Work Text:
April 27, 3:02 AM
Interpol Headquarters
Office of Franziska von Karma
An imposing glass building, the sycamore trees which surround it swaying gently in the warm French breeze. Only one window is still alight. Inside, a woman scratches her pen across the fourth of seven Red Notices that morning, an arrest warrant for the cybercriminal Dmitri Turnitov; that done, she places a gloved hand to her forehead and sighs.
It isn't easy to see the cracks in Franziska. Her silver-blue hair is cut carefully short, her brooches and cufflinks polished to a shine against her starched white shirt. But her office, though neat, is overfull with papers, and dark circles are etched beneath her eyes. Fools and Dünnbrettbohrer might leave after a puny eight hours of work, but there is no shirking perfection. She walks in no one’s shadow, and she depends on no one’s charity.
Three more signatures. The last is misfiled, a €80,000 requisition notice for…some kind of avant-garde coffeemaker from Agent Ullman. He’s written it so sloppily, and stamped it with so many “URGENT” bulletins, that it takes her nearly an hour to work out which department handles such luxury requests. A bit of sunlight seeps into the room; the Interpol staff officer chooses that moment to knock on the door.
“Oh,” she says. “You’re still here.”
“A foolishly redundant observation.”
“Whatever happened to that assistant of yours? Kris, Krissie, you know the one? She was Swedish like you, so I thought you’d get along swimmingly! I was quite taken aback to get her resignation notice…”
Franziska’s eye twitches. Her fingers curl reflexively, as if around a whip handle. “Kristina Tirricall and I did not work well together. I found her…highly strung.”
“Hmph! Agent Ullman never complains-”
Further conversation is precluded when Franziska slams the door in the staff officer’s face. Maybe the Americans weren’t so bad. Universally incompetent police forces, Teflon-coated defense attorneys, moronic drivers, and chocolate like cardboard, but at least they understood that prosecutors should be in charge!
Speaking of America…
She swivels one of the desktop monitors towards her, ignoring the fuzziness of her head. 5 AM CEST is approximately press time on the West Coast, bringing with it a glut of news, indictments, daily reports, and chaff into the Interpol database. Information that might be of her brother or that attorney, or another ludicrous crime up in the foothills—and if it is, she’ll know it first. How satisfying it is to confound Miles Edgeworth by explaining to him all the details, including the obvious culprit, of a murder that’s only just hit his desk.
Her gaze snags on something. Nochmal dasselbe—it cannot be.
Briefcase, passport, spare gloves. Franziska’s fingers twitch again; she’ll pick up her whip from the security desk on the way out. She speed-dials the staff officer, cutting off the woman’s prattling drivel. “Handle my meetings. I’m going abroad. It seems someone has learned nothing at all.”
April 28, 9:30 AM
International Antiquarian Book Fair
Show Floor
The fifth and final day of the show. The atmosphere is subdued—not hardly surprising, considering recent occurrences—but a healthy contingent of collectors, students, and gawkers drift through the aisles, poking their grubby paws at priceless manuscripts. Fools the lot of them, ignorant of what they destroy with merely a brush of each oily finger, but Franziska stays her whip hand. She’s not here for them.
Past the near-bare Elise Deauxnim shelves (strange how death boosts one’s popularity), the de Plume signing, and the first-edition Hawingways, a wide space is left clear around the organizer’s booth. The air smells of paper, disinfectant, and, just faintly, of iron. Sprawled out in front of the empty table is a string outline of a body, surrounded by suspiciously rusty stains and a plethora of evidence markers; as she approaches, gritty white powder crunches beneath her boots. Someone’s liberally coated the entire area in fingerprint dust.
Franziska pinches her nose in frustration. In her periphery, a blonde woman tries anxiously to sneak away without catching her eye. Franziska cracks her whip. “Do you want to explain yourself?”
She jumps, twisting a notebook in her hands. “Um…hi, Franziska. Well—I mean, nothing happened really-”
"Adrian Andrews! You were framed for murder again!”
It had been a fairly straightforward case, by American standards; that was why it’d only made it to the Interpol databases after the trial was already concluded. Adrian had been the event manager for the book fair, and the sole person sitting at the table when visiting scholar Lin Quistix collapsed from the knife wound in his back. Two passing witnesses, Monet Tiburn and Alexa Connor, swore up and down they’d seen Adrian stab him; the police investigation turned up a large lump sum, indicative of blackmail, recently transferred from her to Quistix. Motive, opportunity, and even fingerprints on the knife!
A bit of light glints off Adrian’s glasses; her gaze drops to the floor and sticks there. Just as she did years ago in the Engarde case, she wears a blue, sleeveless blouse, but the sleek fabric is worn and dusty from the detention center. “I was…worried that’s why you came,” she mutters. “But I was innocent…”
Innocent—no such thing. No way to know, not truly. When prosecution is undertaken, it should succeed; to do otherwise is a sign of rank incompetence. These thoughts run rampant through Franziska’s mind; they are not hers, but her father’s. She stifles them in a fit of anger. “You shouldn’t have been in that situation, Adrian Andrews! I gave you a whip to defend yourself. I showed you to use it. So you would not keep on trusting the wrong people!”
“I’m sorry…”
The true culprit in the Quistix murder, when the trial had been gaveled to a conclusion, had been Adrian’s superior: Brad Akhter, head of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. She’d done everything he asked of her—routing the book fair payment through her own account—moving the Elizabethan letter-opener into its case—staffing the information booth during the midday shift—trusting the goddamned grey-haired man, even to the witness stand—and nearly died for it.
Just like with Atmey. Just like with Corrida. Just like with Inpax.
A thump. Franziska starts, surprised. The sellers’ booths around them all have chairs, some hard-backed, some velvet, but Adrian’s chosen instead to sit on the concrete floor. Her legs are tucked up to her chest, her face hidden. “It’s my fault. Always my fault. I’d thought I was getting better…stronger. But I’m not, am I?”
Franziska scuffs her boots on the ground. Few others at the fair are paying them much heed. Adrian cannot expect her to lie. “No.”
“I hate it!”
“What?”
“I hate being this way. Dependent. A windup doll for anyone who wants to order me about, because they know I’ll do it. And yet…” She laughs, but there’s no joy in it. Her words are muffled, cracked. “I don’t want to become a cynic, either. I don’t want to stop trusting people, believing in them.”
“Fool!” She cannot keep the acid from her voice. “You should know better. It is not that you trust anyone, Adrian Andrews, but that from them you are left believing the wrong thing.”
“…oh. But you can help me, can’t you?”
She should be kind to this woman, crying on the floor. She has been, before. Franziska moves to grab Adrian’s shoulder, pull her to her feet—but, at that moment, she cannot will herself to do so. Something in her feels cold and reticent and…
Scared?
No, that cannot be. She, Franziska von Karma, frightened?
Believing the wrong thing. Following a cause to extinction. The same flaw that doomed her father, that buried its cruel claws into him before she was ever born; the same flaw that Miles Edgeworth accuses her, all too frequently, of harboring. How is she—who couldn’t save Papa, who can hardly save herself—ever meant to save Adrian, too?
Her teeth grind against each other. She pivots on her heel, and stalks stiffly away from a bewildered Adrian. “Pull yourself together."
April 28, 10:44 PM
The Carabiner Club
Front Bar
Sparkling white wine glimmers at the bottom of her glass. The cheap American variety, thin and oversweetened; Franziska has been nursing this drink well over an hour, ignoring the displeasure of the tattooed woman behind the bar. Her laptop flashes with harsh, bright light—query complete—and she flicks through the report there.
Money and fear. The basest of motives. For decades, Akhter and Quistix had together forged the provenance of rare books—selling them at vastly inflated prices, then pocketing the difference. Hochschulgebildeterlügner, and shameless ones at that. But when Quistix, a man made thin and gaunt by guilt, his daughter dying of cancer, wanted to finally admit his crimes, Akhter had panicked and stabbed his erstwhile partner through the heart.
The modus operandi of any rare book collector is to stall the ravages of time, to prevent decay eating away at fragile vellum and paper. Easy enough, in such an environment, for Akhter to preserve Quistix’s body and obscure the time of death. Then the bastard set out to frame Adrian. Tiburn and Connor, conducting an illicit affair behind the admissions desk, he blackmailed into a lie; the body, he stuffed into a swiveling bookcase so its weight would ultimately spill it onto the floor in front of Adrian.
Franziska growls, stretches the whip between her hands until she can hear the leather strain. So simple it is, all laid out in neat bullet points. But what if this had been her case? Her prosecution? Would she have believed in it—pursued it to the bitter end—clung so tight to the liar Akhter’s story that eventually it snapped under the weight?
Given the available evidence…probably. Yes. Several times before, in fact. Why must it be so hellishly difficult to know what to believe in?
Franziska downs the rest of the wine. She grimaces, then flicks her whip, wrapping it around the wrist of the nearest unlucky waitress. “Where is your checking service? I will pay eight dollars for this. It is not worth more.”
“Um…hi again…”
“Pah! Have you been following me, Adrian Andrews?”
She, at least, has managed to find some solace in the intervening hours: her hair is neatly combed, hanging loose below her shoulders, and her expression bears little trace of the tension it hard earlier. Between her fingers she clutches a small, white business card. “I needed to talk with you. And…er, a few of the court staff said they’d seen you at this bar before.”
“Which ones? What fools dare admit to spying on me?”
“Not spying. Just—you stand out, even here.”
“’Even here’?”
Adrian looks suddenly uncomfortable; but if she blushes, the moody underlighting of the club obscures it. “I’ve seen a few other women with whips-”
“Enough. You came to say something. Is it legal advice? I know the pertinent statutes of all UN member-states, and…” Franziska grits her teeth. She is not scared. Certainly not of helping a—a friend. And she will not be weak again in front of Adrian. She uncoils her wrist, then motions her into the seat across. “A von Karma does not forget her promises. I told you once you could consult me about anything, and I meant it.”
Back and forth the card goes in her fingers. “Right. Well…I’m out of a job.”
“Absolute prosecutorial immunity. You cannot sue over that.”
“I don’t want that job back, actually. So many fragile books…I was always worried I’d drop one and cover it in paint…” She places the business card on the table, then pushes it towards Franziska. It’s Adrian’s own.
Adrian Andrews, MBA.
Logistics | Management | Organization
“You’re giving this to me? Why?”
She drums her fingers. “I thought about what you said, how I’m…vulnerable to believing the wrong thing. So I want to work for you, Franziska.”
Of everything she expected-! She thumps her hand on the table. “The two are unconnected. And I certainly don’t need any assistance.”
“After the trials, you’ve always helped me; you’ve always tried to point me in the right direction. But it’s like, without you, I get lost. So—I mean, if you’re willing—I can work in your office, I can be near to you, and you can keep me getting into another mess like this.” She smiles. “I trust you to do that.”
“But…”
“As for the personal assistant job, you’re clearly exhausted, Franziska. I can see the luggage stickers on your laptop; when’s the last time you had a chance to rest? Interpol certainly has the budget for it…”
“I need—to think.”
Adrian’s trust, in her hands. What if she endangers it? Misuses it?
But the way Adrian makes her request—it reminds her, oddly enough, of her brother, and his descriptions of the adversarial legal system. The prosecution and the defense may both be blinkered, or misguided, or wrong; but in working together, they uncover the truth. Perhaps she and Adrian can be something similar. (And perhaps it will stop this foolish girl from ending up in quite so many murder cases, too.)
She takes Adrian’s card, and tucks it into her pocket. “Very well. You’re hired. Probationary, of course.”
“Really?”
“I do not lie, Adrian Andrews.”
“But what about—background checks? Documents?”
“Your data’s already in the system. Anyone who is a person of interest in multiple homicide cases is kept tabs on.” Which describes nearly everyone Franziska knows, even the small children. What a strange place America is.
“I see.” Adrian snags a glass of seltzer water from a passing waitress, then raises it in a toast. “To our partnership, then, and to…following the right cause, from here on out.”
Franziska cautiously mimics the gesture. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe it can’t last. But, at least for a moment, the unsettled feeling that’s so long set her on edge is more stable now, like she’s finally found solid ground. Then she cracks her whip. “This is no time for celebration. We have important international business to be done, assistant.”
“We do? Already?”
“Yes! Your salary. I mean to requisition it from Agent Ullman’s department. The man is allowed far too much leeway when it comes to coffee…”