nd a good evening to you as well, Alexander,” he says, keeping his face as smooth and indectal as his field, no matter how vividly he’d like to be cursing through his teeth. He smiles, pleasant and warm – conspiratorial, even – as he clasps Incumbent Burbridge’s shoulder and guides him toward the door.
Burbridge is shaking his head, making faces like a dog that’s just got a taste of something it doesn’t much like. “But I say,” he repeats, pulling at his mustache, “I say – it simply is not right.” He blinks down at Incumbent Vauquelin through his thick glasses.
He breathes in deep, putters a sigh. “It will be what it will be.” He shrugs. “What else can it be?”
“What else, indeed.” Burbridge pauses.
His hand’s slipped the elderly incumbent’s shoulder, and his other’s found the doorknob; he strains at the end of the leash, hoping he won’t have to shove the man out with both hands.
He’s already learned that I really must be going doesn’t do the trick. I wouldn’t keep you from Diana, the dagka will say, then he’ll pause, as if he’s just discovered some more mortar to brick you in with. How is that lovely wife of yours, Anatole? He’ll ask, plucking delightedly at his goatee.
Or maybe he stops there, a faintly guilty look twitching in his hoary whiskers, and you’ve nothing but to say – oh, no, Alexander, it’s a pleasure; it’s so rare we get the chance to catch up. And instead of placation, it is invitation, and the flood gates open up.
Either way, his feet will be like roots in the carpet of your office, and somehow you’ll find yourself pouring more twemlaugh, like he’s holding a gun to your head.
There are no guns tonight, and no riffs, neither. Tom Cooke is not in the best of moods, and as the sun’s slinking below the rooftops, his work’s only begun.
There is a door just down the hall, in the shadow of a crook in the wall, bolstered with more locks than a bank vault. Tom knows what’s behind it; it’s lingered in the back of his mind like a pulse since two nights ago, since the afternoon when Ava Weaver took her case and he shut the study door behind her.
It’s been a busy work day, perhaps fortuitously, where suspicions’re concerned. He hasn’t seen Mr. Shrikeweed since that snowy dream of a couple nights ago; he hears it still, those two words on the Shrike’s tongue, and more. His red-rimmed eyes, the turning of the wine in the glass.
Plamondon Hall. Fifteen minutes after the twenty-third hour. The Shrike, always a meticulous timekeeper. He glances at the clock over the desk – thirteen – then back at Incumbent Burbridge’s plump, innocent smile.
“Indeed.,” He lets a little sharpness seep into his expression; the older Incumbent’s mouth wobbles into a frown, and his brow is deeply lined. “Forgive me, Alexander, but I have some work to do, and I really must—”
Burbridge makes a little noise. “You work much too hard, Anatole!”
Tom’s opening the door, now, stepping to the side. “It will be what it will be, I’m afraid,” he says, not bothering to soften his tone. Burbridge finds himself floated out the door, and his lips are now a puckered frown.
“Well – if you say so – I say—”
“The burden of our kind, I’m afraid. Good evening, Alexander,” he says firmly.
“G-Good evening, Anatole.”
The door shuts.
He stands there, breathing, eyes shut. If he tries hard, he can imagine the clock ticking. He opens them. Fourteen –
He opens the door again, when he can’t hear the dagka’s boots creaking anymore. He steps out into the dimly-lit entryway, to the nook where their kofi is now made by one of the Elephant’s lasses; he breathes in the lingering scents. Behind him, the clock strikes the quarter hour, a little snippet of a melody. It echoes ghostly through the empty offices, quiet against the dusty wood and the drawn blinds and the night-dark glass, and dies before it’s barely begun.
He then looks to Mr. Shrikeweed’s door.