A Borrowed Man (23 page)

“Uncut emeralds? Yes, I think so.”

After half a minute or so, he said, “Have you got any idea what they're worth?”

“Not really. A lot, I hope.”

“It depends on color and whether they're flawed and so forth. Brilliance, and how big they are after cutting. I'm no jeweler.” He put the emerald down. “Mind telling me where you got these?”

“You're right, I do—and I won't. Certainly not now.”

“And maybe not ever. I get it.”

“Good. You've been a great deal of help to me, both of you. I like you, and I'd hate to see our association end in a quarrel. I'm going to make you two mutually exclusive offers; you can take one or the other, but you can't combine both. Understood?”

They nodded.

“First offer. We've got seven stones. I'll divide them into three groups.”

I spoke to Mahala. “You'll get to choose first, picking up one group. Those are yours.”

I turned to Georges. “You next. You choose one of the two remaining groups. That one's yours. Mine is the remaining group. We drive into town, and I let you out at a jeweler's that bought emeralds from Colette's father. Mahala knows about that.”

She nodded again.

“I drive away in the ground car, and when I do we have separated permanently.”

After a moment or two, Georges said, “You're being generous.”

I thanked him.

“Can we hear the other one?”

“Certainly. We stay together. We go to the jeweler as a group and get the best price we can for six of the seven. I keep the seventh, the smallest. When we've sold the other six we split the money three ways. I'll continue to search for Colette, and I'll expect the two of you to continue to help me in every way you can. Of course you may leave, taking your money, if you decide that helping me is too dangerous.”

Georges whispered something to Mahala, and she nodded. He turned back to me. “We accept the second. Are there any more emeralds?”

“At the moment I don't have any more.”

“When you do?”

I shook my head. “I can't say. I may never have any more; it will depend upon the circumstances.”

“But you might?”

“Yes, I might. Certainly.”

“Fine. Like I said, we're in and we'll stay in.” There was more talk, and Georges and I decided on what we were going to tell—and what we were not going to tell—the jeweler.

After that, we went to a place named on several of the receipts. None of us knew where it was, but I gave Maxette the name, and it announced the streets we took and the turns we made till the shop was in sight and it had parked itself.

In the shop I told one of the clerks we wanted to see his boss and it had to do with Conrad Coldbrook. He was gone for five minutes or more, then came hurrying back and told us to follow him.

The boss was a porky man who looked about sixty. He hid his clever eyes behind lenses so thick they looked bulletproof.

There were only two chairs besides the one behind his desk. I took one and Mahala the other. Georges stood behind her. The boss told him, “I can have another chair brought in if you like, but I don't think this will take long.”

Georges said he was fine.

I said, “I take it you know that both Conrad Coldbrook and his son are dead.”

The boss nodded. “A great loss. Is that what you came to talk about?”

“One of the things, yes. Did you know Conrad, Junior, well?”

“I didn't know him at all. His father had mentioned him once or twice. I never met him.”

“Did you know that he was murdered?”

From the way the boss reacted, I might as well have said, “Lovely day, isn't it?”

“Was he? I remember seeing in roundvid that his death was under investigation. Nothing more than that.”

“How did his father take it?”

“I have no idea.”

For a second I thought about that one; then I said, “I believe you saw him after his son's death.”

“Yes, I did. We had business to transact, and we took care of it. Mr. Coldbrook didn't talk about his personal affairs—not to me, at least.”

“Yet you said he had mentioned his son.”

“Once he said that his son was waiting for him out in the shop. He asked my assistant to tell him he was going to be engaged for an hour or more.”

“Was he?”

The boss shook his head. “I don't recall.”

“I suppose you were haggling over the prices of various stones.”

“Possibly. As I said, I don't recall.”

I sighed. “He sold you uncut emeralds.”

The boss said nothing.

“You gave him receipts. I've got some of them in my pocket. Would you like to see them?”

The boss said, “Are you from the government?”

“No. Did you know that Coldbrook had a daughter as well as a son?”

“Did he?”

“Yes, he did. We're friends of hers. We're acting for her.”

“Really?” The boss sat up straighter and pulled his chair closer to his desk. “I'm surprised she doesn't act for herself.”

Georges said, “We'll tell her that the next time we see her. Meanwhile, you'll have to deal with us—if you want to deal at all.”

“You're aware that this is a jewelry store. Are you also aware that my clerks and I are armed?”

“Hell, yes.” Georges was grinning.

I said, “We don't want that kind of trouble, and I'm certain you don't, either.”

The boss seemed not to have heard me; he glanced at Mahala. “Is this Conrad's daughter?”

I said, “No, she's my secretary.”

“Doesn't she ever talk?”

Georges said, “No, she doesn't. Maybe you could learn something from her.”

The boss spoke to me. “What do you want?”

I got out the smallest emerald. “What will you give us for that?”

There was a lot of haggling, and once we got as far as the front door; but in the end we agreed on prices for all seven. I put that first one back in my pocket and told the boss we would sell him the others but we were keeping that one. He did not like it, but after a bit of argument he went along. Then he got out a card and said he would have the money transferred to our account.

I put the rest of the stones away and told him we wanted cash.

“If I withdraw that much in cash, there'll be someone investigating this transaction tomorrow. I wouldn't want that. Would you?”

Georges asked, “How did you handle things with her father?”

“If you've read those receipts you claim to have, you will have seen that he never sold more than three stones at once. It was usually just one or two. I transferred my payment to two or three of his accounts. He had half a dozen that I knew of, and I split it up.”

There was a good deal of argument after that, but I will not give it here. In the end we had him write three checks on three accounts, a check for each of us. He and two of his clerks came with us when we went out to cash them, because we insisted on him and he insisted on the clerks. The three of them took the boss's car, and the three of us went in Maxette. We went to three different banks, Georges and the boss going into the first bank and cashing Georges's check, the boss and I going into the second, and Georges and Mahala going into the third with me, the boss, and his two clerks to cash hers. For the moment at least, Georges, Mahala, and I were rich.

All of this took quite a while. When we came out, it was getting dark. I handed over the stones, the boss gave me a receipt for them, and he and his clerks went back to their jewelry store. When they had gone, Georges asked, “What's next?”

“Dinner and bed,” I told him, and at that time I honestly thought I meant it.

“Tomorrow?”

I had a couple of dozen vague ideas, but I said, “We'll talk about that then.”

So that would have been that if I had not gotten up in the middle of the night. I was curious about the length of their days in the world behind the door, so I opened it. It was nice bright daylight in there, which of course woke me up.

The first thing I did was to go back into the mine and get the rifle. When I had carried it outside into the sunshine and most of the way down the path, I sat down on a stone and figured out what the various levers and buttons were for. One was to let you take the magazine out, which I did. It was a little rotary job you could not have replaced with a bigger box magazine unless you were a pretty good gunsmith and had a shop with all the right tools. It held five cartridges and was fully loaded, which did not surprise me a bit. There had been two cartridge boxes inside the mine. I had not looked, but my guess was that one was full and the other not.

The first me had not known a whole lot about hunting rifles, but he had known enough for me to recognize one when I saw one. Except for a couple of things, they had not changed a whole lot, and one way of looking at it was that both those things were really the same thing. The first was that some parts that would have been steel in the first me's days were something else now. It was black, and it had to be a lot harder and tougher than any plastic we had back then. The trigger guard, the trigger, the cocking handle, and the bolt were all made of this new black stuff; so was the receiver. So were the cartridge cases, for that matter. The barrel was slender and a bit shorter than my arm, made of the black stuff with a thin liner of bright rifled steel. The stock was ponticwood, as near as I could tell, but I may have been wrong about that.

The second was that the rifle was not as heavy as it should have been. Not as light as a wooden mockup would have been, probably, but quite a bit lighter than I expected when I picked it up.

On the one hand, I wanted to shoot it at least once and maybe a couple of times. On the other, I would not be able to clean it. I had no bore cleaner, no cleaning rod, no oil, and no patches. Not even a rag. What decided it was that I knew darned well that it might not be easy to get more cartridges. Sure, I had a lot of money now, and money never hurts; but I might not be able to get any more, and I did not want to blow a wad on cartridges I might never need.

So no shooting.

After that, I went down to the beach and found the place where Georges, Mahala, and I had sat to talk. I sat there for maybe ten minutes or more looking out at the sea and thinking about what we had said and what I had not said.

Next I wanted to go looking for the place where the scarecrows (which was what Georges and I called them when we talked about them) had sat in a circle drumming on the ground. It was a really stupid thing to do, and I knew it; but I swore up and down that if I had any trouble finding it I would give up and go back.

Besides, I had already given in on firing the rifle, and it was time I won one.

Finding the right place was pretty easy, because I knew it had been out of sight of the sea and a piece of level ground with no trees and no bushes. It had not been far away, either—so even though it was not exactly a piece of cake, you could call it a sizable cookie with chocolate chips. No scarecrows there, awake or asleep, and if they had left anything behind, I did not find it.

After that, I went back to the beach and sat looking out to sea again. The rifle had some kind of an optical sight. I think there must have been a switch in the butt plate, too, because every time I put it to my shoulder the sight came on. That sight was always focused on whatever was in the middle of its field, projecting a green hoop on the image to show you where your shot was going to hit. At first I thought the wind could blow that green hoop around, which seemed crazy. Then I realized it was telling me where the bullet would hit for sure, including the correction for wind speed and everything. So that was a very classy sight indeed.

If it had been my gun, I would have put a sling on it, but that is the only change I would have made. As it was, you could not sling it on your shoulder like I kept wanting to. You had to carry it. Like I said, it was not heavy, but it took one hand away, just the same.

When I was through playing with the sight, I decided to walk down the beach a ways to see how far it went. I wanted to take the rifle because I did not know what I might run into, and I wanted to leave
Murder on Mars
where it would be safe because I had been carrying it in my left hand. If I needed to fire the rifle, I was going to have to drop the book; and if it was gone when I tried to come back for it, I would have to stay here for the rest of my days.

I kept thinking about burying it in the sand. But if I did, I knew darned well it was going to take me a week to find it. Finally I realized the driftwood log I had been sitting on was hollow. I figured I would recognize it for sure, so I stuck the book in there as far as I could reach and took a good, long look at that log; then off I went, walking down the beach and turning to look back at the log every three or four steps.

Eventually I had gone so far I could not see it anymore, and there was nothing to do except keep walking until the beach ended. It was white sand (which maybe I have written about here before) and pretty coarse. For some reason I felt sure the water would get deep in a hurry if I waded out from the beach; it was probably the blue color of the waves that fooled me. Pretty soon I found that was dead wrong, and that I could have waded out for a country mile before the water got higher than my chin. I ought to have remembered sitting on the bank with Colette when all this began, and how blue the little stream we had splashed in had looked. Rivers that are not carrying a lot of mud and stuff out to sea, rivers of pure water, generally look blue like that.

The beach went on and on, wider here and narrower there; but I would glance at that little white sun (which was getting low now) every few minutes, and I could see that the beach kept curving around to the right. It made me surer than ever that this was an island—and not a real big one, either.

When my shadow was taller than I was, I decided I had better turn around and go back. That was when I saw a funny shape out to sea that stopped me dead; it looked like a big black rock, kind of rounded but bumpier and lumpier than most rocks.