“Well, well. Look what we got here.”
Slowly I stood up, the gun hanging limp in my hand. Nasty-Face came towards me, leaned forward and took it from my fingers. He put it in his pocket and then stepped back, looking at me with a gloating smile and pointing his repeater at my belly.
Just then another figure came stepping carefully over the rubble, knocking the falling dust from his shoulders. They all got out of his way respectfully while he inspected the scene.
Finally his gaze turned to me, and for the first time I came face to face with Becmath. He was a dapper figure a little below medium height, neat and careful in his movements. He wore clothes which kind of squared off his shoulders; his face, too, had a square look to it. His black hair was combed sideways and plastered down. He stared at me speculatively with his small, almost-black eyes that sometimes seemed to glitter strangely when they looked at you.
“Are you the guy who drove the car?” he said in a flat baritone voice. I nodded.
“Pretty good going.” He sauntered over to one of the bodies, turned it over with his foot. “Too bad about Heth. He was a good worker.” He glanced up at me again from beneath raised eyebrows. “You work for Klamer?”
“Yes.”
“Not any more. Klamer’s dead. From now on Mud Street is part of my territory.”
“You sure think big,” I spat out.
Strangely, he appeared not to notice the insult. “Pity we had to spoil the place,” he said. “Still, it wasn’t up to much anyway, was it?”
“Shall I finish off this klug, boss?” Nasty-Face asked eagerly?”
“What? No, I like the guy! Sitting in my car, the minute I saw him come round that corner I thought to myself, for once somebody around here’s got brains. That’s pretty rare, isn’t it?’” He jabbed a finger at me: “What’s your name?”
“Klein.”
“But he cost us five!” the other objected.
“I know that. Bring him back with us.”
Without another word he climbed back over the rubble to the outside. We followed, me with a repeater in my ribs.
We drove towards the centre of the Basement, taking the old deserted carriageway and then turning on to a newer, busier thoroughfare.
These parts of the Basement were richer and better organised than where we had just come from. Eventually the cars went down a ramp and into a garage. Steel shutters hummed quietly into place behind us. I was nudged out. At the other end of the garage more doors opened. We went through into what appeared by the bad air to be sleeping quarters. I began to get the feeling that I was in the midst of a smart outfit.
“I’ll talk to the new boy,” Becmath said. A few minutes later I found myself alone with him, very much to my surprise. For this part of the world the room was surprisingly tidy. Becmath lit a tube, offered it to me and lit one for himself. Suspiciously I sniffed it, but it was just plain weed, not the pop-derived smoke some people without respect for their persons take.
“All right,” Becmath said. “Tell me about yourself.”
So I told him. Once I had been a metal worker. But I had a fight with a bureaucrat on one of his personal jobs and suddenly I found that my card didn’t get me food from the metal workers’ tank any more. Nobody would help me because the government man had part-control over the tank.
At first I tried to survive by hiring my skills privately. But I discovered what many before me and after me had discovered: that the way down is the way down. I sank through stratum after stratum until I finished up underneath the bastion as a gun for Klamer.
He listened to my brief story attentively, drawing on his smoke every now and then and staring at the floor. Finally he nodded.
“Now you’ll work for me,” he said flatly.
“Suppose I don’t like being pushed around?”
“You’ve got no choice. Tonight I lost five. You owe me an awful lot.” Suddenly he chuckled. “Besides, now you’re on the way up! Listen, I’m tankless, just like you, but it doesn’t bother me too much any more. You want to hear my story? I’ve been tankless since I was fifteen years old, what do you think of that? Yes, I was fifteen when I first came to the Basement.”
“But how is that possible?”
“There was a fire in a big new extension on the upper pile. A big fire. My father got blamed for it. It was a great hysterical thing at the time. They shot my father. They couldn’t really do anything to his family, but just the same we never drew rations again.”
“Was your father the designer?”
“No, he was a worker.”
“Well, why blame him?” I retorted indignantly. “Why not blame whoever it was that specified combustible material?” The taboo on building materials that burn is understandably quite a strong one in Klittmann, and is not often broken.
Becmath shrugged. “I know the Basement inside out. I’ve been upstairs some, too. I know how all these one-shot outfits down here work, and I know how those one-shot outfits up there work too. The whole damned city is nothing but one-shot.”
He puffed meditatively. “I’ve had a lifetime of seeing where everybody goes wrong. Eventually, not too long ago, I was able to form my own outfit. I do it right. We move. Don’t worry about food when you’re with us. Listen, what kind of garbage were you eating with Klamer?”
I made a face. Becmath laughed. “Not too good, huh? I can imagine. Protein tasting like paper, months old. With us you’ll eat good. We’re close to having the whole undercover supply to the Basement sewn up. It’s a funny thing, but there’s more of a black market in luxury foods than there is of the plain stuff. That’s not the whole of it, of course. Once we got organised, I started taking over here, taking over there. It’s only a matter of applying force in the right places at the right time. We’re spreading out, getting bigger all the time. Already we own the distribution of pop in the Basement.”
Pop is an illegal addictive drug that can be taken in the arm or — even more dangerously — smoked. Where it’s grown has always been something of a mystery to most people. Some say there’s a secret private tank, others that a government agency grows it. Even if Becmath knew, I didn’t feel like asking just then.
Maybe it was the weed which was making me slightly high. But Becmath was beginning to get through to me. He was no ordinary Basement gangster, that was clear. Already he was affecting me in an extraordinary way with a kind of magnetism, a spell. I guess he was just a born leader.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I said shortly.
“I’ve told you, you’ve got brains. I can tell that just by looking at you. Men with brains are in short supply around here and I need them.”
He lit up a second tube then turned his oddly glittering eyes on me. “You’d better stick with my outfit, Klein, because before very long I’m going to make an empire out of the whole Basement.”
Three
Becmath was not long in fulfilling his promise.
In less than a year he was the biggest man in the Basement. Nearly all enterprises were sewn up; that is to say, they paid dues to him in order to stay in operation. There were a few, though, that he left alone. “You always need room to manoeuvre,” he used to say.
I saw what he meant when the cops started to get interested, and sent in one of their patrol sloops. They didn’t usually do that. They had enough trouble keeping law and order in the upper reaches and tended to leave the too-violent Basement to stew in its own juice. As might normally be expected, their intrusion caused trouble and they retreated with a badly damaged vehicle, but without being able to blame it on Bec. Somehow he lured them into a showdown with the Vokleit Gang, one of the independent outfits he had left alone.