apron, then signaled Macnamara to carry in the hermetically sealed crate of Onamaka coffee beans from Harzapid, which he laid with care behind the bar.
“Thanks,” the proprietor said. He looked critically at Macnamara’s wet footprints on his glossy tile floor. “By the way, a couple gents want to see you.”
Sula turned as the two men rose from their small marble-topped table. “Good coffee,” the first said, and Sula’s nerves sang a warning. He was a large man, wearing a jacket bright with flower patterns and trousers pegged nearly to his armpits. The trouser legs belled out around heavy boots. He wore a heavy silver necklace splattered with thumb-sized artificial rubies, and a matching bracelet on one thick wrist.
“Very good coffee,” his partner agreed. The second man was smaller but had the deep chest and thick arms of a bodybuilder, and hair that was razored into a perfect narcissistic ruff that shadowed his forehead like a cockscomb.
“The question is,” said the first man, “do you have a permit to be in the coffee business?”
Sula sensed Macnamara stepping protectively to her shoulder, and she slid one foot back into a balanced stance as Spence, understanding that something was wrong, bustled forward with a worried expression.
Sula looked narrowly at the first man. “Who are you, exactly?” she asked.
His hand lashed out, probably a slap intended to rock her on her heels and teach her not to ask imprudent questions. But he was dealing with someone who had been through the Fleet personal combat course. Sula blocked his arm and raked her fist along his radial nerve, pulling him forward and exposing his throat. She hacked at his larynx with the edge of her hand, and as he bent to clutch at his neck, stuck her two thumbs in his eye sockets. After which she simply grabbed his head in her hands and pulled it into a rising knee.
His nose broke with a satisfying crunch. Since he was bent over, choking, it was easy for her to drop her elbow onto the back of his neck, which put him on the ground.
Macnamara had already launched himself at the second man, the bodybuilder. Blows and kicks were exchanged, and the two were about even until Spence hurled a pot of hot coffee into the bodybuilder’s face, then broke his knee with a stomping kick launched from the flank.
After that, all three members of Action Team 491 swarmed the bodybuilder and kicked him till he lay still.
Macnamara searched the two men for weapons and produced a pair of pistols they had been too busy to draw. The cafe‘s only two customers watched in wide-eyed alarm and looked uncertainly at their sleeve displays as if with the thought of calling the police. Sula took two steps behind the counter and grabbed the proprietor by the hair. She dragged him across his counter and said, “Who are these people you sold us to?”
“They’re Virtue Street,” the man said, eyes wide. “I pay them tribute.”
Sula clenched her teeth. “I don’t think I’m going to sell you any more coffee.”
She picked up her Onamaka coffee and carried it to the truck, anger and adrenaline rendering the box as light as a pillow.
“Fuck!”she said, furious at herself as they drove away. “Fuck! Fuck!” She beat a fist on the arm of her chair.
“We came out of it all right,” Macnamara said, fingering a scrape on his cheek where the bodybuilder’s rings had marked him.
“That’s not what I mean,” Sula snarled. “I forgot about the tax! Fuck!” She slapped herself on the forehead. “I should haveknown !” She pounded the seat again. “Damn it all anyway!”
She canceled the morning’s remaining deliveries and raged her way home, spitting anger all the way. At the sight of One-Step, crouched on the pavement in the shade of her building’s porch, she felt the fury fade. One-Step straightened his long shanks and rose, a white smile brilliant on his face.
“Beauteous lady!” he declaimed. “Here you come, glorious as the sun and delicate as a flower!”
“I need to know something,” Sula said.
“Anything!” One-Step threw out an arm. “Anything, beauteous lady!”
“Tell me about the Virtue Street gang.”
The delight faded from One-Step’s face. “Are you messing with them, lovely one?”
“They’re messing with the company I work for.”
Suddenly he was interested. “You have work? Real work?”
“I deliver things. But tell me about the Virtue Street people.”
One-Step threw out his hands. “What can I say? They’re one of the cliques here in the city. They collect the tribute on both sides of Virtue Street.”
“Just in that area?”
“More or less.”
Virtue Street, fortunately, was in a fairly distant part of the city. Sula felt her anxiety ease. “Who collects the tribute in Riverside?” she asked.
One-Step gave her a cautious look. “You want to stay away from them, lovely one.”
“Just for my information.”
His face turned stony. “The Riverside Clique. They don’t go in for fancy names. I have to buy things from them, just so I can stay in business.”
“Are the Riversides worse than the others?” she asked. “Better?”
The sound of pneumatic hammers rang down the street from Sim’s Boatyard. One-Step gave an uneasy shrug. “Depends on who you deal with.”
“If I wanted to start a business, who would I talk to?”
A suspicious look crossed One-Step’s face. “What kind of business?”
“I don’t want to drive trucks all my life,” Sula said.
“For a loan, beauteous lady, you go to your clan’s patron.”
Sula gave a laugh. “My clan’s patron ran like hell when the Naxids came. So didhis patron, and so on up the line.”
“War is no time to start a new business.”
“Depends on the business.”
She looked at him until he shifted uneasily and broke the silence. “You could talk to Casimir,” he grudged. “He’s not as bad as the others.”
“Casimir? Casimir who?”
“They call him Little Casimir, because there was another Casimir who was older. But Big Casimir got executed.”
Sula felt amusement touch the corners of her lips. “So I knock on his door and ask for Little Casimir?”
“Casimir Massoud,” One-Step said. “He has an office in the Kalpeia Building on Cat Street, in that club they’ve got there, but he’s got good reason for not spending a lot of time in his office.”
“Yes?”
One-Step glanced left and right before answering in a lower voice. “The police get an order to take a certain number of hostages, right? They get shot if they don’t obey the Naxids, but everyone hates them if they succeed. So when they get the order they make a little calculation about who the neighborhood won’t miss, right? They take the people already in jail, and arrest all the bad sorts they can find—and with them they arrest the crazy people, and the ones living on the street—and that way they figure people won’t hate them so much.”
Sula remembered the man arrested outside her window, and wondered if he was a clique bagman carried away in front of the people he dunned for protection.
“But don’t people like Casimir buy protection from the police?” she asked.
One-Step smiled and nodded. “You understand these things, beauteous lady,” he said. “Yes, there is protection for the leaders of the cliques, so the police arrest the lower-ranking members. The thieves, the hijackers, the collectors. But when that happens, money stops flowing. Eventually Casimir won’t be able to pay off the police any longer, and then he gets carried off to the Blue Hatches to be shot next time someone in the secret army sets off a bomb.”
Fat, hot raindrops began to plummet from the sky. One-Step winced as one struck him in the eye. Sula ignored the rain as she thought hard.
She had something Casimir wanted, she realized. There were a great many possibilities here, if she played him right.
