I opened up. "Captain. I nearly didn't recognize you out of uniform." Polite. I can manage it sometimes. I glanced around. He was alone. Amazing. His bunch run in crowds. That's one of their survival skills.
"Can we talk?" He was a small, thin character with short brown hair graying around the edges. There was nothing remarkable about him except that he seemed worried. And he was almost polite. He'd never been polite to me before. I was suspicious immediately.
A healthy dose of paranoia never hurts when you deal with the Westman Blocks.
"I have company, Captain."
"Let's walk, then. And don't call me Captain, please. I don't want anyone guessing who I am." Damn, he was working hard. Usually he talked like a longshoreman.
"It's raining out there."
"Can't put anything past you, can they? No wonder you have that reputation."
See? Just not my day. I pulled the door shut without bothering to holler to Dean. What did I have to worry about? I had a heavenly host on guard. "Why don't we scare up a beer, then? I feel the need." For about a keg, taken in one big gulp.
"Be quicker if we just walk." His little blue eyes were chips of ice. He didn't like me but he was working hard not to offend me. He wanted something bad. I noted that he'd acquired a little mustache like Morley's. Must be something going around.
"All right. I'm a civic-minded kind of guy. But maybe you could drop me one little hint?"
"You figured it already, Garrett, I know you. I need a favor I hate to ask for. A big favor. I got a problem. Whether I like it or not, you're probably the only guy I know of can solve it."
I think that was a compliment. "Really?" I swelled with newfound power. It almost matched the growth of my paranoia. I'm the kind of guy gets really nervous when my enemies start making nice on me.
"Yeah." He grumbled something that must have been in a foreign language, because no gentleman would use words like the words I thought I heard. Watch officers are all gentlemen. Just ask them. They'll clue you in good while they pick your pocket.
"What?"
"I'd better just show you. It isn't far."
I touched myself here and there, making sure I was still carrying.
After a block, during which he muttered to himself, Block said, "We got a power struggle shaping up up top, Garrett."
"What else is new?" We haven't had a big shake-up or a king bite the dust for a couple years but, overall, we change rulers more often than Barking Dog changes clothes.
"There's a reform faction forming."
"I see." Bad news for his bunch. "Grim."
"You see what I mean?"
"Yeah." I'd heard grumblings myself. But those were there all the time. Down here in the real world we don't take them seriously. All part of politics. Nobody really wants change. Too many people have too much to lose.
"Glad you do. Because we got something come up that gots to be tooken care of. Fast. We got the word. Else it's going to be our balls in a vise." See? He even talked like a gentleman.
"Where do I come in?"
"I hate to admit it, but there ain't none of us knows what to do." Damn! He was in trouble. He was scared. They must have showed him a vise heated red hot, with ground glass in its jaws. "I put in some time thinking. You was the only answer. You know what to do and you're straight enough to do it. If I can get you to."
I didn't say anything. I knew I wasn't going to like what I was about to hear. Keeping my mouth shut kept my options open. Marvelous, the restraint I showed in my old age.
"You help us out with this, Garrett, you won't be sorry. We'll see you're taken care of fee-wise. And you'll be covered with the Watch from here on in."
Well, now. That would be useful. I've had my troubles with the Watch. One time they laid siege to my house. It took some doing to work that one out.
"Right. So what is it?" I had a creepy feeling.
Didn't take a genius to figure it would be something big and nasty.
"I better just show you," he insisted.
Despite his fine-sounding offer I was liking this less and less.
11
We walked only a mile but that mile took us over the edge of the world into another reality, into the antechamber of hell, the Bustee. Now I understood why he was out of uniform.
TunFaire boasts peoples of almost every intelligent race. Mostly they clump like with like in closed neighborhoods. Likewise with humans not of the ethnic majority. Breeds fall into the cracks, live in between, catch as catch can, often welcome nowhere. Two-thirds of the city is ghetto slum. Poverty is the norm.
But the Bustee is to those slums as the slums are to the Hill. People there live in tents made of rags or in shanties put together from sticks and mud and trash scavenged before the ratmen could collect it. Or they cram in a hundred to the building meant for five or ten two hundred years ago, when the structure had windows and doors and flooring that hadn't yet been torn up to burn for heat during the winter. They lived in doorways and on the street, some so poor they didn't have a grass mat for a mattress. They lived amidst unimaginable filth. The ratmen wouldn't go in there without protection. The soldiers wouldn't go in less than company-strong—if at all. Too many soldiers had come out of there and wouldn't go back even to visit.
The Bustee is the bottom. You can't roll downhill any farther. You roll that far, chances are you'll never climb back. Not till the dead wagons come.
Only the deathmen are safe in the Bustee. Each day they come with their wagons, wearing their long gray robes with the veils that conceal their faces, to collect the dead from the streets and alleys. They chant, "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" as they work. They won't leave the streets to collect. They load their wagons and make their deliveries to the city crematoriums. They work from dawn to dusk, but every day they get a little farther behind.
Death in the Bustee is as ugly as life.
In the Bustee there is no commodity cheaper than life.
In the Bustee there is only one commodity of any value at all. Young men. Hard young men who have survived the streets. These fellows are the only real beneficiaries of the Cantard war. They enlist as soon as they're able and use their bonuses to get whoever they can out of hell. Then, despite their hard and undisciplined youths, they work hard at being good soldiers. If they're good soldiers they can make enough to keep their families out. They go down to the Cantard and die like flies to keep their families out.
That such love should flourish, let alone survive, in the Bustee is ever an amazement to me. Frankly, I don't understand how it does. In the more affluent slums, youth seems to victimize those closest to it first.
Another world, the Bustee. They do things differently there.
Block stopped walking. I halted. He seemed to be having trouble getting his bearings. I looked around nervously. We looked too prosperous. But the streets were deserted.
Maybe it was the rain. But I doubted that. There was something in the air.
"This way," Block said. I followed, ever more alert. We saw no one till I spotted a pair of obvious Watchmen, though out of uniform, peeking from a narrow passageway between two buildings that might have been important back at the dawn of time. They were as big as they get in the Bustee. The men faded back into the passageway.
My nerves worsened. I was supposed to go back in there with a guy loved me the way Block did? But he didn't dislike me that much. Not enough to bring me down here for that kind of fun.
I stepped into the passage—and almost tripped over an old man. He couldn't have weighed more than seventy pounds. He was a skeleton with skin on it. He had just enough strength to shake. The deathmen would collect him before long.