“He’ll continue to launder money for the Baker Street Crew for the usual cut. The Crews will still buy jade from Anorco at a guaranteed set price and move it onto the black market. In addition, Mr. Wyles will receive increased monthly payments for being Joren Gasson’s influential friend in Adamont Capita.” Wyles had never told her any of this directly, but Lula had pieced it together over time, eavesdropping on phone calls with “Jo Boy,” asking about Wyles’s childhood friends from Port Massy, noticing that when they traveled to Marcucuo, he had meetings with Espenian men in dark suits who left behind briefcases of bundled thalirs. “Wyles is taking greater precautions now, to keep the association secret. He won’t meet or communicate with Gasson directly anymore and won’t be seen near him.”
The Espenian press portrayed Art Wyles as a devoutly Truthbearing self-made man who had come from a poor family in a tough neighborhood of Port Massy and risen to wealth and power through business acumen and savvy investments. Lula, who had out of necessity done her homework on the man, was surprised that Espenians wished to believe this fairy tale, or at least conveniently ignore whispers and evidence to the contrary.
Kekonese people know that no man rises without patronage and protection. The oligarch Wyles owed his early success to the Baker Street Crew—the largest, wealthiest, most politically well-connected organized crime outfit in the Republic of Espenia. Ayt Mada hadn’t known this for certain when she first found Lula and placed her in the foreigner’s path—but the courtesan’s discoveries had not surprised her. Obtaining enough recorded proof to make this knowledge useful, however, had taken years.
Lula’s hand shook, rattling the ice cubes in the glass as she drank down the cool tea, trying to drown the anxiety curled in her stomach. Each time she’d come to Ayt’s mansion to make her report, she’d left with the Pillar’s words dragging down her steps. “We don’t have what we need yet. You’ll have to go back and get us more.”
So she had. Over and over again, to be the foreigner’s mistress. She took his cock into her mouth, her pussy, her ass. She pretended to love it, to love him. She learned to lie fluently in Espenian, to whisper that he was the best lover she’d ever had, that she was so lucky and grateful he’d noticed her and made her his woman, given her such nice things and treated her so well. She accompanied a man forty years older than her on business trips and stayed with him in five-star hotels. She planted bugs in his houses in Marcucuo and Karandi—but not Espenia, because he had a wife and family there, and another mistress, so she could not be seen in that country. She pretended to convert to the Church of One Truth and went to services with Wyles, mouthing the foreign words of worship to a foreign God and Seer. She coaxed him into talking about his friends, his businesses, his political ambitions. She pretended to struggle with Espenian, to not understand all the things he spoke of, so he talked about them freely, with the sense of safety a person feels around their cat.
When Wyles was away from Kekon, Lula could pretend she was free. She could take singing lessons and dream about going to college and one day having a real career as a music teacher. She could be with Sumi and imagine a future together. Sumi wept over the trap they were in and vowed she would wait, but Lula knew no one’s resolve was infinite. Every time the phone rang and it was the foreigner summoning her back to his house, their fragile illusions of happiness were snuffed out.
She asked the question she’d been dreading. “Do you have enough, Ayt-jen?”
Ayt Mada considered the stack of evidence in front of her, one of the many that Lula had provided for her over the years. “Do I have enough?” The Pillar gazed out across the perfectly still pools and carefully arranged rocks of her garden, her expression thoughtful and distant. “Is it ever enough?” Her eyes drifted back to Lula and lingered on her as if she were a mildly interesting sculpture. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four, Ayt-jen.” She’d been seventeen when Wyles had discovered her.
An expression Lula did not fully understand passed like a shadow across the Pillar’s face. Nostalgia? Pity? “You’re still a young woman,” Ayt said. “Enjoy it while you can.”
It was the closest thing to an acknowledgment of her sacrifice the Pillar had ever made. Lula had given up seven years of her youth to be a foreigner’s whore, a White Rat for the Mountain clan. She suspected she was the only one of the clan’s many rats to report to Ayt directly, a great honor, surely. She was grateful for what the clan had provided to her family. And she hated the Pillar with the quiet and resigned hatred a rabbit has for its captors.