I walked cautiously over to Samaleon’s still form on the ground.
“What the hell was that?” I heard Bon-Peeb ask.
“Your boss is dead,” I stated, after examining the body.
Bon-Peeb was quiet for some moments. I assume out of respect. But then he asked:
“Are you guys hiring?”
BELVAILLE GENTLEMAN’S CLUB
Krample was an entrepreneur who was truly ahead of his time.
About thirty years ahead of his time, which meant he was a really bad entrepreneur.
He owned two buildings, the Belvaille Gentleman’s Club and Belvaille Athletic Club.
They were both ten story buildings back-to-back on adjacent streets. His idea was to provide a place where the wealthy could relax and enjoy themselves, the Gentleman’s Club, and then go use the sports equipment and exercise at the Athletic Club next door.
The problem was, there were no gentlemen on Belvaille and very few people cared about their health. In fact, a petition had been circulated some while ago, which I signed, to reduce the gravity on the space station. It didn’t happen because I think some other systems needed the gravity to remain a certain level and because the technicians didn’t know how to do it.
After a year the “Gentleman’s Club” name was pure irony because guys would come straight from their jobs at the port or the sewers or cleaning streets or breaking skulls and sit down, eat some food, and stink up the place.
He paid for the sign so Krample wasn’t about to change it just because we were the biggest bunch of ungentlemanly gentleman in the galaxy.
Except for the sound of televised sports, the Gentleman’s Club was a quiet place because at this point bosses didn’t have their own club. So every little corner had every different outfit all sitting together and staring down rival gangs as they talked in hushed voices.
As one of the few people not in any gang, I found all this oppressive. It was not a very social social club.
Some other people had complained to me about it as well. They couldn’t relax while their bosses were there and why else would you go out drinking except to relax?
It got to the point that I was either going to have to find a new place to congregate or fix this one. And this was the only spot that was open 24 hours and televised sports.
I talked to Krample about it and while he recognized there was a problem, he didn’t know what to do. I convinced him to give me six months to help turn his business around and if I was successful, he would give me a percentage of the take and a lifetime membership.
The first thing I did was fire the fancy chefs he had and change the menu to nothing but sandwiches. They say there is no such thing as a free meal, but the Gentleman’s Club actually provided free meals.
The kicker was they were horrible free meals.
Nothing but salt and the worst pseudo space meat you could get. The point was you got so thirsty eating them you would also buy at least one of his terrible beers.
I figured between the food and the beer you had a lot of guys belching, sweating, and with gastric distress. That should force the bosses to leave and make the club a whole lot more enjoyable.
But I underestimated the paranoia of Belvaille’s upper classes.
They were worried that if they stopped coming, their thugs would be snatched up by some other boss, leaving them twisting in the wind. So they would bring their own bag lunches or even have catered food delivered.
The club was more profitable, but it was still a bad time for us blue collar workers.
I decided to go passive-aggressive to try and get the bosses out.
Every tele screen that was displaying sports, I stuck on the loudest volume and placed right around all the dining tables. The bosses adjusted by wearing earplugs and honestly didn’t seem to mind because now they didn’t have to whisper their plans to their crews.
I then did the unholiest of sins and rearranged all the tables and chairs periodically so all the comfortable seating arrangements the gangs had gotten used to were completely changed on every visit. They treated it like musical chairs, rushing to the best spots and most secure corners.
From Organa Dultz I borrowed some sewer solvent, a cleaner that could neutralize the most potent of spills. I had never smelled it directly with unprotected face, but the club shrugged it off like it was a sweet potpourri.
I then left it wet on the floor, causing half the occupants to slip and fall, and causing their clothes to be eaten off their very backs. Still no one was deterred.
I was starting to believe that this was some complicated joke being played upon me. One club couldn’t be worth enduring all these trials. I was merely inflicting them and it was hard to put up with, I could scarcely imagine being on the receiving end.
At this point I was out of tricks. I had made the food, beer, service, and atmosphere all substandard. I had staged barroom fights and even a small building fire.
But the bosses wouldn’t leave.
I was about ready to tell Krample that I had nothing else to try and was going to wish him well in his endeavors. I wasn’t going to sit in a club surrounded by rival gangs all glaring at one another.
The food was hard enough to swallow without those digestive challenges.
As luck would have it, I was doing some lowly work for a fence, just guarding one of his storehouses.
However, I heard about a group of men who had robbed a whole palace a few Portals away and fled straight to Belvaille. They were desperate to try and liquidate their goods and were having no luck at all.
Belvaille didn’t have a lot of luxury goods, it wasn’t an old city and all the furniture it started with was quite sufficient for most everyone’s needs.
There might be a custom desk or chair here or there, but a palace full of finery was well beyond our means of handling.
The thieves knew they couldn’t go deeper into the Confederation with their goods because as sloppy as the Colmarian Navy was, they tended to notice a whole stolen palace stuffed into a freighter.
Some of the fences and black market dealers were willing to buy a few items, but it would take years to sell everything at that rate.
It was then that I approached them.
“How would you like to trade ten stories’ worth of exercise equipment for your goods?” I asked them.
“Are you joking? We got golden vases and jeweled chandeliers and statues. This was a shipping merchant’s vacation home.”
“And it’s so much junk because you can’t do anything with it.”
“What will you do with it?” they asked, wondering what angle I had thought of that they missed.
“Nothing. It will sit here on Belvaille, making buildings look pretty.”
“Why?”
“Look, you all came here because you figured no one would follow you. You can’t take it back into proper Colmarian space or you’ll get busted. We can’t either. It is just a big pile of jail sentence to anyone who tries to do anything with it.”
“What are we going to do with exercise equipment?”
“Sell it. There are no blockades looking for rowing machines and the latest stationary bikes.”
They grew exasperated.
“You don’t get it. We have a ship full of the most valuable luxury goods in this whole state and you’re trying to trade us consumer products. Our merchandise is worth a thousand times more.”
“No, you don’t get it. Your goods are worth exactly what you can get for them. So far you have gotten absolutely nothing. You robbed someone you shouldn’t have robbed and now no one can sell what you took. We might be able to trickle out some lamp or gilded chest of drawers every year, but it’s just not worth it. If you agree to this, you can leave here in two days, fly past every blockade—giving them the finger—and make…not a fortune, but a decent amount of money with no hassle at all.”
I thought that was the hard part, but Krample was no easier.
The Athletic Club had been shuttered for
months, but he still had some hope that the station was going to embrace physical fitness on a ten-story scale and suddenly pour cash into his pockets.
He had no interest in baubles and trinkets from a palace. Especially if it was all stolen and there was a chance, however slight, that the Navy could come looking for it.
It took weeks, but I got them to make the deal in a straight 1:1 swap.
“Now what?” Krample grumbled.
We had one more month on our agreement and I told him to let me set all the prices on the re-opened Athletic Club. He reluctantly agreed.
Membership at the club was ten thousand credits a year. Food was a hundred credits a meal. There was no beer. There were no televised sports. Every table had three seats maximum, to encourage mingling.
I hired the best chefs on the station and bought the best cuisine.
Krample was about to hit the ceiling with rage.
Almost overnight all the bosses left the Gentleman’s Club and migrated to the Athletic Club. It became not only a point of pride, but the primary place where business was done. You simply couldn’t function as a boss without having a membership.
It hadn’t been enough for me to try and scare them out of the Gentleman’s Club. I needed to construct a place more suitable for them.
With them gone, we could make the Gentleman’s Club not quite so horrible.
After a time, what was unofficially the club for bosses and the club for thugs became set in stone. There were no bosses allowed in the Gentleman’s Club under any circumstances. They were denied memberships, which only cost a hundred credits a year—though you needed a sponsor.
Krample, who was a working class guy in his soul, worked the door at the Gentleman’s Club to enforce these restrictions. And without the eagle eyes of our employers above us, the thugs of the station finally had a place to blow off steam, even amid the worst gang wars.
This was one of the first real deals I ever brokered and I was paid nearly 100,000 credits for its completion, which was an incredible amount of money in those days.
I was also given a lifetime membership to both clubs, the only person on the station with dual membership.
THE TIME I DIED
The explorers who populated early Belvaille were dashing figures.
Men of action and confidence, often physically fit. Even when they weren’t technically handsome, their mannerisms and swagger gave them an attractiveness that was unmistakable. You could tell just by looking at them that they were exceptional characters.
The decade and a half after they left I refer to as “The Ugly Years.”
And by ugly I mean unattractive. Dowdy. Unsightly. Lacking in physical pleasantness.
I include myself in that group. While I wasn’t nearly as bad as I would become later in life, I was not ever what you would call pretty.
The station, at this time, was filled with men. Ugly men.
While there was never an official census, we guessed the station was 95% male.
It was a frontier city without many of the benefits of being a frontier. There was no rush to get resources or vast opportunities waiting to be plucked. Sure, you could operate illegally, but you still had to get through several Portals to get those goods back to market. In most cases it was more profitable to stay in the greater Colmarian Confederation.
So Belvaille was a bunch of ugly guys running a bunch of small-time businesses.
The good-looking people stayed in the Colmarian Confederation doing whatever the hell it was good-looking people did.
It was so bad that when word went up that a new woman had docked at the port we would all rush over to take a look. I mean both sides of the street were packed with guys.
No one catcalled or whistled or hooted. We just watched, trying to brush away the cobwebs from our minds and remember what women were. It didn’t even matter if they were a different species—sometimes that was preferable, because it set our imaginations going.
On a scale of one-to-ten, if you figure five was average, then Belvaille hovered around two or three. I mean we were really ugly.
Sure, there were some aberrations. There was an eight or nine here or there. Some man or woman who had been forced into hiding on Belvaille by a stack of arrest warrants or back taxes. But we didn’t treat them like real people. They were just adjectives we used to describe other things.
Your brain gets a bit twisted in an environment like that.
I remember almost getting in a fist fight with a shopkeeper who kept this one particular flag outside his building. The flag had a kind of sweep that if you looked at it from the right angle it sort of looked like a woman’s flowing hair. I went out of my way to walk by that shop whenever I could.
Well, he took down that flag one day and I stormed inside ready to bust his face in. Of course he had no idea what I was upset about and I couldn’t even articulate it because it was simultaneously so stupid and insane.
He finally gave me the flag but I could never get it to look like it once had.
One day a man came to Belvaille who blew the floor off of our ugly. As much as we kept track of the few attractive people, we also kept track of the truly hideous. I don’t think it was so much to mock them as it was to know where we personally stood in comparison—all things being relative and all.
He was by far the ugliest person I had seen in my life and was a new low for Belvaille.
His face and body were almost randomly stitched together. It’s as if he was an ugly man who was looking in the mirror and the mirror smashed. Then someone made a drawing of the shattered image while an angry dog chewed at the artist’s feet.
It was the first time I heard people really start to worry about our gene pool. We were all pretty good-natured about being unattractive, but was Belvaille really going to become the refuge for the galaxy’s most hideous people?
That was pretty depressing.
The man’s name was Leeny and he seemed to check the city out for a few months and then disappeared.
When he came back maybe six months later, Belvaille would never be the same.
He brought with him about a thousand of the most attractive people we had ever seen.
It was like a non-stop model convention.
No work got done for at least a month as the city suffered from a series of terminal infatuations.
Leeny supplied brothels, escorts, dance partners, bartenders, waitresses, and hosts. Any job where it helped to be good-looking kicked a percentage back to Leeny. And that was an awful lot of jobs.
Men, women, and other, he catered to all interests.
There are many ways you can become mentally impaired: being very sleepy, drinking to excess, getting hit in the head, being drugged.
But nothing makes a person quite as stupid as falling in love.
It’s not even as if everything you ever learned was forgotten, that would be simple. It’s like your perceptions and cognition are warped in completely inexplicable directions.
Of all the debilitating loves, young love had to be the most severe.
I was still technically young when I met and fell in love with a woman named Karene Cantosh.
I won’t even try and describe her because it would be pointless. I was in love immediately so what my eyes communicated to my brain was gibberish. Suffice it to say, I had heart palpitations around her, I sweated uncontrollably, and only by regularly telling myself to breathe did I not keel over dead on the spot.
Karene was a waitress at a restaurant. She had no dark past—not very dark, anyway. Her planet was one that practiced arranged marriages and Karene was nearing the tail end of the acceptable age range. Her parents were consequently becoming more and more desperate for a match.
Karene instead decided to join Leeny for an adventure and leave all her unsuitable suitors behind. Leeny never forced her to do anything, she could have certainly made a lot more money as a prostitute, but she wasn’t interested in that.
You wouldn’t think such a trivial,
superficial thing as adding some pretty faces would have much effect on an entire city.
But it did.
Those who ran shipments to Belvaille, picked-up goods and delivered supplies were no longer in such a hurry to leave, being frightened away by our collective monstrosity. They now had reasons to linger.
With more people staying, the kind of businesses that Belvaille was capable of supporting expanded. We now had clubs and bars and restaurants and hotels. Later, we had grocery stores and apartment buildings and music shops and hardware stores.
Whereas before we had only produced goods and services for use off-station, we now had a local economy and growing population.
There were turf wars about the turf here. Real streets on the city, not shipping lanes or planetary markets light years away. It was just as important to control a casino on Belvaille as it was to control a money laundering operation off-station.
And it all snowballed. The more people who came, the more businesses the city could support, and the more criminals came to operate those businesses.
The almost chivalrous ways of fighting gang wars were completely gone. You fought to win with almost no limitations or exceptions.
There isn’t such a thing as a perfect romance anywhere across the galaxy.
Karene and I were as close to a perfect fit as any two distinct organisms can be while still being sentient. We had some great days and days that weren’t as perfect.
This all changed when I was visited by her father, who came to see me at my home.
She had only told me obliquely about her past just as I had done about my own. And while my reluctance stemmed from a desire to protect her and keep my Navy connections at bay, she had completely different reasons for her reluctance to share.
“She is to be a countess,” her father said to me.
“What will she count?” I said without even a hint of sarcasm.
He looked at me a long moment.
Her father was a tall, young-looking man with coal-black hair. He had poise and the underside of his nose was not quite parallel with the ground, as if the sky held more interesting things to view. He seemed wealthy, and all his clothes were baggy and flowing. They were similar to the clothes very poor and lazy people wore, except richly embroidered and meticulous.
Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years Page 3