After the final rolling of the puff pastry Devra scrubbed the flour off her hands and arms – and off the counter and floor too, she’d been maybe a little overenthusiastic with the puff pastry, but at least it hadn’t stuck. – She wrung out the scrubbing cloths in the same bucket of water she’d used to wash her hands. The drains, Vess had warned her, were old and truculent, and any washing water that was full of flour had to be dumped out the back door.
Fortunately Mikal had unlocked both front and back doors when he stumbled down to let her in, before muttering something about not liking five o’clock in the morning and preferring never to see it again, and going grumpily back upstairs to the space he shared with Vess over the café. Devra picked up the bucket in both hands, staggered to the back door, threw the water out in an arc over the syncrete of the back alley – and heard an indignant yowl.
A familiar yowl; screechy as a piece of farm machinery preparing to die. “Scat!”
“Oh, don’t chase him off,” Vess said, rubbing her eyes as she came down the stairs. “We like cats here. Although not in the kitchen, of course, they shed.”
“I wasn’t chasing him off,” Devra said, “that’s his name.”
“You’ve already named him?”
“We were previously acquainted,” she said. “He used to beg around my old apartment block.”
“Hmph,” said Vess. “Don’t see how he could have followed you here. Most likely it’s some other big scruffy stray.”
“There aren’t any more quite like Scat,” Devra said. “If you like cats enough to give me some scraps for him, I’ll show you.”
Vess grudgingly admitted that she’d never seen a cat quite as ugly as Scat, with his particolored square head and his scars where fur would never grow again. Devra smiled as she held out her hand with the last of the leftover meat filling from yesterday’s pies. She’d dropped the other bits of chopped meat on the syncrete, where Scat could sniff them, sneer, and then gobble them down without coming close enough to be touched. But she wanted to pet him… “Come on,” she breathed, “it’s me, don’t be afraid, this is all for you.”
Vess rolled her eyes. “Next you’ll be telling me he understands Anglic.”
No, Devra thought, she wouldn’t be telling Vess that. Nor would she mention the occasional hallucinations where she thought Scat was talking to her.
The big cat approached slowly, sniffing and deciding that yes, that was meat in her hand, just like on the syncrete. All at once he pounced, swallowed the last of the chopped meat in one gulp, and bit Devra’s hand.
“Ow! You didn’t need to do that!”
I’m nobody’s pet, said Scat. I’m my own cat.
“Nice manners,” Vess said sarcastically.
“Oh, it’s just his way,” Devra said, standing up. “See, he didn’t even draw blood.”
“I’ll be sure to recommend him to our customers. Bad-tempered ugly cat, hardly ever draws blood – how could they resist?”
Scat swiped at her ankle.
“Could you unlock the spice cabinet for me?” Devra said hastily, before Vess could revisit the question of Scat’s acceptability.
The next hour was even busier than before. While Vess prepared and simmered her sweetish meat sauce, Devra made raisin scones and a tray of ginger bar cookies. While they were baking, she cut half the puff pastry into strips and half into triangles for the meat pastries. Baking for the kahve house was more demanding than she’d realized. Gunter’s had, of course, boasted the very latest model of sheet roller for making the square meters of puff pastry they needed daily. Maybe some day the Green Cat would be able to afford a sheet roller. A small roller. Maybe a used one.
Then again, if she did this much manual rolling every day, she’d probably develop something resembling actual muscles in her arms. So the work wasn’t a total loss.
An early customer came in as soon as Vess unlocked the front door, loudly demanding a double kahve and “the usual,” and wanting to know what smelled so good. For the next couple of hours Vess was busy at the counter and Devra was watching two ovens at once, one for sweet rolls and another for scones, while spreading the puff pastry strips with the spiced cream cheese she’d developed at Gunter’s. As soon as the sweet rolls came out, the pastries went in.
Over the next few days Devra gradually learned the routines of the café. On the second morning Vess came downstairs to let her in, gave her keys to the front and back, and introduced her to a seedy little man who came to the back door with a hand-wagon full of flour bags. “This is my new assistant,” Vess told him. “When I’m not here, she can sign for supplies.”
And supplies there were, delivered three times a week by people who did not look like employees of any community market. But then, the goods they brought weren’t to be found on the shelves of a Community Market: fine white pastry flour, slices of candied ginger, good thick thornberry jam, cream that stood up in stiff white peaks when you whipped it, eggs so fresh they might have been warm from the nest.
But the prices! The first time she was asked to sign for delivery, Devra asked the delivery man to wait. She ran up the stairs and tapped lightly on the locked door at the head of the stairs that set Vess and Mikal’s private rooms apart. Hoping to waken Vess, she got Mikal instead, who filled up the open doorway with his shoulders while he squinted blearily at the bill and confirmed that yes, these were the prices they’d agreed to pay.
A few days later, Devra brought up the subject of prices again. Mikal was letting his third cop of kahve grow cold while he fiddled with the settings on his old-fashioned reader – really, Esilians were backward; imagine having a device whose only function was to display books! The reader couldn’t calculate, send messages, track appointments, stream broadcasts, or any of the innumerable functions Devra’s CodeX performed!
“We don’t pay Committee prices,” Mikal told her, “because none of these supplies are available in the Community Markets where those prices are set. Of course we have to pay more on the black market; every café and restaurant does. Otherwise they’d all go out of business. Don’t tell me your precious Gunter’s never bought any goods that had fallen off the back of a float!” He waggled his eyebrows at her and smiled sweetly.
“Maybe they did,” said Devra. She wished he wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t fair; they had a strictly business relationship. He made it hard to concentrate, turning that warm smile on her. “But as an apprentice, I was never asked to sign for them. How can you stay in business if you’re paying this much for flour? And how do you pay, anyway? Nobody’s asked me to sign a CodeX; they go off happily with these little scraps of paper.”
“We don’t keep enough marks and silvers here to pay our suppliers in cash,” Mikal said. “The Embassy acts as our banker and pays out on the basis of those ‘little scraps.’ As for paper, get used to it: this is how the underground economy works. If they kept accounts on a CodeX, the Committee could track exactly what they’re selling and how much they’re charging.”
“And so they should!” Devra exclaimed. “This is shameless price-gouging.”
“Is it? Anyway, it’s not dangerous, because the Committee members and the heads of Bureaus also like pastry flour and chocolate, and if they crack down on the black market those things won’t be available any more.”
“Of course they will. The vendors should be forced to take their goods to the People’s Markets instead of sneaking around selling them at these outrageous rates.”
Mikal sighed. “I guess we’ll have to agree to differ on how that would work out. I think that if farmers’ cooperatives can’t make a profit growing and milling soft wheat for cake and pastry flour, they won’t grow it at all and you’ll be stuck baking with whatever you can find in the People’s Market.”
“Well, anyway,” Devra said, feeling a little unsure about this argument, “even for the black market, you’re paying too much for these supplies. I did better when I was shopping in the bazaar for myself, and I wasn’t buying in
anything like the quantity you do. Would you mind if I just had a friendly discussion with your private suppliers about prices and taking advantage of foreigners?”
Mikal’s eyebrows shot up. “Mind? No, but if Rojer couldn’t get better prices from them, what makes you think you’ll be able to?”
“Persuasiveness,” Devra said sweetly. “Feminine wiles. Actually knowing what a fair price would be. I take it you wouldn’t object if I could beat them down to a price that actually allowed the café to make a profit?”
“Huh! I thought you Harmonicas considered ‘profit’ a dirty word. No, no, go ahead. If it works, we’ll have more income to…. Um. We’ll have more income. I don’t think Vess would mind that.”
“At least you won’t be spending a fortune for dairy products from now on,” Devra said cheerfully. “I listen to the early-morning newscasts while I’m starting the baking. The Central Committee is going to put price controls on butter and sour cream and cream cheese.”
“Oh, wonderful. That’ll solve everything. Hallelujah!”
“Why do you take that sarcastic tone?”
Mikal put down the reader he’d been fiddling with and looked her in the eyes again. He seemed serious for once; it was oddly disarming. “I’ll bet you – oh, any number of credits or marks you like – that within a month dairy products will disappear from the People’s Market and you’ll be getting your butter at the back door along with the rest of our ‘luxury’ supplies.”
“I don’t gamble,” Devra said.
“Ha! Being alive is a gamble. Every day you’re betting that you wouldn’t be better off dead. Okay, we don’t have to bet money. If you’re not buying butter on the black market in a month, I’ll talk Vess into getting that sheet roller you want for making pastry. And if I win…when I win, Devra, Deborah, Devra...”
Devra’s cheeks felt hot. He was looking at her with eyes half-closed; she felt he was on the verge of saying something outrageous.
“If you win,” she said quickly, “I’ll make you a whole tray of that over-sweetened chocolate sheet cake you like, and I won’t even say anything about recipes that substitute too much sugar and chocolate for actual skill.”
“’Too much chocolate,” said Mikal, “is a meaningless combination of words. Chocolate frosting too? And that white chocolate-buttercream filling?”
Devra sighed and rolled her eyes. “If that’s what it takes to keep you happy!”
“I guess it’ll have to do,” said Mikal, bending over his reader again. “For now.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lars had been expecting to pass on his page of Sabotage for Dummies to Julle when they met this time. Instead she told him to keep it. There was some difficulty about the copier.
To his surprise, Lars didn’t feel the great relief he would have expected on hearing Julle’s news. He actually felt… disappointed? to hear that the antique copier that had been used for previous leaflets was no longer available. He had this page for the next leaflet committed to paper in his awkward block-capital printing, and he’d composed his own original preface following the hints in the manual: no abstractions, but promises of concrete results. He felt modestly proud of that paragraph. And now Julle was telling him they couldn’t use it?
“I must say, you don’t seem as relieved as I expected.” Julle squinted and looked at him sideways. “Have you got a cold or something?”
“I am perfectly well,” Lars said stiffly, “or as well as anyone can be who actually breathes the air in here.” The basement cafeteria’s airflow system was not nearly strong enough to neutralize the prevailing aroma of wet student: the steady rain had driven them all indoors, but didn’t seem to have damped their incessant, uninhibited chatter.
“Then what’s the matter with you?”
“Does there have to be something wrong with me just because I don’t always react the way you expect me to?” Julle could reduce him from Distinguished University Lecture to Indignant Six-Year-Old faster than anybody had done since his parents died. “As a matter of fact,” Lars said, “I happen to have created an entire leaflet based on some of the ideas in that manual. It’s all neatly written and ready to be copied.”
He tapped the folder in front of him.
Julle slid the folder towards her and opened it about six inches, enough to give her a look at the contents without displaying them to the entire student body. “Mmm. Nice preface.”
“It is good, isn’t it? Though rather a different approach…”
“Professor, you’re fishing for compliments!” Julle giggled. “Okay. You’ve gotten over your conviction that you can’t write, and now you’re acting like every other writer in the world, wanting to put your work out for an admiring public.” She nodded once, sharply, and closed the folder. “And it is worthy of admiration. Don’t worry, we’ll get it out there. Just – not this week.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to get the copying machine working?
“Dunno.” Julle shrugged. “I’m not supposed to know anybody but you and my other contact, but I suspect the copier and distributor was Fix-It Benj, over in the Shady Leaf neighborhood. And he seems to have closed up shop and disappeared. So they’ll need to rebuild his net of passers, fix the machine, and find a new place to operate it. Could take weeks.”
“Where’s the machine now?”
“In a safe place. But it’s been disassembled, and some of the parts are missing – nothing crucial, but the panels that hold it together and keep dirt from getting in, you know?”
But that machine wasn’t the only one capable of making copies, was it? Julle had printed the sabotage manual right there in the science and technology building. “We could use the department printer…”
“Too dangerous,” Julle said.
“But you printed that manual –”
“If anybody got curious, I could have said it was background material for my thesis on History of Technology. This –” she tapped the folder between them, “would be a ticket straight to medical rehab for anybody caught copying it. And even if you didn’t get caught – the department printer just prints from computer or CodeX, it doesn’t copy. Which is really stupid, because it’s got the tech for copying, but somebody saw fit to disable it. So you’d have to enter your text on your CodeX – risky – and send it to be printed in the only font the printer knows – easily traceable – and the final leaflet wouldn’t look anything like all the Leafletter’s previous work. It would be like painting a whole series of big red arrows pointing straight at the sci-tech building… and how long do you think it would take them to get to you, once they got that far?”
Lars shook his head. “Sometimes I feel stupid compared to you, Julle. I hadn’t thought about any of that.”
“It’s all those faculty meetings,” Julle said kindly. “They beat down the capacity for original thought.”
Lars still wanted to see his preface distributed. “I’m reasonably handy. Maybe I could go to this safe place you mentioned and try to fix the copier?”
“Not a good idea,” Julle said. “I’ve never been there myself. Our whole safety depends on separation, unpredictability, nobody knowing more than two or three other members. This place can only survive if there’s no pattern of people under suspicion meeting there.”
“Am I under suspicion?”
“I don’t know,” said Julle wearily. “I don’t know how to hack into Security, and anyway I wouldn’t: too risky. We generally suppose that everybody in our net is under suspicion; it’s the safest assumption.” She drummed her fingers on the folder for a moment, frowning. “But you should know how to find it, in case there’s an emergency and you haven’t time to contact me.”
“What kind of emergency?”
“Habbers in your office?”
“And the people at this place can help with that level of emergency?” Lars asked skeptically.
“So it’s said.” Julle’s smile flashed for a moment. “I haven’t tested it myself. But here’s
the address…”
Automatically, Lars flipped open his CodeX and held it out to catch her words. Julle flipped it shut again. “No. You don’t write this down, and you definitely don’t keep it on your CodeX. You’ll have to memorize it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Devra tried to make a point by using flour from the nearest community market for her next day’s batch of muffins. The muffins came out of the oven late because she had to sift the flour twice, and they would probably have gone unsold entirely if the customers had known what she found in the sifter. Grains of sand were bad enough, but dead bugs would turn people off the café forever. Even with the double servings of cocoa and cinnamon that she stirred into the muffin mix to hide the reddish-brown specks of other grains added for bulk, the results were not a success. Devra heard complaints that they were too heavy, soggy, generally not up to the Green Cat standard; and for the first time since she’d started baking there, more than half that tray of muffins remained unsold.
“What kind of experiment?” Vess asked when Devra tried to explain the failure, and then, “All right, but don’t do it again. You’re a professional; I expect you to keep up professional standards for supplies.”
Devra had to acknowledge that in a match between black-market greed and Community Market price-controlled supplies, greed won. Easily.
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