“Damn!” said Gentry. “If I’d of known you were that anxious, I could’ve held out for thirty!”

“I’m not anxious. I just don’t have any reason to stay here.”

“I got seven absolutely splendid reasons, each and every one personally selected and trained by Moritat’s very favorite son, namely me.”

“Maybe next time around.”

“You got something better to spend it on?”

“That depends on whether you told me the truth or not,” said Cain, walking to the door. Suddenly he stopped and turned to Gentry. “By the way, I assume your friend Stern is going to want to be paid for this?”

“I imagine so. Man sells his soul to the devil, he spends the rest of his life trying to stockpile enough money to buy it back.” Gentry chuckled with amusement. “Have fun, Songbird.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Tell you what,” said Gentry. “You bring in the head of Santiago, and I’ll hold a gun to old Orpheus until he gets it right.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal,” promised Cain.

2.

He’s Jonathan Jeremy Jacobar Stern,

He’s got lust in his heart, and money to burn;

He’s too old to change, and too wild to learn,

Is Jonathan Jeremy Jacobar Stern.

They say that Black Orpheus caught Stern on an off day, that in point of fact Stern never stopped changing and learning, until he’d changed so much that nobody knew him any longer. He began life as the son of a miner and a whore, and before he was done he’d set himself up as king of the Bellermaine system. In between, he learned how to gamble and did a pretty fair job of it; he learned how to steal and became more than proficient; he learned how to kill and did a bit of bounty hunting on the side; and somewhere along the way he learned the most important lesson of all, which was that a king with no heirs had better never turn his back on anybody.

Nobody knew why he hated priests; rumor had it that the first time he’d gone to jail it was a priest who turned him in. Another legend held that he’d once trusted a couple of priests to keep an eye on his holdings while he was fleeing from the authorities, and when he’d finally come back there’d been nothing waiting for him but a note telling him to repent.

It wasn’t all that difficult to figure out why he hated women. He grew up in a whorehouse, and the women he met once he went out on his own weren’t much different from the ones he’d known all his life. He was a man of enormous appetites who couldn’t leave them alone and couldn’t convince himself that their interest in him wasn’t as cold and calculating as his interest in them.