Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

heavily used, and we found a
compartment – half a carriage – to ourselves and
swung down on to the seats and faced each other across the table,
laughing.
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Tell me about it. You had
me a wee bit worried, I have to admit’
    She curled her fingers across the back of my hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I thought it
seemed like a good idea to disappear. That way, if Gantry or
anyone else leaned on you to give the files or the, you know,
other files back, you could honesdy say you couldn’t, you
really wouldn’t know where I was and would look genuinely
flummoxed, say if they went so far as to come back to our room
with you.’
    ‘Oh, right. I was genuinely flummoxed, I’ll give
you that. But if anyone was with me they could have made the same
guess as I did, and come to the station.’
    She shrugged. Td have kept out of sight.’ She combed her
fingers through a hanging fall of hair, smiling coyly. Tm no bad
at that.’
    ‘And caught the train at the last second?’
    ‘Or something.’ She didn’t seem interested
in raking over speculative contingencies. ‘Anyway,
we’re here, and we’ve got the goods. Nothing Gantry
can do to get them off us now.’
    ‘Aye. Still, I’ll have to wire him from Carron,
reassure him they’re in safe keeping.’
    ‘Like you said. So it’s all square.’
    The train began to move. I looked out at the apparently
shifting station and platform, gliding into the past in relative
motion, then looked back at her.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t as
straightforward as that.’
    She listened to my account of what Gantry had said about the
tinkers and the dark storage. When I’d finished she shook
her head slowly.
    ‘You should have just covered up about my being a
tinker,’ she said.
    That was a shock. ‘How could I?’ I protested.
‘He’d figured it already, and it would be easy enough
to check. I didn’t want to lie to him. Especially not lie
and get found out as soon as he picked up a phone.’
    Her mouth thinned. ‘I suppose not. Fair enough. Your
man’s trust matters in the long run. And maybe even being
evasive would’ve confirmed his suspicion.’ She looked
as if a weight had settled on her shoulders at that moment.
    ‘I would have been evasive – Truth help me, I
would have lied if you’d asked me!’
    ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘Ach,
this is so complicated!’
    ‘Hey, it’s all right,’ I said.
‘We’ll think of something. I’ll string Gantry
some kind of line, give ustime to check out the files, and
we’ll have them back in a, week. Take next Monday off too
if I have to.’
    Merrial’s eyes suddenly brimmed. She blinked hard.
    ‘Dhia, I hope it’s that easy!’ She
sighed. ‘I wish I could tell you more right now.’ She
shook her head. ‘But I can’t’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Oh, mo chridhel I’m a tinker, and tinkers
have to mind their tongues. Even if – especially if –
their tongues are spending time in other mouths!’
    ‘So you have secrets of your craft,’ I said dryly,
‘which you have to keep. That’s all right with
me.’
    She looked as if she were about to say something urgent, and
then all she said was, ‘I shouldn’t worry so much.
It’ll probably all turn out all right’
    ‘Yes, sure,’ I said, pretending to agree with her.
‘Oh, well. Shall we have a look at the files,
then?’
    ‘OK,’ she said, pulling them out ‘Tell you
what. You can look through the early one, and I’ll look
through the late. That’ll increase the chances that either
of us will find something we can understand.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ I said.
    I opened the folder from the 1990s and flipped impatiently
through thoroughly dull and worthy stuff about medical charity,
and some fascinatingly improbable economic statistics from
Kazakhstan. Towards the end I found something more personal:
pages ripped from a spiral-bound notebook, apparently a diary. I
pored over the Deliverer’s scrawl:
     
    Thurs Jul 16 98. Trawl of NYC’s remaining left bookshops
– nostalgia, I guess. Picked up Against the Current in St. Mark’s – trendy place, left pubns
marginalised, seems apt. The old Critique clique still banging on
– Suzi W in AtC, etc. At least they’re loyal –
unlike moi, huh. Then trekked over to Revo Bks –
Avakian’s lot, madder than ever. They have a dummy electric
chair in the shop for their Mumia campaign. Flipped through old