New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers (10 page)

9

W
HEN MANAGERS OF ILLICIT TRAFFIC MEET,
their biggest plaint is the employment problem. In a word, henchmen. There are all too few young crooks willing to take training service under older and more accomplished men.

Shirabi was well aware of this. He did not own Star Well. He managed it for other men, who were themselves rather large managers of illicit traffic.

But did he have proper help? No.

He had employees enough. Two hundred and thirty-six of them. But first, over two hundred of those were contract labor and contract labor cannot be trusted. It either isn’t bright enough or it isn’t stupid enough. If it is stupid enough, it can’t be used for very much—and crime can be demanding. If it is bright enough, it knows Rule J, that contract labor is legally responsible for the effect of the orders it obeys.

Part of the trouble was that the wages of sin are poor. The big men, the Zvegintsovs, quite rightly want to keep as much of what they make as they can. They don’t share it readily.

Then, too, many young men are personally ambitious. The long, slow road uphill has no attraction. They go into small business for themselves.

Finally, Star Well was simply not an attractive duty station unless you were at least a submanager. People were bored here. Shirabi had, in fact, been assigned four extra hands, but they somehow hadn’t gotten around to turning up. Deliberately ducking, he was sure.

So that left him how many active henchmen? Fourteen. That’s all. Twelve of them were scheduled in the casino in three shifts. If there was anything else, a ship to load with thumbs, for instance, help at extra pay had to come from the off-duty shifts. He hated to think of how much sleep he’d lost, how many evenings he’d had to postpone pruning, how much of the actual
work
he’d done.

This point is included for clarity. It wouldn’t be fair to have you imagine a band surrounding Louisa and Alice, a horde to be met by the sturdy minions of Empire, an army ranked behind Hisan Bashir Shirabi. This is a small story. Outside is a vast Empire set in a vaster universe. Billions delve and spin, fight and love. Storms and wars shake whole planets and are never noticed. Nonetheless, here money, love and life hang in the balance; important enough things, I think you will agree, without the necessity for overstatement.

* * *

Derek Godwin looked at the filled seats on either side of the marble dueling floor. The number of witnesses pleased him. They would see him doing what he did best. The tune was still running through his mind and he concentrated on that while he waited. He was ready. Only the weapons and Villiers were not.

The choice of weapons had been up to Villiers, and he had made an infelicitous choice for himself—tinglers and knives.

Of all his weapons, Godwin loved his tingler best. If he resembled Ian Steele at all, it was when he held a tingler.

Tinglers are tapering wands, brown or black. A brown practice tingler delivers a flowering shock. A good stroke leaves a welt that persists for a week. Well-used, a practice tingler can knock an opponent unconscious. A black dueling tingler destroys nerves with its touch. A shrewd stroke demands surgical repair. A dueling tingler, well-used, can kill.

And Godwin had no objections to using a knife. He was a left-handed man at heart, and knives are left-handed weapons. They distract, if distractions are needed. They parry, if parries are called for. And they cut, if a throat should be misguided enough to present itself.

Godwin’s second, a fat young man named Harvey Chapeldaine, had helped him out of his coat and drapeau. These had been laid aside along with Godwin’s curdler.

Villiers had also taken his coat off, but he was not ready. He was asking for a ribbon to tie his hair back out of his eyes. Godwin sniffed. His hair was held back at all times by ornamental pins.

No one presented a ribbon immediately. Then a lady in the gallery bent, tore a strip of blue cloth free and threw it down. There was applause and Villiers bowed before tying his hair.

Chapeldaine and Srb met with Shirabi. Shirabi offered a box of knives. These were matched, tested for balance, tested for edge, and two were chosen. Then Shirabi held out two black tinglers. They were a fair match. He switched them both on to show they operated satisfactorily and then switched them off and handed them to the seconds. They returned with them to the principals.

“Here, Mr. Godwin,” Chapeldaine said.

Godwin took the knife first. He tested it in his left hand, feeling the heft, and then with Villiers at the end of his eye, he made a slice through the air.

Then he accepted the tingler, did an arm exercise with it and found it satisfactory. He turned it on, brought it a millimeter too close to Chapeldaine and then turned it off.

The dueling master was not Shirabi. He would have doubted his ability to bring it off, and in his doubting insured his own failure. Perhaps in a leafy glade, but not here. The master was named Bledsoe. He had been the first to present credentials. Shirabi liked the air of the professional, and took him on. Godwin, too, liked having a professional dueling master overseeing things. It improved the occasion.

Bledsoe stepped forward. He was middle-aged, grave, sure, a trace too thin-lipped to be likable. He waved for the principals. He had no flash, but rather the air of a Talmudic scholar.

Chapeldaine said, “Good luck, Mr. Godwin.”

Godwin didn’t answer, but stepped forward feeling the bounce in his stride and appreciating the electric thrill of anticipation. The weight of his weapons was good. The footing was good. The crowd was good. The dueling master was good. And the opponent was just fine. Villiers didn’t look altogether inept: he showed no nervousness, he didn’t drop his weapons, and he was fit. But he was small and his reach was short. He could be held at arm’s length and picked to pieces. Best was that he was due to have his balloon pricked and Godwin relished the idea of doing the pricking.

Bledsoe said, “Is there any possibility of resolving your differences amicably?”

Villiers raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Godwin said, “Let’s get on.”

“All right, gentlemen.” Was there a faint ironic tinge? “The field is yours.”

In this contest there was no canvas border, no stopping for a step out of bounds, no prettiness. In effect, after a fair beginning, nothing would interfere with the satisfaction of the quarrel.

Villiers stepped forward lightly and cautiously and their wands rapped. Godwin had thought to overbear him at the beginning but on impulse decided to be more cautious. There was no cost to himself. His mind hummed his tune as he and Villiers felt each other out.

There was a brief tentative passage, a minor challenge, the beginning of a well-trained response, a block and disengagement. To the observers it was a disappointing tap, tap, tap. To Godwin and Villiers it was important and revealing.

Godwin checked with another obscure opening statement. Villiers replied promptly and properly. Godwin knew then. Villiers was sound. Caution had properly been in order, damn it.

Godwin used his weight and reach to back Villiers down the length of the floor. Step by step they moved. Toy mechanicals, they rapped and clashed their way along the room under the eyes of the hungry spectators.

Then, with a suddenness that astonished Godwin, Villiers counterattacked. He had more strength than one would have guessed, and first by means of fury of attack and then by momentum he forced Godwin to retreat all the way back to the center of the room. It was nice work, but Godwin had himself well-covered, and at the center of the room they broke off and stepped back to consider each other.

“Very nice, Mr. Villiers,” Godwin said, and brought his tingler up again.

Villiers merely nodded.

Godwin was certain of himself, however. In work at close range, Villiers was good enough that Godwin might be hurt, but as long as Villiers was held away he could be played with, picked at, and disposed of.

The spectators were caught by the duel. It was turning out to be no simple slaughter, no easily decided victory. Where Godwin had had their immediate backing, if not their sympathy, now many were starting to change their allegiance to Villiers. Godwin heard some calls of support and hated those who called for their fickleness, their lack of confidence in him.

Godwin moved again to the attack. He feinted with the knife, little used to this point, brought his wand into play and then tried a serious slash with his knife that missed. The miss was only by an inch and Villiers showed greater respect for the knife thereafter.

Then came the turning point. Passages are composed of questions asked and answered, improvisations on themes, the matching of common knowledge to build a bizarre duet. In the pure world of art, accidents, miscalculations, and desperate wildness are mars. In the painful world of reality, they may decide clearly what art cannot.

Godwin went in too low, came up a hair too fast, and was parried. But Villiers did not parry as sharply as he might have. He was the merest bit off-balance. Godwin turned his disengagement into a sideswipe at a hand out of place. It was nothing that could have been counted upon. The opening was an accident. The ploy was a harmless essay: nothing lost, the slightest of chances for gain.

But his wand tipped Villiers’ left hand. Villiers’ hand opened and he dropped the knife. The knife bounced on the floor and struck Villiers on the boot. Without looking he kicked it aside.

But his hand had been touched and he was missing an important weapon. His defense was that much less complete, and his offense was like a flying squirrel in stunt flying competition with a bird, good as far as it went, but lacking versatility. Godwin knew then that Villiers’ life was his—the only question was when he was to touch the balloon. He made no decision. Enjoying himself was the paramount requirement.

The crowd, too, knew that Villiers was in trouble. As the knife fell, they sat the straighter and breathed the harder.

Godwin took Villiers step by step back down the hall again. All the way this time. All the way to the end. Threat, threat answered. Threat, threat answered. Threat, threat answered. But every time Villiers responded, he was forced to give ground. His hand was apparently giving him trouble, too. He was shaking it.

The end of the hall marked the end of the possible. Godwin would not be forced back from it again. Villiers would stay here until he failed to answer a threat or left an opening, and that would be it. Between here and the end of the hall.

The fight, except for Godwin’s single comment, had been empty of conversation. Only a Cyrano fights and talks at the same time; most men lack both the lungs and the wit to compose as they fight, and as they conclude, thrust home.

Constant background rising and falling in volume. Slap and squeak of feet on floor. Clack and ring of weapons. Breaths, light and heavy. Above all, the one smell that Godwin loved and hated most, the smell of sweat.

He held Villiers at the end of his tingler, used his knife discretely, and then there was that final opening. Villiers was moving in with an attack, an act of desperation, and it was caught, of course. And there he was, open for the
mot juste
as he stepped back. Godwin delivered the perfect wand stroke, the ultimate criticism of Villiers. And in that instant he knew the title of the song in his mind.

The stroke did not connect. In a frisson-filled flash Godwin saw that he had made a mistake. Villiers was not moving back. He was moving forward, inside the stroke and past Godwin, and as he passed, with supreme delicacy he brought his tingler down across Godwin’s chest. Duels aren’t fair if the wrong people win them.

It was as though his chest were no longer part of him. It was a wooden block being chopped by an axman. Chips and splinters. And pain, too, but detached. He knew there was pain, but he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t think clearly. He thought about thinking, and felt afraid.

He wasn’t sure where he was. He
was
, and he was somewhere, but he couldn’t have said whether he was standing, sitting, or lying. He existed in a limbo where voices were, but where there was no sense in sound. There were colors moving in random kaleidoscopic patterns, but there was no coherence to them. Light hurt his eyes, and he wanted to ask for it to be turned down, but he couldn’t manage that.

Then there was a face in front of him, so close that against his will he had to recognize it. It was Shirabi.

He summoned himself and managed to say, “Wrong man.”

Shirabi said something in return, but the sound was fuzzy in his ears and he could make no sense of it. It seemed too much effort to try. But in that last moment of clear thought, he had known something he could no longer quite grasp. It seemed important that he should recapture it, however. Desperately, he tried. Words formed themselves in his mind and he struggled to articulate them.

“I’m a little teapot,” he said at last, smiled, filled his pants, and died.

Flights of white-winged angels, their faces radiant, settled down about him and gently lifted him. He was not at all the least of God’s creatures, and they loved and respected him. They accepted him. And they carried him away in company to an altogether better world than any he had ever known. This last, of course, was unwitnessed by those others in the dueling hall who had the misfortune to still exist on a less exalted plane.

* * *

Murder. It was murder of the foulest sort. That Shirabi got away with it was extreme luck.

He opened the box of knives for the inspection of Srb and Chapeldaine. There was no danger in the knives. They were their own sharply discreet selves. However, for practice, just to see if he could do it, he forced single knives from an entire rack on the seconds.

Any practitioner of card tricks knows how to make someone take a particular card from the whole of fifty-two. It is nothing so crude as sticking one card a half-inch out from the others in a fan. In effect, forcing means that you hand over a card and convince the subject that he has made a choice, much like a one-party election. The trick, actually, is not so much to hand the card over as it is to keep the person from wondering about it afterwards.