The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - MARDONIOS AGAIN - (part 3)

(Chapter 4, part 3)

(Ed.: Yes, this has been up before, but it’s slightly edited and re-illustrated.)

The State Gallery is by Landing Park. It’s a big building, all white with terracotta tile roofs and more windows than you can count, and probably a whole indentured staff to wash the inside of them and men to wash the outside. It’s old, too. I don’t know how old. Certainly after the Caballardo, when things were settled down again, and the toffs had lots of money and tech, but when people still thought big in buildings.

I’d been in the Gallery before on other business, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome now. Barsina had a bit of veil in her girdle and pinned it up in case anyone remembered me. No one remembers indentureds unless they’re specially designed or if they’re well-known courtesans, and Barsina is neither, so she faded along behind me, looking at all the paintings with her wide blue eyes.

That’s what you get there. Paintings and sculpture. Marble floors. Tall ceilings. Pillars. I don’t know all the terms, but fancy. The place looks like a temple.

Citizens like their landscapes, so plenty of them—huge vistas of the savano and the Upper Plateau and the mountains and farm country in the Montara Sierpento. They like statues and paintings of naked girls almost as much as they like live ones of same. Seascapes and islands, yes to those. Views of natural beauty on other planets, presumably from life.

There were teachers and lines of schoolchildren stumbling around in their uniforms and little sandals or felted shoes: rows of girls holding notebooks, and a knot of boys looking unruly and sniggering at a massive naked marble man with his serpent just hanging there. An artist painted a copy of a portrait. Then I saw an official-looking person in a brown chiton and white hairscarf.

I made a beeline to her and dropped a slight curtsey. “Miss, I said, “I was wondering if it would be possible to see Sub-Director Azzopardo?”

Holding a tablet in the crook of her arm, the woman looked at me as if I had suggested she walk on the ceiling.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” she asked.

“I am Miss Fenek, Miss Dardana Fenek. I’m investigating the … unfortunate incident of the Director.”

“Ah,” she said, looking at my clothes and my dark eyes peeping over my white veil. “Yes. Unfortunate.” She sounded as if she didn’t consider it a misfortune of any significant proportions. “Investigating for whom?”

This is the tough part of my job: getting people to unsling their jaws for me. No one likes to spill for the militia, but if you’re wise, you play along. But a private inspector—she can’t make you talk, she can’t arrest you, she can’t take all your servants and make them two inches taller in a quest for knowledge about your affairs. You can tell a private inspector to throw herself out or get the militia to do it for you.

If you’re hassling dolemen, I’ve found that they’ll tell you something to make you go away. Agrios are probably the same, but I don’t go out of the city much to root around among the vilaĝos. Mercanters can be persuaded if they think there’s something in it them. Epistarchs and aristoi don’t always see the advantage and usually go the throwing-you-out route the first chance.

This woman was an epistarch if I ever saw one, and as a little girl, I saw plenty of them. All she was missing was the white chiton, and sky-colored shawl, and stethoscope and girdle full of instruments, and she would have been classic.

But today, it occurred to me I had a bit of an advantage.

“I’m working with Ensign-Captain Mardonios of the Night Market Militia Commissariat,” I said. “He’s tasked me with getting some preliminary information for him.” I could feel Barsina tensing behind me at the three-quarters of a lie.

“We are under the Academy Quarter commissariat,” she objected, unmoved. “Mist’ Fortunato died elsewhere.”

“But he worked here,” I said. “The ensign-captain has me covering this part.”

“‘Worked’,” she said, as if she said “slug”. “He was aristoi. He was the Director. He did not … ‘work’.”

“As you say,” I agreed. “May I speak with the Sub-Director?”

She regarded me with narrow blue eyes, then said, “Follow me.”

There were corridors of paintings and halls of statues and stone stairs, and then a floor of carpeted halls and oak office doors. We went through one whose brass placard read …

DIREKTORO FORTUNATO

… and she left me in an antechamber on a couch with a soft cushion, Barsina standing close by.

“Looks like the Sub-Director has already moved himself in,” I said.

“Yes, Miss.”

I looked at a canvas on the wall of the wheel-like Station against the stars, ships coming and going all around it, and the world red and gray and white below.

“I wonder what it’s like to be able to do that,” I mused.

The woman with the tablet emerged, beckoning me into the inner office.

Behind the desk was a woman.

I was glad I had my veil on because I would have looked astonished. As it was, I guess I was pretty wide-eyed, and the woman’s lip curled. She gestured for me to take a chair, and Barsina stood behind.

“Miss Dardana Fenek,” I said. “Thank you for seeing me.”

She inclined her head in acknowledgment. “Will you unveil? I’d like to see who I’m speaking with.”

I obliged. “I’m sorry. Sometimes, I like to walk about without men gawking at me.”

“I understand.—And you, you’re surprised to find a woman at this desk.”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“I imagine it didn’t.” She smiled thinly. “Quite common.” She looked at me closely, but if she recognized me or my name, she never admitted it.

“Well … Miss Azzopardo … I apologize, what is your given name?”

“Nunzia,” she said. “Why is she writing this down?”

“My girl takes my notes.”

“She must be very good. Former citizen?”

“Tank-girl, Miss Azzopardo.”

“I rather thought of them as half literate.”

I smiled, just as friendly as I could be. “Not at all. So, I will start by expressing how sorry I am about your loss here.”

She waved her hand dismissively and looked bored.

“And I would ask, Miss Azzopardo—I’ll cut to the heart—do you know who might have been a suspect in his murder?”

“I can think of a very good one,” she said.

“Ah! And that it is?”

“Myself, of course.”

( … This way to Chapter Four Part 2 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Five Part 1 … )