"Ye like it, don't ye?" Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. "Aye, ye like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? 'Ifye'd steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.' "
Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. "And those trucks? Those what-do-you-callums, tankers?"
"Fine where they are," Jonas said. "Not that we could move em now without attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you'll do it."
"And where will you be while we're flexing our muscles out at Citgo?"
"By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor's House, you clod - the dinner Thorin will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky society of the smaller one." Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap of tobacco. "A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man's locks ... I might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?"
"Don't strain yourself, Eldred."
Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. "So Roy and I aren't invited to this fancy do." "You'll be invited, oh yes, you'll be invited very warmly," Jonas said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for himself. "I'll offer your excuses. I'll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong men may weep."
"All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those hulks. You're too kind, Jonas."
"I'll be asking questions, as well," Jonas said dreamily. "Drifting here and there . . . looking spruce, smelling of baybemes . . . and asking my little questions. I've known folks in our line of trade who'll go to a fat, jolly fellow to find out the gossip - a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets. As for myself. Clay, I find that a woman's best, and the narrower the better - one with more nose than tits sticking off her. I look for one who don't paint her lips and keeps her hair scrooped back against her head."
"You have someone in mind?"
"Yar. Cordelia Delgado's her name."
"Delgado?"
"You know the name, it's on the lips of everyone in this town, I reckon. Susan Delgado, our esteemed Mayor's soon-to-be gilly. Cordelia's her auntie. Now here's a fact of human nature I've found: folk are more apt to talk to someone like her, who plays them close, than they are to the local jolly types who'll buy you a drink. And that lady plays them close. I'm going to slip in next to her at that dinner, and I'm going to compliment her on the perfume I doubt like hell she'll be wearing, and I'm going to keep her wineglass full. Now, how sounds that for a plan?"
"A plan for what? That's what I want to know."
"For the game of Castles we may have to play," Jonas said, and all the lightness dropped out of his voice. "We're to believe that these boys have been sent here more as punishment than to do any real job of work. It sounds plausible, too. I've known rakes in my time, and it sounds plausible, indeed. I believe it each day until about three in the morning, and then a little doubt sets in. And do you know what, Clay?"
Reynolds shook his head.
"I'm right to doubt. Just as I was right to go with Rimer to old man Thorin and convince him that Farson's glass would be better with the witch-woman, for the nonce. She'll keep it in a place where a gunslinger couldn't find it, let alone a nosy lad who's yet to have his first piece of arse. These are strange times. A storm's coming. And when you know the wind is going to blow, it's best to keep your gear battened down."
He looked at the cigarette he had made. He had been dancing it along the backs of his knuckles, as Reynolds had done earlier. Jonas pushed back the fall of his hair and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
"I don't want to smoke," he said, standing up and stretching. His back made small crackling sounds. "I'm crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake."
He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie's bare leg as he went by, also as Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.
"I don't want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I'll smell quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of my hand. But . . .I'd like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme o' things."
"Give them a sore paw."