Casimir, on his way to the bar, was brought up short. “Is there anything else you’d like? Hashish or—”
“Sparkling water will be fine,” she said.
Casimir hesitated again. “Right,” he said finally, and handed her a heavy cut-crystal goblet that he’d filled from a silver spigot.
He mixed drinks for himself and the others, and everyone sat on the broad, oversoft chairs. Sula tried not to oversplay.
The discussion was about music, songwriters, and musicians she didn’t know. Casimir told the room to play various audio selections. He liked his music jagged, with angry overtones.
“What do you like?” Julien asked Sula.
“Derivoo,” she said.
Veronika gave a little giggle. Julien made a face. “Too intellectual for me,” he said.
“It’s not intellectual at all,” Sula protested. “It’s pure emotion.”
“It’s all about death,” Veronika said.
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Sula said. “Death is the universal constant. All people suffer and die. Derivoo doesn’t try to hide that.”
There was a moment of silence in which Sula realized that the inevitability of misery and death was perhaps not the most appropriate topic to bring up on first acquaintance with this group; and then she looked at Casimir and saw a glimmer of wicked amusement in his dark eyes. He seized his walking stick and rose.
“Let’s go. Take your drinks if you haven’t finished them.”
Casimir’s huge Victory limousine was built along the lines of a pumpkin seed, and painted and upholstered in no less than eleven shades of apricot. The two Torminel guards sat in front, their huge, night-adapted eyes perfectly at home on the darkened streets. The restaurant was paneled in old, dark wood, the linen was crisp and close-woven, and the fixtures were brass that gleamed finely in the subdued light. Through an elaborate, carved wooden screen Sula could see another dining room with a few Lai-own sitting in the special chairs that cradled their long breastbones.
Casimir suggested items from the menu, and the elderly waitron, whose stolid, disapproving old face suggested he had seen many like Casimir come and go, suggested others. Sula followed one of Casimir’s suggestions, and found her ostrich steak tender and full of savor; the krek-tubers, mashed with bits of truffle, were slightly oily but full of complex flavors that lingered long on her palate.
Casimir and Julien ordered elaborate drinks, a variety of starters, and a broad selection of desserts, and competed with each other for throwing money away. Half what they ordered was never eaten or drunk. Julien was exuberant and brash, and Casimir displayed sparks of sardonic wit. Veronika popped her wide eyes open like a perpetually astonished child and giggled a great deal.
From the restaurant they motored to a club, a place atop a tall building in Grandview, the neighborhood where Sula had once lived until she had to blow up her apartment with a group of Naxid police inside. The broad granite dome of the Great Refuge, the highest point of the High City, brooded down on them through the tall glass walls above the bar. Casimir and Julien flung more money away on drinks and tips to waitrons, bartenders, and musicians. If the Naxid occupation was hurting their business, it wasn’t showing.
Sula knew she was supposed to be impressed by this. But even years ago, when she was Lamey’s girl, she hadn’t been impressed by the money he and his crowd threw away. She knew too well where the money came from.
She was more impressed by Casimir once he took her onto the dance floor. His long-fingered hands embraced her gently, but behind the gentleness she sensed the solidity of muscle and bone and mass, the calculation of his mind. His attention in the dance was entirely on her, his somber dark eyes intense as they gazed into her face while his body reacted to her weight and motion.
This one thinks!she thought in surprise.
That might make things easy or make them hard. At any rate, it made the calculation more difficult.
“Where are you from?” he asked her after they’d sat down. “How come I haven’t seen you before?” Julien and Veronika were still on the dance floor, Veronika swirling with expert grace around Julien’s enthusiastic clumsiness.
“I lived on the ring,” Sula said. “Before they blew it up.”
“What did you do there?”
“I was a math teacher.”
His eyes widened.
“Give me a math problem and try me,” Sula urged, but he didn’t reply. She wondered if her phony occupation had shocked him.
“When I was in school,” he said, “I didn’t have math teachers like you.”
“You didn’t think teachers went to clubs?” she said.
A slow thought crossed his face. He leaned closer and his eyes narrowed. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why, when you’re from the ring, you talk like you’ve spent your life in Riverside.”
Sula’s nerves sang a warning. She laughed. “Did I say I’ve spent my whole life on the ring?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
“I could check your documents,” his eyes hardening, “but of course you sell false documents, so that wouldn’t help.”
The tension between them was like a coiled serpent ready to strike. She raised an eyebrow. “You still think I’m a provocateur?” she asked. “I haven’t asked you to do a single illegal thing all night.”
One index finger tapped a slow rhythm on the matte surface of the table before them. “I think you’re dangerous,” he said.
Sula looked at him and held his gaze. “You’re right,” she said.
Casimir gave a huff of breath and drew back. Cushions of aesa leather received him. “Why don’t you drink?” he asked.
“I grew up around drunks,” she said. “I don’t want to be like that, not ever.”
Which was true, and perhaps Casimir sensed it, because he nodded. “And you lived in Riverside.”
“I lived in Zanshaa City till my parents were executed.”
His glance was sharp. “For what?”
She shrugged. “For lots of things, I guess. I was little, and I didn’t ask.”
He cast an uneasy look at the dancers. “My father was executed, too. Strangled.”
Sula nodded. “I thought you knew what I meant when I talked about derivoo.”
“I knew.” Eyes still scanning the dance floor. “But I still think derivoo’s depressing.”
She found a grin spreading across her face. “We should dance now.”
“Yes.” His grin answered hers. “We should.”
They danced till they were both breathless, and then Casimir moved the party to another club, in the Hotel of Many Blessings, where there was more dancing, more drinking, more money spread around. After which he said they should take a breather, and he took them into an elevator lined with what looked like mother-of-pearl and bade it rise to the penthouse.
The door opened to Casimir’s thumbprint. The room was swathed in shiny draperies, and the furniture was low and comfortable. A table was laid with a cold supper, meats and cheeses and flat wroncho bread, pickles, chutneys, elaborate tarts and cakes, and bottles lying in a tray of shaved ice. It had obviously been intended all along that the evening end here.
Sula put together an open-faced sandwich—nice Vigo plates, she noticed, a clean modern design—then began to rehearse her exit. Surely it was not coincidental that a pair of bedrooms were very handy.
I’ve got to work in the morning.It certainly sounded more plausible thanI’ve got to go organize a counterrebellion.
Casimir put his walking stick in a rack that had probably been made for it specially and reached for a pair of small packages, each with glossy wrapping and a brilliant scarlet ribbon. He presented one each to Sula and Veronika. “With thanks for a wonderful evening.”