“Antigua.”
A little animation suffused her expression. “I think I know who you mean. He looks and pinches but he never buys. Good tipper, though, so it makes up for the feely-grabby. He isn’t wanted for something, is he? I always thought he was pretty harmless. You a bounty hunter?” Manz shook his head and she relaxed. “That’s good. He’s a funny old toot. Nicer than some of the bizzled big heads who come in here. They think they can buy all of you.” She punctuated her last observation with an illuminating obscenity.
Manz tried to reassure her. “If he’s wanted somewhere, I don’t know anything about it and I don’t care. You know anything about him?”
She shrugged. “Only the stories he tells sometimes. When it gets slow enough in here, you’ll listen to anybody. Mostly he yammers on about being a deep-spacer. I don’t know about the stories but I know he’s been Out There. It’s in his eyes. You can always tell by the eyes.”
“He’s here now.” It was not a question.
This time she did smile, albeit reluctantly. “You’re pretty perceptive, whoever you are. Third booth on the starboard wall, in the back.”
“Thanks.” He patted her on the shoulder and headed in the indicated direction. Picking up the untouched drink, Moses followed. Behind them, the girl unloaded her frustration on the phlegmatic mixologist.
“Gerry, why do the nice ones always just want to talk?”
Wise beyond his years, the bartender made no attempt to reply.
A garishly decorated wall, a sharp turn, and Manz found himself standing outside a booth enclosed on three sides by fake wooden partitions. Taking his drink from Moses, he chugged a third of the contents. From beyond the opaque light-and-sound partition that closed the booth off from the rest of the club, snatches of music-accompanied drunken song could be heard.
“Stick him in with Vyra and we’d have a chorus,” he muttered as he brushed the thin, unsealed partition aside.
The old man wasn’t alone. He had his friends with him, in the form of more than a dozen glasses and serving beakers of variegated color, shape and size. They formed a rough semicircle on the table, facing their master. Some were nearly full, others more than half empty.
Upon concluding a verse, the oldster would sway forward and put his lips to the top of each container, blowing air across them and thereby demonstrating his skill at fashioning a crude tune. Different containers and fluctuating fluid levels generated different tones. Should he succeed in draining them all, there would likely be a concurrent end to the blowing and to the music.
Frowning at one container apparently in need of tuning, he upended the beaker and reduced its contents by two full centimeters. This adjustment simultaneously improved its sound and his disposition.
His leathery, deeply scored face terminated in a scraggly white beard that had apparently resisted all attempts at a neat trim. Lines ran into the beard like ravines trailing from the foot of a glacier. A prominent scar scampered across his right cheek to hide beneath his ear. Standing tall, he couldn’t have stood more than a meter and two-thirds, and he was as scrawny as a maribou stork at the end of a long migration.
As a boy, Manz once found a bird that had been shoved out of its nest by its heartless fellow fledglings. He’d carried it home wrapped in a fold of his shirt and nursed it back to health. It recovered slowly, but at the end of the summer was strong enough to fly free from his bedroom window.
It was the ugliest bird he’d ever seen. It ruined the carpet in his room and never came back. Antigua reminded him of that bird.
At some point the realization that he had uninvited guests reached the old man’s brain. Despite the real possibility of a damaging short, neural connections were made. He stopped singing and leaned back against the padded bench.
“Weel. What meens this, geentlemeens? No, I revise meeself. I see thet one of ye has no blood. Weel, sir and macheene, theen. Come to share an old man’s dreenk, theen?” He eyed Manz suspiciously, and the adjuster saw what the waitress had meant. Old Kohler Antigua’s stare was bottomless.
“Veerily and so, veerily and so. Take a seet. Can no bee tougher than thee one attached to yeer pelvees.” His counter-pointing cackle trailed off into a raspy, hacking cough. As Manz slid onto the bench opposite, Moses remained a silent presence near the booth's entrance.
“You are Kohler Antigua?”
“I ain’t Doctor Leeveengston, sonny.” Cackling redux. This time the cough was mercifully absent. “You seem straight enough. If ye had been seent to keel me ye’d have done it alreedy.” Tugging aside his still largely intact and surprisingly handsome ex-flight jacket, he showed Manz the compact pistol that resided in a shirt-pocket holster. “Eef I’d have thought otherweese I’d alreedy have done ye.”
Manz put on his most accessible expression. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“I’ll beet you are, sonny. Weel theen, a dreenk, anyways.” He pointed to each glass and beaker as he identified their contents. “Peek your fuel.”
“I’ve brought my own, Kohler.” Manz held up the glass Moses had thoughtfully carried from the bar.
“So alreedy it’s ‘Kohler,’ ees it? You presume much, sonny.” As he helped himself to a glass he looked toward Moses. “What about you, macheene?”
“I do not drink, sir. Rust, you know.”
The old man hesitated, then burst out laughing. The more he laughed, the deeper and stronger it seemed to become, as though the laughter itself was a prophylactic against the cough.
“So now they are programming meechanicals with a seense of humor, eh? Soon you weel not bee able to teel the macheenes from the people. Not that I eever could.” Tilting his head back, he chugged an astonishing amount of liquor.
“That’s not healthy,” Manz couldn’t forbear pointing out.
Antigua lowered the tall, tapered glass. “Life ees not healthy, sonny. Living can be dangerous to your health. But you are not old enough to know that.”
“You might be surprised.”
“It would not bee the first time.” Swaying slightly, he focused on the gleaming Minder, started to say something, then lost the thought. “I did not expeect company. What can thees poor withering quasi-corpse do for you surprising people? I can teel thet you are not the kind to frequeent a place like the Pissers, nor the type to barge into another man’s booth in search of free booze. You sought me out for a purpose. Geet to it.”
Manz couldn’t keep from grinning. Drunk or not, the old geezer was as sharp as a pimp’s perception. “Okay, here it is. A number of years ago you worked for a company called Borgia, in their secret research and development program.”
Antigua swallowed something bright green. “Seence you are so sure there eesn’t much point in my trying to deny it.”
“Information that has come into my possession leads me to believe that your departure from the company was other than voluntary.”
“Voluntary!” The old man slammed the beaker of jade fluid down onto the table. “Freend human and automaton, I was sacked! Deposed, removed, pushed out, seent packing forthwith! Unjustly, too, I says. Beest goddamn freelancer those corpocorpro squeents ever had working for them. And they got reed of me.” As he subsided, his expression turned crafty. “Sort of.”
Manz felt a stirring inside. It might have been his lunch, or … “Sort of? You didn’t choose to contest the termination. If you felt you had a legitimate grievance, the Brotherhood would’ve backed you.”
“Peerdition’s apogee they would have! But why go and make a lot of trouble for everybody, I says? The Cardinal turned out to be a seensible man. Put me on a nice peension, weeth bonuses for good behavior. All I had to do was go quietly, and stay quiet, and not make awkward noises. It’s worked out not too badly, I says. Anyone bothers with me, all I have to do is contact Mr. Monticelli and he takes care of it for me. Sometimes you have to work hard at doing nothing at all, but most of the time it’s easy. I got no complaints about the business end of our arrangement, no.” He cradled a beaker. “It’s only thet sometimes my sleep is troubled.”
Smiling ingratiatingly, Manz leaned forward. “You make it sound more like you were promoted than fired. I wonder why a suave hardass like Monticelli’s being so nice to you? It just doesn’t stand to reason that he’d fire you only so he could support you.”
