“Twelve,” I muttered. “We’d just celebrated her birthday two days earlier. Greyboar’d caught a juicy rat—one of those fat ones that hang around the slops—and I’d, uh, obtained an apple pie that some baker must have misplaced.” I smiled for a moment, remembering. “We even spent the money to buy a candle for the pie. Couldn’t afford but the one, so we invented a new arithmetic where one equaled twelve. Laughed, we did, telling ourselves we’d revolutionized mathematics.”
Leuwen’s ensuing chuckle rolled over in a laugh. “Good old Stinky! Never could resist a girl just coming of age.” Another chuckle rolled over. “Wish I’d seen it! They say you were on his shoulders biting his ear off before Gwendolyn even started breaking his fingers.”
I couldn’t help chuckling myself. “Stinky was right! Yuch! Nastiest-tasting ear I ever bit into. Spit the damn thing out as fast as I could. And I can’t tell you how happy I was that I didn’t have to take off the other one. By then, of course, Gwendolyn was breaking his wrists and it was pretty much all over.”
A companionable silence followed, for a few seconds. Then Leuwen mused: “Yeah, good old Stinky. He disappeared the next day. When they dredged his body out of the river a few weeks later, the corpse was in such wretched shape they almost couldn’t identify him. But the cause of death was obvious enough. They say his neck hadn’t been broken so much as pulverized.”
Leuwen gave me a speculative glance. “Even at the time everybody figured that was Greyboar. His first choke.”
I kept my mouth shut. Actually, it’d been Greyboar’s second choke. Stinky hadn’t been the first lecher to think a dirt-poor orphan girl would make easy pickings. But the first one had been a vagrant, so nobody had noticed. In his own way, Stinky had been a well-known fixture in the Flankn. After he, ah, “came to a bad end,” nobody bothered Gwendolyn much anymore.
Leuwen accepted my silence readily enough, and didn’t try to pry anything loose. Even a man with his curiosity can accept a stone wall when he sees one. He went back to wiping the bar, chatting idly.
“Yeah, I can still remember the first time the three of you came in here. Three kids—even if two of them were already huge—swaggering into The Trough bound and determined to order their first real, by God, ale pot. Trying to swagger, I should say.”
He emitted another chuckle. “You couldn’t afford but the one pot to share. I remember the three of you counting out the pennies, almost sweating blood you wouldn’t have enough.”
“We didn’t have enough,” I growled. “Short one lousy penny, we were. We tried to wheedle you into giving us credit. Chintzy bastard! You wouldn’t budge an inch.”
He smiled, shrugging. “You know how it is, Ignace. But look at the bright side—I did agree to give you a pot not quite full. Bent the hell out of professional ethics, if I say so myself.”
He gave the bar an idle swipe, before pointing with the rag to a stool several feet down. “That’s where the three of you sat. Gwendolyn had to hoist you onto the stool. You couldn’t get up that high on your own.” He laughed outright, now. “The thing that impressed me the most was how all three of you split the pot. I thought for sure you’d get shorted, what with those two giants. But—no. You got your fair share, just like they did.”
I could feel the old ache coming, and shoved it under. Ancient history, dammit! Let it stay buried with the rest of the ruins. Then, sighing, I drained the mug and pulled the handful of coins out of my pocket.
I stared at them glumly. To my surprise, Leuwen filled the mug up.
“On the house,” he said.
That was a lie, actually. Under the circumstances, “on the house” meant: as long as you keep my interest up, you can keep drinking. Bullshit me and you die of thirst.
Terrible thing, death from thirst. It took me all of two seconds to decide to spill the beans. The fact is, there wasn’t much harm in it anyway. He obviously knew too much already, and, being as he was the best barkeep in the world, Leuwen practically wrote the book on Barkeep Professional Ethics.
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