“He’s an unusual man. It must have been an unusual experience.” He crossed the room to her and rested his hands alongside her neck, gently kneading the soft flesh and the firm muscles beneath. “Do you really think I’m being jealous, Jolanda?”
“Yes. Damned right I do. You needed this to happen, but you didn’t like it. I could see that when you showed up in the restaurant. You felt you had to hover around us, you had to keep control of the situation even as you were pushing me toward him.”
Enron was a little taken aback by that accusation. Was it so? He had believed that the purpose of his breaking in on Jolanda and Farkas at the restaurant had been merely to send a signal to Farkas that they needed to talk, once Farkas’s dalliance with Jolanda was out of the way. But perhaps there had been more going on than that. He could have waited until tomorrow to make contact with Farkas, after all. But perhaps he had actually needed to let Farkas know that he had some kind of prior claim on Jolanda, some degree of ownership,
He shrugged. “At any rate, did you learn anything useful from him?”
“That depends. What do you mean by useful?”
“For example, did he say anything about why he’s up here?”
“He told you in the restaurant what he’s doing up here. He said he was on a holiday.”
“Of course. A holiday. —You really are stupid, aren’t you?”
“Thank you very much.”
“He’s here spying for Kyocera. You knew that.”
“So he’s spying for Kyocera, then. We didn’t talk about anything having to do with Kyocera. I took some measurements of his face and skull, and then he asked me if I would go to bed with him, and then—”
“Yes. All right.”
“He doesn’t seem like a blind man in bed, Marty. Or somebody who looks at a beautiful woman and sees an arrangement of barrels. He knew where everything was supposed to be.”
“I’m sure he did,” said Enron. He drew a long, slow breath. “Okay, listen to me, now. What I think, Jolanda, is that Kyocera-Merck has a finger in this little plot that your friends from Los Angeles have cooked up, and that the Hungarian is here as the K-M point man, here to meet with the conspirators and help them set things up.”
Jolanda turned in her seat and looked up at him. “What makes you think that? Nobody ever mentioned a word about Kyocera when they were telling me about the plan.”
“Why should they? But an adventure of such a kind takes money. Someone has to buy the weapons, someone has to pay for transporting them here. People have to be trained. And then there are the customs fees, the bribes, all the expenses of buying your way into a well-protected place like this with a small army. Who is their backer, do you think?”
“I don’t have any idea. They never said.”
“My entire purpose in coming here—do you remember?—is to meet with your friends and let them know that my country is willing to offer them whatever financial support they may need. But the possibility arises that they may already have found a very powerful partner in their enterprise.”
“Kyocera-Merck, you mean?”
“So it begins to seem.”
“Why would Kyocera-Merck want to overthrow the dictator of Valparaiso Nuevo?”
“For reasons of pure imperialism, perhaps,” Enron said. “Kyocera is said to be in a strongly expansionist mode these days, and they may just want to add a few more L-5 worlds to their collection. Or maybe it is only that there are some people living here in sanctuary who are wanted by them. I don’t know, Jolanda. But if Farkas is here, and a coup is being engineered, it gives me reason to suspect that he’s mixed up in this plan somehow on K-M’s behalf.”
“And if he is?”
“Then I need to cut myself in on the deal. A partnership arrangement: split the costs, share the payoff. Kyocera can have this place, if it wants it. But some of the people who have been living in hiding here—those are people that
Enron was enjoying a long, extravagant shower just before dinnertime when Jolanda put her head into the cubicle and said, “The courier is on the phone. He thinks he’s found Davidov. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Tell him to wait,” Enron said.
He stepped under the water again, letting it roll down luxuriously over the dense, matted black hair of his chest, which was still covered with soap. In Israel, of course, there was plenty of water to squander on showers. But Enron had been in California just before coming here, living under the enforced Spartan restrictions of the West Coast’s perpetual drought, and now he was reveling in the availability once more of unlimited water up here on Valparaiso Nuevo, where everything was recycled with maximum efficiency and nothing was rationed.
After a long while he emerged, toweling himself dry, and went into the bedroom. Kluge’s fleshy, earnest face was peering out of the visor. Enron casually wrapped his towel around his middle and moved into scanner range.
“Well?”
“Spoke C,” Kluge said. “The Hotel Santa Eulalia, in the town of Remedies. Four men with California addresses on their passports checked in last week. This was one of them. He’s using the name of Dudley Reynolds, but I think he’s the one you wanted to find. I’ll pump his picture across to you.”
The visor image went blurry with download interference for a moment. Kluge was jacking his flex terminal into the output. Then the picture was clear again, and Enron found himself looking at the solido of a square- headed, thick-necked man with austere blue eyes and blond hair, almost colorlessly so, cropped very short. His skin, which must originally have been of a Slavic pallor, was a blackish purple, heavily mottled and blotched from too much Screen. It was a frightening face, big-chinned and almost lipless, a bestial Cossack face.
Enron said to Jolanda, “What do you think?”
“That’s Davidov, yes. It’s him, all right.”
“He looks like a beast.”
“He’s really quite gentle,” Jolanda said.
“No doubt,” said Enron. He told Kluge to come back on camera. “All right, you’ve found them. Well done. Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“They checked out about twelve hours ago. They may have gone back to Earth.”
“Name of a pig,” Enron muttered. “We’ve missed them?”
“I’m not entirely certain of that. My contacts in Emigration haven’t come up with any record of their leaving Valparaiso Nuevo yet. However, the fact remains that they
“You do that.”
“I could use an advance on my fee,” Kluge said. “My expenses on all this have been running high.”
“How much do you want?” Enron asked.
“A thousand callaghanos?”
“I’ll give you two thousand,” Enron said. “It’ll save me the trouble of having you come around with your hand out again in another day or two.”
Kluge seemed very surprised indeed. Jolanda was looking at Enron in puzzlement also.
Enron took his terminal from the drawer, tapped out Kluge’s account number, and pumped the money across to him. Kluge blurted his gratitude and disappeared from the visor.
Jolanda said, “Why’d you give him so much?”
“What does it matter? There’s plenty of money. I was ready to let him have five.”
“They don’t respect you, if you’re too easy with money.”
“They’ll respect me, all right. Kluge has dealt with Israelis before.”
“How do you know that?” Jolanda asked.
“We keep records,” said Enron. “Don’t you think I checked on him before I hired him?” He wadded his towel into a ball, threw it across the room, and began to select clothes for the evening. “Are you ready to go out for dinner?”
