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Outwardly I was worry-free, but inside I was more nervous. A chunk of burning Camembert on your doorstep meant only one thing: a warning from the Swindon Old Town Cheese Mafia—or, as they liked to be known, the Stiltonistas.
16.
Cheese
The controversial Milk Levy from which the unpopular Cheese Duty is derived was imposed in 1970 by the then Whig government, which needed to raise funds for a potential escalation of war in the Crimea. With the duty now running at 1,530 percent on hard and 1,290 percent on smelly, illegal cheese making and smuggling had become a very lucrative business indeed. The Cheese Enforcement Agency was formed not only to supervise the licensing of cheese but also to collect the tax levied on it by an overzealous government. Small wonder that there was a thriving underground cheese market.
T hanks for tipping us the wink about the dodo fanciers,” I said as we drove through the darkened streets of Swindon two hours later. A tow truck had removed the wreckage of the fanciers’ car, and the police had been around to collect statements. Despite its being a busy neighborhood, no one had seen anything. They had, of course, but the Parke-Laine-Nexts were quite popu
lar in the area.
“Are you sure we weren’t followed?” asked Millon as we pulled up outside an empty industrial unit not a stone’s throw from the city’s airship field.
“Positive,” I replied. “Have you got buyers for it?”
“The usual cheeseheads are all champing at the bit, recipes at the ready. The evening air will be rich with the scent of Welsh rarebit tonight.”
A large seventy-seat airship rose slowly into the sky behind the factory units. We watched while its silver flanks caught the colors of the late-evening sun as it turned and, with its four propellers beating the still air with a rhythmic hum, set course for Southampton.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” said Millon.
I beeped the horn twice, and the steel shutters were slowly raised on the nearest industrial unit.
“Tell me,” said Millon, “why do you think the Old Town Stiltonistas gave you the flaming Camembert?”
“A warning, perhaps. But we’ve never bothered them, and they’ve never bothered us.”
“Our two territories don’t even overlap,” he observed. “Do you think the Cheese Enforcement Agency is getting bolder?”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t seem very worried.”
“The CEA is underfunded and knows nothing. Besides, we have customers to attend to—and Acme needs the cash. Think you can liberate five grand by tomorrow morning?”
“Depends what they’ve got,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “If they’re trying to peddle common-or-garden Cheddaresque or that processed crap, then we could be in trouble. But if they’ve got something exotic, then no problem at all.”
The roller shutter was high enough to let us in by now, and we drove inside, the shutter reversing direction to close behind us.
We climbed out of the van. The industrial unit was empty except for a large Welsh-registered Griffin-V8 truck, a long table with leather sample cases lying on it and four men wearing black suits with black ties and sunglasses and looking vaguely menacing. It was all bravado, of course—Scorsese movies were big in the Welsh Republic. I tried to see by the swing of their jackets if any of them were packing heat and guessed that they weren’t. I’d only carried a gun once in the real world since SpecOps was disbanded and hoped I never had to again. Cheese smuggling was still a polite undertaking. As soon as it turned ugly, I was out.
“Owen Pryce the Cheese,” I said in a genial manner, greeting the leader of the group with a smile and a firm handshake, “good to see you again. I trust the trip across the border was uneventful?”
“It’s getting a lot harder these days,” he replied in a singsong Welsh accent that betrayed his roots in the south of the republic, probably Abertawe. “There are dutymen everywhere, and the bribes I have to pay are reflected in the price of the goods.”
“As long as it’s fair price, Pryce,” I replied pleasantly. “My clients love cheese, but there’s a limit to what they’ll pay.”
We were both lying, but it was the game we played. My clients would pay good money for high-quality cheese, and as likely as not he didn’t bribe anyone. The border with Wales was 170 miles long and had more holes than a hastily matured Emmentaler. There weren’t enough dutymen to cover it all, and to be honest, although it was illegal, no one took cheese smuggling that seriously.
Pryce nodded to one of his compatriots, and they opened the sample cases with a flourish. It was all there—every single make of cheese you could imagine, from pure white to dark amber. Crumbly, hard, soft, liquid, gas. The rich aroma of well-matured cheese escaped into the room, and I felt my taste buds tingle. This was top-quality shit—the best available.
“Smells good, Pryce.”
He said nothing and showed me a large slab of white cheese. “Caerphilly,” he said, “the best. We can—”
I put up a hand to stop him. “The punks can deal with the mild stuff, Pryce. We’re interested in Level 3.8 and above.”
