Sylvester punched off the video. She ripped the foil off the bottle and untangled its wire cage. She began twisting the bulging champagne cork with a strong, steady grip.
Nancybeth emerged from the shower. Steam rose from her skin, backlit in the glow from the dressing room light.
She was perfectly unconcerned about the water she was dripping onto the rug. “Was that something about Vince?
On the news?”
“Seems he was the one who outbid me for the Lawrence.” The champagne cork came out with a satisfying thud.
“Vince? He doesn’t care about books.”
Sylvester watched her, a heavy dark Venus deliberately manifesting herself naked, deliberately letting her wet skin chill, letting her nipples rise. “He cared about you,” Sylvester said.
“Oh.” Nancybeth smiled complacently, her violet eyes half-lidded. “I guess it cost you.”
“On the contrary, you’ve saved me a great deal of money I might otherwise have thrown away on a mere book. Fetch some glasses, will you? In the refrigerator.”
Still naked, still wet, Nancybeth brought the tulip glasses to the table and settled herself on the plush chair.
“Are we celebrating something?”
“Hardly,” Sylvester said, pouring out the cold, seething liquid. “I’m consoling myself.”
She handed a tulip to Nancybeth. They bent toward each other. The rims touched and chimed. “Still mad at me?” Nancybeth mewed.
Sylvester was fascinated, watching Nancybeth’s nostrils widen as she lowered her upturned nose into the mouth of the tulip. “For being who you are?”
The tip of the pink tongue tasted sharp carbonic acid from dissolving bubbles. “Well, you don’t have to console yourself, Syl.” The violet eyes under the long, wet lashes lifted to transfix her.
“I don’t?”
“Let me console you.”
The magneplane whirred through the genteel greenery of London’s southwestern suburbs, pausing now and again to drop off and take on passengers, depositing Nikos Pavlakis a mile from his Richmond destination. Pavlakis hired an autotaxi at the stand and as it drove away from the station he rolled down the windows to let the wet spring air invade the cab. Beyond the slate roofs of the passing semi-detached villas, pearly cloud puffs in the soft blue sky kept pace with the cab as it rolled past spruce lawns and hedges.
Lawrence Wycherly’s house was a trim brick Georgian.
Pavlakis put his sliver in the port, paying the cab to wait, then walked to the door of the house, feeling heavy in a black plastic suit that, like all his suits, was too tight for his massive shoulders. Mrs. Wycherly opened the door before he could reach for the bell. “Good morning, Mr. Pavlakis.
Larry’s in the sitting room.”
She did not seem overjoyed to see him. She was a pale, smooth-skinned woman with fine blond hair, pretty once, now on the verge of fading into invisibility, leaving only her regret.
Pavlakis found Wycherly sitting in his pajamas, his feet up on a hassock, a plaid lap robe tucked under his thighs and an arsenal of plastic-back space thrillers and patent medicines littering the lamp table beside him. Wycherly lifted a thin hand. “Sorry, Nick. Would get up, but I’ve been a bit wobbly for the past day or two.”
“I’m sorry to have to give you this trouble, Larry.”
“Nothing of it. Sit down, will you? Be comfortable. Get you anything? Tea?”
Mrs. Wycherly was still in the room, somewhat to Pavlakis’s surprise, temporarily reemerging from the shadows of the arch. “Mr. Pavlakis might prefer coffee.”
“That would be very nice,” he said gratefully. The English repeatedly amazed him with their sensitivity to such things.
“Right, then,” Wycherly said, staring at her until she dissolved again. He cocked a canny eyebrow at Pavlakis, who was perching his muscular bulk delicately on an Empire settee. “All right, Nick. Something too special for the phone?”
“Larry, my friend . . .” Pavlakis leaned forward, hands primly on his knees, “Falaron Shipyards is cheating us— my father and me. Dimitrios is encouraging the worker consortiums to bribe us, and then taking kickbacks from them. For all of which we must pay. If we are to meet the launch window for Star Queen.”
Wycherly said nothing, but a sour smile played over his lips. “Frankly, most of us who’ve worked with the firm over the years have accepted that that was always part of the arrangement between Dimitrios and your dad.” Wycherly paused, then coughed repeatedly, making a humming sound like a balky two-cycle engine deep in his chest. For a moment Pavlakis was afraid he was choking, but he was merely clearing his throat. He recovered himself. “Standard practice, so to say.”
“We can’t afford this standard practice anymore,” Pavlakis said. “These days we face worse than just the old competition . . .”
Wycherly grinned. “Besides which, you’re no longer allowed to get rid of them by something as simple as, say, slitting a few throats.”
“Yes.” Pavlakis jerked his head forward, solemnly.
“Because we are regulated. So many regulations. Set fees per kilo of mass . . .”
“. . . divided by time of transport, multiplied by minimax distance between ports,” Wycherly said wearily.
“Right, Nick.”
“So to attract business one must abide by the strictest adherence to launch windows.”
“I have been with the firm awhile.” Again Wycherly made that lawnmower sound in the back of his throat, struggling for breath.
“These calculations—I keep making them in my head,”
Pavlakis said. He was thinking that Wycherly did not look well; the whites of his eyes were rimmed in bright red and his gingery hair was standing up in tufts, like the feathers of a wet bird.
“Sorry for you, old man,” Wycherly said wryly.
“We are so close to doing well. I have negotiated a long-term contract with the Ishtar Mining Corporation.
The first shipment is six mining robots, nearly forty tonnes.
That will pay for the trip, even give us a profit. But if we miss the launch window . . .”
“You lose the contract,” Wycherly said, keeping it matter of fact.
Pavlakis shrugged. “Worse, we pay a penalty. Assuming we have not declared bankruptcy first.”
“What else have you got for cargo?”
“Silly things. A pornography chip. A box of cigars.
Yesterday we got a provisory reservation for a damned book.”
“One book?” Pavlakis jerked his head again, yes, and Wycherly’s eyebrow shot up. “Why ‘damned’?”
“The entire package weighs four kilos, Larry.” Pavlakis laughed, snorting like a bull. “Its freight will not pay your wages to the moon. But it is to be accompanied by a certificate of insurance in the amount of two million pounds!
I would rather have the insurance.”
“Maybe you could load it and then arrange a little accident.”
Wycherly started to laugh, but was taken by a spasm of coughing. Pavlakis looked away, pretending to be interested in the horse prints on the cream walls of the sitting room, the bookcases of unread leatherbound classics.
At last Wycherly recovered. “Well, of course you must know what book that is.”
“Should I know?”
“Really, Nick, it was all the news yesterday. That book’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Must be. Lawrence of Arabia and all that.” Wycherly’s wasted face twisted in a grin. “Another of the old empire’s treasures carried off to the colonies. And this time the colony’s another planet.”
“Very sad.” Pavlakis’s commiseration was brief. “Larry, without the Ishtar contract . . .”
But Wycherly was musing, staring past Pavlakis into the shadows of the hall. “That’s a rather odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“What’s odd?”
“Or maybe not, really. Port Hesperus, of course.”
“I’m sorry, I fail to . . .”
Wycherly focused on him. “Sorry, Nick. Mrs. Sylvester, she’s the chief exec at Ishtar Mining, isn’t that right?”
His head bobbed forward. “Oh, yes.”
“She was the other bidder for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, you see. Went to over a million pounds and lost out.”
“Ah.” Pavlakis’s eyelids drooped at the thought of that much personal wealth. “How sad for her.”
“Port Hesperus is quite the center of wealth these days.”
“Well . . . you see why we must retain the Ishtar contract.
No room for Dimitrios and his . . . ‘standard practices.’ “ Pavlakis struggled to get the conversation back on track. “Larry, I am not certain that my own father fully understands these matters—”
“But you’ve had no trouble making it all clear to Dimitrios.”
Wycherly studied Pavlakis and saw what he expected.
“And he is not at all happy with you.”
“I was foolish.” Pavlakis fished for his worry beads.
“Could be so. He’ll know this is his last chance to steal.
And still plenty of opportunities for the old crook to buy cheap and charge dear on the specs.”
“I found no sign of cheating on the specifications when I inspected the work two days ago . . .”
“I won’t be wanting to captain any substandard ship, Nick,” Wycherly said sharply. “Whatever else has been going on between Dimitrios and your dad—and I suspect plenty—your dad never asked me to risk my neck in a craft that was unspaceworthy.”