“The palace of Lord Purvis!” the driver said to Adele with a flourish of her arm. A dozen men and a few women squatted in the strip of shade against the front wall of the building. One of the women appeared to be a tailor with a hand stitcher; she was sewing cuffs of contrasting material on the shirt of the fellow waiting bare-chested beside her.
The location agreed with the address given for Commander Adrian Purvis in the Admiralty Records in Government House . . . to the degree that The palace of Prince Pedro Sforza, in the Timber Merchants’ Quarter was an address. It was a better address than the Cluster’s Admiralty Records were records, certainly. Good God, these people’s idea of a filing system was the electronic equivalent of throwing papers in a drawer! If Adele hadn’t been very good at information retrieval, she’d never have been able to—
Adele slid the data unit away in its pocket as she got out of the wagon, shaking her head in self disgust. She was very good at information retrieval; and if she hadn’t been, that would be her fault and not that of whatever passed for archivists here on Todos Santos. Besides, from what Daniel had muttered as he surveyed the Cluster fleet, the Admiralty was all of one sad piece with its records and the addresses of senior fleet officers.
“Twenty-five Cinnabar florins, gracious lady!” the driver said, getting off the bucket seat of her vehicle and bowing low. She ignored Tovera who stood at the back of the wagon, covering both traffic in the street and the idlers in front of the palace with alternate quick glances. “A pleasure to serve so great a personage as you!”
Adele hadn’t seen any aircars in San Juan. Ground transport was eclectic and mostly of off-planet manufacture. The taxi she’d hired was a tractor running on continuous belts, which pulled a wooden cart whose pair of high wheels were almost certainly meant for a bicycle.
There were any number of other styles and ages of vehicles, often with a body of wood or wicker on ancient running gear. The closest thing to public conveyances were larger versions of the tractor-drawn cart Adele had ridden in, but though they followed more-or-less fixed routes, they didn’t appear to keep any schedule.
“The correct charge is thirty piastres,” Adele said, withdrawing a coin from the dispenser in her belt pouch. “A Cinnabar florin is worth about fifty, but I recognize that you’ll have to exchange the coin for your local scrip; and there’s the matter of the tip as well, so I won’t require that you give me change.”
When Adele called her cousin to set up the meeting, she’d asked what the proper fare from the harbor was. She’d refused his offer of an escort. While she wasn’t hiding her presence in San Juan, neither did she want the sort of pomp that would convince even ordinary Alliance merchants and spacers in the city that she was more than a casual visitor. Letting people mistake her for a spy would be as damaging—and as dangerous—as if they identified her for valid reasons.
“What!” shouted the driver. “You insult me—”
She turned to engage the idlers in her harangue.
“—and you insult my planet!”
The palace was a courtyard building with three stories and a further false front along the street. The ground floor had no openings except a gate. The small windows of the second story and the larger ones of the third had iron lattices which seemed more functional than ornamental. The walls were mostly brick from which cream-colored stucco had flaked in large patches, but every six feet or so there was a tie course of pinkish stone.
One of the iron-bound gate-leaves was open. Guards lounged in the shade of the tunnel beyond, silhouetted against the bright courtyard where servants were hanging up laundry.
“Do you foreigners think you can come to Todos Santos and rob her hardworking citizens?” the driver cried.
Vehicles were moving slowly enough in the narrow street that passengers turned their heads to listen. The idlers were interested also. One man got to his feet, glowering. The woman beside him dug a stone out of the packed dust before she rose. Tovera shifted slightly.