“What!” That was enough to bring him bolt-upright. “Why—what—you’ve been turning that swine down for thirty years!”
“Swine, Claude?” Yarthkin leaned forward, resting his chin on paired thumbs. “Or have you forgotten exactly who’s to be monkeymeat day after tomorrow?”
The reaction was more than Yarthkin had expected. A jerk, as if a high-voltage current surged through the other man’s body. A dry retching sound. Then, incredibly, the aquiline Herrenmann’s face crumpled. As if it were a mask, slumping and wrinkling like a balloon from which the air has been withdrawn . . . and he was crying, head slumping down into his hands. Yarthkin swallowed and looked away; Claude was a collabo and a sellout, an extortionist without shame . . . but nobody should see another man this naked. It was obscene.
“Pull yourself together, Claude; I’ve known you were a bastard for forty years, but I thought you were a man, at least.”
“So did I,” gasped Montferrat. “I even have the medals to prove it. I fought well in the war.”
“I know.”
“So when, when they let us out of the detention camp, I really thought I could help. I really did.” He laughed. “Life had to go on, criminals had to be caught, we were beaten and resistance just made it harder on everyone. I’d been a good policeman. I still could be.”
He drank, choked, drank. “The graft, everyone had to. They wouldn’t let you get past foot-patrol if you weren’t on the pad too, you had to be in it with them. If I didn’t get promotion how could I accomplish anything? I told myself that, but every year a little more of me was gone. And now, now Ingrid’s back and I can see myself in her eyes and I know what I am, no better than that animal Axelrod-Bauergartner, she’s gloating, she has me on this and I couldn’t, couldn’t do it. I told her to take care of it all and went and I’ve been drunk most of the time since, she’ll have my head and I deserve it, why try and stop her, it—”
Yarthkin leaned forward and slapped the policeman alongside the head with his open palm, a gunshot crack in the narrow confines of the office. Montferrat’s mood switched with mercurial swiftness, and he snarled with a mindless sound as he reached for his sidearm. But alcohol is a depressant, and his hand had barely touched the butt before the other man’s stunner was pointed between his eyes.
“Neyn, neyn, naughty,” Yarthkin said cheerfully. “Hell of a headache, Claude. Now, I won’t say you don’t deserve it, but sacrificing your own liver and lights isn’t going to do Ingrid any good.” He kept the weapon unwavering until Montferrat had won back a measure of self-command, then laid it down on the desk and offered a cigarette.
“My apologies,” Montferrat said, wiping off his face with a silk handkerchief. “I do despise self-pity.” The shredded cloak of his ironic detachment settled about him.
Yarthkin nodded. “That’s better, sweetheart. I’m selling the club because I need ready capital, for relocation. Grubstaking my people, the ones who don’t want to come with me or stay here.”
“Go with you? Where? And what does this have to do with Ingrid?”
Yarthkin grinned again, tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. Exhilaration filled him, and something that had been missing for far too long. What? he thought. Not youth . . . yes, that’s it. Purpose.
“It isn’t every man who’s given a chance to do it over right,” he said. “That, friend Claude, is what I’m going to do. We’re going to bust Ingrid out of that Preserve. Give her a chance at it, at least.” He held up a hand. “Don’t fuck with me, Claude, I know as well as you that the system there is managed through Munchen Police HQ. One badly mangled corpse substituted for another, what ratcat’s to know? It’s been done before.”
“Not by me,” Montferrat said, shaking his head dully. “I always kept out of the setup side of the Hunts. Couldn’t . . . I have to watch them, anyway, too often.”
Odd how men cling to despair, once they’ve hit bottom, Yarthkin thought. As if hope were too much effort. Is that what surrender is, then, just giving in to exhaustion of the soul?
Aloud: “Computer, access file Till Eulenspiegel.”
The surface of his desk flashed transparent and lit with a series of coded text-columns. Montferrat came erect with a shaken oath.
“How . . . if you had that, all these years, why haven’t you used it?”
“Claude, the great drawback of blackmail is that it gives the victim the best possible incentive to find a permanent way of shutting you up. Risky, especially when dealing with the police. As to the how, you’re not under the impression that you get the best people in the police, are you?” A squint, and the gravelly voice went soft. “Don’t think I wouldn’t use it, sweetheart, if you won’t cooperate, and there’s more than enough to put you in the edible-delicacy category. Think of it as God’s way of giving you an incentive to get back on the straight and narrow.”
“I tell you, Axelrod-Bauergartner has the command codes for the Preserve! I can override, but it would be flagged. Immediately.”
“Computer, display file Niebelungen AA37Bi22. Damned lack of imagination, that code . . . There it is, Claude. Everything you always wanted to know about your most ambitious subordinate but were afraid to ask, including her private bypass programs.” Another flick of ash. “Finagle, Claude, you can probably make all this look like her fault, even if the ratcat smells the proverbial rodent.”
Montferrat smoothed down his uniform tunic, and it was as if the gesture slicked transparent armor across his skin once more. “You appear to have me by the short and sensitives, kamerat,” he said lightly. “Not entirely to my dismay. The plan is, then, that Ingrid and her gallant Sol-Belter are whisked away from under the noses of the kzin, while you go to ground?”
Yarthkin laughed, a shocking sound. “Appearances to the contrary, Claude old son, you were always the romantic of us two. The one for the noble gesture. Nothing of the sort: Ingrid and I are going to the Swarm.”
“And the man, Jonah?”
“Fuck him. Let the ratcats have him. His job was done the minute they failed to dig the real story out of him.”
Montferrat managed a laugh. “This is quite a reversal of roles, Hari . . . but this, this final twist, it makes it seem possible, somehow.” He extended a hand. “Seeing as you have the gun to my head, why not? Working together again, eh?”
* * *
“All right, listen up,” the guard said.
Jonah shook his head, shook out the last of the fog. Ingrid sat beside him on the plain slatted wood of the bench, in this incongruous pen—change-rooms for a country club, once. Now a set of run-down stone buildings in the midst of shaggy overgrown wilderness, with the side open to the remnants of lawn and terrace covered with a shockfield. He looked around; there were a round two dozen humans with them, all clad alike in gray prison trousers and shirts. All quiet. The shockrods of the guards had enforced that. Some weeping, a few catatonic, and there was an unpleasant fecal smell.
“You get an hour’s start,” the guard said, in a voice of bored routine. “And you’d better run, believe me.”
“Up yours!” somebody shouted, and laughed when the guard raised her rod. “What you going to do, ratcat-lover, condemn me to death?”
The guard shrugged. “You ever seen a house cat playing with a mumbly?” she jeered. “The ratcats like a good chase. Disappoint them and they’ll bat you around like a toy.” She stepped back, and the door opened. “Hell, keep ahead of them for two days and maybe they’ll let you go.” A burly man rose and charged, bounced back as she took another step through the door.
Laughter, through the transparent surface. “Have fun, porkchops. I’ll watch you die. Five minutes to shield-down.”
“You all right?” Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field-expedients. And the psychists’ shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold. . . . Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human’s mind more than they had to, and the drug addiction that helped to develop their talents did little for motivation or intelligence.
“Fine,” Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. “Just thinking how pretty it is out there,” she continued; tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.