"The good news," she said, ringing up her deposit, "is today's inflation adjustment was only two per cent."
He nodded, and remembered to tell her, "There's other good news. I've got a new job."
"Well, wonderful! Calls for a drink-let me supply the beer." She had unlocked the fridge and brought out a bottle from her private stock-one half-liter bottle for the two of them to share-before she thought to ask, "What was wrong with the job in import-export?"
"No future," he said. As was usual with most of the things he told people about himself, the statement was true enough; whatever future there had been with the importers had vanished when the colonel ordered him to drop it and try to hook on with his cousin. "The place I'm working for now is an astronomical observatory."
"Oh, boy! What, do you think there's money in looking for Martians?"
"There aren't any Martians, Rita, and anyway that isn't what we do." He explained to her, from his small and very recently acquired store of astronomical knowledge, that the Dannerman Observatory spent its time analyzing data about distant gas clouds and quasars, trying to puzzle out the origins of the universe. Then he had to explain why the observatory was called "Dannerman."
Rita approved of that. "It's good to have family, these days," she said, chewing wistfully. "You're close, you and your cousin?"
"Not really. She's not a blood relative. She was Uncle Cubby's wife's sister's daughter, and I was his younger brother's son."
"Even so," she said vaguely, and then commented: "You could have put a little more sausage in the fry."
"Nobody's making you eat it."
She didn't take offense. She didn't even seem to notice what he'd said. She went on dreamily, "We used to eat really well while Jonathan was alive-truffles, guinea hen, steaks you could cut with a fork. Oh, and roast beef, and rack of lamb, and three or four different wines at almost every meal. Dan, do you know we used to have as many as twenty-four at dinner some nights? We'd eat in the main dining hall-that's where the Rosenkrantzes and the Blairs live now-and we had the butler and the maids to hand everything around. If anybody wanted seconds, why, they could have as much as they wanted. There was plenty, and we didn't even mind when the servants took the leftovers home. And then, if the weather was nice, we'd go out on the terrace for coffee and brandy afterward."
"I don't have any coffee," Dannerman said, to keep her from getting her hopes up.
"Neither do I," she said, swallowing the last of her beer. "Thanks for dinner. I'll clean up-and, Dan? It's nice about your cousin, but this city's no place for a young man like you. You ought to get out of it while you can."
"And go where?" he asked. She didn't have any answer for that. She didn't even try.
Before Dannerman unlocked the door to his own room he checked the telltales. They were clear. No one had entered while he was out; his stock of collectibles was still intact, and so were the more important items concealed among them. He locked the door behind him and began his evening chores.
After Rita finished partitioning the condo for lodgers, her original eight rooms had become fourteen. Dan Dannerman had a windowless chamber that had once been a kind of dressing room to the condo's master bedroom, now occupied by the Halverson family of four. His part got the huge marble fireplace, but it was the Halversons who got the direct entrance to the bath; when Dan wanted to use it he had to go down the hall.
All in all, Dannerman would gladly have traded with the Halversons. He couldn't use the fireplace, because of pollution regulations, so it was just an annoyance that took up wall space he could have used for his personal stock of inflation hedges.
Those were the goods that people with jobs bought from the pitiful sidewalk vendors, the fixed-income people or the noincome people who were reduced to selling off their possessions to stay alive. It didn't matter what you bought. With daily inflation running at two or three per cent, sometimes more, anything you bought was bound to be worth more than you paid for it if you just held it for a while. It was part of Dannerman's cover to be just like everybody else who had a little spare cash, but not enough to put it into the good inflation hedges like option futures. He spent his surplus on collectibles as fast as he could. In Dannerman's personal store he had glass paperweights, small items of furniture-all he had room for in the tiny chamber-a Barbie doll from the 1988 issue in nearly mint condition, old flatscreen computers, bits of costume jewelry, CDs, optical disks and even magnetic tapes of music of all kinds. Of course, the stock in his room didn't represent all of his real capital, but since he couldn't admit what his real capital was he couldn't draw on it; the Bureau would hand it over to him, fully inflated with whatever the then-current cost-of-living adjustment might be, when he retired. Meanwhile, in times of unemployment Dannerman, too, had had to protect his cover by setting up a booth along Broadway and selling ofif goods.
He checked his watch and noted that it was time to take care of his last bit of business with the Carpezzios. He dialed the number, let it ring once; dialed again for two rings; then dialed again and waited for an answer. "Nobody's here but me," said the voice of their main shooter and watchman, Gene Martin.
"Shit," Dannerman said. He wasn't particularly disappointed, and not at all surprised-he had timed it for when none of the bosses would be in-but that was just the way you started most sentences around Carpezzio amp; Sons Flavors and Fragrances. "So take a message. I can't come in, I have to go to the dentist, but tell Wally he'll have to do the meet tonight himself."
"He'll be pissed," sighed Martin. "You got a toothache?" "No, I just like to go to the dentist. See you later." And he would see him later, Dannerman thought, but not until it was time to testify at their arraignment, and they wouldn't be very sociable then.
That taken care of, he had chores to do. From behind a print-book set of Lee s Lieutenants-not a very good investment, really, but one of these days he intended actually to read the books-he pulled out his rods and cloths, turned on his room screen and switched his pocket phone over to the screen to check the day's messages while he cleaned his guns.
The messages were almost all junk, of course. That was what he expected; his pocket phone was set to record everything that came in as voicemail except for the ones from Hilda. He reminded himself to add calls from the observatory to the priority list, now that he had a job, and set himself to review the day's garbage accumulation. People wanted to cast his horoscope or sell him weapons. A men's-clothing store was inviting him to a private advance sale of the season's newest sportswear and impact-resistant undergarments. A real-estate office had forced-sale condos in Uptown to offer. A couple of news services urged him to subscribe; a finance company offered to lend him money at just one per cent over the COLA; in short, the usual. There were just two real calls. One was from the theater group in Brooklyn, and, although the caller didn't give a name, he recognized the voice: Anita Berman. The other was from the lawyer, Mr. Dixler. Both wanted him to return their calls, but he thought for a moment and decided against it. Dixler could wait. And Anita Berman-
Well, Anita was a separate problem, and Dannerman wasn't quite ready to deal with it. Thoughtfully he left the phone live, while he began cleaning his twenty-shot, considering the case of Anita Berman. She was a sweet lady; there was no doubt of that. She liked him very well, and that was for sure, too. But Hilda thought she was a security risk, and now with the new job Hilda was bound to think Anita was excess baggage.