Текст книги "Forge of Heaven "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Fortunately the governor had a sense of how things on Blunt worked, too, and had given him as clear a signal as he could send without coming out and saying so, that he intended to divert attention away from Blunt.

“I don’t want it unraveled, either,” Brazis said. “The business with the old network has been delicate for years. What agency sent this Mr. Gide?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find out. I just ask your cooperation for a few days.”

“You certainly have that. Just leave the police work and the surveillance to us. You won’t see my agents. But I assure you they’ll be out there, in contact in ways you don’t have, and they are efficient.” He already knew one man he wanted to talk to personally, one of Apex Council’s little gifts, operating there currently completely independent of his office. But the existence of an Apex operative delving into whatever he was into, down in the Trend, needn’t concern Reaux’s office. “I’ll fix it.”

“Has Kekellen queried you?”

“Yes.”

“How did you answer?”

“I said Earth ship. Not Outsider.”

“Tossing the ball into my court.” Reaux said with a little compression of the lips. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.”

“Absolutely. It isyour ship inbound.”

“A good idea to confer and compare, your experts and mine, if we get any stir out of the ondat.At least until this ship leaves.”

“But not to coordinate answers. He’d know. I’m quite sure he’d know.” Their resident ondatsent random inquiries, when he, she, or it was disturbed, and might ask a plumber on three deck what he thought of this inbound ship, if Kekellen took the notion. Contacts with other tiers of society might completely violate Outsider and Inner Worlds notions of security, but if Kekellen specifically queried a plumber on three-deck, he wanted an answer. University experts might get involved helping that plumber answer the letter, and there was a hotline to help such individuals, but that man had to answer in his own name, or Kekellen went on sending, jamming the system, to the detriment of all station business.

That was another kind of ondattrouble, one he was sure their governor didn’t need demonstrated in front of the incoming ship.

“That’s a point,” Reaux said. “That is a point. But I hope you’ll consult with us. At least cross-check what’s being said. Or asked.”

“And shall we cross-check what’s being said back and forth with this inbound ship?” Brazis asked.

“I’m sure you’ll know.”

“Oh, make it easy on us.”

Reaux heaved a visible, a desperate sigh. “Our offices have a good relationship. In all honesty, Antonio, I don’t know why this is happening. But if trouble does turn up, yes, I will communicate with you. I hope it’s reciprocal. If you hear anything.”

He leaned his arms on the chair. Considered the question. “All right. Let’s have a valiant try at honesty. I have a situation I’m keeping a particular eye on, down on Blunt. You’ll only mess things up if you send anybody down there to check up on it. If I identify a troublemaker, he’ll be off the street for a few days on a warrant for spitting on the street. Our police are extremely efficient. Keep your people out, and I’ll tell you what I find out. Do me another favor. Youfeed Kekellen enough basic information to keep him from querying our personnel and asking us questions we can’t answer.”

“Oh, now—”

“Nothing detrimental and nothing to do with that ship. We’re busy just now. We have a developing situation down on the planet.”

“Of interest?”

“Not political. Geological. We’re about to have a new sea, give or take a few decades. Or maybe sooner. Maybe much sooner. I’m getting alarms from the geologists. I’ve sent a briefing to your staff. I’ll send it to your office if you’re curious.”

“I’ll query them. I’m sure it’ll be in a briefing.” Reaux made those small movements, fussing with items on the desk, that began to say that new seas a decade removed were farther from his personal interest than that inbound ship or some fool of an activist down on Blunt. Given his doubtless full schedule, geology was likely very far from his interest. And the interview was over. “As for your person on Blunt, no difficulty, if you say so. I will appreciate your honesty.”

“We’ll exchange information as it becomes available.”

“Excellent.”

“A pleasure.” Brazis stood up and the governor stood up, mutual courtesy. They didn’t shake hands. “Visit myoffice when this is over.”

The governor of Concord never visited him in his own territory. The protocols—and certainly that residual Earthborn fear—kept Reaux from accepting Outsider hospitality. It was an ages-old official situation.

Reaux just smiled, as generations of governors had smiled benignly, and gave vague promises for a visit someday.

The bubble they lived in had its set of balances, its food chain, and until a high-level Earth ship showed up, the governor’s office was largely preoccupied with the internal business of its own society. The Earth governor never gave up a shred of his dignity, thin as it sometimes was, and never admitted that his power didn’t effectively extend to the fifth level of the station he ran. The Outsider Chairman never gave up a shred of his power, which was vested, in his case, not only in a population vastly outnumbering the Earther veneer on his station, but in an office that could impose martial law on this station and forbid that inbound ship a docking, no matter their objections—if he wanted to use it.

He didn’t. He bowed to the governor, walked out, exchanging pleasant words with Ernst, and picked up his highly modded security escort on the way out.

He swept down the hall, back through the ambush of competing news agencies. His frown was sincere, and annoyed, his answers terse.

“Consultation,” he said. “A frank exchange. No further comment.” It was politic, for the news, that an Outsider Chairman not be seen smiling and happy after a visit to a governor.

His own lift-car was waiting at the nearest station, with another of his security team aboard, holding that car private, making sure it wasn’t diverted or switched, it went without saying. He escaped the swarm of reporters and cameras, got in and sat down as the door shut, his two bodyguards standing. He heaved a sigh, as the car set into motion.

And still didn’t smile.

He didn’t have to tell the governor that Blunt Street was a potential problem. But the wide universe, of which he was well aware, in his capacity as local Chairman, had stresses and strains of far more import than the opinions of some young local idiot who’d read a political tract.

That didn’t mean some eloquent young idiot inspired by a random occurrence like this ship-call couldn’t light a dangerous fire, and he knew it and Reaux knew it.

More to the point, and the current thorn in his side, the Chairman General at Apex had sent one of his observers to Concord to carry on a very deep investigation of affairs on Blunt Street, two years ago…covertly inserting his agent, as the CG tended to move. Not covert enough to prevent him finding it out: whether that lapse was intentional or not, Brazis had no idea, but he viewed the CG’s ongoing investigation as a potential problem and an inquiry from Earth as no help at all, if the two crossed.

Magdallen was the agent’s name—or at least the name he was going by on this mission.

Time to talk to the Council’s deeply lodged ferret. No question of it.

He tapped in and contacted Dianne. “The Council’s man,” he said. “Down on Blunt. I want to talk to him immediately, in my office.”

“Yes, sir,” Dianne said.

He’d never talked to Magdallen. It had seemed politic to keep his distance and pretend he was unaware of Magdallen’s activities, considering that the investigation might run under official doors as well as down on Blunt, and that they might even hope—the CG’s personal, long-held hope—to find that he wasn’t handling that dual office with complete efficiency. Just let the man rummage quietly about for the CG and leave without a word, he’d thought, previously. He’d had no intention of talking directly to Magdallen, less of appearing to put pressure on him to suppress whatever findings he might make.

The ship’s arrival changed things. If Earth was investigating at such great trouble and expense, it was time to ask questions of the Council agent and give certain clear directions. Missed communication had done harm enough in human affairs.

ARDATH WASN’T ON Procyon’s personal tap—she couldn’t be, since the nanoceles in his body were government issue and classified, so classified they’d demolished the output communications tap he’d gotten in his Freethinker days, in those few months of breaking away from family influence and doing stupid teenaged things. Nowadays he couldn’t explain his lack of ordinary personal communication to the universe at large—well, at least he couldn’t give the real story on it. Certain friends suspected him of going tapless out of respect for his parents’ religion; even his sister had accused him of lying about having a tap and just not wanting to hear from her, the family black sheep.

Oh, he’d gotten one, he’d admitted to her finally, but it had broken down when he went to work for the government. There was a government reason he didn’t get another one. He didn’t want to talk about it. It was upsetting to him.

If thatdidn’t tell her the government had wiped the output portion, he’d thought when he said it, she was deaf to hints.

Then she’d started worrying about him. Then she’d understood just a little of the constraint he was under, and forgave him. She could contact himif she needed.

And as things had gotten to be, even without the output tap most people had, he could still usually find her, because Ardath was by no means a quiet presence on the street.

He hadn’t made it to the desserts at La Lune Noir yet. He’d decided, after taking her name in vain on the gift card, that it was a good idea to let his sister know about it, on the exceedingly remote chance Ardath, née Arden, had uncharacteristically intended a filial moment, a gift of her own for the occasion. They all lived their little fantasy of family, peaceful so long as Arden believed what she believed, that he was a cog in the bureaucracy, so long as the parents believed what they believed, that they’d brought up good, ordinary children and that Arden would come around to their view of the universe the way her brother had. The way it didn’t do at all to have the parents see beneath the scenery, it didn’t at all do to have Ardath’s lively curiosity or her sense of indignation engaged on his case.

So he went through the usual dance of notlooking for her, just happening into and out of her usual places—at this hour it was cocktails and dinner, indisputably, and he let slip he was meeting her, dropping the word in three different high-priced restaurants.

“ Pro-cyon?”

Isis. He stopped, among the evening traffic of minor Fashionables. He cut a fine enough, though quiet, figure. But this was one of the Style, whose glittering gold bodysuit used a drifting glow to trick the eye into believing it saw skin. Green-eyed Isis hailed him on the common street, merely brushing his arm as she melted aside into the neon of the Astral Plane. Her music was her own. Her body moved to it, hips swaying, a liquid vision in retreat.

“Procyon.” Sweetly. It was Spider at his elbow, then, one of Ardath’s intimates. Originally male, Spider. Now even his lovers weren’t sure. “Are you looking for Ardath?”

“Maybe.”

Spider, whose naturally black skin glistened with sparks of color, likewise brushed by him and touched his sleeve. “A message?”

“Oh, a visit with my sister. Familybusiness.”

Spider, beautiful dark eminence, nodding with plumes, gave a flourish toward the Plane. Wait for her inside, that meant, and Procyon walked casually into the not-quite-door of the place—a set of reflective columns, light dimming progressively to eye-teasing shades of magenta and blue and deep shadow. The floor disappeared into black and reappeared in blue around a turn. Rhythmic vibrations flooded from the flooring up to the bones—enticing a customer to switch his commercial tap on and get the music from the local relay. The vibrations quivered against the skin, little discharges from the pillars. And from overhead, puffs of air teased and caressed.

He didn’t tap in. He didn’t hear the subliminal commercials or the music. He went to the bar, ordered wine, slipped his hand into the reader that debited his account twice the price of anywhere else on Grozny, and scanned the establishment.

The clientele ranged from Fashionables to bankers, elaborate elegants with fiery tracings on bare skin, and the occasional Earther in a gray pin-striped suit, zipped close and collared in sober black. There were living plumes, lately: that was the new chic, replacing hair. There were skin-shadings, finger-caps, and exotic hair-mods. A bony young man with magenta hair drew cold stares with a pair of green glowing-soled boots that left lime green tracks where he walked—not a happy sight, that boy’s style, tragedy waiting to happen, if certain Stylists met him, but it was also his choice to be here, and one wondered if he knew the notice he gained was so highly unfavorable.

The wine arrived. He’d ordered a middling Outer Worlds Sauvignon, twenty a glass. It was, indeed, middling quality on his own scale, but in the Plane the average customer paid such prices un-questioningly, not for the wine, but for the spectacle of the elegants and the Fashionables, the walking adverts of various upscale emporia—not to mention the grotesques, whose choice was body-sculpting and augmentation of a risky but trend-setting sort. Spider verged on that class. Many successful Stylists did—the difference between Stylist and grotesque being the individual’s sense of where that tasteful line was—and the general response of the Trend to the whole. Spider set trends for his admirers. So did Isis. Eyes fixed on them when they crossed the room, and people who wondered what shop sold what they wore needed only scan the fashion news of the week, and wonder if they dared. Shops thrived on Spider’s patronage, and happily claimed to be the origin of certain unique items.

A stir attended a new arrival into the Plane. Heads turned. His turned more slowly.

Ardath was amazing. The plain black suit might have graced a corporate Earth auditor, except it glossed like satin and had an open throat. To answer their mother’s question, yes, she was modified:patterns came and went on her skin, a delicate surface glow of flickering pale violet and gold. Her hair had the texture of straight silk thread, skeins of shining black silk done up in twists of lavender and blue and gold. Her eyes, with augmentation that didn’t, at the moment, show, saw him plainly in dimmest light, no question. She rippled her surface glow, a little shiver of pale color, as she glanced at him and recognized his presence.

But then the cat-suited owner of the establishment intercepted her. She let the owner take her hand, and walked about with him, being shown a table set and waiting for her, with a low centerpiece of crystal and exotic blooms. She touched the chair, smiled in acceptance, caressed the owner’s arm, and made, perhaps, a request.

Wine arrived for her, not, he could be sure, the middling one. A handsome young waiter brought it, and Ardath sat and sipped it, listening to the owner’s passionate monologue as he sat opposite at the table.

When will she get a job? their mother asked plaintively. At sixteen, Arden Stafford had been on the Street. At seventeen Arden had disappeared into it, and Ardath had emerged from that chrysalis, a young Fashionable immediately turning heads.

Get a job? Ardath had whatever she wanted and paid for nothing. She had the best wines, the best suppers, for merely walking into the Plane and being herself—Ardath, a Grand Stylist, one of the chief arbiters on the street, of what Fashionables should be and do. If Ardath even spoke to a Fashionable, that person’s public esteem rose, and if Ardath turned a cold shoulder to a certain look, that person’s stock plummeted in the Trend.

So with establishments. Wherever she dined, the place thrived and raked in the money. If she lived in an apartment complex, it profited, and that complex had a long waiting list for rentals at inflated prices. If she wanted a modification, she had it, gratis, and the doctor could as well move into a fancier residence and take on assistants. Theaters, style shops, restaurants, accessory shops, jewelers, all begged her attendance and offered her gifts. She let most such offerings fall untouched and unrebuffed. Grand Stylists made no mistakes, and what they noticed, let alone what they adopted for themselves, they chose ever so carefully.

She knew he was here, no question, and Procyon waited. After a few moments with the owner, she rose from the table, made her obligatory tour of inspection, briefly noting this and that person, chatting amiably with Spider, pausing to tip up the face of a young female hopeful and look critically, then smile. Ardath was never cruel. It was always positive notice, encouragement to what pleased her. Young Fashionables regarded her with worship and flocked to her vicinity in droves, wearing their best, all in a hope sometimes gratified for no plea at all, only the spontaneous honesty of her judgment.

His own dark tones, shirt and coat, matched her somber dress. He was glad of that accident as she slipped up and joined him at the bar. He’d known if he was going shopping uptown he wanted no flamboyance in any shop frequented by Earthers, but if he subsequently visited his sister, modest plumage definitely served. He by no means wanted a visual conflict with Ardath, by no means wanted to attract her kind of notice to his inexpert choice of style.

She leaned an elbow on the bar. Her skin settled on the lowest, slowest flicker. Blues melted back in curling, gold-edged shapes around her features, making of Ardath’s natural clear complexion an Arden-mask, his sister’s real face, revealed for him for the moment.

“Procyon.” The voice had grown sweeter and lower over the last year. Even that was modified, and sounded like power in restraint, no longer his sister’s voice, or even her original accents. “You look very well tonight.” Seeing that she was beyond the Style, if she wanted to take her brother’s hand, even to smile and compliment his modest, off-the-rack, though pricey suit, no one could fault her. Her fingers lingered on his, on the three hand-made rings that were his personal vanity. “And what brings elder brother asking questions?”

“Oh, the annual parental occasion.” He was just a little pained by the continuing performance, by the continual diminution of Arden in Ardath. “I just thought you’d like to know it’s taken care of. A friendly advisory.”

“Do I care? Let me see…”

“A truly déclassé crystal egg will find its way to the parental door tomorrow, with a Caprice label.”

She drew back the hand in dismay. “Oh, shame, Procyon!”

Nowit was his sister’s voice. And he smiled, having scored.

“I confess. I did it. I doubt they’ll see the humor in it. I signed both our names.”

Very few people took any liberties with Ardath these days. He did. He saw the indignant fire in her eyes and the frown on her lips, and was immensely gratified to see the little girl for a moment, his outraged little sister in the Stylist’s mask.

“ Jeremy and Arden.In eighteen-point engravure. We were very proper. Mother, by the way, patiently asks whether you have a job yet.”

Lifted brows. An uncontrolled gold flush washing over her cheeks spoiled the carefully modulated tendrils of color. Then outright laughter roused a sparkle of blue and gold, dancing like fire along her skin. No need for big brother to take her on a guided tour. She knew she’d been tagged, by someone who knew her well.

She said, with hauteur: “I hope you reassured her of your own orthodox circumstances.”

“Oh, I did. Certainly.”

“What doyou do these days?” Tag, and tag. “You’re not flopped down with those Freethinkers again, are you? Not embezzling from banks.”

And she got no more information than usual.

“Still just pushing keys for the government.”

“And wearing fabulous silk shirts.” A touch drifted across his collar. “That isnice silk, big brother. Imported?”

“Expensive, expert keys for the government.” A sweet, false smile. For revenge, she ran him through the everlasting familial maze: what do you do, where do you work, why the secrecy. “Expensive keys for very many hours. Slave labor. But I won’t intrude my decadent Freethinker self here. Dessert at La Lune. I’ve dropped a bit of weight. I have it coming.”

“La Lune Noir. Nice place. Drop my name there.”

Meaning the establishment would give him his dessert and dinner just for the notice of Ardath’s brother. “No. No, little sister.” The false, sweet smile became true. “I pay my own way. And I don’t want a personal following. I only thought you should know I’ve taken your name in vain—your birth name—just keeping those parental doors open.”

“I won’t visit them. I won’t ever. You’re entirely wasting your time.”

“Life’s long. Things change. And please don’t trouble to damn Caprice. They exist to please our mother. It’s ever so good someone does.”

“Oh, don’t talk about her. It’s a boring topic.”

“She’s a good person. So’s our father, for that matter. Don’t get too improved to remember that they gave us a good start.”

“I don’t remember that. I don’t choose to remember it. Our mother used up that credit.”

“Will you forget me? Will I get just too boring to cross your mind?”

“Never.” Light danced in her eyes. Likely a number of chemo-machines did, and music attended her, unheard by anyone outside her skull, music along with her personal messages. He saw from time to time how her eyes flickered with external input. She’d become the center of her own electronic universe, a very active internal universe of lights and signals and transmissions. “But Caprice! I could just die.”

“Oh, don’t. I’m sure you have something else to do this evening. I’m off to La Lune.”

“On your own card, silly brother.”

“It’s just money. I have plenty.”

“Mysterious, always mysterious. Are you actually going to the parentals tomorrow?”

“I’m hard to catch. I’m sure there’s a gruesome dinner in the works, tomorrow off shift. I intend to disappear for at least six hours. Overtime at the office.”

Slow, wicked smile. “Do they think of me often?”

“The parentals? They always ask how you are. I lie and say I see you often. I tell the truth and say you’re doing fine.”

“I’ll bet she prays over me.”

“Not such an unloving thing to do, midge.”

“You’re so brave, to go there.”

“Oh, not that brave. I sometimes miss vegetables boiled to mush.” Sometimes he longed for a parental voice. He was human. He experienced nostalgia. He wasn’t that sure about Ardath. She had had yet to grow into her emotional adulthood when she fled a career in the plastics plant, and something in her had never ticked over to love for her origins, only roused a rebellion more bitter and more lasting than his. If she didn’t cure that anger, she’d carry a lasting scar that nothing could cure—a part of her, he feared, that never would grow up. Lately, too, he detected a troubling chill, a remoteness he didn’t like in her, and he suspected a first twist around that deep scar: he might be the only one who could talk to her that knew what her growing up should be. So he didn’t give up the battle.

But no one took up an inordinate amount of Ardath’s time. Her fans were hovering. It was time to get out of the way.

“I feel the urgent need for dessert. I’ll leave now. Have a wonderful time, sis.”

“So déclassé.” She kissed him on the cheek. The whole restaurant must notice. The old warmth was there, and his sister was there, not yet warped by the anger or the changes, and that pleased him. “Why don’t you just get a tap like every other reasonable person in the universe? Your department won’t know. They can’t rule your whole life.”

“Government rules, government restrictions. A third time, government restrictions, and, trust me, they would know, darling sister. I know I’m not convenient. But my job’s how I afford to go into these trendy places to see my dear sister. And you always manage to know when I’m looking for you. So somber today. You so clearlydressed to match me.”

No one else would dare that impertinence. Her lips parted a second time in shock, her eyes flashed. And being his sister, she laughed aloud and hit him on the arm. “Silly Procyon. Go entertain yourself.” Her skinlights curled closer and closer to her features, well controlled, now—over lips, tip of nose. Eyes lingered last, changing subtly from dull native green to pale, gas-fire azure. “Be good.”

“I’m always good,” he said solemnly. “Virtuous is another matter.”

He left half his glass. He walked out among the reflective columns, out toward the street, the cynosure of every eye in the Plane. He was an encounter he was sure Ardath would have to live down tonight, oh, at least for two minutes; but she had the personal force to do it with complete aplomb: it was why he dared needle her.

Not exactly what Brazis liked, his skirting through the kind of attention that surrounded his sister, but on the PO staff’s advice, he wore that public notice like a mantle, just another camouflage. Noone high in government service sought public attention—so perhaps it made him less suspect. He walked out into the normal neon light of Grozny and down the street, momentarily enveloped in a string of dancers that melted past him, then stepping around a band of preteens clustered around a bench, kids likely not going home tonight and maybe not going home for the next number of nights—until the police rounded them up, asked them where they did belong, and billed the parents.

Most teens out at this hour were simple sessions-dodgers or young half-day factory workers on off shift, plus the more or less honest daylighters, who studied their hours or worked their hours and then played as hard as their finance let them, no one at home caring. They weren’t generally a problem, but you didn’t lay a credit card down on a counter and turn your head when that sort was about.

A few Freethinkers congregated at the corner—you could tell the type by the grimy, threadbare casuals, their own statement of style, their contempt of money. He didn’t know the faces: those had all seemed to change in the years since his sojourn there…but then, he’d been transitory in that group. He’d attended only two meetings, long enough for disillusionment to set in; he’d quit them in three months, seeing nothing that interested him there.

And he’d made a full confession of his former associations in his government résumé, so he wasn’t open to blackmail. Brazis reportedly didn’t take his admission for a problem. Intellectual flirtation, he’d called it, in his interview. The rest who’d shared those grimy rooms at Michaelangelo’s claimed they wanted to change the universe, but they spent their meetings nitpicking their own election rules and taking up collections for legal fees for extremist idiots. Mostly they sat around swilling cheap beer, complaining that everything the government touched was corrupt, and proposing no societal fix that could survive their own personal habits.

Well, so now he was working for the corrupt government himself, well, working inside it, on a critical job, and he had a very different view of how much actually did get done by officialdom, hour by hour, day by day, to keep the station running, never mind the corruption that threaded its way through human affairs in every endeavor—including Freethinker elections.

Maybe Freethinkers were leaven in the societal loaf, and shoved public opinion into progressing a healthy few degrees a century, in a society otherwise far out of time with the rest of the speeding cosmos, but otherwise they had no power, and Chairman Brazis just did as he did, and moved society in his own, far more powerful way. A former Freethinker strongly suspected Brazis had his own shadowy spots; but Brazis made the Project work, and did his job, and was, meanwhile, fair to his staff. A former Freethinker held a niggling suspicion that purity of life and purpose was the most suspicious thing in a public official. A former Freethinker began to think that the real world had far more layers than he’d once thought.

Well, but he was growing layers, himself. Secrets. Things he didn’t admit. Ardath grew more and more apart from him. He worried about her, but as yet thought of nothing he could do but live within her reach, and wait, and keep to his own venues except on rare occasions of purpose. Like the parental anniversary.

La Lune Noir wasn’t on his sister’s list. Too near Blunt for high fashion, but sitting on Grozny, purveying its fancy food at a modest price that didn’t upset his old Freethinker sense of economy. It had that kind of clientele, not quite in the Style, rubbing elbows with the fringe of the Trend.

And it had that beautiful showcase of desserts, right in the window.

He walked in and, being as he was a regular, his regular waitress nabbed him and showed him right to his table, his preferred place near the vid screen. “The usual?”

“Everything.”

He loved not having to think much on his off shift. He liked La Lune for leaving their patrons music-free and vibration-free, to bring in their private choices on their taps, or not.

It meant the place was hushed, except the noise of adjacent conversations, the clink of glasses, and the occasional crash of a dish.

“Damn!” from the kitchen. He laughed.

Thatwas La Lune.

A trio came in during his supper, danced on the transparent floor, to music the lot of them shared, and he recognized in that set three of his old Freethinker friends, who’d likewise left the den and prospered obscenely, by Freethinker standards. Marcus Liebermann was a medtech and Danny Casper was a paralegal. And Angie Wu, who’d recently married Danny, had become that archenemy of Freethinkers and terror of every marginal shop on the street—a customs cop.