Chapter FOUR
You seem ill at ease, Mr.Kovacs. Are you?”
I looked over my shoulder at the maid who had shown me in, then back at Miriam Bancroft. Their bodies were about the same age.
“No,” I said, more coarsely than I’d intended.
She briefly curved her mouth down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she’d been studying when I arrived. Behind me the maid pulled the chart room door closed with a heavy click. Bancroft hadn’t seen fit to accompany me into the presence of his wife. Perhaps one encounter a day was as much as they allowed themselves. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as we came down from the balcony in the seaward lounge. Bancroft paid her about as much attention as he had last time.
When I left, he was standing by the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.
Mrs.Bancroft deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.
“Well,” she said, without looking up. “Ask me your questions, then.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“I was in bed.” She looked up at me this time. “Please don’t ask me to corroborate that; I was alone.”
The chart room was long and airy under an arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. I moved out of the centre aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs.Bancroft and myself. It felt a little like taking cover.
“Mrs.Bancroft, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I’m not the police. I’m interested in information, not guilt.”
She slid the wrapped map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She had left her fresh young sweat and tennis clothes in some elegant bathroom while I was talking to her husband. Now she was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to the elbow, her wrists unadorned with jewellery.
“Do I sound guilty, Mr.Kovacs?” she asked me.
“You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger.”
She laughed. It was a pleasant, throaty sound and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out. A laugh I could get to like.
“How very indirect you are.”
I looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of me. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before I was born. The names marked on it were in a script I couldn’t read.
“Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs.Bancroft.”
“No? Then what is?”
I shrugged. “Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties.”
“Sounds boring. I think you’re going to have a few shocks here, Mr.Kovacs.”
“I didn’t say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs.Bancroft.”
“Oh.” She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards me. “Yes, Laurens told me a little about you. It seems you’re thought of as a dangerous man on Harlan’s World.”
I shrugged again.
“It’s Russian.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The script.” She came round the rack and stood beside me, looking down at the map. “This is a Russian computer-generated chart of moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at auction. Do you like it?”
“It’s very nice. What time did you go to sleep the night your husband was shot?”
She stared at me. “Early. I told you, I was alone.” She forced the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. “Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Mr.Kovacs, it’s not. It’s resignation. With a twist of bitterness.”
“You feel bitter about your husband?”
She smiled. “I thought I said resigned.”
“You said both.”
“Are you saying you think I killed my husband?”
“I don’t think anything yet. But it is a possibility.”
“Is it?”
“You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives.”
Still smiling, she said, “Building a case, are we, Mr.Kovacs?”
I looked back at her. “If the heart pumps. Yeah.”
“The police had a similar theory for a while. They decided the heart didn’t pump. I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.”
I looked down at my hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out Kristin Ortega’s cigarettes. I was in the middle of tapping one out of the pack. Nerves. Feeling oddly betrayed by my new sleeve, I put the packet away.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s a question of climate control. A lot of the maps in here are very sensitive to pollution. You couldn’t know.”
She somehow managed to make it sound as if only a complete moron wouldn’t have realised. I could feel my grip on the interview sliding out of sight.
“What made the police—”
“Ask them.” She turned her back and walked away from me as if making a decision. “How old are you, Mr.Kovacs?”
“Subjectively? Forty-one. The years on Harlan’s World are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.”
“And objectively?” she asked, mocking my tone.
“I’ve had about a century in the tank. You tend to lose track.” That was a lie. I knew to the day how long each of my terms in storage had been. I’d worked it out one night and now the number wouldn’t go away. Every time I went down again, I added on.
“How alone you must be by now.”
I sighed and turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. Syrtis Minor; 3rd excavation, east quarter. Bradbury; aboriginal ruins. I started to tug one of the rolls free.
“Mrs.Bancroft, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”
She whirled on me almost before I had finished speaking and her face was tight with anger.
“My husband did not kill himself,” she said freezingly.
“You seem very sure of that.” I looked up from the map and gave her a smile. “For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.”
“Put that back,” she cried, starting towards me. “You have no idea how valuable—”
She stopped, brought up short as I slid the map back into the rack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.
“Are you trying to make me angry, Mr.Kovacs?”
“I’m just trying to get some attention.”
We looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs.Bancroft lowered her gaze.
“I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?”
“Where had your husband gone that night?”
She bit her lip. “I’m not sure. He went to Osaka that day, for a meeting.”
“Osaka is where?”
She looked at me in surprise.
“I’m not from here,” I said patiently.
“Osaka’s in Japan. I thought—”
“Yeah, Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labour. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.”
I stopped. Mrs.Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.
“I am over three centuries old, Mr.Kovacs.” There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. “Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.”
The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.
“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please. He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.”
“No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”
“Yes?”
She shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.”
“And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”
The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. “He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr.Kovacs.”
“This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”
“Oh … no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to source.”
I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs.Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.
“Routine stuff, huh?”
“I would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr.Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”
“I’m sure they do as well, Mrs.Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”
“You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.”
This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.
“Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”
Mrs.Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.
“Most of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”
For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.
Old.
With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to nm, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.
“Are you all right, Mr.Kovacs?”
Download dues.
I focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs.Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”
She moved towards me. “Would you like—”
“No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”
The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.
I badly needed a cigarette.