For a brief moment, Pirate Lafitte hesitated. Then, “Done!” he snapped, and offered his hand. “For 15 percent. Plus rental of the building.”
They shook, and Darger said, “You will have no objection to having the ingot tested by a reputable assayer.”
In the French Quarter, meanwhile, Surplus was having an almost identical conversation with a slight and acerbic woman, clad in a severe black dress, who was not only the mayor of New Orleans but also the proprietress of its largest and most notorious brothel. Behind her, alert and unspeaking, stood two uniformed ape-men from the Canadian Northwest, both with the expressions of baffled anger common to beasts that have been elevated almost but not quite to human intelligence. “An assayist?” she demanded. “Is my word not good enough for you? And if it is not, should we be doing business at all?”
“The answer to all three of your questions, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, is yes,” Surplus said amiably. “The assay is for your own protection. As you doubtless know, silver is routinely adulterated with other metals. When we are done with the silver, the slurry will be melted down and recast into an ingot. Certainly, you will want to know that the bar returned to you is of equal worth to the bar you rented out.”
“Hmmm.” They were sitting in the lobby of the madam-mayor’s maison de tolérance, she in a flaring wicker chair whose similarity to a throne could not possibly be unintentional, and Surplus in a wooden folding chair facing her. Because it was still early afternoon, the facility was not open for business. But messengers and government flunkies came and went. Now one such whispered in Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s ear. She waved him away. “Seventeen and a half percent, take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Good,” Tresjolie said. “I have business with the zombie master now. Move your chair alongside mine and stay to watch. If we are to do business, you will find this salubrious.”
A round and cheerful man entered the public room, followed by half a dozen zombies. Surplus studied these with interest. Though their eyes were dull, their faces were stiff, and there was an unhealthy sheen to their skin, they looked in no way like the rotting corpses of Utopian legend. Rather, they looked like day laborers who had been worked into a state of complete exhaustion. Which doubtless was the case.
“Good morning!” said the jolly man, rubbing his hands briskly together. “I have brought this week’s coffle of debtors who, having served their time, are now eligible for forgiveness and manumission.”
“I had wondered at the source of your involuntary labor force,” Surplus said. “They are unfortunates who fell into arrears, then?”
“Exactly so,” said the zombie master. “New Orleans does not engage in the barbarous and expensive practice of funding debtors prisons. Instead, debt-criminals are chemically rendered incapable of independent thought and put to work until they have paid off their debt to society. Which today’s happy fellows have done.” With a roguish wink, he added, “You may want to keep this in mind before running up too great a line of credit at the rooms upstairs. Are you ready to begin, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie?”
“You may proceed, Master Bones.”
Master Bones gestured imperiously and the first zombie shuffled forward. “Through profligacy you fell into debt,” he said, “and through honest labor you have earned your way out. Open your mouth.”
The pallid creature obeyed. Master Bones produced a spoon and dipped into a saltcellar on a nearby table. He dumped the salt into the man’s mouth. “Now swallow.”
By gradual degrees, a remarkable transformation came over the man. He straightened and looked about him with tentative alertness. “I …” he said. “I remember now. Is my … is my wife …?”
“Silence,” the zombie master said. “The ceremony is not yet complete.” The Canadian guardsmen had shifted position to defend their mistress should the disoriented ex-zombie attack her.
“You are hereby declared a free citizen of New Orleans again, and indebted to no man,” Tresjolie said solemnly. “Go and overspend no more.” She extended a leg and lifted her skirts above her ankle. “You may now kiss my foot.”
* * *
“So did you ask Tresjolie for a line of credit at her sporting house?” Tawny asked when Surplus reported his adventure to his confederates.
“Certainly not!” Surplus exclaimed. “I told her instead that it has always been my ambition to own a small but select private brothel, one dedicated solely to my own personal use. A harem, if you will, but one peopled by a rotating staff of well-paid employees. I suggested I might shortly be in a position to commission her to find an appropriate hotel and create such an institution for me.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me that she doubted I was aware of exactly how expensive such an operation would be.”
“And you said to her?”
“That I didn’t think money would be a problem,” Surplus said airily. “Because I expected to come into a great deal of it very soon.”
Tawny crowed with delight. “Oh, you boys are such fun!”
“In unrelated news,” Darger said, “your new dress has come.”
“I saw it when it first arrived.” Tawny made a face. “It is not calculated to show off my body to its best advantage—or to any advantage at all, come to that.”
“It is indeed aggressively modest,” Darger agreed. “However, your character is demure and inexperienced. To her innocent eyes, New Orleans is a terribly wicked place, indeed a cesspool of carnality and related sins. Therefore, she needs to be protected at all times by unrevealing apparel and stalwart men of the highest moral character.”
“Further,” Surplus amplified, “she is the weak point in our plans, for whoever has possession of her tattoo and knows its meaning can dispense with us entirely by kidnapping her off the street.”
“Oh!” Tawny said in a small voice, clearly intended to arouse the protective instincts of any man nearby.
Surplus took an instinctive step toward her, and then caught himself. He grinned like the carnivore he was. “You’ll do.”
The third meeting with a potential investor took place that evening in a dimly lit club in a run-down parish on the fringe of the French Quarter—for the entertainment was, in the public mind, far too louche for even that notoriously open-minded neighborhood. Pallid waitresses moved lifelessly between the small tables, taking orders and delivering drinks while a small brass-and-drums jazz ensemble played appropriately sleazy music to accompany the stage show.
“I see that you are no aficionado of live sex displays,” the zombie master Jeremy Bones said. The light from the candle sconce on the table made the beads of sweat on his face shine like luminous drops of rain.
“The artistic success of such displays depends entirely on the degree to which they agree with one’s own sexual proclivities,” Darger replied. “I confess that mine lie elsewhere. But never mind that. Returning to the subject at hand: The terms are agreeable to you, then?”
“They are. I am unclear, however, as to why you insist the assay be performed at the Bank of San Francisco, when New Orleans has several fine financial institutions of its own.”
“All of which are owned in part by you, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, and Duke Lafitte.”
“Pirate Lafitte, you mean. An assay is an assay and a bank is a bank. Why should it matter to you which one is employed?”
“Earlier today, you brought six zombies to the mayor to be freed. Assuming this is a typical week, that would be roughly three hundred zombies per year. Yet all the menial work in the city has been handed over to zombies and there still remain tens of thousands at work in the plantations that line the river.”
“Many of those who fall into debt draw multiyear sentences.”
“I asked around and discovered that Lafitte’s ships import some two hundred prisoners a week from municipalities and territories all the way up the Mississippi to St. Louis.”