Dispatch from a Colored Room

He wrote the letters by hand, did he not?

No applause followed Pel's last line; she slipped into the wings and disappeared, never emerging from backstage to talk amongst the members of the audience, as the man who had preceded her had done. A gangly, yellow-haired young man stood and suggested an intermezzo before the next speech, and the audience began to chatter and diffuse.

A woman in her thirties worked her way through the crowd toward the yellow-haired man; she was dressed oddly for the crowd, in loose, well-cut dark suit, a polychrome scarf and a few large pieces of false jewelry gesturing at camouflage. On closer examination, though, it was clear that the suit had recently been scrubbed of several black and brown stains; there was dirt under her fingernails, a ragged cut just at her hairline. "Simeon Leblanc, am I right?"

The yellow-haired man smiled. "I can't think of the last time someone called me Simeon. What told you?"

The well-dressed woman pointed at his throat. "The scar. I'm a physician. Hana Tailleur."

Leblanc shook her hand. "Good. We need people like you, now more than ever. What can I do for you?" His eyes flickered behind her; she looked back, following his gaze, but saw nothing unusual.

"You're throwing in with your... what would you call her? Your stepmother?"

"I call her by real name. But we can call her Pel. And yes." Neither his face nor his body seemed to change, but something about Leblanc's gaze intensified, and Tailleur felt an icy lance transfix her. “We don’t support the resistance. It was a decision carefully taken. And not negotiable."

"I won't negotiate. I just wanted to ask you a question about your grandfather's illness."

Only razored silence came from Leblanc. His eyes flickered again to look behind Tailleur.

"The chancre he described. I'm not a neurologist, but the principal symptoms would have been problems with movement. Tremor, difficulty walking. Not behavioral problems." She paused a moment, searched his grey eyes with her own. "Hard to tell from the letters what he was suffering, of course. He didn't talk much about the symptoms, did he?”

Something in Leblanc's gaze seemed to say Go on.

"Well," Tailleur said, setting her stance against Leblanc's examination as she might against a gale, "he wrote the letters by hand, did he not? So you can tell for yourself." She blinked once, staring at the air in front of her, then met his eyes again. "Honestly, I can't believe she said she'd put a dandelion out, after what they did to your grandfather—"

Again, it was difficult to tell what exactly had changed in Leblanc's face, but where she had seen a slender pillar of ice and steel, Tailleur now saw a gangling boy. His grey eyes looked at her, brimming with terrible questions; then they looked back behind her again, and coldness and hardness settled back into his posture, his hands, the jut of his chin. She looked back again, still seeing nothing. "Wait here," said Leblanc, "we may have need of you—" And he was gone, leaping the seats two by two toward some indistinct and unmemorable object at the back of the theater, from which her gaze slid like water on glass.