Michaelmas

Four

It was truer than ever that airports look the same all over the world. But not all airports are located in the Alps.

Michaelmas descended just behind Watson and Campion, into a batting of light reflected from every surface, into a cup of nose-searing cool washed brilliance whose horizon was white mountaintops higher than the clouds. The field was located high enough above the Aar, and far enough from the city itself, to touch him with the sight of the Old City on its neck of land in the acute bend of the river, looking as unreally arranged as a literal painting. It was with that thought, blinking, that he managed to locate himself in time, space, and beauty, and so consider that his soul had caught up with him.

There was a considerable commotion going on at the shuttle lounge debarking ramp. Movement out of the lounge had stopped. Watson had been right about any number of details : it was likely that half the journalists in Europe were on the scene, and there was a gesticulating, elbowing crowd of them there, many of them in berets and trenchcoats, displaying the freelance spirit.

Even the people with staff jobs had caught the infection either here or much earlier, and there was the usual jostling with intent to break directed at any loosely held piece of equipment. There was a bewildering variety of that — sound and video recorders both flat and stereo, film cameras, and old minicams as well as holograph recorders —as if every pawnbroker on the continent were smiling this morning. Most of the people down here had to be working on speculation. There weren’t enough media contracts or staff jobs in the world to support that mob, or, truth to tell, speculation markets either.

The current compromise pronunciation of his name seemed to be Mikkelmoss! and emerged most often from the gaggle of voices. Lenses glittering like an array of Assyrians, they tried to get to him in the lounge or cannily waited for him to ensnare himself among them. Michaelmas could feel himself blushing, his round cheeks hot under his crinkling eyes. He could not help smiling, either, as he discovered a staff cameraman for Watson’s client network actually shooting for a zoom close-up of him over Watson’s shoulder. It was Campion who raised his comm unit to block that shot; Watson had his head down and was working his way through the crowd with effective hips and shoulders.

The first man to get to Michaelmas —a wiry, shock-headed type with blue jaws, body odour, and an elaborate but obsolescent sound recorder—clutched a hand-rail, planted his feet to block passage fore and aft, and shot his microphone forward. “Is true dzey findet wreckidge Kolonel Norwoot’s racquet?” “What is your comment on that, sir, please?” came from a BBC man down on the ground beside the ramp with a shotgun microphone, an amplifier strapped over his mouth and phones on his ears. His camera was built into his helmet, exposure sensors flashing.

And so forth. Michaelmas made his way through them, working his way towards Customs and the cab rank, feeling a sudden burst of autumn chill as someone opened a door; smiling, making brief reasonable comments about his own lack of information. Domino was saying to him: “Remember, Mickeymouse—you are but a man.” As he cleared the fringes of the crowd, Domino also said : “You have a suite at the Excelsior and an eight a.m. appointment with your crew director. That is forty-eight minutes from… now.”

Michaelmas re-set his watch.

It was a beautiful drive into the city with the road winding its way down to the river, looping lower and lower like a fly fisherman’s line until unexpectedly the cab crossed the stonework bridge and they were in the narrow streets of the Old City.

Michaelmas loved Switzerland. He loved the whole idea of Switzerland. He sat back among the cushions with the cab’s sunroof open at his request. He beamed through the rented windows at the people going about their business and out of the fairy-tale buildings that were still preserved, with hidden steel beams and other subtle interval reconstructions, among the newer modern buildings that were so much more efficient and economical to erect from scratch.

“The escape capsule wreckage has not been reported as yet,” Domino said. “There have only been a few daylight hours for the helicopters to be out. In any case, we can expect it to be under a considerable accumulation of snow, and not indicative of anything of value to us. If Limberg can produce a genuine Norwood, he can produce genuine wreckage.”

“Quite so,” Michaelmas said. “I don’t expect it to tell us anything. But it would be nice if I were the first newsman to report it.”

“I am on all local communications channels,” Domino said tartly, “and am also making the requisite computations. I have been doing that since before arranging your hotel reservations.”

“Didn’t mean to question your professional competence,” Michaelmas said. He chuckled aloud, and the cab driver said:

“Ja, mein Herr, it is a day to feel young again.” He winked into the rear-view mirror. It was a moment before Michaelmas realized they had been driving by an academy for young ladies in blue jumpers and white wool blouses, and in their later teens. Michaelmas obligingly turned in his seat and peered back through the rear window at sun-browned legs in football-striped calf socks scampering two by two up the old white steps to class. But to be young again would have been an unbearable price.

The suite in the Excelsior spoke of matured grace and cultivated taste. Michaelmas looked around approvingly as the captain supervised the bustling of the boys with his luggage and the plod of the grey old chambermaid with his towels. When they were all done and he was sated with wandering from room to room through open doorways, he found the most comfortable drawing-room chair and sank into it. Putting his feet on an ottoman, he called downstairs for coffee and pastry. He had about fifteen minutes before his crew director was due. He said to Domino: “All right, I suppose there are certain things we have to take care of before we get back to the main schedule.”

“Yes,” Domino said unflinchingly.

“All right, let’s get to it.”

“President Fefre.”

Michaelmas grinned. “What’s he done now?” Fefre was chief of state in one of the small African nations. He was a Harvard graduate in economics, had a knife scar running from his right temple to the left side of his jaw, and had turned Moslem for the purpose of maintaining a number of wives in the capital palace. He sold radium, refined in a Chinese-built plant, to anyone who would pay for it, running it out to the airport in little British trucks over roads built with American money. He had cut taxes back to zero, closed all but one newspaper, and last month had imprisoned the seventy-two-year-old head of his air force as a revolutionary.

Domino said : “The Victorious Soviet People’s Engineering Team has won the contract to design and build the hydro-electric dam at the foot of Lake Egendi, despite being markedly underbid by General Dynamics. A hundred thousand roubles in gold has been deposited to Fefre’s pseudonymous account in the Uruguayan Peasant Union Bank. It would be no problem to arrange a clerical error that would bring all this to light.”

Michaelmas chuckled. “No, no, let him go. The bank needs the working capital and, besides, I like his style. Anything else?”

“The source of funds for the Turkish Greatness Party is the United Arab Republic.”

“Imagine that. You sure?”

“Quite. The Turkish National Bank has recently gone into fully computerized operation, with connections of course to London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, and so forth. The Continental Bank and Trust Company of Chicago is in correspondence with all those, as part of the international major monetary exchange body, and is also the major and almost sole stockholder in the State Bank and trust Company of Wilmette, Illinois, where I have one of my earliest links. When Turkey joined that network I immediately began a normal series of new data integrations. I now have all the resulting correlations, and that’s one of them.”

“Do you mean to say the Arabs are paying the Turks by cheque?”

“I mean to say there’s a limit to the number of gold pieces one can stuff into a mattress. Sooner or later someone has to put it somewhere safe, and when he does, of course, I find it.”

“Yes, yes,” Michaelmas said. He had a very clear picture in his mind of suave, dark, blue-eyed gentlemen in white silk suits and French sunglasses passing canvas bags that rustled to somewhat rougher-looking people in drophead Bentleys by the light of the desert moon. Gentlemen who in turn paid for their petrol on a Shell card and booked air passage from El Fasher to Adana against personal checks which would be covered by deposit of lira notes which had trickled through the weave of the moneybags. On balance, if you had a mind like Domino’s and knew all credit card numbers, the flight times of all airliners, and the vital statistics of all gentlemen known to engage in the buying and selling of other gentlemen and submachine-guns, in all portions of the world, there was no great trick to it. “I know you can take a joke,” he said to Domino. “But sometimes I do wish you could understand a jest.”

“Life,” said Domino, “is too short.”

“Yours?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” Michaelmas pondered for a moment. “Well, I don’t think we need any expansionist revolutions in Turkey. The idea of armoured cavalry charging the gates of Vienna again is liable to be too charming to too many people. Break that up, next opportunity.” Michaelmas looked at his watch.“All right. Any more?”

“US Always has learned that Senator Stever is getting twenty-five thousand dollars a year from that north-western lumber combine. USA’s Washington office made a phone call reporting it to Hanrassy’s national headquarters at Cape Girardeau.”

“In that simple-minded code of theirs? If they’re planning to save the whole country from the rest of the world, you’d think they’d learn to respect cryptanalysis. Any information on what they’re planning to do with this leverage?”

“Nothing definite. But that brings to six the total of senior Senators definitely in their pockets, plus their ideological adherents. This is not a good time for USA to be gaining in power. Furthermore, although it’s very early in the morning in Missouri, Hanrassy’s known to work through the night quite often. I won’t be surprised if a Senatorial inquiry starts today on why Colonel Norwood wasn’t immediately reinstated as head of the Trans-Martian flight. Even allowing for her intake of amphetamines, Hanrassy’s annoyingly energetic.”

“Better she than someone with staying power. But I think we’d better take this committee chairman pawn away from her. Sam Lemoyne’s still on the night side for the Times-Mirror. It’d be good if he got the idea to go buy a drink for that beachboy Stever beat up in his apartment last year.” “I’ll drop him a note,” Domino said.

It was nearly eight o’clock. “All right, unless there’s a real emergency, go ahead and follow standard practice with anything else that’s pending.” With the passage of time, Domino was beginning to learn more and more about how Michaelmas’s mind worked. He didn’t like it, but he could follow it when instructed. That fact was the only thing that let Michaelmas contemplate the passage of time with less than panic.

Michaelmas’s house phone chimed. He listened and said : “Send her up.” His crew director was here.

She came in just ahead of the room-service waiter. Michaelmas attended to the amenities and they sat together on the balcony, sipping and talking. She and the crew were all on staff with his employer network. Her name was Clementine Gervaise, and he had never met her because the bulk of her previous experience had been with national media, and because this was his first time with her network, which was up-and-coming and hadn’t been able to afford him before.

Gervaise — Madame Gervaise, he gathered from the plain band on her finger — was the model of one kind of fortyish, chic European woman. She was tall, blonde, with her hair pulled back severely from her brow but feathered out coquettishly over one ear, dressed in a plain blue-green couturier suit, and very professional. It took them ten minutes to work out what kind of equipment they had available, what sort of handling and transport capabilities they had for it, and what to do with it pending permission to enter the sanatorium grounds. They briefly considered the merit of intercutting old UNAC footage with whatever commentary he devised, and scrubbed that in favour of a nice, uncluttered series of grab shots of the sanatorium and any lab interiors they might be able to pick up. She expressed an interest in Domino’s machine, which Michaelmas displayed to her as his privately designed comm unit, giving her the line of Proud Papa patter that had long ago somnolized all the newsmen he knew.

With all that out of the way, they still had a few sips of coffee left and a few bites of croissant to take, so they began to talk inconsequentially.

The skin on the backs of her hands was beginning to lose its youthful elasticity, so she did not do much gesturing, but she did have a habit of reaching up to pull down the dark glasses which were de rigueur in her mode. This usually happened at the end of a question such as: “It is very agreeable here at this time of year, is it not?” and was accompanied by a glance of her medium green eyes before the glasses went back into place and hid them again. She sipped at her cup daintily, her pursed lips barely kissing the rim. She kept her legs bent sidewards together, and her unfortunately large feet pulled back inconspicuously against her chair.

All in all, Michaelmas was at first quite ready to classify her as being rather what you’d expect — a well-trained, competent individual in a high-paying profession which underwrote whatever little whims and personal indulgences she might have. This kind of woman was usually very good to work with, and he expected to be out of Switzerland before she had quite made up her mind whether she or the famous

Laurent Michaelmas was going to do the seducing. And even if he were delayed past that point, a moment’s frank discussion would solve that problem without offending her or making him look like an ass. At least this type of woman played it as a game, and took it as a matter of course that if there was to be no corrida in this town today, there was always an autobus leaving for the next ring within the half hour. As a matter of fact, she was the type of woman he most liked working with because it could all be made clear-cut so easily, and then they could resume what they were being paid to do.

And in fact, Clementine Gervaise herself was so casual, despite the glances and the exposition from knees to ankles, that it seemed the whole business was only a pro forma gesture to days perhaps gone by for both of them. But just before he poured the last of the coffee from the chased silver pot into the translucent cup with its decoration of delicately painted violets, he found himself listening with more than casual attention to the intonations of her voice, and finding that his eyes rested on the highlights in her washed blond coiffure each time she turned her head.

For content, her conversation was still no more than politeness required, and his responses were the same. But there was a certain comfortable relaxation within him which he discovered only with a little spasm of alertness. For the past minute or two, his smile of response to her various gambits about European travel and climate had been warming. He had begun thinking how pleasant it all was, sitting here and looking out over the mountains, sipping coffee in this air; how very pleasant it was to be himself. And he found himself remembering out of the aspect of his mind that was like an antique desk, some of its drawers bolted, and all the others a little warped and stiff in their sides, so that they opened with difficulty:

He looked down into his cup, smiled, and said: “Dregs”, to cover the slight frown he might have shown.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said as if she also worked in the Excelsior kitchen. It was this little domestic note that did it.

He continued to be charming, and in fact disarmingly attentive for the next few minutes until she left, saying: “I shall be looking forward to seeing you later today.” And then when he had closed the door to the suite behind her, he walked back out on to the balcony and stood with his hands behind his back, his cheeks puffing in and out a little.

“What is it about her?” he said to Domino.

“There’s a remarkable coincidence. She’s very much as I’d expect your wife would have been by now.”

“Really? Is that it?”

“I would say so. I have.”

“Like Clementine Gervaise?” He turned back inside the parlour, his hands still clasped behind him. He placed his feet undecidedly. “Well. What do you think this is?”

“On the data, it’s a coincidence.”

Michaelmas cocked his head towards the machine. “Are you beginning to learn to think beyond actuarials?” he said with pleasure.

“It may be a benefit of our continuing relationship, O Creator.”

“Long time coming,” Michaelmas said gruffly. He straightened and began to stride about the parlour. “But what have we here? Has someone been applying a great deal of deductive thought to what profession a man in my role would choose in these times? My goodness, Dr. Limberg, is all this part of a better mousetrap? Domino, it seems I might also have to watch behind me as I beat a path to his door.”

“You are not more than part of the whole world, Mighty Mouse,” Domino said.

“You know it,” Michaelmas answered, kicking off his shoes as he stepped into the bedroom. “Well, I’m going to take an hour’s nap.”

He slept restlessly for thirty-seven minutes. From time to time he rolled over, frowning.