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his looks, so he’d had a sun-bed installed in his quarters. Hence the orange skin. It was a touchy subject with him. The last guy to crack an Oompa-Loompa joke in Move-Easy’s presence was now sleeping with the fishes.
    The audience chamber, as Move-Easy called it, was a room about twelve meters square. It looked like an interior decorator’s dream from the nineteen-seventies: all maroon, white, orange and brown, with geometric-patterned wallpaper, ornate gold lamps and paintings that would once have been considered avant-garde, but now looked hopelessly out-dated. A cinema screen was built into one wall, with a state-of-the-art sound system, and there was a bar in one corner. A snooker table was visible through one doorway, a second door was closed, and the third door admitted staff and guests. Scope came through this door to find that Move-Easy had visitors. There was a circular sunken area in the floor, its circumference made up of couches. A young man and woman sat on one couch with their backs to Scope. When they turned to look up at her, she recognized Punkin and Bunny. She’d seen them enough times before to wonder why two small-time chancers were being given an audience with the boss. They weren’t members of his organization, and rarely had anything of real worth to sell. They were looking pretty pleased with themselves now.
    There was a round, smoked-glass table in the middle of the circle. On the table sat a cuddly caterpillar with a green body, a large red head and multi-colored legs. That was new.
    “Got yor tools?” Move-Easy asked, gesturing her towards him.
    Scope nodded. She descended the three steps to the sunken floor and sat down beside her boss, opening the toolbox on the floor. Move-Easy was sitting on the couch opposite Punkin and Bunny. He had a bulbous, brutish face, a smutty grin and chilly blue eyes. His thinning, dyed black hair was slicked back in a widow’s peak from his orange brow. He was wearing an expensive white shirt and navy suit trousers, his wrists and fingers adorned with heavy gold bracelets and rings. A gold chain hung down over the shirt, the gray hairs of his orange chest sticking in a tuft over the open collar at the front. He made her skin crawl, and there were times that he terrified her, but she knew he liked her. As he often said, she was worth her weight in diamonds.
    “These two ’ave brought us a present, ’aven’t you, guys?” he said, not expecting an answer to his question. “Robbed a cash courier, comin’ from another Void. Some poor soul’s lost his profits for the week. Still, their loss is our gain, eh? Have to say, I’m impressed, Punkin. Didn’t think you had the brains to pull off a job like that, out among all the eyeballs, and get away with it. But my boys tell me you wasn’t followed or nuffink. So…had some ’elp, didya?”
    “It was all us, Mister Easy,” Punkin replied casually, throwing a smug smile at Bunny. “What can we say? We got the moves, y’know?” “You got the moves, eh?” the boss said thoughtfully, working his jaw. “Thing is, my lovelies, you was scanned when you came down, and we found a piece of electronics on you that you didn’t declare. Only reason you’re sittin’ here now is that it’s not transmittin’ any signals .”
    Punkin and Bunny looked nervously at each other. Everyone knew you got scanned when you came into Move-Easy’s place. It was a standard precaution in any Void, but he ran his place like airport customs. You had a better chance of getting on a plane with a machine-gun than you had of slipping an electronic device into his Void without him knowing. And the penalties for trying could be ugly and painful. Scope could tell from their expressions that they didn’t know what he was talking about.
    “I’m tellin’ you, Mister Easy, we don’t know nothin’ about—”
    “Obviously,” the gangster growled, cutting him off. “You ’aven’t the balls. But neither of you has more brains