apartment. On the way, I listened to the voice mail that had accumulated while I was out, including a message from Diana that said Lakshmi Chatterjee had had a cancellation and could see her to talk about her poetry tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. It was less necessary now, I suspected, to bug Shopatsky House; Dirk had almost certainly been her accomplice. But it was still probably worth finding out if Lakshmi had revealed the location of the Alpha to anyone else or was planning another trip out to it.
Despite all I’d been through today, I was totally clean—the surface suit had kept all the dust and mud out. But I definitely needed a shower. Once I got home, I stripped and headed into the stall, opting to treat myself to a water rinse. (The irony was that it was water showers that were noisy; sonic showers were ultrasonic and didn’t interfere with your hearing—not a lot of people sang while taking sonic showers.)
But while other sounds were being drowned out by the jets of H2O, someone must have jimmied the lock on my apartment door. Or maybe they’d broken in earlier, and had simply been hiding until now. Either way, when I turned off the nozzles, what I heard was not the drip-drip-drip that I really needed to get fixed, but rather a low, unpleasant voice that said, “Freeze.”
TWENTY-SIX
The door to my shower stall was alloquartz—not bulletproof, but, as they used to say about watches that you could get wet, bullet-resistant.
I turned slowly in the little stall so that I was facing the intruder, and so he might feel a little intimidated. The air was steamy, and there was the transparent door between us, with beads of water on it, but I’d lay money that the mug facing me was a transfer. Unfortunately, my money was in my wallet, in the other room, along with my pants.
The guy was big, the kind of bruiser that people would have called “Moose” on a planet that had any. He was aiming a gun at me—and, indignity of indignities, I soon recognized that it was my own.
“What can I do for you?” I said, as amiably as I could manage. He hadn’t told me to stick my hands up, so I hadn’t.
“You have something I want.” His voice was slow, thick.
I looked down. “That’s what all the boys say.”
“Stow it,” said the man. “I’m talking about the diary. We can do this one of two ways. You tell me where it is, I get it, I leave, and you go towel off and put baby powder on your butt. Or you make me rip this joint apart looking for it, and I leave powder burns right above that six-pack of yours.”
“You make a tempting case for the former option,” I said.
It clearly took him a moment to digest this, but then he nodded. “Good.”
“It’s in a safe in my living room. The safe opens to simultaneous scanning of my fingerprint and me uttering a passphrase—a combination lock, if you will.”
He jerked the Smith & Wesson to indicate I should step out. If he’d been standing closer, I might have been able to slam the alloquartz door into his arm—my bathroom wasn’t much bigger than a closet—but that wasn’t going to work. As I opened the door, he moved out into the living room. I dripped my way across to join him.
“Where’s the safe?” he asked.
“In the wall. Behind the couch.”
The couch was a threadbare affair upon which I’d pursued many a threadbare affair. It was heavy—it pulled out into a bed, for those occasional times I had an overnight guest who wasn’t going to share mine—but not so heavy that I couldn’t easily move it in Martian gravity. Still, I indicated for Moose to take an end, in hopes that his doing so would destabilize the situation enough that I could recapture my gun. But he was a transfer: he bent and put his left hand under the bottom of the couch and swung it away from the wall all by himself, without once taking the gun off me.
The safe couldn’t be installed flush with the wall, of course; that would have made it protrude into my neighbor’s apartment, and Crazy Gustav and I made a point of staying out of each other’s way. Instead, it jutted from the wall at floor level. It was about forty centimeters tall and wide, and half that deep. Moose looked disappointed: he’d probably been hoping for