China Mieville - Perdido Street Station

He had run off a set of heliotypes of her most recent batch of work, hawked them around the city. It was a regular process, as he attempted to establish a reputation among the artists and patrons of New Crobuzon. Gazid was a pathetic figure forever reminding anyone who would listen of the one successful show he had arranged for a now-dead aether sculptress thirteen years previously. Lin and most of her friends viewed him with pity and contempt. Everyone she knew let him take his heliotypes and slipped him a few shekels or a noble, “an advance on his agent’s fee.” Then he would disappear for a few weeks, to emerge again with puke on his trousers and blood on his shoes, buzzing on some new drug, and the process would begin again.

Only not this time.

Gazid had found Lin a buyer.

When he had sidled up to her in The Clock and Cockerel she had protested. It was someone else’s turn, she had scribbled on her pad, she had “advanced” him a whole guinea only a week or so ago; but Gazid had interrupted her and insisted she retreat from the table with him. And as her friends, the artistic elite of Salacus Fields, laughed and cheered them on, Gazid had handed her a stiff white card stamped with a simple crest of a three-by-three chessboard. On it was a short printed note.

Ms. Lin, it said. My employer was most impressed with the examples of your work your agent showed him. He wonders whether you might be interested in meeting him to discuss a possible commission. We look forward to hearing from you. The signature was illegible.

Gazid was a wreck and an addict of most things going, who could not help going to any lengths to secure money for drugs; but this was not like any scam that Lin could imagine. There was no angle for him, unless there was indeed someone wealthy in New Crobuzon prepared to pay for her work, giving him a cut.

She had dragged him out of the bar, to catcalls and whoops and consternation, and had demanded to know what was going on. Gazid was circumspect at first, and seemed to rack his brains to think of what lies to spout. He realized quite quickly that he needed to tell her the truth.

“There’s a guy I buy some stuff from occasionally…” he started shiftily. “Anyway, I had the prints of your statues lying around…uh…on the shelf when he came round, and he loved them and wanted to take a couple away, and…uh…I said ‘yeah.’ And then a while later he told me that he showed them to the guy who supplies him with the stuff I sometimes buy, and that guy liked them, and took them away, and showed them to his boss, and then they got to the kind of top man, who’s huge into art-bought some of Alexandrine’s stuff last year-and he liked them and wants you to do a piece for him.”

Lin translated the evasive language.

Your drug dealer’s boss wants me to work for him??? she scrawled.

“Oh shit, Lin, it’s not like that…I mean, yeah, but…” Gazid paused. “Well, yeah,” he finished lamely. There was a pause. “Only…only…he wants to meet you. If you’re interested he has to actually meet you.”

Lin pondered.

It was certainly an exciting prospect. Judging by the card, this was not some minor hustler: this was a big player. Lin was not stupid. She knew that this would be dangerous. She was excited, she could not help it. It would be such an event in her art-life. She could drop hints about it. She could have a criminal patron. She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

And while she was deciding that she didn’t care, Gazid named the kinds of sums the mysterious buyer was quoting. Lin’s headlegs flexed in astonishment.

I have to talk to Alexandrine, she wrote, and went back inside.

Alex knew nothing. She milked the kudos of having sold canvases to a crime boss for what she could, but she had only ever met an at-best middle-ranking messenger, who had offered her enormous sums for two paintings that she had just finished. She had accepted, handed them over, and never heard anything again.

That was it. She had never even known the name of her buyer.

Lin decided that she could do better than that.

She had sent a message through Gazid, down the illicit conduit of communication that led fuck-knew-where, saying that yes, she was interested, and would be prepared to meet, but she really must have a name to write in her diary.

The New Crobuzon underworld digested her message, and made her wait a week, and then spat back an answer in the shape of another printed note, pushed under her door while she slept, giving her an address in Bonetown, a date, and a one-word name: Motley.

A frenetic snapping and clatter sifted into the corridor. Lin’s cactacae escort pushed open one dark door among the many, and stood aside.

Lin’s eyes adjusted to the light. She was looking into a typing pool. It was a large room with a high ceiling, painted black like everything in this troglodytic place, well-lit with gaslamps, and filled with perhaps forty desks; on each was a bulky typewriter, at each a secretary copying from reams of notes by their sides. Mostly human and mostly women, Lin also caught smell and sight of men and cactacae, even a pair of khepri, and a vodyanoi working at a typewriter with keys adapted for her huge hands.

Around the room Remade were stationed, mostly human, again, but of other races too, rare as xenian Remade were. Some were organically Remade, with claws and antlers and slabs of grafted muscle, but most were mech, and the heat from their boilers made the room close.

At the end of the room was a closed office.

“Ms. Lin, finally,” boomed a speaking-trumpet above its door as soon as she entered. None of the secretaries looked up. “Please make your way across the room to my office.”

Lin picked her way between the desks. She looked closely at what was being typed, hard though it was, and harder in the odd light of the black-walled room. The secretaries all typed expertly, reading the scribbled notes and transferring them without looking at their keyboards or their work.

Further to our conversation of the thirteenth of this month, read one, please consider your franchise operation under our jurisdiction, terms to be arranged. Lin moved on.

You die tomorrow, you fuck, you wormshit. You’re going to envy the Remade, you cowardly cunt, you’re going to scream till your mouth bleeds, said the next.

Oh… thought Lin. Oh…help.

The door to the office opened.

“Come in, Ms. Lin, come in!” The voice boomed from the trumpet.

Lin did not hesitate. She entered.

Filing cabinets and bookshelves filled most of the small room. There was a small, traditional oil painting of Iron Bay on one wall. Behind a large darkwood desk was a folding screen illustrated with silhouettes of fish, a large version of the screens behind which artists’ models changed. In the centre of the screen, one fish was rendered in mirrored glass, giving Lin a view of herself. Lin hovered uncertainly in front of the screen.

“Sit, sit,” said a quiet voice from behind it. Lin pulled up the chair in front of the desk.

“I can see you, Ms. Lin. The mirrored carp is a window on my side. I think it’s polite to let people know that.”

The speaker seemed to expect a response, so Lin nodded.

“You’re late, you know, Ms. Lin.”

Devil’s Tail! Of all the appointments to be late to! Lin thought frantically. She began to scribble an apology on her pad when the voice interrupted her.

“I can sign, Ms. Lin.”

Lin put down her pad and apologized profusely with her hands.