He had also purchased certain technical assistance here. A short scrawny man with a wizened face, completely naked from head to toe, flung himself into a chair at their table. ‘Hi, Realto, the suit work all right?’
Devilishly handsome in his Caeanic titfer, Mast tapped the end of his nose and gave a saturnine smile. ‘Well enough, Moil. You should ask Peder here. He was our brave “infranaut”.’ He chuckled.
Since Moil had manufactured the infra-sound baffled suit, in a sense Peder’s life had been in his hands. The sartorial felt uncomfortable as the technician’s eyes flicked to him, not knowing how much Mast had told him of the purpose behind the project.
‘It was a bit hairy, but I survived,’ he said.
‘Any of the stuff get through?’ Moil asked him. ‘Got the recorder box on you? I’d like to look it over.’
‘No, sorry, I haven’t,’ Peder said, not realizing until now that there had been a recorder.
‘We dumped the suit, I’m afraid, Moil,’ Mast explained apologetically. ‘We didn’t keep anything.’
Moil nodded absently. ‘Well, let me know if you need anything else,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Always glad to do business.’
‘Likewise.’ After he had gone Mast refilled Peder’s glass. ‘Fancy a game, Peder? Cards, or some shuffle? Luck’s with you, I can see.’
‘No,’ said Peder, certain by now that Mast was a barefaced, accomplished, habitual cheat.
One large table in the corner of the diner was separated from the rest of the room by cloth screens. Mast kept glancing at it from time to time, a speculative look crossing his features. Eventually he leaned across to Peder, speaking in a confidential tone. ‘See that screen table, Peder? That’s the permanent booking of the most powerful fence on Harlos. There’s no saying whether he’s here tonight, of course, until you get behind the curtain.’
‘Who cares?’ Peder responded desperately, gulping down his wine. But Mast was already on his feet, and oblivious of Peder’s look of ineffectual anxiety, he made his way across the saloon to the tented table. A tall, cadaverous man appeared suddenly from behind the screen and held a brief conversation with him, punctuated by vigorous gestures.
Mast returned looking excited. ‘Jadper is there, Peder. I haven’t managed to obtain an interview with him yet – but there’s a definite possibility that later in the evening… if so, I want you to come with me. You understand the merchandise; you’ll be able to talk to him.’
He slurped his wine, unaware of Peder’s nervous strain. ‘You realize what this means? Jadper won’t be interested in bits and pieces. He’ll take the whole load in one go! By this time tomorrow you may be rich!’
‘No, no,’ Peder protested in anguish. ‘That’s not how to do it at all. I must sell them slowly, piece by piece over a period of years, through my contacts in the trade. That way they’ll enhance their value. This is already agreed, Realto.’
Mast arched his eyebrows. ‘How long must I wait to recoup my capital? You are too amateurish, Peder, one doesn’t do things like that at all if one can help it. The thing is to make quicker gains to invest in new projects.’ He lowered his tone. ‘I haven’t mentioned this before, but I know a way to tap the main root of the sap-oil forest on Tundora. The outlay is rather expensive, but we can draw off a substantial quantity of fluid before being detected, and it can be sold immediately at a large profit, no questions asked.’ He tapped Peder on the knee. ‘Come in with your share from selling the garments, and in a few months you’ll get it back tenfold. What do you say to that?’
‘No,’ Peder said. ‘I’m not in your line of business. I’m a sartorial, and that’s all I ever want to be. I’m sticking to our agreement.’ He folded his arms stubbornly.
‘Are you aware of how risky it is to be in possession of Caeanic apparel?’ Mast reminded him, wide-eyed. ‘Leave it to the fences, the professionals. They take the risk, and they don’t mind hanging on to the goods for a year or two.’
‘Neither do I,’ Peder said in a surly tone. Part of his resentment stemmed, in fact, from the prospect he had been savouring of doling out the merchandise to avid customers culled from all over Ziode; discriminating elegantors who would pay almost anything for such treasures as a pair of Caean-cut breeches or a Prossim cheviot.
Mast was undergoing one of his dangerous bouts of over-confidence. It had been a mistake to come to the Mantis, Peder thought. Without him Mast would make no move; he needed his expertise.
Peter had initially been seduced by Mast’s glamorous aura of privateering, even imagining – falsely – that they were kindred souls; that the care Mast took to be a snappy dresser meant he was seriously interested in the sartorial art. But he was wrong in that, and he did not have the nerve to go along with the man’s compulsive opportunism.
He jumped to his feet in a near-panic. ‘I’m going home,’ he said bluntly. ‘I have as much at stake in this as you do. I’m using my right of veto.’
‘You do not have as much at stake in it!’ Mast exclaimed, leaning back and looking up at him. ‘Who paid for the co-ordinates, hired the Costa, had the baffle suit made? Your own expenditure has been nil – and your share in the proceeds, correspondingly, is minor. Or had you forgotten that?’
‘I risked my life,’ Peder reminded him icily. ‘You didn’t – or ever intend to.’
Clutching his hold-all, he went stumbling for the rainbow plastic elevator. As it rushed him to the Mantis Diner’s greasy street-front, he hoped vacillatingly that he had not hurt Mast’s feelings.
It was midnight when he arrived in Tarn Street, and the stars of the Ziode Cluster blazed overhead, a spangled ceiling to the city’s night-glow. Peder unlocked his small shop, The Sartorial Elegantor, and stepped quietly within.
The closeted smell of cloth greeted him. In his imagination the populations of garments huddled on their racks, like a close-packed army on parade, seemed to welcome him. He brushed through them in the near darkness and descended a few steps to his cellar workshop, switching on the light.
Neatly arrayed before him in the cramped space were the tools of his trade: the pressing board, the dummies, the slender bodkins, the array of power needles for stitching and seaming in hundreds of different ways, the fibril-loom – a hand-held machine for joining cloth so that there was no seam. Another machine wove individual suits from the ground up, starting from reels of yarn, a procedure which ostensibly was personal tailoring, the sartorial sitting at the control board and feeding in instructions; but one which Peder rarely used – the work was too remote from the hands, it was something borrowed from a factory.
His eye fell on the half-completed garments bedecking the walls, and as he compared them mentally with the contents of the hold-all he carried Peder smiled the bitter-sweet smile of an artist who knows he is inferior, knows he is in the presence of a creativity transcending all he could aspire to.
And yet he would have to summon up what talents he did possess, for judging by his first hasty examination of it the Frachonard suit was a trifle too large for him, and would have to be adjusted. The thought of adjusting the work of a Frachonard sent prickles down his spine, but it would have to be done if the suit was to be his own.
He laid the hold-all on the table, and opened it.
He took out the lavender suède slippers.
He took out the Frachonard suit.
Handling it gently, he draped it on a hanger and then stepped back to view it.
Just as when he had first seen it on the crashed Caeanic spaceship, it took over the whole room. The Frachonard Prossim suit! How annoyed Mast would be to know he had appropriated such a rarity!