He slipped back into a familiar shape, warm and comfortable. Pitched his voice a little higher, leaned into Anatole’s aged rasp, not unlike the one the Rose’d worn into him in life. He hoped it wasn’t too much. Not enough to patronize. He needed it just as much.
Ava opened her eyes and started speaking again. She pressed her fingertip to the pendulum, brought the bit of paper round in a half-circle.
It drew his eye, and he looked at it for a long time.
She. If Tom’d expected Ava to know it, he’d expected her to know it from the mouth of Anatole; he’d expected her to know it as a braggart’s aside, a rung on the ladder of golly success. The truth was worse and better, all at once. It was a leap where he’d expected a stumble, and now he knew, oes – unbroken wax seals, burnt-black paper curling in the hearth. There’d be time, later, to curse a mung drunkard.
Now wasn’t it. She wasn’t looking at him, so he kept looking at the paper; he took a sip of tea. She was silent more than she spoke. It was only when she apologized that he looked up.
He almost said, Don’t apologize, caught himself before his mouth opened; he’d been saying that a lot lately. “Of course,” he said instead.
If you’d wanted something out of a kov – words or birds, whatever the case may’ve been – Tom had been your man. It wasn’t just ’cause he’d been good with his fists, or ’cause he wasn’t the kov to ask too many questions; he’d been both of those things, naturally, but that wasn’t it. Shep’d once described him as “the meanest fucker this side of Sharkswell”, and from one angle, that about summed it up: more than just being good at it, he’d seemed to enjoy his little chats with dobbers. Maybe he had taken pleasure in it, or something like pleasure, like a dog on a scent. But that wasn’t it, either.
If you wanted to be fair good at making kov talk or pay up, good enough to catch Hawke’s eye, it wasn’t enough to rough ’em up and bark at ’em like some kind of mung animal. Nobody’d ever died on Tom before he had what he wanted, or he was sure there was nothing to get. You had to listen as much as you swung, and when you swung, you had to be careful. Precise, even. It wasn’t all swinging; sometimes, for the real tricky ones, you had to figure out what they were scared of losing.
And you learned from silence, just as much as noise. The spaces between. Kov told you by omission what they could never tell you by confession. The raw spots were the ones they pulled in, hid away, and those were the ones you did best to use. Something simple as a sore tooth behind a worming tongue, or –
Tom was so tired. He’d already pressed and prodded. Ava’s face was all smooth control, but it was the omissions, after all. He felt bad in a way he couldn’t define.
“I’ll poke around,” he said after a moment, “with your leave. Nothing conspicuous. Keep an ear out. Open my godsdamn mail, for once.” His voice warmed up; there was a flicker of mirth in his eyes. Something sad, still, in all of it.
With a soft click, he set his teacup down on the table. Then, finally, delicate-like, he plucked a wedge of pastry off the saucer and took a contemplative bite. He burbled something – might’ve been “benny” – and then took another sip of tea.
Once he’d washed it down, he looked at Ava levelly, raising his eyebrows a fraction. “It’s been a long day. Shall I let you get some rest, Ms. Weaver?”
His tone was neutral, carefully casual. He wanted to say something else, maybe, but he couldn’t think what. He hardly knew what he wanted. He was lonely, but what of it? Business was lonely.