Dispatch from a Colored Room, Page 2

rickety table, a set-off tiled area with a little counter and a gas stove. The little boy who was banging around when I was outside has stopped now that I'm in; he's a ghostly little thing, paler than his ma, almost pink, his hair such a light brown it's almost no color at all. Grey eyes. "What's your name?" he asks.

  "I'm Catherine Pelerine," I tell him, which by the way isn't my real name, "but I never liked Cat and Cath and Catie, so people call me Pel." Also not true. "What's yours?"

  He says it's Sim and swiftly ignores me, picks up two of the toys to bang them together, some greybeard with spiky hair and a big sword and a skinny little girl with mouse ears. Aimée points me to the table and offers acullico; I could really use some, after the mile under that glowering sky and the five flights of stairs, but I frankly don't trust hers not to be cut with detergent or ground glass or, maybe worse, with something habit-forming, and I decline, which means now I can't take mine because I've refused hers.

  I guess I should start. "Aimée, what's happened here is called a discovery of beneficiary investigation," I say. "What that means is just this: Dawnroad Bank recently came into stewardship of an asset that has quietly been accumulating wealth for about two decades, ever since its owner passed away. We are required by law to exert the maximum reasonable effort to find someone to control this asset—a blood relative or long-time domestic partner—before we can file to possess it. The reason this hasn't happened until now is that Dawnroad Bank wasn't steward of the asset until a few months ago; we acquired it in the purchase of a small concern operating principally out of the fifth terrace, formerly known as Duskstreet Wealth Husbandry." I should probably not have improvised these names, but we're stuck with that now, I guess. Don't worry, I won't talk about it much. "They should have done the DBI when the asset's owner died, but they didn't, and no one noticed until the acquisition—anyway, the legal issues aren't your concern. And the money is definitely yours. So we need to get your information into our system, and we need to talk about what you want to do with the money."

  Aimée had been looking intently at me the entire time. When I hand the conversation back to her, she looks down, then at Sim, then at the apartment, then moistens her lips. Her eyes are hooded when they meet mine again. "It was my father's money?" she asks.

  "That's right," I say. They've equipped me with precious few details on the matter, Imen be praised; what I know is bad enough.

  "How did you find me?" she asks.

  "Well, the difficulty would have been the anonymity of the account," I say. "Your name would have been easy enough to track down, but your father used a pseudonym, and you're probably getting the sense that this Duskstreet group weren't exactly scrupulous about record-keeping. But it was easy enough, actually." This is the part that kills me, looking around at this terrible little place—I know it's not my place to judge anyone else's life, but what I can't deal with is to know that Gauthier Leblanc wanted something better for his daughter, and got it, and the only thing between it and her was the greed and disdain of a few half-shekel geeks who fancied themselves financial operators, when in fact they were too small for anyone to pay attention to until it was too late. So there's a little catch in my voice, a little tremor, much as there is now. "Your father left a note with the account. He said the assets should all revert to you on his death, with your mother as steward until your majority."

  Aimée takes this news as though I'd described some newly discovered species of colorful beetle. "So what happened?"

  "What happened?" I'm not screeching, but not the way you don't screech when you aren't thinking seriously about screeching. "Aimée, the fuckers stiffed you. They had their marching orders and they didn't deliver."

  My profanity quirks a smile out of her—that or the instant expression of contrition as I realize I've stained the ears of an innocent little boy. My eyes must have flickered over to little Sim, because Aimée says "Sorry to say it, Mlle Pelerine, but he's heard worse." She runs her tongue over her teeth, then moistens her lips again; I realize that she hasn't popped a quid after I refused her offer, that she must think that I think it's impolite or something. So now we're both just panting for a fix and pretending we aren't.

  "I've never heard of Dawnroad Bank," she says.

  "I'll take you to the main branch if you want," I say.

  "In Aerestan?"

  "The central second," I say, just a little bit defensively. "We keep our costs down for our customers."

  "Land's cheap down here," she says, and the only thing I can do is press my lips together in a fake smile as puckered as a nun's cunt. We both know the reasons Dawnroad doesn't operate down here, and we both know my professional servility forbids me to utter them. But at the same time, I'm a little happy to have been wrong-footed by this unpleasant and none too fragrant person, because it means she actually finds value in manipulating me. Which means she believes I have something to offer her.

  "The central second sounds all right to me," she says. "Let's see it."

  This, though, is a little outside my expectations. "I meant in the future," I say. "Not too far from now. There's some paper I'll need to file at the office—we'll have to carve out some time for an interview—"

  Aimée leans back, fixes me with a look, and crosses her arms. I've stepped in it, of course. I offered her the main branch on the central second as proof that I was on the up and up. But I can't imagine she's authorized to leave the terrace, much less the district. Now, Dawnroad Bank is of course a respectable financial concern with clients all over Altronne, and it of course has ways and means. But half-shekel scrubs like me are not supposed to invoke them at a moment's notice. "If you could wait perhaps a day... ?"

  Aimée quirks another smile. "I don't think so."

  "I! Don't! Think! So!" says Sim, galloping around in a circle and waving one of his toys.

  "All right," I say, pinching the skin between my eyebrows. "We can arrange it. But it'll take hours to get up there, hours to get back; there could be hours of waiting in between—"

  "I've got all the time under the sun," Aimée says.

  Here I will digress briefly to give you a sense of how I, then a half-shekel scrub operating in the sub-basement below the lowest tier of the banking industry, might be empowered to direct the actions of Dawnroad Bank from a stinking boondock on the sinistral sixth. I imagine your first thought would run to the beams, and I have reason to believe that the synod does license a certain amount of communication to run through that system; it makes their eavesdropping much easier. But the cyturgy involved in both transmission and reception is expensive, tightly regulated, and very easy for the beams themselves to detect, meaning that breaking the law to piggyback on it is as far as we know scientifically impossible unless, maybe, adapting to the beam network's countermeasures is literally all you do. In other words, if you're the Dandelion Knight. Dawnroad isn't a player on that scale and doesn't have the authorizations.

  The system, which Dawnroad is neither the first nor the only one to use, takes advantage of the rail lines—basically the only electrical distribution system still functioning in this moribund shithole of a civilization. There's always current running through the rails, of course, and it didn't take the technicians too long to figure out that you can get in there and add little pulses on top of the huge amounts of current it takes to power the trains. The embroidery on top of the insight is a little complicated; these messages are not actually that reliable, since the signal drops out at long distances and is invariably ruined if and when it runs into a train. So there's a whole system of receipts where a station verifies that it's received a message; and those receipts are also messages, so you have to figure out a way to keep the system from being overrun by receipts; and on top of the technical problems, you have to figure out an accounting system, so all the rail technicians in the value chain get their piece and the system keeps running on.

  It's a long value chain. Half-shekel scrubs are not thought to provide particularly valuable services. When a person wh
o does not provide valuable services incurs a large expense, you can see how that person might worry about how his net worth will be viewed by the bookkeepers.

  And I'll digress one more level to point out the obvious, which is the following: I was about to do good business. The only reason anyone bothered to expend a day of my admittedly pitiful salary sending me to the sinistral sixth was that the bookkeepers saw an upside in seducing Aimée Leblanc. They didn't give me numbers down to the shekel, but I knew the interest on Aimée Leblanc's assets would pay for a rail-mail in a matter of days.

  But I also knew it might not matter. If someone hasn't decided you're smart enough to make the call, you can find yourself out on your ear in a heartbeat. And I wasn't so rich back then that I could just discard a job.

  I also wasn't so rich that I could afford to fail, though. So in some ways that made the decision easy.

  I'm sorry if this all seems off the point. But this crowd—you know my stories. You know it all comes back around in the end.

  Speaking of which.

  It is with deep self-hate and melancholy that I write this, my Aimée, from an awful hole an octant away from you and your mother. We agonized over the decision, but ultimately we decided it was better