“What the hell,” she said quietly. “I could do with a holiday anyway.”
That was Wednesday.
By Friday the city was a no.. go area.
By the following Tuesday the economy of Kumbolaland was shattered, twenty thousand people were dead (including the barman, shot by the rebels while storming the market barricades), almost a hundred thousand people were injured, all of Scarlett's assorted weapons had fulfilled the function for which they had been created, and the vulture had died of Greasy Degeneration.
Scarlett was already on the last train out of the country. It was time to move on, she felt. She'd been doing arms for too damn long. She wanted a change. Something with openings. She quite fancied herself as a newspaper journalist. A possibility. She fanned herself with her hat, and crossed her long legs in front of her.
Farther down the train a fight broke out. Scarlett grinned. People were always fighting, over her, and around her; it was rather sweet, really.
* * *
Sable had black hair, a trim black beard, and he had just decided to go corporate.
He did drinks with his accountant.
“How we doing, Frannie?” he asked her.
“Twelve million copies sold so far. Can you believe that?”
They were doing drinks in a restaurant called Top of the Sixes, on the top of 666 Fifth Avenue, New York. This was something that amused Sable ever so slightly. From the restaurant windows you could see the whole of New York; at night, the rest of New York could see the huge red 666s that adorned all four sides of the building. Of course, it was just another street number. If you started counting, you'd be bound to get to it eventually. But you had to smile.
Sable and his accountant had just come from a small, expensive, and particularly exclusive restaurant in Greenwich Village, where the cuisine was entirely nouvelle: a string bean, a pea, and a sliver of chicken breast, aesthetically arranged on a square china plate.
Sable had invented it the last time he'd been in Paris.
His accountant had polished her meat and two veg off in under fifty seconds, and had spent the rest of the meal staring at the plate, the cutlery, and from time to time at her fellow diners, in a manner that suggested that she was wondering what they'd taste like, which was in fact the case. It had amused Sable enormously.
He toyed with his Perrier.
“Twelve million, huh? That's pretty good.”
“That's great. ”
“So we're going corporate. It's time to blow the big one, am I right? California, I think. I want factories, restaurants, the whole schmear. We'll keep the publishing arm, but it's time to diversify. Yeah?”
Frannie nodded. “Sounds good, Sable. We'll need.. ”
She was interrupted by a skeleton. A skeleton in a Dior dress, with tanned skin stretched almost to snapping point over the delicate bones of the skull. The skeleton had long blond hair and perfectly made.. up lips: she looked like the person mothers around the world would point to, muttering, “That's what'll happen to you if you don't eat your greens”; she looked like a famine.. relief poster with style.
She was New York's top fashion model, and she was holding a book. She said, “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Sable, I hope you don't mind me intruding, but, your book, it changed my life, I was wondering, would you mind signing it for me?” She stared imploringly at him with eyes deepsunk in gloriously eyeshadowed sockets.
Sable nodded graciously, and took the book from her.
It was not surprising that she had recognized him, for his dark gray eyes stared out from his photo on the foil.. embossed cover. Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful, the book was called; The Diet Book of the Century!
“How do you spell your name?” he asked.
“Sherryl. Two Rs, one Y, one L.”
“You remind me of an old, old friend,” he told her, as he wrote swiftly and carefully on the title page. “There you go. Glad you liked it. Always good to meet a fan.”
What he'd written was this:
Sherryl, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine Rev. 6:6.
Dr. Raven Sable.
“It's from the Bible,” he told her.
She closed the book reverently and backed away from the table, thanking Sable, he didn't know how much this meant to her, he had changed her life, truly he had ... .
He had never actually earned the medical degree he claimed, since there hadn't been any universities in those days, but Sable could see she was starving to death. He gave her a couple of months at the outside. Handle your weight problem, terminally.
Frannie was stabbing at her laptop computer hungrily, planning the next phase in Sable's transformation of the eating habits of the Western World. Sable had bought her the machine as a personal present. It was very, very expensive, very powerful, and ultra.. slim. He liked slim things.
“There's a European outfit we can buy into for the initial toehold—Holdings (Holdings) Incorporated. That'll give us the Liechtenstein tax base. Now, if we channel funds out through the Caymans, into Luxembourg, and from there to Switzerland, we could pay for the factories in ...”
But Sable was no longer listening. He was remembering the exclusive little restaurant. It had occurred to him that he had never seen so many rich people so hungry.
Sable grinned, the honest, open grin that goes with job satisfaction, perfect and pure. He was just killing time until the main event, but he was killing it in such exquisite ways. Time, and sometimes people.
* * *
Sometimes he was called White, or Blanc, or Albus, or Chalky, or Weiss, or Snowy, or any one of a hundred other names. His skin was pale, his hair a faded blond, his eyes light gray. He was somewhere in his twenties at a casual glance, and a casual glance was all anyone ever gave him.
He was almost entirely unmemorable.
Unlike his two colleagues, he could never settle down in any one job for very long.
He had had all manner of interesting jobs in lots of interesting places.
(He had worked at the Chernobyl Power Station, and at Windscale, and at Three Mile Island, always in minor jobs that weren't very important.)
He had been a minor but valued member of a number of scientific research establishments.
(He had helped to design the petrol engine, and plastics, and the ring.. pull can.)
He could turn his hand to anything.
Nobody really noticed him. He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.
At this time he was working as deckhand on an oil tanker, heading toward Tokyo.