There wasn’t enough elbow room on the banquette seats for the fellow to draw. Peres saw the attempt, glanced blank-faced toward the oncoming Frisians, and broke into an oily smile.
“My friend Master Coke!” Peres called over the glass-edged music. The gigolo reached across the girl he’d been fondling to lay a finger of restraint on the wrist of the henchman with the machine pistol. “And Master Vierziger as well! Can I hope that you’re here for pleasure?”
“Business first, Master Peres,” Coke said. “But if it goes well, then in a couple months we’ll all have both time and a reason to celebrate. Is there a place you and we could…?”
“Here,” Peres said without hesitation. He chucked the girl under the chin. “You lot, get out of here. We need the space.”
“Hey!” said the girl. “You told us that—”
Peres’ three henchmen stood up. The boy and the other two women were leaving the booth without objection. Peres hit the protesting woman with the same hand that had been between her legs a moment before. Her head snapped back and she sprawled across the banquette.
The guard with the beanbag gun turned at the commotion. When he saw Peres was involved—and that Peres didn’t need further help—he looked away.
One of the Astras with Peres carried gloves thrust through the epaulette loops of his sleeveless blue shirt. He took the pair out and pulled one of them on. It had fishhooks sewn into the back, points forward.
The other two women shrieked and grabbed their fellow. They dragged her out of the booth before the Astra was ready to punch her. He aimed a kick, but she was too groggy to react.
No bones broken, just a bruise or two.
Coke smiled at Peres. The escorts sat down again.
Coke thought of the ruck of blood and offal the mines had left of the L’Escorial cordon. This time he fantasized that the uniforms were blue, and that some of the pellet-torn faces were those of the men before him.
He sat on one end of the semi-circular banquette; Vierziger took the other end, across from his leader, so that they both had a way out of the booth. In a room full of guns and blue garb, that wasn’t a free ticket home, but it was better than having to ask permission of Peres and his thugs before getting to your feet.
“What I was thinking, Master Peres …” Coke said.
“Adolpho, please,” the gigolo said. “And Matthew and—”
He cocked an eyebrow toward Vierziger and smirked.
Vierziger smirked back, for the Lord’s sake! “Johann, and of course you may,” the little killer said.
“We realize that you’re doubtful about committing so much money without certainty of the result, Adolpho,” Coke resumed. “I’d like to show you that quite apart from armed force, we can help you through planning and—data collection.”
He’d almost said “intelligence,” meaning it in the military sense. Peres might have misunderstood by taking the word at its general meaning. That would have been correct also; but the wrong thing for Coke to have said aloud.
“What do you have in mind, then?” the gigolo said. Peres wasn’t as stupid as Vierziger claimed while listening to the bugged conversation. Rather, he had no experience of the world outside Cantilucca, and he was too young to realize that Cantilucca was a very small pond.
“Your competitors warehouse their gage,” Coke said. “With the information my colleagues and I provide, you can snatch the whole amount without any alarm being given. That’s pure profit, a good quarter of the cost of the FDF’s services.”
“We could never do that!” said the Astra holding the hooked gloves. He looked as though Coke had told him to walk on water.
“Besides which,” Vierziger said with a smile, “that will leave your L’Escorial friends with severe liquidity problems. They won’t be able to bid for comparable services for several months.”
Peres looked from one Frisian to the other. His right index finger sorted out one of the unused stim cones in the pile before him. He flicked it across the table to Vierziger. “Try this,” he directed.
Vierziger rotated the thumbnail-sized gray cone. The casing didn’t have the usual markings, lines, or spots to indicate the contents. “Gage?” he asked.
“Gage and,” the gigolo said. “Go on, try it.”
Vierziger shrugged and set the injector to his left wrist.
Peres wheeled and looked at Coke again. “Why are you offering me suggestions that’ll handicap you in getting the Lurias to jack up your price?” he demanded
Coke smiled. “I’m not on Cantilucca to raise the price,” he said. “I’m here to deal on the terms my superiors set me.”
The smile broadened and grew as terrible as the one that played over Vierziger’s lips in the aftermath of the mine blasts. “It may be that your L’Escorial friends think the way they greeted me cost them only a dozen dead. They would be wrong. It’s cost them everything they have—so long as the Widow is willing to meet our minimum demands.”
“The Widow is willing to do whatever I tell her,” Peres sneered. “But how can I be sure you’re not playing a double game? Let’s you and him fight, hey? Astra and L’Escorial …and your troops land to loot the ruins.”
A shudder rolled through Vierziger’s frame. Coke looked at his companion with unexpressed concern. The little gunman waved a negligent hand when the spasm passed.
“What is it?” he asked Peres.
“Gage,” the gigolo said. He smiled. “But cut with first-distillation tailings. Are you afraid now?”
Vierziger laughed. “Afraid of what? Dying? No, Master Peres, not me.”
Vierziger flexed his hands above the table, showing that the nerves and muscles all responded normally. He laughed again. His voice sounded like snake scales scraping on rock. The nearest gunman groped toward his hip holster, then caught himself.
“There won’t be a fight,” Coke said to Peres. The pulse of the music overrode the discussion anywhere beyond the booth itself. The gigolo’s decision to negotiate here had been a reasonable one. “There’s only a few watchmen in the warehouse. I can show you how to get through the walls, and how to disconnect all the alarms before you start the operation.”
“Are you afraid of a fight, Master Peres?” Vierziger asked in a voice too soft to be a gibe …and with a grin that could have sharpened knives.
“No,” the Astra leader snapped. He looked at Coke. “Money in my purse so that there can be money in yours, hey? Very reasonable. So we’ll do it—but you’ll come along, Matthew, so that we can be sure the deal is that reasonable.”
“All right,” Coke agreed. “We’ll go to your headquarters now and I’ll brief you. I’ll need a hologram projector—or I can get one from the hotel.”
Peres’ lips tightened. “We have projectors. We’re civilized here, not some backwater, you know!”
Coke didn’t laugh in the gigolo’s face. Again, it wouldn’t have been politic.
“Then let’s go,” he said, rising. “After I brief you, I’ll send a message capsule to my superiors to update them. The operation itself will take place tonight, if you can get your end together that quickly.”
“Yes, of course we can!” Peres snapped. He looked at Vierziger, rising also. “Are you going?”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Johann Vierziger, stroking the inside of his left wrist with his right index finger, his trigger finger.
Coke viewed his surroundings from a cool vantage point above his flesh and prickling nerves. He would see Pilar when he routed the message capsule toward Nieuw Friesland. There would be time for dinner afterward, and other things.
And it might be the last time Matthew Coke had.
Sten Moden emerged from the alley between a pair of six-story structures. Washed clothes hung by an arm or leg from poles thrust out of windows on the upper floors. The washing was the first sign of domesticity the Frisian had seen on Cantilucca.