So he wasn't all the way gone to wine. Yet. There's a point beyond which they just don't care.
I led him to a place a couple blocks away, as seedy as his own. It was a little more densely populated-five guys had gotten there ahead of us—but the ambience was the same: gloom laden with despair.
The operator was more businesslike. A frail ancient slattern, she was on us before we got through the doorway. She made faces at my newfound friend.
"We need something to eat," I told her. "Beer for me and tea for my buddy. You got someplace he can clean himself up?'' A flash of silver stilled her protests.
"Follow me," she told him. To me, "Take that table there."
"Sure. Thanks." I let them get out of the room before I went to the door for a peek outside. I hadn't imagined anything. Mumbles had followed us. He was doing his routine against a wall down the street. I suppose he was talking about the weather.
If he'd taken a notion to keep an eye on me he wouldn't be going anywhere. I could handle him when I wanted. I planted myself at the appointed table and waited for my beer. The prospect of the kind of food such places served depressed me.
My pal didn't look much better when he came back but he did smell sweeter. That was improvement enough for me. "You look better," I lied.
"Bullshit." He dropped into a chair, slouched way down. The old woman brought beer and tea. He gripped his mug with both hands and looked at me. "So what do you want, pal?"
"I want to know about Smith and Smith."
"Not much to tell. Them wasn't their real names."
"No! Do tell. How long did they stay there?"
"They first come two weeks ago. Some old guy come with them. Paid for them to stay, room and board, for a month. He was a cold fish. Eyes like a basilisk. They wasn't none of them from TunFaire."
That got my attention. "How do you figure?"
"Their accents, man. More like KroenStat or CyderBen, somewhere out there, only not quite. Wasn't one I ever heard before. But it was like some. You get what I'm saying?"
"Yeah." I got it. Sometimes I catch on real fast. "That man who came with them. Did he have a name? What was he like?"
"I told you what he was like. Cold, man. Like a lifetaker. He didn't exactly encourage you to ask questions. One of the Smiths called him Brother Jersey."
"Jerce?"
"Yeah. That's it."
Well, well. The very boy who hired Snowball and Doc. That coin from up there maybe didn't prove anything but this did. "Any idea how I could find him? He's got to be the guy who had my friend killed."
"Nope. He said he'd come around again if Smith and Smith had to stay more than a month."
"What about them? Anything on them?"
"You kidding? They never said three words. Didn't socialize. Ate in their room. Mostly they was out."
I nibbled at him this way and that while we ate a chicken and dumpling mess that wasn't half bad. I couldn't get anything else until I showed him my coin collection.
He barely glanced at them. "Sure. That's the kind that Brother Jersey used to pay the rent. I noticed on account of most all of them was new. You don't see a bunch of new all together at once."
You don't. It was a dumb move, calling attention that way. Except Jerce probably figured Smith and Smith would never get made.
"Thanks." I paid up.
"Been a help?"
"Some.'' I gave him a silver tenth mark for his trouble. "Don't spend it all in one place."
He ordered wine before I got to the door.
I went out thinking I had to bone up on my geography. KroenStat and CyderBen are out west and west-northwest, good Karentine cities but a far piece overland. I'd never been out that way. I didn't know much about the region.
I also thought about asking Jill Craight a few more questions. She was in the center of the action. She knew a lot more than she'd admitted.
Mumbles was on the job. I'd make it easy for him to stick if he wanted—if he wasn't following my drunken buddy or wasn't there by absurd coincidence. I didn't care if I was followed.
24
I was followed.
The drizzle tapered off to nothing most of my walk. But as I neared the Royal Assay Office the sky opened up. I ducked inside grinning, leaving Mumbles to deal with it.
Considering the size of Karenta as a kingdom and considering TunFaire's significance as largest city and chief commercial center, the Assay Office was a shabby little disappointment. It was about nine feet wide, with no windows. A service counter stood athwart it six feet inside. There was no one behind that. The walls were hidden behind glass plates fronting cases that contained samples of coins both current and obsolete. Two antique chairs and a lot of dust completed the decor.
No one came out though a bell had rung as I entered.
I studied the specimens.
After a while somebody decided I wouldn't go away.
The guy who came out was a scarecrow, in his seventies or eighties, as tall as me but weighing half as much. He was thoroughly put out by my insistence on being served. He wheezed, "We close in half an hour."
"I shouldn't need ten minutes. I need information on an unfamiliar coinage."
"What? What do you think this is?"
"The Royal Assay Office. The place you go when you wonder if somebody is slipping you bad money." I figured I could develop a dislike for that old man fast. I restrained myself. You can't get a lot of leverage on minions of the state. I showed him my card. "These look like temple coinage but I don't recognize them. Nobody I know does, either. And I can't find them in the samples here."
He'd been primed to give me a hard time but the gold coin caught his eye. "Temple emission, eh? Gold?" He took the card, gave the coins a once-over. "Temple, all right. And I've never seen anything like them. And 1 been here sixty years." He came around the counter and eyeballed the coins on one section of wall, shook his head, snorted, and muttered, "I know better than to think I'd forget." He hobbled around the counter again to get a scale and some weights then took the gold coin off the card and weighed it. He grunted, took it off the scale, gouged it to make sure it was gold all the way through. Then he fiddled with a couple other tests I figured were meant to check the alloy.
I studied the specimens quietly, careful not to attract attention. Nowhere did I spy a design akin to the eight-legged fabulous beasties on those coins. Real creepies, they looked like.
"The coins appear to be genuine," the old man said. He shook his head. "It's been a while since I was stumped. Are there many circulating?"
"Those are all I've seen but I hear there's a lot more." I recalled my drunk's remark about accents. "Could they be from out of town?"
He examined the gold piece's edge. "This has a TunFaire reeding pattern." He thought a moment. "But if they're old, say from a treasure, that wouldn't mean anything. Reeding patterns and city marks weren't standardized until a hundred fifty years ago."
Hell, practically the night before last. But I didn't say that out loud. The old boy was caught up in the mystery. He'd already worked past his half hour. I decided not to break his concentration.
"There'll be something in the records in back."
I bet on his professional curiosity and followed him. He didn't object though I'm sure I broke all kinds of rules by passing the counter.
He said, "You'd think the specimens out there would be enough to cover every inquiry, wouldn't you? But at least once a week I get somebody who has coins that aren't on display. Usually it's just new coinage from out of town and I haven't gotten my specimens mounted. For the rest we have records which cover every emission since the empire adopted the Karentine mark."
Hostility certainly fades when you get somebody cranked up on their favorite thing.