Bribes, Yarthkin translated to himself.
“It takes so much more than we thought, and to live while we wait! Now we have not enough for the final clearance, and . . . and we know nothing but farming. The policeman told Wilhelm that we must have four thousand krona more, and we had less than a thousand. Nobody would lend more against his wages, not even the Sina moneylender, he just laughed and offered to . . . to sell me to . . . and Wilhelm hit him, and we had to pay more to the police. Now he gambles, it is the only way we might get the money, but of course he loses.”
The house always wins, Yarthkin thought. The girl steeled herself and continued.
“The Herrenmann policeman—”
“Claude Montferrat-Palme?” Yarthkin inquired, nodding with his chin. The police chief was over at the baccarat tables with a glass of verguuz at his elbow, playing his usual cautiously skillful game.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He told me that there was a way the papers could be approved.” A silence. “I said nothing to Wilhelm, he is . . . very young, younger than me in some ways.” The china-blue eyes turned to him. “Is this Herrenmann one who keeps his word?”
“Claude?” Yarthkin said. “Yes. A direct promise, yes; he’ll keep the letter of it.”
She gripped her hands tighter. “I do not know what to do,” she said softly. “I must think.”
She nodded jerkily to herself and moved off. Yarthkin threw the butt of his cigarette down for the floor to absorb and moved over to the roulette table. A smile quirked the corner of his mouth, and he picked up a handful of hundred-krona chips from in front of the croupier. Stupid, he thought to himself. Oh, well, a man has to make a fool of himself occasionally.
The Amishman had dropped his last chip and was waiting to lose it; he gulped at the drink at his elbow and loosened the tight collar of his jacket. Probably seeing the Welfare Office ahead of him, Yarthkin thought. These days, that meant a labor camp where the room-and-board charges were twice the theoretical wages . . . They would find something else for his wife to do. Yarthkin dropped his counter beside the young farmer’s.
“I’m feeling lucky tonight, Tony,” he said to the croupier. “Let’s see it.”
She raised one thin eyebrow, shrugged her shoulders under the sequins and spun the wheel. “Place your bets, gentlefolk, please.” Impassively, she tossed the ball into the whirring circle of metal. “Number eight. Even, in the black.”
The Amishman blinked down in astonishment as the croupier’s ladle pushed his doubled stakes back toward him. Yarthkin reached out and gripped his wrist as the young man made an automatic motion toward the plaques. It was thick and springy with muscle, the arm of a man who had worked with his hands all his life, but Yarthkin had no difficulty stopping the motion.
“Let it ride,” he said. “Play the black, I’ll do the same.”
Another spin, but the croupier’s lips were compressed into a thin line; she was a professional, and hated a break in routine. “Place your bets . . . Black wins again, gentlefolk.”
“Try twelve,” Yarthkin said, shifting his own chip. “No, all of it.”
“Place your bets . . . twelve wins, gentlefolk.”
Glancing up, Yarthkin caught Montferrat’s coldly furious eye, and grinned with an equal lack of warmth. At the next spin of the wheel he snapped his finger for the waiter and urged the younger man at his side to his feet, piling the chips on an emptied drink tray. “That’s five thousand,” Yarthkin said. “Why don’t you cash them in and call it a night?”
Wilhelm paused, scrubbed his hands across his face, straightened his rumpled clothes. “Yes . . . Yes, thank you sir, perhaps I should.” He looked down at the pile of chips, and Yarthkin could see his lips whiten with shock as the impact hit home. “I . . .”
The girl came to meet him, and gave Yarthkin a single glance through tear-starred lashes before the two left, clinging to each other. The owner of Harold’s shrugged and pushed his own counters back to the pile before the croupier.
“How are we doing tonight, Tony?” he asked.
“About five thousand krona less well than we could have,” she said sharply.
“We’ll none of us starve,” Yarthkin added mildly, and strolled over to the baccarat table. Montferrat glanced up sharply, but his anger had faded.
“You’re a sentimental idiot, Harry,” he said.
“Probably true, Claude,” Yarthkin said, and took a plain unlogoed credit chip from the inside pocket of his jacket. “The usual.”
Montferrat palmed it and smoothed back his mustache with a finger. “Sometimes I think you indulge in these little quixotic gestures just to annoy me,” he added, and dropped three cards from his hand. “Banco,” he continued.
“Probably right there too, Claude,” he said. “I’m relying on the fact that you’re not an unmitigated scoundrel.”
“Now I’m an honest man?”
“No, a scoundrel with mitigating factors . . . and I’m a sentimental idiot, as you mentioned.” He stopped, listened abstractedly. “See you later; somebody wants to see me. Sam says it’s important, and he isn’t given to exaggeration.”
The doors slid open and Yarthkin stepped into the main room, beside the north end of the long bar. The music was the first thing he heard, the jaunty remembered beat. Cold flushed over his skin, and the man he had been smiling and waving to flinched. That brought the owner of Harold’s Terran Bar back to his duties; they were self-imposed, and limited to this building, but that did not mean they could be shirked. He moved with swift grace through the throng, shouting an occasional greeting over the surf-roar of voices, slapping a shoulder, shaking a hand, smiling. The smile was still on his face as he stepped up off the dance floor and through the muting field around the musicomp, but he could taste the acid and copper of his own rage at the back of his throat.
“I told you never to play that song again,” he said coldly. “We’ve been together a long time, Samuel Ogun, it’d be a pity to end a beautiful friendship this way.”
The musician keyed the instrument to continue without him and swiveled to face his employer. “Boss . . . Mr. Yarthkin, once you’ve talked to those two over at table three, you’ll understand. Believe me.”
Yarthkin nodded curtly and turned to the table. The two Belters were sitting close to the musicomp, with the shimmer of a privacy field around them, shrouding features as well as dulling voices. Yarthkin smoothed the lapels of his jacket and wove deftly between tables and servers as he approached, forcing his anger down into an inner cesspit where discarded emotions went. Sam was no fool, he must mean something by violating a standing order that old. He did not shake easy, either, and that had been plain to see on him. This should be interesting, at least; it was good to have a straightforward bargaining session ahead, after the embarrassing exhilaration of the incident in the gambling room. Money was a relaxing game to play; the rules were clear, victory and defeat a matter of counting the score and no embarrassing emotions. And these might be the ones with the special load that the rumors had told of. More profit and more enjoyment if they were. More danger, too, but a man had to take an occasional calculated risk. Otherwise, you might as well put a droud in your head and be done with it.
The man looked thirty and might be anything between that and seventy; tough-looking, without the physical softness that so many rockjacks got from a life spent in cramped zero-G spaceships. A conservative dark innersuit, much less gaudy than what most successful Swarmers wore these days, and an indefinably foreign look about the eyes. Yarthkin sat, pulled out a chair and looked over to study the woman’s face. The world went black.
“Boss, are you all right?” There was a sharp hiss against his neck, and the sudden sharp-edged alertness of a stimshot. “Are you all right?”
“You,” Yarthkin whispered, shaking the Krio’s hand off his shoulder with a shrug. Ingrid’s face hovered before him, unchanged, no, a little thinner, more tanned. But the same, not forty years different, the same. He could feel things moving in his head, like a mountain river he had seen on a spring hunting trip once. Cracks running across black ice, and the rock beneath his feet toning with the dark water’s hidden power. “You.” His voice went guttural, and his right hand went inside the dress jacket.
“Jonah, no!” Ingrid’s hand shot out and slapped her companion’s to the table. Yarthkin felt his mind stagger and broach back toward reality as the danger-prickle ran over his skin; that was probably not an engineer’s light-pencil in the younger man’s hand. He struggled for self-command, dropped his gun-hand back to the table.