Chapter 009

"Where's My Money?"

With less than an hour before the doors opened to the rest of the passengers, I guided CAT to our quarters. My plan was to dump him in the room without gawking at it, have a chat with Vatel, then see as much as I could before the common areas were inundated with my social betters.

I failed immediately.

Despite its diminutive dimensions, my room was a temple to affluence. Every inch oozed luxury thick as molten gold. Handblown-glass light fixtures cast a warm glow from corner to corner. The ensuite facilities were cast in marble. Even the rolling shade mounted atop the portrait window pulled out to reveal a sumptuously embroidered tapestry. And this wasn’t even one of the nicer suites. According to Wilder, I was traveling coach.

Perhaps unwilling to disturb the rich linens stretched tautly across the bed, CAT hopped up onto a handsome chaise lounge. Judging from the way he sank into it, I assumed it would take little effort to convince him to stay put for my preliminary round of investigation.

“You good up there, bud? I can move the sheets if you want.”

He tucked his nose deeper beneath his tail and snuffled.

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

I tossed my carry-on onto the foot of the bed, where I spotted a steamer trunk. It was mahogany, its surface exquisitely patterned with the marquetry of a master atelier. I wondered if Matteo had gotten the chance to drop off my valise yet. It was still early, but I felt naked without my sidearm, especially when acting in an official capacity. I undid the hasp and heaved the surprisingly heavy lid over on well-oiled hinges to reveal a cache of extra blankets. Poking around amongst their folds proved equally fruitless.

I slammed the trunk shut more loudly than intended. There was no reason to panic, at least not yet. I could handle a sous chef on my own. There was still time before the guests arrived, though at this point it was dwindling down to mere minutes.

“Stay put, CAT. I’ll be right back.”

He showed no sign that he heard me. I dimmed the lights and pulled the door shut behind me.

Finding the kitchen was more difficult than anticipated. With few exceptions, the crew areas were carefully concealed from public view. They were not pictured on the posted floor plans and were not included in the wall signage. I followed my nose as far as I could before flagging down an attendant in burgundy livery for help. He was young, late teens, with sleepy eyes and the wisps of a faint mustache. His bellboy cap was cocked at a rakish angle.

“Service kitchen’s in the main dining room, but if you’re looking for chef, he’s in the little prep kitch off the Northstar Lounge.”

I knew there were three different dining rooms, each offering a unique atmosphere and menu, but it had somehow eluded me that there might be separate kitchens as well.

“Can you think of any reason the chef wouldn’t be in the first kitchen?”

The bellboy shrugged. “Might be that he’s used to it. Lots more pressure in the big one. Could also be that he’s working with something tricky. Guests love watching an open kitchen until something gets burnt. Stinks up the whole place fast.”

His answers were more prescient than I’d expected given his appearance, but the service industry had an interesting way of aging people, of making them wise and broken beyond their years. I thanked him for his time and reached into my pocket for a tip but he waved it off, assuring me that what the Denaros paid him more than covered it.

A bartender with an impressively curled mustachio took a final inventory of the bar in the Northstar Lounge. I slipped past him, ducked into a short, tiled hallway, and pushed through the swinging door at the end. My first impression of the spotless kitchen was clouded out by the pungent vapors roiling from a battery of stockpots simmering on the stovetop.

“Mr. Vatel, a moment of your time?”

“Oui?”

A disheveled man in flour-dusted chef’s whites emerged from behind a rack of saucepans. He was around my age, slightly built, with an unhealthy pallor and bags under his eyes. His movements were jittery and he looked like he reeked of cigarettes. In one hand he clutched a battered recipe book, a finger jammed between the pages to mark his place. He did not seem prepared to rise to the occasion of taking the head chef’s place.

“My name’s Max Miller.” I caught another whiff of his cooking and reconsidered. “Is that soup?”

“Oui. Un soubise velouté.”

Maybe the passengers weren’t out of luck after all.

After I’d convinced him I wasn’t there to spy on behalf of Boiardo, he switched to unaccented English. His answers remained shy, stunted, like if he spoke for too long his untended ovens would burst into flame. He didn’t know if Boiardo had any enemies and couldn’t remember anything unusual about the farewell banquet. It was served family-style and everyone had eaten the same things.

Unsure what else I stood to learn from the anxious gourmet, I asked if he knew anything about Vance Wilder or Frankie Denaro.

“No, but if you see them please let them know that my Santoku has gone missing. I can’t afford to replace it, but I’m sure they can.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I told him I would pass the word along and let him get back to his soups before they boiled over.

I headed back to my room to shower and change before the scheduled cocktail reception. The other passengers had begun to trickle into the hallways, their baggage and its handlers following behind them in mirthless conga lines.

When I was within range, my comex sent a silent signal to my room door to unlock it. I regretted showing up empty-handed, not having thought to grab CAT anything from the kitchen. I hoped he hadn’t gotten into the food I’d packed for him while I was gone. When he greeted me at the threshold I thought I spotted crumbs on his muzzle, but a closer inspection of his food container showed that it was still sealed.

I hung my suit up to steam while I showered, hoping it hadn’t wrinkled too severely on the short flight down. I would hate to have to trouble the concierge over something so trivial. I doubted the room contained its own iron. This was not a clientele that expected to do their own work, not when it could be farmed out to one of the plentiful attendants hired specifically to cater to their needs.

If I hadn’t heard the countdown over the intercom system, I never would have noticed that the Lunar Express had taken off. The artificial gravity generators compensated for the enormous amount of thrust admirably, even keeping the water pressure constant throughout the launch. When I stepped out from behind the curtain, I found CAT with his head buried beneath his paws, his superior senses unable to reconcile what they saw with what they felt on a deeper level. Maybe there was something to the sedation process after all.

Before I left the room, I checked the steamer trunk one last time. I felt like CAT would have told me if Matteo had stopped by, but it was still worth making sure. Now I had to head out into the thick of things unarmed. I knew that the safest place to be on the Express was around as many people as possible. If anyone involved in the crime spree or Wilder’s mysterious tickets was indeed on board, it was unlikely they would risk revealing themselves. But still.

I filled CAT’s food dish and stationed it on the uncarpeted floor under the sink. His joy at being fed early was tempered by his disappointment at being left behind again.

“All right, buddy, you know the drill. I’ll be back in a bit. Don’t wreck the place, and maybe I’ll bring you something good for dessert.”

I checked myself one last time in the mirror on the back of the door, squaring off the knot in my tie. If I was going to die, I could at least leave my corpse in a good-looking man’s clothes.

I accepted a flute of champagne from a tray-bearing server at the door as I stepped into the crowded ballroom. Captain Dillon Fox, flanked by his chief crew members standing at parade rest, addressed the flock of travelers from an elevated dais. His tone seemed jovial but I did not bother with the individual words. I was too taken with the room’s keynote feature, an enormous multipiece chandelier modeled after the solar system. Spanning the full length and width of the ceiling, the lighting fixture was composed of glass orbs of various sizes and colors arranged at intervals around a larger central globe stylized as Sol. In between them, smaller single bulbs and prisms of cut glass mimicked the effect of other celestial bodies as seen from afar.

Before I could stop myself, my eyes shot to the red sphere of Mars. Using it as a reference I found the incandescent proxy of its moon Titan. That’s where it happened, I thought, losing all control of my conscious thoughts. That’s where my family died, right there above the guy with the convincing hair implants and the woman with the almond eyes.

The woman with the almond eyes. I’d seen her before, at the Pallana trial. What was she doing here? The odds of me seeing her in the same week at a courthouse in New York and then a Luna-bound space elevator launching from Ecuador seemed astronomical at best. Then again, I’d seen Wilder in both places. And Matteo, while not showing up in the courthouse proper, had certainly been in the vicinity. But they were both directly involved in…well, whatever it was that I was doing. It only made sense that so was she.

We made eye contact from across the room. More accurately, she caught me staring at her. If there were any doubt she remembered me, the fact that I only owned one suit—tie included—pushed things in her favor. She, on the other hand, had traded her sensible blazer with its clipped-on press credentials for a steel-blue cocktail dress of a material that clung to her like liquid metal. A jeweled pendant glittered from the scoop of its modest neckline. Fox’s introductory speech continued to ricochet meaninglessly off my ears, which were now preoccupied with the thudding of my own pulse. Idiotically, I wondered if pretending I was just checking her out would somehow help my cause.

I didn’t get the chance to find out. A heavy hand fell on my shoulder, hard enough to send my drink sloshing from its glass in a crashing effervescent wave. Hot breath on the back of my neck preceded the intermingled scents of cheap hash and top-shelf booze, which were further disguised with a staggering dose of cologne. Somehow the combination ended up nowhere near as abhorrent as it should have, a garish collage of too many good nights overlaid upon one another.

A burst of applause marked the end of Fox’s speech.

“Bad news,” Matteo stage-whispered over the clapping. “I fucked up.”

The courtroom journalist, having seen enough, faded in amongst the revelers. I’d have to find her again later.

Matteo looked about as good as he smelled. I wondered where he’d found a moving bus to take a nap under.

“You lose your sunglasses?”

“No.” He reflexively tapped a hand to his unadorned face, his fingertips grazing his painfully swollen eye. “Well, yeah, but not that.” His slight slurring made for an offensively accurate impersonation of Luca. “I lost your case.”

“You did what?” I snarled. I checked to make sure I hadn’t drawn too much attention to us. Not a single head turned. True to Matteo’s word, we were all but invisible. So long as we didn’t bleed at them.

“Not so much lost it really. Misplaced.” He hiccupped, then gulped from his tumbler. It took everything I had in me not to knock it to the ground. “I gave it to one of the bellhops to drop off but he misunderstood me and stowed it in baggage.”

I had no idea how poor his instructions had to be for someone to make that mistake, but in all fairness, I had no idea how he was still upright, considering the stench of the substances seeping from his pores.

“So tell him to go get it.”

“No can do, not ’til we hit transfer to the main line. No access to the center ring until then.”

“Fuck. When’s that?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Fuck!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll send one of ’em bright and early. Have ’em put it on your pillow like a breakfast mint.”

If I wasn’t so pissed off, I’d have been jealous of how good he was feeling. I tried to refocus. I didn’t need my kit. Everything was going to be fine so long as I remained calm and collected. The only thing I needed was my keen sense of observation.

That was when I noticed Vance Wilder making a beeline in my direction.

“Fuck!”

“Dude, it’s not that big a deal.” Matteo reached into his jacket and fumbled with his ECG. “If you need a gun, just take mine.”

I slapped his hand away and pulled his jacket shut before anyone saw.

“No, you moron, it’s Wilder. I can’t let him see me talking to one of Denaro’s fixers when I’m supposed to be working for him.”

Matteo’s features hardened with a sudden clarity. Even his confused aromas seemed to converge into a single primal odor.

“Oh shit, Wilder’s here?” He spun to face the same direction I did, raising up on his tiptoes to see over the other partygoers. “Just the guy I wanted to see. Gimme a second.”

He was out of my reach in a flash, shoving his way through the congregants while yelling over the din of a hundred polite conversations.

“Where’s my money, motherfucker? We had a deal!”

Fuck.