And St. Clair realized that L'n did not understand that she had been mistaken for a pet. Oh, well. She would wait awhile before she let her furry friend in on it. But, oh, God, was there going to be an explosion when she found out.
Later, after St. Clair had explained and then scraped her friend off the ceiling of the compartment, she just had to ask it. "Did you know how to purr before?"
"No," L'n had said. "I've never even heard of a cat, either!"
"Then how..."
L'n gave a shrug of a furry pink shoulder. "I don't know. I just reached down inside and... purred, dammit! Now, will you shut up about it, before I show you what I can do with teeth?"
It was the turning point in the life of the once-shy being called L'n. And there would be no going back.
As soon as they reached the center of the city, St. Clair instinctively gravitated toward Chaboya. In any area where sin was largely ignored and corruption was waist deep, cops tended to ignore most of the evildoers and their victims. The crackdowns usually came against well-known types who had not coughed up enough to stay in business. Credits changed hands, and then it was back to business as usual.
St. Clair found a dive for them to hole up in and then hit the streets. For the first day or two she fooled around with a few penny-ante shell games just to get warmed up and increase her stash of credits. Then she hit the casinos. Unnoticed, she filtered through them one by one, dropping a little here, picking up a little there, always keeping a low profile. She found what she was looking for at the K'ton Klub. From the thin crowds and the peeling plas walls, she knew it was close to folding. She played small-time dice machines for a while, watching the crowds.
She identified the owner right off. He was an older, handsome man who tended to dress a bit too flashily. She noticed that he spent little time on the floor, appearing only when another obviously high-stakes flash gambler occasionally showed up.
He would personally greet him, then they would disappear upstairs to what St. Clair just knew was a big-time game. It was time to strike. She invested a healthy chunk of her stake for the flashiest, sexiest outfit she could find, then reentered the club, looking for all the world like a bored professional anxious to find some action.
The owner spotted her right off. A little flirting followed, and teasing remarks were exchanged. Mild sexual innuendo was used on each side to check out the gambler in the other. An invitation was offered.
A little later she found herself being ushered into the owner's office. As soon as she entered the room, she knew she was home. In the center of the table was the pot. And it did not consist of the funny money the Tahn laughingly called credits. Instead, there were rare gems and exotic heavy mineral baubles. And there were also stacks of parchmentlike papers that could only be Imperial bonds and real estate deeds.
One week of around-the-clock playing later, she was bowing the owner out of his own office, holding his deed to the club. All the objects that made up the pot were also hers. She expected a bit of a strong-arm bluff from the man. And she was prepared for it—St. Clair had a minipistol hidden in the voluminous sleeve of her blouse. Oddly enough, the man did not seem to mind all that much. He said he had been thinking it was time to move on, and the cards that they all worshiped had confirmed that.
There was one other deed on the table that proved to be of far greater value than was obvious at first glance. It was for the seemingly worthless cargo of a freighter—a museum ship stranded by the war in midtour.
As soon as she and L'n had cracked the rusted hold and entered, St. Clair had smelled money. Inside was a traveling exhibit of ancient Earth-style casinos: mechanical gambling machines, crap tables, bingo machines, roulette wheels, decks of real paper playing cards. And vidbooks after stacks of vid-books on how the old folks had lost their money thousands of years before.
St. Clair stripped the K'ton Klub down to the ground floor, then installed the machines. The lure of honest percentages and old-fashioned gambling drew customers like beasts to carrion. The marks were sure they could not be cheated because there was little electronics involved. Things that went crank-crank, whirr were considered far more trustworthy and ruled by the laws of a kind nature than were computers that talked to one, fooled with one, and toyed with reality livie-style, all the while gulping away at one's credits.
From the very beginning, St. Clair decided that the place would be as exclusive as possible. Instead of garish, lighted signs outside, she had only a small glowing plaque on the front door reading "The K'ton Klub. Members only."
St. Clair congratulated herself as she slinked through the more drably dressed customers who made up the crowds on the ground floor. She noted the things that were going right and, just as importantly, what was going wrong—if anything. The room was ringed with the one-armed bandits she had salvaged off the museum ship. On this floor they were one of the biggest money-makers, second only to the dice tables and followed by chuck-a-luck and the marathon bingo games that featured a pot that grew each day until no simpleminded blue-collar type mark could resist laying his credits down.
To keep a bit of class and social strata awe going, the center of the room was occupied by a raised, roped-off platform where there was always a high-stakes whist game going. To encourage a constant supply of whist players, St. Clair charged only a minimum fee per chair and took no house percentage at all.
Sexily uniformed servers constantly moved through the crowd, offering cocktails, narcotics, and snacks. In peacetime it would all have been free, but now the marks were so grateful that there was anything available at all that they gladly paid. There were two ways a customer could go from there. A mark could either exit to the street—after passing through a brothel where joyboys and joygirls hustled whatever credits remained—or he or she could climb the stairs to the next casino, where the price soared along with the class of the clientele.
The previous owner had had a somewhat similar setup, with three working casinos on each floor and a nightclub restaurant on top. However, he had used entrances and elevators to separate the poor marks from the middle class and the middle class from the rich. One of the first things St. Clair did when she took over was eliminate the elevators and the separate entrances. Everyone had to go the same way to get to the top, and without exception, money was left on each floor.
St. Clair climbed the stairs, making sure at each level that the bouncers were properly culling the credit-level chaff from the wheat. The second casino leaned toward roulette and higher-stakes card games and crap tables. The next floor was invitation-only straight card games, mostly poker, whist, t'rang, bezique, and bridge.
The nightclub was on the top floor. There was no cover, no minimum. It was St. Clair's idea. The prices she charged for food, drink, and sex with the entertainers who swung that way were astronomical, even for those inflationary times. Everything else about the nightclub was L'n's.
She had designed it so that the mark and his mate would be overwhelmed as soon as they entered. It hit St. Clair even though she had known what to expect.
She was overwhelmed by the multicolored lights that dipped, dodged, swirled, and smoked, grabbing the viewer's mind in a soft glove and delivering him or her into the arms of the entertainers who danced and sang and cavorted on three stages. The moment L'n had spotted the dusty room jammed with creaky, high-tech seats, she had known she was on the verge of discovering a new art form, a living art form that would call into play all the powerful talents she had spent so many years developing. She used light sources of all types but seemed to get the most out of the more natural effects of resistor-based vacuum bulbs, and especially candles and torches whose burning centers she captured on moveable mirrors, split with prisms, and then re-formed again to be cast any place she chose.