Draiken says, “I never did know your real name.”
The fat man uses the discarded scarf to dab at his beads of sweat dotting his brow. He clears his throat, takes a sip of the beer in the mug before him, tests his voice with another cough, and says, “Would it…mean anything to you if I introduced myself now?”
“Any name, even a fictional one, would be the least of the many reparations you owe me.”
The fat man draws a smiley face in the condensation on the side of his mug. “It would have to be a fictional one. I don’t have a real name anymore.”
“Tell me another one.”
“It’s the literal truth, my old friend. You know as well as I do that when you work for the powers we worked for, doing the kind of work we did, traceable backgrounds can be inconvenient. Some time after you hopped the fence, they,” he winces in sudden pain and rubs the angry red line beneath the least of his many chins, “developed some special new techniques, and removed my background.”
Draiken arches an eyebrow. “How appropriate. The biter, bitten.”
“Indeed. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you anything about my civilian life, or much about my professional one, even if I wanted to. I remember it all, but no longer have the ability to reference it in conversation. I’m afraid my range of friendly conversation these days is pretty much limited to the nonsense I’ve indulged myself in since entering my dotage. My answers for you will therefore have to be general in nature, perhaps even,” he rubs his neck again, “frustratingly so. If it helps, I’m traveling under the name Grade. You may call me that, if you like.”
Despite all the years that have passed, Draiken knows that it would a tremendous mistake to treat this officious bureaucrat, this professional ferret, this torturer and interrogator, as a harmless relic now. He cannot be allowed to set the rules of this their long-delayed final match, even if that means being contrary on what seems the most minor of points. So Draiken says, “I believe I’ll call you Janus.”
“The two-faced God. You are good. And what shall I call you, if not Draiken? I can’t believe you still use your real name, not if you’ve been in hiding all this time.”
“Anybody who knows me, here, calls me Old John.”
“John,” the fat man says, as if weighing it in his mouth. It seems to amuse it. “If I recall correctly, that’s your actual first name. I give you credit. You like to live dangerously.”
“I prefer to think of it as living free.”
“And, of course, the smallest possible defiant gesture is involving the casual use of a name so common that many in this world so congenial so expatriates and fugitives will inevitably suppose it an alias anyway. Well done, Draiken. Well done.”
“And you,” Draiken says, his voice clipped and controlled, no longer the genial instrument of the old man eking a living from the sea, but the sharp scalpel of an even sharper mind, “still need to provide me a reason why I should not kill you where you sit. When I was in your power, you said that you’d stop at nothing to break me. Am I supposed to believe your presence in this backwater just a random coincidence?”
Janus takes another sip of his drink and makes a face as it burns his throat going down. “You’ll believe what you want to believe.”
“There are thousands of worlds out there. The chances of my old jailer, settling on the same obscure planet, the same backwater region…”
“Astronomical,” Janus agrees. He tips his glass, studies the brown liquid inside, swirls it as if searching for answers in the little maelstrom he stirs up and holds captive. His voice turns distant. “And yet it’s happened. I can’t explain it.”
“Try.”
“I don’t know. You and I were trained to distrust coincidence. But coincidences happen. If they didn’t happen, there wouldn’t be a word for them. Perhaps, being in the same kind of business once upon a time, making the same kind of enemies, being the same kind of men, we both followed the same criteria for choosing the kind of place fit for hiding out our old age. Nor can we be the first. I am certain that, for people like us who survived the kind of lives we lived, there have always been chance meetings like this in places too insignificant to have been touched by the madness of governments. Perhaps there are any number of old enemies, playing on opposite sides, who found themselves neighbors after a lifetime of conflict and found themselves forced, as we are now, to decide whether to end our lives as each other’s murderers.”
Draiken almost snarls. “Is that the best you can do?”
“If I were lying, my old friend, would I not do better?”
Draiken realizes that he’s sitting with his back to the street, a foolish and amateurish move that testifies to how long he’s been out of practice, light years from the business of deceit and secrets. He has been so focused on the hated face before him, so intent on finding the lie behind the rickety story, that he’s tuned out the other patrons of the café, the merchants and passersby in the square, the windows of the low squat buildings across the way, and the hundred separate angles from which a capture or kill squad could be converging upon him right now. He has been a fool today, the kind of fool he hasn’t been since before the day when he’d escaped from the hell this man commanded. But would he be a bigger fool if he surrendered to that paranoia, and by so doing proved that he’d never quite left that prison behind, or if he remained where he sat, and trusted that time had been enough to protect him?
Indecision prods him to a rare exclamation. “For your life, fat man, how can you expect me to believe that the likes of you would just retire?”
Janus stares at him for several seconds, his rotund face incredulous. And then something odd happens. His balloon cheeks twitch. His lips curl. At first he fights what’s happening to him, but then he surrenders to it, the chuckle deep in his throat blossoming into what soon becomes a belly laugh, complete with shortness of breath and rampant weeping. He has almost emerged from the hysterics when he catches a glimpse of Draiken’s uncomprehending face and is set off again, unable to stop or regain control of himself for several long minutes.
“Oh, Draiken, my old friend,” he manages at long last, “that you of all people would ask me that question…”
* * *
Greeve’s attraction to fugitives from the iron fist of the Confederacy and Man’s other empires may lie in large part to the world’s genial contempt for laws, but that’s not the same thing as mistaking the status quo there for anarchy.
On Greeve, people steal little because there’s little to steal; they murder rarely because there are so few reasons to kill; they fight rarely because it’s so hot and there’s no goddamned point. But people do get in trouble from time to time, and when they do they remember those who pull them out.
Draiken has spent his long decades here eschewing close friendships but always being helpful to a fault, whenever anyone needed anyone who needed him, a smart policy that has earned him a small fortune in the local favor bank.
One of Draiken’s best investments over the years has been a local woman of pleasure who goes by the first name Aletha and the family name None. Older by a couple of decades than most ladies who make a good living at her venerable profession, even on Greeve where prostitution is less a crime than a hereditary lifestyle, she is as pale by birth and as bronzed by long exposure to the Greevian sun as he has become. She has plied her trade for a long time and must not have much time left. Her years show. Her cheeks become ripples of nested parentheses when she smiles. But she is also avid, and inventive, and experienced in ways to make the act itself less a grunting resentful obligation undertaken for coins and more a deep mutual pleasure for both parties, which even her modest fee fails to sully with the taint of commerce. She is gifted at creating the illusion that the payment she asks for is not so much an entrance fee as a gift, something that helps support her while she provides what she would just as soon give away. It might not even be a pretense. This is Greeve, where people are less formal about such things.
Drai
ken has never availed himself of Aletha’s services. He has, indeed, invited much wistful speculation among the members of her thriving community by only rarely availing himself of such carnal opportunities. But he has been her friend, providing her and her colleagues of the night, with unsolicited aid on a number of occasions when off-worlders passing through Fritaun, drunk on the region’s cheap pleasures and inferring from its lawlessness opportunities that did not exist, attempted to take liberties beyond both what they had paid for and Aletha was inclined to sell.
Marching his old acquaintance Janus up the stairs that lead to the sunny balcony outside the fourth-floor room where Aletha lives and plies her venerable trade, Draiken finds her relaxing at her little round table, nude but for a diaphanous vest worn loose around her shoulders, and multiple necklaces and bracelets of shells. Her feathery shoulder-length hair is like a glowing nutmeg beneath the rays of the setting sun. On guard before she identifies the callers ascending the stairs from the street, she offers the huffing Janus a professional smile before spotting Draiken behind him and switching to a far warmer one. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite caller! Who’s your friend?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t met him already,” Draiken tells her, as he marches the gasping Janus to a seat at the same table. “I’ve told that he’s been quite the regular among the local ladies of pleasure.”
She waves a hand tipped with sculpted green nails. “Has he now? And nobody’s recommended me as the best?”
“Don’t take it personally, love. I suspect that he would have found you sooner or later, once he worked his way through everybody at street level.”
Aletha clucks, her many bracelets clattering like laughter. “That’s the chief trade-off of being up a few flights, in a town like this. You don’t get as many walk-in visitors, but the ones you do get really want to see you.” Her thin eyebrows narrow as she finally picks up on the tension between the two men. She draws close to Draiken, places her palms against his chest, and murmurs, “But you’ve never been one to bring me business. Are you in trouble, John?”
He tells the truth. “I don’t know.”
She raises an incredulous eyebrow. “Trouble with him?”
“I don’t know.”
Aletha’s glorious smile fades, not disappearing but becoming just one distant note contributing to a symphony of other, more complicated emotions. She gives Janus a once-over, finding nothing in his flab or his offworlder features that could threaten a man like the one she’s known for so many years, then turns to Draiken, as troubled as he’s ever seen her. “And you’re not taking him…away?”
This is a reference to the most notorious, and most widely admired, among the many reasons the locals see Draiken as a man to be respected, a certain occasion now many years old where, in response to trouble spotted from the street, he raced up her stairs to drag a bellowing, fat, noxious animal of an offworlder from her protesting form, out her front door, down to the water, and onto his launch.
Taking the pig six hours out into the water to an atoll he knew, Draiken had dumped him there with a fishing net and a blanket and a chest of dried fruit slices and a desalinization kit to turn the undrinkable ocean brine into bitter, but workable fresh water. “I’ll pick you up one year from today,” he had told the sputtering man, “when your apology to a lady might mean something.” And then he’d left. Draiken hadn’t bothered telling the fool that he’d meant a Greevian year, which was almost twice the length of the Mercantile standard, almost seven hundred days in toto; and he didn’t waste much time sticking around when he showed upon the appointed anniversary only to face curses and a murder attempt by the scraggly-bearded, wild-eyed, naked emaciate the offworlder had become. “Another year, then,” an unbothered Draiken told the offworlder, before turning his launch around and departing.
The apology Aletha had received another seven hundred days after that, from a wreck of a man who had been offered plenty of time to consider its precise wording, was so tearful and sincere that she sponge-bathed him and then provided the very service he’d once attempted to take by force, an act of kind forgiveness well beyond anything Draiken would have considered deserved.
The unfortunate off-worlder still lives on Fritaun, since he long ago missed his berth back to whatever civilized place he came from; and since the belongings had long since been divided among the people of Fritaun he still makes his hardscrabble living on the beach, dragging the shallows with nets. He could be called poor, but he is no poorer than his neighbors; and whenever he manages to collect enough coins for another night of pleasure, as happens from time to time, he approaches Aletha with abject humility, as she is not always willing and his ordeal has left him incapable of physical response for any other in her profession.
Protect a woman like Aletha, asking nothing in return, and she will love you with a loyalty that would shame the most devoted of wives. Draiken despises the necessity, but he has come here to call in the debt. “I can’t strand any man if I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come back for him. He might die.”
“If he’s a danger to you,” Aletha counters, “maybe he should.”
“Unfortunately, one key disagreement between this man and me has always been my refusal to become what he would make me.”
She shakes her head in mingled amusement and frustration. “You and your principles. I swear, I’ve always thought that you’d be better off without them.”
Janus, makes a series of sounds that could be mistaken for a choking fit, but which reveal themselves after about a half a minute as uproarious laughter. “Another reminder of the past. Do you know, woman, I always contended the same thing.”
Draiken consonants become a sliver more clipped in anger. “Easy to say for a man who never had any principles himself.”
“Still demonizing me after all these years? You should know better. Any man who ever enlisted in a war he didn’t have to fight did so because he believed in his cause. Your problem is that you still think that, years after you should have learned better. You can’t stand the thought that nobody cares about us or the wars we fought anymore.”
The clipped words now escape Draiken’s mouth with the force of little explosions. “Do you really expect me to believe your masters ever changed their minds about me?”
Janus responds with logic that borders on cruelty. “No, John, I expect you to understand that they’ve died or moved on or forgotten all about you. Alliances have changed. Governments have fallen in disgrace and been replaced with new ones that have yet to sully themselves with the same crimes. New people have come into power who never heard of you. So many secrets have been piled on top of the ones you knew that it would take an entire team of archeologists weeks to uncover the ones dating back to our time. Even if they did, many of the answers have become public knowledge or irrelevancies in light of newer developments. Face it, John. I know you’ve needed a strong ego to survive so long, but if there’s a reason nobody’s found you, it’s not because you’re so bloody brilliant but because you’re ancient history and it’s been so many years since anybody bothered to look.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I don’t know how many times I can tell you. I’m just an old man now, trying to lose himself the same way you’ve lost yourself. By God, man, I was so starved for conversation by the time you showed up that I was even happy to see you. What does that say?”
Silence descends on the sun-drenched balcony, the old man and aging courtesan silent in gathering shadows while the captured enemy protested innocence between them. Laughter bubbles up from the street.
Aletha says, “He’s telling the truth.”
“A man like him tells the truth only when it’s the pathway to some more pernicious lie.”
“No! You have to listen to me. If there’s one thing a woman in my profession needs to learn how to do, it’s how to recognize when a man’s lying. I’d stake my life on it. He means what he says.”
Draiken studies her, an
d Janus, and if his gaze is cold and measuring there is also a moment when a generous observer might discern signs of softening. But the flash of vulnerability lasts less than a second. Then he grabs the fat man under the arm and with a sudden jerk yanks him to his feet, pulling him inside the beaded archway into Aletha’s bedroom. A small animal with a pair of tails circling each other in helices turns wide-eyed when it sees them and leaps from the mound of plush pillows that adorn the mattress just before Janus lands in its previous spot, grunting and bouncing. Janus makes no attempt to scramble off the bed and run away; but just watches warily as Draiken stops at the end of the bed, his hands curled into fists.
Aletha comes through the beads at a frantic run, her eyes wild and burning with the expectation of imminent murder. She shows no concern for the fat man or for the sanctity of her own home, but seems terrified for Draiken, and is only slightly mollified as the moment passes without any blood spilled.
Draiken does not look at her. “I’m sorry. I should not have involved you in this.”
“After all you’ve done for me over the years, I’d be upset with you if you hadn’t. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that you’re likely right. That we’re almost certainly looking at a spent shell.”
Janus raises his voice. “I am. I told you—”
“But the one thing I learned from the life I led before this one is that small truths can be used to camouflage gigantic lies. He’s already told me that his memory’s been tampered with. I’m meant to believe that it’s so his masters will permit him to retire – but what if it’s so that even he doesn’t know why he’s here? What if he’s a Judas goat, sent to this world in all blind innocence to lure me to my slaughter?”
Janus laughs again. “Just how dangerous do you think you are, in your old age? What makes you think that they’d still need to manipulate you with tricks?”
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