As the last of the late afternoon light faded toward dusk, lights flickered to life in the tenaments, but the street lights remained dark. Their glass globes had long since been broken out by vandals with nothing better to do than hurl stones at something that wouldn’t be likely to shoot back. Men without jobs moved in aimless eddies, like flotsam on the backwater of some stagnant, slow-moving river. A few, driven by currents of anger and hatred, dared the wrath of the P-Squads by gathering on street corners. They stood there, defiantly, to share bitter complaints and talk treason they weren’t entirely sure how to carry out.
That was Simon’s job. He was here to teach them.
He’d spent the past week doing exactly that. Tonight’s meeting wasn’t the beginning of the process, it was the beginning of the end. Of a lot of things. Simon’s guide was a smallish woman in the earlier years of middle age. Maria was her name, the only name she’d given him. She had that bowed-down, exhausted look that was a hallmark of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Maria had barely spoken to him since their cautious meeting at the prearranged spot where the urban guerillas had agreed to rendezvous with him. Whoever she was, Maria was as thin as the ragged children and moved like a woman fifty years older than her probable true age.
As they passed the angry men on the street corners, men who stared at him — a stranger in their midst — with dagger-sharp hatred, Maria nodded a silent greeting to them. That gesture, made again and again, defused what might’ve swiftly resulted in a lethal confrontation. He’s with me, I vouch for him, that gesture meant, making it clear that the stranger who’d thrust himself into their ugly little corner of a once-beautiful world had, in fact, been invited. Simon had no doubt at all that he would’ve been waylaid, murdered without a moment’s pity, and stripped like a dead chicken if he’d dared walk in here alone. He knew, as well, that nobody would’ve bothered to stop them. Not even the P-Squads would patrol these particular streets, not unless they traveled in packs of at least six officers armed like jaglitch hunters.
They passed bars that exuded alcoholic fumes, their grimy interiors artificially bright with the grating laughter that comes from bitter, hopeless people whose sole outlet is to get drunk. They stepped across several of the drunkest, who’d crawled out of the bar and collapsed on the street. After walking for nearly half an hour, they rounded a corner and interrupted a business transaction between a teenage girl whose breasts were the only plump part of her and a man who looked like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a loose sack.
Maria broke stride, staring hard at the girl. Whoever she was, she flushed crimson. Then she stammered out something unintelligible and fled through the rapidly gathering shadows of dusk. The man she’d been bargaining with sent a screeching curse after her. He swung abruptly toward Maria.
“Y’damned bitch! I’d already give ’er the money!”
“That’s your own fault, you fool! You give a whore money after she’s done what you hired ’er for. Now get your filthy bones off my street an’ don’t come back. I swear t’ God and all the devils in hell, I’ll break your skinny neck, if I see you back in these parts.”
For a long, dangerous moment, Simon braced himself to prevent a murder. He shifted his weight, ready to move, but the other man darted a swift glance at Simon and let the moment — and his money — pass away without further protest. He sidled into a noxious alleyway, cursing under his breath. Simon flexed his fingers, shaking the tension loose. Maria tilted her head slightly, casting a glance upward from beneath hooded eyes.
“He’d a’ killed you.”
“He could’ve tried.”
She studied him for a moment. “You might be right, at that. C’mon, we’re nearly there.”
She led him further down the street, in the direction the girl had fled, then opened a door sandwiched in between a boarded-up storefront that had once sold groceries and what looked like a combination self-service laundrey and betting parlor, judging by the number of frowsy, bitter-faced women playing cards and the even greater number of men rolling dice while the machines jigged and bumped and rattled their syncopated rhythm, cleaning what few clothes these people owned.
The door Maria opened led to a stairway barely wide enough for one person to climb. The first landing gave onto a corridor with only one door, presumably leading into a storage room above the laundry. Maria climbed to the second floor, where a line of apartment doors stretched away down the corridor, their faded paint bearing the numerals assigned to each cramped residence. Maria led the way to the third from the end. They stepped inside — and found the girl they had interrupted on the street below.
She flushed crimson again.
“Get supper started,” Maria said in a cold, angry voice.
“Yes’m,” the girl whispered, rolling her eyes at Simon before she fled into an adjoining room.
Simon didn’t know what to say. Maria shut her eyes for a moment, but not before Simon caught a glimpse of the tears in them. When she opened her eyes, again, she met Simon’s distressed gaze. “She’s not a wicked girl.”
“No.”
“Just… desperate.”
“Yes.”
“It’s why I told that creep…” She halted.
“Yes,” Simon said again. “I know. I have a daughter. Just a couple of years older than yours.”
She slanted a look up at him, a look at once shuttered and painfully clear. Then a sigh tore loose. “That’s different, then, innit?” She didn’t say anything else, but Simon understood. Her lips vanished in a bitter, white-clenched line that slashed across the weariness and the pain on her face. Then she spoke again, voice brusque. “They’ll be here in a bit. We got nuthin’ fancier to offer than water, if you’re thirsty?”
“Water’s fine, thank you.”
She nodded. “Find a chair, then. I still got one or two. I’ll be back.”
Simon studied the tiny living room, with its government-supplied viewscreen and a few cheap pictures on the wall. The pictures were religious. The viewscreen was a standard model of the type issued by the POPPA propaganda machine, with its vested interest in reaching the masses. The furniture was cheap, much-mended, and mismatched, but the whole place was neat and fresh-scrubbed, in contrast with other tenements they’d passed. Unlike her neighbors, Maria had not given up hope.
Simon discovered a profound respect for the woman. She must have been holding herself and her family together with little more than determination, for a long time, now. The knowledge that her little girl was selling herself on the streets must’ve been a blow that struck to the heart, made worse for having been witnessed by a stranger here to help. She returned from the kitchen, where that selfsame daughter was busy rustling through cabinets and banging pots and implements around, in a subdued and careful fashion that suggested she was trying to tiptoe around her mother’s temper.
“Got no ice,” Maria said, holding out the glass, “but there’s a jug in the icebox that’s cold and plenty more from the tap.”
Simon nodded his thanks and sipped. The pause between them was awkward, but it didn’t last long, because someone tapped at the door, in a definite pattern that was clearly a code. Maria slanted another glance in his direction. Simon stepped back, so that he was behind the door when she opened it.
“Come in,” she said in a whisper, “an’ be quick about it!”
An instant later a gasp broke from her. Simon caught a glimpse of her face as the door swung shut. She was staring, ash-pale, at one of the men who’d just stepped into the room, swinging the door quickly shut behind them.