Roy turned the corner of the arcade and started walking along the eastern side of the square, down toward where the restaurant was. He would have loved to pause under one of those heaters, but it would have attracted attention after more than a moment, and if there was anything one did not do in this job, that was it. His business was to be as colorless as possible, not to stick out in any significant way. That, Roy thought, was what had gotten him this job in the first place, when-after answering a truly mind- numbing and unspeakably nosey questionnaire with which Jill provided him-he "met" the people who were going to be paying him. The meeting had taken place in a quiet, plush virtual office which was not part of Haven, but which led out of it through a Net-portal into which Roy did not inquire too closely, since the Breathing Space people had said that such things were both not allowed and supposedly impossible. He had been carefully looked over by people he couldn't see more clearly than as shadowy seated forms, and the few words initially exchanged among his interviewers when he came in all centered around how nondescript he looked. It was, Roy now supposed, a compliment, if a backhanded one.
Roy never then nor since saw anything of his employers' faces. He never heard anything but voices which he was sure had been so completely electronically altered that there was no way he would ever recognize the originals. He had answered their questions with carefully concealed impatience-for they were a lot of the same ones he had already answered on the questionnaire, about his home life (nonexistent) and his relationships with his relatives (ditto) and his family income and so on-and finally one of the three voices which had been speaking to him said simply, "You'll do."
"All you'll have to do for us," said another of the voices, "is go places, and either drop things off and leave them, or pick things up and bring them back. You finish the job, you get paid. Pay varies, but we start at…" and he named a figure which actually made Roy blink and think he had misheard… but he hadn't. "Can we work together?"
"Yes," Roy had said instantly. And that had been the end of that meeting, but the beginning of what would be many brief exchanges with the third voice, the Gruff Voice, the voice on the 'phone with the source that always stood just out of video pickup.
The work had turned out to have its elements of drudgery about it, but it was still mostly worth it, though there were annoying moments… like this one. Roy passed. By the restaurant now, just glancing in as he went by the windows and looked in at the golden stripped stone of the walls, and the couples eating and laughing together or single people sitting alone, reading as they ate or drank their wine. He walked slowly, so as to let the heat from the tall gas heaters at least drift briefly over him before he headed out from under the arcades to cross catty-corner to the other side of the square. Roy's stomach rumbled at the scent of steak and onions being sauteed inside.
Later, he thought, and then smiled the foolish smile of someone who catches himself talking to his own guts. But this was lonely work, in its way. None of the people you met for pickups or drop-offs was ever particularly glad to see you after the first moment of your appearance. Mostly, whether you were picking up or dropping off, they wanted you to go away as quickly as possible. After that, all that was left for you was the inevitable cheap hotel room- for you dared not expose yourself to attention by paying for a good one-and fast food wolfed hastily in train stations or bus shelters. Roy had become a connoisseur of this particular style of cheap-and-cheerful eating, and prided himself on knowing the location of the best and cheapest tapas place in Chamartin station in Madrid, the last coal-fired chippie in Dublin, the immense and inexpensive bhaji booth at the Wednesday food market in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich, and the open-air frites kiosk in Brugge that had both the best "French" fries in Belgium, and (bizarrely) a Net-access booth attached to it around the back. But even at places like these, it was Roy's business not to stand out, not to become memorable. And all of this was interleaved with endless legs of travel-almost always public transport, paid for with cash whenever you could find a form of transport that still accepted cash, or otherwise, the cheapest possible flights on the "company" debit card they'd given him… cramped in with all the other denizens of cattle class, trying to read or sleep through the noise of crying babies, and once again, trying not be noticed.
But it still isn yt all that bad a life, Roy thought as he came under the shelter of the arcades once again. He made good money, and had put aside a fair amount of it in the private account he'd established on one of his trips over here, in a little town in the Schwaebische Alps, south of Stuttgart. The thought of that slowly growing lump sum gave him a lot of satisfaction, after all his mother's insistence that she didn't want to give him money because "he'd just spend it." And now Roy was, to a certain degree, his own boss. He could take time off from this work whenever he liked, and stay at the shelter, or go somewhere else to have a holiday by himself… always making sure not to be noticed. The thought occurred to him, as it did occasionally, of how terrific it was going to be when he finally had enough money piled up to that he could just take it all home and show it to his mother and silence her once and for all, a lump that would plainly mean its owner didn't have to even think about work for about ten years. But that won't be for a good while, he thought. Let her worry. The peace and quiet of not having to listen to her complaining all the time is wonderful…
Roy sighed, pausing to look in another of the windows, this one belonging to a chocolatier and full of exquisitely decorated and ornamented sugar in a hundred different guises. If there was a problem with the work, that was it: the eternal necessity to move lightly on these errands, to * leave no "footprints" behind. And he also wondered fairly often what kinds of things were being dropped off or picked up by him that couldn't more easily be transmitted on the Net, in virtual meetings. Information, probably.. Though information can be encrypted.. Roy never went much further down that line of inquiry, though. It wasn't his business, and more to the point, he got the very strong feeling that it wouldn't be safe. He could lose this very nice, lucrative line of work… and something worse might happen. Better not to even think about it privately, let alone out loud to Jill or anyone else.
A sudden spate of frantic barking brought his head up again. Down at the end of the arcade, having just come into it from down the square, was the woman in the fur coat, the one with the dogs. The collies were pulling her along as energetically as they had been before. One of them suddenly broke loose from her, and she dropped her alligator purse.
Roy's eyes widened a little, since that was exactly the signal he had been told to look for. The purse came open as it hit the ground and sprayed stuff everywhere-
change, little cosmetics cases, a gold pen, a wallet. But Roy was briefly distracted by the dog, which came running at him with absolute delight and an idiot grin all over its face. He just managed to snag its wildly flapping leash as the dog went plunging past him, and braced himself so that it came up sharp, with a yelp.
He headed back toward the woman with her dog, slipping one hand into his pocket as he went, and as soon as he came up close to her Roy went down on one knee and started helping her pick up the things that had fallen out of her purse. "Merci, m'sieur," she said as he pressed the dog's leash back into her hand. "Je suis desolee, mon chien est tres mechant-" She must have picked up on Roy's bewildered expression, for then she said, "I beg your pardon, sir, I am desolated, my dog, she is-I do not have the word, but she wants a boy dog very much."