Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (4 page)

They were both ten story buildings back-to-back
on adjacent streets. His idea was to provide a place where the wealthy could
relax and enjoy themselves, the Gentleman’s Club, and then go use the sports
equipment and exercise at the Athletic Club next door.

The problem was, there were no gentlemen on
Belvaille and very few people cared about their health. In fact, a petition had
been circulated some while ago, which I signed, to reduce the gravity on the
space station. It didn’t happen because I think some other systems needed the
gravity to remain a certain level and because the technicians didn’t know how
to do it.

After a year the “Gentleman’s Club” name was
pure irony because guys would come straight from their jobs at the port or the
sewers or cleaning streets or breaking skulls and sit down, eat some food, and
stink up the place.

He paid for the sign so Krample wasn’t about to
change it just because we were the biggest bunch of ungentlemanly gentleman in
the galaxy.

Except for the sound of televised sports, the
Gentleman’s Club was a quiet place because at this point bosses didn’t have
their own club. So every little corner had every different outfit all sitting
together and staring down rival gangs as they talked in hushed voices.

As one of the few people not in any gang, I
found all this oppressive. It was not a very social social club.

Some other people had complained to me about it
as well. They couldn’t relax while their bosses were there and why else would
you go out drinking except to relax?

It got to the point that I was either going to
have to find a new place to congregate or fix this one. And this was the only
spot that was open 24 hours and televised sports.

I talked to Krample about it and while he
recognized there was a problem, he didn’t know what to do. I convinced him to
give me six months to help turn his business around and if I was successful, he
would give me a percentage of the take and a lifetime membership.

The first thing I did was fire the fancy chefs
he had and change the menu to nothing but sandwiches. They say there is no such
thing as a free meal, but the Gentleman’s Club actually provided free meals.

The kicker was they were horrible free meals.

Nothing but salt and the worst pseudo space
meat you could get. The point was you got so thirsty eating them you would also
buy at least one of his terrible beers.

I figured between the food and the beer you had
a lot of guys belching, sweating, and with gastric distress. That should force
the bosses to leave and make the club a whole lot more enjoyable.

But I underestimated the paranoia of
Belvaille’s upper classes.

They were worried that if they stopped coming,
their thugs would be snatched up by some other boss, leaving them twisting in
the wind. So they would bring their own bag lunches or even have catered food
delivered.

The club was more profitable, but it was still
a bad time for us blue collar workers.

I decided to go passive-aggressive to try and
get the bosses out.

Every tele screen that was displaying sports, I
stuck on the loudest volume and placed right around all the dining tables. The
bosses adjusted by wearing earplugs and honestly didn’t seem to mind because
now they didn’t have to whisper their plans to their crews.

I then did the unholiest of sins and rearranged
all the tables and chairs periodically so all the comfortable seating
arrangements the gangs had gotten used to were completely changed on every
visit. They treated it like musical chairs, rushing to the best spots and most
secure corners.

From Organa Dultz I borrowed some sewer
solvent, a cleaner that could neutralize the most potent of spills. I had never
smelled it directly with unprotected face, but the club shrugged it off like it
was a sweet potpourri.

I then left it wet on the floor, causing half
the occupants to slip and fall, and causing their clothes to be eaten off their
very backs. Still no one was deterred.

I was starting to believe that this was some
complicated joke being played upon me. One club couldn’t be worth enduring all
these trials. I was merely inflicting them and it was hard to put up with, I
could scarcely imagine being on the receiving end.

At this point I was out of tricks. I had made
the food, beer, service, and atmosphere all substandard. I had staged barroom
fights and even a small building fire.

But the bosses wouldn’t leave.

I was about ready to tell Krample that I had
nothing else to try and was going to wish him well in his endeavors. I wasn’t
going to sit in a club surrounded by rival gangs all glaring at one another.

The food was hard enough to swallow without
those digestive challenges.

As luck would have it, I was doing some lowly
work for a fence, just guarding one of his storehouses.

However, I heard about a group of men who had
robbed a whole palace a few Portals away and fled straight to Belvaille. They
were desperate to try and liquidate their goods and were having no luck at all.

Belvaille didn’t have a lot of luxury goods, it
wasn’t an old city and all the furniture it started with was quite sufficient
for most everyone’s needs.

There might be a custom desk or chair here or
there, but a palace full of finery was well beyond our means of handling.

The thieves knew they couldn’t go deeper into
the Confederation with their goods because as sloppy as the Colmarian Navy was,
they tended to notice a whole stolen palace stuffed into a freighter.

Some of the fences and black market dealers
were willing to buy a few items, but it would take years to sell everything at
that rate.

It was then that I approached them.

“How would you like to trade ten stories’ worth
of exercise equipment for your goods?” I asked them.

“Are you joking? We got golden vases and
jeweled chandeliers and statues. This was a shipping merchant’s vacation home.”

“And it’s so much junk because you can’t do
anything with it.”

“What will you do with it?” they asked, wondering
what angle I had thought of that they missed.

“Nothing. It will sit here on Belvaille, making
buildings look pretty.”

“Why?”

“Look, you all came here because you figured no
one would follow you. You can’t take it back into proper Colmarian space or
you’ll get busted. We can’t either. It is just a big pile of jail sentence to
anyone who tries to do anything with it.”

“What are we going to do with exercise
equipment?”

“Sell it. There are no blockades looking for
rowing machines and the latest stationary bikes.”

They grew exasperated.

“You don’t get it. We have a ship full of the
most valuable luxury goods in this whole state and you’re trying to trade us
consumer products. Our merchandise is worth a thousand times more.”

“No,
you
don’t get it. Your goods are
worth exactly what you can get for them. So far you have gotten absolutely
nothing. You robbed someone you shouldn’t have robbed and now no one can sell
what you took. We might be able to trickle out some lamp or gilded chest of
drawers every year, but it’s just not worth it. If you agree to this, you can
leave here in two days, fly past every blockade—giving them the finger—and
make…not a fortune, but a decent amount of money with no hassle at all.”

I thought that was the hard part, but Krample
was no easier.

The Athletic Club had been shuttered for
months, but he still had some hope that the station was going to embrace
physical fitness on a ten-story scale and suddenly pour cash into his pockets.

He had no interest in baubles and trinkets from
a palace. Especially if it was all stolen and there was a chance, however
slight, that the Navy could come looking for it.

It took weeks, but I got them to make the deal
in a straight 1:1 swap.

“Now what?” Krample grumbled.

We had one more month on our agreement and I
told him to let me set all the prices on the re-opened Athletic Club. He
reluctantly agreed.

Membership at the club was ten thousand credits
a year. Food was a hundred credits a meal. There was no beer. There were no
televised sports. Every table had three seats maximum, to encourage mingling.

I hired the best chefs on the station and
bought the best cuisine.

Krample was about to hit the ceiling with rage.

Almost overnight all the bosses left the
Gentleman’s Club and migrated to the Athletic Club. It became not only a point
of pride, but the primary place where business was done. You simply couldn’t
function as a boss without having a membership.

It hadn’t been enough for me to try and scare them
out of the Gentleman’s Club. I needed to construct a place more suitable for
them.

With them gone, we could make the Gentleman’s
Club not quite so horrible.

After a time, what was unofficially the club
for bosses and the club for thugs became set in stone. There were no bosses
allowed in the Gentleman’s Club under any circumstances. They were denied
memberships, which only cost a hundred credits a year—though you needed a
sponsor.

Krample, who was a working class guy in his
soul, worked the door at the Gentleman’s Club to enforce these restrictions.
And without the eagle eyes of our employers above us, the thugs of the station
finally had a place to blow off steam, even amid the worst gang wars.

This was one of the first real deals I ever
brokered and I was paid nearly 100,000 credits for its completion, which was an
incredible amount of money in those days.

I was also given a lifetime membership to both
clubs, the only person on the station with dual membership.

The explorers who populated early Belvaille
were dashing figures.

Men of action and confidence, often physically
fit. Even when they weren’t technically handsome, their mannerisms and swagger
gave them an attractiveness that was unmistakable. You could tell just by
looking at them that they were exceptional characters.

The decade and a half after they left I refer
to as “The Ugly Years.”

And by ugly I mean unattractive. Dowdy.
Unsightly. Lacking in physical pleasantness.

I include myself in that group. While I wasn’t
nearly as bad as I would become later in life, I was not ever what you would
call pretty.

The station, at this time, was filled with men.
Ugly men.

While there was never an official census, we
guessed the station was 95% male.

It was a frontier city without many of the
benefits of being a frontier. There was no rush to get resources or vast
opportunities waiting to be plucked. Sure, you could operate illegally, but you
still had to get through several Portals to get those goods back to market. In
most cases it was more profitable to stay in the greater Colmarian
Confederation.

So Belvaille was a bunch of ugly guys running a
bunch of small-time businesses.

The good-looking people stayed in the Colmarian
Confederation doing whatever the hell it was good-looking people did.

It was so bad that when word went up that a new
woman had docked at the port we would all rush over to take a look. I mean both
sides of the street were packed with guys.

No one catcalled or whistled or hooted. We just
watched, trying to brush away the cobwebs from our minds and remember what
women were. It didn’t even matter if they were a different species—sometimes
that was preferable, because it set our imaginations going.

On a scale of one-to-ten, if you figure five
was average, then Belvaille hovered around two or three. I mean we were really
ugly.

Sure, there were some aberrations. There was an
eight or nine here or there. Some man or woman who had been forced into hiding
on Belvaille by a stack of arrest warrants or back taxes. But we didn’t treat
them like real people. They were just adjectives we used to describe other
things.

Your brain gets a bit twisted in an environment
like that.

I remember almost getting in a fist fight with
a shopkeeper who kept this one particular flag outside his building. The flag
had a kind of sweep that if you looked at it from the right angle it sort of
looked like a woman’s flowing hair. I went out of my way to walk by that shop
whenever I could.

Well, he took down that flag one day and I
stormed inside ready to bust his face in. Of course he had no idea what I was
upset about and I couldn’t even articulate it because it was simultaneously so
stupid and insane.

He finally gave me the flag but I could never
get it to look like it once had.

One day a man came to Belvaille who blew the
floor off of our ugly. As much as we kept track of the few attractive people,
we also kept track of the truly hideous. I don’t think it was so much to mock
them as it was to know where we personally stood in comparison—all things being
relative and all.