Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,24
off in front of a worn four-story building that is the lone holdout for modernization on the corner of King Williams Street and Waymouth Street. I keep my back turned to the high-rise going up across the wide boulevard of King Williams; the windows are in, and they're reflecting the sunlight directly across the street.
The bank's windows, on the other hand, are heavily tinted and the climate is tightly controlled at a reasonable temperature. The décor goes for ostentatious in its effort at replicating someone's vision of an aristocratic drawing room from a century ago. The ubiquitous security guard near the entrance straightens slightly when I enter. He's wearing a dark blue wool suit and an expensive silk tie.
It's that sort of bank.
I ignore the security guard who is eyeing me because I'm dressed down for bank's normal clientele, and I adopt the sort of laconic swagger that suggests more money than fashion sense as I head for the client services desks in the back. The ones with the comfortable leather chairs next to them. I throw myself down into one of the chairs, kick my legs out, and stare at the finely attired young man behind the desk.
The nameplate on the desk reads Rupert Gillam, and his sandy brown hair is cut very precisely across the back of his head, a scant millimeter above the finely tailored line of his collar. His suit is perfectly muted for a conservative banker, and his tie is a shade of purple somewhere between aubergine and plum.
“How may I help you?” he asks, setting aside whatever he had been pretending to be working on as I had approached.
“I need some money,” I say with just enough bluntness that he hesitates for a second, his eyes flicking across my attire and general scruffy condition. I smile, and it is my pristine dentition that convinces him that I'm not some homeless person who has come in to rob the bank.
“Certainly, Mister…”
I tell him the family name Callis and I had been using during our jaunt through late-nineteenth-century London. “Call me Silas though,” I say.
He pulls out a keyboard tray and clacks on the keys. “Do you know your account number?” he asks.
I stare at him and he fidgets for a moment, his eyes flickering back and forth from me to his computer screen. “Oh,” he says as he spots something on his monitor. “Oh,” he says again as he starts to read. “Yes,” he continues, licking his lips nervously, and I imagine he's gotten to the part where the account history goes back a hundred plus years. “Certainly, sir,” he finishes. “There's… ah… there's a password.”
“Of course there is,” I say, briefly wondering what it could be. Genevieve,” I settle on. Callis hadn't warned me, which meant it had to be something obvious to both of us. The name of the banker's daughter who Callis had a thing for, for instance.
Rupert nods. “Well,” he says, placing his hands on his desk. He smiles. His dental work isn't as good as mine, though it looks to have cost his family a great deal. “What can I do for you today?”
Finally, some good news. “I'll need some cash. About this much.” I hold two fingers several centimeters apart. “And a debit card of some kind. Something I can use to get more. Oh, and the name of the place where you get your suits.”
TEN
Where Rupert gets his suits turns out to be a place a few blocks away. The stack of cash is easy enough—that only requires a looping scrawl that passes for a signature—but the card will take an hour or two and so I spend it being fitted for a suit I'll never pick up. I buy other clothes too, an outfit that makes me indistinguishable from any other fashion-aware man in Adelaide. Afterward, I stop at a juice shop on the way back to the bank. A mega dose of chia and wheatgrass powder. Processing kills a lot of the green but in large enough quantities, it'll help keep the thirst at bay.
I'm heading to the hospital next, and I can't afford to lose control there. Regardless of what it smells like, most of the blood in the building is going to be compromised. My immune system is already under enough stress.
The Royal Adelaide Hospital is located in North Adelaide, on the south side of the River Torrens, and I cross the gently flowing water on a pedestrian foot bridge near the zoo. I'm