Baha’i, he thought, mentally snapping his fingers. He was tall, even for a Herrenmann, with one side of his face cleanshaven and the other a close-trimmed brown beard cut to a foppish point; the plain blue uniform and circular brimmed cap of the city police emphasized the deep-chested greyhound build. This was a Baha’i neighborhood.
“You may go,” he said to the guards. “I will call for the car.”
“Sir,” the sergeant said, the guide-cone of her stunner waving about uncertainly. Helmet and nightsight goggles made her eyes unreadable. ” ‘Tis iz a rough district.”
“I am aware of that, Sergeant. Also that Harold’s place is a known underworld hangout. Assignment to my headquarters squad is a promotion; please do not assume that it entitles you to doubt my judgment.” Or you may find yourself back walking a beat, without such opportunities for income-enhancement, went unspoken between them. He ignored her salute and walked up the two low stairs.
The door recognized him, read retinas and encephalograph patterns, slid open. The coal-black doorman was as tall as the police officer and twice as broad, with highly-illegal impact armor underneath the white coat and bow tie of Harold’s Terran Bar. The impassive smoky eyes above the ritually scarred cheeks gave him a polite once-over, an equally polite and empty bow.
“Pleased to see you here again, Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme,” he said.
You grafting ratcat-loving collaborationist son of a bitch. Montferrat added the unspoken portion himself. And I love you too.
Harold’s Terran Bar was a historical revival, and therefore less out of place on Wunderland than it would have been in the Sol system. Once through the vestibule’s inner bead-curtain doorway Montferrat could see most of the smoke-hazed main room, a raised platform in a C around the sunken dance-floor and the long bar. Strictly human-service here, which was less of an affectation now than it had been when the place opened, twenty years ago. Machinery was dearer than it used to be, and human labor much cheaper, particularly since refugees began pouring into Munchen from a countryside increasingly preempted for kzin estates. Not to mention those displaced by strip-mining . . .
“Good evening, Claude.”
He started; it was always disconcerting, how quietly Harold moved. There at his elbow now, expressionless blue eyes. Face that should have been ugly, big-nosed with a thick lower lip and drooping eyelids. He was . . . what, sixty-three now? Just going grizzled at the temples, which was an affectation or a sign that his income didn’t stretch to really first-class geriatric treatments. Short, barrel-chested; what sort of genetic mismatch had produced that build from a Herrenmann father and a Belter mother?
“Looking me over for signs of impending dissolution, Claude?” Harold said, steering him toward his usual table and snapping his fingers for a waiter. “It’ll be a while yet.”
Perhaps not so long, Montferrat thought, looking at the pouches beneath his eyes. That could be stress . . . or Harold could be really skimping on the geriatrics. They become more expensive every year. The kzin don’t care . . . there are people dying of old age at seventy, now, and not just Amish. Shut up, Claude, you hypocrite. Nothing you can do about it.
“You will outlast me, old friend.”
“A case of cynical apathy wearing better than cynical corruption?” Harold asked, seating himself across from the police chief.
Montferrat pulled a cigarette case from his jacket’s inner pocket and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. It was plain white gold, from Earth, with a Paris jeweler’s initials inside the frame and a date two centuries old, one of his few inheritances from his parents . . . Harold took the proffered cigarette.
“You will join me in a schnapps?” Montferrat said.
“Claude, you’ve been asking that question for twenty years, and I’ve been saying no for twenty years. I don’t drink with the paying customers.”
Yarthkin leaned back, let smoke trickle through his nostrils. The liquor arrived, and a plateful of grilled things that resembled shrimp about as much as a lemur resembled a man, apart from being dark-green and having far too many eyes. “Now, didn’t my bribe arrive on time?”
Montferrat winced. “Harold, Harold, will you never learn to phrase these things politely?” He peeled the translucent shell back from one of the grumblies, snapped off the head between thumb and forefinger and dipped it in the sauce. “Exquisite . . .” he breathed, after the first bite, and chased it down with a swallow of schnapps. “Bribes? Merely a token recompense, when out of the goodness of my heart and in memory of old friendship, I secure licenses, produce permits, contacts with owners of estates and fishing boats—”
“—so you can have a first-rate place to guzzle—”
“—I allow this questionable establishment to flourish, risking my position, despite the, shall we say, dubious characters known to frequent it—”
“—because it makes a convenient listening post and you get a lot of, shall we say, lucrative contacts.”
They looked at each other coolly for a moment, and then Montferrat laughed. “Harold, perhaps the real reason I allow this den of iniquity to continue is that you’re the only person who still has the audacity to deflate my hypocrisies.”
Yarthkin nodded calmly. “Comes of knowing you when you were an idealistic patriot, Director. Like being in hospital together . . . Will you be gambling tonight, or did you come to pump me about the rumors?”
“Rumors?” Montferrat said mildly, shelling another grumbly.
“Of another kzin defeat. Two shiploads of our esteemed ratcat masters coming back with their fur singed.”
“For god’s sake!” Montferrat hissed, looking around.
“No bugs,” Yarthkin continued. “Not even by your ambitious assistants. They offered a hefty sweetener, but I wouldn’t want to see them in your office. They don’t stay bought.”
Montferrat smoothed his mustache. “Well, the kzin do seem to have a rather lax attitude toward security at times,” he said. Mostly, they don’t realize how strong the human desire to get together and chatter is, he mused.
“Then there’s the rumor about a flatlander counterstrike,” Yarthkin continued.
Montferrat raised a brow and cocked his mobile Herrenmann ears forward. “Not becoming a believer in the myth of liberation, I hope,” he drawled.
Yarthkin waved the hand that held the cigarette, leaving a trail of blue smoke. “I did my bit for liberation. Got left at the altar, as I recall, and took the amnesty,” he said. His face had become even more blank, merely the slightest hint of a sardonic curve to the lips. “Now I’m just an innkeeper. What goes on outside these walls is no business of mine.” A pause. “It is yours, of course, Director. People know the ratcats got their whiskers pasted back, for the fourth time. They’re encouraged . . . also desperate. The kzin will be stepping up the war effort, which means they’ll be putting more pressure on us. Not to mention that they’re breeding faster than ever.”
Montferrat nodded with a frown. Battle casualties made little difference to a kzin population; their nonsentient females were held in harems by a small minority of males, in any event. Heavy losses meant the lands and mates of the dead passing to the survivors . . . and more young males thrown out of the nest, looking for lands and a Name of their own. And kzin took up a lot of space; they weighed in at a quarter-ton each, and they were pure carnivores. Nor would they eat synthesized meat except on board a military spaceship. There were still fewer than a hundred thousand in the Wunderland system, and more than twenty times that many humans, and even so it was getting crowded.
“More ‘flighters crowding into Munchen every day,” Yarthkin continued in that carefully neutral tone.
Refugees. Munchen had been a small town within their own lifetimes; the original settlers of Wunderland had been a close-knit coterie of plutocrats, looking for elbow room. Limited industrialization, even in the Serpent Swarm, and rather little on the planetary surface. Huge domains staked out by the Nineteen Families and their descendants; later immigrants had fitted into the cracks of the pattern, as tenants, or carving out smallholdings on the fringes of the settled zone. Many of them were ethnic or religious separatists anyway.
Until the kzin came. Kzin nobles expected vast territories for their own polygamous households, and naturally seized the best and most-developed acreages. Some of the human landworkers stayed to labor for new masters, but many more were displaced. Or eaten, if they objected.
Forced-draft industrialization in Munchen and the other towns; kzin did not live in cities, and cared little for the social consequences. Their planets had always been sparsely settled, and they had developed the gravity polarizer early in their history, hence they mined their asteroid belts but put little industry in space. Refugees flooding in, to work in industries that produced war matériel for the kzin fleets, not housing or consumer-goods for human use . . .