“Are you okay, Guido?” she sez, peerin’ at me concerned-like. “You sound a little flat.”
“I’m all right. I’ll tell youse though, Tananda, this assignment is gettin’ me down a little.”
“Well cheer up, things may have been rocky so far, but working together, we should be able to make some progress. Tell you what, find Nunzio and fill him in what we’re doing. Then we’ll meet back here and give it a try … say, tomorrow night?”
“Sure, why not?”
“In the meantime,” she sez, openin’ her disguise mirror again and startin’ to fiddle with the knobs, “come on downstairs and I’ll buy you a drink or two.”
For a minute that sounds like a good idea. Then I remember Frumple.
“I think we’d better cool it, Tananda. We gotta be careful about how much we’re seen together here.”
“What do you mean?”
“The reason we’re hangin’ out here is we found out that the proprietor’s a Deveel. The trouble is, he seems to know the Boss and has some kind of grudge against him. So far, he doesn’t know we’re connected with the Boss, but if he gets suspicious …”
“A Deveel?”
“Yeah. Says his name is Frumple.”
“Frumple? So he’s back in operation again, is he?”
“You know him?”
“Sure. He teamed up with Isstvan against us back when I first met Skeeve … and you’re right, if he gets suspicious, a disguise spell wouldn’t keep him from figuring out who I am.”
“Maybe we should wait and try to run our gambit somewhere other than here,” I sez, tryin’ to keep the hope out of my voice.
“No need,” Tananda grins. “As long as he doesn’t make the connection between us beforehand, we should still be able to pull it off tomorrow night. In fact, it’ll be killing two birds with one stone, in a manner of speaking. I don’t mind doing Frumple a bit of dirt in the course of action, but it ‘ looks like his place will be at ground zero when the fireworks start. By the time he puts it together, we’ll be long gone.”