Shibumi (37 page)

Hannah was confused and hurt. This was nothing like the man her uncle had described, the honest professional who was also a gentle man of culture, who paid his debts and refused to work for the uglier of the national and commercial powers. How could her uncle have been fond of a man who showed so little human sympathy? Who was so lacking in understanding?

Hel, of course, understood only too well. He had several times had to clean up after these devoted amateurs. He knew that when the storm broke, they either ran or, from equally cowardly impulses, shot up everything in sight.

Hannah was surprised to find that no tears came, their flow cauterized by Hel’s cold adherence to fact and information. She sniffed and said, “Uncle Asa had sources of information in England. He learned that the last remaining two of the Munich murderers were with a group of Black Septembrists planning to hijack a plane departing from Heathrow.”

“How large a group?”

“Five or six. We were never sure.”

“Had you identified which of them were involved in Munich?”

“No.”

“So you were going to put all five of them under?”

She nodded.

“I see. And your contacts in England? What is their character and what are they going to do for you?”

“They are urban guerrillas working for the freedom of Northern Ireland from English domination.”

“Oh, God.”

“There is a kind of brotherhood among all freedom fighters, you know. Our tactics may be different, but our ultimate goals are the same. We all look forward to a day when—”

“Please,” he interrupted. “Now, what were these IRA’s going to do for you?”

“Well… they were keeping watch on the Septembrists. They were going to house us when we arrived in London. And they were going to furnish us with arms.”

“‘Us’ being you and the two who got hit in Rome?”

“Yes.”

“I see. All right, now tell me what happened in Rome. EEC identifies the stuntmen as Japanese Red Army types acting for the PLO. Is that correct?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weren’t you there?”

“Yes! I was there!” She controlled herself. “But in the confusion… people dying… gunfire all around me…” In her distress, she rose and turned her back on this man she felt was intentionally tormenting her, testing her. She told herself that she mustn’t cry, but tears came nonetheless. “I’m sorry. I was terrified. Stunned. I don’t remember everything.” Nervous and lacking something to do with her hands, she reached out to take a simple metal tube from the rack on the wall before her.

“Don’t touch that!”

She jerked her hand away, startled to hear him raise his voice for the first time. A shot of righteous anger surged through her. “I wasn’t going to hurt your toys!”

“They might hurt you.” His voice was quiet and modulated again. “That is a nerve gas tube. If you had turned the bottom half, you would be dead now. And what is more important, so would I.”

She grimaced and retreated from the weapons rack, crossing to the open sliding door leading to the garden, where she leaned against the sill to regain something of her composure.

“Young woman, I intend to help you, if that is possible. I must confess that it may not be possible. Your little amateur organization has made every conceivable mistake, not the least of which was aligning yourselves with IRA dummies. Still, I owe it to your uncle to hear you out. Perhaps I can protect you and get you back to the bourgeois comfort of your home, where you can express your social passions by campaigning against litter in national parks. But if I am to help you at all, I have to know how the stones lie on the board. So I want you to save your passion and theatrics for your memoirs and answer my questions as fully and as succinctly as you can. If you’re not prepared to do that just now, we can chat again later. But it is possible that I may have to move quickly. Typically in patterns like this, after a spoiling raid (and that’s probably what the Rome International number was) time favors the other fellows. Shall we talk now, or shall we go take luncheon?”

Hannah slid down to the
tatami
floor, her back against the sill, her profile cameoed against the sunlit garden. After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been through a lot.”

“I don’t doubt that. Now tell me about the Rome hit. Facts and impressions, not emotions.”

She looked down and drew little circles on her tanned thigh with her fingernail, then she pulled up her knees and hugged them to her breast. “All right. Avrim and Chaim went through passport check ahead of me. I was slowed down by the Italian officer, who was sort of flirting and ogling my breasts. I suppose I should have kept my shirt buttoned all the way up. Finally, he stamped my passport, and, I started out into the terminal. Then the gunshots broke out. I saw Avrim run… and fall… the side of his head all… all. Wait a minute.” She sniffed and drew several deep, controlling breaths. “I started to run too… everyone was running and screaming… an old man with a white beard was hit… a child… a fat old woman. Then there were gunshots coming from the other side of the terminal and from the overhanging mezzanine, and the Oriental gunmen were hit. Then suddenly there was no more gunfire, only screams, and people all around, bleeding and hurt. I saw Chaim lying against the lockers, his legs all wrong and crooked. He had been shot in the face. So I… I just walked away. I just walked away. I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was going. Then I heard the announcement on the loudspeaker for the plane for Pau. And I just kept walking straight ahead until I came to the departure gate. And… and that’s all.”

“All right. That’s fine. Now tell me this. Were you a target?”

“What?”

“Was anyone shooting specifically at you?”

“I don’t know! How
could
I know?”

“Were the Japanese using automatic weapons?”

“What?”

“Did they go rat-a-tat, or bang! bang! bang!”

She looked up at him sharply. “I know what an automatic weapon is! We used to practice with them out in the mountains!”

“Rat-a-tat or bang bang?”

“They were machine guns.”

“And did anyone standing close to you go down?”

She thought hard, squeezing her knees to her lips. “No. No one standing close to me.”

“If professionals using automatic weapons didn’t drop anyone near you, then you were not a target. It is possible they didn’t identify you as being with your two friends. Particularly as you left the check-through line some time after them. All right, please turn your mind to the shots that came from the mezzanine and blew away the Japanese hitmen. What can you tell me about them?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I don’t remember anything. The guns were not automatics.” She looked at Hel obliquely. “They went bang bang.”

He smiled. “That’s the way. Humor and anger are more useful just now than the wetter emotions. Now, the radio report said something about ‘special agents’ being with the Italian police. Can you tell me anything about them?”

“No. I never saw the people firing from the mezzanine.”

Hel nodded and bowed his head, his palms pressed together and the forefingers lightly touching his lips. “Give me a moment to put this together.” He fixed his eyes on the weave pattern of the
tatami,
then defocused as he reviewed the information in hand.

Hannah sat on the floor, framed in the doorway, and gazed out on the Japanese garden where sunlight reflected from the small stream glittered through bamboo leaves. Typical of her class and culture, she lacked the inner resources necessary to deal with the delights of silence, and soon she was uncomfortable. “Why aren’t there any flowers in your…”

He lifted his hand to silence her without looking up.

Four minutes later he raised his head. “What?”

“Pardon me?”

“Something about flowers.”

“Oh, nothing important. I just wondered why you didn’t have any flowers in your garden.”

“There are three flowers.”

“Three varieties?”

“No. Three flowers. One to signal each of the seasons of bloom. We are between seasons now. All right, let’s see what we know or can assume. It’s pretty obvious that the raid in Rome was organized either by PLO or by the Septembrists, and that they had learned of your intentions—probably through your London-based IRA comrades, who would sell their mothers into Turkish seraglios if the price was right (and if any self-respecting Turk would use them). The appearance of Japanese Red Army fanatics would seem to point to Septembrists, who often use others to do their dangerous work, having little appetite for personal risk. But things get a little complicated at this point. The stunt men were disposed of within seconds, and by men stationed in the mezzanine. Probably not Italian police, because the thing was done efficiently. The best bet is that the tip-off was tipped off. Why? The only reason that comes quickly to mind is that no one wanted the Japanese stunt men taken alive. And why? Possibly because they were not Red Army dum-dums at all. And that, of course, would bring us to CIA. Or to the Mother Company, which controls CIA, and everything else in American government, for that matter.”

“What is the Mother Company? I’ve never heard of them.”

“Few Americans have. It is a control organization of the principal international oil and energy companies. They’ve been in bed with the Arabs forever, using those poor benighted bastards as pawns in their schemes of induced shortages and profiteering. The Mother Company is a wiry opponent; they can’t be got at through nationalistic pressures. Although they put up a huge media front of being loyal American (or British or German or Dutch) companies, they are in fact international infragovernments whose only patriotism is profit. Chances are that your father owns stock in them, as do half the dear gray-haired ladies of your country.”

Hannah shook her head. “I can’t feature CIA taking sides with the Black Septembrists. The United States supports Israel; they’re allies.”

“You underestimate the elastic nature of your country’s conscience. They have made a palpable shift since the oil embargo. American devotion to honor varies inversely with its concern for central heating. It is a property of the American that he can be brave and selfsacrificing only in short bursts. That is why they are better at war than at responsible peace. They can face danger, but not inconvenience. They toxify their air to kill mosquitoes. They drain their energy sources to provide themselves with electric carving knives. We must never forget that there was always Coca-Cola for the soldiers in Viet Nam—”

Hannah felt a chauvinistic sting. “Do you think its fine to generalize like that about a people?”

“Yes. Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.”

“I refuse to believe that Americans were involved in the blood and horror of what went on in that airport. Innocent children and old men…”

“Does the sixth of August mean anything to you?”

“Sixth of August? No. Why?” She gripped her legs closer to her chest.

“Never mind.” Hel rose. “I have to think this out a bit. We’ll talk again this afternoon.”

“Do you intend to help me?”

“Probably. But probably not in any style you have in mind. By the way, can you stand a bit of avuncular advice?”

“What would that be?”

“It is a sartorial indiscretion for a young lady so lavishly endowed with pubic hair as you to wear shorts that brief, and to sit in so revealing a posture. Unless, of course, it is your intention to prove that your red hair is natural. Shall we take lunch?”

Lunch was set at a small round table in the west reception room giving out onto the rolling green and allée that descended to the principal gates. The
porte fenêtres
were open, and the long curtains billowed lazily with cedar-scented breezes. Hana had changed to a long dress of plum-colored silk, and when Hel and Hannah entered, she smiled at them as she put the finishing touches to a centerpiece of delicate bell-shaped flowers. “What perfect timing. Lunch was just this minute set.” In fact, she had been awaiting them for ten minutes, but one of her charms was making others feel socially graceful. A glance at Hannah’s face told her that things had gone distressingly for her during the chat with Hel, so Hana took the burden of civilized conversation upon herself.

As Hannah opened her starched linen napkin, she noticed that she had not been served the same things as Hana and Hel. She had a bit of lamb, chilled asparagus in mayonnaise, and rice pilaf, while they had fresh or lightly sautéed vegetables with plain brown rice.

Hana smiled and explained. “Our age and past indiscretions require that we eat a little cautiously, my dear. But we do not inflict our Spartan regimen on our guests. In fact, when I am away from home, in Paris for instance, I go on a spree of depraved eating. Eating for me is what you might call a managed vice. A vice particularly difficult to control when one is living in France where, depending on your point of view, the food is either the world’s second best or the world’s very worst.”

“What do you mean?” Hannah asked.

“From a sybaritic point of view, French food is second only to classic Chinese cuisine. But it is so handled, and sauced, and prodded, and chopped, and stuffed, and seasoned as to be a nutritive disaster. That is why no people in the West have so much delight with eating as the French, or so much trouble with their livers.”

“And what do you think about American food?” Hannah asked, a wry expression on her face, because she was of that common kind of American abroad who seeks to imply sophistication by degrading everything American.

“I couldn’t really say; I have never been in America. But Nicholai lived there for a time, and he tells me that there are certain areas in which American cooking excels.”

“Oh?” Hannah said, looking archly at Hel. “I’m surprised to hear that Mr. Hel has anything good to say about America or Americans.”

“It’s not Americans I find annoying; it’s Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ‘American’ only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. As for your food, no one denies that the Americans excel in one narrow rubric: the snack. And I suspect there’s something symbolic in that.”