I relaxed, slightly. Only slightly, however, because I could see the next—yeah.
“So why did you get mixed up in it?” he asked quietly. “More of Greyboar’s philosophy? Wasn’t it enough he got you chased out of New Sfinctr with that foolishness?”
“Wasn’t philosophy,” I grumbled. “Worse. Gwendolyn.”
“Ah.” Wipewipewipe. “Ah.”
I scowled at the bar top. “What was I supposed to say? No—we wouldn’t do it?”
Scowl, scowl, scowl. “You know with a Rap Sheet in Grotum, Gwendolyn’s as good as dead. Every porker in the land’s been looking for her for years. The damned thing’s a Joe relic. Most powerful magic there is. They’d find her in a heartbeat. Then—chop, chop, chop.”
The bar top was suddenly subjected to a vigorous cleansing. “Ah.”
“Can’t you say anything else?” I demanded crossly.
He shrugged his fat shoulders. “What’s to say, Ignace? Gwendolyn’s family. Only family Greyboar’s got left, now. For that matter, she’s the only family you’ve got left. After your parents all died when you were youngsters—their mom and your pop—the three of you brought each other up. Like your own little miniature clan.”
He chuckled. Leuwen’s chuckles were kind of a signature piece. Large, rolling, heavy—and somehow very dry at the same time.
“And just as fierce in your feuding as any clan of Groutch legend, too! God, the three of you were ferocious, if anybody messed with any of you. Even you, tiny as you were. I still laugh, now and then, thinking about that time old Stinky Gerrin started pawing at Gwendolyn when she got off work at the packinghouse after her first day on the job. What was she then? Twelve? Maybe thirteen?”
“Twelve,” I muttered. “We’d just celebrated her birthday two days earlier. Greyboar’d caught a juicy rat—one of those fat ones that hang around the slops—and I’d, uh, obtained an apple pie that some baker must have misplaced.” I smiled for a moment, remembering. “We even spent the money to buy a candle for the pie. Couldn’t afford but the one, so we invented a new arithmetic where one equaled twelve. Laughed, we did, telling ourselves we’d revolutionized mathematics.”
Leuwen’s ensuing chuckle rolled over in a laugh. “Good old Stinky! Never could resist a girl just coming of age.” Another chuckle rolled over. “Wish I’d seen it! They say you were on his shoulders biting his ear off before Gwendolyn even started breaking his fingers.”
I couldn’t help chuckling myself. “Stinky was right! Yuch! Nastiest-tasting ear I ever bit into. Spit the damn thing out as fast as I could. And I can’t tell you how happy I was that I didn’t have to take off the other one. By then, of course, Gwendolyn was breaking his wrists and it was pretty much all over.”
A companionable silence followed, for a few seconds. Then Leuwen mused: “Yeah, good old Stinky. He disappeared the next day. When they dredged his body out of the river a few weeks later, the corpse was in such wretched shape they almost couldn’t identify him. But the cause of death was obvious enough. They say his neck hadn’t been broken so much as pulverized.”
Leuwen gave me a speculative glance. “Even at the time everybody figured that was Greyboar. His first choke.”
I kept my mouth shut. Actually, it’d been Greyboar’s second choke. Stinky hadn’t been the first lecher to think a dirt-poor orphan girl would make easy pickings. But the first one had been a vagrant, so nobody had noticed. In his own way, Stinky had been a well-known fixture in the Flankn. After he, ah, “came to a bad end,” nobody bothered Gwendolyn much anymore.
Leuwen accepted my silence readily enough, and didn’t try to pry anything loose. Even a man with his curiosity can accept a stone wall when he sees one. He went back to wiping the bar, chatting idly.
“Yeah, I can still remember the first time the three of you came in here. Three kids—even if two of them were already huge—swaggering into The Trough bound and determined to order their first real, by God, ale pot. Trying to swagger, I should say.”
He emitted another chuckle. “You couldn’t afford but the one pot to share. I remember the three of you counting out the pennies, almost sweating blood you wouldn’t have enough.”
“We didn’t have enough,” I growled. “Short one lousy penny, we were. We tried to wheedle you into giving us credit. Chintzy bastard! You wouldn’t budge an inch.”
He smiled, shrugging. “You know how it is, Ignace. But look at the bright side—I did agree to give you a pot not quite full. Bent the hell out of professional ethics, if I say so myself.”