“We do with what we've got, or we do without. That is the way of the Swamp Fox, from time immemorial. But we haven't got, sir. That's our problem. I am having to re-create a government out of a sea of neglect, is what I am doing. To put a sadly blunt comment upon it, out of my usually polite way of putting things, you understand? But we are broke as a shattered vase, sir.”
I stood up from my chair. "Too bad. We don't take
charity cases very often, pal, and we're full up on our quota for the month." Matfany stood up, a bemused look on his face.
“Sir, I don't understand.” “I have to explain 'no' to you?” “Aahz!” Tananda fired off a warning shot. “What did we just finish discussing?”
I knew. I sat back and signaled for him to do the same. I had agreed to take the next case to come through the door and make more money than Skeeve could, no matter what it was. I sighed and poured myself a half bucket of single malt, drained it, and refilled it.
“All right, tell me all about it.”
The sincere eyes fixed on mine, and he hooked a thumb beneath the suspender holding up his trousers, took a deep breath, and began.
“Well, sir, you may have visited Foxe-Swampburg in the past. The thing is that it looks like a pretty nice place, and it is, only I have to tell you that underneath what is a very handsome and appealing exterior are problems that would just curl your hair, sir, if you had hair, that was. No offense intended to people with scales. It's just an expres-sion. Now, I have had the enormous responsibility ...”
“Of course I could do better than the kid!” I had rea-soned, once Tanda and I were alone in my private office. “I just didn't want him to feel bad.”
“Not bad after you just tore strips out of him for walk-ing out on us?” Tananda had countered. “And how did you feel when he walked out?” I asked. “Pretty awful. But I made up with him. You haven't.”
I had to admit she was right. The one time he came to find me, I'd been pretty glad to see him, but he had a ri-diculous job on tap for which he wanted my help. I turned him down flat because he should have turned it down. And the fact was he came out of it without a bent copper coin. Oh, maybe they gave him the D-hopper, which was cur-rently in my right-hand pants pocket, but so what? A Klahd was only asking for trouble getting involved with ten Per-vect females.6 But Skeeve never listened to what I said. And he never came back to find me again. Hell with it.
I had plenty of other friends, Tananda included. But to have Skeeve waltzing back into the Bazaar after an ab-sence of months and expecting to take over M.Y.T.H., Inc. again like he had never left didn't take into account any-one's past feelings or present positions. We'd all moved on.
Including me.
Except we hadn't. Not really. That's what hurt. We trusted him, and he walked off without looking back. The whole M.Y.T.H., Inc. enterprise was possible mostly be-cause of his ... I don't want to say leadership; call it glue. He was the glue. Once he was gone we hung together in a kind of loose fashion, mostly because of inertia. We liked each other, but, well, maybe I understated it when I said we liked him. I never knew a Klahd who could engender such loyalty, and all without seeming to know what he was do-ing.
He said he had his reasons. Maybe we had too high ex-pectations where he was concerned. Not me. I knew what Klahds were capable of. Skeeve just exceeded those capa-bilities most of the time. He should have been born a Per-vect. Together we could have taken over dimensions.
Nah. The upkeep'd kill you.
"... And what do you think, after all that? She says the treasury's not up to her expectations, and what am I gonna do about that? What am / gonna do? I'm supposed to keep filling it up so she can just empty it again? With what? Our
6. See the whole account in Myth Alliances, available from your more reputable purveyors of fiction.
people's got what they've got, sir. And, as I said, what they've got at the moment is nothing. We've got creditors breathing down our necks, and we don't like it. We like to keep ourselves to ourselves, sir. I collect taxes to pay the bills, but when there's no income, there are no taxes, and when there are no taxes, there's no revenue for nothing else."
I made a face. Back to business. I snapped on my asset-counting hat. “Can you increase exports of anything?” I asked, men-tally going down the checklist. “We don't really export anything, sir,” said Matfany, ruefully. I raised an eyebrow. “So how do you make money?”
“I thought you said you'd heard of Foxe-Swampburg? Hospitality, sir. Ours is an economy based upon visitors, especially repeat visitors. We used to get plenty of guests from off-dimension looking for a little getaway, if you un-derstand me?”
I leered at him.
