He went back to the cab.
“Is a good painting?” David asked.
“It’s pretty. Trivial, but pretty.”
“I don’t mean good that way. I mean, is it real?”
“Of course,” Eitel said, perhaps too sharply. “Do we have to have this discussion again, David? You know damned well I sell only genuine paintings. Overpriced a little, but always genuine.”
“One thing I never can understand. Why you not sell them fakes?”
Startled, Eitel said, “You think I’m crooked, David?”
“Sure I do.”
“You say it so lightheartedly. I don’t like your humor sometimes.”
“Humor? What humor? Is against law to sell valuable Earth works of art to aliens. You sell them. Makes you crook, right? Is no insult. Is only description.”
“I don’t believe this,” Eitel said. “What are you trying to start here?”
“I only want to know, why you sell them real stuff. Is against the law to sell real ones, is probably not against the law to sell them fakes. You see? For two years I wonder this. We make just as much money, we run less risk.”
“My family has dealt in art for over a hundred years, David. No Eitel has ever knowingly sold a fake. None ever will.” It was a touchy point with him. “Look,” he said, “maybe you like playing these games with me, but you could go too far. All right?”
“You forgive me, Eitel?”
“If you shut up.”
“You know better than that. Shutting up I am very bad at. Can I tell you one more thing, and then I shut up really?”
“Go ahead,” Eitel said, sighing.
“I tell you this: you a very confused man. You a crook who thinks he not a crook, you know what I mean? Which is bad thinking. But is all right. I like you. I respect you, even. I think you are excellent businessman. So you forgive rude remarks?”
“You give me a great pain,” Eitel said.
“I bet I do. You forget I said anything. Go make deal, many millions, tomorrow we have mint tea together and you give me my cut and everybody happy.”
“I don’t like mint tea.”
“Is all right. We have some anyway.”
Seeing Agila standing in the doorway of her hotel room, Eitel was startled again by the impact of her presence, the overwhelming physical power of her beauty. If she confuse you, it can cost you. What you see is all artificial, he told himself. It’s just a mask. Eitel looked from Agila to Anakhistos, who sat oddly folded, like a giant umbrella. That’s what she really is, Eitel thought. She’s Mrs. Anakhistos from Centaurus, and her skin is like rubber and her mouth is a hinged slot and this body that she happens to be wearing right now was made in a laboratory. And yet, and yet, and yet—the wind was roaring, he was tossing wildly about—
What the hell is happening to me?
“Show us what you have for us,” Anakhistos said.
Eitel slipped the little painting from its case. His hands were shaking ever so slightly. In the closeness of the room he picked up two strong fragrances, something dry and musty coming from Anakhistos, and the strange, irresistible mixtures of incongruous spices that Agila’s synthetic body emanated.
“The Madonna of the Palms, Lorenzo Bellini, Venice, 1597,” Eitel said. “Very fine work.”
“Bellini is extremely famous, I know.”
“The famous ones are Giovanni and Gentile. This is Giovanni’s grandson. He’s just as good, but not well-known. I couldn’t possibly get you paintings by Giovanni or Gentile. No one on Earth could.”
“This is quite fine,” said Anakhistos. “True Renaissance beauty. And very Earthesque. Of course it is genuine?”
Eitel said stiffly, “Only a fool would try to sell a fake to a connoisseur such as yourself. But it would be easy enough for us to arrange a spectroscopic analysis in Casablanca, if—”
“Ah, no, no, no, I meant no suspicioning of your reputation. You are impeccable. We unquestion the genuinity. But what is done about the export certificate?”
“Easy. I have a document that says this is a recent copy, done by a student in Paris. They are not yet applying chemical tests of age to the paintings, not yet. You will be able to take the painting from Earth, with such a certificate.”
“And the price?” said Anakhistos.
Eitel took a deep breath. It was meant to steady him, but it dizzied him instead, for it filled his lungs with Agila.
He said, “If the deal is straight cash, the price is four million dollars.”
“And otherwise?” Agila asked.
“I’d prefer to talk to you about that alone,” he said to her.
“Whatever you want to say, you can say in front of Anakhistos. We are absolute mates. We have complete trust.”
“I’d still prefer to speak more privately.”
She shrugged. “All right. The balcony.”
Outside, where the sweetness of night-blooming flowers filled the air, her fragrance was less overpowering. It made no difference. Looking straight at her only with difficulty, he said, “If I can spend the rest of this night making love to you, the price will be three million.”
“This is a joke?”
“In fact, no. Not at all.”
“It is worth a million dollars to have sexual contact with me?”
Eitel imagined how his father would have answered that question, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. Their accumulated wisdom pressed on him like a hump. To hell with them, he thought.
He said, listening in wonder to his own words, “Yes. It is.”
“You know that this body is not my real body.”
“I know.”
“I am an alien being.”
“Yes. I know.”
She studied him in silence a long while. Then she said, “Why did you make me come outside to ask me this?”
“On Earth, men sometimes become quite angry when strangers ask their wives to go to bed with them. I didn’t know how Anakhistos would react. I don’t have any real idea how Centaurans react to anything.”
“I am Centauran also,” she pointed out.
“You don’t seem as alien to me.”
She smiled quickly, on-off. “I see. Well, let us confer with Anakhistos.”
But the conference, it turned out, did not include Eitel. He stood by, feeling rash and foolish, while Agila and Anakhistos exchanged bursts of harsh rapid words in their own language, a buzzing, eerie tongue that was quite literally like nothing on Earth. He searched their faces for some understanding of the flow of conversation. Was Anakhistos shocked? Outraged? Amused? And she? Even wearing human guise, she was opaque to him too. Did she feel contempt for Eitel’s bumptious lusts? Indifference? See him as quaintly primitive, bestial, anthropoid? Or was she eagerly cajoling her husband into letting her have her little adventure? Eitel had an idea. He felt far out of his depth, a sensation as unfamiliar as it was unwelcome. Dry throat, sweaty palms, brain in turmoiclass="underline" but there was no turning back now.
At last Agila turned to him and said, “It is agreed. The painting is ours at three million. And I am yours until dawn.”
David was still waiting. He grinned a knowing grin when Eitel emerged from the Merinides with Agila on his arm, but said nothing. I have lost points with him, Eitel thought. He thinks I have allowed the nonsense of the flesh to interfere with a business decision, and now I have made myself frivolous in his eyes. It is more complicated than that, but David would never understand. Business and women must be kept separate things. To the taxi driver, Eitel knew Helen of Troy herself would be as nothing next to a million dollars: mere meat, mere heat. So be it, Eitel told himself. David would never understand. What David would understand, Eitel thought guiltily, was that in cutting the deal with Agila he had also cut fifty thousand dollars off David’s commission. But he did not intend to let David know anything about that.