"I want to see it," I told her. "I have to come and check this out myself."
"You're sure? If you get caught up there, The Cardinal won't like it."
"I'll chance it."
"Very well. But you can't come the way I do-you won't fit through the gap in the gate. Can you meet me inside? Tomorrow night, about ten?"
"Why not tonight?" I asked.
"I have to go to a party with Cafran. It's for one of his brothers. I'm hoping I'll find out a bit about my past-maybe one of his brothers knows something and will let it slip. I doubt it, but I have to check. Besides, I want to give you time to think this through and do some research of your own. Search the files. Check that I'm telling the truth. I don't want you going into this with divided loyalties. Did you bring a weapon today?"
I nodded slowly and flashed my knife. She laughed and produced a gun. "Just as well for you this ended amicably," she joked. "You had to come armed-you didn't know me or the sky above me. But there's no room for suspicion from here on. If you come to Party Central with me, you're in for keeps. If you're serious about seeing this through, you'll have to cross The Cardinal. You can't play both sides off against each other. It's your future or your past, your career or the truth."
"I know." I kicked the loose pebbles around us. "I didn't before. Ithought I'd listen, kill you and it'd be over. But I can't do that. The need to know is too strong, even stronger than the need to succeed. Idon't want to betray The Cardinal-I'm still hoping I won't have to-but if I've got to choose between loyalty and peace of mind…
"I'm with you," I said.
And that was that. On the word of a woman I barely knew, I'd pitted myself against the most powerful creature in the city. It was crazy, illogical, suicidal. But I had no choice. The need to know who I was outweighed all my dreams, ambitions and plans. If I lost everything in my hunt for the truth, so be it.
We hung around the docks a while and tried discussing other stuff, but we kept coming back to The Cardinal and our missing pasts. I told Ama about the woman and the glimpses I sometimes caught of a world I couldn't remember. It was more than she could do. For her the past was a complete blank.
I thought I'd grow to love Ama Situwa. I didn't know why, or what attracted me to her so passionately, but I felt we were meant for each other.
"We might be old sweethearts," I said as we wandered through one of the empty warehouses. "We might have known each other in the past. Maybe that's why we… on the stairs…"
"Perhaps." She kicked a hole in a rotten plank and smiled.
"I wonder if the other Ayuamarcans have memory gaps?"
"I think they probably have," she said.
"Where could we have come from?" I frowned. "Employees, brainwashed to do The Cardinal's bidding?"
"Brainwashing's not real," she scoffed. "You can maybe alter people's minds a bit, but not to this extent."
"Science can do anything these days," I disagreed. "For all we know, we might have volunteered. Maybe the others-the ones with the lines through their names-aren't dead. Maybe they just regained their old memories and were withdrawn from the program."
"Sounds flaky, Raimi."
"How else do you explain it?"
"Maybe The Cardinal scours hospitals for amnesiacs," she said. "Buys or steals them, feeds them false identities and…" I raised an eyebrow. "It's as likely as your theory," she sniffed.
"We're probably way off base," I said. "The rest probably have perfect memories and we're just two screwups who came together by chance."
"You believe that?" she asked.
"I don't believe anything anymore," I told her.
We parted eventually, reluctantly, having said nothing about our feelings for each other or any future we might have together. There was no time. Not until this Ayuamarca business was out of the way. How could we think about a relationship when we didn't even know if our names were real?
We agreed to meet on the nineteenth floor of Party Central at ten the next night if we were both still alive. We kissed once and parted, no heroic or amorous last words. Ama returned to Cafran Reed on her scooter and I went back to the less fatherly Nathanael Mead. He was reading a paper when I arrived. He glanced up when the door opened, folded the paper and started the engine.
"A productive meeting?" he asked when we were on the road back to civilization.
"It was… different," I said.
"He's a dangerous man, The Cardinal," Mead said. "You wanna watch yourself. He'll chew you up if you don't."
"How come you know so much?" I asked.
"I'm a cabbie. Been one all my working life. You hear things. See things. If you want to. Most don't-they turn a blind eye and mind their own business. I'm not like that. I like to keep in touch."
"Speaking of blind eyes," I said. "You know anything about a gang of blind, religious nuts? They dress in robes and-"
"-Come out whenever there's a fog," he said, nodding. "Sure. I don't know much about them, except they've been around as long as I can remember."
"Have they got anything to do with The Cardinal?"
"No idea," he said.
When we returned to the heart of the metropolis I told him to stop. I paid the fare and gave him a hearty tip for his trouble.
"Not bad," he whistled appreciatively.
"If I ever need you again, can I call?"
"Sure." He gave me a grubby card. "My cell." He paused. "You're OK, Raimi. You need me, call. I'll come get you wherever you are."
"Thanks."
I waited around a while, then hailed another cab, directed the driver to Party Central, and gave him a tip up front to break a few speeding regulations. I had investigations to make.
capac
I stayed through the night. Secretaries and temps came and went in shifts but I remained, hooked to one terminal or another, eyes glued to screens or pages, fingers flicking over keys or through books, searching, absorbing, analyzing. The files were as detailed as Ama had claimed. Everything I'd done since coming to the city was listed. Bills, receipts, inventories. Transcripts of conversations with clients, friends and associates. Even the tennis scores from my day at the courts. The Cardinal must have spent a fortune compiling this.
But not a word about my past. I used the computers to cross-reference my name with everything they could muster, but it was like I'd asked them to find a ghost. As far as the records were concerned, before I'd come to this city I hadn't existed. In the face of such a lack of evidence, I could almost believe that I'd blinked into existence that day. Except I had memories. They were vague and I couldn't get a proper fix on them, but they were there. The face of the woman. My familiarity with old movies, songs and books that I liked.
It had to be amnesia. The Cardinal must have found me in a hospital as Ama had suggested, mind frayed, a wreck. He brought me here to serve one of his obscure purposes, fed me a false identity and set me loose. It was like something out of a sci-fi flick but I could buy it. Just about.
But what about Theo, Cafran Reed and Sonja Arne? They weren't amnesiacs. Maybe it was a big pretense but Theo had acted as if he truly thought I was his nephew. Cafran had studied Ama with a father's loving eyes. Sonja had doted on Adrian before she denied all knowledge of him. Easy to think they'd been bought, that they were playing The Cardinal's game, but I didn't think it was that simple. If I was any judge of character, they really believed that we were their relations.
I looked up Theo's files. He had two sisters, neither living in the city. I called both, my throat dry, not a hundred percent neither of them was my mother. I told them I was an old friend of Theo's, that I'd been away a long time and had just learned of his death. They were glad to talk about him. Neither recognized my voice. I probed gently, throwing innocent questions their way. One was divorced and childless, the other had six children, the eldest a mere seventeen years old. I thanked them for their time, promised to drop in if I was ever nearby, and severed my connections with my uncle once and for all. He wasn't my mother's brother. He'd probably never seen me before I arrived that dull and rainy day.
I searched for Y Tse Lapotaire and Adrian Arne. I figured they had to crop up somewhere. But not a whiff. I went back further. As Inti Maimi, Y Tse had been The Cardinal's right-hand man. There had to be files on him. You couldn't go through a period of your life as the second most powerful man in the city without leaving some trace. Even if his files had been pulled, there had to be mention of him in the records, photos of him in the press, like Ford Tasso, Sonja Arne and every other major mover.