“He’s—” Pierro shrieked.
“I’m here,” Coke said. The courtyard was indifferently lighted, primarily by the headlights of the armored vehicles. The Frisian in his gray cape was a moving shadow.
“Coke!” Luria cried. “Thank the Lord you’re here! Look, you have to stop your troops coming. At once! You have to hold them back until Madame Yarnell has left Cantilucca!”
“Nobody at Camp Able’s going to make a decision until they have your money in hand, Luria,” Coke said harshly. “According to your paymaster, Suterbilt, that’s still several days. You needn’t have kittens.”
Despite his aggressive tone, Coke felt cold inside. His daily message capsules were shipped by first available transport to Nieuw Friesland, but there was at least a week between sending and receipt. Coke wondered what the Lurias would do to him if they knew he had recommended against taking the proffered contract, whether or not Suterbilt came through with the earnest money.
The Old Man lurched along the hallway toward his son. Gunmen, groggy with drink and gage, were being hastened onto the back stairs by their more alert fellows. Pepe Luria fought his way down the stairwell through them. He wore the firefly controller, but none of the spheres were themselves in evidence.
“She’s coming!” a L’Escorial shouted from the courtyard gate. “She’s coming!”
“Everybody into the basement!” Ramon screamed. He gripped the Frisian’s arm, fiercely and apparently unaware of what he was doing. His hand bumped the muzzle of Coke’s sub-machine gun.
“Oh my Lord!” Ramon cried. “You’re carrying a gun! Are you mad? She said no weapons in sight, none! She’ll—”
Pepe joined them. Ramon turned to his son and said, “He’s carrying a gun, Pepe!”
The youngest Luria looked Coke up and down with the interest of a dog sniffing something dead. “So, you’d be the expensive Major Coke, would you?” he said. “I suppose I needed to meet you some time, since L’Escorial now employs you.”
To his father Pepe added, “It isn’t in sight. But”—Pepe’s eyes were as black as cannel coal. They focused again on Coke.—“hold it so that it’s less obvious nonetheless. I don’t care what the good madame does to you, but she might mistakenly think L’Escorial was involved in your bad manners.”
The last of the L’Escorial armored trucks collided with a wall. The vehicle stalled on the ramp into the garage. The driver tried to restart his engine.
Ramon scampered over to the vehicle. “Leave it!” he cried. “Shut it down! And get out, get out!”
A car with a slim, armored body and four metal-mesh wheels on wide-spread outriggers pulled up in front of the L’Escorial building. Coke had seen similar vehicles used for ground reconnaissance where for one reason or another hovercraft were contra-indicated.
Raul Luria reached the doorway. Pepe put an arm around the Old Man’s shoulders, more for solidarity than for physical support. Ramon skipped back to join his father and son.
Matthew Coke stepped aside, flattening himself in the shadows across the wall. He held the sub-machine gun vertically against his body, covered by the folds of the cape. He glanced at Pepe Luria, but only for an instant; and there was no expression on his face.
The door of the reconnaissance car folded down; the female passenger got out. Though the car’s interior was more luxuriously appointed than was normal for the type of vehicle, it was still cramped quarters for those within.
The woman wore a white jumpsuit trimmed with silver, and a short, lustrous cape of some natural fur. She was by no means young, but surgery and cosmetics prevented Coke from trying to guess her age within two decades. She halted in the gateway where the lights of the stalled truck lit her brilliantly.
Raul Luria began hobbling toward her with his descendants a half-pace behind to either side. “Madame Yarnell!” he wheezed. “You honor us with your presence.”
“Don’t bother, Luria,” the woman ordered sharply. “I’m going to say what I have to and then go back and repeat it to the Astras, those other childish idiots. This must stop! Do you understand?”
“Madame—” Ramon said, “we of course—”
“No, it’s not ‘of course,’” Madame Yarnell snarled. “If anything were obvious to you morons, you’d get on with business instead of ruining it. Can you imagine how much trouble you’ve caused with your fighting already?”
“It wasn’t us who—” Raul began.
“Shut up, old man!” the woman ordered. “I’m here to talk, not listen. The reason gage deliveries have dropped by thirty percent over the past two quarters, and the reason that the product my fellows and I need to fulfill contracts has burned to ash—the reason is that you and Astra are squabbling instead of doing business. That will stop, now! Do you understand?”
“Of course, we want nothing more than to do business ourselves, mistress,” Pepe said with his eyes lowered.
“That’s good,” the Delian representative said, “because if there’s any more trouble, our retailers will cancel contracts and find other sources of supply. Whereupon Cantilucca will become superfluous …and you gentlemen in particular will become superfluous. Do you understand me?”
Pepe’s face tightened.
Raul laid a hand heavily on the youth’s shoulder. “May we offer you the hospitality of L’Escorial during your stay on Cantilucca, madame?” the Old Man said.
“You may not,” Madame Yarnell snapped. “I’ll be staying in the cartel offices in the port reservation while I’m here. And if you’re wondering how long that will be—it will be until I’m absolutely sure that you and your imbecile compatriots have heard my message and are acting on it. I regret to say that it may be years that I’ll be stuck in this cesspool!”
She spun on her heel, whirling the cape out from her shoulders, and walked back to the recon car. As soon as the door latched, the driver slammed into a tight turn and headed back toward Astra HQ. Coke suspected that the cartel representative had bypassed the Astras initially because she feared that L’Escorial, as the more seriously aggrieved party, was likely to take the next escalating step.
The Lurias bent their heads together, all talking at once. Coke looked at them, pursed his lips, and sauntered across the street to Hathaway House.
He supposed he should have been pleased that peace might come to Cantilucca. The trouble was, he kept thinking that with the syndicates in unbroken control, the best ordinary citizens could hope for was the peace of the grave.
Cantilucca: Day Six
“The beer isn’t any better than Hathaways,” Sten Moden said. The logistics officer watched the afternoon traffic over Coke’s shoulder, as Coke did over Moden’s. “But it’s good to get out anyway. With Madame Yarnell in town, you could almost imagine Potosi was a normal place, couldn’t you?”
Niko Daun returned from the bar, clanking three more mugs down on the sidewalk table. “They’ve got a dancer in the back room,” he said indignantly. “They let the johns poke at her with shock batons. I don’t care if she’s stoned, they shouldn’t do that!”
“There’s a lot of things on Cantilucca they shouldn’t do,” Coke said. He drained the last mouthful from his current mug and set the empty under his chair to get it out of the way. “Madame Yarnell stopped people who’d be better dead from killing each other. That’s about it.”
He didn’t see any guns on the street. Syndicate colors were muted as well. A red beret, a blue neckerchief—rarely anything more overt. Widow Guzman and the Lurias had sent most of their gunmen back into the farming districts for the time being.
“I wonder how Esteban’s father-in-law’s doing,” Sten Moden said. “I’m afraid that the thugs that were swaggering around Potosi’ll be looking for something to keep them occupied out in the sticks.”
A woman screamed in a broken voice from the cafe’s back room. Shouts and laughter greeted the outburst. A pair of men wearing red armbands got up from the table beside the Frisians and walked toward the back. They were fumbling in their pockets for the cover charge.