Rogues

TAWNY PETTICOATS

Michael Swanwick

The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie laborers to docks where cargo was loaded into wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses. So none thought it particularly noteworthy when, for three days, an endless line of young women waited in the hallway outside a luxury suite in the Maison Fema for the opportunity to raise their skirts or open their blouses to display a tattooed thigh, breast, or buttock to two judges who sat on twin chairs watching solemnly, asked a few questions, thanked them for their time, and then showed them out.

The women had come in response to a handbill, posted throughout several parishes, that read:

SEEKING AN HEIRESS

ARE YOU …

A YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 21?

FATHERLESS?

TATTOOED FROM BIRTH ON AN INTIMATE PART OF YOUR BODY?

IF SO, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO GREAT RICHES

INQUIRE DAYTIMES, SUITE 1, MAISON FEMA

“You’d think I’d be tired of this by now,” Darger commented during a brief break in the ritual. “And yet I am not.”

“The infinite variety of ways in which women can be beautiful is indeed amazing,” Surplus agreed. “As is the eagerness of so many to display that beauty.” He opened the door. “Next.”

A woman strode into the room, trailing smoke from a cheroot. She was dauntingly tall—six feet and a hand, if an inch—and her dress, trimmed with silver lace, was the same shade of golden brown as her skin. Surplus indicated a crystal ashtray on the sideboard and, with a gracious nod of thanks, she stubbed out her cigar.

“Your name?” Darger said after Surplus had regained his chair.

“My real name, you mean, or my stage name?”

“Why, whichever you please.”

“I’ll give you the real one, then.” The young woman doffed her hat and tugged off her gloves. She laid them neatly together on the sideboard. “It’s Tawnymoor Petticoats. You can call me Tawny.”

“Tell us something about yourself, Tawny,” Surplus said.

“I was born a carny and worked forty-milers all my life,” Tawny said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Most recently, I was in the sideshow as the Sleeping Beauty Made Immortal By Utopian Technology But Doomed Never To Awaken. I lay in a glass coffin covered by nothing but my own hair and a strategically placed hand, while the audience tried to figure out if I was alive or not. I’ve got good breath control.” She folded the blouse and set it down by her gloves and hat. “Jake—my husband—was the barker. He’d size up the audience and when he saw a ripe mark, he’d catch ’im on the way out and whisper that for a couple of banknotes it could be arranged to spend some private time with me. Then he’d go out back and peer in through a slit in the canvas.”

Tawny stepped out of her skirt and set it atop the blouse. She began unlacing her petticoats. “When the mark had his trousers off and was about to climb in the coffin, Jake would come roaring out, bellowing that he was only supposed to look—not to take advantage of my vulnerable condition.” Placing her underthings atop the skirt, she undid her garters and proceeded to roll down her stockings. “That was usually good for the contents of his wallet.”

“You were working the badger game, you mean?” Surplus asked cautiously.

“Mostly, I just lay there. But I was ready to rear up and coldcock the sumbidge if he got out of hand. And we worked other scams too. The pigeon drop, the fiddle game, the rip deal, you name it.”

Totally naked now, the young woman lifted her great masses of black curls with both hands, exposing the back of her neck. “Then one night the mark was halfway into the coffin—and no Jake. So I opened my eyes real sudden and screamed in the bastard’s face. Over he went, hit his head on the floor, and I didn’t wait to find out if he was unconscious or dead. I stole his jacket and went looking for my husband. Turns out Jake had run off with the Snake Woman. She dumped him two weeks later and he wanted me to take him back, but I wasn’t having none of that.” She turned around slowly, so that Darger and Surplus could examine every inch of her undeniably admirable flesh.

Darger cleared his throat. “Um … you don’t appear to have a tattoo.”

“Yeah, I saw through that one right away. Talked to some of the girls you’d interviewed and they said you’d asked them lots of questions about themselves but hadn’t molested them in any way. Not all of ’em were happy with that last bit. Particularly after they’d gone to all the trouble of getting themselves inked. So, putting two and four together, I figured you were running a scam requiring a female partner with quick wits and larcenous proclivities.”

Tawny Petticoats put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Well? Do I get the job?”

Grinning like a dog—which was not surprising, for his source genome was entirely canine—Surplus stood, extending a paw. But Darger quickly got between him and the young woman, saying, “If you will pardon us for just a moment, Ms. Petticoats, my friend and I must consult for a moment in the back room. You may use the time to dress yourself.”

When the two males were secluded, Darger whispered furiously, “Thank God I was able to stop you! You were about to enlist that young woman into our conspiracy.”

“Well, and why not?” Surplus murmured equally quietly. “We were looking for a woman of striking appearance, not overly bound to conventional morality, and possessed of the self-confidence, initiative, and inventiveness a good swindler requires. Tawny comes up aces on all counts.”

“Working with an amateur is one thing—but this woman is a professional. She will sleep with both of us, turn us against each other, and in the end abscond with the swag, leaving us with nothing but embarrassment and regret for all our efforts.”

“That is a sexist and, if I may dare say so, ungallant slander upon the fair sex, and I am astonished to hear it coming from your mouth.”

Darger shook his head sadly. “It is not all women but all female confidence tricksters I abjure. I speak from sad—and repeated—experience.”

“Well, if you insist on doing without this blameless young creature,” Surplus said, folding his arms, “then I insist on your doing without me.”

“My dear sir!”

“I must be true to my principles.”

Further argumentation, Darger saw, would be useless. So, putting the best possible appearance on things, he emerged from the back room to say, “You have the job, my dear.” From a jacket pocket he produced a silver-filigreed vinaigrette and, unscrewing its cap, extracted from it a single pill. “Swallow this and you’ll have the tattoo we require by morning. You’ll want to run it past your pharmacist first, of course, to verify—”

“Oh, I trust you. If y’all had just been after tail, you wouldn’t’ve waited for me. Some of those gals was sharp lookers for sure.” Tawny swallowed the pill. “So what’s the dodge?”

“We’re going to work the black-money scam,” Surplus said.

“Oh, I have always wanted a shot at running that one!” With a whoop, Tawny threw her arms about them both.

Though his fingers itched to do so, Darger was very careful not to check to see if his wallet was still there.

The next day, ten crates of black money—actually, rectangles of scrap parchment dyed black in distant Vicksburg—were carried into the hotel by zombie laborers and then, at Surplus’s direction, piled against the outside of Tawny’s door so that, hers being the central room of the suite, the only way to enter or leave it was through his or Darger’s rooms. Then, leaving the lady to see to her dress and makeup, her new partners set out to speak to their respective marks.

Darger began at the city’s busy docklands.

The office of the speculator Jean-Nagin Lafitte were tastefully opulent and dominated by a Mauisaurus skull, decorated with scrimshaw filigree chased in silver. “Duke” Lafitte, as he styled himself, or “Pirate” Lafitte, as he was universally known, was a slim, handsome man with olive skin, long and flowing hair, and a mustache so thin it might have been drawn on with an eyebrow pencil. Where other men of wealth might carry a cane, he affected a coiled whip, which he wore on his belt.

“Renting an ingot of silver!” he exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

“It is a simple enough proposition,” Darger said. “Silver serves as a catalyst for a certain bioindustrial process, the precise nature of which I am not at liberty to divulge to you. The scheme involves converting bar silver to a colloidal slurry which, when the process is complete, will be recovered and melted back into bar form. You would lose nothing. Further, we will only tie up your wealth for, oh, let us say ten days to be on the safe side. In return for which we are prepared to offer you a 10 percent return on your investment. A very tidy profit for no risk at all.”

A small and ruthless smile played upon the speculator’s lips. “There is the risk of your simply taking the silver and absconding with it.”

“That is an outrageous implication, and from a man I respected less highly than I do you, I would not put up with it. However”—Darger gestured out the window at the busy warehouses and transshipment buildings—“I understand that you own half of everything we see. Lend my consortium a building in which to perform our operation and then place as many guards as you like around that building. We will bring in our apparatus and you will bring in the silver. Deal?”

For a brief moment, Pirate Lafitte hesitated. Then, “Done!” he snapped, and offered his hand. “For 15 percent. Plus rental of the building.”

They shook, and Darger said, “You will have no objection to having the ingot tested by a reputable assayer.”

In the French Quarter, meanwhile, Surplus was having an almost identical conversation with a slight and acerbic woman, clad in a severe black dress, who was not only the mayor of New Orleans but also the proprietress of its largest and most notorious brothel. Behind her, alert and unspeaking, stood two uniformed ape-men from the Canadian Northwest, both with the expressions of baffled anger common to beasts that have been elevated almost but not quite to human intelligence. “An assayist?” she demanded. “Is my word not good enough for you? And if it is not, should we be doing business at all?”

“The answer to all three of your questions, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, is yes,” Surplus said amiably. “The assay is for your own protection. As you doubtless know, silver is routinely adulterated with other metals. When we are done with the silver, the slurry will be melted down and recast into an ingot. Certainly, you will want to know that the bar returned to you is of equal worth to the bar you rented out.”

“Hmmm.” They were sitting in the lobby of the madam-mayor’s maison de tolérance, she in a flaring wicker chair whose similarity to a throne could not possibly be unintentional, and Surplus in a wooden folding chair facing her. Because it was still early afternoon, the facility was not open for business. But messengers and government flunkies came and went. Now one such whispered in Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s ear. She waved him away. “Seventeen and a half percent, take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Good,” Tresjolie said. “I have business with the zombie master now. Move your chair alongside mine and stay to watch. If we are to do business, you will find this salubrious.”

A round and cheerful man entered the public room, followed by half a dozen zombies. Surplus studied these with interest. Though their eyes were dull, their faces were stiff, and there was an unhealthy sheen to their skin, they looked in no way like the rotting corpses of Utopian legend. Rather, they looked like day laborers who had been worked into a state of complete exhaustion. Which doubtless was the case.

“Good morning!” said the jolly man, rubbing his hands briskly together. “I have brought this week’s coffle of debtors who, having served their time, are now eligible for forgiveness and manumission.”

“I had wondered at the source of your involuntary labor force,” Surplus said. “They are unfortunates who fell into arrears, then?”

“Exactly so,” said the zombie master. “New Orleans does not engage in the barbarous and expensive practice of funding debtors prisons. Instead, debt-criminals are chemically rendered incapable of independent thought and put to work until they have paid off their debt to society. Which today’s happy fellows have done.” With a roguish wink, he added, “You may want to keep this in mind before running up too great a line of credit at the rooms upstairs. Are you ready to begin, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie?”

“You may proceed, Master Bones.”

Master Bones gestured imperiously and the first zombie shuffled forward. “Through profligacy you fell into debt,” he said, “and through honest labor you have earned your way out. Open your mouth.”

The pallid creature obeyed. Master Bones produced a spoon and dipped into a saltcellar on a nearby table. He dumped the salt into the man’s mouth. “Now swallow.”

By gradual degrees, a remarkable transformation came over the man. He straightened and looked about him with tentative alertness. “I …” he said. “I remember now. Is my … is my wife …?”

“Silence,” the zombie master said. “The ceremony is not yet complete.” The Canadian guardsmen had shifted position to defend their mistress should the disoriented ex-zombie attack her.

“You are hereby declared a free citizen of New Orleans again, and indebted to no man,” Tresjolie said solemnly. “Go and overspend no more.” She extended a leg and lifted her skirts above her ankle. “You may now kiss my foot.”

* * *

“So did you ask Tresjolie for a line of credit at her sporting house?” Tawny asked when Surplus reported his adventure to his confederates.

“Certainly not!” Surplus exclaimed. “I told her instead that it has always been my ambition to own a small but select private brothel, one dedicated solely to my own personal use. A harem, if you will, but one peopled by a rotating staff of well-paid employees. I suggested I might shortly be in a position to commission her to find an appropriate hotel and create such an institution for me.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me that she doubted I was aware of exactly how expensive such an operation would be.”

“And you said to her?”

“That I didn’t think money would be a problem,” Surplus said airily. “Because I expected to come into a great deal of it very soon.”

Tawny crowed with delight. “Oh, you boys are such fun!”

“In unrelated news,” Darger said, “your new dress has come.”

“I saw it when it first arrived.” Tawny made a face. “It is not calculated to show off my body to its best advantage—or to any advantage at all, come to that.”

“It is indeed aggressively modest,” Darger agreed. “However, your character is demure and inexperienced. To her innocent eyes, New Orleans is a terribly wicked place, indeed a cesspool of carnality and related sins. Therefore, she needs to be protected at all times by unrevealing apparel and stalwart men of the highest moral character.”

“Further,” Surplus amplified, “she is the weak point in our plans, for whoever has possession of her tattoo and knows its meaning can dispense with us entirely by kidnapping her off the street.”

“Oh!” Tawny said in a small voice, clearly intended to arouse the protective instincts of any man nearby.

Surplus took an instinctive step toward her, and then caught himself. He grinned like the carnivore he was. “You’ll do.”

The third meeting with a potential investor took place that evening in a dimly lit club in a run-down parish on the fringe of the French Quarter—for the entertainment was, in the public mind, far too louche for even that notoriously open-minded neighborhood. Pallid waitresses moved lifelessly between the small tables, taking orders and delivering drinks while a small brass-and-drums jazz ensemble played appropriately sleazy music to accompany the stage show.

“I see that you are no aficionado of live sex displays,” the zombie master Jeremy Bones said. The light from the candle sconce on the table made the beads of sweat on his face shine like luminous drops of rain.

“The artistic success of such displays depends entirely on the degree to which they agree with one’s own sexual proclivities,” Darger replied. “I confess that mine lie elsewhere. But never mind that. Returning to the subject at hand: The terms are agreeable to you, then?”

“They are. I am unclear, however, as to why you insist the assay be performed at the Bank of San Francisco, when New Orleans has several fine financial institutions of its own.”

“All of which are owned in part by you, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, and Duke Lafitte.”

“Pirate Lafitte, you mean. An assay is an assay and a bank is a bank. Why should it matter to you which one is employed?”

“Earlier today, you brought six zombies to the mayor to be freed. Assuming this is a typical week, that would be roughly three hundred zombies per year. Yet all the menial work in the city has been handed over to zombies and there still remain tens of thousands at work in the plantations that line the river.”

“Many of those who fall into debt draw multiyear sentences.”

“I asked around and discovered that Lafitte’s ships import some two hundred prisoners a week from municipalities and territories all the way up the Mississippi to St. Louis.”

A small smile played on the fat man’s face. “It is true that many government bodies find it cheaper to pay us to deal with their troublemakers than to build prisons for them.”

“Madam-Mayor Tresjolie condemns these unfortunates into the city’s penal system, you pay her by body count, and after they have been zombified you lease them out for menial labor at prices that employers find irresistible. Those who enter your service rarely leave it.”

“If a government official or family member presents me with papers proving that somebody’s debt to society has been paid off, I am invariably happy to free them. I grant you that few ever come to me with such documentation. But I am always available to those who do. Exactly what is your objection to this arrangement?”

“Objection?” Darger said in surprise. “I have no objection. This is your system and as an outsider I have no say in it. I am merely explaining the reason why I wished to use an independent bank for the assay.”

“Which is?”

“Simply that, happy though I am to deal with you three individually, collectively I find you far too shrewd.” Darger turned to stare at the stage, where naked zombies coupled joylessly. Near the front, a spectator removed several banknotes from his wallet and tapped them meaningfully on his table. One of the lifeless waitresses picked up the money and led him through a curtain at the back of the room. “Acting together, I suspect you would swallow me and my partners in a single gulp.”

“Oh, there is no fear of that,” Master Bones said. “We three only act collectively when there is serious profit in the offing. Your little enterprise—whatever it is—hardly qualifies.”

“I am relieved to hear it.”

The next day, the three conspirators made three distinct trips to the Assay Office at the New Orleans branch of the Bank of San Francisco. On the first trip, one of Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s green-jacketed zombie bodyguards opened a lockbox, withdrew a silver ingot, and placed it on the workbench. Then, to the astonishment of both the mayor and the assayist, Surplus directed his own hired zombies to hoist several heavy leather bags to the bench as well, and with the aid of his colleagues began pulling out drills, scales, acids, reagents, and other tools and supplies and setting them in working order.

The affronted assayist opened his mouth to object, but—“I’m sure you won’t mind if we provide our own equipment,” Darger said suavely. “We are strangers here, and while nobody questions the probity of San Francisco’s most prestigious financial concern, it is only good business to take proper precautions.”

As he was talking, Tawny and Surplus both reached for the scales at once, collided, and it almost sent them flying. Faces turned and hands reached out to catch them. But, in the fact, it was Surplus who saved the apparatus from disaster.

“Oops,” Tawny said, coloring prettily.

Swiftly, the assayist performed his tests. At their conclusion, he looked up from the ingot. “The finding is .925,” he said. “Sterling standard.”

With an absent nod, Madam-Mayor Tresjolie acknowledged his judgment. Then she said, “The girl. How much do you want for her?”

As one, Darger and Surplus turned. Then they subtly shifted position so that one stood to either side of Tawny. “Ms. Petticoats is our ward,” Darger said, “and therefore, it goes without saying, not for sale. Also, yours is not an entirely reputable business for so innocent a child as she.”

“Innocence is in high demand at my establishment. I’ll give you the silver ingot. To keep. Do with it as you wish.”

“Believe me, madam. In not so very long, I shall consider silver ingots to be so much petty cash.”

Master Bones watched the assay, including even the chaotic assembly of the trio’s equipment, with a beatific smile. Yet all the while, his attention kept straying to Tawny. Finally, he pursed his lips and said, “There might be a place in my club for your young friend. If you’d consider leasing her to me for, oh, let’s say a year, I’d gladly forgo my 20 percent profit on this deal.” Turning to Tawny, he said, “Do not worry, my sweet. Under the influence of the zombie drugs you will feel nothing, and afterwards you will remember nothing. It will be as if none of it ever happened. Further, since you’d be paid a commission on each commercial encounter performed, you’d emerge with a respectable sum being held in trust for you.”

Ignoring Tawny’s glare of outrage, Darger suavely said, “In strictest confidence, sir, we have already turned down a far better offer for her than yours today. But my partner and I would not part with our dear companion for any amount of money. She is to us a treasure beyond price.”

“I’m ready,” the assayist said. “Where do you wish me to drill?”

Darger airily waved a finger over the ingot and then, seemingly at random, touched a spot at the exact center of the bar. “Right there.”

“I understand that on the street they call me the Pirate,” Jean-Nagin Lafitte said with quiet intensity. “This, however, is an insolence I will not tolerate to my face. Yes, I do chance to share a name with the legendary freebooter. But you will find that I have never committed an illegal act in my life.”

“Nor do you today, sir!” Darger cried. “This is a strictly legitimate business arrangement.”

“So I presume or I would not be here. Nevertheless, you can understand why I must take offense at having you and your clumsy confederates question the quality of my silver.”

“Say no more, sir! We are all gentlemen here—save, of course, for Ms. Petticoats who is a gently reared Christian orphan. If my word is good enough for you, then your word is good enough for me. We may dispose of the assay.” Darger coughed discreetly. “However, just for my own legal protection, in the absence of an assay, I shall require a notarized statement from you declaring that you will be satisfied with whatever quality of silver we return to you.”

Pirate Lafitte’s stare would have melted iron. But it failed to wilt Darger’s pleasant smile. At last, he said, “Very well, run the assay.”

Negligently, Darger spun a finger in the air. Down it came on the exact center of the bar. “There.”

While the assayist was working, Pirate Lafitte said, “I was wondering if your Ms. Petticoats might be available to—”

“She is not for sale!” Darger said briskly. “Not for sale, not for rent, not for barter, not available for acquisition on any terms whatsoever. Period.”

Looking irritated, Pirate Lafitte said, “I was going to ask if she might be interested in going hunting with me tomorrow. There is some interesting game to be found in the bayous.”

“Nor is she available for social occasions.” Darger turned to the assayist. “Well, sir?”

“Standard sterling,” the man said. “Yet again.”

“I expected no less.”

For the sake of appearances, after the assays were complete, the three swindlers sent the zombies with their lab equipment back to Maison Fema and went out to supper together. Following which, they took a genteel stroll about town. Tawny, who had been confined to her room while negotiations took place, was particularly glad of the latter. But it was with relief that Darger, Surplus, and Tawny saw the heavy bags waiting for them on the sitting-room table of their suite. “Who shall do the honors?” Darger asked.

“The lady, of course,” Surplus said with a little bow.

Tawny curtsied and then, pushing aside a hidden latch at the bottom of one of the bags, slid out a silver ingot. From another bag, she slid out a second. Then, from a third, a third. A sigh of relief went up from all three conspirators at the sight of the silver glimmering in the lantern-light.

“That was right smartly done, when you changed the fake bars for the real ones,” Tawny said.

Darger politely demurred. “No, it was the distraction that made the trick possible, and in this regard you were both exemplary. Even the assayist, who was present all three times you almost sent the equipment to the floor, suspected nothing.”

“But tell me something,” Tawny said. “Why did you make the substitution before the assay, rather than after? The other way around, you wouldn’t have needed to have that little plug of silver in the middle for the sample to be drawn from. Just a silver-plated lead bar.”

“We are dealing with suspicious people. This way, they first had the ingots confirmed as genuine and then saw that we came nowhere near them afterwards. The ingots are in a safety-deposit box in a reputable bank, so to their minds there is not the least risk. All is on the up-and-up.”

“But we’re not going to stop here, are we?” Tawny asked anxiously. “I do so want to work the black-money scam.”

“Have no fear, my lovely,” Surplus said, “this is only the beginning. But it serves as a kind of insurance policy for us. Even should the scheme go bad, we have already turned a solid profit.” He poured brandy into three small glasses and handed them around. “To whom shall we drink?”

“To Madam-Mayor Tresjolie!” Darger said.

They drank, and then Tawny said, “What do you make of her? Professionally, I mean.”

“She is far shrewder than she would have you think,” Surplus replied. “But, as you are doubtless aware, the self-consciously shrewd are always the easiest to mislead.” He poured a second glass. “To Master Bones!”

They drank. Tawny said, “And of him?”

“He is more problematic,” Darger said. “A soft man with a brutal streak underneath his softness. In some ways he hardly seems human.”

“Perhaps he has been sampling his own product?” Surplus suggested.

“Puffer-fish extract, you mean? No. His mind is active enough. But I catch not the least glimmer of empathy from him. I suspect that he’s been associating with zombies so long that he’s come to think we’re all like them.”

The final toast inevitably went to Pirate Lafitte.

“I think he’s cute,” Tawny said. “Only maybe you don’t agree?”

“He is a fraud and a poseur,” Darger replied. “A scoundrel who passes himself off as a gentleman, and a manipulator of the legal system who insists he is the most honest of citizens. Consequently, I like him quite a bit. I believe that he is a man we can do business with. Mark my words, when the three of them come to see us tomorrow, it will be at his instigation.”

For a time they talked business. Then Surplus broke out a deck of cards. They played euchre and canasta and poker, and because they played for matches, nobody objected when the game turned into a competition to see how deftly the cards could be dealt from the bottom of the deck or flicked out of the sleeve into one’s hand. Nor was there any particular outcry when in one memorable hand, eleven aces were laid on the table at once.

At last Darger said, “Look at the time! It will be a long day tomorrow,” and they each went to their respective rooms.

That night, as Darger was drifting off to sleep, he heard the door connecting his room with Tawny’s quietly open and shut. There was a rustle of sheets as she slipped into his bed. Then the warmth of Tawny’s naked body pressed against his own, and her hand closed about his most private part. Abruptly, he was wide-awake.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he whispered fiercely.

Unexpectedly, Tawny released her hold on Darger and punched him hard in his shoulder. “Oh, it’s so easy for you,” she retorted, equally quietly. “It’s so easy for men! That hideous old woman tried to buy me. That awful little man wanted you to let him drug me. And God only knows what intentions Pirate Lafitte holds. You’ll notice they all made their propositions to you. Not a one of them said a word to me.” Hot tears fell on Darger’s chest. “All my life I have had male protectors—and needed them too. My daddy, until I ran away. My first husband, until he got eaten by giant crabs. Then various boyfriends and finally that creep Jake.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Surplus and I have never abandoned a confederate, nor shall we ever. Our reputation is spotless in this regard.”

“I tell myself that, and daytimes I’m fine with it. But at night … well, this past week has been the longest I ever went without a man’s body to comfort me.”

“Yes, but surely you understand …”

Tawny drew herself up. Even in the dim half-light of the moon through the window she was a magnificent sight. Then she leaned down to kiss Darger’s cheek and murmured into his ear, “I’ve never had to beg a man before, but … Please?”

Darger considered himself a moral man. But there was only so much temptation a man could resist without losing all respect for himself.

The next morning, Darger awoke alone. He thought of the events of last night and smiled. He thought of their implications and scowled. Then he went down to the dining room for breakfast.

“What comes next?” Tawny asked, after they had fortified themselves with chicory coffee, beignets, and sliced baconfruit.

“We have planted suspicions in the minds of our three backers that there is more profit to be had than we are offering to share,” Surplus said. “We have given them a glimpse of our mysterious young ward and suggested that she is key to the enterprise. We have presented them with a puzzle to which they can think of no solution. On reflection, they can only conclude that the sole reason we have the upper hand is that we can play them off of one another.” He popped the last of his beignet into his mouth. “So sooner or later they will unite and demand of us an explanation.”

“In the meantime …” Darger said.

“I know, I know. Back to my dreary old room to play solitaire and read the sort of uplifting literature appropriate to a modest young virgin.”

“It’s important to stay in character,” Surplus said.

“I understand that. Next time, however, please make me something that doesn’t need to be stored in the dark, like a sack of potatoes. The niece of a Spanish prisoner, perhaps. Or a socialite heiress. Or even a harlot.”

“You are a Woman of Mystery,” Darger said. “Which is a time-honored and some would say enviable role to play.”

Thus it was that when Darger and Surplus left Maison Fema—at precisely ten o’clock, as they had made it their invariant habit—they were not entirely astonished to find their three benefactors all in a group, waiting for them. A brusque exchange of threats and outrage later, and protesting every step of the way, they led their marks to their suite.

The three bedrooms all opened off of a sunny common room. Given the room’s elegant appointments, the crates of black paper that had been stacked in front of Tawny Petticoats’s door looked glaringly out of place.

Gesturing their guests to chairs, Darger adopted an air of resignation and said, “In order to adequately explain our enterprise, we must go back two generations to a time before San Francisco became the financial center of North America. The visionary leaders of that great city-state determined to found a new economy upon uncounterfeitable banknotes, and to this end employed the greatest bacterial engraver of his age, Phineas Whipsnade McGonigle.”

“That is an unlikely name,” Madam-Mayor Tresjolie sniffed.

“It was of course his nom de gravure, assumed to protect him from kidnappers and the like,” Surplus explained. “In private life, he was known as Magnus Norton.”

“Go on.”

Darger resumed his narrative. “The results you know. Norton crafted one hundred and thirteen different bacteria which, as part of their natural functions, lay down layer upon layer of multicolored ink in delicate arabesques so intricate as to be the despair of coin-clippers and paper-hangers everywhere. This, combined with their impeccable monetary policies, has made the San Francisco dollar the common currency of the hundred nations of North America. Alas for them, there was one weak point in their enterprise—Norton himself.

“Norton secretly created his own printing vats, employing the bacteria he himself had created, and proceeded to mass-produce banknotes that were not only indistinguishable from the genuine item but for all intents and purposes were the genuine item. He created enough of them to make himself the wealthiest man on the continent.

“Unfortunately for that great man, he tried to underpay his paper supplier, precipitating an argument that ended with his being arrested by the San Francisco authorities.”

Pirate Lafitte raised an elegant forefinger. “How do you know all this?” he asked.

“My colleague and I are journalists,” Darger said. Seeing his audience’s expressions, he raised both hands. “Not of the muckraking variety, I hasten to assure you! Corruption is a necessary and time-honored concomitant of any functioning government, which we support wholeheartedly. No, we write profiles of public figures, lavishing praise in direct proportion to their private generosity; human-interest stories of heroic boys rescuing heiresses from fires and of kittens swallowed by crocodiles and yet miraculously passing through their alimentary systems unharmed; and of course amusing looks back at the forgotten histories of local scoundrels whom the passage of time has rendered unthreatening.”

“It was this last that led us to Norton’s story,” Surplus elucidated.

“Indeed. We discovered that by a quirk of San Francisco’s labyrinthine banking regulations, Norton’s monetary creations could neither be destroyed nor distributed as valid currency. So to prevent their misuse, the banknotes were subjected to another biolithographic process whereby they were deeply impregnated with black ink so cunningly composed that no known process could bleach it from the bills without destroying the paper in the process.

“Now, here’s where our tale gets interesting. Norton was, you’ll recall, incomparable in his craft. Naturally, the city fathers were reluctant to forgo his services. So, rather than have him languish in an ordinary prison, they walled and fortified a mansion, equipped it with a laboratory and all the resources he required, and put him to work.

“Imagine how Norton felt! One moment he was on the brink of realizing vast wealth, and the next he was a virtual slave. So long as he cooperated, he was given fine foods, wine, even conjugal visits with his wife … But, comfortable though his prison was, he could never leave it. He was, however, a cunning man and though he could not engineer his escape, he managed to devise a means of revenge: If he could not have vast wealth, then his descendants would. Someday, the provenance of the black paper would be forgotten and it would be put up for public auction as eventually occurs to all the useless lumber a bureaucracy acquires. His children or grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren would acquire it and, utilizing an ingenious method of his own devising, convert it back into working currency and so make themselves rich beyond Croesus.”

“The ancients had a saying,” Surplus interjected. “ ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.’ The decades passed, Norton died, and the black paper stayed in storage. By the time we began our researches, his family was apparently extinct. He had three children: a daughter who was not interested in men, a son who died young, and another son who never wed. The second son, however, traveled about in his early adulthood, and in the same neglected cache of family papers where we discovered Norton’s plans, we found evidence that he was paying child support for a female bastard he had sired here some twenty years ago. So, utilizing an understanding of the city bureaucracy which Norton’s wife and children lacked, we bribed the appropriate official to sell us the crates of seemingly worthless paper and came to New Orleans. Where we found Tawny Petticoats.”

“This explains nothing,” Madam-Mayor Tresjolie said.

Darger sighed heavily. “We had hoped you would be satisfied with a partial explanation. Now I see that it is all or nothing. Here before you are the crates of blackened banknotes.” A plank had been removed from one of the topmost crates. He reached in to seize a handful of black paper rectangles, fanned them for all to see, and then put them back. “My colleague and I will now introduce you to our young charge.”

Swiftly, Darger and Surplus unstacked the crates before the doorway, placing them to either side. Then Surplus rapped on the door. “Ms. Petticoats? Are you decent? We have visitors to see you.”

The door opened. Tawny’s large brown eyes peered apprehensively from the gloom. “Come in,” she said in a little voice.

They all shuffled inside. Tawny looked first at Darger and then at Surplus. When they would not meet her eyes, she ducked her head, blushing. “I guess I know what y’all came here to see. Only … must I? Must I really?”

“Yes, child, you must,” Surplus said gruffly.

Tawny tightened her mouth and raised her chin, staring straight ahead of herself like the captain of a schooner sailing into treacherous waters. Reaching around her back, she began unbuttoning her dress.

“Magnus Norton designed what no other man could have—a microorganism that would eat the black ink permeating the banknotes without damaging the other inks in any way. Simply place the notes in the proper liquid nutrient, add powdered silver as a catalyst, and within a week there will be nothing but perfect San Francisco money and a slurry of silver,” Darger said. “However, he still faced the problem of passing the information of how to create the organism to his family. In a manner, moreover, robust enough to survive what he knew would be decades of neglect.”

Tawny had unbuttoned her dress. Now, placing a hand upon her bosom to hold the dress in place, she drew one arm from its sleeve. Then, switching hands, she drew out the other. “Now?” she said.

Surplus nodded.

With tiny, doll-like steps, Tawny turned to face the wall. Then she lowered her dress so that they could see her naked back. On it was a large tattoo in seven bright colors, of three concentric circles. Each circle was made of a great number of short, near-parallel lines, all radiant from the unmarked skin at the tattoo’s center. Anyone who could read a gene map could easily use it to create the organism it described.

Master Bones, who had not spoken before now, said, “That’s an E. coli, isn’t it?”

“A variant on it, yes, sir. Norton wrote this tattoo into his own genome and then sired three children upon his wife, believing they would have many more in their turn. But fate is a fickle lady, and Ms. Petticoats is the last of her line. She, however, will suffice.” He turned to Tawny. “You may clothe yourself again. Our guests have had their curiosities satisfied, and now they will leave.”

Darger led the group back to the front room, closing the door firmly behind him. “Now,” he said. “You have learned what you came to learn. At the cost, I might mention, of violently depriving an innocent maiden of her modesty.”

“That is a swinish thing to say!” Pirate Lafitte snapped.

In the silence that followed his outburst, all could hear Tawny Petticoats in the next room, sobbing her heart out.

“Your work here is done,” Darger said, “and I just ask you to leave.”

Now that Tawny Petticoats was no longer a secret, there was nothing for the three conspirators to do but wait for the equipment they had supposedly sent for upriver—and for their marks to each separately approach them with very large bribes to buy their process and the crates of black paper away from them. As simple logic stipulated that they inevitably must.

The very next day, after the morning mail had brought two notes proposing meetings, the trio went out for breakfast at a sidewalk café. They had just finished and were beginning their second cups of coffee when Tawny looked over Darger’s shoulder and exclaimed, “Oh, merciful God in heaven! It’s Jake.” Then, seeing her companions’ incomprehension, she added, “My husband! He’s talking to Pirate Lafitte. They’re coming this way.”

“Keep smiling,” Darger murmured. “Feign unconcern. Surplus, you know what to do.”

It took a count of ten for the interlopers to reach their table.

“Jake!” Surplus exclaimed in evident surprise, beginning to rise from his chair.

“Come for his pay, no doubt.” Darger drew from his pocket the wad of bills—one of large denomination on the outside, a great many singles beneath—which any sensible businessman carried with him at all times and, turning, said, “The madam-mayor wishes you to know—”

He found himself confronted by a stranger who could only be Tawny’s Jake and Pirate Lafitte, whose face was contorted with astonishment.

Darger hastily thrust the wad of bills back into his pocket. “Wishes you to know,” he repeated, “that, ah, anytime you wish to try out her establishment, she will gladly offer you a 10 percent discount on all goods and services, alcohol excepted. It is a courtesy she has newly decided to extend, out of respect for your employer, to all his new hires.”

Lafitte turned, grabbed Jake by the shirtfront, and shook him as a mastiff might a rat. “I understand now,” he said through gritted teeth. “The honorable brothel-keeper wished to deal me out of a rich opportunity, and so she sent you to me with a cock-and-bull story about this virtuous and inoffensive young woman.”

“Honest, boss, I ain’t got the slightest idea what this … this … foreigner is talking about. It’s honest info I’m peddling here. I heard it on the street that my filthy bitch of a—”

With a roar of rage, Pirate Lafitte punched Jake so hard he fell sprawling in the street. Then he pulled the whip from his belt and proceeded to lay into the man so savagely that by the time he was done, his shirt and vest were damp with sweat.

Breathing heavily from exertion, he touched his hat to Darger and Surplus. “Sirs. We shall talk later, at a time when my passions are not so excited. This afternoon, five o’clock, at my office. I have a proposition to put to you.” Then, to Tawny: “Miss Petticoats, I apologize that you had to see this.”

He strode off.

“Oh!” Tawny breathed. “He beat Jake within an inch of his worthless life. It was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.”

“A horsewhipping? Romantic?” Darger said.

Tawny favored him with a superior look. “You don’t much understand the workings of a woman’s heart, do you?”

“Apparently not,” Darger said. “And it begins to appear that I never shall.” Out in the street, Jake was painfully pulling himself up and trying to stand. “Excuse me.”

Darger went over to the battered and bleeding man and helped him to his feet. Then, talking quietly, he opened his billfold and thrust several notes into the man’s hand.

“What did you give him?” Tawny asked, when he was back inside.

“A stern warning not to interfere with us again. Also, seventeen dollars. A sum insulting enough to guarantee that, despite his injuries, he will take his increasingly implausible story to Master Bones, and then to the madam-mayor.”

Tawny grabbed Darger and Surplus and hugged them both at once. “Oh, you boys are so good to me. I just love you both to pieces and back.”

“It begins to look, however,” Surplus said, “like we have been stood up. According to Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s note, she should have been here by now. Which is, if I may use such language, damnably peculiar.”

“Something must have come up.” Darger squinted up at the sky. “Tresjolie isn’t here and it’s about time for the meeting with Master Bones. You should stay here, in case the madam-mayor shows up. I’ll see what the zombie master has to say.”

“And I,” Tawny said, “will go back to my room to adjust my dress.”

“Adjust?” Surplus asked.

“It needs to be a little tighter and to show just a smidge more bosom.”

Alarmed, Darger said, “Your character is a modest and innocent thing.”

“She is a modest and innocent thing who secretly wishes a worldly cad would teach her all those wicked deeds she has heard about but cannot quite imagine. I have played this role before, gentlemen. Trust me, it is not innocence per se that men like Pirate Lafitte are drawn to but the tantalizing possibility of corrupting that innocence.”

Then she was gone.

“A most remarkable young lady, our Ms. Petticoats,” Surplus said.

Darger scowled.

After Darger left, Surplus leaned back in his chair for some casual people-watching. He had not been at it long when he noticed that a remarkably pretty woman at a table at the far end of the café kept glancing his way. When he returned her gaze, she blushed and looked quickly away.

From long experience, Surplus understood what such looks meant. Leaving money on the table to pay for the breakfasts, he strolled over to introduce himself to the lady. She seemed not unreceptive to his attentions and, after a remarkably short conversation, invited him to her room in a nearby hotel. Feigning surprise, Surplus accepted.

What happened there had occurred many times before in his eventful life. But that didn’t make it any less delightful.

On leaving the hotel, however, Surplus was alarmed to find himself abruptly seized and firmly held by two red-furred, seven-foot-tall uniformed Canadian ape-men.

“I see you have been entertaining yourself with one of the local sluts,” Madam-Mayor Tresjolie said. She looked even less benevolent than usual.

“That is a harsh characterization of a lady who, for all I know, may be of high moral character. Also, I must ask you why I am being held captive like this.”

“In due time. First, tell me whether your encounter was a commercial one or not.”

“I thought not when we were in the throes of it. But afterward, she showed me her union card and informed me that as a matter of policy she was required to charge not only by the hour but by the position. I was, of course, astonished.”

“What did you do then?”

“I paid, of course,” Surplus said indignantly. “I am no scab!”

“The woman with whom you coupled, however, was not a registered member of the International Sisterhood of Trollops, Demimondaines, and Back-Alley Doxies and her card was a forgery. Which means that while nobody objects to your noncommercial sexual activities, by paying her you were engaged in a union-busting activity—and that, sir, is against the law.”

“Obviously, you set me up. Otherwise, you could have known none of this.”

“That is neither here nor there. What is relevant is that you have three things that I want—the girl with the birthmark, the crates of money, and the knowledge of how to use the one to render the other negotiable.”

“I understand now. Doubtless, madam-mayor, you seek to bribe me. I assure you that no amount of money—”

“Money?” The madam-mayor’s laugh was short and harsh. “I am offering you something far more precious: your conscious mind.” She produced a hypodermic needle. “People think the zombification formula consists entirely of extract of puffer fish. But in fact atropine, datura, and a dozen other drugs are involved, all blended in a manner guaranteed to make the experience very unpleasant indeed.”

“Threats will not work on me.”

“Not yet. But after you’ve had a taste of what otherwise lies before you, I’m sure you’ll come around. In a week or so, I’ll haul you back from the fields. Then we can negotiate.”

Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s simian thugs held Surplus firmly, struggle though he did. She raised the syringe to his neck. There was a sharp sting.

The world went away.

Darger, meanwhile, had rented a megatherium, complete with howdah and zombie mahout, and ridden it to the endless rows of zombie barns, pens, and feeding sheds at the edge of town. There, Master Bones showed him the chest-high troughs that were filled with swill every morning and evening, and the rows of tin spoons the sad creatures used to feed themselves. “When each of my pretties has fed, the spoon is set aside to be washed and sterilized before it is used again,” Master Bones said. “Every precaution is taken to ensure they do not pass diseases from one to another.”

“Commendably humane, sir. To say nothing of its being good business practice.”

“You understand me well.” They passed outside, where a pair of zombies, one male and the other female, both in exceptional condition and perfectly matched in height and color of hair and skin, waited with umbrellas. As they strolled to the pens, the two walked a pace behind them, shading them from the sun. “Tell me, Mr. Darger. What do you suppose the ratio of zombies to citizens is in New Orleans?”

Darger considered. “About even?”

“There are six zombies for every fully functioning human in the city. It seems a smaller number since most are employed as field hands and the like and so are rarely seen in the streets. But I could flood the city with them, should I wish.”

“Why on earth should you?”

Rather than answer the question, Master Bones said, “You have something I want.”

“I fancy I know what it is. But I assure you that no amount of money could buy from me what is by definition a greater amount of money. So we have nothing to discuss.”

“Oh, I believe that we do.” Master Bones indicated the nearest of the pens, in which stood a bull of prodigious size and obvious strength. It was darkly colored with pale laddering along its spine, and its horns were long and sharp. “This is a Eurasian aurochs, the ancestor of our modern domestic cattle. It went extinct in seventeenth-century Poland and was resurrected less than a hundred years ago. Because of its ferocity, it is impractical as a meat animal, but I keep a small breeding herd for export to the Republic of Baja and other Mexican states where bullfighting remains popular. Bastardo here is a particularly bellicose example of his kind.

“Now consider the contents of the adjoining pen.” The pen was over-crammed with zombie laborers and reeked to high heaven. The zombies stood motionless, staring at nothing. “They don’t look very strong, do they? Individually, they’re not. But there is strength in numbers.” Going to the fence, Master Bones slapped a zombie on the shoulder and said, “Open the gate between your pen and the next.”

Then, when the gate was opened, Master Bones made his hands into a megaphone and shouted, “Everyone! Kill the aurochs. Now.”

With neither enthusiasm nor reluctance, the human contents of one pen flowed into the next, converging upon the great beast. With an angry bellow, Bastardo trampled several under its hooves. The others kept coming. His head dipped to impale a body on its horns, then rose to fling a slash of red and a freshly made corpse in the air. Still the zombies kept coming.

That strong head fell and rose, again and again. More bodies flew. But now there were zombies clinging to the bull’s back and flanks and legs, hindering its movements. A note of fear entered the beast’s great voice. By now, there were bodies heaped on top of bodies on top of his, enough that his legs buckled under their weight. Fists hammered at his sides and hands wrenched at his horns. He struggled upward, almost rose, and then fell beneath the crushing sea of bodies.

Master Bones began giggling when the aurochs went down for the first time. His mirth grew greater and his eyes filled with tears of laughter and once or twice he snorted, so tremendous was his amusement at the spectacle.

A high-pitched squeal of pain went up from the aurochs … and then all was silence, save for the sound of fists pounding upon the beast’s carcass.

Wiping his tears away on his sleeve, Master Bones raised his voice again: “Very good. Well done. Thank you. Stop. Return to your pen. Yes, that’s right.” He turned his back on the bloodied carcass and the several bodies of zombies that lay motionless on the dirt, and said to Darger, “I believe in being direct. Give me the money and the girl by this time tomorrow or you and your partner will be as extinct as the aurochs ever was. There is no power as terrifying as that of a mob—and I control the greatest mob there ever was.”

“Sir!” Darger said. “The necessary equipment has not yet arrived from the Socialist Utopia of Minneapolis! There is no way I can …”

“Then I’ll give you four days to think it over.” A leering smile split the zombie master’s pasty face. “While you’re deciding, I will leave you with these two zombies to use as you wish. They will do anything you tell them to. They are capable of following quite complex orders, though they do not consciously understand them.” To the zombies, he said, “You have heard this man’s voice. Obey him. But if he tries to leave New Orleans, kill him. Will you do that?”

“If he leaves … kill … him.”

“Yasss.”

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong, but Surplus could not put his finger on exactly what it was. He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts were all in a jumble and he could not find words with which to order them. It was as if he had forgotten how to think. Meanwhile, his body moved without his particularly willing it to do so. It did not occur to him that it should behave otherwise. Still, he knew that something was wrong.

The sun set, the sun rose. It made no difference to him.

His body labored systematically, cutting sugarcane with a machete. This work it performed without his involvement, steadily and continuously. Blisters arose on the pads of his paws, swelled, and popped. He did not care. Someone had told him to work and so he had and so he would until the time came to stop. All the world was a fog to him, but his arms knew to swing and his legs to carry him forward to the next plant.

Nevertheless, the sensation of wrongness endured. Surplus felt stunned, the way an ox that had just been poleaxed might feel, or the sole survivor of some overwhelming catastrophe. Something terrible had happened, and it was imperative that he do something about it.

If only he knew what.

A trumpet sounded in the distance, and without fuss all about him the other laborers ceased their work. As did he. Without hurry he joined their chill company in the slow trek back to the feeding sheds.

Perhaps he slept, perhaps he did not. Morning came and Surplus was jostled to the feeding trough where he swallowed ten spoonsful of swill, as a zombie overseer directed him. Along with many others, he was given a machete and walked to the fields. There he was put to work again.

Hours passed.

There was a clop-clopping of hooves and the creaking of wagon wheels, and a buckboard drawn by a brace of pygmy mastodons pulled up alongside Surplus. He kept working. Somebody leaped down from the wagon and wrested the machete from his hand. “Open your mouth,” a voice said.

He had been told by … somebody … not to obey the orders of any strangers. But this voice sounded familiar, though he could not have said why. Slowly his mouth opened. Something was placed within it. “Now shut and swallow.”

His mouth did so.

His vision swam and he almost fell. Deep, deep within his mind, a spark of light blossomed. It was a glowing ember amid the ashes of a dead fire. But it grew and brightened, larger and more, until it felt like the sun rising within him. The external world came into focus, and with it the awareness that he, Surplus, had an identity distinct from the rest of existence. He realized first that his throat itched and the inside of his mouth was as parched and dry as the Sahara. Then that somebody he knew stood before him. Finally, that this person was his friend and colleague Aubrey Darger.

“How long have I …?” Surplus could not bring himself to complete the sentence.

“More than one day. Less than two. When you failed to return to our hotel, Tawny and I were naturally alarmed and set out in search of you. New Orleans being a city prone to gossip, and there being only one anthropomorphized dog in town, the cause of your disappearance was easily determined. But learning that you had been sent to labor in the sugarcane fields did not narrow the search greatly for there are literally hundreds of square miles of fields. Luckily, Tawny knew where such blue-collar laborers as would have heard of the appearance of a dog-headed zombie congregated, and from them we learned at last of your whereabouts.”

“I … see.” Focusing his thoughts on practical matters, Surplus said, “Madam-Mayor Tresjolie, as you may have surmised, had no intention of buying our crates of black paper from us. What of our other marks?”

“The interview with the Pirate Lafitte went well. Tawny played him like a trout. That with Master Bones was considerably less successful. However, we talked Lafitte up to a price high enough to bankrupt him and make all three of us wealthy. Tawny is accompanying him to the bank right now, to make certain he doesn’t come to his senses at the last minute. He is quite besotted with her and in her presence cannot seem to think straight.”

“You sound less disapproving of the girl than you were.”

Twisting his mouth in the near grimace he habitually assumed when forced to admit to having made a misjudgment, Darger said, “Tawny grows on one, I find. She makes a splendid addition to the team.”

“That’s good,” Surplus said. Now at last he noticed that in the back of the buckboard two zombies sat motionless atop a pile of sacks. “What’s all that you have in the wagon?”

“Salt. A great deal of it.”

In the final feeding shed, Surplus kicked over the trough, spilling swill on the ground. Then, at his command, Darger’s zombies righted the trough and filled it with salt. Darger, meanwhile, took a can of paint and drew a rough map of New Orleans on the wall. He drew three arrows to Madam-Mayor Tresjolie’s brothel, Jean-Nagin Lafitte’s waterfront office, and the club where Master Jeremy Bones presided every evening. Finally, he wrote block letter captions for each arrow:

THE MAN WHO TRANSPORTED YOU HERE

THE WOMAN WHO PUT YOU HERE

THE MAN WHO KEPT YOU HERE

Above it all, he wrote the day’s date.

“There,” Darger said when he was done. Turning to his zombies, he said, “You were told to do as I commanded.”

“Yass,” the male said lifelessly.

“We must,” the female said, “oh bey.”

“Here is a feeding spoon for both of you. When the zombie laborers return to the barn, you are to feed each of them a spoonful of salt. Salt. Here in the trough. Take a spoonful of salt. Tell them to open their mouths. Put in the salt. Then tell them to swallow. Can you do that?”

“Yass.”

“Salt. Swall oh.”

“When everyone else is fed,” Surplus said, “be sure to take a spoonful of salt yourselves—each of you.”

“Salt.”

“Yass.”

Soon, the zombies would come to feed and discover salt in their mouths instead of swill. Miraculously, their minds would uncloud. In shed after shed, they would read what Darger had written. Those who had spent years and even decades longer than they were sentenced to would feel justifiably outraged. After which, they could be expected to collectively take appropriate action.

“The sun is setting,” Darger said. In the distance, he could see zombies plodding in from the fields. “We have just enough time to get back to our rooms and accept Pirate Lafitte’s bribe before the rioting begins.”

But when they got back to Maison Fema, their suite was lightless and Tawny Petticoats was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Pirate Lafitte.

The crates of black paper, having served their purpose, had not been restacked in front of Tawny’s bedroom door. Hastily lighting an oil lamp, Darger threw open the door. In the middle of her carefully made bed was a note. He picked it up and read it out loud:

Dear Boys,

I know you do not beleive in love at first site because you are both Synics. But Jean-Nagin and I are Kindrid Spirits and meant to be together. I told him so Bold a man as he should not be in Trade, esp. as he has his own ships banks and docks and he agrees. So he is to be a Pirate in fact as well as name and I am his Pirate Queen.

I am sorry about the Black Mony scam but a girl can’t start a new life by cheating her Hubby that is no way to be

Love,

Tawny Petticoats

P.S. You boys are both so much fun.

“Tell me,” Darger said after a long silence. “Did Tawny sleep with you?”

Surplus looked startled. Then he placed paw upon chest and forthrightly, though without quite looking Darger in the eye, said, “Upon my word, she did not. You don’t mean that she …?”

“No. No, of course not.”

There was another awkward silence.

“Well, then,” Darger said. “Much as I predicted, we are left with nothing for all our labors.”

“You forget the silver ingots,” Surplus said.

“It is hardly worth bothering to …”

But Surplus was already on his knees, groping in the shadows beneath Tawny’s bed. He pulled out three leather cases and from them extracted three ingots.

“Those are obviously …”

Whipping out his pocketknife, Surplus scratched each ingot, one after the other. The first was merely plated lead. The other two were solid silver. Darger explosively let out his breath in relief.

“A toast!” Surplus cried, rising to his feet. “To women, God bless ’em. Constant, faithful, and unfailingly honest! Paragons, sir, of virtue in every respect.”

In the distance could be heard the sound of a window breaking. “I’ll drink to that,” Darger replied. “But just a sip and then we really must flee. We have, I suspect, a conflagration to avoid.”