without stopping. The shiver and groan of the bridge itself, as river traffic passed between the spans.
Someone had put out a card table in the old decontamination chamber that fronted the street. Esteban himself peered over the mezcбl flasks and ornaments of pressed tin. I remembered the picture from a bridge party we had been to across the canal in El Ciudad de Cenizas. Esteban had that look he always had, that sort of half-smile, as if he were listening to a punch line just beyond his understanding.
“Orlando, who’s with you?” Cynthia Contreras called to us from the kitchen. “Martisela Coria? Ay Dios mнo. I can’t believe they let you out.” She was wedged in between relatives at the back of this giant mahogany heirloom table. She waved us over for hugs. Her eyes were pink, but, for the moment, dry.
My impression of Cynthia Contreras through six years of marriage was this kohl-eyed wraith at Esteban’s elbow. In a better life, she might have raised a couple of picked-on kids and gone on to spend all her pent-up rage closing lucha de la lagartijos, something socially uplifting like that.
But this widow business would not be part of her plan. I was not entirely sure I wanted to see what she made of the opportunity.
Esteban’s brother, Jorge, sat with her, maybe a little closer than a brother-in-law should. Jorge Contreras always greeted me with this frown of vast and belabored interest. A dimwit’s caricature of a philosopher. “Orlando Coria,” he said. “The Lucky Man himself.” He glared all protective as I put the contract on the table beside Cynthia. I did what I was always do with Jorge; I ignored him. He continued to frown inscrutably. Maybe he was ignoring me as well. “This was Esteban’s,” I said to Cynthia. “It represents a great deal of wealth, and has to be handled quickly.”
She knew what it was, which surprised me. Jorge pestered her to explain and she ignored him while she read to the bottom.
“Do I own all the rights?”
“It’s all tied up,” Martisela said. “The baryonic matter rights. The vacuum state.”
“What about the isotope rights?” Without looking up. “Do I own them? And through how many decay plateaus?”
This was a sore point. I wasn’t sure what she had cooking with Chamberlain and Bell. Once upon a time, we had actually owned the decay rights to this pterachnium, extending down to lyghnium 485, at least. Though we were asking a lot more for it then the 620 meg that Zuniga had offered us. No point going into all that mess.
“We’ve had some trouble pinning down the isotope rights,” Martisela answered quickly. “That hardly matters so long as the pterachnium is sold off.”
“And you have buyers for this stuff.”
“Lining up buyers is the easy part,” I said. “Bright Matter fleets from Buenaventura to the Four Planet Nation are salivating for a tuned singularity.”
Martisela, as always, was out front of the market. She set her investment portfolio on the table with a little flourish. She was ready to hedge Cynthia Contreras’ profits across the breadth of the communications market-A little to the designers of the event-horizon skimming satellites that put all those quantum-entangled photons in orbit. A portion to the enclave of Jesuit electrical engineers who fashioned the polarizing screens that spun those photons into code. A portion to the shipwrights who installed the answering micro-singularities onto the ships. Any one of these markets could tank and a flood of investors would buoy up the other two.
Cynthia Contreras flipped through the printout. She nodded. She smiled. She was impressed. Then she said, “I’m thinking of investing in Buenaventura municipal bonds.”
“Municipal bonds.” Martisela looked up at me. “Municipal bonds?”
Cynthia Contreras did not look up. “What do you think, Orlando?”
She was turning her back on a 2400 percent return and a perpetual reinvestment for municipal bonds.
“I think you’re crazy.”
That only made her laugh. She leaned toward me as if we were plotting an assassination. “Have you seen the debt market in the last couple of hours?”
“Debt market?” I felt Martisela’s fingers dig through my pant leg.
“About two hours ago, someone inflated the debt market-I know, I know. Why would anyone do that? But they did, till it’s as over-valued as it’s ever been.” I felt this electric tension at my side. “Say I put part of my money into Buenaventura bonds,” Cynthia said, “which, by law, have guaranteed lines of credit. Say I put the rest into shorting the debt market. When the debt market crashes, I’ll be sitting on a couple teratramos in saleable debt potential.”
Martisela looked to me to say something. I would have, if she hadn’t cut me off before I could draw a breath. “I think you misunderstand the nature of strategic investing,” she said carefully.
Cynthia frowned. “You think it won’t work?”
“There are people sitting at this table who will be ruined by what you’re proposing.”
“Esteban’s true friends will understand and forgive.”
“It’s a sin,” Martisela said. “To ruin people when you’re not even hungry.”
Cynthia had this laugh she’d been saving up for six years, knowing and angry and disappointed. It made the hairs bristle against my sleeves. “Perfect,” she clapped her palms like a little girl. “Perfect.” She looked past us toward a man leaning in the doorway. “They’re worried for me,” she said to him in Cargo English. “For my future, or my soul. They can’t decide.”
“Look upon it as a challenge,” he said. I recognized the lazy smile even before I recognized the face. Here was the little Anglo I had seen at Chuy’s.
“Hola, Cholito.” A finger came up, pointing my way. He cocked his thumb, ray-gun style, Prssshk prssshk. He laughed his lazy laugh.
“Everyone?” Cynthia Contreras waved a hand: “Noah Dryden.” She made no further explanation, but that was explanation enough. We all lived with expatriate Anglos. We could pretty much guess what this one was doing here.
Dryden nodded at me. “How’s the commodities trade?” he said.
“Never better. How’s the smuggling trade?”
“I’m afraid you have me confused with someone.” He smiled. “I’m in franchised socialism.”-Even as his left hand rose by dead reckoning to the forty-eight yuen strung from his right wrist. “You mean this?” He laughed. “I’ve had this since childhood. But these bracelets are hardly uncommon where I’m from.”
In the dusky light of the kitchen, the eyes glowed bright enough to light the unmarked underside of Dryden’s wrist. Cynthia knew where I was looking; I thought she would look away, but her course was set. She didn’t much care what I figured out now.
“What did this one promise you?” I asked her. “Revenge on the men who killed Esteban?” Cynthia said nothing. “And now that he’s brought proof of their deaths, you turn over Esteban’s pterachnium to him as payment.”
“He seems to know a lot about my business,” Dryden drawled as casually as possible.
I would have asked Cynthia about the isotope futures she had sold Chamberlain and Bell. What was it like to lure two men to their deaths? Cynthia turned to me with these huge and meaningful eyes; all my pointed questions dried up in my throat.
“They’re friends of my husband,” she said to Dryden. “They won’t go to the Shoes. They have their own problems with the law right now.”
As for Martisela, she nodded at Cynthia the way old girlfriends do- where did you find this guy?
Cynthia, for all her veneer, could not look Martisela in the eye. “He helped me,” she said to Martisela. “He helped me even the score for Esteban.”
“For a price,” I said.
“Everything has a price,” Cynthia said. “One way or another, everyone pays.”
Dryden nodded his amen to this. “Bell and Chamberlain were a couple of over-reaching franchisees,” he said. “Their accounts have been settled.”
“ ‘Settled.’ ” Martisela gave me an owlish look. “Doesn’t that sound final.”
“Let him be,” Cynthia said. “It’s been hard enough getting things sorted out to my liking. I don’t want anybody having second thoughts now.” She gave me two eyes like steel bearings. “Esteban was hopeless.” She tilted her head at me defiantly. “He left it to me to avenge his death. A trader shouldn’t leave his family to do that. Not if he has command of his skills. Not in this market.”
An odd sentiment coming from a widow. Even Jorge frowned. But Cynthia Contreras was in that state of grace
