And you’d want to find it, if you were the sort of kov who didn’t care for prying eyes or piercing questions. For this little rendezvous, Tom’d wanted to avoid the former; the latter, he reckoned, was a given, what with his company. But today, he was prepared.
Just on the cusp of the evening, toddling somewhere past the late afternoon, the Soot District was darkening. Still, the Garmon was near-empty this time of day; even then, it was a cramped space, dark and full of turns, old wood creaking with every breeze. Low candlelight drifted on smoke, picked out motes of dust. There was one kov at the bar, an inked old wick with a shaved head, smoking and laughing in a low voice with the barkeep. A skinny woman with a pox-scarred face and a dirty apron was leaned on the bar nearby, listening intently.
They gave him stray glances, occasionally, but for the most part, they left him alone. Even dressed down, he reckoned they knew him for a golly, and a frazzled, porven field like his was insurance enough. Sitting at a table in the corner, Tom nursed his whisky, watching the entryway for flickers of light – listening for the creak of the door, the creak of the floorboards. Trying to brace himself on the burn of the cheap liquor. Fit the pieces of his head together, as if that’d help.
The Garmon was a place he’d frequented in those months he’d spent living in the Soots. There was something pleasantly familiar about it, in a strange, brutal way. It’d stayed the same; he’d changed. All the same dusty glasses, the same piss-poor whisky, the same furtive faces. He watched the low light flicker over his hands, the veins and the freckles and the delicate bones, uncalloused, indisputably the hands of an Uptown politician.
He remembered when they’d shaken worse than they did now; he remembered when he hadn’t even been able to look at them, so strange as it’d been, looking down at another man’s hands. They still didn’t feel like his – how could they? – but they didn’t shake so badly anymore. Funny, how quick you got used to going through the motions, even if the mind never really adjusted.
He hadn’t been ready to see Oisin again the first time; he didn’t know he was, this time, either.
He reckoned he didn’t have much of a choice. Dze, that wasn’t right: he had a hell of a choice, and that was the problem. That was at the beating heart of all of it. There was a choice, but there weren’t always a lot of options.
When he’d got the summons, right on the heels of all rainy season’s laoso, he’d thought he might go moony; in the first place, he wanted nothing to do with it – it was nothing to do with him – and in the second, he was acutely aware of the danger. It’d driven him right back to the bottle, and it’d taken him a handful of days to get himself together.
It hadn’t taken long for a certain wick reporter, with his haunted eyes and his decade overseas, to drift back to the front of his mind. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Being honest, he hadn’t planned to follow up; the last thing he needed nipping at his (and Ava’s) heels was a pen from the Post. But that one letter with its wax seal and its glistening black ink had changed everything, and once again, Tom Cooke was bringing all his chroveshit to Oisin Ocasta.
You give me a job, he thought to himself, and shut his eyes, and took a long drink, gripping the tumbler white-knuckled tight. When he set his glass down and opened his eyes again, he saw a familiar figure moving through the smoke and candlelight, and he raised his glass with a bitter twist of a smile.