Free Turn of the Cards by George R. R. Martin, Victor Milan Page B

name of “Hamilton, Gary A.” would be on them. The master of the Montenegro didn’t give a particular damn if his passenger called himself Nur al-Allah. Or even if he was Nur al-Allah, as long as he behaved.
    The Italian authorities were no problem at all. Italian exit controls were anything but notoriously strict, something they had in common with the Dutch ones. Like everybody else the Italians were on the watch for guns, drugs, and undocumented immigrants coming into the country from places with economies still more blighted than their own. They didn’t worry much about who left, or what they left with, as long as it didn’t look like immobile naked people with very pale complexions under tarps.
    The trip was uneventful. The crew seemed genuinely friendly. Half of them spoke some English, and his science-symposium German was enough to get him the rest of the way.
    He negotiated with the ship’s cook, a wiry and diminutive Macedonian with curly black sideburns who probably wasn’t as young as he looked, for a French passport. It wasn’t his first choice; when you looked at Mark Meadows, Frenchman wasn’t the first word that popped into your mind, unless you were from some weird ex-colonial part of the Third World where the only white guys you’d ever seen were Frenchmen. But French papers cost far less than, say, American, by reason of lesser demand, and anyway the cook had the fixings for a French ID on hand.
    Even as he began negotiations, it occurred to him that the simplest way for the cook to get whatever money he offered for the papers was to slip him a plate of food dosed with some nice corrosive sublimate that would dissolve his bowels for him come mealtime. He had been sure to let the cook know — untruthfully — that the settled price took him near the limits of his ready cash. And he had been careful not to dicker too long.
    In some ways Mark was turning into somebody he didn’t exactly like, somebody nasty and suspicious of his fellow bits of star-stuff. He blamed his stay on Takis for that; intrigue was like an extra classical element there: earth, air, fire, water, skullduggery. All the same he slept lightly, didn’t venture too near the rail when others were around, and tasted gingerly in case the cook used a little too much lye in the goulash.
    The most Mark could say about the passport was that the Polaroid picture of him glued inside it looked rather more like him than the picture of Hamilton in the liberated American one, which he’d handed over to the cook by way of a trade-in. At Piraeus, Customs went over the ship as if they were expecting loose diamonds to have rolled into the seams in the decking, but passed him ashore without a glance. He suspected — that nasty Takisian-born cynicism again — they were really scouting for cumshaw. He had simply shouldered the imitation Vuitton flight bag he’d picked up before hitting the train in Rome and walked down the gangplank with an airy wave to them and his Central European pals.
    If only all life’s problems could be blown off with such ease.
    The papers had stood him to a third-floor — okay, second — walkup room in a grimy pension , with a sporadic and unsanitary bathroom on the floor below. The stripy-papered walls of the flat were even more sweat-stained than the male concierge’s undershirt, but unlike the building’s water and electricity, the rats inside them ran day and night.
    It wasn’t exactly Rarrana , the harem of the Ilkazam. But then it beat Bowery flophouses or the stinking dorms on the Rox. Or a wet, drafty warehouse on the IJ. Creature comforts had never mattered that much to Mark.
    And the price was right. Mark had sensibly run Agent Gary’s Gold Card to the cash limit before leaving Amsterdam and picked up a few extra bucks selling the card itself to a hustler on the Brindisi docks — fewer American tourists got down that way than to Rome, so the market price was higher. But he didn’t know where he was going