“Willard?” Trader looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, shit, sure. Why not ask? I never seen a man so deep sunk in jolt and still moving around. I doubt he knows which end produces words and which produces shit.”
The sec man shook his head at him. “I truly urge you to zip that tongue shut. Way the baron lives and what he does is in that part of the field marked off as his business. Best we all leave it that way.”
Trader sniffed. “I always say that a man doesn’t ask doesn’t get.”
“Say what you like,” Ryan whispered, “but try saying it quiet.”
“Your brides are coming, gentlemen,” Arkadin announced. “Just think. This time tomorrow and it’ll be all for real. Happily married husbands.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I think of it constantly.”
NOTHING MUCH SEEMED to be happening and Abe had rolled over on his back, absently plucking straggling hairs from his mustache and watching a small flock of unidentified blue birds swooping and diving across the lighter blue of the perfect sky.
“Sure I felt a kind of tremble just then,” he said. “Another of those afterquakes?”
“Aftershock,” J.B. corrected him. “Felt it too.”
“Anything going down?”
“Fat guy’s sitting on an old sofa. Can’t tell where he begins and the furniture ends.”
“Mind if I catch up on sleep?”
J.B. laughed, pushing the brim of the fedora back off his forehead. “Way you snored last night, I wouldn’t have thought you needed any more sleep.”
“Never get too much.” Abe closed his eyes and folded his hands on his chest.
J.B. watched the tableau. It was an almost motionless scene. Every now and then one of the guards would shuffle his feet, or surreptitiously spit a dark stream of tobacco juice onto the watered turf.
He was particularly interested in the precarious state of the main building, perched on the very brink of the canyon. One wing had already fallen, and the rest squatted like a reluctant partner in a suicide pact.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?” Abe didn’t bother to open his eyes. “What is it?”
“It’s either a couple of tubs of lard covered in yesteryear’s curtains, or two women just moved out. Could be the old man’s daughters, way they’re curtsying and stuff.”
Abe belched and rolled over, rubbing at his eyes. “Finest gaudy sluts I ever saw. You reckon them as the daughters of a baron, J.B., then you’ve got to have a spent round under the hammer.” He laughed. “Daughters of a baron!”
One of the sec men closest to them half turned, as though he’d caught the snort of amusement from the little gunner. Then he turned back again.
“Quiet,” J.B. whispered. “Looks like they’re all waiting for something to happen.”
THE SISTERS WERE DRESSED in identical costumes. “Dresses” certainly wasn’t the right word for what they were wearing, Ryan thought.
In their brief stay as enforced guests in the old resort hotel, both he and Trader had noticed that some of the original floral furnishings still remained, though those exposed to the sun had faded badly. It looked like Cissie and Bessie Torrance had both found a closet somewhere that contained some of these fabrics and they had been cobbled together into bridal gowns.
Purple peonies clashed with orange tulips and electric-green lilacs with silvery lilies.
The two women swayed together through the hall, arm in arm, chins trembling, ignoring their bridegrooms-to-be.
Ryan and Trader watched them in silence as they vanished into the sunshine, following after their father. Immediately after them came a servant, trailing yards of cable, a microphone and a set of speakers.
“What are” Trader began.
“Baron wants to make sure everyone around the ville can hear the ceremony,” Arkadin answered.
“When do we get out there?” asked Ryan.
Arkadin glanced outside, waiting patiently for a signal from one of the other sec men. “Real soon,” he said confidently. “Real soon.”
“THAT SOMETHING happening yet?” Quickly bored with the lack of any movement in the proceedings, Abe had rolled over onto his back again.
“No.” J.B. had removed his spectacles and was assiduously polishing them on a piece of clean cloth from one of his bottomless pockets.