A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) (2 page)

“Okay.” Conger had had some of his money changed into Portuguese currency at the New Lisbon teleport station. “Here, now stop sloshing crap on me.” He shoved a bill into the mechanism’s donation slot.

“Muito ‘brigado,”
said the wheeled machine as it ingested the money.

“Which means, much obliged or thank you very much.”

“I know,” said Conger.

“Here’s your lapel pin, senhor. Forgive the grease on it.” The machine bumped against one of the thousands of noryl plastic pillars which supported New Lisbon up above. Caked mud and bird droppings shook loose from the support struts, which were a hundred feet above them at this point, and sprinkled down on Conger’s two-piece travel suit.
“Sinto
muito,”
muttered the machine, reaching out an extendable hand to brush dove dung off Conger’s shoulder. “Which means, I am very sorry.”

“Why don’t you apologize to me also?” complained a derelict sprawled in the mucky passway. “You just ran over my prosthetic device.”

“Your what?” asked the machine, slowing to a stop.

The derelict clutched his ragged one-piece lounging suit to his frail body, then kicked the smudged machine in the side. “This,
tonto
, my false leg.”

Conger pulled away from the squabble, turned down a cobblestone street. The roof of Old Lisbon had a light vent here, letting thin late afternoon sunlight cut down through the murk. Conger stepped over a dead dog, scattering the fat grey rats that had been at it. Near the corner, next to the ruins of a 16th Century cathedral rose the new looking dome of a building. Its light strip signs pulsed, advertising Pugilismo Mecanico!

Roboxing! in two foot high script.

One of the rats had followed him to the box office of the prize fighting dome. Conger booted it toward a stuffed gutter with one of his synthleather tourist shoes.

Inside the tinted plastic ticket booth a humanoid robot who’d recently been repainted a bright flat pink was leaning far to the right. “How many, senhor?”

“One,” said Conger, “in the private box section.” He’d arrived in New Lisbon at 5 PM. The teleport trip from Manhattan took only a few seconds, but because of the time difference he’d jumped ahead six hours.

When he checked in at the Novo America Hotel he’d found one of his coded messages directed him to descend into Old Lisbon and contact the sniper who had shot and killed Colonel Cavala. The sniper was to meet him in his box at the robot fight arena.

The climb ramps weren’t functioning, so Conger had to walk up and around to the horseshoe row of hanging plastic boxes above the ring.

Inside Box #15 a plump man in parts of a military uniform was sitting back in a partially inflated cushion chair as he watched the robot bout below, munching on a thick link of black sausage wrapped in brown bread.

Conger crossed the catwalk to #15 and gave the prearranged knock on the door of the plastic box.

The plump man turned to blink at him, still chewing.
“Que deseja?”
he asked. “Which means …”

“What do I want, I know.” Conger’d taken a sleep course in Conversational Portuguese only six months ago. Putting one hand near the smeared see-through wall, he made the prearranged highsign.

“Que?” said the plump man. He took another bite of his rough hewn sandwich, then slowly began to smile. “Oh,
sim,
yes, of course, the American spy.
Entre,
which means …”

Conger came into the booth. “Let’s have the countersign,” he told the plump man.

The man waved his sausage at him. “I am Captain Conti Delgado,” he laughed. “Anyone here will assure you of that. I’m a well-known pugilism buff.”

Up from below came the clang of two ancient boxing robots going at each other.

“Even so,” said Conger.

Sighing, the plump man placed his sandwich on the lid of a realistic imitation wicker picnic basket which was sitting between his sneakered feet. He gave the countersign. “Now,
sente-se, por favor,
which means . . .”

Conger sat down on the hanging booth’s only other chair. The air-filled chair gave a mild hiss and commenced to very slowly deflate. “What can you tell me about Colonel Cavala?” he asked.

Delgado retrieved his snack, reached his other hand into the basket.

“Care for some blood sausage, senhor? Made from one of my own pigs.”

He cocked his head upward. “I have a pig farm up on the outskirts of New Lisbon.”

“No, thanks.” Conger took a vial of kelp pills from his pocket, shook four into his palm.

“These are the most healthy pigs you’ll come by, senhor. They eat only organically grown slop and I myself give each one a shot of antibiotic once a month. Did you ever inject several thousand pigs inthe …”

“About the colonel,” said Conger.

Giving a shrug, Delgado withdrew his hand from the picnic hamper. An immense clattering bang rose up from the ring. “Huh, the Masked Marvel fell down. That wasn’t supposed to happen.” He took a bite out of the sausage, turning to watch Conger. “Colonel Cavala is dead.”

“You’re certain?”

“I know who I shoot—after all, senhor.”

“And it was Cavala you killed?”

Delgado laughed. “I make my living now as a freelance assassin, senhor, and have since I left the service, after many happy years on the front lines in Angola. To survive as a freelance, and perhaps the same is true in your rather specialized line of work, you have to be good and dependable. Were I to shoot more than one or two of the wrong people I’d be finished.”

“You knew the colonel well?”

“At one time we were extremely close,” said Captain Delgado. “That was of course before he turned into a wild-eyed radical and soft-hearted liberal. He served together in the unfortunately unsuccessful campaign to regain Goa from those wretched Indians.”

“Then you can be sure it was him you shot.”

“Of course,” replied the plump man. “I did my job, I guarantee you. I don’t know why NSO is so worried.”

“I’m not with NSO.” Conger ate two kelp pills. “I’m with RFA.”

“Ah, you RFA people are not so … not so …” He made circles in the musty air with his sausage. “Not so daring and flamboyant as NSO. I rarely if ever get any work out of your organization.” He returned to eating for a moment. “Well, senhor, whoever you are working for you can rest assured Cavala is dead and gone. I put a hole through him right here … no, a little higher … right here. In through here and out the back with the best laser rifle you can get, a Russian-made job your NSO people bought me on my last saint’s day. Even the most gifted surgeons in the world can not patch up a man after that.”

“Where do you think his body is now?”

“Poor Cavala is buried in the family plot at the New Relocated Sacred Ground of Our Blessed Lady Cemetery,” said Delgado, jabbing a thumb toward the ceiling. “Up in New Lisbon.”

There’d been a coded message about that waiting at Conger’s hotel as well. “One of our RFA men in New Lisbon checked this morning,” Conger told the assassin. “The coffin is empty.”

“Merde!”
Captain Delgado dropped his sausage and bread.

“You didn’t know that?”

“Of course not, senhor. My work is more taken up with another phase of things,” said the plump man. “I don’t keep track of all of them after I finish with them. But in this case, due to my sentimental feelings over our once pleasant association in the military, I attended poor misguided Cavala’s funeral. I saw him in his coffin. With a chest wound like that, you can display them if you dress them just so. I know it was Colonel Macaco Cavala they put in the ground.”

“Somebody took him out again.”

“That’s one on me,” admitted the plump assassin.

The gargoyle was horned and scaly, made of sandy-colored plastic nearstone, and weighed approximately four hundred and ten pounds. It came plummeting down from one of the towers of the New Relocated Church of Our Lady of Fatima and hit the walkway three feet to the left of Conger.

He had sensed the falling gargoyle a few seconds before it slammed into the twilight street of New Lisbon and thrown himself to the right. Conger lost his balance, kept himself from falling over completely by slapping a palm against the street. Tilted out like that, he glanced upward.

A large black man was still at the parapet where the gargoyle had been.

He gave a disappointed shrug, a darn-it swing of the fist before he went climbing away over the spires of the transplanted cathedral. “Big Mac,” said Conger, guessing who the statue pusher was. “So AEF is in on this, too.”

A cluster of tourists, all in multi-color one-piece touring suits, had gathered around the fallen gargoyle. “You usually don’t get to see one of these up so close,” remarked a pleasant-looking man from Holland. He let his small robot camera loose and it began clicking off pictures, circling the ugly sprawled plastic statue.

Conger uprighted himself, rubbed his strained wrist against his side. He back stepped away from the half dozen curious people, spun and walked quickly on.

The Ritz-Mechanix Hotel was only two blocks from there, but Conger carefully walked a circular eight blocks before easing into a rear entrance of the twenty story building. He was to meet his other Portuguese contact here.

The long green corridor he found himself in at street level was full of loitering cleanup androids. Here in New Lisbon they still favored the Negro mammy model, long since outlawed in the United States and most other English speaking countries.

Selecting an android-picking tool from the small kit he carried strapped to his side, Conger doctored a hefty bandana-wearing robot maid. Then he ordered her, “Take me up to floor 19A in one of the service elevators.”

“Oh, yassuh. I’se gwine ter be bodacious glad ter do dat little thing, suh,” replied the amiable android as she led him around a green bend.

“Dis yere’s our mostest nicest ely-vator, suh.”

When the elevator let him out on his contact’s floor Conger ungimmicked the android and headed for room 1926A. All the doors along this stretch of wall had freshly painted portraits of the current dictator of Portugal on them at eye level. Conger halted before 1926A, knocked his prearranged knock on the dictator’s broad nose.

On the other side of the door someone yelled,
“Voila!”
There was a good deal of metallic clacking, followed by a jittering crash.

Conger knocked again, this time on the triple chin.

Finally someone called,
“Momentito.”

There was more clattering, followed by another zestful shout of
“Voila!”

“Enough already,” said the other voice. “Where’s that nitwit turnoff switch? There.”

“Voila!”
was yelled once more, in a running down mechanical way.

“You’re pretty tall for a spy,” said a voice from immediately behind the door. “I’m giving you the once over through this nitwit spyhole. They didn’t put it in the right place and I have to stand on tiptoe. There.”

“How about the counter knock?” suggested Conger.

“Which?” asked the voice behind the door.

“When I knock like this,” said Conger, knocking again, “you’re supposed to knock a certain way in response.”

“Wait a second, I’ll try to remember. Is this it?”

“Nope.”

“You’re right. I can’t keep all these nitwit knocks straight. They put too many beats in them. Nobody can remember a knock that goes on forever. This is it. Am I right?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Okay, hold on and I’ll try to get this nitwit door to let you in. I wanted to stay at the Novo American but they tell me the RFA budget is tight this season and anyway the Ritz-Mechanix, being 90% automatic, will take better care of me. Is the door opening? No, it isn’t. Just stay right there while I give it a couple good taps with my shoe. Hold on and I’ll get my shoe off. Boy, the way they make shoes nowadays you can hardly remove the nitwit things. I don’t know about you, but when I was a boy shoes had laces instead of these little electric seams. Did you have shoes with laces as a kid?”

“I went barefoot a lot.”

“Oh, really? My parents would never sit still for barefeet. I was considered too fragile, being the runt of the family. There, now I’ll wap it.”

After a moment the door groaned, gave a chill sigh and slid aside.

Standing in the foyer, his electric-seam shoe still raised high, was a man not quite five feet tall. He had curly blond hair and a substantial curly blond moustache. He was thirty-nine years old, dressed in a one-piece white fencing suit with a red heart stitched to its chest. “How do you do, senhor. I’m Canguru, the master spy. Come in.”

Fallen, arms-wide, over the floating air column coffee table was a fencing master android. Though the teaching mechanism was turned off, it still made a low dry buzzing. “Taking up fencing?” asked Conger.

“No, ballroom dancing, but the nitwit room service sent up the wrong machine. Since they did, and included this outfit, I gave the fencing a try.”

Canguru guided Conger to a tin sofa, then sat opposite him on an imitation rubber divan. “Besides being a highly successful spy, senhor, I now and then do a little highjacking.” He leaned toward Conger, passing him a bowl of puffed potato balls. “Care for a snack?”

“No, thanks.” Conger got a pillbox of vitamin B-Complex out of a side pocket, swallowed two capsules. “You’re supposed to have seen Colonel Cavala up and around.”

“Exactly what I’m leading up to,” said the small spy. “A few days ago, while engaged in the highjacking facet of my career, I chanced to be behind the walls of the monastery of the San Joaquim Brothers.”

“Where is it?”

“Near the town of Vinda, some fifty miles from us, to the south,” replied Canguru. “It’s where they make Mizinga.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Have you never heard of Mizinga? It’s a world-famous liqueur. These nitwit brothers turn the stuff out. It contains over one hundred herbs and other ingradients. Only the San Joaquim Brothers, plus some six or seven robots, know the secret of Mizinga. Personally I don’t think they’re making it quite right, it could stand more anise, but you can’t argue with the public taste.”

“Can people from the outside walk right into the place?”