“I thought—” she started, then began again, astonished. “But what about everything you just said?”

“That wasn’t a legal defense,” said Rinko. “There is no legal defense for what your brother has done. There are records showing his confessions to treason and murder.”

“Ospie records,” said Lillian. “Coerced confessions. Probably under torture.”

“This country wants to see your brother hang. I might be able to keep him off the scaffold, but do not ask me to set him free. It is beyond my skill, or anyone’s. And that is something you need to understand from the outset, or we will be working at cross-purposes.”

Speechless, Lillian watched Rinko tip her glass back, gray pearl earrings sweeping the skin of her neck. When she set it down she said, “Now, may I come up to Carmody and speak with Cyril?”

“You’re welcome to try,” said Lillian, hearing her own words at a distance through the ringing in her ears. “But who knows if he’ll talk.”

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

West Cultham Rail Company had a warehouse near what had once been the bad end of the harbor and didn’t appear to have gotten much better. The only thing that had changed was the graffiti. No Ospie quartered circles, or regionalist yellow and blue. Still dirty jokes and scatological sketches, of course, but here and there Aristide saw a motif of parallel lines hatched at regular intervals. Train tracks, with Saeger’s name scrawled beneath them in dripping paint. Or, sometimes, Cordelia’s.

Swathes of the neighborhood had once been his territory, under a different name than the one he used onstage. A gnarled wen on the city’s ass made up of vast hangars and the piss-stinking alleys in between. A place where anything might be bought or sold: flesh, drugs, false documents, and foreign currency. Shipping containers could conceal a multitude of sins. Such as the poppy tar now biding its time in orderly rows, listed in the harbormaster’s books as tin, cloth, and exotic woods.

“Humble, ain’t it?” Custler asked, leaning heavily on the railing of the screeching metal gallery that ran around the warehouse walls. “We’re sitting on a hoard, and yet you’d never think to look. Canny art, that.”

“Indeed,” said Aristide. “But never one I strove to master.”

She cased him from the sides of her eyes. “I don’t think it’d look as good on you.”

He thought of the patchy beard he’d grown in the Culthams. The uneven tangle his hair had made as it grew out in the bowels of the steamer to Hyrosia. “You’d be quite right.”

Side by side for a moment, silence settled between them like a lanky, dour bird with evil eyes. Aristide had just begun to worry when Custler said, “Your, um … your pencil pusher. He ain’t here?”