Engineman - Eric Brown [53]
How many times had Rossilini had to reassure him on that score over the past few days? He must have thought he was losing his nerve...
"Well, I hope you're right, Mr Rossilini. I do hope you are right. I wouldn't want the morgue to find itself in business again."
Rossilini cleared his throat. "Of course not, sir."
They passed from an unlighted, overgrown area - where the alien flora could be seen only in the glare of the headlights, silver-etched and eerie - to a suburb that was just as overgrown but bathed in the illumination of jerry-rigged arc-lights and neons powered by a private generator. The extraterrestrial vegetation obscured the buildings on both sides of the main street, lush and green, like something from the work of Henri Rousseau.
"We're due to meet Miguelino at eight in the Nada Bar," Sassoon said, pointing through the windscreen at a pulsing neon sign.
Rossilini braked the roadster before the bar and Hunter and Sassoon climbed out. Drinkers spilled from the gaudily flower-bedecked premises, many wearing silversuits even though they were too young to recall the hey-day of the space age.
Hunter eased his way through the crowd. The warm night air was heavy with the scent of burning narcotics and loud with computer-generated samba-jazz. Head throbbing, Hunter entered the Nada, a half-lighted, roughly triangular room done up to resemble the bridge of a bigship. As he made his way to the bar, he was aware of the stares directed at his facial disfigurement. On his homeplanet and even on the worlds of the Rim, genetic herpes was such a common trait that it aroused little comment. Only on his arrival in Paris had he been made aware of this facial feature being in any way unique. Indeed, some of his closer aides had questioned the advisability of being seen out on the streets of the city: he was a wanted man, after all, and among the citizens of Paris he was conspicuous, to say the least. In a bid to disguise his identity, he'd employed a cosmetician to extend his disfigurement so that it covered fully half his face, not just the upper left quarter that it had formerly occupied. To be on the safe side he had delegated most of his responsibilities, but had decided to go through with others himself. At this stage of the operation he was, after all, dispensable; any one of his aides could pick up where he left off, if the worst came to the worst, and successfully see through the operation. He wondered if his fatalism had anything to do with his desire to atone for the sins of his past.
Miguelino was sitting on a bar-stool, a tall glass in his hands between his knees. He signalled for two beers when Hunter and Sassoon joined him.
"Mr Miguelino," Hunter greeted the Beta-Engineman, "you've certainly picked the most inhospitable of bars."
"But appropriate," Miguelino said in his usual dolorous baritone, passing them their beers.
"Oh, appropriate, I'll grant you that," Hunter said, glancing at the waiters in the uniforms of the various Lines, and the plasma graphics of the bigships on the wall behind the bar.
Sassoon asked, "Where's your contact?"
The Engineman looked at his watch. "He was due in at eight. The bastard's late." Hunter noted that Miguelino was jumpy, which was not surprising in the circumstances. He was a short, squat Spanish colonial who'd worked with Hunter and Kelly out on the Rim. Indeed, after Kelly - who had remained on the Rim to conduct operations at that end - Miguelino was Hunter's most trusted aide.
He sipped his beer and glanced around the packed bar-room, trying to filter the monotonous thump of the music from his consciousness. He killed time by attempting to spot the colonists among the crowd. One or two of the more freakishly tall revellers were obviously from low gravity worlds - Xyré or Cannon's Landfall in the Core. One particularly squat citizen, almost as broad as she was tall, clearly hailed from a planet of extremely high gravity - Some-day-Soon or Zia-al-Haq. He saw no-one from his homeplanet of Fairweather.