Corellia: Don't Bother to Knock

[Talus Longstar]

We went up to the office.

I'd been renting the place for about a year. It wasn't in the best location, but it was cheap and it had a separate waiting room where prospective clients could flip through old issues of Corellian Life. I gestured the woman by all of that, into the office itself.

The room was small and clean, without much clutter. I had a desk, three chairs and a couple of cabinets for storing files and such. A private investigators license hung on the wall behind me, side by side with a decoration of honour from CorSec. On the desk I had a calendar, a blotter and a framed picture of my wife Leeadra and daughter Cerri looking happy, probably on account of the fact that I wasn't in the picture.

I turned on a small lamp and it made the room seem a little more welcoming.

I shrugged out of my overcoat, folded it over the back of my chair and put my hat down on the corner of the desk. She didn't shed the cloak completely but she eased back the hood and pushed the heavy fabric from her shoulders. She was young or at least comfortably rich enough to look young. She had pale eyes and a little button nose, a little like Leeadra. I rubbed my thumb against the underside of my wedding ring as I sat down behind the desk and she sat opposite, in one of the upholstered chairs.

She gave the arm of the chair a squeeze and it elicited, from the look on her face, a satisfying creak of old leather. “You have a... cosy little office, Mr. Longstar. Very nice.” She looked around, though that didn't take long at all, then let her eyes wander for a moment to the rain streaming down the window pane, the glass tinted purple by a neon sign hanging from the wall a few windows down from my office.

“I'm not looking to sell.” She laughed, the kind of sparkling laughter that took years to hone but could be deployed on cue. I didn't wait for the witty retort. “You said you were looking for two someone's. Assuming I'm one of them, who's the other?”

If she was offended by me cutting to the chase, she didn't show it. That practised smile was bulletproof. “Straight to business, then.”

“That isn't why you're here, isn't it? Business?”

She reclined, crossing one leg over the other. “Yes. I've heard you're a discreet man, Mr. Longstar.”

“I can be, when the mood takes me.” I reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a notepad and pen. I'd tried using a data-card and stylus to take notes in the past and it just felt... wrong. Seeing me reach for the pad, she paused, lips still parted. “Go on,” I said, “Mrs...?”

“Larel... Ms. Brimseld.”

I recognised the family name, though I couldn't quite place where from. “Old Corellian?”

She looked pleased at that question. “Yes. Are you familiar, then, with the phrase hustru fönster, Mr. Longstar?”

Since the Imperial occupation, there had been a resurgence in speaking Old Corellian. I guess people thought it gave them an edge on the Empire or showed that they were more proud of their heritage than the average man on the street. It was a fad. In some families, though, it had always been there. There were still branches of my family – maybe more like sticks, shoved in the mud – who wouldn't call themselves anything but Langsteorra.

For all the baggage that came with it, Longstar was fine by me as far as names went, but I still remembered how to talk the talk. Hustru fönster meant 'lover in the window'. It was a throwback to the days when you married Corellian or you didn't marry at all. To get around the old prejudices, people would marry for commercial or political reasons, then make their lover into the hired help, so they could have their ryshcate and eat it.

“I might have heard it,” I said.

“Then you'll know who I'm looking for.”

“I'm flattered, Ms. Brimseld, but I'm a married man – and not in the market to play Astrild.” I pictured myself in the outfit of the mythical goddess of romance; it wasn't pretty.

For the first time, something other than sweetness and light played on her features. Her eyebrows bent together a little. “I don't need a matchmaker. I need you to find my lover. He's.. missing.”