That boy, Burton said, letting the words take on an affected drawl, is some piece of work.
Yeah, Oestra said.
Hes good at what he does, Erich said. Hell get better.
Burton was quiet for a long moment. A man at the front door pointed an angry finger toward Burtons table, demanding something of the waitress. She took the strangers hand and pushed it down. The angry man left. Burton watched him go. If he didnt know any better, this wasnt the place for him.
Erich, I dont think I can take your friend off his probation period. Not with this. Not yet.
Erich nodded, the urge to speak for Timmy and the fear of losing Burtons fickle forgiveness warring in his throat. Oestra was the one to break the silence.
You want to give him another job? The words carried a weight of incredulity measured to the gram.
The right job, Burton said. Right one for now, anyway. You say he watched out for you, growing up?
He did, Erich said.
Let him do that, then. Timmys going to be your personal bodyguard on your next job. Keep you out of trouble. See if you can keep him out of trouble too. At least do better than Oey did with him, right? Burton said and laughed. A moment later Oestra laughed too, only a little sourly. Erich couldnt manage much more than a sick, relieved grin.
Ill tell him, he said. Ill take care of it.
Do, Burton said, smiling. An awkward moment later, Erich got up, head bobbing like a birds with gratitude and discomfort. Burton and Oestra watched him limp back toward the storage room. Oestra sighed.
I dont know why youre cultivating that freak, Burtons lieutenant said.
Hes off the grid and he cooks good identity docs, Burton said. I like having someone who cant be traced keeping my name clean.
I dont mean the cripple. I mean the other one. Seriously, theres something wrong with that kid.
I think hes got potential.
Potential for what?
Exactly, Burton said. Okay, so tell me the rest. Whats going on out there?
Oestra hoisted his eyebrows and hunched forward, elbows on the table. The kids running unlicensed games by the waterfront werent coming up with the usual take. One of the brothels had been hit by an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant syphilis; one of the youngest boys, a five-year-old, had it in his eyes. Burtons neighbor to the northan Earthbound branch of the Loca Griegawere seeing raids on their drug manufacturing houses. Burton listened with his eyelids at half-mast. Individually, no one event mattered much, but put together, they were the first few fat raindrops in a coming storm. Oestra knew it too.
By the time the lunch rush ended, the booths and tables filling and emptying in the systole and diastole of the days vast urban heart, Burtons mind was on a dozen other things. Erich and Timmy and the death of a small-time deadbeat werent forgotten, but no particular importance was put on them either. That was what it meant to be Burton: those things that could rise up to fill a small persons whole horizon were only small parts of his view. He was the boss, the big-picture man. Like Baltimore itself, he weathered storms.
Time had not been kind to the city. Its coastline was a ruin of drowned buildings kept from salvage by a complexity of rights, jurisdictions, regulations, and apathy until the rising sea had all but reclaimed them for its own. The Urban Arcology movement had peaked there a decade or two before the technology existed to make its dreams of vast, sustainable structures a reality. It had left a wall seven miles long and twenty stories high of decaying hope and structural resin that reached from the beltway to Lake Montebello. At the street level, electric networks laced the roadways, powering and guiding the vehicles that could use them. Sparrows Island stood out in the waves like a widow watching the sea for a ship that would never come home, and Federal Hill scowled back at the city across shallow, filthy water, emperor of its own abandoned land.
Everywhere, all through the city, space was at a premium. Extended families lived in decaying apartments designed for half as many. Men and women who couldnt escape the cramped space spent their days at the screens of their terminals, watching newsfeeds and dramas and pornography and living on the textured protein and enriched rice of basic. For most, their forays into crime were halfhearted, milquetoast affairsa backroom brewer making weak, unregulated beer; a few kids stealing a neighbors clothes or breaking their furniture; a band of scavengers with scrounged tools harvesting metal from the buried infrastructure of the city that had been. Baltimore was Earth writ small, crowded and bored. Its citizens were caught between the dismal life of basic and the barriers of class, race, and opportunity, vicious competition and limited resources, that kept all but the most driven from a profession and actual currency. The dictates of the regional administration in Chicago filtered down to the streets slowly, and the local powers might be weaker than the government, but they were also closer, the gravities of law and lawlessness finding their balance point somewhere just north of Lansdowne.
Time had not been kind to Lydia either. She wasnt one of the unregistered, but very little of what was important in her life appeared in the government records. There, she was a namenot Lydiaand an address where she had never lived. Her real home was four rooms on the fifth floor of a minor arcology looking out over the harbor. Her real work was keeping track of inventory for Liev, one of Burtons lieutenants. Before that, she had been his lover. Before that, she had been a whore in his stable. Before that, she had been someone else who she could hardly remember anymore. When she was alone, and she was often alone, the narrative she told herself was of how lucky she was. Shed escaped basic, shed had dear friends and mentors when she was working, shed been able to retire up in the ad hoc structure of the citys underworld. Many, many people hadnt been anywhere near as fortunate as she had been. She was growing old, yes. There was gray in her hair now. Lines at the corners of her eyes, the first faint liver spots on the backs of her hands. She told herself they were the evidence of her success. Too many of her friends had never had them. Never would. Her life had been a patchwork of love and violence, and the overlap was vast.
Still, she hung warm-colored silk across her windows and wore the silver bells at her ankles and wrists that were the fashion among much younger women. Life, such as it was, was good.
The evening sun hung over the rooftops to the west, the late summer heat thickening the air. Lydia was in the little half-kitchen warming up a bowl of frozen hummus when the door chimed and the bolts clacked open. Timmy came in, lifting his chin in greeting. She smiled back, raising an eyebrow. There was no one with him, and there never would be. They had never allowed someone else to be with them when they were together. Not since the night his mother died.
So, how did it go?
Kind of fucked it up, me, Timmy said.
Lydias heart went tight and she tried to keep her voice calm and light. How so?
Burton told me to get what I could out of this guy. Looking back, I think he just meant money. So. Timmy leaned against the couch, hands deep in his pockets, and shrugged. Oops.
Was Burton angry?
Timmy looked away and shrugged again. With that motion, she could see him again as hed been as a young boy, as a child, as a baby. She had known his mother when theyd worked together, each watching out for the other when they turned tricks. Lydia had been there the night Timmy was born among the worn tiles and cold lights of the black-market clinic. Shed made him soup the night Liev had turned him out the first time and while he ate told him lies about her first time with a john to make him laugh. Shed picked music with him for his mothers memorial and told him that shed died the way shed lived, and not to blame himself. She had never been able to protect him from anything, so shed helped him live in the jagged world, and he gave her something she couldnt describe or define but that she needed like a junkie craved the needle.