CHAPTER TWELVE

I flicked on the gasthaus table radio and listened to the newscast while I shoveled food into my mouth. When they came around to the weather prediction for the second time and still hadn't mentioned the brouhaha at the Wayfarer's Home, or that one of their citizens was missing, I turned it off.

But I did not stop eating and it was only when I was about two-thirds of the way through the second portion that the table-boy had brought me that I looked up from my work to eye the tall man at the far end of the room who was making a poor job of not looking at me through his heavy-rimmed glasses.

He'd taken more than a decent interval to come into the gasthaus after me and he sat alone at his round table now, worrying the one large cup of local tea he'd picked up, and getting very hard stares from his table-boy.

The food in my stomach was having its effect, and he didn't look quite so menacing. In fact, now that I was pointedly staring at him as I ate, I saw that he was beginning to fidgit.

Or, if not actually fidgit, then twitch in his seat like a man with something on his mind that he would rather not have there. A fish out of water, a man over his depth. He hunched around in his seat until his back was toward me, and I saw his head bobbing slightly up and down as though he were talking to somebody. Only there was nobody in the chair opposite him at the table.

Then abruptly he shoved back both his chair and his cup and got up, all at the same time and almost in the same motion, and he was coming directly toward me with a deep scowl on his face.

He stopped so close that he had his small pot of a stomach almost in my face. I don't like a pepper-and-salt pattern, and I like it even less up against my snout. His baggy jumpsuit had a musty smell to it, like something locked up and long forgotten.

"Sklar," he said in a voice that was almost belligerent. "I'm Dr. Rolf Sklar. May I sit down?"

He said the name as though it ought to mean something to me. It didn't. And I didn't like his stomach in my face. Or maybe it was just that it was my belly that was full.

"You can drop dead if you like, friend," I said and dropped my eyes back to my plate.

I'd dropped my eyes, but I'd seen the flicker of a pained look in his face, and I realized that his belligerence could very well be directed, not at me, but at himself. Here was indeed a fish out of its element

I'm sorry, Doctor, I said in my head. But aloud I said nothing. I just let him stand there while I went on eating. He took a long time deciding, but when he did I heard him let out his breath in a gasping wheeze.

On the run of my vision I saw him reach into the inside pocket of his baggy jumpsuit and come up with something that he laid on the table in front of me.

My eyes couldn't help flicking up to it, but I had them back on my plate in an instant.

He sighed and opened the folded-over bit of thick paper and flattened it out with long, spadelike fingers. Circles. I didn't read the first digit, but the zeros that came after it impressed me. A sight-draft for five figures. Ten thousand Earth credits and maybe more if I was willing to appear interested enough to actually look at the first digit closely enough to make it out.

I didn't look.

He sighed again, this time with a quavering sound. "It's all I have," he said. "All I could get together. Tell me where the boy is."

I felt myself sweating, and it wasn't all the fault of Poldrogi's heat or the suddenly stuffy air of the gasthaus. This was a man who thought I knew something ... and something valuable enough to lay out five figures worth of credits for.

"You have got the wrong table," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about."

He pulled back the chair opposite and slammed himself down into it. "Look," he said, right into my face, "I'm not a devious man. This is all the cash I have and it's all there is, and I might just be giving you a way out. Think about that."

Cheese. That local green cheese with the heavy streaks of white-and-blue mold running through it He'd had cheese for breakfast.

"I still don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"I said I'm not a devious man and I'm not, but I was out at the Wayfarer's Home yesterday and I saw what happened." He let his voice trail off and sat looking at me as though what he'd just said was supposed to have a special meaning for me.

It did, but not what he thought it should have, I'd have been willing to bet.

It was starting to occur to me that maybe that sniper's shot at me wasn't a lucky near-miss at all. That I'd been set up as a patsy, but not for an assassination attempt. This could be the reverse play.

I'd been thinking that someone had wanted to kill Plagiar and then nail me before I could be arrested and talked to. It could very well be that the sniper didn't want Plagiar dead and had never intended to hit me. That the only intent had been to make me look important enough to kill. Important enough to kill and so important enough to contact and offer money to for information about a boy. Important enough to be a red herring across somebody else's trail.

And it had worked, else why was this agitated man sitting opposite me, leaning so close and peering at me through his thick glasses?

But where did a missing transhaus manager fit in? And the green dye that had almost gotten me lynched by a mob? And Plagiar's bully boys ... do not forget Plagiar's bully boys. I shook my head and Sklar misunderstood the motion. He snatched up his sight-draft and jammed it into his inside pocket. "All right," he said. "Have it your way. I said that I'm not a devious man and I'm not. If you live long enough to change your mind I'm staying at the Matruza." He slammed back his chair and was stalking out of the gasthaus before that crack about living long enough to change my mind made its way past my ears and into my head.

I was still shaking my head when I looked up from staring into my plate and saw that I was about to have another visitor.

Bearing down on me, mouth all pulled down and dark eyes intense looking, was Brigit.

Brigit Plagiar ... and behind her were two bully boys and one of them had pale skin patched on his chin, his lip, and his nose; his right hand stiff with splints and bandages.