Sleeping Dogs Page 3

  Long seconds pass as the accusation hangs in the air, nobody willing to be the first to comment on it. And then Aletha’s words break the silence, dangerous things that know they’re barbed but nevertheless loathe the possibility of drawing blood. “It does seem unlikely…John.”

  It’s the first time in their long years of acquaintance that she’s ever used his name instead of a generic, false endearment.

  Draiken’s raised eyebrow is as close as he ever seems to come to showing surprise. They regard each other for a long moment, one more pregnant with conversation than any mere collection of words could possibly be.

  After a long time, he asks her, “Do you understand that I can’t afford to take anything this man says at face value?”

  Her answer is immediate. “Yes. Is there a way to make sure?”

  “I’m sure you have something around here that can put him to sleep for a while. Something safe and pleasant, something that won’t do him any damage if this all turns out to be nothing. I’ll pay you whatever it costs to keep an eye on him while I test the hypothesis, and be back as soon as I can.”

  Her forehead wrinkles just long enough to reflect the sting of an unintended wound. “You don’t have to pay.”

  “It might be a couple of days. Even a week.”

  “John, you don’t have to pay.”

  Another uncomfortable silence passes between them.

  On the bed, Janus quivers with a combination of amusement and disgust. “For the love of heaven, miss. I volunteer. I’m a dabbler in narcotics anyway. Give me whatever it is and I’ll take it gladly, if it means we have a chance to settle this nonsense once and for all.”

  Aletha nods and, without waiting for assent from Draiken, moves across the room to a storage cabinet, sliding the curved door into its tracked recess and to reveal a shelf with an array of exotic, but not too exotic, scents, ointments, and euphorics. There’s a crystal vial in the middle, mostly air now, but bearing a finger or two of a purple liquid that seems to reflect light sources in addition to those evident in the room. She unplugs the stopper, sniffs it, then offers the vial to Draiken, who holds it to his own nose for a second before nodding with approval.

  She turns to the bed. “You’ll have pleasant dreams.”

  Janus extends his right hand, palm up. “That would be a welcome change. It would be nice to have pleasant dreams for once in my life.”

  She taps the base of the vial with her index finger and releases a single drop of the purple liquid into the palm. It sinks into the fat man’s skin at once, as if considering his flesh no more than an illusion hiding the circulatory system beneath.

  Stupor is only a minute away, but Janus still claps his hands together and rubs, embracing oblivion before it comes, almost celebrating it as an improvement over life in the world that has brought him to this place and this bed. Before his eyes glaze over he grins at Draiken, as if the past enmity between them pales by the fellowship of men in so many matters involving women. “John?” he says, his voice already slurring. “I am not blind to certain things. If you do not let this woman love you, you’re a fool.”

  It takes him five seconds apiece to say each of the last three words, and he only barely manages the last one. Then his eyes go someplace far away. His face turns slack and stupid, freed for now from the tyranny of understanding. He does not start to drool right away, but it’s clear that the indignity lurks in his immediate future.

  Draiken takes no pleasure in neutralizing his old enemy. Long before Aletha is certain that the fat man is under, he’s already out the curtained entranceway and at the balcony wall, his hands curled into impotent white-knuckled fists. His features remain calm, but his neck muscles twitch with controlled anger.

  The beads clatter as Aletha returns outside. He feels her presence. He knows that she’s staring at the tight muscles of his shoulders, willing them to relax, waiting for him to turn. He even knows which of her two faces, the one she wears when plying her profession and the genuine one she only shows to the few people she knows she can trust, he would see if he brought himself to look. But he doesn’t.

  She whispers, “Who were you, John?”

  He runs the side of his hand across her face, wiping away a sheen of tears. “Nobody.”

  “I understand if you don’t want to tell me.”

  “I did just tell you. I was Nobody. A professional Nobody. You want another word for it? I was a soldier, a secret soldier, a spy. I gave up name, past, friends, citizenship, any right to ambition or desires of my own—everything, really, but the willingness to do awful things for the cause I thought I was serving.”

  “Which was?”

  “He’s right about one thing, Aletha. It was a long time ago and the specifics mean nothing.” A sudden spasm of weariness drives him to the chair, where he slumps, for the first time assuming the attitude of exhausted old age. “They would likely mean nothing to you.”

  “And this man—he worked for your enemies?”

  “I have no way of knowing. It was just as possible that he worked for my own side, turning on me.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not easy to say. At the level he and I inhabited, loyalties were fluid. You could be branded a traitor one day for following the orders you were given the day before. If taking stock and realizing that my life was spent in the service of a lie made me a traitor, then maybe I was. But all you need to know is that I was just a man, with a man’s secrets and a man’s depths and a man’s right to keep some parts of himself hidden even from those who thought they owned him. One day, I decided that I’d had enough. I tried to walk away. My superiors didn’t trust my motives.”

  “So. What did they do to you?”

  “What didn’t they do? They imprisoned me, they tortured me, they drugged me, they interrogated me. They offered privileges every time I retreated and punishments every time I pushed back. At times they arranged for me to make allies who were only interested in betraying me. At other times they manipulated me into betraying others. A couple of times they even allowed me to escape, so they could take their own sweet time recapturing me; it was their way of demonstrating their ability to claim me again, any time they wanted. Their goal was to either break me completely, or reduce me to a manageable psychosis, and they came damned close to succeeding. By the time I broke free and ran so far that I thought I’d left them far behind…it no longer mattered. By then I carried my prison cell on my back. I’ve been living free on this tiny world of yours for thirty years, and I still felt like there was never anyone I could trust.”

  She kneads his shoulders with a gentleness a million light years removed from the services she offers in the room where the fat man sits intoxicated. “And yet you still made yourself my good friend.”

  He shows some embarrassment. “I don’t know if this will make sense to you…but for me being a friend has always been easier than having one.”

  She leans in to kiss him, but he pulls back, and the moment passes. She’s left blinking at him, not knowing what has happened, searching the features that have let slip a small moment of candor, but will not go any further.

  Entire volumes of conversation take place without either one of them saying anything.

  Then he takes her wrists and removes her hands from his shoulders. “Maybe we can talk after I find out what I need to find out.”

  Aletha has been in her business for a very long time and is well used to promises that might never amount to anything. She just nods, turns her gaze over the low tiled rooftops that form a truncated horizon within Greeve’s unlimited one of sea and sky. There can be no surprises in sight to a woman who has spent so many years surveying this street from this balcony; the glistening places where rainfall collects in puddles, to the discolored patches where the tiles have not held proof against the bleaching effect of the sun. Even the first few stars beginning to appear, with the dying of the light, appear in the same places that they always have: an infinite distance away, but ultimately irr
elevant to eyes that may never see them from any other angle.

  “I need to know,” he says.

  She wipes her long lashes with the edge of her palm. “Just go, already.”

  * * *

  The fat man’s guest house is no luxury hotel. There is nothing of the sort on Greeve and there would be no point in having anything of the sort within the shabbier borders of the village called Fritaun. It is a squat inn, two stories tall, flat in color and in character, its chief attraction an unspoken guarantee of anonymity. There are only three guest rooms, all of them on the second floor; and the marginal nature of the local economy is best gauged by the vacancy rate, which is more or less constant.

  Finding out where Janus has been staying is the work of an hour. Identifying the specific room takes less time than that. Waiting for the day’s light to start to fade, and for gathering shadows to start to provide him a modicum of cover, is a matter of waiting a couple of hours after that. Breaking into that room through the window is a simple matter of accessing the roof, which takes minutes. That’s one of the advantages of living on Greeve. Nobody owns much, and burglary is always easiest in those places where mere theft is pointless.

  The windows are simple wooden shutters that swing inward with minimal persuasion. There is an ionic field at the threshold, in place to keep out bad weather and insects, but it is no more than a tickle to a grown man, and Draiken barely feels the tingle on his skin and his drops through and alights on the wooden floor. The air inside, maintained by the field, is less humid than the early evening air outside, but there’s a staleness to it, a heaviness, that to Draiken seems saturated with the special kind of sweat a man like Janus would exude, when reliving his past deeds in nightmares. It is exactly the same kind of scent Draiken has left in the air overnight, in more cheap rooms than he wants to remember.

  Beyond that, the room is devoid of character. There is no art on the walls, nothing but form following function. The bed is a hammock stretched tight in a metal frame, the closest thing to a bureau the small folding table that bears the traveler’s suitcase. Another table bears a glass bottle of a popular local brew, half-full, the cap missing; an array of wall hooks bear the few clothes that require hanging.

  The man Draiken remembers had always been immaculate in his dress and appearance. He had cultivated expensive tastes in food, drink, and accommodations, and flaunted them in the faces of the prisoners under his control, offering them as rewards for cooperation. Draiken finds it hard to imagine the years turning Janus into a happy derelict capable of finding even a moment’s comfort in a place like this, but then, he has not walked the intervening years at the man’s side, and does not know what countries of the mind he’d traveled through on his journey to the man he was now. It is a reason for suspicion, but not proof. Draiken needs more.

  The suitcase is a simple plex box, with no special security systems or telltales. Draiken finds nothing inside but well-worn clothing, an extra pair of shoes, and a battered sonic shower head, the one indispensable tool for the traveler who might find himself passing through regions unequipped with running water. There’s enough paper money, an anachronism as outdated as the bartering of shells that has fallen back into use among the people of Greeve, to fund the man’s stay here for a year; it can’t be all the money he has, but he must have an account he can access through his hytex connection if he needs more.

  A balled sock hides a ROM Disk the size of Draiken’s palm, a commercially available device that contain enough information for an entire planetary library; Draiken hesitates at the very prospect of reading it, and spends long minutes turning it over and over his hand as he agonizes over whether he wants exposure to its secrets. Ultimately he decides it’s his only next step, and places it against his forehead.

  No safeguards scramble the contents. There is the usual collection of all extant art, music, and literature, some flagged to indicate prior reading; there is the travel database, confirming an itinerary that has left the centers of power far behind and has for almost a decade now carried Janus through any number of rustic backwaters. There is a half-hearted attempt at a memoir, one that comprises some two thousand words and amounts to a boring recitation of the places seen in retirement, not the secrets pursued in his active career; there are the codes to the fat man’s retirement account, which represent the first item of genuine interest since there are, by Draiken’s calculation, a couple of zeroes too many, with too many infusions from another money source that Draiken cannot find in several minutes of searching.

  This is enough to establish that the fat man has more money that he could have earned in his career, but not that he has access to government pockets; it might just mean that he’s a thief or an embezzler, who has used his position to loot accounts at will. It also establishes that the fat man could be wallowing in luxury on some pleasure world if he wanted, but not enough to prove that he’s lying.

  As Draiken knows very well, sometimes luxury for people in their shared business is just the freedom to go someplace unknown, and disappear…the very consummation he has achieved, the same one the fat man claims to want.

  He plucks the ROM disk off his forehead and ponders. He is a man who spent much of his early life ferreting out secrets he was not supposed to know. If he wanted to he could muster his own considerable hidden resources and journey to the very same worlds where the fat man’s memoir claims that he traveled, confirming his visit to each and ultimately proving that nothing of any interest happened on any of them. He could devote as much time to his own travels as Janus took in his, following the trail all the way back to the worlds that would be dangerous for him, and in the end prove the fat man’s claim of irrelevancy but sacrifice his own freedom. And that is no solution. To accomplish what he needs to accomplish, and still retain the life he has made for himself, he needs to employ more creative methods.

  He takes the disk with him as he leaves through the main door, passes like a wraith through the narrow upstairs hallway sweltering in afternoon heat, and descends the stairs to the street entrance, where an obese local woman sits on a stool, cooling herself with a paper fan. Draiken has never spoken to this woman, or dealt with her, but she is a familiar sight from past travels in town; he knows that from dawn to well past dusk she can be found at this spot, her eyes slitted to the point of somnolence as she observes the endless interplay of the people passing to and fro on the streets outside her establishment. She is the proprietor, the stool is her front desk, and there is deep suspicious in the way she frowns at Draiken, the man who leaves without passing her on his way in. “Ye?”

  Draiken spreads his unencumbered arms to show that he is not leaving with any items stolen from any of her tenants. “Forgive, mum. Ken ye stunprised, but ye pinkie squat, Grade, left me cust of his ‘zontal, pere suntime. Seen where he goes, for repay of his kindity?”

  The landlady is terribly upset at Grade for sneaking in guests, probably amorous guests, without her knowledge, but seems to believe the story. She shakes her jowly cheeks, cooperating because the more she does the sooner this unpleasant and inconvenient conversation will be over.

  He next asks her whether the fat man has been traveling with, or been seen alongside, any other off-worlders. “Pinkies longside?”

  She allows as how Grade has been seen, from time, in the company of one or more off-worlders, though these encounters have as far as she can see been brief and it might be no more than the phenomenon, well known to innkeepers everywhere, of tourists seeking out other tourists to share their mutual disorientation.

  According to her there have been three others, a white-haired man and two younger male companions, all seen wandering around Fraitan in various combinations. She once asked Grade about them, not long after seeing the four in huddled consultation, and he pretended that he hadn’t spoken to anybody at all.

  Draiken takes this intelligence under advisement. “Thankee.”

  He strolls away from the old woman’s station, performing the old spy�
��s trick of pretending to be headed nowhere in particular, paying absolutely no attention to his surroundings, while actually watching every corner for assassins.

  The old woman’s testimony hasn’t rendered the situation any less ambiguous. The presence of other offworlders might very easily be a coincidence, like the one Janus professes as explanation for his own presence here. There are always people checking out backwaters like this, for resources or people who can be exploited, rebellions that can occupy entire populations while the land is looted. So maybe the three others are just that: sinister, but not suspicious. Maybe the moment of huddled conversation she spotted is nothing more than the gravitation that attracts one group of strangers in town to another, and the conversation that passed between them is no more than a simple comparing of notes, over the best places to drink or the riskiest places to eat. But Draiken has not lived to his current age by not comforting himself with such maybes.

  Draiken turns off the main street, such as it is, and ambles down a narrow gap between houses, just as he would if he were heading to the beach. When he reaches the far side he makes an unhurried right turn and then, ambles down an alley the locals use as a quick shortcut to the water and the second his doings are hidden by the wall, speeds up to circle the building and make his way back to the street.

  He is not surprised when he turns a corner and meets a young offworlder in a suit that must be oppressively hot in this weather, circling the same house in the other direction.

  Smoking out one of them hasn’t taken long at all.

  There’s a moment of stupefied eye contact before the offworlder makes a move that could be a lunge for the weapon in his pocket.

  Draiken puts him down. It is not difficult. There are always places to strike a man that make immobility a more viable option than movement. Hit one of those places quickly and a second strike to one that induces unconsciousness isn’t even difficult.