"Look, call Mrs. Rowan. She'll promise you I'll be out by three. You know her-if she made the promise to you, she'd see to it I got out in time. It's a three-month out, for chrissakes."
"What about the desk?"
"I'll bullshit my way past. I've got an understanding with Turnip. Thesh captain's bars are good for more than just a spot at the front of a ration line, eh?"
"Sir, maybe that's the way they do things up in the Great Lakes, but not here."
Valentine held his breath, forcing his face to color and his tone to harden. "Do they stand their watches indoors here?"
Hinks blanched. "Aww, Mr. Rowan sir, have a-"
"Heart?" Valentine finished.
The guard looked inside the Station Rooms. "Okay, Mr. Rowan, three a.m. You're not here by three-oh-five, I'm phoning up. Okay? Mr. Turner isn't at the desk anyway. Reading in the John again. You wanna report someone, you should start with him."
"Forget about it, Ed, errr-Perry. You're a good egg. I'll bring you back a bottle of rum or something, how'sh that?"
"Just be out by the time my shift ends, or I'm perishable."
"Hey," Valentine slurred, "I promished, right? Just a quick visit, and we ain't spending it talking."
The guard opened the door. "Mrs. Rowan's some lady, sir. I hope I get some rank and get a chance to take my pick."
"That's the shpirit, Perry," Valentine said, coming in out of the rain and wiping his hair back. "One way to move up is to do favors for higher ranks. Maybe I can get you into the Coastal Marines. Quick advancement. Dishipline isn't too hard, if you do your job."
The sentry shook his head. "Like my outfit just fine, sir.
Going ashore and attacking a blockhouse full of outlaws ain't my idea of a career."
David Valentine waited for the sentry to unlock the inner door, and moved across the stained carpet to the stairs. The night manager's desk was empty, as Hinks predicted. Most of the lights were off, and the remaining elevator that still worked was always shut down at night when the hotel closed up to conserve electricity. Valentine smelled soap and heard splashing water coming from the basement: someone was doing laundry in one of the slop tubs there.
He climbed to the top floor, remembering the intolerable heat of their arrival that summer, the last in a series of moves as he performed his duties as a Quisling Officer. His real home lay in the hill country of Arkansas, Missouri, and Eastern Oklahoma, on free soil, though since being recruited as a Cat, he'd hardly spent six consecutive months there. For the past year, he'd been dragging Duvalier all around the Gulf Coast, worming through the Kurian Order, obtaining a commission and a promotion under a dead man's name and background provided for him by Southern Command-it made him feel like a maggot in a corpse.
Though the Station Rooms predated climate control and therefore had fair-size windows, the bars prevented residents from escaping to the fire escape to nap out the heat. The bars and windows were the only part of the Station Rooms inspected and kept in prime condition. Elsewhere the paint was peeling, the walls were dimpled, and the plumbing fixtures were maintained in a condition that shifted back and forth between inoperative and barely functioning.
Valentine reached the chipped wooden door to "Mrs. Rowan's" apartment. He knocked softly, using a three-and-two rap to identify himself, three soft and two loud. The sole lightbulb in the hallway faded for a moment and then brightened; New Orleans's patchwork power system was having its usual nighttime irregularities.
The door opened, revealing an attractively angular face under short red hair sticking out in all directions.
"You're out late," Alessa Duvalier said, still half-asleep. She wore an oversize yellow T-shirt of tentlike proportions, which was coming apart at the shoulder seams. "What is it?"
He ducked inside and flicked off the light. To his Cat-eyes, the room remained lit and as detailed as ever. There was just the usual color-shift that came with low-light vision.
"I was recognized." He used old American Sign Language to convey this information as he said for the benefit of the microphones: "Baby, we're out tomorrow. Last chance for ninety nights." They'd found a bug when they'd first moved to the Station Rooms months ago, and asked for a different room-complaining, with justification, about bedbugs. Management moved them to the stifling top floor, and a Coastal Marine widow, Mrs. Kineen, took an empty room next to them the same day.
Duvalier woke up fast. "Somebody made you? How?" she signed.
He flopped down on the bed as soon as he got his coat off. He let out an occasional moan as he told her, spelling out some of the words with his fingers. They'd had training in sign language before setting out from the Ozark Free Territory, and though they practiced, Valentine's usually quick-acting brain faltered after the long day and the encounter with Alistar.
The woman who'd taught him to be a Cat sat in her chair, folded herself up so her chin rested on her left knee, and rocked the bed with her right leg so the headboard banged the wall they shared with Mrs. Kineen.
The room smelled of cloves and walnuts. Duvalier had picked up intestinal parasites in her travels, perhaps as long ago as their trek into the Great Plains Gulag when she first recruited him three years ago, and was dosing herself again in an effort to flush them.
"This week has been nothing but bad news," she signed, interrupting the tale when he began to describe his disposal of the corpse. "Laundry-room intelligence says there's been a lot of new faces in town. Troops moving in. Some say a push into the Tex-Mex borders; others say it's Southern Command's turn again. I know the train station's been busy. Lots of cars taking on supplies coming in from the Gulf Coast and moving west. This didn't turn into such a dull assignment after all. I've been able to watch the station and pick up a little." She peeked out the window. "Hope you can get going soon. Southern Command needs to know details."
"I don't think the Wolves are going to show," he decided. "I'm going to have to go with it and improvise. Figure out a way to oust Captain Saunders and get control of the Thunderbolt-"
She let out a yelp, faintly orgiastic, and winked at her partner.