Will wondered where somebody of their neighbor’s age had to be so urgently. “Going far, Mr. Teksa?”
“To Tarragon Street,” he said, bowing as he left. “I have an appointment to see the physical terrorist. Thank you so much.” He closed the door behind him.
Will looked at Bernadette. “ ‘Physical terrorist’?”
“He meant therapist. He meant Tanamonde Street, too. He’s had a lot of trouble with words since he came out of the holding pens.”
“That old guy was in the pens?” Will stared toward the door with new respect. “How? I refuse to believe he’s capable of any great crime.” Disloyalty? Heresy? The Teksas had fallen to Sangaree long ago, from some other level; they were too timid to even speak up at street meetings.
“Someone denounced him. I don’t know … some people said the Eigerlys denounced him because they wanted his compartment.”
“They moved in after the Teksas left,” said Johnny. He was taking out another beer.
“They didn’t stay long, though, did they?” said Bernadette. “The lock kept getting tom off their door. And the maintenance teams wouldn’t pick up their garbage, so they had to drag it to the Belt all by themselves.”
“’Cause when they didn’t, they got fined.” Johnny took a long drink.
“They had to move out finally. So the place has been empty till the Teksas came back … Mr. Teksa, I mean. Mrs. Teksa didn’t come back.”
Will was glad he hadn’t asked after her.
“He talks funny now,” said Bernadette, “and he has to keep going to the meds. But he seems okay.”
And to think that Hartley Quince had been in the same holding pens, for years, and like Mr. Teksa, he was one of the few to come out again. But there was nothing wrong with his speech patterns, nor his intelligence, nor any other ability Will could think of; and he found himself impressed again by Hart’s achievement: escaping the pens unscathed. Then Will shook himself mentally—what was he thinking? Probably Teksa was a thousand times more healthy than Hartley Quince.
“You want your beer?” Johnny (whose mind had held onto essentials) was asking.
“Sure,” said Will. And how healthy did that make him for hanging around with Hart? Not that there was a lot of choice involved.
Since Johnny and Will hadn’t progressed very far with dinner, and Will’s homecoming had imparted a festive mood, they decided to go out to eat.
“Why the hell not?” said Bemie. “We’ll put this stuff in the friggin’ garbage. You only live once.”
Jack, who had a disturbed look in his eyes, led Bernadette gently away and whispered to her. Will hid a smile. Jack had a romantic view of things, and didn’t like to hear words like “friggin”’ come from the lips of his beloved. Willie knew this because his sister had told him how once, as they stopped to buy peaches from a street vendor, Jack had turned to her, gazed deeply into her eyes, and said, “Darling, I’d really like for you to spend Christmas with me and my family.”
“You’re out of your friggin’ mind,” said Bemie. “It’s still June.”
Now she and Jack returned to them, and she said, “All right—but I want to go to a Sangaree bar.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Absolutely not,” said Will.
“I don’t know—” said Johnny, only to receive glares from the other two.
“ Lysettegoes to Sangaree bars,” said Bemie.
This reference to his fiancee only annoyed Will. “Lysette has to, she’s a performer. And she only goes where the management guarantees her protection.”
“The three of you can guarantee my protection, can’t you?”
Put that way, she had a point. Will had a high opinion, not entirely unjustified, of his own abilities in a fight. And although he knew his sister was pressing his “respond to challenge” button, he responded anyway. “Maybe,” he said, “but we sit quietly and eat and then we leave.”
“Wait a minute—” said Jack, looking startled.
“It’ll be all right,” Will told him. And it probably would. Taking one’s sister to a Sangaree bar was a little daring, but the truth was that Bernadette Stockton was well-known through most of the area. She could probably walk into a bar now, unescorted, and not get hurt—as long as it was in the neighborhood. Flanked by three fairsized males, the problem shouldn’t arise.
Will went quickly into the other room, where he stripped off his sergeant’s uniform and put on a red jacket and gray pants. He didn’t want to be challenged for wearing die uniform, or reported for not wearing it. This was non-reg, but close enough to the uniform that it might confuse observers in a dark bar into leaving him alone.
As they trooped out the door, Bemie patted his hand and favored him with a smile. “Next time it’ll be the Cafe Bordo,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Will. “Maybe we’ll run into Stretch.”
“You mean you never heard of Stretch?” asked Johnny. They were sitting at a round table in the Coeur de Noir, far from the singer’s spot and close to the door.
Will had chosen it. Coming inside, looking around the interior of the bar, there was another moment of double vision: the opulence of Adrian’s court coming between the image of the bar as familiar comfort and the image of it as dark, cramped, and poor. Will found himself choosing the table for Bernadette as he would have for Iolanthe, for security reasons. A tattered sign hung in the darkness above the door, reading: Coeur de Noirceur. Somewhere over the years the final syllable had gotten lost from people’s speech; maybe in the future the name would shorten even further.
“Stretch worked at the Cafe Bordo in my father’s time,” Johnny was saying. “He was a bouncer. Chicken Savoy was the only thing he could cook. When he was drunk, he used to insist that at least one person in every party order it. And boy, did they. He was a big guy, my father said—practically a legend.”
Sangaree was full of legends. Maybe it was the compression of time. The heyday of Johnny and
