She frowned in concern and added, “Bruchinsky keeps pretty good discipline in the field, you know. You only see his lot when they come in to tie one on, but it’d take a battalion to replace them.”
“But you bring in two units for every three we get from Bruchinsky’s whole band, Mistress Crais,” Evertsen said. He was flattering her, but the words were still the cold truth.
Crais grinned. “That’s so,” she said. “Hunting’s a job best done alone, I think.”
There was a boom of laughter and a huge Slav squeezed through the entrance. His hair and beard were matted into a sheepskin vest worn fleece-side out, and a large rosary hung from his neck. “It is I, the great Bruchinsky, Colonel!” he said. “Eight hundred gold you owe us! We celebrate tonight!”
Evertsen saw his nephew’s nostrils flare, then tighten. The Rallier’s effluvium was a shock even to those prepared for it by experience. Well, Janni would smell worse things when he first stood on a battlefield fought over for several days in high summer; as he surely would, if he survived.
Crais and the Rallier exchanged brief comments in Zone Pidgin, a mixture of English, German, and several Slavic dialects. The two irregulars respected one another, though Evertsen knew there were undercurrents of mutual disdain as well: for a Slav on the one hand, for a woman on the other.
“We’ll be with you in a moment, Captain Bruchinsky,” Kuyper said. “We were just paying off Mistress Crais.”
He took out a roll of ten-auric coins and broke the paper on the edge of the strongbox. He stacked ten pieces of new-minted gold behind each of the larger ears. “That’s a hundred apiece for the two adults, and . . .”
Kuyper set six coins beside the first, the second, and the third of the small ears, then paused to break another roll. “And the last,” he said. “Sixty aurics apiece for each of the children, two hundred and forty in all.”
“What?” Bruchinsky said in amazement. “What’s this fucking shit? You pay for ear, not fucking man ear and kid ear!”
“Not any longer, Captain Bruchinsky,” Evertsen said coldly. “Capetown has decreed a change in the bounty, and of course we’re bound by their decision.”
“No fucking way I let you Draka bastards cheat me!” the Rallier shouted. “No fucking way!”
He flung back the sheepskin, exposing the sub-machine gun he slung beneath it. Like Crais’ rifle it was of Soviet manufacture, a Shpagin with a 71-round drum. Soviet weapons had a rugged willingness to function that made them favorites among troops who operated without the luxury of a unit armorer.
Neither Evertsen nor Kuyper spoke. Janni stood like a statue, his face unreadable. The only sign that the boy was aware of his surroundings was the way his eyes traversed the room: back and forth, taking it all in.
Bettina Crais bent forward and scooped her coins, stack by stack, into a calfskin purse. The gold chimed musically. She folded Evertsen’s note to his steward and stuck that in her purse as well.
“Crais!” said Bruchinsky. “You let them shit on you this way? You take their fucking sixty?”
Crais looked at the Rallier. Evertsen had seen gun muzzles with more expression. “It doesn’t look to me like there’s much choice, Bruchinsky,” she said. “You want to buy my string off me at the old price?”
“Fuck!” the big Slav said. “Fuck all fucking Draka!”
He laughed as explosively as sudden thunder and slapped his string down on the desk beside that of Crais. There were eight units, four of them so fresh that a drop of blood oozed from the adult’s torn lobe.
“Sure, pay me the fucking money,” he said cheerfully. “The boys all be so drunk in the morning they don’t know how much money we get. Me too, by Jesus!”
Crais settled the purse back under her cape. She gave a nod; more a lift of her chin. “I’ll be on about my business, then,” she said. “See you in a week or two, I reckon, Colonel.”
She stared at Janni again with her expressionless eyes. “Watch how you go, boy,” she said. “It’d be a pity if ears as cute as yours wound up hanging from a string.”