20 - Jack

JACK

I didn't fall on my face as badly as you might fear, replacing Edmund Depper. I'll tell you first about the way the MS and I would do our morning briefings. He didn't like me to have notes, because he wanted me to prove that I was familiar enough with the state of affairs to go off of memory. Master Secretary Cyril Knollblum was a fairly young man. I think he might have only been forty-one. He was short and round, although not particularly fat. He just had an odd roundness to him, and a thinness to his mustache, and a thinness to his hair. For all his peculiar physical traits, though, he was cogent and sharp. He sat behind his great wood desk, fingers together, and listened as I spoke.

“Navy Command reports that Redcastle and her carrier group have reached Clairplage and already distributed most of the emergency aid to the local population.”

“To the needy or to resellers?” Knollblum asked me, lighting his pipe.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Half those Midlanders are peasants, the other half are crooks. Which half is getting food and medicine?”

“The Foreign Secretary has the full report, sir,” I said. “I'll get it for him. Or, more realistically, I’ll call the Navy when we're through.”

Knollblum was very perceptive, and he could tell exactly why I didn't want to go and talk to Boyd Flinter. “I don't mind Flinter hating you, Clearwater,” he said. “It means you go to the source for foreign intelligence instead of copying his homework.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Munitions plants. The mayor of Archcove doesn't want to rush the factory construction if they'll all be sitting dormant for lack of steel.”

Knollblum rapped his fingers on the desk and tried to remember. He, like me, tried to show his competence by going off memory.

“I told you to get an opinion from your Army Laboratories man on this, didn't I?”

At first I thought he meant Tom, but Tom didn't have the authority to do any of this logistics stuff. Then I remembered Tom's boss, with whom I'd become acquainted. “Major Summiter,” I said. “I will remind him today.”

“Any news on someone for your own desk?”

By that, he meant an assistant to me. I had indeed interviewed a few. “There's a candidate I liked out of Pax Polytechnic, Roy Eame. He can start Monday.”

I knew that these postings were generally for scholars who had graduated from the prestigious lifegate religious halls. I knew I was breaking protocol a bit by going with Eame, but Knollblum had told me to choose a man I liked, so that's what I was doing.

“A state schooler bringing in state schoolers,” the Master Secretary said. “Is this the end of the lifegate scholar elite?”

“I just need a man who can fit with my style, sir. You'll like Eame. That's all I've got for you.”

“No, there's one more thing,” said the MS. “The Army is developing a foreign intelligence office of their own. They have agreed to total oversight from this office, presumably on the assumption that we'll be too busy to stick our noses in their business. So I want you to go down to Army Command to—”

“Stick my nose in their business?” I asked.

“In their everything,” he said.

“How often, sir?”

“Twice a week.”

I shifted my weight in my shoes. I'd been developing a callus from wearing the same heeled dress shoes over and over again. I needed to get a second pair. “In person, across town?” It seemed like a lot of work, on top of everything, to go physically across town just to check in on some spies.

“You're a bachelor, Clearwater. There's no one waiting at home for you in that empty apartment. This is the time to work dawn to dusk and really make a name for yourself.” Of course, he would not be paying me overtime for this extra effort, but I was expected to assent without protest.

“Yes, sir.”

I started to leave.

“Oh, Jack?” It was unusual for him to have so many points of business for me. He usually wanted me out of his office as quickly as possible so I could get to work.

I turned around. The Master Secretary took another puff of pipe and seemed to take on a more personal tone. “I had some warnings about you, but you're quite good. The lightsmen and the lifegaters and the laborers' sons are all going to hold a grudge for what you are. But don't let that stop you from keeping on putting your back into it. You could make a respectable career of this.”

I tried to decide how to take this. I decided it was positive. “Thank you, Master Secretary,” I said, and left.

Staff passed me as I walked out. I made sure I wasn't needed elsewhere in Cabinet Hall. Then, as the MS had asked me, I took a streetcar across town to see about this mysterious new intelligence office.

I entered the Army Command staff office in which it was supposed to be located. To my surprise, the first room I tried was full of filing cabinets and maps. There were men and women working side by side in there, and I recognized the women as belonging to the ever-expanding Women's Auxiliary. The people at their desks seemed to look up at me in confusion as I entered.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm looking for General Office Two.”

They looked at each other. Then one man spoke. “This is the General Office for Personnel Affairs. There is no General Office Two.”

I stuttered, pretty sure that this was wrong. “I'm Jack Clearwater Jr. from Cabinet Hall.”

The man in the Personnel Affairs office, which would come to be known as G1, looked very annoyed. “I don't care if you're Jaywright the Conqueror,” he said. “This is the only General Office.”

Thankfully, a badger-faced young woman with red hair spoke up beside him. “They are clearing out the old library,” she said, in a funny Southerner's accent. “For what? I don't know. Maybe that's what you're looking for?”

I liked the red hair, and I liked the funny accent. I'd never gotten acquainted with a Southern girl before. “Would you show me?” I smiled at her.

She would not stand up. “It's just down the hall, sir,” she said, and pointed toward it.

Gay and well fed, full of coffee, I whistled the march of my state school and walked down the hall in search of this second office. I reached a brass knob and an unmarked door, and saw that the word ‘LIBRARY’ had clearly been recently removed.

Turning the handle, I entered and found a dusty, stuffy space full of empty bookshelves all piled in a corner. More shelves like them lined the wall. There were Venetian blinds on the far side, with light shining through. I liked the way the beams interacted with the dust that had been kicked up by the opening door. The whole room, overall, was quite spacious.

I walked inside, listening to the creak of floorboards beneath me, and tried to figure out if there was anything going on that I needed to report. Then I heard another creak behind me.

To my astonishment, it was the very same woman in red I had encountered at Bistro Moderne. She wore the same suit, and had her hair the same, and seemed in every way like she was here to pick up exactly where we'd left off. Upon seeing me, she shut the door and smiled. She seemed coy and observant, like she was sizing me up.

“You,” I said.

“You,” she said back, although she did not give off an air of surprise.

I felt a little flustered by the intensity of her stare. “Jack,” I said again. “Hi.” We were a little too far to shake hands, so I bowed.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

She nodded her head. “Iris Riverland,” she said, and I finally had her name.

“Iris.” I sounded out how the word felt in my mouth. It was a little flat. I would have liked a little more movement of the tongue, but it would do all right. “I'm looking for a department called the G2.”

“This is it.”

I looked around again at the busted bookshelves. “This is it? I took the cable car half an hour. I heard there were already operatives on payroll.”

“There's me,” she said.

Believe me when I tell you I was quite startled at this. I had an image of a spy that had been taken from classical history books, one of a man in black sneaking up a castle wall to kill someone with a poison dart. This movie star figure, the seductress, did not fit that bill.

“Well, I should have figured,” I said, “with you hanging around the prince and all.” I was trying my hardest to seem like I knew my stuff.

She saw straight through me. “I'll make your job easy and tell you what you're here for. I'm one of three G2 staff. The others will get here tomorrow. Sunday morning, Army Command is sending me to Southspire to gather intelligence in the office of Warston Forge.”

Warston Forge, at that time, was the president of the troublesome entity known as the Midland Civic Union. Forge was a former general, by all accounts a dictator. Now he was trying to assemble a civicist government in the Midlands, aping all the Far West political styles. An independent and organized political body of millions of Midlanders was not what we needed just across the sea.

“Southspire,” I said. That was the name of the ancient city that now served as the MCU capital. “Do you know courtspeak?”

“As if I was born in they the Midlands,” said Iris, taking on something like a courtspeak accent. As I'm sure you can tell, Paxanan and courtspeak are cousins. They sound very strange to each other, but there is some mutual discernment possible even if you haven't done any formal study.

“Your pronunciation's a tell,” I said, going off what I had learned from my teachers.

She continued in courtspeak. “On contrary, Clearwater. It's you what takes on the impression that you no more than studied that of she poetry in he the school.”

I didn't want to argue linguistics with her any further. “Are you to take a post in the Forge administration?” I asked.

The woman in red took a step away from the door. Her heels were much taller than mine, and they brought her up almost to my own height. “Reports suggest he tends to give too much access to his mistresses of choice,” she murmured.

“Mistresses,” I said. “Oh.”

I suppose she saw some kind of naïveté or reproach on my face because she felt the need to justify herself. “That's the business.”

Then she turned away from me toward an empty bookshelf and did something I will never forget for the rest of my days. She put both her hands on a middle shelf about at chest height and gripped it. Her feet were just a little bit back, causing her to lean slightly forward in order to hold the wood. All I saw of her head was her curly black hair.

“Would you see if there's a tear in my stocking, Jack?” she said, “Just above my right heel.”

She shuffled her feet slightly more back, exaggerating her lean and keeping her hands where they were. I walked forward, smelling her perfume and perhaps something else, and knelt down.

“Look close,” she said to me.

I examined the place where her stocking thinned from the stretch around her heel. I could see just a trace of her tanned skin through it, but there was no visible tear.

“No, it looks fine,” I said, deep in a kneel.

“A little higher,” she said to me.

I paused. Only then did I start to get some sense of her game. I raised my head just a touch and put my finger on the back of her flexed right calf, pressing into the muscle.

“Here?”

“A little higher,” she said.

I moved my finger like a pen up the back seam of the stocking until it reached her knee pit. I didn't press too hard, lest I cause her knee to buckle.

“A little higher,” she said again.

Again I moved my finger up, up to about my nose level, just below the hem of her red skirt.

“Higher?” I asked, my voice a little shallow.

“Just to be sure,” she said.

I did as she asked, and turned my hand from a pointing gesture into an open palm under her skirt. I gripped the right side of her backside firmly, and with the other hand I lifted up the bottom hem of her skirt until it was at her waist.

“I think I should pull the stockings down a bit,” I said to her, “to be sure.”

I heard her breath growing hot and her voice change character. “All right.”

Then I pulled her stockings down to the tops of her thighs, and her underwear came with them. The skirt started to fall down a little, but I moved quickly forward, and with my nose and face, pushed it up again.

“Oh,” she said with surprise as I continued in this way. She bent forward and shuffled back more to create more pressure between us, and I gripped her legs. She was more than happy to let me indulge myself as I liked.

“What do you think?” she asked, and there was a throbbing in my temple such that I could only partially hear her. “Will it please the president?”

I rose to stand behind her, hiking her skirt up further. Her narrow waist meant it could hang there without falling down, and so I left it be and rushed to unbuckle my belt. “I think so,” I said, and found that I was more than ready for her.

Then, before I knew it, I was up against her with my nose and mouth pressed into her curled black hair. “Just no mess in me or on my clothes,” she said, and at this distance I heard her voice quite crisply.

I pressed harder against her, resolving to do as she asked. She reached back to grip my hair as we moved as one.

I'll tell you, it was just about dusk when I finally left the Army Command Staff Office building. I hoped there hadn't been any emergencies at Cabinet that I had not been there to solve. My hair had been tossed into something like a bird's nest, and I was very hopelessly trying to pat it into place.

At that moment, I was intercepted by someone whom I would have loved to see at almost any other hour.

It was my father, and I was mortally embarrassed for him to catch sight of me. He seemed cheery, and perhaps he didn't notice my state.

“Junior,” he shouted with enthusiasm as I hurriedly tried to tuck in my shirt.

“Father,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Your temp boy told me you were here,” he said, referring to the kid who had been filling in as my assistant until we could get Roy Eame.

“Well, he shouldn't have,” I remarked with some gruffness. It was against protocol to share any personal information.

My father was undaunted. “Buy you lunch?” he asked. “Well, it might be more like dinner now, actually.”

“I really should get home and clean up,” I told him.

“Just a quick bite?” my father asked. “Just here from Pax for the day.”

I had to stop myself from snapping at my father after all he had done for me. I knew he just wanted to buy me a meal, and it was not his fault that I had made such a mess during the workday. Standing in the shade to conceal how disheveled I was, I made a compromise. “Dinner at Moderne. Seven o'clock,” I said to him. I knew this would give me time to get home and get cleaned up.

He accepted this with a smile. “I'll get a table.”

That night at Bistro Moderne, a chef brought a miniature cake out for me in the shape of the suited body of the Master Secretary. Since Knollblum was on the rounder side, he made a good cake, with a fondant head and candle pipe burning. Sitting across from my father, I had had a couple drinks and I reacted with laughter at the sight of it.

“Congratulations on the promotion, son,” he said, taking credit for the gag I had been presented with.

“It was more an emergency circumstance than anything else,” I said in truth.

My father shrugged. “The context fades. The title remains. And you earned it.”

I blew out the candle. The waiter left the cake for me and departed to return to the kitchen. The band that night was low and somber, and I kind of liked it. It contrasted with the giddiness of our mutual moods. “Is this what you're here for?” I asked him. “To say congratulations?”

“Yes. Partly,” he said. “How are you liking Knollblum?”

I shrugged. “I think he's grand.”

“Really?” my father exclaimed with astonishment.

“Truly,” I smiled.

“What’s he got you on?”

“Everything. Army, Navy, trade agreements, labor relations. We’re having a hell of a time making up the import shortfalls from the Almenreich. Price spikes are all but guaranteed.”

My father leaned in. “On what?”

I laughed. This was a line I could not cross. “I can’t say.”

He didn’t relent. “’Course you can,” he chuckled, trying to be casual.

“Really,” I said to him, putting a hand up. “I’m under oath.”

Then all of a sudden his mood changed. He stayed smiling, but there was a seriousness within. “And your very first oath is to me. Your father. From birth.”

I was so surprised by this change in tone that it caught me with a mouthful of cake. I chewed and swallowed and adjusted to match his demeanor. “What do you want to know, anyway?”

He was helping himself to my cake as well, more readily and more greedily than me. “That’s my business,” he said with a mouthful. “No need to make it a spat. Just give me the basics.”

I tried to explain. “At Cabinet I make very clear I’m there on my own. Not for Paxcorp. Not for the House of Clearwater.”

He blotted his lips with his napkin and rose to make himself look larger. In the candlelight it was almost a little scary. “That’s all well and good to win respect from the mailroom boys, Junior. But you are a Clearwater, down to your bones. And there’s a very big machine running under our feet and we all need to try and keep it fed.”

I braced myself as his speech went on.

“I don’t want to be nasty, Junior, and I certainly don’t want to compromise your fierce independence. I just need to know what we might want to think of buying up before market week’s end. To keep the big machine happy.”

To my regret and dishonor, I folded. I don’t know if it was the liquor or the gratitude or the guilt or what, but I did not resist him.

“Type One gasoline engines. Rail car bogeys. Industrial lathes. Those are the three biggest sticking points.”

It felt like doing a dirty thing, telling him all that, and he could see the guilt on my face. “See?” he said, trying to lift me out of it. “That’s not so hard, Junior. I tell all the board men at Paxcorp about you, they couldn’t be more proud.”

I couldn’t even look at him. “Thanks, Father.”

As much as I wanted to enjoy the cake, I had no appetite now. The same did not seem to be true for my father, and he took another large bite before pointing to the fondant on top. “I think the Master Secretary’s a little bit heavy on the buttercream.”