The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - MARDONIOS, THEN SCYROS (part 3)

(Chapter 7, part 3)

The bus let us out near the bottom of Strato Paraidos, on the outskirts of the Green Quarter and well past the Mercanter Narrows. My new friend stayed on and waved goodbye as I ignored him. As with all these epistarch neighborhoods around the outskirts of the Green Quarter, it isn’t too busy and combines big residences with high-street shops—jewelers, perfumers, furriers, bootmakers, sandal makers, dressmakers, hairdressers, bladesmiths. If you know little about Miss Scyros’s business, a labor-broker seems out of place. But although she deals in contracts of the usual sort—agriculture and light-manufacturing types, general-purpose maids, and skivvies, her bread-and-butter is high-class pretty girls and cultured courtesans, drawn chiefly from select young women in desperate straits trying to dodge a humiliating public end to their citizenship; younger daughters or step-daughters who are a burden to better families; or those young women who failed to dodge desperate straits but have caught Miss Scyros’s discriminating eye.

She owns a private prison on Strato Paraidos. Half of it is a holding pen for indentures headed for either the Arkado of Skilled Hands or the Arkado of Labor, and they seldom stay longer than a day or two. Half of it is a school that turns out students who are very, very good indeed at one particular set of skills and pretty good at being useful and diverting otherwise. This lot ends up in the Arkado of Beauty and Charm, and they reside in her seraglio for two or three months until she’s shined them up to be worth something at auction.

I say private prison, and you may think stone fortress towers in a brooding wilderness, but it doesn’t look like that on the outside—pretty normal building, all painted ochre like much of Aulis, with windowless but otherwise normal walls, a door with a brass plate, a green wooden double door, carefully locked, for her transport van. Like most big houses, all the action faces the courtyards inside, and what goes on in there goes on unseen and unheard in the street, and I imagine that’s as close as any woman would care to come to it.

The doorplate said,

HOUSE OF SCYROS

Quality Girls

which should tell you enough. The engraved head of a woman in profile was beneath the words, eyes and chin lowered properly, and her hair done up in ringlets on the back of her neck.

“Miss, you are going to too many places that are unsafe,” Barsina said as I paused to let her take off her sandals and slip them into her girdle. I was busy scraping off some bit of rubbish off the bus from the sole of one of my own at the boot-scraper by the door.

“Nothing will happen,” I said. “I’m going to go in and see if Miss Scyros is willing to talk about this painting. I need to understand if it has any connection to the case, or if it’s just happenstance that the key was taken. If it is, it goes a ways to making it a random robbery.”

“Does Miss believe it’s a random robbery?”

“No,” I said shortly.

“Nor do I, Miss,” she said, and she squeezed my hand. She doesn’t like labor-brokers. I can’t stand them either, men or women.

But in we went.

They had chilled air in there, and you know how much that costs, electric fans blowing air over cold water and circulating it through the house. I can barely afford the electric fan on my desk. But it was a mercy after the hot street. The light was dimmed and pleasant, and it was like a bit of what-have-you, a salon, with elegant couches and chairs and a little desk with gilt scrolling and a terminal.

The Miss had a girl working there, all wrapped in a semitransparent coppery and bronze chiton wound tight around her breasts and behind her shoulders, leaving a lot of belly visible. Everything seemed to fade in a haze around the hems and the drapery down her back, and her collar was very polished brass, with a little red terminal at each end almost closed on her throat. She stepped away from the desk and was, of course, as barefoot as Barsina but clinked with bangles as she curtsied. She was absolutely perfect in every way and was plainly tank-bred with the highest ratings.

She looked speculatively at Barsina and then very sharply at me in a way that left me uncomfortable. “Miss,” she said after a too-long inspection. “How may I serve?”

“I’m Miss Dardana Fenek,” I said boldly and confidently and what have you. “I’m a private inspector on a serious case. An aspect of the case relates to artwork. I’ve heard your Miss is knowledgeable on such matters, and I wanted to ask if she could shed some light on a piece.”

Barsina produced my card and presented it to the girl, who gazed coolly at it, and at me again, then curtsied once more. “If Miss will wait,” she said, indicating one of the couches, and slipped away on feet as silent as a cat’s.

I sat gingerly on the silk damask cushions, feeling like a fairy princess testing for hidden peas and hoping that I had not put my bum in something awful on the bus. Barsina stood by anxiously, smoothing and tugging on her girdle-strings, and I realized that she (and I) probably looked like a skivvy compared to this bondgirl working the desk. The thought made me angry for some reason, I guess because I’m fond of Barsina and regard her more highly than I do anyone else in the world.

The girl came back, and curtsied silently, ushering me with both hands.

A short shadowy hall led directly into a big, frescoed office; windows swung open into the courtyard, and a big, busy terminal on the desk looked like it had all sorts of human misery on display.  There was some sort of big noisy bird in a cage out there calling in the courtyard and a fountain. There was a handwoven Penthesilian carpet on the marble floor. There were framed works on the walls of people in unfamiliar clothes and rooms, and in an alcove there was a stone bust of a sour-looking old man that I suspected was older than it looked.

Miss Scyros sat at the desk in a deep leather chair and looked at us with curiosity, tapping my card on her lacquered nails.  She indicated the opposite chair for me as I performed a rigid curtsey no deeper than absolutely necessary. The girl from the antechamber evaporated.

“Miss Fenek,” she said. “We’ve met. I recall you.”

“Yes, Miss Scyros.”

“Was it at the Director of the State Hospital for Genetic Repair’s garden soiree last year? I recall an issue with his daughter’s stolen moonstones.”

“Something like that, Miss Scyros.”

“I remember this one.” She fixed Barsina with a gaze. “Turn around for me, girl.” Barsina was unable to refuse the woman’s voice. “Nice bum, nice breasts. I don’t suppose you’d entertain an offer?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, gritting my teeth. “She’s irreplaceable.”

“Oh, my dear,” she laughed idly. “I hear that often. No girl is,” she gestured dismissively, “irreplaceable.”

Another servant came in, similarly dressed to the first, a genetic design-job with skin even darker than mine but with a mane of golden hair, to serve the labor-broker and me tea and some sort of tiny pastries. I accepted the cup while trying to ignore her smile.

“I couldn’t do without her,” I persisted.

“The offer stands if you ever wish … Now Tala tells me you have a question, not about contract-girls, but about … art?”

“Yes,” I said, happy to come to the point so quickly. “It’s about Meisje.”

( … This way to Chapter Seven part 2 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Eight part 1 … )