Nicola Griffith - Slow River

Spanner’s eyes were very blue, Lore thought, very beautiful. And there was no choice. They had to get their money from somewhere. For now. She nodded, and the motion spilled the tears that had been gathering in her eyes.

Spanner took off one of her gloves and gently brushed at Lore’s cheek. “Don’t cry. We’ll just do this for a little while longer. Just until we have the money for the equipment. Then I’ll make everything all right. I promise.”

She smiled, but Lore just cried harder. She had seen that half curl of the lip: Spanner was lying.

After Lore had set out the cat’s food, she sat on the damp earth by the rookery she had made of broken bricks and lumps of concrete with the steel still stuck through it. The worst of winter was over. There were two snowdrops poking bravely from the scraggy grass. It had rained earlier; the earth smelled freshly turned. She felt utterly blank. She watched the sky, a beautiful, cold, clear blue that made her ache. It reminded her of the Netherlands, of being six, of being looked after, protected from the world.

A faint mewling brought her back to the present. It came from under the bushes. She moved her head very slowly. Slight movement. Something—several somethings—small. She stayed very still, trying to breathe quietly, evenly. Heard it again, this time two thin squeaks. Kittens.

Lore thought about the thin, pathetic thing she had buried just a few months ago, the kitten that had died of utter starvation. Nothing, probably, had improved for the feral mother, but she did not know the meaning of giving up. Giving up got you nowhere. Nowhere at all. She would keep trying, keep giving birth, until she had a soft, round kitten.

Meisener came in, talking to Cel, while I was wriggling into my skinny. I watched him covertly while he took off his coat, folded it up and bundled it into his locker, and unhooked his slate.

His slate. It would be so simple. If I dealt with Spanner again. No. Not that. Not again. But you have to do something, Magyar had said, and she was right. Lucas Chen was strapped to a chair in a tent, somewhere, or shivering in a sleeping bag, naked and afraid. I had to do something. I worked through the first half of the shift, thinking, then ate my food at the break while staring unseeingly at the fish loop, still thinking. Near the end of the shift, I found Magyar. “Is there any way you can stay here after the end of the shift Pretend you need to do some office work, or something?”

“I don’t need to pretend. There’s a lot to do.”

“Would they notice if you uploaded Meisener’s records to me at home?”

“I could find a way to disguise it. What do you have in mind?”

“A records search. Between your official status and the things I’ve picked up in the last couple of years, we can learn a lot about Nathan Meisener.”

The flat was cold when I got home, but I opened a link to Magyar before I even turned on the heat so that she could start uploading Meisener’s information. I asked her to also call each of the previous employers he had listed, and get from them several things: a picture, a DNA scan if available, biographical data—age, height, family and so on—and the references and employers he had listed.

I turned on the heat and lights and made some tea while she started on that. It was going to be a long night.

When the information began to come through, I kept Magyar’s link in the top left corner while I scrolled through the data.

The preliminary data from his last listed employer, EnSyTec, checked out. “It says he worked for these people nearly eleven years,” Magyar said as I sipped and read. “It looks kosher to me.”

“How about the resume he gave them—does it match the one he gave when he applied for this job?”

“I don’t know. All I could get immediately without bumping up a level was his performance records, which match what he gave us when he arrived.”

“See if you can get the rest.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“Not in Sarajevo.”

Her picture box at the top of my screen went blank. I scrolled through the resume that had got Meisener the Hedon Road job: EnSyTec, eleven years; Work, Inc, a placement agency, for three; Piplex, a manufacturing plant, for six years before that. It just didn’t feel right. Meisener did not strike me as the kind of man to stay in one place for eleven years. For all his competence and outward cheer, he struck me as a person who would one day simply not show up for work. Rootless. But he said he was married, with children.

I went back to the biographical information: Sarah Meisener, a chemist with a local government lab. Number listed. I called Magyar at Hedon Road and left a message. “When you get off the phone to Sarajevo, try calling Sarah Meisener.” I gave her the number, and went back to the list.

I finished my tea and was debating between soup and toast when Magyar came back. “I wasn’t talking to Sarajevo,” she said. She looked pleased with herself. “It was Athens. Meisener’s ex-supervisor. ‘I didn’t think he would be working anymore,’ he said when I told him we were thinking of promoting Meisener to shift supervisor. ‘Is his heart better now, then?’ ‘Heart?’ I said, ‘are we talking about the same Meisener?’ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘built like a bull, doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with him.’ ‘A bull,’ I said, ‘yes, indeed.’ Apparently he was retired early.

“Planned to go to Israel. The supervisor in Athens is making sure I get the full record. ‘Old Nathan deserves every chance.’ Best buddies, it seems.” She grinned. “Would you call that bandy-legged little man a bull?”

“No.”

“No. I think we’ve got him.”

I wasn’t so sure. He could have just assumed an ID, the way I had. But I had been aiming for the long term, for something that would stand up for years, forever, if necessary. It could have happened. If I hadn’t met Magyar, if she hadn’t made me take a good look at myself, I could have been trapped at Hedon Road, as a drudge, for the rest of my life. My bones felt as though they were shrinking; the thought was appalling. Meisener, though, would only have been working for the short term. Four or five weeks. You got paid? Kinnis had asked. Nah. Timed it all wrong. But he had timed it perfectly: employers often did not check too rigorously until money had changed hands. Which meant that maybe Meisener, or whoever he was, had taken a shortcut. “Did you try his wife?”

Magyar snorted. “At four in the morning? What would I say: Did Nathan get home all right?”

“Just call, and hang up. Tell me what you get.”

I decided on toast. Easier to eat at the screen. The smell of scorching bread reminded me of being five, the sun hot on the courtyard stones in Amsterdam, Tok shouting, How do you know it’s clean? How did anyone ever know anything was clean? I was no longer hungry, but I forced myself to eat one of the slices, with a thin spread of baba ghanouj. I wondered what Lucas Chen was doing, if he felt clean.

The screen signaled that Magyar was calling. Her face was smooth; she was not happy. “She answered on the first ring. A cool blonde. Young. And the video pickup was fuzzed around the edges.”

“Did you say anything?”

Names on the Platinum list—people who gave more than seventy thousand a year, There, near the end of the list was G. van de Oest.

Wind whistling along the sand outside the tent. Marley nodding seriously. “Greta is a much more powerful force in this company than most people realize. Your future might be smoother if you bore that in mind. ”

And Tok, years earlier, telling me: “It was just getting interesting when Greta came on the net and kicked me out… she cut me out of those files clean as a whistle.”