Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“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.

Sula needed the appropriate documents for her demonstration, so it was two days before she could approach Casimir. During that time there were a pair of bombings in different parts of the city, causing no fatalities though each explosion was big enough so that the Naxids felt they couldn’t suppress the news. Fifty-three hostages were shot.

While she waited, she went to the Cat Street club with Spence and Macnamara-it was a huge place, with one dance band in the main room and another on the lower level, glass-walled courts for ball games, a long curved bar made of black ceramic and silver alloy, and a wide selection of computerized entertainments. Women in low-slung pantalettes, bottles in holsters on their hips, wandered from table to table pouring drinks straight into the open mouths of the clientele. Smoking was permitted, and a permanent fog of tobacco and hashish hung below the high ceiling.

Sula confined her debauchery to sparkling water, but she found herself smiling as she glanced over the club. Gredel had spent a great many nights in places like this with her lover, Lamey, who had done much the same sort of work as Casimir. On Zanshaa they might be called clique members, but on Spannan they were linkboys. They were young, because few lived to be old before encountering the work farm or the garotte. Gredel’s father had been a linkboy who fled ahead of an indictment, and her mother spent years on an agricultural commune paying for her man’s misstep.

Gredel had grown up in an environment where she was going to meet certain people and make certain decisions. She tried not to make the mistakes her mother had made, and instead invented mistakes all her own.

The sound of the club, the music and laughter and electronic cries, rose around her. Sula had only just reached her majority at twenty-three, but somehow to her the Cat Street club seemed a younger person’s idea of fun. The club was a straightforward appeal to the flesh, to desire for sex or rhythm or companionship or oblivion. For a terrorist, who plotted death by gun or bomb, it was perhaps a little tame.

One-Step looked at her reproachfully as Sula walked home reeking of other people’s vices. “One-Step would show you a better time,” he said.

“One-Step-” Sula began, then sneezed. She wasn’t used to being around tobacco, and vowed she would wash her hair before bed, and stuff her clothing in an airtight laundry bag where she couldn’t smell it.

“One-Step needs a job,” she said through her stuffed nose.

“You get your money from Casimir, maybe you’ll give One-Step some work.”

“Maybe,” Sula smiled.

The idea, she admitted, had a certain wayward appeal.

“More hostages taken today,” One-Step said. “I need to get off the street.”

Good point, Sula thought. “I’ll see what I can do,” she told him.

Whatever else you could say about One-Step, he had better people skills than she did.

Sula dressed in fine Riverside low style for her meeting with Casimir. The wide, floppy collar of her blouse overhung a bright tight-waisted jacket with fractal patterns. Pants belled out around platform shoes. Cheap colorful plastic and ceramic jewelry. A tall velvet hat, crushed just so, with one side of the brim held up by a gold pin with an artificial diamond the size of a walnut.

Riverside was still, and the pavement radiated the heat of the day as if exhaling a long, hot breath. Between bars of light, the long shadows of buildings striped the street like prison bars. Sula saw no sign of Naxid or police patrols.

The night was young and the Cat Street club was nearly deserted, inhabited only by a few people knocking back drinks on their way home from or to work. The hostess said that Casimir wasn’t in yet. Sula sat at a back table, ordered sparkling water, and transformed the tabletop into a video screen so she could watch a news program-the usual expressionless Daimong announcer with the usual bland tidings, all about the happy, content people of many species who worked productively for a peaceful future beneath the Naxids.