Awaiting him at the studio entrance was a black ofVoortrekker convertible, the Capetown-built skimwhich was the world’s most expenmeans of private transport. Mayor Black owned six of them personally, a matter about which Diablo had never been entirely happy despite the rationalization that the South Africans and the American knees were allegedly on the same side in the ultimate analysis; the argument smacked too much of the similar one which had justified the admission of Black Muslims to meetings of the Ku Klux Klan back in the last century. He scowled more deeply still as he was forced into the back seat of the Voortrekker by the macoots, who joined him, one on each side. The vehicle hummed off in the direction of the Mayor’s palace, the way ahead being cleared by the remote override which put the stop lights to red on all the cross streets at the touch of a button on the dash.
In spite of everything, Diablo sat with his mouth firmly shut. He had no idea what could have led up to this, but his best guess was that Mayor Black had got out of bed on the wrong side this morning. When he was in that sort of mood, he tended to enjoy re-asserting his authority over anyone who contributed to the econoof Blackbury, and Diablo certainly fell into that category. His canned vushows were among the city’s chief sources of foreign exchange, quite apart from their propaganda value, and it had revolutionized their relawith the American Federal authorities when they started to be able to pay their power and water taxes in hard currency like cedi and riyals.
He made a mental note to trace the macoot who had publicly insulted him and make sure his future was blacker than his backside. It would be difficult, in view of his issue mask, but in a small community like this one it wouldn’t be impossible.
Regardless of that, though, he kept telling himself, someone with Pedro Diablo’s status had no reason to be afraid of a fit of bad temper on the Mayor’s part.
He kept on telling himself so until he was actually shown into the Mayor’s presence-if you could call being herded into a room at gunpoint “being shown.” For Mayor Black was not alone. Seated next to his enormous desk was a honky: a thin man with a straggly apology for a beard supplemented by mismatched rozar flock, very pale hair combed carefully across the pink baldof his crown, knees primly together and hands folded on his lap.
Then Diablo’s heart sank like a stone in a deep well He knew that stern, thin-lipped face. The features of Herman Uys, top South African expert on race, were perhaps as well known as any in the modern world.
He was still struggling to work out why Uys’s presence in Blackbury had been kept secret from him, Pedro Diablo, when the Mayor uttered his only statement of the interview.
“Out of town, mongrel. You have three hours.”
Without warning Flamen’s comweb circuit reverted to normal and he found himself back in touch with Prior. The moment he realized, the latter’s face took on a shifty expression which Flamen recognized from years of close association: the look which signified that he was about to put over some really monstrous con job on the assumption-almost always justified-that the person he was dealing with had overlooked some very subtle trap. He might be na‹ve in some matters, as witness his ready acceptance of a Lar as everything the advertising claimed, but when it came to closing a deal weighted in his own favor he was brilliantly devious. That, chiefly, was why Flamen put up with him. He had never dared tarnish his own image of himself by learning the whore’s-trading skills required to keep afloat in the cut-throat ocean of modern business, yet he correspondingly did not dare to forgo them altogether. Prior was a perfect compromise: the epitome of self-deluded honor, who could dismiss the most flagrant kind of cheating from his conscience on the grounds that he had thought of it and he could not possibly be a dishonest man.
Flamen tensed. If he, now, was to become the target for Prior’s personal talent.