City of Stairs

Chapter 10

Another wintry morning. As Shara opens the embassy front door the courtyard guard, up to his nose in furs, turns and says, “He’s at the front gate. We didn’t let him in, because …”

“I understand,” says Shara. She crosses the embassy courtyard. The trees bow with what looks like layers of black glass; the embassy’s numerous corrosions and cracks are filled with pearly white, as if given fresh spackling overnight. The mug of coffee in her hand leaves a river of steam behind like a ship leaves bubbles in its wake. She reflects that it feels so much different in the day, clean and cold and glittering, than it did the night before, when Wiclov bayed through the bars like a guard dog.

The gates rattle open. The boy stands in the embassy drive holding a silver plate aloft. He is dressed in what she recognizes as manservant clothing, but it seems he has walked some way: his upper lip is frosted with icy snot. If he were not shivering so fiercely, the expression he makes at her could almost be a smile. “Ambassador Thivani?”

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I … have a m-message for you.” He holds the silver plate out to her. In its center is a small white card.

Shara fumbles at it with her cold hands and squints to read.

Shara crushes the card. “Thank you,” she says, and tosses it away. Of all the luck, she thinks. The one thing to break is the one thing I told Vinya I wouldn’t look at.

“Pardon, miss,” says the boy. “I hate to interrupt, but … c-can I go?”

Shara glowers at him for a moment, then shoves the cup of coffee into his hand. “Here. This’ll do you more good than it will me.”

The boy trudges away. Shara turns and swiftly paces back to the embassy front door.

A child begins crying in the street beyond the embassy. A snowball fight has taken a bad turn: one salvo contained an excessive quotient of ice, and the sidewalks fill up with pointed fingers and the persistent cries of Not fair, not fair!

Upon the opening of the door, the interior of the Ghoshtok-Solda Dinner Club appears to be a solid wall of smoke. Shara is perplexed by this sight, but the attendants do not seem to notice: they gesture as if this dense block of fog is a perfectly welcoming sight. The outside wind comes sweeping through, turning the smoke to swirling striae and slashing it thin, and Shara can just barely see the wink of candlelight, the sheen of greasy forks, and faces of laughing men.

Then the overwhelming reek of tobacco hits her, and she is almost blown backward.

As she enters, her eyes begin to adjust. The smoke is not quite so thick as she initially imagined, yet the ceiling remains all but invisible: chandeliers and lamps seem to be suspended from the heavens. The desk attendant looks at her—surprised, slightly outraged—and requests a name, as if he could not expect a Saypuri to provide anything more. “Votrov,” says Shara. The man nods stiffly—I should have known—and extends a sweeping arm.

Shara is led through a labyrinth of booths and private rooms and bars, each stuffed with men in suits and robes, all gleaming gray teeth and gleaming bald heads and gleaming black boots. Cigar ashes dance in the fug like red-orange fireflies. It’s as if the whole place is smeared over with oil and smoke, and she can feel the smoke snuffling bemusedly at the hem of her skirt, wondering, What is this? What alien creature has infiltrated this place? What could this be?

Some tables go silent as she passes. Bald heads poke out of booths and watch her. I am, of course, a double offense, she thinks as she maintains her composure. A woman, and a Saypuri …

A twitch of a velvet curtain, and a grand backroom is revealed. At the head of a table the size of a river barge sits Vohannes, half-hidden behind a tent of newspaper and slouched in a cushioned chair with his light brown (but muddy) boots propped up on the table. Behind him, in very comfortable-looking chairs, sit his Saypuri bodyguards; one looks up, and waves and shrugs apologetically: This wasn’t our idea. Vohannes’s tent of newspaper deflates slightly; Shara spots a bright blue eye peeking over the top; then the tent collapses.

Vohannes springs up as quickly as his hip allows, and bows. “Miss Thivani!”

He would make an excellent dance hall emcee. “It’s been less than two days,” she says. “There’s hardly need for such ceremony.”

“Oh, but there’s plenty of need for ceremony! Especially when one is meeting … How does the saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my …”

“What are you talking about, Vo? Do you have what I asked you to get?”

“Oh, I have it. And what a joy it was to get. But first …” Vohannes claps twice. His gloves—white, velvet—bear smudges from the newsprint. “Oh, sir—if you could, please fetch us two bottles of white plum wine, and a tray of snails.”

The attendant bows like a spring toy. “Certainly.”

“Snails?” says Shara.

“Are you fine gentlemen”—Vohannes turns to the Saypuri guards—“in need of any refreshments?”

One opens his mouth to respond, glances at Shara, rethinks his answer, and shakes his head.

“As you wish. Please.” Vohannes gestures to the chair next to him with a flourish. “Sit. So glad you could make it. You must be terribly busy.”

“You have picked an interesting venue for our meeting. I believe a leper would have received a more cordial welcome.”

“Well, I figured that if I meet you at your place of work, you might as well meet me at mine.… For though this place may look like a lecherous din of old fogies, Miss Thivani, I guarantee you, here is where Bulikovian commerce lives and dies. If one could see all the flow of finance, envisioning it as a golden river hanging above our heads, here—right here, among all this smoke and all the crass jokes, all the boiled beef and bald heads—would be where it forms its densest, most impenetrable, most inextricable knot. I invite you to look and reflect upon the rickety, shit-spattered ship that carries Bulikov’s commerce forward into the seas of prosperity.”

“I get the strangest sense,” says Shara, “that you do not enjoy working here.…”

“I have no choice,” says Vohannes. “It is what it is. And though it may look like one building, it’s actually several. Any house in Bulikov is a house divided, and this house is cut to ribbons, my battle-ax. Each booth could be color-coded for its party allegiances. You could draw lines on the floor—if the warped floorboards would allow it—highlighting barriers some club members would never dare cross. But recently, this club—like Bulikov—is beginning to align itself around two main groups. My group, and, well …”

He slaps his paper in her lap. A smallish article has been circled: WICLOV TAKES STAND AGAINST EMBASSY.

“You’ve been accumulating some ink, my dear,” says Vohannes. Shara eyes the article. “Yes,” she says. “I have been notified of this. What do you care about it?”

“Well, I have been ruminating on ways I could help you.”

“Oh, dear.”

“And I can help you quite a lot with Wiclov.”

A waiter materializes out of the smog with a bottle of white plum wine. He proffers the bottle to Vohannes; Vohannes glances at the label, nods, and lazily extends a hand, which is promptly filled with a brimming crystal glass. The waiter looks doubtfully between them, as if to say, And do you really want me to serve her, as well? Vohannes nods angrily, and the waiter, exasperated, gives Shara a perfunctory version of the same ceremony.

“Cheeky shit,” says Vohannes as the waiter leaves. “Do you get a lot of that sort of thing?”

“What are you proposing, Vo?”

“What I am proposing is that I can get you somewhere on Wiclov. And I would do this out of the godly goodness of my own heart … provided you also bury that fat bastard.”

Shara sips her wine, but does nothing more. She sees there is a suitcase sitting beside Vohannes, as white and velvet and ridiculous as his gloves. By the seas. Have I honestly enlisted a clown as an operative? But, she notes, there’s a second suitcase on his opposite side. Were the contents of the safety deposit box that extensive?

“How would you get us somewhere on Wiclov?”

“Well, that’s the tricky bit.… I’m not the sort for sneaky, underhanded political machinations, despite what is happening, ah, right now. My style is much more”—he twirls a slender finger, thinking—“grand idealist. I win support specifically because I don’t dirty myself.”

“But now you are willing to do so.”

“If that fly-ridden turd of a human being is genuinely, really connected to the people who attacked us, who killed Pangyui, it would not grieve my heart excessively to see him removed from the political theater, no. But while I can’t plant the dagger in his back, perhaps I could pass the dagger along to someone more talented in its use.” The waiter pounces back out of the reeking mist with a large, flat stone covered in small holes. The stone swims with butter, and the holes appear to be stuffed with tiny beige buttons.

“What are you saying, Vo?” she asks again.

Vohannes sniffs and picks up a fork the size of a needle. “I have a friend in Wiclov’s trading house. That’s how he made himself, you know—Wiclov is one of the few old-guard icons to actually dabble in trade. Made his living with potatoes. Seems appropriate for him, somehow. Something that grows in the mud, away from the sun …” He spears a snail, pops it in his mouth, grunts, and says around it, “Haat. Mm.” He maneuvers the little ball of flesh onto his teeth, breathes, and swallows. “Very hot. Anyways. I have convinced this contact within Wiclov’s trading house to pass along all investments and purchases Wiclov has made in the past year.” He smiles triumphantly and taps the second suitcase beside his chair. “I am sure there is something very rotten going on under his robes, let’s say. Probably nothing smutty, unfortunately—once a Kolkashtani, always a Kolkashtani, and Wiclov is about as Kolkashtani as they get—but something. And I would love for you to find out.”

Shara cuts to the point: “Is he funding the Restorationists?”

“I’ve taken a glance at the pages, and I admit that I haven’t seen that, unfortunately. Though there is some oddness that stands out.”

“Like what?”

“Like the loomworks.”

“Like … Wait, the what?”

“Loomworks,” says Vohannes again. “Wiclov has bought, outright bought, three loomworks around the city. You know, the big weaving factories they use to make rugs?”

“I understand the general idea.…”

“Yes. He’s bought them. Not cheap, either—and he hasn’t changed the names.”

“So you think he doesn’t want anyone to know,” says Shara.

“Yes. But there must be something else in all his history. I just can’t see it. But then, I don’t have a massive intelligence agency behind me.”

She considers it. “Did he buy these loomworks after the month of Tuva?”

“Ah … Well, I can’t recall off the top of my head with complete accuracy, but I suppose so.”

Interesting, she thinks. “How good is your source?”

“Quite good.”

“Yes, but how good?”

Vohannes hesitates. “I know him very personally,” he says slowly. “That should be enough for you.”

Shara almost asks further, but then she understands. She coughs uncomfortably and says, “I see.” She watches him take another sip of wine. He is sweating, and pale; suddenly he seems wrinkled and soft, as delicate as finely made linen. “Listen, Vo. I … I am going to do something I don’t often do for willing sources.”

“What’s that?”

“I am going to give you the chance to reconsider.”

“You what?”

“I am going to give you the opportunity to rethink what you’re doing here,” says Shara. “Because if you offer me those papers again, I will use them. It would be unprofessional of me not to. And when someone asks where I got them from—and they will ask—then I will have to tell them. I can’t predict what will happen, but once this is all played out, there is a chance that, in the future, in some very public, very accessible forum in Saypur, someone will testify that Vohannes Votrov, City Father of Bulikov, provided valuable material to the government of Saypur with the full understanding that another City Father would be damned by it. And a thing like that … It has repercussions.”

Vohannes watches a candle flame waltz on its taper.

“I’ve seen it before,” says Shara. “I’ve lost sources this way before. I use people, Vo. That’s what I do now. It is not pretty. It has many consequences. And … And if you offer me this material again, I will take it, because I’d have to. But I want you to really think about what could happen to you if you hand over that suitcase.”

Vohannes fixes his bright blue eyes on her. They must still be, she imagines, the same blue as when he was an infant.

“Come work for me,” he says suddenly.

“What?”

“You seem unhappy where you are.” He stabs a snail and blows on it. Droplets of butter rain on the tablecloth. “Come work for me. It’d be a change of pace. We’re not the old guard. None of my companies are. We’re doing big new things. And also I can pay you perfectly despicable amounts of money.”

Shara stares at him, disbelieving, and laughs. “You’re not serious.”

“I am gravely serious. Serious as death itself.”

“I am … I am not going to work for you, Vo.”

“Then hells, take over.” He glugs wine, eats another snail. “It’s all just a headache for me. Run my businesses. Direct my money. I’ll just sit around, getting elected and, I don’t know, sitting on parade floats or some such.”

Shara puts her face in her hands, laughing.

“What are you laughing about?” He gallantly tries to keep sounding serious, but his smile betrays him. “What. I’m serious here. Come be with me.” The smile fades. “Come live with me.”

Shara stops laughing. She winces, groans. “Oh, Vo. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you have to say that?”

“I meant … Oh, come now, I meant live in Bulikov.”

“It didn’t sound like it. And … And that’s exactly what you asked me when you graduated.”

Vohannes, sheepish, looks at the Saypuri guards. “Could you, ah, gentlemen please excuse us for a moment?”

The guards shrug and take up stations outside the backroom door.

“That … Shara, that obviously is not what I meant,” says Vohannes. He laughs desperately.

“Is this why you invited me here? For fine dining and propositions?”

“This is not fine dining. I can only taste tobacco, for the gods’ sakes.…”

Silence. A throaty laugh from the next room contorts into emphysematous coughing.

“Bringing me back won’t make us happy,” says Shara.

Vohannes, stung, sits back in his chair and stares into his glass.

“I’m not who I was,” she says, “and you aren’t who you were.”

“Why must everything be so awkward,” he says, sulky.

“You’re engaged.”

“Oh, yes, engaged.” He raises his hands, drops them: And what does that mean? “We’re a very merry couple. We carouse a lot. Make the papers.”

“But you don’t love her?”

“Some people need love in their lives. Others, not so much. It’s like buying a house: ‘Do you want a central fireplace? Do you want windows in your bedroom? Do you want love?’ It’s not part of my necessary package.”

“I don’t think that’s true of you.”

“Well, it’s not like I have a choice,” he snarls. “Have … Have you seen those men in the booths when you walked in? Can you imagine what they would …?” Again, he fights for composure. “I’m dirtier than you know, Shara.”

“You don’t know dirty.”

“You don’t know me.” He stares at her. His cheeks tremble. One tear quivers at the inner corner of his right eye. “I can give you Wiclov. He deserves it. Take him. Take him and burn him.”

“I’m sad to see you so happy to persecute Kolkashtanis.”

He laughs blackly. “Don’t they deserve it? I mean, my own damn family … You want to talk about persecution, why don’t you talk to the people who did so with zeal for hundreds of years, even without their damn”—he glances around, lowers his voice—“god?”

“Aren’t they still your people, the very ones you want to help? Do you really want to reform Bulikov, Vo, or burn it to the ground?”

Vohannes is so struck by this he cannot speak for a moment.

“Your family was Kolkashtani?” asks Shara quietly.

He nods.

“You never told me.”

His skin grows pale and papery again. His brow wrinkles as he considers it. “No,” he says. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t feel like I needed to—most of Bulikov was Kolkashtani back then. Still is. Lots of the Continent still is. They got used, I suppose, to living without a Divinity. After the Kaj and the War, the transition was just so much easier for Kolkashtanis than anyone else.…” He pours off the rest of one bottle of wine, one of his rings making a chipper tink tink tink as he taps out the last drops. “My father was a rich Kolkashtani, so that was even worse. To most Kolkashtanis, you show up to the world with plenty to be ashamed of—born in shame—but to the rich ones, you show up poor, too. Just one more thing to be ashamed of, y’see. Strict man. If we did anything wrong, we had to go and cut a switch”—he extends his index—“the size of our finger for him to beat us with. If we picked one too small, then he got to choose for us. And though he was a stingy man in life, he was never so stingy with his switches.…” A glug of wine. “My brother loved him. They loved each other, I suppose I should say. Maybe it was just because Volka was older—father always had a grudge against children for having the insolence to not act like reasonable adults. And when my father died, my brother never forgave … Well. Everything. The world. Saypur, especially—since we Continentals assumed the Plague was a Saypuri invention. Turned into something like a monk, he joined up with a group of pilgrims when he was fifteen and went on a trek to the icy north to try and find some damn temple. Left me with a bunch of nannies and servants when I was nine years old. And Volka never came back. I got news years later that the whole bunch of them died. Froze to death. Expecting a miracle”—Vohannes lifts his wineglass to his lips—“that never came. Maybe I want to ruin Wiclov, sure. Perhaps he’s an obstacle to the future of the Continent—for I don’t see him ever wishing to see a bright new future, but rather the dead, dull, dusty past. Either way, I wouldn’t shed a tear to see him go.”

Shara shuts her eyes. How easily, she thinks, my corruption spreads. “If you offer me it again, I’ll have to take it.”

“Do it, Shara. If this is what you do for a living, I’d love to see you do it to him.”

Shara opens her eyes. “Fine. I will. I presume the contents of the safety deposit box are in the other suitcase?”

“You presume correctly.” He picks it up, slams it down on the table, and starts to open it.

“No, no,” says Shara. “Don’t.”

“What? Why?”

“I … made an unfortunate promise.” And Aunt Vinya remembers what promises are made to her … and which ones are broken. She wonders if she is willing to disobey her aunt and crack the suitcase open. To do so, she feels, could bring hells shrieking down on her, especially after Vinya’s threat. A last resort, then, she thinks, wondering if this is how fools rationalize their poor choices. “If you can just give me the suitcase, the Ministry would be more than happy to reimburse you.”

“You want me to just give you the suitcase?” Vohannes is agog at the idea. “But this luggage is worth a fortune!”

“How much?”

“I don’t know.… I didn’t buy them. I have people for that.” He grumbles and inspects the suitcases. “It ought to be worth a fortune.…”

“Send us an invoice, and we’ll compensate you accordingly.” She slides one suitcase off the table. It is only mildly heavy. Paper? she thinks feverishly. Books? Some artifact? Then she takes the other suitcase from Vo. She stands, a suitcase in either hand, and feels quite absurd, like she is about to depart for a relaxing vacation at the beach.

“Why is it,” says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, “that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?”

“Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.”

Escaping the air of the club is like swimming up from the depths of the sea. I shall have to throw these clothes away, she thinks. The very fabric has been poisoned.…

“Oh,” says a voice. “Is it … Miss Thivani?”

Shara looks up, and her heart plummets. Sitting in the back of a long, expensive white car is Ivanya Restroyka, face as pale as snow, lips painted bright, bloody red. She looks somehow more colorless than when Shara saw her last, at Vohannes’s party. One curl of black hair escapes her fur hat to curl across her brow and behind her ear. Yet despite these carefully cultivated features, she stares at Shara with a look of unabashed shock.

“Oh,” says Shara. “Hello, Miss Restroyka.”

Ivanya’s dark eyes slide to the club door and dim with disappointment. “So. You were the one he was meeting tonight.”

“Yes.” Think quickly now. “He was making some business introductions for me.” Shara slowly walks to the car window. “He has a lot of business he wishes to drum up with Saypur. It was very good of him to do.” A good lie: serviceable, sound, maybe one-sixth true.

“At this club. The most old guard of any club in Bulikov.”

“I suppose, as they say, times are changing.”

Ivanya glances at the white suitcases and nods, obviously disbelieving. “You knew him once, didn’t you?”

Shara pauses. “Not really, no.”

“Mm. Might I ask you something of you, Miss Thivani?”

“Certainly.”

“Please … be careful with him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“For all his bravado, for all his bluster, he’s so much more fragile than you think.”

“What do you …?”

“Did he tell you he broke his hip falling down the stairs?” She shakes her head. “He was at a club. But not a club quite like this. It was a club where men went to meet men, I suppose you could say, but … there the similarities end.”

Shara feels her heart beat faster. I knew all this already. But why does it surprise me so?

“The police raided the club the night he was there,” says Ivanya. “Bulikov, as you probably know, has never really given up many of its Kolkashtani inclinations. Such … practices are terribly illegal. And they were quite brutal with the people they caught. He almost died. Hips are quite difficult things to fix, you see.” She smiles sadly. “But he never learns. That’s why he got into politics. He wanted to change things. It was, after all, Ernst Wiclov who ordered the raid.”

A flock of drunken men exit the club, laughing. Smoke clings to their collars in a lover’s embrace.

“Why are you with him?” asks Shara.

“Because I love him,” says Ivanya. She sighs sadly. “I love him, and I love what he is, and what he wants to do. And I wish to look out for him. I hope you want to do the same.”

Headlights splash over the long white car. Shara hears Pitry’s voice calling her name from the embassy car. The door of the club opens, and Vohannes emerges, his white fur coat gleaming in the light of the lampposts.

Ivanya smiles. “Farewell, Miss Thivani. I wish you a good evening.”

Shara still remembers the day: long ago, toward the end of the second semester of her second year at Fadhuri, when she was walking up his building’s stairs and Rooshni Sidthuri came rushing down them. She said hello, but Rooshni—mussed, sweating—said nothing back. And when she went into Vo’s room, and saw him sitting shirtless in his desk chair, feet up on the windowsill and hands behind his head, for some reason warning bells went off in her mind—for he only ever seemed to do that after making love.

As they talked—innocuously enough—she sidled over to the bed. Felt the sheets.

How damp they’d been, and in one spot—right where the hips and waist would be, were you to lie upon it—just positively drenched.

How young Rooshni had hurried, as if the building were burning down.…

She did not confront him then. But she began to watch. (This is what I’ve always been, she’d think, much later. Someone who does not intervene in her own life, but only watches, and works behind the scenes.) She watched how Vo seemed to spend so much time with young men, the way he embraced them. She watched the way he watched them, the way his posture grew more languid, relaxed around them.

Does he even know it? she wondered then. Do I?

And one day she could bear it no more, and she quietly walked into his apartments while he and—she cannot even remember the boy’s name now, Roy something or other—moved so slowly and so gently against one another in the very bed where Vo had whispered how much he loved her in her ear not more than two days before.

The look on their faces when she cleared her throat. The boy, hustling out the door. Vo, screaming in rage at her, while she stood silent.

He’d wanted her to scream back at him. She could tell. But she would not give him that. This was not a fight. She was not complicit in what he’d done. She could not imagine a purer betrayal.

The worst of it was how much the boy had looked like her. Shara had never and would never possess a particularly feminine form: she had, she thought, a boy’s body, all shoulders and no hips, and certainly no breasts. Was I just a substitute? she thought afterward. A way to fabricate forbidden love without ever doing anything forbidden? And if so, she was still inadequate, unable to capture the essence of the real thing.

He begged her to say something, to respond to him, to fight back. But she did not. She walked out of his apartment and, more or less, out of his life for the remainder of their school careers.

(She is still somewhat proud of this: how tranquil she was, how cold, how maintained. And yet she is also ashamed: Was she so shocked, so cowardly, so withdrawn that she could not even allow herself to shout at him?)

She threw herself into schoolwork, suddenly inflamed with a sense of patriotic discipline. He approached her after his graduation, months later, packed and ready for the train trip to the docks, and on to Bulikov. He begged her to come with him, begged her to help him be the man he so dearly wished to be. He tried to bribe her, spin a storybook lie, told her she could be a princess back in his home, if she wished. And Shara, all ice, all cold steel, had hurt him as best she could—What I think you truly want, my dear child, is a prince. But you can’t have such a thing at home, can you? They’d kill you for that—before she shut the door in his face.

One day you’ll know, her Auntie Vinya told her. And understand. You’ll figure yourself out. And things will be all right.

One of the few times, Shara often reflects, that Auntie Vinya was quite terribly and completely wrong.