The common room of the tavern, lit by kerosene lamps and almost empty at that early hour, was shaped like a capital I and smelled of fried onions, stale beer, and several decades of grease. Pitch-covered beams quartered the ceiling, beneath which lay benches and boards, and whitewashed walls gone a splotchy gray from kitchen smoke and innumerable grimy touches, and a counter behind which a corpulent barman wearing a fez (not Ali, who was a purely fictive personage) stood lordly and watchful, punctuating the quiet with the occasional thwack of a flyswatter. Three young women in loosely belted dressing gowns sat at the center of the room, talking softly. Carts rattled by outside, and a vendor shrilled the virtues of her coconut sweets. To George, sitting at a window in a rear corner of the I, the conversations of passersby came as bursts of unintelligible words peppered with curses.
While inspecting the contents of a glass jar containing coins and buttons and tin badges that he had purchased as a lot, he unearthed a dark leathern chip stiff with age and grime, shaped like a thumbnail, though three times the size and much thicker. He opened his cleaning kit and dabbed at the chip with a cotton ball dipped in solvent, after some exercise clearing a speck of bluish green at the center. His interest enlisted, he put on the spectacles he used for close work, bent to the chip and rubbed at it vigorously with the cotton ball, widening the speck. The blue-green color held a gem-like luster. He fitted a jeweler’s loupe to his spectacles and held the chip to his eye.
‘What you got there?’
A prostitute clad in a robe of peach silk, a thin brunette in her early twenties with curly hair, a dusky complexion, and a face that, though pretty, was too sharp-featured for his tastes, slid onto the bench beside him and held out a hand. ‘Can I see?’
Startled not only by her, but by the fact that the tavern had, without his notice, filled with a noisy crowd, he dropped the chip into her hand, an action he instantly regretted, worried that she might abscond with it.
‘I haven’t seen one of these since I was a bare-ass kid,’ the woman said, pushing her hair back from her eyes. ‘My granny wore one like this around her neck. She promised she’d leave it to me, but they buried the old hag with it.’
‘You know what it is, then?’
‘A dragon scale . . . not off a monster like Griaule. The babies have this blue color when they’re born, or so I hear.4 I suppose it could be Griaule’s from when he was little. There ain’t been any baby dragons around these parts for centuries. The scale my granny wore was passed down from her great-great-great.’
George reached for the scale, but the woman closed her hand.
‘I’ll give you a ride for it.’ She opened her robe, exposing her breasts, and shimmied her shoulders.
‘Let me have it,’ said George, snapping his fingers.
‘Don’t act so stern!’ She jiggled the scale in her palm, as if assessing its weight, and then passed it to him. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you liberties for a week. When you go back to Port Chantay, you’ll have more than a guided tour of Griaule to remember, I promise.’
‘How can you tell I’m from Port Chantay?’
With a disdainful sniff, she said, ‘I have a gift.’
Her breasts were fuller than he had thought, quite shapely, with large cinnamon areolae. Ever a pragmatic sort when it came to business affairs, he reckoned the scale to be a curiosity piece, not worth that much to the run of his customers; but he pressed his seller’s advantage.
‘I’m here two more weeks,’ he said. ‘Put yourself at my disposal for that time and the scale is yours.’
‘At your disposal? You’ll have to speak plainer than that. I ain’t letting you tie me up, if that’s how you’re bent.’
‘I’m staying at the Weathers. I’d want you there with me.’
‘The Weathers,’ she said, and made an appreciative face. ‘What else would you want?’
George spelled out his needs in clinical detail; the woman nodded and said, ‘Done.’
She extended a hand and, as if imitating George, snapped her fingers. ‘Give it here.’
‘When the two weeks are up. One of us will have to trust the other to fulfill their end of the bargain. I’d prefer it be you.’
1 The mile-long dragon, paralyzed by a wizard’s spell, in whose lee Teocinte had grown.
2 Portions of this sky, scales shed by the dragon, would occaisionally fall on the rooftops below, crushing the houses beneath, causing the plots of land upon which they had stood to appreciate in value because they would be unlikely to experience another such disaster.
3 As the tale was told, over the centuries people came from the ends of the earth to lay offerings before him, and these offerings had been transported by a succession of creatures and men controlled by the dragon to a hiding place known only to him (its location having been subsequently erased from the minds of his minions). The treasure was said by some to be fabulous beyond belief, and by others to be a complete fabrication.
