“Still?”
And Whittemoor’s voice was the only thing worse than the tinnitus: a beat out of line, like the sudden and unexpected crack of a whip. He leaned heavily on the sink, rubbing his eyes. When he opened them, the soft gold phosphor light lanced through, and he shut them again. From outside the door, Whittemoor’s voice came again: “Are you quite sure you don’t need anything?”
“Yes. Thank you.” He would have taken anything to lay a blanket over the throbbing silence, anything regular, even, soft, like the murmuring of water or even the hum of an aeroship engine. He knew that phosphor made no sound, but he thought he could feel the light singing.
He dropped his hand, and his spectacles clattered awkwardly back down on the bridge of his nose. He wrinkled his nose; he felt the bottom frame chafe his cheek.
“All right,” Whittemoor said, and Morandi could imagine him pulling at that curly red mustache of his uncertainly.
He straightened as best he could, feeling the muscles between his shoulder-blades crack. “All the same, I believe that I shall be spectating tonight. I do not much feel like playing.”
Whittemoor laughed. “I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear it; you did rather clean them out last nine.” A beat. “I do hope it lays off, Desiderio.”
That note of concern. Morandi could hear it; he had no idea what to do with it, especially from Whittemoor. It made everything rather uncomfortable – it made him feel as if he should say something, anything, to placate the man, only reassurance never seemed to work. It would have to do, all the same. “I have no doubt that it will.”
Morandi sighed, sagging again as he heard Whittemoor’s footsteps recede down the corridor. He opened his eyes, looking at himself in the glass, trying to prepare himself for all the light and movement around the billiards table.
He was not a particularly vain man. There was little use in being one. Still, he thought that he looked rather – out of place like this, and the glasses helped not at all. The suit, like everything else, he had had to have tailored, and recently; it fit him well, but it did not make him look smaller.
And he thought the glasses on top of all of it made him look like he was some sort of soldier playing at being an accountant. They rather seemed to highlight the parts of him that were – well – not very accountant-like. Amelie liked them, though, or at the very least was amused by them, which he supposed was the same thing.
He touched with his fingertips the old scarflesh that crept up from his collar, over his jaw and up his cheek, and to the frames. Then he straightened them and himself, breathed in, and tried to set the pain in his head aside. The difficulty of casting on oneself in the perceptive conversation was a cruel irony; he would very much have liked to dig around in his own mind, if it meant removing the pieces that hurt. It was damnably inefficient.
But there was little use in dwelling on that, either.
It was darker out in the corridor, though the trickle of sound from a ways down still ached.
When he stepped into the quiet third floor bar, nobody noticed, at first. He loomed to one side of the door, watching. He had at least a head on all the other gentleman, and a decent amount of breadth, too; he would not go unnoticed for long, especially not by Mr. Doyle, but it was a precious reprieve.
Whittemoor was standing back with Nealing-Roach, both of them rapt at the table. The two other men he did not recognize; one, the shorter, was dark-skinned, with a clean-shaven head.
The other was of average height, older than him, Morandi thought, but he could not tell how much; he could not tell much at all about him, other than his thick auburn sideburns and his intent bearing. He eyed the bar, but for the moment hung back, stepping only a little closer to the table. The game looked like it was about to run its course.