The Cat was tempted. After several sleepless nights, he'd spent the day keying himself up to kill a hatful of high-ranking Quislings, and then perhaps himself, only to find the moment, or his nerve, failing to live up to his destructive plan.
"What is it?"
"Joy-juice," the bearded laborer who'd produced the sack said.-"Little wine, little homemade brandy, some fruit squeezings. Go on, Colonel, it's good stuff. Ain't blinded us yet."
Valentine shot some of the mixture into his throat, but didn't have the knack for stopping the stream yet. It splashed across his dress uniform shirt. He gulped it down. He'd had worse.
By the time the truck passed the markers at the bottom of the estate hill, they'd all had a round.
"How do you like working on the Residence?" Valentine asked.
"Good work," the man said, a few stray gray hairs on his head standing out against the black of his face and beard. "Ration book, and cash besides. No way I'm going back across the Missisisippi. There'll be good work for years. I can do electricity, plumbing, carpentry ..."
Valentine felt for Xray-Tango across the river, trying to build New Columbia using captured Free Territory men, while the skilled workers, imported at God-knows-what expense, went to Solon's Residence.
"You don't live on the site?"
"Naw. Town's more fun. We all got a real house, even a couple of Tex-Mex women in residence for the chores and such. It's a sweet setup, Colonel. There's a diner in town, bars. They're talking about getting a movie-house going."
"I'm due at a party tonight. What's good to eat at the Blue Dome?"
The laborer smiled at Valentine with tobacco-stained teeth. "Shit, Colonel, what do you take me for? Only time I seen the inside of that place was getting the toilets running. Most of us do odd jobs at night, and old Dom, he pays well. But if I tried to walk in as a customer ..."
"Exclusive?"
"Strictly for you officer-types and the rat-boat captains. What passes for society in these parts. But don't you worry; they'll treat you right, and the food'll stay down."
Valentine thought regretfully of the cigar box full of "Solon Scrip" back at his tent. He hadn't expected the day to end with dinner and drinks, so he'd left that morning with only a dollar or two tip money in his identification pouch.
The truck dropped him off next to a pyramid of rubble with a watch post atop it.
"Follow this street down to the river, Colonel," the workman said. "You'll see the Ragbag, a clothing-swap warehouse that'll still be open. Just to the right is the Blue Dome. No windows and only one entrance. It's got a neon sign with an arrow; you can't miss it."
"Thanks for the drink," Valentine said, after a second squirt from the leather flask. He offered two dollars in scrip. The laborer refused.
"It comes with the ride. Watch your money at the card table, and when you draw a flush, think of me."
The pickup bucked into gear and Valentine waved goodbye. He walked to the new riverfront of the north side of the Arkansas, at the edge of a little slope above the river proper, and thus safe from flooding. There were tent bars playing music, street vendors with food in carts, and everywhere men in deck shoes and woolen coats and sweaters, wearing knit caps or baseball-style ones with ship names sewn into the crown. A trio of muscular rivermen drinking behind a bar glanced at him, but shifted their eyes apologetically when they took in the uniform.
Valentine peered into the Ragbag's single window. The rest were still boarded up. Long tables and racks of recovered clothing were piled everywhere, and there was a cobbler in the corner tearing apart old shoes to recover the soles. He looked up the lively street and saw that a neon sign advertising the Blue Dome hummed from its position hanging out over the sidewalk. The joy-juice had assuaged his headache and left him sleepy.
The Blue Dome was a squatty block of masonry, better fitted together than most of the ant heaps on the south side of the shallow Arkansas bisecting New Columbia, and painted to boot. There were no windows on the first story, and only shuttered, tiny slit ones on the second. Atop the building he could see the awning of something he guessed to be a penthouse; someone had gone to the trouble to hang basketed plants. From the alley between the Ragbag and the Blue Dome he heard the hum of ventilation fans and picked up the charred smell of meat on the grill. Valentine realized he was hungry.
Oddly enough, the Blue Dome's entrance was in the alley rather than on the main street. The aged stairs were pre-2022; he descended them to a new wooden door, which opened even before he knocked.
"Pri-oh, excuse me, sir, come right in," the burly doorman said, moving aside. Valentine stepped inside and halted, awestruck.
He felt as though he'd opened a worm-eaten wooden box only to find a Faberge egg enclosed. Stuccoed walls opened up on an elegant room. Ensconced lighting behind delicate glass seashells drew his eyes upward to the glow of the Dome.
It stretched above a parquet wooden dance floor and stage to the right of the entrance. The concave surface was painted with some kind of luminescent blue material, which glowed in the reflected light of what Valentine guessed to be hundreds of small, low-wattage bulbs, giving the effect of a cloudless sky at twilight. Opposite him stood a massive wooden bar with polished silver fittings, a solid wall of liquor bottles behind it, and a bartender in a crisp white shirt and black tie standing ready. Between the bar and the stage, an elevated corner platform held a seated knot of musicians playing a quiet variety of jazz. The undomed part of the room stretched off to Valentine's left. Uniformed members of the TMCC sat around linen-topped tables. They stood on staggered burgundy-carpeted levels under the subdued blue light from what looked to be fifty miles of fiberoptic cable artfully wound into the ceiling and structural pillars. Around the edges of the room velvet-curtained alcoves were more brightly lit; Valentine could just make out green-topped gaming tables behind heavy burgundy curtains.
"Quite a basement," Valentine said to the doorman.
A man wearing the first true tuxedo Valentine had ever seen glided over to him. He had the coconut brown features of the subcontinent, and teeth as brilliantly white as his eyes. "Welcome, Colonel. I've been told of you and the service you did in the floods. Your first time here, yes?"
Valentine nodded.
"It was just a murky basement when I came here a year ago."