The youngster didn’t reply. He was already back on his knees, peering with surgically enhanced eyes into the glassine and plasticized bowels of his inert patient.
The number-cruncher was transcribing tax records with the grim dedication of a veteran interior lineman waiting for the play to be called his way. He was short and squat, with a heavy spade beard and eyebrows like mossy ledges in a miniature rain forest. His demeanor matched his appearance. Moses and Manz stood on the other side of the security barrier that separated them from this sophisticated Cro-Magnon statistician.
“I’d rather not discuss the matter, gentlemen,” he said without looking in their direction. The security membrane distorted each word slightly, as if the tail end of each consonant had been slightly filed.
Manz persisted. “All we want to know is why Borgia let you go.”
“I already told the police.”
The adjuster fingered the security membrane, heard it complain. “As I’ve already explained, we’re not with the authorities. We represent a public polling company.”
“As someone who works constantly with numbers, I certainly sympathize with your situation,” Moses murmured.
The statistician coded three lines of keys and abruptly whirled to face them. “All right.” He grinned nastily. “I won’t talk to any more people, but I’ll talk to you.” He pointed sharply at Moses.
As an attempt to belittle Manz, it failed utterly. He didn’t care if the man dictated to a toilet, so long as he answered their questions. The adjuster could see him being less than cooperative with the police, which raised hopes of obtaining some potentially useful crumb of information he’d deliberately or angrily chosen not to mention to Hafas’s troops.
“I thank you for confiding in me,” Moses replied, playing his role superbly. “Why did Borgia terminate your employment with them?”
“I’m a statistician, right? It’s my job to add and subtract and make sure everything balances properly. To make sure the right numbers are in the right places at all times.”
“And this was in some doubt at Borgia?” Moses asked him.
“Of course not! Not with me on the lines. My accounts always balance!”
“I’m sure,” Moses said soothingly. “In that event, why were you terminated?”
The statman sniffed disdainfully. “I came across an item that didn’t belong. Checked it three times, like I always do. It was a big item, and it just seemed to have fallen through the cracks, so I brought it to the attention of my superior.”
“Do you recall the precise nature of the error?”
“Didn’t say it was an error. Said it didn’t belong. Was in the wrong place. Had to do with corporate income derived from ‘Incidental Franchises.’ There was nothing wrong with the accounting. I just thought it excessive for the locale. So I wanted to check it out, just to make sure it was correct.”
Manz made a face. “Seems a funny reason for firing somebody. Lots of companies list large amounts under proprietary headings. For tax purposes, to keep stockholders baffled; all sorts of reasons.”
The statman affected a look of contempt. “Twenty-eight percent of all net profit for the preceding fiscal period?” He turned back to his instrumentation, and his fingers resumed flying over the lines.
“That does seem a bit excessive,” Moses finally commented. “Thank you for your time.” The statistician neither replied nor looked up from his work. “One more thing. While working at Borgia did you ever happen to run into another employee; young, good-looking temptech name of Suhkhet li Trong?”
The statman surprised Manz by emitting a vulgar snigger. “Sooky? Sure, I knew her. She spent a lot of time with old man Monticelli, and I don’t think it had anything to do with stats. Leastwise, not the company’s.” He made the unpleasant noise again before returning with dismissive finality to his work.
XII
By the time they returned to the hotel, Vyra had recovered sufficiently to take the two remaining pills the house physician had prescribed. In her weakened condition they knocked her out all over again, leaving Manz and Moses to check out the last name on their list without her.
The meccab deposited them in a run-down neighborhood that could trace its architectural roots all the way back to the mid-twentieth century. Manz decided it probably ran the city’s main recycling zone a close second in terms of noxious smells and environmental desirability.
The old-style apartment house across the street from the vandalized, graffiti-stained meccab stop looked slightly more stable than its tangent edifices, but only slightly. Rock-proof flexan made the unbroken windows impregnable to all but the most heavily armed teens. Low in a cloud-smeared sky the afternoon sun squirmed around corners and over rooftops, trying to worm its way into the grimy street. For the most part it was unsuccessful.
“A somewhat less appealing address than those we have visited so far,” Moses opined.
“You never know. Might look like the crystal palace inside.” Manz led the way across the deserted street.
The only crystal in the building took the form of memories and discarded drug paraphernalia. Manz kicked at the detritus of somebody’s broken life. For every drug the government legalized, another, custom crafted in some African or Asian lab, took its place in the litany of the proscribed. It wasn’t the particular chemical-of-the-week that so tempted people, he knew, as much as it was the lure of the forbidden. Behind him, the floor creaked alarmingly under Moses’s weight.
The second floor yielded graffiti in several languages and a broken pocket watch. The adjuster’s practiced eye pegged it instantly for a reproduction. That went without saying, since anything pawnable would not be left lying about in such a place. The hallway was dark and filthy, the walls stained yellow at heights beyond the reach of the most ambitious dog.
The old woman seated behind the battered, chipped wooden counter sat hunched over the text reader, scanning it by the uneven light of its flickering built-in illuminator. Manz managed to make out the words “lust” and “fever” before she quickly folded it shut against her lap and slid it out of sight beneath the counter. Her stringy hair would not have tempted a starving spider, though a wandering arachnid might have found her disposition compatible. Her gaze was suspicious and hostile.
She looked her visitors up and down, unimpressed. “Well, whadda you want?”
“A human concierge,” Moses whispered. “This place is even more primitive than it initially appeared. Where is your palace?”
“Quiet, brassbrain.” Manz raised his voice to address the old woman. “You have a boarder here named Kohler Antigua? Older man, lean, ex-spacer?”
The woman chuckled, an uncomely rasping. “Didn’t think ya wanted a room, by the looks of you. Who wants ta know? The old fart’s a friend o’ mine, an’ not just ’cause he pays his rent on time.”
The adjuster reached into a jacket pocket and produced a universal credit chit. It would fit any credit processor on or off the world. With ceremonial deliberation he laid it on the counter, denomination side up so she could read it. Her eyes glittered, and the chit disappeared into regions best left unfathomed somewhere deep within the voluminous dress.
“Huh! Whadda ya want me ta do, vape ’im?” She grinned, exposing a lunar landscape of decrepit molars and decaying bicuspids. “Friends cost more, and I factor you can pay, by the looks o’ you.”
“We don’t want to hurt him, or have him hurt. We just want to ask him a few questions.”
She squinted hard at him. “Guv’mint?”
“No … by the looks o’ us. He does board here, doesn’t he?”
“Yah, sure. Keeps to himself, mostly. Biggest liar on the continent. He ain’t here now. You’d likely find him around the corner, two blocks north. In the Dead Sonnet Pissers, by the looks o’ it. You sure you ain’t gonna kill ’im? I’d like to know so’s that if you are I can let his rooms.”
“I told you; we just want to ask him a few questions.”
“Well, I reckon that’s good, by the sound o’ it. Hard to find boarders who’ll cough up the rent on time without havin’ to be threatened.”
So disagreeable did Manz find the proprietress that he couldn’t bring himself to thank her. With Moses and the Minder in tow, he got out of there as fast as he could. She followed them with her eyes, fingering the credit chit sequestered beneath her dress.
Despite the crumbling, desperate appearance of the neighborhood, no one tried to murder, jack, or otherwise interfere with their progress as they made their way to the establishment named by the concierge. Maybe Moses’ presence discouraged would-be troublemakers. More likely it was Manz’s calmness and unmistakable air of self-confidence. Killers in the wild instinctively identify and shy away from potentially dangerous prey. The reactions of human predators are not that very different from those of their fellow toothed mammals.
The Dead Sonnet Pissers showed the only lights on the street, a scrawl of lambent xenon tubing behind a heavy thermalite grill. The xenon needed refreshing, and the “A” and “N” in the sign kept winking in and out. Cheap holos of cheaper young women wearing tired smiles and little else bracketed the narrow, recessed entrance.
Moses rolled to a stop. “To all outward appearances, a decidedly lower-class establishment.”
“You should care. Think of the potential opportunities for ‘research.’” Manz put out a hand and pushed through the self-sealing door membrane.
Beyond the privacy screen was an unexpectedly energized world of noise, sweet smoke, angry laughter, and music. Vast quantities of air freshener pumped through the climate-control system suppressed the natural aroma of the place. Those patrons he could make out through the purposefully dim light were far better dressed than he had anticipated.
There was crystal here, unexpected and surprising, even if most of it was flawed, cracked, and rife with imperfections. It trailed from clothes and comments, glasses and the gleamings in the eyes of men and women with too much money and not enough time.
With Moses trailing behind and the Minder hovering nearer his head than usual, he sourced through the tinted smoke in search of the man surnamed after an obscure Caribbean island. In the course of his quest he bumped up against slumming couples, nattily attired statistic-ridden traveling businessfolk, independent entrepreneurs of both sexes selling similar intangibles, a synoptic top-to-sewer selection of Juarez el Paso’s criminal subculture, and a sizable number of uncategorizable individuals whose reasons for patronizing an establishment like the Dead Sonnet Pissers were not immediately apparent.
