The Third Claw of God (21 page)

I may be an unsympathetic bitch, much of the time, but I’m still capable of being moved. “If it’s within my power, I’ll make it happen.”

She did not thank me for the promise yet to be fulfilled. She just nodded and went back to her seat, content to wait for the next of the revelations she had to witness.

Skye, who had watched the exchange without comment, now turned to me. “Who next? Philip? We have some hard questions to ask him right now.”

“No, not yet. I’ll want a little more ammunition before I go after that one.”

“Dejah? Given her prior antipathy toward the Bettelhines, her presence here raises the most questions.”

“I think not.”

“Jason and Jelaine?”

“No,” I said. “I think we’ll hold on to them for a little while, yet.”

“Who, then?”

I bit my lip, considering. And then said, “Mendez.”

10

We did not have to send for him. Oscin, who was still outside with the others, knew we needed Mendez the instant Skye did. This time, as per the head steward’s lowly status in the scheme of things, Philip raised no tiresome fuss about including Bettelhine Family counsel in the discussion. Mendez entered alone, his head a little bowed and his lips a little pursed, but his deferential, formal manner otherwise undisturbed by our mutual encounter with violent death. Had he been affected at all by the bloody turn our journey had taken, it manifested only as the thin layer of perspiration turning his forehead into yet another reflective surface, glowing in the presence of Bettelhine riches. He came in, sealed the door after him, then made his way to the place Dina Pearlman had just vacated, all without urgency, trepidation, or any sense that his mission here might entail more than serving drinks or wiping up spills. He stood beside the ottoman, declining to sit. “Counselor. How may I help you?”

“You can begin by taking a seat.”

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m on duty, and I fear I’d find it improper. Indeed,” he said, his voice rising a decibel or two as he directed withering criticism toward Paakth-Doy, who had been sitting all along, “it is improper forher as well.”

Paakth-Doy turned red and began to stand.

I snapped, “Sit your ass down, Doy!”

Caught in the very act of rising, Paakth-Doy froze. There was no way of determining the specific arguments raised in the resulting internal debate, but gravity may been the tie-breaker. She collapsed back in her seat, wearing the special misery of any human being caught between competing faux pas. I kept my voice steady. “Tonight’s etiquette violations include murder, sir. With that on that table I could not care less about who stands, who sits, and who uses the wrong goddamned fork while eating their goddamned pretentious inedible entrée. Tonight, Paakth-Doy’s working for me, and tonight she’ll sit if she’s fucking comfortable that way, or if I fucking want her to sit. Is that clear?”

Mendez didn’t show even the slightest sign of anger, behind his placid, butlerian exterior. “Whatever Counselor wishes. Am I to sit as well?”

“No, you may do whatever makes you most comfortable.”

“Then I’ll stand.”

“All right.” A second passed before I damned myself for my shortsightedness in giving him a choice. Now, for as long as I remained seated myself, I’d have to spend the entire interview looking up at him. Suppressing a sigh, I rose, cracked my spine, paced a half dozen steps away and turned to face him across a level playing field. The most difficult part was ignoring the gentle grin on Skye’s face.

“Mr. Mendez, your primary purpose here is to provide a timeline. But I’d like to know a little bit about you first.”

“Is that necessary?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I must confess I wonder why.”

It wasn’t the first time in my experience that a suspect in a major crime had objected to personal questions, or even the first time a witness had expressed confusion over their relevance. But that had usually been a sign I was striking too close to home. This may have been the first time, ever, that one had questioned the relevance of a basic profile. I stared at him for a moment, expecting insolence, but found none: just a bland, academic curiosity. “I find it helpful to develop a general sense of the person first. Why? Do you think it impinges on your privacy?”

“No, Counselor. I recognize the importance of what you’re doing. I just don’t know why anything in my life would be considered of special interest.”

Meaning that it very well could be. “Well, we’ll just let me be the judge of that. How old are you, sir?”

“Forty-seven, Mercantile Standard.”

“Have you lived on Xana all your life?”

“No. I came here as a young adult.”

“From where?”

“I was born on a planet named Greeve, and lived there until I was seven.”

“Greeve?” I had never heard of the place.

“Yes, Counselor.” He spelled it for me.

It still rang no bells, which was far from unusual, given the number of worlds that maintained a human presence, large or small. “Is it part of the Confederacy?”

“Yes,” he said, betraying some amusement for the first time. “If only just.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s no jewel in the crown. It has a tiny population, no industry, no exports to speak of, no corporate debt, and a lifestyle so simple that the local economy is only a few steps removed from barter. It’s signed with the Confederacy, but contributes almost nothing to it except for its name on the registry, and takes nothing in return except for occasional imported staples, which are considered relief. I’m certain that you’ve heard of places that aren’t even dots on the map? Greeve is a dot compared to even those places.”

I’ve been to worlds that fit that description. A number were dysfunctional hellholes, inhabited only because the people there were too stubborn or too mean to just pack up and let the hostile local conditions win. The few who left formed a large percentage of the indentured population in the Dip Corps. But he hadn’t said the name with the revulsion I’d heard from so many refugees. “What’s it like?”

A slight smile pulled at his lips. “Something like ninety-nine percent ocean. The seas are deep enough to submerge almost all the land to an average depth of about seven kilometers. There’s a small spaceport carved into the northern ice cap, but the bulk of the human population, a grand total of some seven thousand people the last time I checked, lives on a chain of some three hundred tropical islands. There are only two islands big enough to support populations of more than five hundred. The rest of the people live in island villages or on houseboats.”

It sounded horrid to me but, then, I’d spent most of my life in enclosed orbital environments and had never been able to reclaim my childhood appreciation for natural ecosystems. “Would you call it a pleasant place?”

“It’s a paradise if you like sun, sand, friendly people, and gentle ocean breezes.”

“You didn’t?”

“I was a child.”

“You liked it.”

A tinge of regret shone through this rock-rigid demeanor. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

“But you left when you were seven.”

“My parents thought they could do better.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, as if even that much personal information was too much to impart. “Our island, Needlefish, was home to two extended families with a total population of about forty people. We saw the same faces every day and faced the same challenges every day. If my parents wanted a big night out they had to make their way to another island, about twenty kilometers north, where she had cousins and my father had old school friends. Maybe once or twice a year, on the only island in our region large enough to accommodate it, there were socials, where the residents of some eighty villages got together to catch up on old gossip and introduce the young people to potential spouses farther removed than first and second cousins. But that’s about as exciting as our lives ever got. It wasn’t that there was no money. Nobody on Greeve ever needed any money. But my parents felt that lives had gotten to be a little…I suppose you would say, arid. When I was six they arranged passage on the next freighter offworld.”

“Which happened when you were seven.”

“Yes. Ships only came to Greeve when asked to.”

I wondered how many places like that remained in the Confederacy: worlds of little interest to anybody except those who lived there, whether they wanted off or preferred to stay for the rest of their lives.

“Where were you headed?”

“I don’t remember. Wherever it was, we never got there. The ship suffered some kind of disaster between systems. My parents, my sister, and some two-thirds of the vessel’s complement never came out of bluegel alive.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Paakth-Doy told him.

“As am I,” said Skye.

He gave them a slight nod. “Thank you.”

I asked, “How did you survive?”

“I don’t know,” he said, with the terseness of a man who had long ago decided that the precise details had no further relevance for him. “I was revived, alongside the remaining survivors, aboard a Tchi transport that answered the distress beacon. I wanted to go back to Greeve, where I still had friends and relatives, but I had no money and no documentation, and neither the Tchi nor the Dip Corps were willing to pay for my passage back to a place where there were no scheduled transports. So I became a ward of the Dip Corps and found myself spending the rest of my childhood in a Confederate vocational school, being trained in hospitality.”

I’d been a ward of the Dip Corps too. Had I not been a dangerous anomaly under close observation until the day my keepers decided that my intelligence merited higher education, would I have also received training only for the most menial positions available? Feeling somewhat more sympathy for the man now than I’d managed at the beginning, I pressed on. “And were the Bettelhines your first employers?”

“No. I spent my late teens and early twenties working in-system cruises, in and around the Lesothic wheelworlds. But I sent resumes to the company for years.”

“Why?”

“Xana has some luxury resorts famous in the industry. Some are in the subtropics. I hoped to work at one.”

“Because that was the kind of environment you’d left on Greeve.”

“Not quite,” he said, with a knowing smile that poked fun at my naïveté. “Greeve evolved; Xana was engineered. Greeve has species like the tube-tree, the flopfish, and the glowswarm, and delicacies like cosweed wine. Xana’s ecosystem has none of those things. The places even possess different smells. I would never mistake one for the other, even with my eyes closed. But Xana’s tropics have cool ocean water, a warm sun, and beaches to walk on. It may not be Greeve, but it’s not bad.”

I asked him, “Why didn’t you ever just go back to Greeve?”

He stared straight ahead and answered in a voice that betrayed none of what must have been years of frustration and regret. “It’s not like there was ever direct passage to such an obscure place, from any of the hubs where I worked. I would have had to zigzag across systems, bankrupting myself for each leg of my journey, then once again earn enough for the next hop until I reached a place where I could wait for a freighter that happened to be heading where I wanted to go. And even then I would have had to earn my passage again, and wait a long time for a berth to be available. There were times when it seemed remotely possible. But most of the time, it was out of the question.”

“But you did manage to find a position on Xana.”

He gave a slight nod. “Eventually, yes.”

“Did it pay well?”

“Yes.”

“What about your off hours? Was it like being on Greeve?”

“There was no way to return to Greeve so I made do.”

“Were you happy?”

“I had friends. Women. The prospect of family. A place as close to home as I was ever likely to know.”

He described the heartaches of his life with about as much emotion as I would have devoted to listing the contents of my spartan quarters back on New London, a place that for most of my life had been less home than clean place to sleep.

I realized that Skye was studying me. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the sheer length of time I had devoted to the background of this one minor figure, who had not been upstairs with us during the emergency stop and could not have been the culprit responsible for the murder of the Khaajiir. Maybe she thought I’d gotten lost in the minutiae of a life with some sad parallels to my own. Or maybe she sensed what I sensed about this story that seemed no more than a digression: the ghost of a question larger than any of the answers Mendez had provided so far.

I didn’t know what was nagging at me. The man’s situation was far from unusual, after all. Even before we’d left the homeworld, Mankind’s history had always been a long parade of expats and refugees, people who through no fault of their own had become trapped on strange shores and who were forced to make do while keeping an eye on the distant, possibly mythical, pleasures of the homes they’d lost. Hell, if you wanted to go that far, I was one of them. The few tidbits the Porrinyards had fed me about their past as individuals marked them as two others.

But there was something else going on with Mendez. Something that verged on the monstrous. I found myself pacing furiously, my arms crossed before me, my thoughts racing so fast that they almost drowned out the pounding of my heart. “How did you wind up as head steward of the Royal Carriage?

That strikes me as a pretty plum position around here.”

The further we got from his tales of Greeve, the more he seemed to relax. “About fourteen years ago I served two months as personal valet to Mr. Conrad Bettelhine, youngest brother of Kurt, when he spent an extended vacation at one of the resorts where I worked. He was a lonely man who required little of me beyond conversation and companionship. But he was touched by my story, and offered to bring me aboard as junior steward. When the senior retired, I moved up.”

“What’s your work schedule like?”

“I live aboard the carriage, year-round, serving between five and ten complements of passengers per month.”

“How much time off do you get?”