Hautley's driver landed the aircab with a bounce and a thump that must have loosened half the nuts and bolts holding the craft together. Hautley, however, was grateful to have come down in one piece. From the sounds it had made in flight, the antiquated vehicle either had a bad case of asthma, or could be expected to blow a gasket or lose a venturi at any moment during flight. Quicksilver paid the exorbitant fare, added a gratuity whose sheer opulent munificence made the cabby's toes curl with ecstacy; and rang the doorbell.
He proffered his card to the robutler, eschewing, for just this once, a nom de plume, and while waiting, glanced about him curiously. Everywhere was rose-marble from far Capuchine and grillwork of fine Phriote craftsmanship, chastely ornamented with a zircon-studded chromium relief illustrative of various culture heroes from the local religion (Juarez, Mickey Mouse, Fidel Castro, Zorro and Joan Blondell, to be precise.) Hautley's sardonic brows mounted. What luxury! What taste! Dugan Motley, it seemed, had certainly invested his criminously-gotten gains wisely and well ...
A deep-chested foghorn voice in full-throated bellow interrupted these cultural musings.
"By dog, the great Quicksilver himself landing on mine doorstep, it is! Scintillate me for a no-good, a joy it is for you to meeting up with me—no?”
Surging mountainously in advance of the prim and staid robutler, came Dugan Motley himself, all seven foot-three inches and 325 pounds of him, dwarfing the automataton as he waddled into the hall. A gigantic, fiercely-bristling piratical beard of flaming crimson, twinkling eyes merry and bright and blue as the earth sea, Caribbean, he lumbered forward, his immense paunch of heroic, nay! mythological proportions swinging from side to side as he strode, with one fat iridium ring glittering from his left earlobe.
Beaming smiles and thundering forth articulate welcomes and little goat-cries of enthusiasm, he bore down on the startled Quicksilver like a super-dreadnaught descending in full force upon a tiny rowboat, enveloping him in a vast, bonecrunching bear bug, thumping him on the back with pats of spine-pulverizing impact; and firing off floor-shaking salvos of hearty booming laughter that caused the bric-a-brac to jingle, several alabaster busts to quake on their fluted pedestals and aroused seismic waves of tinkling among the crystal chandeliers.
The Master Burglar ushered Quicksilver into a first-floor den only a few microns smaller that the Grand Imperial State Audience Chamber itself. Pushing his guest into the seductive embrace of a cozy pneumatique that instantly adjusted to his contours and began a subtle massage job on his shoulder muscles, Dugan waddled over to the wall and thumbed a dial.
The wall sank into the floor soundlessly, revealing to Hautley's stunned gaze the most astounding collection of cut-crystal decanters filled with potables of every hue in the spectrum—an alcoholic's dream of the Land of Oz.
Roaring with Falstafian joviality, Dugan Motley grinned through the bristling bush of his bright beard.
"You, my friend, the great Quicksilver of about whom I have so much heard, you will drink—what?" He gestured expansively, using for the gesture a hand only slightly smaller than a medium-sized ham.
"Your choice you will taking, please, of two hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred thirty-six different varieties of booze, rotgut and panther's sweat (as the earthly Ancients would say, ho ho). So what is it you are choose? Or to the smoking perhaps-maybe? Sniff? Inject? Nasal-spray? Nerve center electrostimulus? Ovo-Snave? You ask—I got!" he boomed, crimson with the flash of hospitality.
"In other words—name my poison, eh?" Quicksilver smiled. For once his aplomb was overwhelmed by the sheer prodigality of the Master Burglar's generosity. He assumed a judicious air and pondered the row of sparkling decanters.
"Well. . . Chateau Moskowitz, Dugan, if you have it."
"If I am having it—to laugh, to laugh it is! Seventeen more bottles I am' having than the Emperor himself in the Imperial booze collection, har-har." Dugan slapped his wobbling paunch with one massive hand, a wallop that would have staggered a bullock. ''The bottles, the drinking, it is a lonely, sick old man's only joy," he snorted. "But no, yes—scut me for a snazzer, I having the same, by dog!" Waddling over to the wall of spirituous beverages, the fat man selected a crystal bottle.
"Vintage of '022, is okay being by you, mine boy? Heh?" he rumbled inquiringly.
Hautley nodded. "A good year, I believe, yes."
Dugan slopped the priceless beverage into two diamond-studded cups and they toasted each other.
"To crime," Quicksilver proposed aptly.
"Too crime, har har!"
They drank.
25
DUGAN MOTLEY gargled down his brew with snorting appreciation, and wiped the back of his hand across his whiskery mouth.
"Pfthaa! Hot damn and by dog, now, but that has the genuine old-fashioned Moxie, or am I be-lying in my molars, heh? Heh!" he belched.
"Excellent," Hautley commented. Judiciously he swizzled the palid sparkling wine about the outer rim of the goblet with a practised twist of the wrist. He threw back his head to languidly savor the bouquet with first the left nostril, then the right, and then with the left again, as it was particularly sensitive.
"A charmingly unpretentious little wine," he pronounced, after sampling it thoughtfully. "Ever so cautiously verging on audacity, but sweetly retiring from the brink, blushing, as it were. But pleasant, very ... ah ... humble, but touched with an amusing degree of self-confidence."
"Hot damn," Dugan Motley rumbled, admiringly. Hautley inserted the very tip of his tongue into the fluid and sipped frowningly.
"Hmm ... from the, ah, the west side of the vinyard, I should say," he continued. "More sun in the afternoons, you know," he improvised, at Dugan's gape of non-comprehension. "Brings out the tannic acid in the soil, of course. Yes ... on the whole, a very hospitable little wine. Very."
Dugan's huge red face split in two with a grin that revealed a display of ivories that would have quickened the heart of a pianist.
"Ho, it is the true connoisseur, this Quicksilver, by hot damn and hot dog! What expertise and know-how, not to mentioning the savvy too! Oh, the joy it is to an old lonely sick man's heart, the very sight of you is bringing,—the great Quicksilver!"
"Happy to meet you, too," Hautley said. "I've always been an admirer—"
Dugan's cement-mixer voice roared on over Hautley's polite interpolation like a bulldozer sliding over a cabbage patch. "Upstairs—! can show you!—I am keeping scrapbooks full of you, yes! That time on Zanuck 3 when the ruby eye from the idol of N'gumba-Yoh-Yoh the Corn Goddess you are the stealing of! What finesse! And the timing, how smooth!"
"Tut, now!" Hautley said modestly.
"And the kidnaping for the huge ransom of that Prince from Niekas 12—how you are, with the adroits and the subtles, too, hoy! And him the Prince, too, a forty-foot Crocodile Man! Oh, the marvelousness of it all! To an old man's heart it is like a breath of the good old days ..."
Against his innate sense of modesty, Quicksilver could not help but bask before the warmth of this praise like earth poet of pre-antiquity Walter Savage Landor before the fires of life.
"Old!" he protested, rallying the old bandit. "Why, Dugan you sound like a real old-timer, but from the looks of you, I'd swear you're not a day over two hundred! Come on, now, I'd thumbprint an oath to the fact."
"Oh, har har har!"
They joshed back and forth over the sparkling wine, as two veteran professionals will upon their first meeting. But it was grim business that had brought Hautley speeding to this quaint backwater of a planet, and he was impatient to get the social amenities out of the way so that he could get down to the brass tacks of business, as it were. He had no slightest doubt in mind, that Dugan Motley would refuse to give him the inside information he required. For, as yet, he had not found a chance to reveal to the bluff, swaggering old space-pirate the disquieting news that the evil forces against whom Hautley was opposed in a duel of wits had ruthlessly murdered in cold blood Dugan's old partner in crime, helpers, inoffensive Shpern Hufferd.