Shibumi (41 page)

“…so it appears that both you and your brother found a way to combine native sadism with the comforting fringe benefits of working for big business, he for the army and CIA, you for the oil combines. Both products of the American Dream, the mercantile mumpsimus. Just bright young men trying to get ahead.”

“But at least neither of us ended up as hired killers.”

“Rubbish. Any man is a killer who works for a company that pollutes, strip-mines, and contaminates the air and water. The fact that you and your unlamented brother killed from institutional and patriotic ambush doesn’t mean you’re not killers—it only means you’re cowards.”

“You think a coward would walk into your lair as I have done?”

“A certain kind of coward would. A coward who was afraid of his cowardice.”

Diamond laughed thinly. “You really hate me, don’t you?”

“Not at all. You’re not a person, you’re an organization man. One couldn’t hate you as an individual; one could only hate the phylum. At all events, you’re not the sort to evoke such intense emotions as hate. Disgust might be closer to the mark.”

“Still, for all the disdain of your breeding and private education, it is people like me—what you sneeringly call the merchant class—who hire you and send you out to do their dirty work.”

Hel shrugged. “It has always been so. Throughout all history, the merchants have cowered behind the walls of their towns, while the paladins did battle to protect them, in return for which the merchants have always fawned and bowed and played the lickspittle. One cannot really blame them. They are not bred to courage. And, more significantly, you can’t put bravery in the bank.” Hel read the last information card quickly and tossed it on the stack to be refiled later. “All right, Diamond. Now I know who you are and what you are. At least, I know as much about you as I need to, or choose to.”

“I assume your information came from the Gnome?”

“Much of it came from the person you call the Gnome.”

“We would give a great deal to know how that man came by his intelligence.”

“I don’t doubt it. Of course, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. But the fact is, I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“But you do know the identity and location of the Gnome.”

Hel laughed. “Of course I do. But the gentleman and I are old friends.”

“He’s nothing more or less than a blackmailer.”

“Nonsense. He is an artisan in the craft of information. He has never taken money from a man in return for concealing the facts he collects from all over the world.”

“No, but he provides men like you with the information that protects you from punishment by governments, and for that he makes a lot of money.”

“The protection is worth a great deal. But if it will set your mind at rest, the man you call the Gnome is very ill. It is doubtful that he will live out the year.”

“So you will soon be without protection?”

“I shall miss him as a man of wit and charm. But the loss of protection is a matter of little importance to me. I am, as Fat Boy must have informed you, fully retired. Now what do you say we get on with our little business.”

“Before we start, I have a question I want to ask you.”

“I have a question for you as well, but let’s leave that for later. So that we don’t waste time with exposition, allow me to give you the picture in a couple of sentences, and you may correct me if I stray.” Hel leaned against the wall, his face in the shadows and his soft prison voice unmodulated. “We begin with Black Septembrists murdering Israeli athletes in Munich. Among the slain was Asa Stern’s son. Asa Stern vows to have vengeance. He organizes a pitiful little amateur cell to this end—don’t think badly of Mr. Stern for the paucity of this effort; he was a good man, but he was sick and partially drugged. Arab intelligence gets wind of this effort. The Arabs, probably through an OPEC representative, ask the Mother Company to erase this irritant. The Mother Company turns the task over to you, expecting you to use your CIA bully boys to do the job. You learn that the revenge cell—I believe they called themselves the Munich Five—was on its way to London to put the last surviving members of the Munich murder away. CIA arranges a spoiling action in Rome International. By the way, I assume those two fools back in the house were involved in the raid?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re punishing them by making them clean up after themselves?”

“That’s about it.”

“You’re taking the risks, Mr. Diamond, A foolish associate is more dangerous than a clever opponent.”

“That’s my concern.”

“To be sure. All right, your people do a messy and incomplete job in Rome. Actually, you should be grateful they did as well as they did. With a combination of Arab Intelligence and the CIA competence, you’re lucky they didn’t go to the wrong airport. But that, as you have said, is your concern. Somehow, probably when the raid was evaluated in Washington, you discovered that the Israeli boys were not going to London. They carried airline tickets for Pau. You also discovered that one of the cell members, the Miss Stern with whom you just took dinner, had been overlooked by your killers. Your computer was able to relate me to Asa Stern, and the Pau destination nailed it down. Is that it?”

“That roughly is it.”

“All right. So much for catching up. The ball, I believe, is in your court.”

Diamond had not yet decided how he would present his case, what combination of threat and promise would serve to neutralize Nicholai Hel. To gain time, he pointed to a pair of odd-looking pistols with curved handles like old-fashioned dueling weapons and double nine-inch barrels that were slightly flared at the ends.

“What are these?”

“Shotguns, in a way of speaking.”

“Shotguns?”

“Yes. A Dutch industrialist had them made for me. A gift in return for a rather narrow action involving his son who was held captive on a train by Moluccan terrorists. Each gun, as you see, has two hammers which drop simultaneously on special shotgun shells with powerful charges that scatter loads of half-centimeter ball bearings. All the weapons in this room are designed for a particular situation. These are for close work in the dark, or for putting away a roomful of men on the instant of break-in. At two meters from the barrel, they lay down a spread pattern a meter in diameter.” Hel’s bottle-green eyes settled on Diamond. “Do you intend to spend the evening talking about guns?”

“No. I assume that Miss Stern has asked you to help her kill the Septembrists now in London?”

Hel nodded.

“And she took it for granted that you would help, because of your friendship for her uncle?”

“She made that assumption.”

“And what do you intend to do?”

“I intend to listen to your proposal.”

“My proposal?”

“Isn’t that what merchants do? Make proposals?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a proposal.”

“What would you call it?”

“I would call it a display of deterrent action, partially already on line, partially ready to be brought on line, should you be so foolish as to interfere.”

Hel’s eyes crinkled in a smile that did not include his lips. He made a rolling gesture with his hand, inviting Diamond to get on with it.

“I’ll confess to you that, under different conditions, neither the Mother Company nor the Arab interests we are allied with would care much one way or another what happened to the homicidal maniacs of the PLO. But these are difficult times within the Arab community, and the PLO has become something of a rallying banner, an issue more of public relations than of private taste. For this reason, the Mother Company is committed to their protection. This means that you will not be allowed to interfere with those who intend to hijack that plane in London.”

“How will I be prevented?”

“Do you recall that you used to own several thousand acres of land in Wyoming?”

“I assume the tense is not a matter of grammatical carelessness.”

“That’s right. Part of that land was in Boyle County, the rest in Custer County. If you contact the county clerk offices, you will discover that there exists no record of your having purchased that land. Indeed, the records show that the land in question is now, and has been for many years, in the hands of one of Mother Company’s affiliates. There is some coal under the land, and it is scheduled for strip-mining.”

“Do I understand that if I cooperate with you, the land will be returned to me?”

“Not at all. That land, representing as it does most of what you have saved for your retirement, has been taken from you as a punishment for daring to involve yourself in the affairs of the Mother Company.”

“May I assume you suggested this punishment?”

Diamond tipped his head to the side. “I had that pleasure.”

“You are a vicious little bastard, aren’t you. You’re telling me that if I pull out of this affair, the land will be spared from strip-mining?”

Diamond pushed out his lower lip. “Oh, I’m afraid I couldn’t make an arrangement like that. America needs all its natural energy to make it independent from foreign sources.” He smiled at this repetition of the worn party line. “Then too, you can’t put beauty in the bank.”

He was enjoying himself.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing, Diamond. If you intend to take the land and destroy it, no matter what I do, then what leverage does that give you over my actions?”

“As I said, taking your land was in the nature of a warning shot across your bow. And a punishment.”

“Ah, I see. A personal punishment. From you. For your brother?”

“That’s right.”

“He deserved death, you know. I was tortured for three days. This face of mine is not completely mobile even now, after all the operations.”

“He was my brother! Now, let’s pass on to the sanctions and penalties you will incur, should you fail to cooperate. Under the key group KL443, Code Number 45-389-75, you had approximately one-and-a-half-million dollars in gold bullion in the Federal Bank of Zurich. That represented nearly all the rest of what you intended to retire on. Please note the past tense again.”

Hel was silent for a moment. “The Swiss too need oil.”

“The Swiss need oil too,” Diamond echoed. “That money will reappear in your account seven days after the successful accomplishment of the hijacking by the Septembrists. So you see, far from interrupting their plans and killing some of their number, it would benefit you to do everything in your power to make sure they succeed.”

“And presumably that money serves also as your personal protection.”

“Precisely. Should anything happen to me or my friends while we are your guests, that money disappears, victim of an accounting error.”

Hel was attracted to the sliding doors giving out on his Japanese garden. The rain had come, hissing in the gravel and vibrating the tips of black and silver foliage. “And that is it?”

“Not quite. We are aware that you probably have a couple of hundred thousand here and there as emergency funds. A psychological profile of you from Fat Boy tells us that it is just possible that you may put such things as loyalty to a dead friend and his niece ahead of all considerations of personal benefit. All part of being selectively bred and tutored in Japanese concepts of honor, don’t you know. We are prepared for that foolish eventuality as well. In the first place, the British MI-5 and MI-6 are alerted to keep tabs on you and to arrest you the moment you set foot on their soil. To assist them in this task, the French Internal Security forces are committed to making sure you do not leave this immediate district. Descriptions of you have been distributed. If you are discovered in any village other than your own, you will be shot on sight. Now, I am familiar with your history of accomplishments in the face of improbable odds, and I realize that, for you, these forces we have put on line are more in the nature of nuisances than deterrents. But we are going through the motions nonetheless. The Mother Company must be seen to be doing everything in Her power to protect the London Septembrists. Should that protection fail—and I almost hope it does—then the Mother Company must be
seen
to mete out punishment—punishment of an intensity that will satisfy our Arab friends. And you know what those people are like. To satisfy their taste for revenge, we would be forced to do something very thorough and very… imaginative.”

Hel was silent for a moment. “I told you at the outset of our chat that I had a question for you, merchant. Here it is. Why did you come here?”

“That should be obvious.”

“Perhaps I didn’t accent my question properly. Why did
you
come here? Why didn’t you send a messenger? Why bring your face into my presence and run the risk of my remembering you?”

Diamond stared at Hel for a moment “I’ll be honest with you…”

“Don’t break any habits on my account.”

“I wanted to tell you about the loss of your land in Wyoming personally. I wanted to display in person the mass of punishment I have designed, if you are rash enough to disobey the Mother Company. It’s something I owe my brother.”

Hel’s emotionless gaze settled on Diamond, who stood rigid with defiance, his eyes shining with a tear glaze that revealed the body fright within him. He had taken a dangerous plunge, this merchant. He had left the cover of laws and systems behind which corporate men hide and from which their power derives, and he had run the risk of showing his face to Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel. Diamond was subconsciously aware of his dependent anonymity, of his role as a social insect clawing about in the frantic nests of profit and success. Like others of his caste, he found spiritual solace in the cowboy myth. At this moment, Diamond saw himself as a virile individualist striding bravely down the dusty street of a Hollywood back lot, his hand hovering an inch above the computer in his holster. It is revealing of the American culture that its prototypic hero is the cowboy: an uneducated, boorish, Victorian migrant agricultural worker. At base, Diamond’s role was ludicrous: the Tom Mix of big business facing a
yojimbo
with a garden. Diamond possessed the most extensive computer system in the world; Hel had some file cards. Diamond had all the governments of the industrialized West in his pocket; Hel had some Basque friends. Diamond represented atomic energy, the earth’s oil supply, the military/industrial symbiosis, the corrupt and corrupting governments established by the Wad to shield itself from responsibility; Hel represented
shibumi,
a faded concept of reluctant beauty. And yet, it was obvious that Hel had a considerable advantage in any battle that might be joined.