‘Tanner, are you insane?’
‘Very probably several kinds of insane,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.’ And then — approximating a leisured stroll — I started to walk around to the other side of the tank, the perspiration from my palm dampening the metal of the gun. I eased it fractionally from my pocket, hoping that the gesture looked casual, like someone extracting a cigar case, but freezing before the action was complete, as if something else had snared their attention.
I turned the corner.
Reivich was gone.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘You were going to kill someone,’ Chanterelle said as her cable-car brachiated home, swinging through the lantern-bedecked brain coral growth of the Canopy with the Mulch hung below, dark except for a dappling of scattered fires.
‘What?’
‘You had your gun half out of your pocket like you meant to use it. Not the way you showed it to me — not as a threat — but like you weren’t going to say a word before you squeezed the trigger. Like you were just going to walk up, put a bullet through someone and walk away.’
‘There’d be little point lying, would there?’
‘You have to start talking to me, Tanner. You have to start telling me something. You said I wouldn’t like the truth because it would complicate things. Well, trust me — this is complicated enough. Are you ready to let some of that mask slip, or are we going to carry on this game?’
I was still playing the whole incident over in my head. The face had been that of Argent Reivich, and he had been standing only a few metres from me, in a public place.
Was it possible he had actually seen me all along, and was much cleverer than I had realised? If he’d recognised me, he could have left the area in the opposite direction while I walked around Methuselah. I’d been too fixated on the idea of him still standing up against the glass to pay enough attention to the people who had just left. So it was possible, yes. But in accepting that Reivich had been aware of my presence all along, I opened myself up to a far more unsettling set of questions. Why had he stayed there, if he had already seen me? And how had we met each other so easily? I hadn’t even been looking for him at that point; I was just getting the feel of the area before I began the real work of tightening the net. As if that was not enough, now that I reviewed the few moments which separated my discovery of Reivich from the moment when I realised he had left, I became aware that something else had happened. I had seen something or someone, but my mind had suppressed it, concentrating my attention on the imminent kill.
I had seen another face in the glass — another face that I knew, standing very close to Reivich.
She had erased the surface markings, but the underlying bone structure was reasonably intact, and her expression very familiar.
I had seen Zebra.
‘I’m still waiting,’ Chanterelle said. ‘There’s only so much of that meaningful frown I can take, you know.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just—’ I found myself grinning. ‘I almost think you might like me for who I am.’
‘Don’t push your luck, Tanner. Only a couple of hours ago you were pointing a gun at me. Most relationships that start like that tend to go downhill.’
‘Ordinarily, I’d agree. But you also happened to be pointing a gun at me, and your gun was considerably larger than mine.’
‘Hmm, maybe.’ She sounded far from convinced. ‘But if we’re going to take it any further — and make of that what you will — you’d better start elaborating on that dark and mysterious past of yours. Even if there are things you don’t really want me to know.’
‘Oh, there are plenty of those, believe me.’
‘Then get them out into the open. By the time we get back to my place, I want to know why that man was going to die. And if I were you, I’d seriously try and persuade me that he deserves it — whoever it was. Otherwise you might begin to slip in my estimation.’
The car pitched and swayed, but I no longer found the motion really sickening.
‘He deserves to die,’ I said. ‘But I can’t say he’s a bad man. If I’d been in his place, I’d have done exactly what he did.’ Except done it professionally, I thought, and not left anyone alive afterwards.
‘Mm, bad start, Tanner. But please continue.’
I thought about giving Chanterelle the sanitised version of my story — before realising that there was no sanitised version. So I explained about about my soldiering days, and how I had fallen into Cahuella’s orbit. I told her that Cahuella was a man of both power and cruelty, but not genuinely evil since he was also a man of trust and loyalty. It was not hard to respect him and to want to earn his respect in return. I suppose there was something very primitive about the relationship between Cahuella and me: he was a man who desired excellence in everything around him — in his surroundings; in the accoutrements he collected; in the way he chose his sexual partners, like Gitta. He also desired excellence in his employees. I considered myself a fine soldier, bodyguard, liege, man-at-arms, assassin; whatever label suited. But only in Cahuella could I measure my excellence against any kind of absolute.
‘A bad man, but not a monster?’ Chanterelle said. ‘And that was enough reason for you to work for him?’
‘He also paid pretty well,’ I said.
‘Mercenary bastard.’
‘There was something else, too. I was valuable to him because I had experience. He wasn’t willing to risk losing that wisdom by placing me in situations of undue danger. So a lot of the work I did for him was purely advisory — I hardly ever had to carry a weapon. We had real bodyguards for that; younger, fitter, stupider versions of myself.’
‘And how did the man you saw in Escher Heights come into it?’
‘The man’s name is Argent Reivich,’ I said. ‘He used to live on Sky’s Edge. The family name’s rather well established there.’
‘It’s also an old name in the Canopy.’
‘I’m not surprised. If Reivich already had connections here, that would explain why he managed to infiltrate the Canopy so quickly, when I was still getting soaked down in the Mulch.’
‘You’re getting ahead of yourself. What brought Reivich here? And you, for that matter?’
I told her how Cahuella’s weapons had fallen into the wrong hands, and how those wrong hands had used them against Reivich’s family. How Reivich had traced the arms back to my employer, and his determination to exact revenge.
‘That’s rather honourable of him, don’t you think?’
‘I have no quarrel with Reivich about that,’ I said. ‘But if I’d done it, I’d have made sure everyone died. That was his one mistake; the one I can’t forgive him for.’
‘You can’t forgive him for leaving you alive?’
‘It wasn’t an act of mercy, Chanterelle. Quite the opposite. The bastard wanted me to suffer for failing Cahuella.’
‘Sorry, but the logic’s just a little too tortuous for me.’
‘He killed Cahuella’s wife — the woman I should have been protecting. Then he left Cahuella, Dieterling and me alive. Dieterling was lucky — he looked dead. But Reivich deliberately left Cahuella and me alive. He wanted Cahuella to punish me for letting Gitta die.’
‘Did he?’
‘Did he what?’
She sounded like she was about to lose patience with me. ‘Did Cahuella do anything to you afterwards?’
The question seemed simple enough to answer. No, obviously, he hadn’t — because Cahuella had died afterwards. His injuries had eventually killed him, even though they hadn’t appeared particularly life-threatening at the time.