love for anyone using the back way without cause… wanted no one seen in the main
room who had not come in by the front door and wanted no access alarms going off
in comp. Ngo’s was a place where the market flourished, and as such it tried to
be cleaner than most, one of almost a score of bars and entertainment
concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the
traffic of merchanters… a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and
restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row. Most of the bars were
open; the theaters and the chapel and some of the sleepovers were burned out
shells, but the bars functioned, most like Ngo’s, as restaurants as well, the
channels through which station still fed the population, arid black-market food
augmented what the station was willing to supply.
He cast cautious glances one way and the other as he approached the front and
ever-wide door of Ngo’s, not obvious looks around, but a rhythm of walking and
looking as a man might who was simply making up his mind which bar he wanted.
A face caught his eye, abruptly, heart-stoppingly. He delayed a half a beat and
looked toward Mascari’s, across the corridor at the emptying of nine onto the
docks. A tall man who had been standing there suddenly moved and darted within
Mascari’s.
Dark obscured his vision, a flash of memory so vivid he staggered and forgot all
his pattern. He was vulnerable for that instant, panicked… turned for Ngo’s
doorway blindly and went inside, into the dim light and pounding music and the
smells of alcohol and food and the unwashed clientele.
The old man himself was tending bar. Josh went to the counter and leaned there,
asked for a bottle. Ngo gave it to him, no asking for his card. That all came
later, in the back room. But his hand shook in taking the bottle, and Ngo’s
quick hand caught his wrist. “Trouble?”
“Close one,” he lied… and perhaps not a lie. “I got clear. Gang trouble. Don’t
worry. No one tracked me. Nothing official.”
“You better be sure.”
“No problem. Nerves. It’s nerves.” He clutched the bottle and walked away toward
the back, stopped a moment against the back doorway that led into the kitchen
and waited to be sure his exit was not observed.
One of the Mazianni, maybe. His heart still pounded from the encounter. Someone
with Ngo’s under surveillance. No. His imagination. The Mazianni did not to need
to be so subtle. He unstopped the bottle and drank from it, Downer wine, cheap
tranquilizer. He took a second long drink and began to feel better. He
experienced such flashes… not often. They were always bad. Anything could
trigger it, usually some small and silly thing, a smell, a sound, a momentary
wrong way of looking at a familiar thing or ordinary person… That it should have
happened in public—that most disturbed him. It could have attracted notice.
Maybe it had. He resolved not to go out again today. Was not sure about
tomorrow. He took a third drink and a last look over the patrons at the dozen
tables, then slipped back into the kitchen, where Ngo’s wife and son were
cooking up the orders. He paid them a casual glance, received sullen stares in
return, and walked on through to the storeroom.
He pushed the door open on manual. “Damon,” he said, and the curtain at the rear
of the cabinets opened. Damon came out and sat down among the canisters they
used for furniture, in the light of the batteried lamp they used to escape
comp’s watchful economy and infallible memory. He came and sank down wearily,
gave Damon the bottle and Damon took a drink. Unshaven, both of them, with the
look of the unwashed, depressed crowds which collected down here.
“You’re late,” Damon said. “You trying to give me ulcers?”
He fished the cards out of his pocket, arranged them by memory, made quick notes
with a grease pencil before he should forget. Damon gave him paper and he wrote
the details for each one, and Damon did not talk to him the while.