Strange Trades Read Free Page A

applause faded. If he continued to voice his drunken racial slurs, I’d have to sic Deatherage’s man on him. I had plenty of HUB patrons richer than he whom I had no wish to offend.
    As it was, his daughter intervened.
    “Quiet, Father,” she said firmly. “I think he sings very well.”
    Her grip on his arm seemed to drain all belligerence from him. Across his riven face, his love for his daughter warred with his hate. Finally, he raised his glass to his lips and drank deeply, a tired and defeated old relic.
    I studied the strange tableau they presented. Van Staaden was a cranelike figure with a stubble of white hair and a sharp nose. Blauvelt was a beefy man in his thirties, with a dandy’s mannerisms ill-suited to his heavy body. Christina—well, Christina, I thought then, no more fitted in visually with those two than a nun in a rogue’s gallery, or Circe amid her swine.
    She was a willowy, small-breasted woman with hair the color and fineness of platinum threads, styled in bangs across her brow and feathered down the back of her long neck. Her nose was tiny, her lips always hidden by jet lip-gloss. Tonight, she wore lilac pants and top, with white sandals. Like half the women in the club, she had a small lifegem affixed at the base of her throat, which fluxed in time with her pulse.
    The whole potentially ugly scene was over in seconds, much shorter than I have taken to describe it. Charlie had vanished from the stage, and the club buzzed anew with meaningless talk.
    Ten minutes later, I felt a gentle tug at my elbow as I mingled.
    I turned to face Christina van Staaden.
    “I know you overheard my father’s tactless comment, Mr. Holloway,” she said. “I’d like to apologize for him. You will make the proper allowances for his situation, I hope.”
    I nodded without expressing my real opinion. It was something I had grown quite good at.
    “Wonderful,” she said. “It’s all forgotten, then. By the way, I really do feel that Kid Charlemagne is a most exciting performer. I wasn’t just sticking up for him out of sympathy. In fact, I was wondering if I could possibly meet him.”
    She paused for a moment. Then, as if it possessed the utmost importance, she said, “I understand he’s from Mexico.”
    Again, I nodded without comment, neither confirming nor denying. I was trapped in her eyes.
    Once a friend brought me a piece of olivine from Hawaii. Formed in a volcano’s heart, the gem was like translucent jade, hard and impenetrable, with fascinating depths.
    Christina’s eyes were two shards of olivine.
    I thought about her request. I neither liked nor disliked the woman at this point. Yet I felt indebted to her for defusing her father. And of course, she could always approach Charlie on her own if I didn’t introduce her.
    But why try to dissect my motives at this late date?
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go now.”
    Backstage, I knocked on the door to Charlie’s small dressing room. There was no answer, so we went in.
    We found Charlie reading. He pored intently over a paperback I had given him. It was the ’95 edition of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands, with the Ralph Steadman cover.
    “Charlie,” I said. He looked up.
    Sky met sea.
    Something snapped closed in the air between them.
    “Christina van Staaden,” I said.
    But neither heard me.
     
    The next morning, I sat at a table in the empty room still pulsing with the ghosts of last night’s events, figuring accounts. A shadow fell across the screen of the submicro.
    Across from me stood Leon Deatherage, head of Hesperides security, having arrived in his usual silence.
    I filed my useless reckoning of gains and losses and flicked the machine off. “Sit down, Leon, and save your energy for evildoers.”
    Deatherage lifted a heavy transparent chair off the table with one hand and deftly set it upright. He dropped down into it with a grace that surprised me in such a big man. From his pocket he took a pack of Camel vegerettes. He lit one,