Chương 3: What the Dead Man Was

I looked down on the paper and completed the filling-in, as things stood, and if there were gaps or missing things, well then practically every death had unanswered questions. The old man had obviously, somehow, incongruously, cared more for his beard than much else at the end of his life. I thought of this, and wanted to offer him this small grace. If he were an ochre, Amalia would do this, but he was not, and I took up the comb and turned back to the slab.

I worked the comb through the beard from below, the way a barber does, and it came through clean. No lice and no burrs. Whatever the streets had done to the rest of him, they had not touched his beard. Under the comb I could see what I had only half-marked in the arcade: a blade had run a gentle curve along the jawline, close and even, no nicks, no ragged tail at the hinge where amateurs always leave one. As unanswered questions go, Sinon would have thought this minor, but to me it stuck out like a sore tooth.

A man sleeping under an arcade does not get barbered. I set the comb down and rinsed my hands at the drain. The water took the grey away and ran clear. Corso's kettle was ticking itself cool on the hob as I dried on the linen and pulled the stool up to the foot of the slab. The feet first. Now washed; they had been grimy, but as I had noted on the form that grime had come away easily, with little scrubbing.

Now I saw that the soles were calloused to leather, the old white lines of blisters healed over blisters, the slight spread of the toes that comes from decades of walking unshod or nearly. Scarring from where he had stepped on sharp somethings was everywhere; under the toe, on the heel: cuts and bruises. On the face of it, a poor man's feet, but I also thought that these were not a Varenza beggar's feet.

The city's poor sit, mostly; begging is a sedentary trade, cold and still, and the side edges of their feet become as calloused as the soles. And those who walk get the polished cobblestones as their only public benefit, giving them hard feet, but with much less scarring. These feet had travelled. Had kept travelling, until recently. The hands second. Calloused, and again, something was… if not wrong exactly, there was something not quite right.

A labourer's calluses sit in the pads, palm and grip, and are shaped by the tool that they use. This man's hands were hardened at the fingertips, the first knuckles, the web of the thumb, and everything in a pattern that I could not recognise (and it was very rare that I could not read the marks on a body). Not rope. Not stone. Not the loom. But something precise, intentional, done tens of thousands of times, in the same pattern again and again. Another question, unanswered.

I ask it of all of them, out of habit, more the room than the corpse: what did you do? Some days, when I know myself to be alone, I even ask out loud. You would be surprised to learn how often the patterns of death match the patterns of life. Stevedores are either crushed under a heavy load on the docks, or crushed by the pain-killing herbs they all take for their broken backs when they retire. Those that come down from the palaces have either run afoul of a rival's blade, or have eaten themselves into the grave.

I had always loved these little mysteries, I think. Even during those years when jealousy and a lust for revenge burned so bright they left no room for appreciating what I had, I remember finding solace and joy in hypothesising the causes and consequences that landed clients on my slab. And in twenty-two years, a man builds up a comprehensive library of these causes and consequences. Normally it was a matter of careful observation, and then to identify the mental shelf that held the knowledge.

But this was different. A sound brought me out of my reveries, and the door swung before Corso's shoulder finished pushing it, which was his way of knocking. He had a sheet in his hand and I easily read from his face that there was something bothering him.

"Eleven went out this morning, chief. I counted eleven, then I wrote eleven down, and then I loaded eleven. A runner came back from the cart office, delivering a return of only ten strips. This keeps happening, and Sinon was gruff enough the last time. Someone is stealing, and—""You counted wrong a fortnight ago, did you not?"

"I don't count wrong." He poured; steam climbed off the pail.

"Eleven ankle strips went onto eleven bodies, I cut them myself, I strung them myself. Ten came back off the cart. Somebody kept one, somewhere. Who would even want them?" Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Or did you lose a body somewhere?" I muttered, but my mind was still focused on the body in front of me and I don't think he heard me. He went to the shelf for cloths, still talking.

"You still on the man from the arcade? Set him aside and get started on the cooper, who has been here for longer. His wife came in earlier and paid for a red strip, if we can get him out for a Saturday burial. Then, the woman from the Rope Walk. She's been here for too long already, and her parish has been asking—""I cannot just set him aside. The guild wants his report by tomorrow's dusk bell. Itemised, I told you."

"Itemised." He snorted.

"Get it done then. The cooper's grave is dug for Saturday and the grave-digger doesn't wait on your pen. Nobody's paid a copper for the arcade man, and nobody will." He began to hum over that, some dockside thing with no tune in it, and the sound went round the small room and came back worse.

"Corso."

"Hm."

"Don't."

"Don't what." He looked over my effects report on the table, still humming. Then, "Itemised," he said, with satisfaction, as he tapped a finger on the page.

"Down to the button. You even kept the bread, Vale. I'd pay a copper to watch the factor's clerk scratch his head as he wonders what to do with that."

"You haven't got a copper to spare."

"I'd borrow this one." He picked up one of the old man's coppers sitting next to the report on the table and held it up in case there was any confusion about what he was referring to.

"Then use it to pay the clerk that copper. I get entertainment, he gets a copper, and everybody's happy."

"Except now the factor's clerk has to write us a new report, asking about the missing copper, and—" I broke into a smile.

"I see. Devious, Corso." Grinning back at me, he set down the coin and took up his sheet and left for the doorway.

"Hey," I asked of his retreating back, "did you want something, or did you just come in to disturb me?" Not turning to face me, he simply waved the hand holding the sheet and began to hum. With Corso's humming bouncing off the marble walls in the corridor outside, I turned back to the coat, picked it up, turned it around — and for the first time noticed the patches. Down the inside of the right front side, a dozen of them, sewn with a thread that must have been of good quality to hold so long.

And the patches themselves were silk, and not Varenzan silk. A tighter weave, shining almost oily as I brought them closer to the lantern. One scrap showed a corner of an embroidered bird that seemed familiar, and I struggled to place it. Why was that crust of bread cherished, and this obviously cared-for coat was not? Then it came to me, where I had seen this bird before. A dead merchant, once, who had traded past the western straits and come home with a fever instead of a fortune.

He had been carrying a sealed wooden box which my investigation found to contain a relic from a treasure hunt. A beggar, mending his coat with silk worth more than the bier he was lying on. A coat he did not seem to hold in any significant regard. Stolen, the watch would say, if I were to ask them. But the reading of my skill belied that interpretation: something stolen would have shone brightly, with shame or with glee. It is as if the man did not know he even owned this coat.

I wrote it all in my own ledger, in my small careful hand: feet: decades of travel. hands: calloused, pattern unidentified. coat: patched with foreign silk, imagery possibly associated with western straits. No one, except perhaps myself in another decade, would read it. When the book was full it would join the others in the regesta, and I had never seen anyone but myself pull down the old journals. As for myself, on slow days, I found entertainment, comfort and learning in reading and re-reading the older entries.

As my experience and knowledge had grown, I had found a type of enjoyment which was disturbing, even to myself, in annotating updated and correct conclusions in the margins of past investigations. It had reached the point where I tried to hide my actions from Corso, or we would spend the entire day making fun of my incessant need to solve mysteries decades old. But today, I had more than enough mysteries right here. I opened the old man's mouth to clean it, as I always do, and stopped when I saw what was inside.

Four teeth missing from the lower jaw. Not lost… removed. And not front teeth, teeth that come out with some will and a jerk, but molars, far back in his mouth, which I knew would normally be affixed so that only somebody both determined and strong could remove them. The sockets were still raw, the gum broken and dark with scab, the wounds too fresh to have anything to do with his death. Days old, no more.

I have seen poor men's teeth gone before, gone to rot and hunger and the long neglect that empties a mouth by degrees. That kind of loss leaves scars long healed, bone smoothed over, a jaw that learned to live without. This was not that. These teeth had been taken out, all four at once, and recently, by someone who almost knew what they were doing. The scabbing was clean-edged, the sockets whole, no tearing where a clumsy hand would have torn. I turned the head gently and considered.

What made the missing teeth valuable? I noted the mouth in the ledger: four teeth, lower jaw, removed. I set the pen down. And this is about the time when the strangeness of it all finally settled on me. Why did the guild hurry this? Why did they want him gone before their barge docked? Who wants to see this man in the pits so quickly and why?

"Exposure sounds… too convenient," I said quietly, to the dead man, in the same even tone I'd used all morning.

"But you knew that already."