Li shuddered and looked away, back into the half dark of the cab.
St. Joe’s sprawled in the shadow of the poorest projects. It had one permanent building—a drafty-looking parish church whose brick facade was overdue for pointing. The rest of the orphanage was housed in colonial-era modular units that weren’t much more than Quonset huts.
The sister who met Li at the door wore blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a rawboned no-bullshit air that made Li wonder if she were ex-militia.
“So you’re the one who wants to know about Hannah,” she said. “What are you, half-XenoGen? That why you’re interested?”
“I’m the senior UN officer on-station,” Li said. “It’s my job to be interested.”
The sister narrowed her eyes at Li for a moment. “You’d better keep your cab,” she said. “You won’t find another one in this neighborhood.” She waved her into a long, dimly lit corridor. “Sorry for the lack of a welcoming committee, but everyone else has class now. You’ll have to make do with the principal.”
“Thanks, Sister…”
“Just Ted.” She grinned. “For Theresa. Class lets out in two minutes. We’d better beat a strategic retreat to my office.”
They walked back through the rat’s nest of tin-roofed buildings, down linoleum-floored hallways, past long racks of children’s winter coats and school bags. The smell of chalk and Magic Markers seeped out from under the classroom doors, along with the disciplined refrain and chorus of every Catholic-school class everywhere. As they passed one room, Li heard a voice that could only belong to a nun say, “You’re not as cute as you think you are,” provoking a quickly smothered wave of childish laughter.
The bell rang ten minutes to the hour, and a noisy, laughing, rambunctious flood of uniformed schoolgirls poured out into the corridors. Sister Ted waded through the flood with the decisive step of a woman who expected people to make way for her. And make way they did; for the next several minutes, Li shadowed her through an unrelenting barrage of Good morning, Sister Ted and Excuse me, Sister Ted and Hello, Sister Ted.
“You’ve got them well trained,” Li said.
The other woman turned a sharp unforgiving look on her. “We wouldn’t help them by cutting them any slack, Major. You can bet no one else ever will.”
“How many of your students are genetics?”
“Look around and take a guess.”
Li looked at the sea of young faces, so many of them the same two or three faces. “Two-thirds, I’d say.”
“Then you’d be right.”
“Any jobs for them when they get out of here?”
“Not unless they’re five times as good as any human who wants the job. And not unless they’re polite enough to not scare people.” The nun threw another of her sharp looks at Li. “I bet you learned how to keep your mouth shut early.”
“You’d bet right, then.” Li grinned. “I can’t walk into this place without the creeping feeling that Sister Vic is going to rise from the grave and ask me for my hall pass.”
That got a laugh.
“What can I tell you?” Sister Ted asked, when they were settled in the dilapidated relative peace of her office.
“What Sharifi was doing here two weeks ago for a start.”
“Making a donation. We have a lot of Ring-side donors.”
“Do all of them come here to visit personally?”
“Hannah was a former student. And she was extremely generous.”
Li couldn’t help glancing around the run-down office at that and thinking of the cheap buildings the school was housed in.
“She gave the things that counted,” Ted said. “Books. Food money. And she guaranteed every student college tuition at the best school she could get admitted to. Every student. Do you have any idea what that means to the girls we get here?”
“I can imagine.”
“I imagine you can do more than imagine.”
“How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked, brushing the implied question aside.
Ted smiled. “Not that well. She was my age, you know. The women who would have taught her are all long gone.”
“What did she visit for, then?”
“To talk to me.”
“About?”
“A new gift.”
“Look,” Li said. “I’m investigating Sharifi’s death, not your school. Can you just spare me the effort of dragging this out of you?”
The sister’s eyes widened slightly. “Can you just tell me what you want to know, then, and spare me the effort of guessing?”
“I want to know who killed her.”
“Oh.” Sister Ted pursed her lips and made a faint blowing sound. That was all the reaction Li’s news got from her. But then Li got the impression this was a woman who was used to bad news. “She seemed like her usual self. I’d only ever met her instream before that, of course.” She gestured to the ramshackle bulk of an old VR rig gathering dust in the corner of the office. “But she was adamant that she wanted to wrap this gift up in person.” She shifted in her chair, setting the old springs creaking. “If I’d thought anything like that was going on, I would have tried to help, Major. I liked her. And not just because she got our girls to college. She was the kind of person you just liked, somehow.” She grinned. “Well, the kind of person I liked. I imagine she pissed the hell out of most people.”
“What about the gift? Anything unusual there?”
Sister Ted twisted in her chair to reach a file drawer. “Have a look at it,” she said, handing a thick sheaf of paper to Li. “The digital original’s on file Ring-side.”
Li flipped through the document, her heart beating faster with every page she read. It was a will. A will that left everything Sharifi owned to St. Joseph’s School.
“Congratulations,” Li said. “You’re rich.”
“I know. I would have expected to feel better about it.”
Li handed the papers back, and Sister Ted set them on the desk, absently, as if she were thinking of something else. Or someone else.
There was a problem finding Korchow’s street. The cabbie kept circling through lunch-hour traffic, insisting that he knew the address, that the turn was in the next block, or the next one. Finally Li got out and walked.
She stumbled onto the shop abruptly, turning a blind corner into a narrow flagstoned alley and bumping up against a spotlit window full of old carpets and inlaid furniture. A gold-lettered sign readANTIQUITIES and below it, in dark red, she saw the same intricate lozenge design she had seen on Korchow’s card.
He sat at a small desk toward the back, in a carved laminate chair that was either an astronomically expensive generation-ship artifact or a very professional forgery. A tank silk raincoat and a stylish gas mask lay neatly across a nearby table, as if Korchow had just come in or was just leaving.
“Major,” he said. “What a surprise. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding me?”
“I did, actually. Pretty out-of-the-way place to run a business from. Must cut into your profits.”
Korchow smiled. “I have a certain reputation among discerning collectors. Can I get you something? Tea?”
He bustled through a curtained doorway into the back of the shop, and Li heard the clink of glass on china, the sound of running water. He returned with two covered teacups, an ornately carved glazed-iron teapot, and a sleek black box that he set carefully on the desk between them.
He served the tea, which was excellent. Then he picked up the box and handed it to her. “I thought you might like to see it,” he said. “You seemed quite put out by it the last time we met.”