After a moment he turned his head to face her. “Where do you go when they toss you out?”
She was silent. The eventual answer, they both knew, was to the recycler. Her nervousness around him had always been evident, but—
“Nobody told me this was a death sentence when I first came,” he said.
Beth-Ann bit her lips. “Forget it,” she said. She put one hand on his chest. “I’ll think of something.” Of course she wanted him to forget it, to have his money’s worth; experience had taught her that men who didn’t have a good time didn’t come back, and she needed this one to come back. Her fear of him was the only thing that made her constant kindness bearable.
He continued to stare toward the ceiling, oblivious to her efforts. “How much do the girls make here on an average night?” he asked.
“About a hundred, if they’re lucky. Sometimes less.”
“And on holidays?”
“Well, some girls tell me that they make five hundred, but I’ve never seen more than ten go to anybody’s room in a night. And even that’s rare.”
He said, “Ten at twenty dollars apiece. That’s an average of a hundred fifty for a given day, less if you factor in the ratio of holidays to normal days in a regular calendar year.”
“I guess.” She risked running her tongue around the shell of his ear. “We don’t have to talk about money at this stage.”
“I like discussing money. I wonder how much of that Lena keeps, and how much she has to pay the Board of Sin Control.”
“Forty-five percent,” said Beth-Ann at once.
Tal was surprised. “You know?”
“I listen,” she said.
He said, in a pleased voice, “Beth-Ann.” And kissed her.
She smiled. “If I knew you liked money, I would have lined all my twenty-dollar pieces along the bedsheet.”
“Would you?”
“
She grinned and began doing a few things with her hand that would get him hard again, and this time he didn’t stop her.
After his usual courteous good-bye he went to see Lena. She was pacing the sitting room below as though she were just waiting for him to leave. As though, he smiled, demons made her nervous.
“I’d like to put Beth-Ann on a retainer,” he said.
“On a what?” she asked blankly.
“A retainer. Like an attorney. I’d like her to be available whenever I visit.”
Lena sat down on the polished rocking chair she kept in the anteroom. Lena was big on homey touches, apparently. “That’s not something we she said.
“I don’t see why not,” said Tal reasonably. “You do everything else.”
At that she gave him a sharp glance. She said, “It’s out of the question.”
“Of course it’s not. You don’t want to keep her around; you don’t want to toss her out and annoy the Protector’s Mend.” Lena was starting to look murderous. He said, “I suppose you could toss her out. But then you’d have to come up with a new girl each time I visit, and they’d be no use afterward. Your house could get quite a reputation for, how was it so charmingly put, ‘shriveling up’ people’s ‘manhood’?”
“Sir,” she said coldly, “I have tried to show you every courtesy—”
“One hundred and fifty dollars.”
She paused. “Per day? That does seem very fair—”
“Per week.”
“Are you joking, sir? Do you know what our girls make here?”
“I know what Beth-Ann makes. Nothing, except for my rare visits. Why not be reasonable? You were going to toss her out—all this is pure profit.”
Lena was silent, apparently doing math in her head.
Tal added, “And the Board need never know. It’s common knowledge she’s been ruined for profit by a demon. You could be paying Beth-Ann’s upkeep yourself, out of charity.”
“No one would ever believe—” she began, and stopped, a flush coming over her face.
Tal waited. She cleared her throat and said, “Two hundred?”
“Sorry.”
She bit her lip, tapped her heels, and said, “Done.”
Chapter 28
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
SAMUEL BUTLER
In his capacity as Iolanthe’s bodyguard, Will Stockton heard all the gossip on the Diamond. What he didn’t eavesdrop on at parties and banquets his subordinates brought to him proudly, like housecats with small furry prey, depositing their bits of fact at his feet and taking his approval as reinforcement. Will knew that Iolanthe had locked herself in an inner room in the women’s quarters, crying, for two days last week, because Adrian had commented that it was time to set the wedding date. He knew that the Governor of Baret Station had agreed to sponsor a conference between Baret Two and the Three Cities, to take place on the Station shortly. And he knew that Adrian was annoyed that once this agreement had been reached, Opal had begun to be coy about participating in a joint trade negotiation.
No one ever asked Will what he knew. He had no brief. He gathered information solely on the principle that a Sangaree among aristos had to be ready to protect himself, and he wanted to know where the blows might come from. To this end he had Hartley Quince followed nearly round the clock, whether his subordinates thought it relevant or not. If Hartley had noticed that he often looked up at parties to see an Opal City Guard standing in a comer flirting with a ladies’ maid, he had not shown any sign of it.
Which meant nothing where Hart was concerned. Still, to lessen suspicion, Will would take a shift of watching himself when he knew Hartley was due to be at some function Io would attend. When they went their separate ways afterward, one of his people would take over.
Just now he was doing his share of watching at one of the ten thousand engagement parties that Diamond social scramblers were throwing for Adrian and Iolanthe. It was understood by everyone that Adrian was too busy to actually attend these
