Jennifer Morgue (15 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
It's dark, and the air temperature has dropped to about gas mark five, leaving me feeling like a Sunday roast in a tinfoil jacket. There's an onshore breeze that gives a faint illusion of coolness, but it's too humid to do much more than stir the sand grains on the sidewalk. The promenade is a modern pastel-painted concrete walkway decorated to a tropical theme, like Neo-Brutalist architecture on holiday. It's bright and noisy with late-opening boutiques, open-windowed bars, and nightclubs. The crowd is what you'd expect: tourists, surfers, and holiday-makers, all dressed up for a night out on the town. By the morning they'll be puking their margaritas up on the boardwalk at the end of the development, but right now they're a happy, noisy crowd. Ramona leads me through them with supreme confidence, straight towards a garishly illuminated, red-carpeted lobby that covers half the block ahead of us.
My nose prickles. Something they never mention in the brochures is that the night-blooming plants let rip during the tourist season. I try not to sneeze convulsively as Ramona sashays right up the red carpet, bypassing the gaggle of tourists being checked at the door by security. A uniformed flunkey scrambles to grovel over her gloved hand. I follow her into the lobby and he gives me a cold-fish stare as if he can't make up his mind whether to grope my wallet or punch me in the face. I smile patronizingly at him while Ramona speaks.
"You'll have to excuse me but Bob and I are new here and I'm so excited! Would you mind showing me where the cashier's office is? Bobby darling, do you think you could get me a drink? I'm so thirsty!"
She does an inspired airhead impersonation. I nod, then catch the doorman's eye and let the smile slip. "If
you'd show her to the office," I murmur, then turn on my heel and walk indoors — hoping I'm not going in the wrong direction — to give Ramona space to turn her glamour loose on him. I feel a bit of a shit about leaving the doorman to her tender mercies, but console myself with the fact that as far as he's concerned, I'm just another mark: what goes around comes around.
It's darker and noisier inside than on the promenade and a lot of overdressed, middle-aged folks are milling around the gaming tables in the outer room. Mirror balls scatter rainbow refractions across the floor, at the far end of the room a fourpiece is murdering famous jazz classics on stage. I spot the bar eventually and manage to catch one of the bartender's eyes. She's young and cute and I smile a bit more honestly.
"Hi! What's your order, sir"
"A vodka martini on the rocks." I pause for just a heartbeat, then add, "And a margarita." She smiles ingratiatingly at me and turns away, and the ghostly sensation of a stiletto heel grinding against my instep fades as quickly as it arrived.
''That was entirely unnecessary,'' I tell Ramona stiffly.
''Wanna bet? You're falling into character too easily, monkey-boy. Try to stay focused.'' When I find her she's leaning up against a small, thick window set in one wall, scooping plastic chips into her purse.
I wait alongside with the drinks, then hand her the margarita.
"Thanks." She closes the purse then leads me past a bunch of chattering one-armed-bandit fans towards an empty patch of floor near a table where a bunch of tense-looking coffin-dodgers are watching a young chav in a white shirt and dickey-bow deal cards with robotic efficiency.
"What was that about?" I murmur.
"What was what?" She turns to stare at me in the darkness, but I avoid making eye contact.
"The thing with the doorman."
"It's been a hard day, and American Airlines doesn't cater for my special dietary requirements."
"Really?" I stare at her. "I don't know how you can live with yourself."
"Marc over there — " she jerks her head almost imperceptibly, back towards the door " — likes to think of himself as a lone wolf. He's twenty-five and he got the job here after a dishonorable discharge from the French paratroops. He served two years of a five-year sentence first. You wouldn't believe the things that happen on UN peacekeeping missions ..."
She pauses and takes a tiny sip of her drink before continuing.
Her voice is over-controlled and just loud enough to hear above the band: "He's not in contact with his family back in Lyon because his father kicked him out of the house when he discovered what he did to his younger sister. He lives alone in a room above a bike repair shop. When a mark runs out of cash and tries to stiff the house, they sometimes send Marc around to explain the facts of life. Marc enjoys his work. He prefers to use a cordless hammer-drill with a blunt threeeighths bit. Twice a week he goes and fucks a local whore, if he's got the money. If he hasn't got the money, he picks up tourist women looking for a good time: usually he takes their money and leaves their flight vouchers, but twice in the past year he's taken them for an early morning boat ride, which they probably didn't appreciate on account of being tied up and out of their skulls on Rohypnol. He's got an eight-foot dinghy and he knows about a bay out near North Point where some people he doesn't know by name will pay him good money for single women nobody will miss." She touches my arm. "Nobody is going to miss him, Bob."
"You — " I bite my tongue.
"You're learning." She smiles tensely. "Another couple of weeks and you might even get it."
I swallow bile. "Where's Billington"
"All in good time," she croons in a low singsong voice that sends chills up and down my spine. Then she turns towards the baccarat table.
The croupier is shuffling several decks of cards together in the middle of the kidney-shaped table. A half-dozen players and their hangers-on watch with feigned boredom and avaricious eyes: leisure-suit layabouts, two or three gray-haired pensioners, a fellow who looks like a weasel in a dinner jacket, and a woman with a face like a hatchet. I hang back while Ramona explains things in a monotone in the back of my head — it sounds like she's quoting someone: '''lt's much the same as any other gambling game. The odds against the banker and the player are more or less even. Only a run against either can be decisive and "break the bank" or break the players.' That's Ian Fleming, by the way.''
''Who, the guy with the face ...?''
''No, the guy I was quoting. He knew his theory but he wasn't as competent at the practicalities. During the Second World War he ran a scheme to get British agents in neutral ports to gamble their Abwehr rivals into bankruptcy. Didn't work. And don't even think about trying that on Billington.'' The croupier raises a hand and asks who's holding the bank. Hatchet-Face nods. I look at the pile of chips in front of her. It's worth twice my department's annual budget. She doesn't notice me staring so I look away quickly.
"So how does it go now?" I ask Ramona quietly. She's scanning the crowd as if looking for an absent friend. She smiles faintly and takes my hand, forcing me to sidle uncomfortably close.
"Make like we're a couple," she whispers, still smiling.
"Okay, watch carefully. The woman who's the banker is betting against the other gamblers. She's got the shoe with six packs of cards in it — shuffled by the croupier and doublechecked by everyone else. Witnesses. Anyway, she's about to — "
Hatchet-Face clears her throat. "Five grand." There's a wave of muttering among the other gamblers, then one of the pensioners nods and says, "Five," pushing a stack of chips forwards.
Ramona: "She opened with a bank of five thousand dollars.
That's what she's wagering. Blue-Rinse has accepted. If nobody accepted on their own, they could club together until they match the five thousand between them."
"Ri-ight." I frown, staring at the chips. Laundry pay scales are British civil service level — if I didn't have the subsidized safe house, or if Mo wasn't working, we wouldn't be able to afford to live comfortably in London. What's already on the table is about a month's gross income for both of us, and this is just the opening round. Suddenly I feel very cold and exposed. I'm out of my depth here.
Hatchet-Face deals four cards from the shoe, laying two of them face-down in front of Blue-Rinse, and the other two cards in front of herself. Blue-Rinse picks her cards up and looks at them, then lays them face-down again and taps them.
"The idea is to get a hand that adds up to nine points, or closest to nine points. The banker doesn't get to check his cards until the players declare. Aces are low, house cards are zero, and you're only looking at the least significant digit: a five and a seven make two, not twelve. The player can play her hand, or ask for another card — like that — and then — she's turning."
Blue-Rinse has turned over her three cards. She's got a queen, a two, and a five. Hatchet-Face doesn't smile as she turns her own cards over to reveal two threes and a two. The croupier rakes the chips over towards her: Blue-Rinse doesn't bat an eyelid.
I stare fixedly at the shoe. They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not ...
"Come on," Ramona says quietly. "Back to the bar, or they'll start to wonder why we're not joining in."
"Why aren't we?" I ask her as she retreats.
"They don't pay me enough."
"Me neither." I hurry to catch up.
"And here I was thinking you worked for the folks who gave us James Bond."
"You know damn well that if Bond auditioned for a secret service job they'd tell him to piss off. We don't need upperclass twits with gambling and fast car habits who think that all problems can be solved at gunpoint and who go rogue at the drop of a mission abort code."
"No, really?" She gives me an old-fashioned look.
"Right." I find myself grinning. "They go for quiet, bookish accountant-types, lots of attention to detail, no imagination, that kind of thing."
"Quiet, bookish accountant-types who're on drinking terms with the head-bangers from Two-One SAS and are field-certified to Grade Four in occult combat technology"
I may have done a couple of training courses at Dunwich but that doesn't mean I've graduated to breathing seawater, much less inhaling vodka martinis. When I stop spluttering Ramona is looking away from me, whistling tunelessly and tapping her toes. I glare at her, and I'm about to give up on it as a bad job when I see who she's watching. "Is that Billington?" I ask.
"Yep, that's him. Aged sixty-two, looks forty-five."
Ellis Billington is rather hard to miss. Even if I didn't recognize his face from the cover of Computer Weekly, it'd be pretty obvious that he was a big cheese. There's a nasty facelift in a big frock hanging on his left arm, a briefcase-toting woman in wire-frame spectacles and a tailored suit that screams lawyer shadowing him, and a pair of thugs to either side, who wear their tuxedos like uniforms and have wires looped around their ears. A gaggle of Bright Young Things in cocktail dresses and tuxes bring up the rear, like courtiers basking in the reflected glory of a medieval monarch; the dubious doorman Ramona fingered for her midnight snack is oozing up to one of them. Billington himself has a distinguished silver-streaked hairdo that looks like he bought it at John De Lorean's yard sale and feeds it raw liver twice a day.
For all that, he looks trim and fit — almost unnaturally wellpreserved for his age.
"What now?" I ask her. I can see a guy who looks like the president of the casino threading his way
across the floor towards Billington.
"We go say hello." And before I can stop her she's off across the floor like a missile. I scramble along in her wake, dodging dowagers, trying not to spill my drink — but instead of homing in on Billington she makes a beeline towards the Face Lift That Walks Like a Lady. "Eileen!" squeaks Ramona, coming over all blonde. "Why, if this isn't a complete surprise!"
Eileen Billington — for it is she — turns on Ramona like a cornered rattlesnake, then suddenly smiles and switches on the sweetness and light: "Why, it's Mona! Upon my word, I do declare!" They circle each other for a few seconds, sparring congenially and exchanging polite nothings while the courtier-yuppies home in on the baccarat table. I notice Billington's attorney exchanging words with her boss and then departing towards the casino office. Then I see Billington look at me. I take a deep breath and nod at him.
"You'rewith her." He jerks his chin at Ramona. "Do you know what she is?" He sounds dryly amused.
"Yes." I blink. "Ellis Billington, I presume"
He looks me in the eye and it feels like a punch in the gut. Up close he doesn't look human. His pupils are a muddy gray-brown and slotted vertically: I've seen that before in folks who've had an operation to correct nystagmus, but somehow on Billington it looks too natural to be the after-effect of surgery. "Who are you?" he demands.
"Howard — Bob Howard. Capital Laundry Services, import/export division."
I manage to make a dog-eared business card appear between my fingers. He raises an eyebrow and takes it. "I didn't know you people traded over here."
"Oh, we trade all over." I force myself to smile. "I sat through a most interesting presentation yesterday. My colleagues were absolutely mesmerized."
"I have no idea what you're talking about." I take half a step back but Ramona and Eileen are laughing loudly over some shared confidence behind me: there's no escape from his lizardlike stare. Then he seems to reach some decision, and lets me down gently: "But that's not surprising, is it?
My companies have so many subsidiaries, doing so many things, that it's hard to keep track of them all." He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn't wearing them. "Are you here for the sunshine and sea, Mr. Howard? Or are you here to play games"
"A bit of both." I drain my cocktail glass. Behind him, his lawyer is approaching, the casino president at her elbow. "I wouldn't want to keep you from business, so ..."
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