The Return of Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future (13 page)

      
Her specialty was that she didn't specialize. Gold, diamonds, artwork, fissionable materials, promissory notes, she stole them all. She'd done two years in the hellhole prison on Spica II, and another four months on Sugarcane. She escaped from both, the only prisoner ever to break out of either penitentiary.

      
She was a lot of things Dante wasn't—skilled in the martial arts, skilled in the ways of
haute couture
society, exceptionally well-read—and a few things that Dante was, such as an outlaw with a price on her head. It didn't bother her much; she figured that if she could survive Spica II, she could survive anything the Democracy or the Frontier threw at her.

      
The most interesting aspect of her past was that she came from money, and had every whim catered to. At eight she was so graceful a ballerina that her family mapped out her entire future—and at nine she proved to be even more independent than graceful by leaving the Democracy forever. She stowed away on a cargo ship bound for Roosevelt III, somehow made her way to the carnival world of Calliope, bought a fake ID with money she'd stolen from her brother, and soon found work dancing in various stage shows.

      
As she grew older she learned every dance from a tango to a striptease, and made her way from one world to another as an entertainer, dancing solo when possible, with partners when necessary. She changed her name as often as most people changed clothes, and changed her worlds almost as frequently—but she never left a world without some trinket, some banknote, some negotiable bond,
something
, that she hadn't possessed when she arrived.

      
Just once she made the error of stealing within the Democracy's borders. That was when she was apprehended and incarcerated on Spica II. She never went back again.

      
No one knew her real name. She liked the sound of Matilda, and used it with half a hundred different surnames. She was Waltzin' Matilda just once, on Sugarcane, but that was where she was arrested the second time, and after she escaped from jail, that was the name that was on all the Wanted posters.

      
She still used a different name, sometimes more than one, on every world, but she was resigned to the fact that to most of her friends and almost all of her enemies she had become Waltzin' Matilda, despite the fact that she could not recall ever having performed a single waltz on stage.

      
It was a pleasant life, punctuated only by the occasional narrow escape from the mignons of the Democracy or those bounty hunters who wished to claim its reward. She liked appearing on stage, and she found her secret vocation as a thief sexually exciting, especially when she knew that her movements were being watched.

      
Like tonight.

      
Dimitrios of the Three Burners was in the audience. He hadn't come to Prateep IV to find her—he was after other prey—but he had a notion that Matilda Montez was really Waltzin' Matilda, and since he hadn't turned up his quarry yet, he'd dropped in to check her out, maybe keep an eye on her in case she was up to her usual tricks.

      
She watched him out of the corner of her eye as she spun and dipped, jumped and pirouetted. It was Dimitrios, all right, with his trademarked burners in two well-worn holsters and the handle of the third peeking out from the top of his boot. He seemed relaxed, sipping his drink, staring at her with the same appreciative smile she'd seen on so many other men in so many other audiences.
Well, you just keep drinking and smiling, bounty killer, because before you leave here I'm going to be two million credits richer—and even you, who's seen it all and heard it all, won't believe the only eyewitness.

      
She spun around twice more, then stopped and bowed, perfectly willing to let the audience think her smile was for them. They were informed that she would take a twenty-minute break, and then return for the evening's finale.

      
She waited for the applause to die down and bowed one last time, then began making her way to her dressing room. A drunken man jumped up from his chair and tried to climb onstage. She dispatched him almost effortlessly with a spinning kick to the chest, and got another standing ovation as she finally left the stage.

      
Once there, she locked the door behind her, peeled off her clothes, and donned a thin robe. She picked up a tiny receiving device and inserted it in her ear, then hit the control on her make-up table.

      
"Twenty minutes . . . nineteen minutes 50 seconds . . . nineteen minutes 40 seconds . . ." droned a mechanical voice.

      
She slid her feet into a pair of rubber-soled shoes, then ordered her window to open. She climbed up onto the ledge and leaped lightly to the roof of the adjoining brokerage house with the grace of an athlete. A cloth bag was suspended on a very thin line from her room. She walked over to it, removed a pint of hard liquor from the neighboring system of Ribot, walked to a door leading to the building's interior, whispered the code that opened it, and stepped inside.

      
"Eighteen minutes, 30 seconds . . ."

      
She removed her shoes, took off her robe, and unstrapped the shocker from her leg. Then, totally naked, she descended two levels on the airlift.

      
A middle-aged man, dressed in a guard's uniform, suddenly looked up from the musical holo he had been watching on his pocket computer. His jaw dropped when he saw Matilda.

      
She smiled at him and began walking straight toward him.

      
"My God!" muttered the man. "Who . . . what are you doing here?"

      
Her smile widened, promising no end of wonders as she approached him, her hands behind her back.

      
"You . . . you . . . you shouldn't be here!" he stammered.

      
She considered replying, but decided that total silence would be more effective as she continued walking toward him.

      
"This is . . ." he began, and then seemed to run out of words for a moment. He blinked his eyes. "Things like this don't happen to me!"

      
Her left hand held the whiskey. She stretched it out to him, offering it, and as if in a dreamlike trance, he took a step toward her and reached out his arms.

      
And then, before he quite knew what hit him, she brought the shocker out in her right hand, aimed it at him, and felt it vibrate with power as it sent its voltage coursing through his body. For a moment he seemed to be a life-sized puppet dancing spasmodically on strings; then he fell to the floor in a silent heap.

      
She knelt down next to him, poured as much of the whiskey as she could into his mouth without choking him, spilled the rest on his clothes, and, after carefully wiping her fingerprints from the bottle, tossed it onto the floor, where it broke into pieces. She then raced to his desk and began manipulating his pocket computer.

      
"Fifteen minutes, ten seconds . . ."

      
She was still trying to find what she needed five minutes later. Then, finally, she broke through the encryption, found the code words she needed, walked to the safe, uttered the words in the proper order, and a minute later was thumbing through a score of negotiable currencies. She finally settled on New Stalin rubles and Far London pounds, since they were the largest denominations, took two huge handfuls, and raced to the airlift. Once she reached the third level she donned her robe and shoes and walked out onto the building's roof.

      
The guard would be out cold for at least five more hours. More to the point, he'd stink of booze, and no one on this or any other would believe his story about a gorgeous naked woman entering the building and turning a shocker on him. It sounded too much like a drunken fantasy—and the remains of the drink were there to prove it.

      
She went to the bag that was suspended from her window, the one where she'd found the whiskey, and put the money into it. Then she tested the line that held it to make sure it was secure. It was, and a moment later she scrambled up the wall, feet on the slick metal exterior, hands on the line, until she reached her window.

      
She climbed back into her dressing room, raised the line high enough so that in the unlikely event someone else were to walk on the brokerage house's roof, they wouldn't be able to reach the bag, then removed her shoes and robe, put them in a closet, and began climbing back into her costume.

      
"Four minutes, 20 seconds . . ."

      
She felt proud of herself. She didn't believe in repeating her methods—that was the quickest way to give the police and the bounty hunters a line on you—and she thought tonight's job was one of her most creative to date. She'd stolen the equivalent of two million credits in currency that would be almost impossible to trace, and the only witness an old man stinking of alcohol and raving about a naked lady. It was beautiful.

      
"Two minutes, 30 seconds . . ."

      
She took the receiver out of her ear, deactivated it, and placed it in a jar of face cream, covering it so no one could see it—not that anyone had a reason to look for it, but she hadn't made it this far by not being thorough.

      
Then, nineteen minutes after she left the stage, she walked out again and stood in the wings, waiting to be introduced, her take suspended from a window where no one could see it, and another perfect crime to her credit. If she was a little flushed from her efforts, well, that could be written off to excitement at appearing on stage, or satisfaction at the wild applause she generated.

      
She waited for the emcee to run through her intro, then stepped out and faced the audience, smiling and bowing before beginning to dance again.

      
Yes, he was still there: Dimitrios of the Three Burners.
I pulled it off right under your nose, bounty killer, and it's almost a pity that I did it so well you'll never know what happened. That's the only part of this business I don't enjoy; I can never let anyone know how good I am at what I do.

      
She was on such an adrenaline high that she not only gave them a five-minute dance, but a four-minute encore, and then another four minutes in which she and the band improvised wildly but in perfect harmony. When it was finally over, she bowed again, gave Dimitrios a great big smile, and returned to her dressing room—and found a small, slightly-built man sitting there on her chair.

      
"Hi," he said. "My name's Dante Alighieri. We have to talk."

      
"Who let you in here?" she demanded.

      
"I let myself in. It's one of the things I do really well."

      
"Well, you can let yourself right out!"

      
"Look," he said, "I'm not a bounty hunter, I'm not a security guard, I don't work for the Democracy or any police agency. I don't give a damn that you robbed the office next door."

      
Her eyes widened. "How . . . ?" She forced herself to stop in mid-thought.

      
"Because robbery is another of the things I do really well. I have nothing but professional admiration for you." Suddenly he smiled. "I wonder if Dimitrios knows how close he is to a
real
outlaw?"

      
"Probably not," she said, still eyeing him suspiciously.

      
"Where are my manners?" said Dante, suddenly getting to his feet. "This is your chair."

      
"I'd prefer to stand."

      
"All right," he said. "But hear me out before you start hitting and kicking. That's
not
one of the things I do well—though I'm learning."

      
"Just what the hell is it that you want?"

      
"I told you—I want to talk to you."

      
"If you think I'm going to pay you to keep quiet about tonight, you can forget it. They can question that old man all they want, his story will never hold up."

      
"I don't care about him or about what you stole."

      
"Then what
do
you want to talk about?"

      
"Santiago."

9.

      
      
He was a cop on the make, a cop on the take,

      
      
As corrupt as a cop gets to be.

      
      
The very same men that he saved from the pen

      
      
Are now owned by Simon Legree.

      
His name was Simon Legree, and he'd been after Matilda for a long, long time. She was the One Who Got Away, and it was a point of honor with him that he bring her to the bar of justice—or at least threaten to do so.

      
For Legree had his own profitable little business, not totally dissimilar from Wait-a-bit Bennett's. It was trickier, because he didn't have the advantage of a price on his prey's head—but when it worked, it was far more lucrative.

      
Oh, he took bribes, and he always managed to stuff a few packets of alphanella seeds in his pocket for future resale when there was a major drug bust—but what Simon Legree lived for was to catch a criminal in the act of committing a crime. Then it was a choice between jail and turning over a third of their earnings for the rest of their lives—and Legree had enough working capital to hire agents to make sure his new partners fulfilled their obligations.