"Passarelli would have to be in on it, too," he decided. "And I can't
figure _him_ for a louse. O.K., Maragon. I'll pick you up at your
office at about eight o'clock."
* * * * *
With nearly two hours to kill, I went out to eat. I still felt glum
and lousy. Part of it was the knifelike penetration of Crescas'
intuition--his knowing that I was just a stalking horse so that the
big guns could zero in on Mary Hall. And there was that little tremor
of fear that comes from knowing that a Psi may think you've
doublecrossed him. They have some powerful abilities when it comes to
exacting vengeance. Well, if everything about the deal was as much
screwed up as the part I had heard so far, I decided, I might get out
with a whole skin at that.
That was my attempt at consolation--that and an order of sweet-breads,
Financiere, which is a ridiculous dish for a sawed-off shyster tending
toward overweight.
I was back in the law library by ten minutes of eight, trying to
occupy my mind with the latest _Harvard Law Review_, when the 'phone
rang. Keys' face, a little tight-lipped and bright-eyed, peered at me
from the screen, which it completely filled. He must have darned near
swallowed the 'scope.
"Ready?" he asked softly.
"Sure. You picking me up?"
His lip curled in half a smile. "What do I look like?" he sneered.
"Grab a cab. You know a bar called the Moldy Fig?" I nodded. "That's
where." He cut the image.
Well, this was more like it. You can't deal with Psis without the
whole affair acting like something out of E. Phillips Oppenheim. I
closed up the office, turned out the ceiling, and rode the elevator
down to the street.
The night howled and shrieked with air-borne traffic. A hot-rodding
kid gunned his fans up the street a way and ripped what silence might
have remained to the night into shreds as he streaked past me. The
jerk wasn't forty feet off the ground, and was pouring the coal to his
turbine. The whine of his impellers sounded a strong down-Doppler as
his ripped past me, nose dropped a good thirty degrees and dragging
every knot he could get out of his 'copter.
I waved to a cab standing at the rank up the block a way and watched
the skim-copter rise a couple inches off the ground as the hacker
skimmed on the ground-cushion toward me. City grit cut at my ankles
from the air blast before I could hop into the bubble and give him my
destination. He looked the question at me hopefully, over his
shoulder, his hand on the arm of his meter.
"Oh, what the hell," I said, still sore at the world, and a little
worried about what I was trying to do. "Let's 'copter!" He grinned and
swung the arm over to the "fly" position with its four-times-higher
rate. His turbine screamed to a keener pitch with wide throttle, and
he climbed full-bore into the down-town slow lane.
* * * * *
The swift ride down to the Village was long enough to induce that odd
motion-hypnosis so common in night flight over a metropolitan area.
The dizzy blur of red and green running lights from air-borne traffic
at levels above and below us, the shapes of 'copters silhouetted
beneath us against the lambent glow of the city's well-lit streets,
all wove into a numbing pattern.
[Illustration]
"Here's the _Fig_, Mac," the hacker said as we grounded. I stuck my
credit card in the meter and hopped out, not fast enough to duck the
fan-driven pin-pricks of sand as he pulled away.
Crescas appeared as if by magic--Psis act like that--and had me by the
arm. "Quick!" he said, pushing me back into the spot he had appeared
from. It was a doorway beside the Moldy Fig, opening on a flight of
steps running to an apartment above the bar. As we climbed the clean
and well-lit stairs, I reminded myself that I was probably entering a
den of Psis--and clamped down tight on my thoughts. There was plenty
they had better not peep.
Keys didn't have to knock on the door--there's always a telepath
hanging around these Stigma hideouts who knows who's coming. A husky
young man, quite blond and pink of face, opened the door. A soft
rustle of music spilled out around his big shoulders. He wore a
T-shirt, and his powerful forearms were bare.
"Hey!" he said to Keys, spotting himself as a Southerner as surely as
if he'd had the Stars and Bars tattooed on his forehead. We followed
him down a short hall into a room furnished, with a couple of couches,
an easy-chair, several small but delightful tables, and a piano. Here
was the music. A blond bombshell was drumming box chords on the
ivories, and grouped around her on side chairs were four young men,
playing with her. It was jazz, if that's what you call the quiet
racket that comes out of a wooden recorder, a very large pottery
ocharina that hooted like a gallon jug, a steel guitar and a pair of
bongo drums played discreetly with the fingertips.
My appearance stopped them right in the middle of a chorus of "Muskrat
Ramble." I'd have liked to hear more--it was Dixieland times two--what
the Psis call Psixieland. That's jazz played by a gang of telepaths.
Each one knows what the others are about to play. The result is
extemporaneous counterpoint, but without the clinkers we associate
with jazz. Almost too perfect, yet untrammeled.
My eyes ran around the room as the four men who had been playing with
the girl got up and prepared to leave. The place was spotless. Oh, the
furnishings weren't costly, but they were chosen with that sense of
fitness, of refinement of color and decor that is curiously Psi. I
suppose that's one of the little things that annoys Normals so much.
Stigma powers seem to go beyond telepathy, clairvoyance and
telekinesis--they extend in some hard to define way into the
aesthetic. A chaste kind of cleanliness is only part of it. _Taste_, I
guess that's the word. Their attire, their homes, everything about
Psis, seems tasteful.
* * * * *
In moments only Keys, the blond Southerner and the still blonder bomb
on the piano bench were left to face me. Keys poked a finger at the
plow-jockey in the T-shirt. "Elmer," he explained.
"Take off yo' hat, Yankee," Elmer grinned. I felt it tipped from my
head by his TK.
I glowered at him. "Kid stuff!" I snorted. "So you can lift four
ounces from six feet away. But you don't have any idea what
incorporeal hereditaments are. Which is better?"
The pink of his face got red. He could have broken me in two.
"Just making a point," I said. "I'm stupid about TK. You're stupid
about the law. I figure that makes us even."
He clamped his mouth shut. I turned back to Keys and the girl I was
sure was Mary Hall. "What I came here for--"
"What we _got_ you here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you
straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The
impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went
on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a
Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on this 99th National Bank
fracas."