The Golden Globe

She slumped back on the couch, then sprang to her feet. I thought she was going to resume her tirade against me, but she had a new target.

"I can do this all right. I can pick my nose, I can feed myself. I'm getting better at signing my name. But Bach? Mozart? Forget it. I can't do a simple arpeggio. I'm back to scales. If there's anything I can do to hurt him, hurt him really bad, I want to hear it."

"Okay. There's one finger we didn't mention." I stuck up my thumb. "It's the finger of transportation, and maybe we can use it to hitch a ride out of here."

And I told her my plan.

It all sounds so much better when you're laying it out. Or when I am, anyway. My powers of persuasion are pretty sharp, having been honed over seventy years of getting myself into situations I end up having to talk myself out of. To run a good con, it helps if you can at least partly persuade yourself that you're telling the truth. I know how to tell the mark the parts she wants to hear, and to skim over the problems.

So it went down well, there in her apartment. She bought it, and so did I. Now, almost half a day later, alone, sober and determined to stay that way, it seemed a very long shot.

I was in the hub, sitting at a table in a carousel bar, waiting to see how it all came out. I had a tall, bubbly glass of ginger ale in front of me, and I wished it were something a little stronger. I wished I had something to smoke, too, but all I'd ever liked was hemp, and I needed my wits about me. Some tobacco, that would be nice, though I'd never smoked it and heard it tasted vile. Humphrey Bogart, sitting here, would have had a smoke going, the cigarette stuck high up between his fingers. That hound-dog face that never seemed to look panicky. I could do Bogart if I had a smoke, and I wouldn't be so nervous.

I kept my eye on the rope lift constantly moving down from the hub—not the hub of Oberon, though that's where I was, but the hub of the pub, the pub-hub that was within the larger hub, to make myself perfectly opaque. The bar was for tourists and others who liked their drinks to stay in the glass and the glass to stay on the table. Therefore, it rotated, at a pretty good rate, enough to give one-third gee at the rim, where everybody sat. The place was small enough that you didn't want to stand up too quickly or the coriolanus force would knock you down. Your head would get a lot lighter than your feet.

I spotted her as she floated into the hub, glanced around, and selected the lift rope that would take her close to where I sat. It pulled her down at first, then somewhere when the forces were equalized she swung around with ease and grace and she was hanging from the strap, like a commuter only with her feet off the floor. The rope lowered her and she hit the ground walking. I was envious. A few hours before I had looked like all three stooges trying to do the same thing, and I'd landed on my butt. Toby had thought it was a neat trick, I think. He'd barked in delight.

Now he was curled up in one of the chairs at the table, his belly full of bar pretzels and beer nuts and ginger ale. Poly pulled out the third chair and sat down.

"I need a drink." She held up her hand and signaled to the bartender. I watched with interest, because this wasn't a mere finger gesture but a more elaborate sign language that resulted in what looked like a Bloody Mary being delivered to our table. I memorized the gestures. You never know when you'll need a bit of business to lend authenticity on the stage.

I let her take a deep drink.

"How'd it go?" I asked. She took another.

"Okay, I guess."

"What do you mean, you guess?"

"Well, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it?" I could see she was having some of the same doubts I'd been entertaining. She'd had plenty of time to find fault with the plan on the elevator ride to the hub.

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't there." I looked at her pointedly, and she sighed, took another drink, and put the glass down.

"Okay. They weren't happy about it."

"I warned you they wouldn't be."

"But there wasn't anything they could do. Except make me feel small."

"I warned you about that, too."

Poly had been visiting with the Oberon police. I was glad it was her and not me, because what she told them was she was dropping her lawsuit against Isambard Comfort, and as far as she was concerned, he was free to go.

"They'd already told me the position he was taking," she said. We'd gone through that at her apartment, but I let her tell it her way. "How you killed his sister in self-defense, in spite of what it looked like. What sort of story he fed them to make it look that way I don't know, they didn't tell me, but it was clear they weren't buying it. I know they'd really like to talk to you about it, because they're sure the two of you wouldn't tell the same story. But as of now, there's nothing they can charge you with."

"Did anybody follow you?"

"I don't think so. I did what you said, and I didn't see anybody."

No way to tell, with an amateur. But if they really wanted to talk to me and had followed her, they'd probably already be here.

That Izzy was not going to finger me in his sister's death didn't surprise me, either. If I was in prison, it would be tougher for him to get at me. Oh, he could hire my death easily enough, but Charonese like to take care of matters like that themselves. They never testify in court, no matter what. If they have a beef with you, don't expect them to sue you.

"So I told them I had accepted the settlement the Charonese ambassador had offered me, that I'd already cashed the check. They tried to bluff me." She took another drink, and made another gesture to the bartender. "That was the scariest part. Said they intended to prosecute him under the criminal statutes, and they demanded my testimony. Said they'd prosecute me if I didn't take the stand. I told 'em that would go down great with the public, going after the victim. I said I wasn't going to testify, no matter what, that I was dropping all charges. They kept trying to frighten me—did frighten me, let me tell you—but I stuck to my story, like you said, and eventually they threw me out. She took a sip of her second drink.

"Threw you out."

"Told me to leave. Said they'd get back to me after they'd talked it over with the State's Attorney. So, I don't think they'll prosecute—"

"They won't, trust me."

"Don't make me laugh. Anyway, I'll be glad to get out of here." Right.

"I'd like to talk to you about that," I said.

She gave me a cold smile. "I'm not surprised."

"You're not?"

"Something in your quick agreement to my terms didn't, shall we say, play right."

"I'll stick to my agreement," I said, indignantly. "I just still think you're making a mistake, and I want to try to talk you out of it while there's still time. You've got the money now to—"

"You said that before." She reached into her purse. "Before you waste a lot of hot air, I want to show you something." She pulled a blue, eight-ounce thermos from the purse and held it up for me. There was a smiling picture of me—Sparky—on the side. She jiggled it, and something rattled inside.

I was stu

"Naughty," she said, wagging her finger. "You wouldn't want to cause a disturbance, would you? Something that might bring the police." She had me, and she knew it. "While you went to the bathroom. Remember?"

"But the combination—"

"I've got a good memory. Shame, shame, Trevor. An old con man like you, not covering up when you opened that ridiculous traveling coffin."

I'd brought the Pantechnicon with me, naturally, since I expected to get out of Oberon fast if I got out at all. After I had her attention I'd taken it to her apartment, as without a bit of grisly show-and-tell I wasn't sure she'd buy my plan. And the bitch had foxed me. And what was this about ridiculous? I was as indignant about that as about the theft.