The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - CARUANO GATTO (Part 1)

(Chapter 14, Part 1)

Caruano Gatto’s offices are at the wide end of the Mercanter Narrows, the more posh end with the high streets and respectable clubs—no brothels—but the sort of places where the young toffs mingle with epistarchs and the better class of mercanter children, drinking, dancing, and dipping into illegal substances. The office takes up the ground floor and first floor of a building—his sign, a scratching cat, hangs over the front door declaring Gatto Brothers Inspectors. The other Gatto brother, Cherchi, runs their office on the Station; what work the Gattos do up there, I can’t imagine, but I never heard of anyone seeing Cherchi, so he has to have been in orbit for years. Launch and landing fares are enormous, so people don’t take trips off or back to Iphigenia without a good reason.

I’ve been in Gatto’s office, same as he’s been in mine, on jobs and out of professional courtesy. He’s not a bad man, at least no worse than most of them, but if he were looking for me, he’d find me. It was business, it was money, and he had a reputation to maintain. And I’m a woman, but that’s always a consideration, isn’t it?

“I think we’ll stay away from home a few days,” I said to Barsina as we ducked down Strato Zingibra to avoid Gatto’s neighborhood. “At least until we know what’s what, yah?”

“Where will Miss go?” Barsina’s voice rose an octave. Tank-girls do not like change, even temporary.

“Don’t know yet,” I said, looking over my shoulder and pretending to not care, either. “Somewhere on the waterfront, maybe. Militia don’t like hanging out there.”

“Mist’ Gatto might.”

“We’ll see."

The address Demetri Valeth gave me for his missing Zerah and her man Amador wasn’t that far from the waterfront, which made sense, considering the husband was supposed to be a longshoreman ’prentice.  There was a gin shop on the ground floor, a canvas tailor on the first, and it looked like ratty little flats stacked from the third floor on. I looked up and up and all around. Merchant-marine types in toques and rubber boots. Drying nets. Fishwives. A generally salty, fishy, decaying odor filled the air.

“He’s been here and not found them, Miss,” Barsina said. “What do you expect to find?”

“This is where we start,” I said. “A fat pork merchant isn’t able to see a clue if it poked him in the eye. You and me, we know what we’re looking for.”

I was hoping for receipts, a banknote so I’d know where the money was being drawn from, a wrapper from a shop, newsjournal pages with a nice fat recent date on them. Anything.

The street seemed quiet. There was a beggar rolled in a blanket by the gin-shop door, and he rattled a centono in a cup at us but we stepped by and tried the door to the stair. I’d drop a deka on the way out. Barsina kept looking left and right as I opened it.

“Time to earn our ten drachms,” I said.

The stairwell was as narrow as ours, but smelled of piss and gin and had no electric lights at all. It must have been like the inside of a cave after sundown. The flat was supposed to be on the top floor, so we followed the curving, bowed steps higgledy-piggledy up, smelling cabbage, fish, filth, and mildew and hearing not much of anything except a crying baby on the floor above the tailor’s.

At the top of the stair a hall went all the way to the back, where we found a stained white door with the number seventeen clumsily painted on it. It was dimly lit through an unglazed slot in the back wall. I stuck my head out. The courtyard looked about fourteen meters down, narrow and dank, with a well. A woman was drawing a bucket out of it, and I made a face at the thought of how dirty that water probably was.

“All right,” I said, looking at the door. “Knock, no knock?”

“Miss, this feels unsafe.”

“No knock it is.”

I put my hand on the handle and my thumb on the latch, and click, it swung open.

“Simple,” I said, gently pressing it wide.

It was pretty typical and pretty dismal. The walls were plastered and painted light green from the floor to chest height, and terracotta from there to the ceiling. Someone at some point had done some subpar frescoes of fruit on a table and owls on a fountain, and a scene of Irodiada coming out of the waves blessing fishermen. I gave that one a little curtsey for luck. There was also a switchbox on the wall for lights, but the rubberized cotton conduiting didn’t go anywhere and the singed fixture on the ceiling didn’t look like it would work, and had no light diode in it anyway. There probably hadn’t been any current above the tailor’s for years, assuming he had any.

There was a broken table missing a leg, and a chair missing part of its back, and a workbench under some shelves on the wall, and a pottery oil lamp with a rough shape of a cat molded on top of it. There didn’t seem to be anything at all personal here.

“Let’s try the back room,” I said. The door to it, which had neither handle nor latch, just a bit of leather nailed onto it to tug it by, was nearly shut. Someone had done an inexpert job of painting it white with a tree and a faun playing the pipes.

The door closed behind us, and we whirled around.

There was Caruano Gatto and one of his inspectors.

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( … This way to Chapter Thirteen part 3 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Fourteen part 2 … )

… ( … This way to Chapter One part 1 … ) …

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