d never ridden on it before. This was a rich person’s train.

  It was nicer than the city trains, she supposed, although the compartments were windowless and the decor was the same overwrought turn-of-the-century style as the amusement park. Elian
a sat down at a table, lit a cigarette, and splurged on a fernet coffee and watched the little flames flickering in their glass globes on the tables. Seemed a stupid idea to her, letting fires burn on a moving train.

  The train was mostly empty. No one was in the dining car but her and the bartender, who leaned up against the wall and flipped through a newspaper. When Eliana had seen that Lady Luna’s house had a name, Southstar, instead of an address, it hadn’t surprised her. Of course she lived in one of those domes that lay outside the main city dome. A private dome for the privately wealthy, with its own private maintenance drones, its own private power plant. One of those things no one even bothered to complain about, because complaining was just a reminder that the people who ran the city didn’t have to give a shit whether or not the heat was turned up enough, whether or not the power blacked out.

  Eliana smoked her cigarette down to the filter, lit another one. The bartender turned the pages of his newspaper. A bell chimed, the lights blinked twice. The bartender sighed, tossed the paper onto the bar, and sat down.

  “Better hold on,” he said.

  A pause. Then he leaned over and blew out the flame on the candle burning next to the cash register.

  “What?” said Eliana.

  The bell chimed again.

  The train began to rattle and whine. The chairs and tables knocked against the floor. Eliana jammed her cigarette into her ashtray and blew out her own candle too. The polar winds shrieked on the other side of the wall. Now she understood why there were no windows—it was bad enough feeling the Antarctic air slipping in through the invisible cracks in the train’s construction.

  Eliana set one hand over the top of her drink glass, her bones vibrating inside her skin. She curled the fingers of her free hand against the seat of her chair. The bartender looked up at the bottles of liquor shaking against the mirror like he hoped they’d fall.

  The rattling stopped.

  Another chime, like an exhalation of breath. The bartender stood up, swiped his newspaper off the counter, and resumed his previous position as if the rattling interlude had never occurred. Eliana sat for a moment, breathing hard.

  “First time?” the bartender asked without looking up.

  “Yeah.” With shaking hands, Eliana lit another cigarette.

  “You get used to it.” The bartender turned a page of his newspaper.

  The rest of the trip passed uneventfully. Eliana was the only person who got off at Southstar Station. The platform was empty too, and small, although well kept-up, with a metal bench and a wisteria tree dropping dots of purple. No ticket counter. It took Eliana a moment to connect the names and realize this was a private station.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  A house loomed in the distance, emerging out of a field of golden grass. Eliana stepped off the platform. She was surrounded by a quiet, arrhythmic susurration, the grass rippling in tandem—false wind. She felt it on her skin, that dry, artificial warmth. It wrapped around her as she cut a path toward the house, trampling down the grass. There was probably a designated way, some stone path leading to the front door, but Eliana was too overwhelmed, and too determined, to figure out where it was.

  The grass brushed feather-soft against her bare hands, making her jump. She hated its constant, babbling whisper, like it was trying to tell her something that she couldn’t understand.

  She was grateful to arrive at the house. It was large, as she’d expected, although quite contemporary, with lots of flat modernist lines and gray brick and huge windows. It was hard to imagine that it existed in the same city as the little shanty houses where Eliana had grown up.

  She pressed her thumb against the doorbell and waited.

  The rustle of the grass was sounding more and more likes voices. Eliana rang the doorbell again.

  This time, someone answered.

  It was a man, tall and slim and dressed in simple cotton clothing. He blinked at Eliana and said, “How can I help you?”

  As soon as he spoke, Eliana saw it. The andie. He had almost fooled her, but his voice was too measured, too soft, too pleasant. She remembered her mother saying once that they unsettled you if you looked too closely, and she thought she could see why now—there was something too much about him. Too much of what humans thought made them human.

  “I need to speak with Marianella Luna. I told her I’d be coming by.”

  “Ah yes, of course.” The robot smiled. “Eliana Gomez, yes? Come in. I can show you to the library. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  He stepped back, still holding the door open. Eliana went inside. The lighting was the same as it had been out in the golden grass, muted and indistinct. The robot led Eliana into the library, past a parlor with a mirrored chandelier and a series of closed doors. Above one of the doors hung a cross wrapped in red lace; Eliana blinked, not expecting something like that in such a wealthy house.

  The library was almost all window. Hardly any books, just a table looking out over the ocean of grass. The safe was set into the lone non-windowed wall, its door hanging open at an angle.

  “I didn’t touch anything.”

  Lady Luna’s voice was like a wind chime. Eliana turned around. Lady Luna stood in the doorway, her hair falling around her shoulders.

  “That helps. Thanks.”

  “This is Luciano,” she said, walking forward. “You said you might want to talk to him.”

  Eliana looked at the andie, unsure of how to act around him. It?

  “It would be my pleasure,” the andie said. “Although I don’t think I know anything of value.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Eliana said.

  Lady Luna and the andie stood side by side, watching her.

  “If you give me a minute,” she said, “I’m just gonna poke around here, and then I’ll talk to—to him.”

  Lady Luna nodded. She put her hand on the andie’s arm, and they both turned away. It was a small gesture, an intimate one, and it made Eliana uncomfortable.

  Lady Luna dropped her hand to her side as if she knew what Eliana was thinking.

  Eliana turned back to the safe. She reminded herself of the stack of money she’d locked away in her own safe back at the office; then she knelt down on the carpet, moving slowly, her eyes scanning the room. Everything seemed in its place except for the safe, but Eliana had already learned that sometimes you had to look beyond the surface of things. She didn’t have the equipment to dust for fingerprints, but something told her she wouldn’t find any anyway. She had to look close.

  She felt around on the carpet in front of the safe. Nothing. The fuzzy artificial light made it difficult to see, so she straightened up and walked over to a nearby lamp. Lady Luna was sitting in a chair, her arm draped over the side. The andie was gone.

  “I’m going to borrow this,” Eliana said, and before Lady Luna could answer, she yanked the cord out of the wall and dragged the lamp across the room. She plugged it in closer to the safe and shone the light on the floor, where she uncovered a solar system of dust and flakes of grass. Nothing of interest. She directed the light into the safe. Nothing there, either.

  Eliana sat back on her heels. “I’d like to talk to the andie now, if you don’t mind.” She glanced over her shoulder at Lady Luna, who stared at her from across the room.

  “Yes, of course.” Lady Luna leaned forward toward the coffee table and rested her fingers on top of a brass paperweight in the shape of a shell. It didn’t fit in with the rest of the library. Too old-fashioned. It made a loud clicking noise when she pressed on it.

  A few moments later, the andie appeared in the doorway.

  Eliana hesitated. He looked so much like a person. But she still found him unnerving—the placid dark eyes, the inexpressive mouth. He didn’t move the way a person would, didn’t shift his weight, didn’t tap his fingers against his thigh.

  She took
a deep breath.

  “What exactly did you hear last night?”

  The andie glanced at Lady Luna, machine-quick.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing unusual.”

  “What’s usual?”

  The andie took on a blank expression. His eyes went slack. Eliana was aware of Lady Luna standing up, her arms wrapped around her chest like she was cold.

  “Wind,” the andie said. “The maintenance drones increase it at night. The grass, of course. A handful of animals.”

  “Animals?”

  “Yes, field mice. Owls.”

  “You have owls out here?” The city dome had rats and spiders. Eliana’d seen pictures of an owl once and hadn’t realized they’d been imported into Antarctica.

  “Of course.”

  “So are you sure you didn’t hear anything that you mistook to be an animal?”

  Lady Luna was at Eliana’s side now, staring at the andie with a peculiar intensity. Intelligence, Eliana thought. Cunning.

  Lines appeared in the robot’s brow, distressingly human.

  “I did hear a—scratching, I suppose you could call it.”

  “Scratching? You didn’t think that was unusual enough to report?”

  “It’s not unusual,” the robot said. “You often hear scratching along the walls. I heard it three times last night, several hours apart.”

  “He’s right,” Lady Luna said. “I hear it sometimes myself, as I’m trying to fall asleep. The emptiness out here—it amplifies sound. That’s what my husband used to say.” She smiled, her face incandescent.

  “Fine. It’s not unusual. But it could still be something.” Eliana stared up at the robot. “Do you remember exactly where you heard it? Each time?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, do you know where it was coming from, not where you were—” Eliana’d worked with enough computers in secretary school to know that you had to be specific with them. And this man was a computer, even if he didn’t look like it.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought you meant. I can show you.” The andie smiled politely, coldly. “Come.”