Shibumi

Trevanian

Shibumi

To the memories of the men who here appeared as: Kishikawa, Otake, de Lhandes, Le Cagot

All other characters and organizations in this book lack any basis in reality—although some of them do not realize that

Gameform of Shibumi

PART ONE

Fuseki — the opening stage of a game when the entire hoard is taken into account.

PART TWO

Sabaki — an attempt to dispose of a troublesome situation in a quick and flexible way.

PART THREE

Seki — a neutral position in which neither has the advantage. A "Mexican stand-off."

PART FOUR

Uttegae — a sacrifice play, a gambit.

PART FIVE

Shicho — a running attack.

PART SIX

Tsuru no Sugomori — "The confinement of the cranes to their nest," a graceful maneuver in which the enemy stones are captured.

PART ONE

Fuseki

Washington

The screen flashed 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3... then the projector was switched off, and lights came up in recessed sconces along the walls of the private viewing room.

The projectionist's voice was thin and metallic over the intercom. "Ready when you are, Mr. Starr."

T. Darryl Starr, sole audience member, pressed the talk button of the communication console before him. "Hey, buddy? Tell me something. What are all those numbers in front of a movie for anyway?"

"It's called academy leader, sir," the projectionist answered. "I just spliced it onto the film as a sort of joke."

"Joke?"

"Yes, sir. I mean... considering the nature of the film... it's sort of funny to have a commercial leader, don't you think?"

"Why funny?"

"Well, I mean... what with all the complaints about violence in movies and all that."

T. Darryl Starr grunted and scrubbed his nose with the back of his fist, then he slipped down the pilot-style sunglasses he had pushed up into his cropped hair when the lights first went off.

Joke? It damn well better not be a joke, I shit thee not! If anything has gone wrong, my ass will be grass. And if the slightest little thing is wrong, you can bet your danglees that Mr. Diamond and his crew will spot it. Nit-picking bastards! Ever since they took control over Middle East operations of CIA, they seemed to get their cookies by pointing out every little boo-boo.

Starr bit off the end of his cigar, spat it onto the carpeted floor, pumped it in and out of his pursed lips, then lit it from a wooden match he struck with his thumbnail. As Most Senior Field Operative, he had access to Cuban cigars. After all, RHIP.

He scooted down and hooked his legs over the back of the seat before him, like he used to do when he watched movies at the Lone Star Theater as a boy. And if the boy in front objected, Starr would offer to kick his ass up amongst his shoulder blades. The other kid always backed off, because everybody in Flat Rock knew that T. Darryl Starr was some kind of fierce and could stomp a mud puddle in any kid's chest.

That was many years and knocks ago, but Starr was still some kind of fierce. That's what it took to become CIA's Most Senior Field Operative. That, and experience. And boo-coo smarts.

And patriotism, of course.

Starr checked his watch: two minutes to four. Mr. Diamond had called for a screening at four, and he would arrive at four—exactly. If Starr's watch did not read four straight up when Diamond walked into the theater, he would assume the watch was in need of repair.

He pressed his talk button again. "How does the film look?"

"Not bad, considering the conditions under which we shot it," the projectionist answered. "The light in Rome International is tricky... a mixture of natural light and fluorescent overheads. I had to use a combination of CC filters that brought my f-stop way down and made focus a real problem. And as for color quality—"

"I don't want to hear your piddly-assed problems!"

"Sorry, sir. I was just answering your question."

"Well, don't!"

"Sir?"

The door at the back of the private theater opened with a slap. Starr glanced at his watch; the sweep second hand was five seconds off four o'clock. Three men walked quickly down the aisle. In the lead was Mr. Diamond, a wiry man in his late forties whose movements were quick and adroit, and whose impeccably tailored clothes reflected his trim habits of mind. Following closely was Mr. Diamond's First Assistant, a tall, loosely jointed man with a vague academic air. Not a man to waste time, it was Diamond's practice to dictate memos, even while en route between meetings. The First Assistant carried a belt recorder at his hip, the pinhead microphone of which was attached to his metal-rimmed glasses. He always walked close beside Mr. Diamond, or sat near him, his head bowed to pick up the flow of clipped monotonic directives.

Considering the heraldic stiffness of CIA mentality, it was inevitable that their version of wit would suggest a homosexual relationship between Diamond and his ever-hovering assistant. Most of the jokes had to do with what would happen to the assistant's nose, should Mr. Diamond ever stop suddenly.

The third man, trailing behind and somewhat confused by the brisk pace of action and thought surrounding him, was an Arab whose Western clothes were dark, expensive, and ill-fitting. The shabby look was not his tailor's fault; the Arab's body was not designed for clothes requiring posture and discipline.

Diamond slipped into an aisle seat across the auditorium from Starr; the First Assistant sat directly behind him, and the Palestinian, frustrated in his expectation that someone would tell him where to sit, finally shambled into a seat near the back.

Turning his head so the pinhead microphone could pick up the last of his rapid, atonic dictation. Diamond closed off the thoughts he had been pursuing. "Introduce the following topics to me within the next three hours: One—North Sea oil rig accident: the media suppression thereof. Two—This professor type who is investigating the ecological damage along the Alaska pipeline: the termination thereof by apparent accident."

Both these tasks were in their final phases, and Mr. Diamond was looking forward to getting in a little tennis over the weekend. Provided, of course, these CIA fools had not screwed up this Rome International action. It was a straightforward spoiling raid that should not have presented any difficulties, but in the six months since the Mother Company had assigned him to manage CIA activities involving the Middle East, he had learned that no action is so simple as to be beyond CIA's capacity for error.

Diamond understood why the Mother Company chose to maintain its low profile by working behind the cover of CIA and NSA, but that did not make his job any easier. Nor had he been particularly amused by the Chairman's lighthearted suggestion that he think of the Mother Company's use of CIA operatives as Her contribution to the hiring of the mentally handicapped.

Diamond had not yet read Starr's action report, so he reached back for it now. The First Assistant anticipated him and had the report ready to press into his hand.

As he glanced over the first page, Diamond spoke without raising his voice. "Put the cigar out, Starr." Then he lifted his hand in a minimal gesture, and the wall lights began to dim down.

Darryl Starr pushed his sunglasses up into his hair as the theater went dark and the projector beam cut through slack threads of blue smoke. On the screen appeared a jerky pan over the interior of a large, busy airport.

"This here's Rome International," Starr drawled. "Time reference: thirteen thirty-four GMT. Flight 414 from Tel Aviv has just arrived. It's going to be a piece before the action starts. Those I-talian customs jokers ain't no speed balls."

"Starr?" said Diamond, wearily.

"Sir?"

"Why haven't you put that cigar out?"

"Well, to tell you God's own truth, sir, I never heard you ask me to."

"I didn't ask you."

Embarrassed at being ordered around in the presence of a foreigner, Starr unhooked his leg from the seat in front and ground out the almost fresh cigar on the carpet. To save face, he continued narrating as though nothing had happened. "I expect our A-rab friend here is going to be some impressed at how we handled this one. It went off slick as catshit on linoleum."

Wide shot: customs and immigration portal. A queue of passengers await the formalities with varying degrees of impatience. In the face of official incompetence and indifference, the only passengers who are smiling and friendly are those who anticipate trouble with their passports or luggage. An old man with a snow-white goatee leans over the counter, explaining something for the third time to the customs officer. Behind him in line are two young men in their twenties, deeply tanned, wearing khaki shorts and shirts open at the throat. As they move forward, pushing their rucksacks along with their feet, camera zooms in to isolate them in mid-close-up.

"Those are our targets," Starr explained needlessly.

"Just so," the Arab said in a brittle falsetto. "I recognize one of them, one known within their organization as Avrim."

With a comically exaggerated bow of gallantry, the first young man offers to let a pretty red-headed girl precede them to the counter. She smiles thanks, but shakes her head. The Italian official in his too-small peaked cap takes the first young man's passport with a bored gesture and flicks it open, his eyes straying again and again to the girl's breasts, obviously unfettered beneath a denim shirt. He glances from the photograph to the young man's face and back again, frowning.

Starr explained. "The mark's passport picture was taken before he grew that silly-assed beard."

The immigration official shrugs and stamps the passport. The second young man is treated with the same combination of mistrust and incompetence. His passport is stamped twice, because the Italian officer was so engrossed in the red-headed girl's shirtfront that he forgot to use the ink pad the first time. The young men pick up their rucksacks, slinging them over their shoulders by one strap. Murmuring apologies and twisting sideways, they slip through a tangle of excited Italians, a large family pressing and standing on tiptoe to greet an arriving relative.

"Okay! Slow 'er down!" Starr ordered over the intercom. "Here's where it hits the fan."

The projector slowed to one-quarter speed.

From frame to flickering frame the young men move as though the air were gelatin. The leader turns back to smile at someone in the queue, the motion having the quality of a ballet in moon gravity. The second one looks out over the crowd. His nonchalant smile freezes. He opens his mouth and shouts silently, as the front of his khaki shirt bursts open and spouts blood. Before he can fall to his knees, a second bullet strikes his cheek and tears it off. The camera waves around dizzily before locating the other young man, who has dropped his rucksack and is running in nightmare slow motion toward the coin lockers. He pirouettes in the air as a slug takes him in the shoulder. He slams gracefully against the lockers and bounces back. His hip blossoms with gore, and he slips sideward to the polished granite floor. A third bullet blows off the back of his head.

The camera swishes over the terminal, seeking, losing, then finding again two men—out of focus—running toward the glass doors of the entrance. The focus is corrected, revealing them to be Orientals. One of them carries an automatic weapon. He suddenly arches his back, throws up his arms, and slides forward on his toes for a second before pitching onto his face. The gun clatters silently beside him. The second man has reached the glass doors, the smeared light of which haloes his dark outline. He ducks as a bullet shatters the glass beside his head; he veers and runs for an open elevator out of which a group of schoolchildren are oozing. A little girl slumps down, her hair billowing as though she were under water. A stray has caught her in the stomach. The next slug takes the Oriental between the shoulder blades and drives him gently into the wall beside the elevator. A grin of anguish on his face, he twists his arm up behind him, as though to pluck out the bullet. The next slug pierces his palm and enters his spine. He slides down the wall and falls with his head in the elevator car. The door closes, but reopens as the pressure pads meet the obstructing head. It closes again upon the head, then reopens. Closes. Opens.

Slow pan back over the terminal. High angle.

...A cluster of shocked and bewildered children around the fallen girl. One boy screams in silence...

...Two airport guards, their little Italian automatics drawn, run toward the fallen Orientals. One of them is still firing...

...The old man with the snow-white goatee sits stunned in a puddle of his own blood, his legs straight out before him, like a child playing in a sandbox. His expression is one of overwhelming disbelief. He was sure he had explained everything to the customs official...

...One of the young Israeli boys lies face down on his missing cheek, his rucksack improbably still over his shoulder...

...There is a largo minuet of stylized confusion among the gaggle of Italians who were awaiting a relative. Three of them have fallen. Others are wailing, or kneeling, and one teenaged boy is turning around and around on his heel, seeking a direction in which to run for help—or safety...

...The red-headed girl stands stiff, her eyes round with horror as she stares at the fallen boy who just seconds ago offered to let her pass ahead...

...The camera comes to rest on the young man sprawled beside the coin lockers, the back of his head missing...

"That-a—that-a—that-a—that's all folks!" said Starr. The beam from the projector flickered out, and the wall lights dimmed up to full.

Starr turned in his seat to field questions from Mr. Diamond or the Arab. "Well?"

Diamond was still looking toward the white screen, three fingers pressed lightly against his lips, the action report on his lap. He let the fingers slip to beside his chin. "How many?" he asked quietly.

"Sir?"

"How many killed in the action?"

"I know what you mean, sir. Things got a little wetter than we expected. We'd arranged for the I-talian police to stay clear of the area, but they got their instructions all balled up—not that that's anything new. I even had some trouble myself. I had to use a Beretta so the slugs would match up for I-talian. And as a handgun, a Beretta isn't worth a fart in a hurricane, as my old daddy would have said. With an S&W, I could of dropped those Japs with two shots, and I wouldn't of hit that poor little girl that stepped out into my line of fire. Of course, in the first part of the action, our Nisei boys had been instructed to make it a little messy—make it look like a Black September number. But it was those panicked I-talian cops that started spattering slugs around like a cow pissing on a flat rock, as my old—"

"Starr?" Diamond's voice was heavy with disgust. "What was the question I asked you?"

"You asked how many were dead." Starr's tone was suddenly crisp, as he discarded the good ol' boy facade behind which he habitually took cover, to lull the target with the assumption that it was dealing with a bucolic fool. "Nine dead in total." A sudden grin, and the down-home twang was back. "Let's see now. There was the two Jew targets, of course. Then our two Nisei agents I had to maximally demote. And that poor little girl that bumped into one of my slugs. And that old fella who collected a stray. And three of that family of locals that were loitering around when that second Jew ran past them. Loitering's dangerous. It ought to be against the law."

"Nine? Nine killed to get two?"

"Well, sir, you gotta remember that we were instructed to make this look like a Black September-type action. And those boys have this tendency to be some extravagant. It's their style to open eggs with sledge hammers—no offense intended to Mr. Haman here."

Diamond looked up from the report he was speed-reading. Haman? Then he remembered that the Arab observer seated behind him had been given Haman as a cover name by the imaginative CIA.

"I take no offense, Mr. Starr," said the Arab. "We are here to learn. That is why some of our own trainees are working with your men at the Riding Academy, under a Title Seventeen grant for cultural exchange. To tell truths, I am impressed that a man of your seniority took the time to deal with this matter personally."

Starr waved that aside with pleased modesty. "Think nothing of it. If you want a job done right, give it to a busy man."

"Is that something else your old daddy used to say?" Diamond asked, his eyes not leaving the report as they raced vertically down the center of the page, speed-reading.

"Matter of fact, it is, now you mention it."

"He was quite the folksy philosopher."

"I think of him more as a rotten son-of-a-bitch, sir. But he did have a way with words."

Diamond sighed nasally and returned his attention to the action report. During the months since the Mother Company had assigned him to control all CIA activities touching the interests of the oil-producing powers, he had learned that, despite their institutionalized ineptitude, men like Starr were not stupid. They were, in fact, surprisingly intelligent, in the mechanical, problem-solving sense of that word. None of the chitlin grammar, none of the scatological paucity of language ever appeared in Starr's written reports of wet-work assignments. Instead, one found concise, arid prose calculated to callus the imagination.

From going over his biographic printout, Diamond had learned that Starr was something of a hero figure among the younger CIA operatives—the last of the old breed from the precomputer era, from the days when Company operations had more to do with swapping shots across the Berlin Wall than with controlling the votes of congressmen by amassing evidence of their fiscal and sexual irregularities.

T. Darryl Starr was of the same stripe as his over-the-hill contemporary who left the Company to write inarticulate spy novels and dabble over his head in political crimes. When his gross ineptitude led to his being caught, he clung to truculent silence, while his cohorts sang mighty choruses of mea culpa and published at great profit. After serving a bit of soft time in federal prison, he sought to ennoble his panicked silence by falling back on The Unwritten Code, which declares, "Thou shall not squeal—out of print." The world groaned as at an old joke, but Starr admired this bungling fool. They shared that blend of boy scout and mugger that characterizes old-timers in the CIA.

Diamond glanced up from the report. "According to this, Mr. ... Haman, you went along on the spoiling raid as an observer."

"Yes. That is correct. As a trainee/observer."

"In that case, why did you want to see this confirmation film before reporting to your superiors?"

"Ah... yes. Well... in point of most absolute fact..."

"It wouldn't be possible for him to report his eyeball reactions, sir," Starr explained. "He was with us up on the mezzanine when it all started, but ten seconds later we couldn't find hide nor hair of him. A man we left behind to sweep up finally located him in the back stall of the public benjo."

The Arab laughed briefly and mirthlessly. "This is true. The calls of nature are as inopportune as they are empirical."

The First Assistant frowned and blinked. Empirical? Did he mean imperative? Imperious?

"I see," Diamond said, and he returned to his scan-reading of the seventy-five-page report.

Uncomfortable with the silence, the Arab quickly filled in with: "I do not wish to be an inquisitor, Mr. Starr, but there is something I do not understand."

"Shoot, pal."

"Exactly why did we use Orientals to make the slap?"

"What? Oh! Well, you remember that we agreed to make it look as though your own men did the hit. But we don't have no A-rabs in the shop, and the boys we're training out to the Academy ain't up to this kind of number." Starr did not consider it tactful to add that, with their genetic disabilities, they probably never would be. "But your Black September boys have been members of the Japanese Red Army on their operations... and Japs we got."

The Arab frowned in confusion. "You are saying that the Japanese were your own men?"

"You got it, A couple of Nisei boys with the Agency in Hawaii. Good ol' boys too. It's a real pity we had to lose 'em, but their deaths put what you call your stamp of verisimilitude on your otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. The slugs they dig out of them will be from a Beretta, and the local cops will get credit for pinching them off. They carried documents identifying them as Red Army members helping their A-rab brothers in what you call your unending struggle against the capitalist whatevers."

"Your own men?" the Arab repeated in awe.

"Don't sweat it. Their papers, their clothes, even the food that'll be found in their stomachs... it all makes them out to be from Japan. Matter of fact, they flew in from Tokyo just a couple of hours before the hit—or slap, as we sometimes call it."

The Arab's eyes shone with admiration. This was precisely the kind of organization his uncle—and president—had sent him to the United States to study, to the end of creating a similar one, and ending their dependence on their new-found allies. "But surely your Japanese agents did not know they were going to be... what is your term for it?"

"Maximally demoted? No, they didn't know. There's a rule of thumb in the shop that actives shouldn't know more than they need to do the job. They were good men, but even so, if they'da known they were gonna do a Nathan Hale, they might'a lost some of their enthusiasm, if you catch my drift there."

Diamond continued to read, his vertical sweep of eye always well ahead of the mixing and analyzing operations of his mind, which sorted and reviewed the data in a way best described as intellectual peripheral vision. When some bit failed to fall into place, or rang false, he would pause and go back, scanning for the offending fragment.

He was on the last page when the internal alarms went off. He paused, turned back to the preceding page, and read carefully—this time horizontally. His jaw muscles rippled. He lifted his eyes and produced a characteristically understated exclamation: for a moment he did not breathe.

The First Assistant's eyes flickered. He knew the signs. There was trouble.

Diamond drew a long-suffering sigh as he handed the report back over his shoulder. Until he had evaluated the problem, he would not alert the Arab observer. His experience told him that it is unwise and wasteful to equip Arabs with unnecessary information. It is not a burden they carry gracefully.

"Well?" he asked, turning his head slightly. "Are you satisfied, Mr. Haman?"

For an instant the Arab failed to recognize his code name, then he started and giggled. "Oh, yes. Well, let us say that I am impressed by the evidence of the films."

"Does that mean impressed, but not satisfied?"

The Arab pulled in his neck, tilted his head, and lifted his palms, smiling in the oblique way of the rug merchant. "My good friends, it is not for me to he satisfied or unsatisfied. Dissatisfied? I am merely a messenger, a point of contact, what you might call... a..."

"Flunkey?" Diamond offered.

"Perhaps. I do not know that word. A short time ago, our intelligence agents learned of a plot to assassinate the last two remaining heroes of the Munich Olympics Retaliation. My uncle—and president—expressed his desire to have this plot staunched... is that the word?"

"It's a word," Diamond admitted, his voice bored. He was out of patience with this fool, who was more a broad ethnic joke than a human being.

"As you recall, the staunching of this evil plot was a condition for continued amicable relations with the Mother Company in matters relating to oil supply. "In its wisdom, the Mother Company decided to have CIA handle the matter—under your close personal supervisory, Mr. Diamond. I mean no offense to my brave friend, Mr. Starr, but it must be admitted that since certain bunglings of CIA-trained men led to the downfall of a most friendly and cooperative President, our confidence in that organization has not been without limits." The Arab tipped his head onto his shoulder and grinned apologetically at Starr, who examined his cuticles with deep interest.

The Arab continued. "Our intelligence organ was able to supply CIA with the names of the two Zionist gangsters assigned to this criminal attack, and with the approximate date of their departure from Tel Aviv. To this, Mr. Starr doubtless added his own sources of information; and he decided to avert the tragedy by technique of what you call a 'spoiling raid,' arranging that the criminals be executed before they committed their crime—a most economical judicial process. Now, you have shown me certain audiovisual medias proving that this raid was successful, I shall report this to my superiors. It is for them to be satisfied or nonsatisfied; not me."

Diamond, whose mind had been elsewhere through most of the Arab's singsong monologue, now rose. "That's it, then." Without further word, he strode up the aisle, followed immediately by his First Assistant.

Starr hooked his leg over the seat before him and drew out a cigar. "You want to see it again?" he asked the Arab over his shoulder.

"That would be pleasant."

Starr pressed the talk button of his console, "Hey, buddy? Let's have it again." He slipped his sunglasses up into his cropped hair as the lights dimmed down. "Here we go. A rerun. And on prime time." Pronounced: prahm tahm.

* * *

As he walked quickly down the white-walled corridor of the Center, Diamond's fury was manifest only in the sharp click of his leather heels over the tiles. He had trained himself to restrict his emotions to a very narrow band of expression, but the slight tension around his mouth and his half-defocused stare were sufficient to alert the First Assistant that anger was writhing within him.

They stepped into the elevator, and the First Assistant inserted a magnetic card into the slot that replaced the button for Floor 16. The car dropped rapidly from the main lobby to the subbasement suite coded as Floor 16. The first thing Diamond had done when he took over CIA activities on behalf of the Mother Company was to create a work area for himself in the bowels of the Center. No CIA personnel had access to Floor 16; the office suite was enclosed in lead sheeting with antibugging alarms designed to keep that organization in its traditional state of ignorance. As further security against governmental curiosity, Diamond's office was served by a direct computer link with the Mother Company through cables that were armored against the parallel-line/incidental capacitance method of eavesdropping by means of which NSA monitors telephone and telegraph communications in the United States.

In constant touch with the research and communications facilities of Mother Company, Diamond needed only a staff of two: his First Assistant, who was a gifted artist at computer search; and his secretary, Miss Swivven.

They stepped out into a large open work space, the walls and carpets all in matte white. In the center was a discussion area consisting of five lightly padded chairs around a table, with an etched glass top that served as a screen upon which television images generated by the computer complex could be projected. Of the five chairs, only one could swivel: Diamond's. The others were set rigidly into the floor and were designed to provide minimal comfort. The area was for quick, alert discussion—not for small-talk and social fencing.

Into the wall across from the discussion area was built a console that linked their computer with the Mother Company's master system: Fat Boy. The bank also contained television, telephoto and teletype connections back to Fat Boy for printout of verbal and visual data, together with local storage banks for short-term hold and cross-reference. The First Assistant's place was always before this console, upon which instrument he played with unique abstract artistry, and with great affection.

Raised slightly on a dais, Diamond's own desk was conspicuously modest, with its white plastic surface only fifty centimeters by sixty-five. It had no drawers or shelves, nowhere to lose or overlook material, no way to delay one matter by pushing it aside on the excuse of attending to something else. A priority system, ordered by a complicated set of strict criteria, brought each problem to his desk only when there was sufficient research available for decisions, which were made quickly, and matters disposed of. Diamond despised both physical and emotional clutter.

He crossed to his desk chair (constructed by an orthopedic specialist to reduce fatigue without providing narcotising comfort) and sat with his back to the wide, floor-to-ceiling window beyond which could be seen a neat patch of park and the stele of the Washington Monument in the middle distance. He sat for a moment with his palms pressed together in a prayerlike attitude, forefingers lightly touching his lips. The First Assistant automatically took his place before the data console and awaited instructions.

Alerted by their entrance, Miss Swivven entered the work area from her anteoffice and sat in her chair beside and below Diamond's dais, her note pad ready. She was in her late twenties, lush of body, with thick honey-colored hair done up in an efficient bun. Her most salient feature was an extreme fairness of skin beneath which her veins traced faint bluish patterns.

Without raising his eyes, Diamond tilted his praying hands from his lips and directed the fingertips toward the First Assistant. "Those two Israeli boys. They belonged to some organization. Name?"

"The Munich Five, sir."

"Function?"

"To avenge the killing of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics. Specifically, to hunt down and kill the Palestinian terrorists involved. Not official. Nothing to do with the Israeli government."

"I see." Diamond turned his fingers toward Miss Swivven. "I'll dine here tonight. Something quick and light, but I'll need a protein shock. Make it brewer's yeast, liquid vitamins, egg yolks, and eight ounces of raw calf's liver. Do it up in a blender."

Miss Swivven nodded. It was going to be a long night.

Diamond turned in his desk chair and stared sightlessly out toward the Washington Monument. Walking across the lawn near the base was the same group of schoolchildren that passed every day at exactly this time. Without turning from the window, he said over his shoulder, "Give me a data pull on this Munich Five."

"What indices, sir?" the First Assistant asked.

"It's a small organization. And recent. Let's begin with history and membership."

"At what depth do I scan?"

"You work that out. It's what you do well."

The First Assistant turned in his chair and began instructing Fat Boy. His face was immobile, but his eyes behind the round glasses sparkled with delight. Fat Boy contained a medley of information from all the computers in the Western World, together with a certain amount of satellite-stolen data from Eastern Bloc powers. It was a blend of top-secret military information and telephone-billing records; of CIA blackmail material and drivers' permits from France, of names behind numbered Swiss bank accounts and mailing lists from direct advertising companies in Australia. It contained the most delicate information, and the most mundane. If you lived in the industrialized West, Fat Boy had you. He had your credit rating, your blood type, your political history, your sexual inclinations, your medical records, your school and university performance, random samplings of your personal telephone conversations, a copy of every telegram you ever sent or received, all purchases made on credit, full military or prison records, all magazines subscribed to, all income tax records, driving licenses, fingerprints, birth certificates—all this, if you were a private citizen in whom the Mother Company had no special interest. If, however, the Mother Company or any of her input subsidiaries, like CIA, NSA, and their counterparts in the other democratic nations, took particular notice of you, then Fat Boy knew much, much more than this about you.

Programming facts into Fat Boy was the constant work of an army of mechanics and technicians, but getting useful information out of Him was a task for an artist, a person with training, touch, and inspiration. The problem lay in the fact that Fat Boy knew too much. If one scanned a given subject too shallowly he might not discover what he wanted to know. If he scanned too deeply, he would be overwhelmed with an unreadable mass of minutia: results of former urine tests, boy scout merit badges won, predictions in high school annuals, preference in brand of toilet paper. The First Assistant's unique gift was his delicate touch in asking just the right questions of Fat Boy, and of demanding response at just the right depth of scan. Experience and instinct combined to send him after the right indices, the right permutations, the right rubrics, the right depths. He played the instrument of the computer masterfully, and he loved it. Working at his console was to him what sex was to other men—that is to say, what he assumed sex was to other men.

Diamond spoke over his shoulder to Miss Swivven. "When I'm ready, I'll want to talk to this Starr person, and to the Arab they call Mr. Haman. Have them kept on tap."

Under the First Assistant's manipulation, the console was warming and humming. The first responses were coming in; fragments were being stored in the local memory bank; the dialogue had begun. No two conversations with Fat Boy were alike; each took on its own patois, and the delights of the problem were beginning to stroke the First Assistant's considerable, if exclusively frontal, intellect.

It would be twenty minutes before a full picture was available. Diamond decided not to waste this time. He would take a little exercise and sun, tune up his body and clear his mind for the long haul to come. He gestured with a fingertip for Miss Swivven to follow him into the small exercise room off the principal work area.

As he stripped down to his abbreviated shorts, Miss Swivven put on a pair of round, dark eyecups, handed him a similar pair, and turned on the bank of sunlamps installed along the walls. Diamond began doing sit-ups on an inclined platform, his ankles held by a loop of velvet-covered rope, while Miss Swivven pressed against the wall, keeping her vulnerably pale skin as far away from the intense glare of ultraviolet as possible. Diamond did his sit-ups slowly, getting the most work out of the fewest repetitions. He was in excellent shape for a man of his age, but the stomach required constant attention. "Listen," he said, his voice tight with a withheld grunt as he rose and touched his right knee with his left elbow, "I'll have to bring some CIA clout in on this. Alert whoever is left at the top after that last round of cosmetic administrative shakeups."

The highest-ranking administrator below the political shills that came and went as sacrificial lambs to outraged public opinion was the Deputy International Liaison Duty Officer, who was typically referred to by his acronym. Miss Swivven informed her superior that he was still in the building.

"He'll do. Order him to keep himself on tap. Oh—and cancel my tennis date for this weekend."

Miss Swivven's eyebrows lifted above her dark eyecups. This must be something very serious indeed.

Diamond began to work with the weights. "I'll also want a 0-jump priority on Fat Boy for the rest of the afternoon, maybe longer."

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. What do you have on your pad?"

"High protein input in liquid form. Alert and freeze Mr. Starr and Mr. Haman. Alert and freeze the Deputy. Request 0-jump priority on Fat Boy."

"Good. Precede all that with a message to the Chairman." Diamond was breathing heavily with the effort of exercise. "Message: Possible that Rome International spoiling raid was imperfect. Will seek, sort, and report alternatives."

When Miss Swivven returned seven minutes later, she was carrying a large glass of thick, foamy, purplish liquid, the color lent by the pulverized raw liver. Diamond was in the last phase of his exercise routine, working isometrically against a fixed steel pipe. He stopped and accepted his dinner, as she pressed close to the wall, avoiding the sunlamps as best she could, but knowing perfectly well that she had already had enough exposure to burn her delicate skin. Although there were many advantages of her job with the Mother Company—overtime, good retirement plan, medical benefits, company vacation resort in the Canadian Rockies, Christmas parties—Miss Swivven regretted two aspects of her career: this getting sunburnt every week or so, and the occasional impersonal use Mr. Diamond made of her to relieve his tensions. Still, she was philosophic. No job is perfect.

"Note pad cleared?" Diamond asked, shuddering slightly as he finished his drink.

"Yes, sir."

Disregarding her presence, Diamond stepped out of his shorts and into a glass-fronted shower stall, where he turned on a full spray of bracing cold water, over the noise of which he asked, "Did the Chairman respond to my message?"

"Yes, sir."

After a short silence, Diamond said, "Please feel free to tell me what the response was, Miss Swivven."

"Pardon me, sir?"

Diamond turned off the shower, stepped out, and began to dry off on the rough towels designed to heighten circulation.

"Do you want me to read the Chairman's message to you, sir?"

Diamond sighed deeply. If this twit had not been the only attractive one in the over-100 wpm pool... "That would be nice, Miss Swivven."

She referred to her note pad, squinting against the glare of the sunlamps. "Response: Chairman to Diamond, J.O.: 'Failure in this matter not acceptable.'"

Diamond nodded as he dried his crotch meditatively. It was as he had expected.

When he returned to the work area, he was crispminded and prepared for decision-making, having changed into his working clothes, a jumpsuit of pale yellow that was loose and comfortable, and set his rotisserie tan off to advantage.

The First Assistant was working at the console with narrow concentration and physical exhilaration, as he tickled a cogent printout of data on the Munich Five out of Fat Boy.

Diamond sat in his swivel chair above the milky etched glass tabletop. "Punch up the RP," he instructed. "Give me a roll-down rate of five hundred WPM." He could not absorb information faster than this because the data came from half a dozen international sources, and Fat Boy's mechanical translations into English were as stilted and unrefined of idiom as a Clint Eastwood film.

MUNICH FIVE, THE...

ORGANIZATION... UNOFFICIAL... SPLINTER... GOAL EQUALS TERMINATION OF BLACK SEPTEMBRISTS INVOLVED IN KILLING ISRAELI ATHLETES IN MUNICH OLYMPICS...

LEADER AND KEYMAN EQUALS STERN, ASA...

MEMBERS AND SATELLITES EQUAL LEVITSON, YOEL... YARIV, CHAIM... ZARMI, NEHEMIAH... STERN, HANNAH...

"Hold it," Diamond said. "Let's take a look at them one at a time. Just give me sketches."

STERN, ASA

BORN APRIL 13, 1909... BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, USA... 1352 CLINTON AVENUE... APARTMENT 3B...

The First Assistant clenched his teeth. "Sorry, sir." He was probing just a shade too deeply. No one wanted to know the number of the apartment in which Asa Stern was born. Not yet, anyway. He shallowed the probe a micron.

STERN EMIGRATES TO PALESTINE PROTECTORATE... 1931...

PROFESSION AND/OR COVER... FARMER, JOURNALIST, POET, HISTORIAN...

INVOLVED IN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE... 1945-1947 (details available)...

IMPRISONED BY BRITISH OCCUPATION FORCES (details available)...

UPON RELEASE BECOMES CONTACT POINT FOR STERN ORGANIZATION AND OUTSIDE SYMPATHETIC GROUPS (details available)...

RETIRES TO FARM... 1956...

REACTIVATES WITH MUNICH OLYMPICS AFFAIR (details available)...

CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT .001...

REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:

THISMAN NOW DEAD, sub CANCER, sub THROAT

"That's a surface scratch, sir," the First Assistant said. "Shall I probe a little deeper? He's obviously the pivot man."

"Obviously. But dead. No, just store the rest of his stuff in the memory bank. I'll come back to him later. Let's have a look at the other members of his group."

"It's rolling up on your screen now, sir."

LEVITSON, YOEL

BORN DECEMBER 25, 1954... NEGEV, ISRAEL...

FATHER KILLED... COMBAT... 6-DAY WAR... 1967...

JOINS MUNICH FIVE... OCTOBER 1972...

KILLED... DECEMBER 25, 1976... (IDENTITY BETWEEN BIRTH AND DEATH DATES NOTED AND CONSIDERED COINCIDENTAL)

"Hold that!" Diamond ordered. "Give me a little depth on this boy's death."

"Yes, sir."

KILLED... DECEMBER 25, 1976... VICTIM (PROBABLY PRIMARY TARGET) OF TERRORIST BOMB...

SITE EQUALS CAFE IN JERUSALEM... BOMB ALSO KILLED SIX ARAB BYSTANDERS. TWO CHILDREN BLINDED...

"Okay, forget it. It's unimportant. Return to the light scan."

CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT .001...

REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:

THISMAN NOW DEAD, sub MULTIPLE FRACTURES, sub COLLAPSED LUNGS...

* * *

YARIV, CHAIM

BORN OCTOBER 11, 1952... ELATH, ISRAEL...

ORPHAN/KIBBUTZ BACKGROUND (details available)...

JOINS MUNICH FIVE... SEPTEMBER 7, 1972...

CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT .64±...

REASON FOR MEZZO-COEFFICIENT EQUALS:/p>

THISMAN CAUSE-DEVOTED, BUT NOT LEADERTYPE...

* * *

ZARMI, NEHEMIAH

BORN JUNE 11, 1948... ASHDOD, ISRAEL...

KIBBUTZ/UNIVERSITY/ARMY BACKGROUND (details available)...

ACTIVE GUERRILLA, sub NONSPONSORED (details of known/probable/possible actions available)...

JOINS MUNICH FIVE... SEPTEMBER 7, 1972...

CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT .96±

REASON FOR HIGH COEFFICIENT EQUALS:

THISMAN CAUSE-DEVOTED AND LEADERTYPE...

SEE THIS! SEE THIS! SEE THIS! SEE THIS! THISMAN MAY BE TERMINATED ON SIGHT.

* * *

STERN, HANNAH

BORN APRIL 1, 1952... SKOKIE, ILLINOIS, USA...

UNIVERSITY/SOCIOLOGY AND ROMANCE LANGUAGES/ACTIVE CAMPUS RADICAL (NSA/CIA DOSSIERS AVAILABLE)...

SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!

Diamond looked up from the conference table screen.

"What's the matter?"

"Something's in error, sir. Fat Boy is correcting himself."

"Well?"

"We'll know in a minute, sir. Fat Boy's cooking."

Miss Swivven entered from the machine room. "Sir? I have requested telephotos of the members of the Munich Five."

"Bring them as soon as they print out."

"Yes, sir."

The First Assistant lifted his hand for attention. "Here it comes. Fat Boy is correcting himself in terms of Starr's report on the spoiling raid in Rome. He just digested the information."

Diamond read the rear-projected roll-down.

NEGATE PRIOR, RE: YARIV, CHAIM sub CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY...

CORRECTED COEFFICIENT EQUALS .001...

REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:

THISPERSON TERMINATED...

* * *

NEGATE PRIOR, RE: ZARMI, NEHEMIAH sub CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY...

CORRECTED COEFFICIENT EQUALS .001...

REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:

THISPERSON TERMINATED...

* * *

Diamond leaned back and shook his head. "An eight-hour lag. That could hurt us someday."

"It's not Fat Boy's fault, sir. It's an effect of rising world population and our own information explosion. Sometimes I think we know too much about people!" The First Assistant chuckled at the very idea. "By the way, sir, did you notice the rephrase?"

"Which rephrase?"

"THISMAN is now expressed as THISPERSON. Fat Boy must have digested the Mother Company's becoming an equal opportunity employer." The First Assistant could not keep the pride from his voice.

"That's wonderful," Diamond said without energy.

Miss Swivven entered from the machine room and placed five telephotos on Diamond's desk, then she took her position below his dais, her note pad at the ready.

Diamond shuffled through the photographs for that of the only member of the Munich Five not known to be dead: Hannah Stern. He scanned the face, nodded to himself, and sighed fatalistically. These CIA imbeciles!

The First Assistant turned from his console and adjusted his glasses nervously. "What's wrong, sir?"

His eyes half closed as he looked through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Washington Monument threatening to violate that same chubby cloud that always hung in the evening sky at this time. Diamond tapped his upper lip with his knuckle. "Did you read Starr's action report?"

"I scanned it, sir. Mostly checking for spelling."

"What was the ostensible destination of those Israeli youngsters?"

The First Assistant always felt uncomfortable with Mr. Diamond's rhetorical style of thinking aloud. He did not like answering questions without the aid of Fat Boy. "As I recall, their destination was London."

"Right. Presumably intending to intercept certain Palestinian terrorists at Heathrow Airport before they could hijack a plane to Montreal. All right. If the Munich Five team were going to London, why did they disembark at Rome? Flight 414 from Tel Aviv is a through flight to London with stops at Rome and Paris."

"Well, sir, there could be several—"

"And why were they going to England six days before their Black September targets were due to fly out to Montreal? Why sit in the open in London for all that time, when they could have stayed securely at home?"

"Well, perhaps they—"

"And why were they carrying tickets to Pau?"

"Pau, sir?"

"Starr's action report. Bottom of page thirty-two through middle of page thirty-four. Description of contents of victims' knapsacks and clothing. List prepared by Italian police. It includes two plane tickets for Pau."

The First Assistant did not mention that he had no idea where Pau was. He made a mental note to ask Fat Boy first chance he got. "What does all this mean, sir?"

"It means that once again CIA has lived up to the traditions of Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Once again, they have screwed up." Diamond's jaw tightened. "The mindless voters of this country are wrong to worry about the dangers of CIA's internal corruption. When they bring this nation to disaster, it won't be through their villainy; it will be because of their bungling." He returned to his pristine desk and picked up the telephoto of Hannah Stern. "Fat Boy interrupted himself with that correction while it was backgrounding this Hannah Stern. Start me up on that again. And give me a little more depth."

Evaluating both the data and the gaps, Diamond analyzed Miss Stern to be a fairly common sort found on the fringes of terrorist action. Young, intelligent mid-American, cause-oriented. He knew the type. She would have been a Liberal, back when that was still fashionable. She was the kind who sought "relevance" in everything; who expressed her lack of critical judgment as freedom from prejudice; who worried about Third World hunger, but shambled about a university campus with a huge protein-gobbling dog—symbol of her love for all living things.

She first came to Israel on a summer tour at a kibbutz, her purpose being to visit her uncle and—in her own words quoted in a NSA lift from a letter home—"to discover my Jewishness."

Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.

Fat Boy ascribed a low coefficient of irritant potential to Miss Stern, regarding her as a typical young American intellectual woman seeking a cause to justify her existence, until marriage, career, or artsy hobbies defused her. Her personality analysis turned up none of those psychotic warps that produce the urban guerrilla who finds sexual expression in violence. Nor was she flawed by that desperate hunger for notoriety that causes actors and entertainers who, unable to remain in the public eye by virtue of their talents, suddenly discover hitherto unnoticed social convictions.

No, there was nothing in Hannah Stern's printout that would nominate her for particular attention—save for two facts: She was Asa Stern's niece. And she was the only surviving member of the Munich Five.

Diamond spoke to Miss Swivven. "Have Starr and that Arab... Mr. Haman... in the screening room in ten minutes."

"Yes, sir."

"And have the Deputy there too." He turned to the First Assistant. "You keep working on Fat Boy. I want a deep rescan of the leader, this Asa Stern. He's the one who will bleed through. Give me a list of his first-generation contacts: family, friends, accomplices, associates, acquaintances, affairs, and so on."

"Just a second, sir." The First Assistant introduced two questions into the computer, then one modifier. "Ah... sir? The first-generation list will have... ah... three hundred twenty-seven names, together with thumbnail sketches. And we'll cube as we move to second-generation lists—friends of friends, etc. That'll give us almost thirty-five million names. Obviously, sir, we have to have some kind of priority criterion."

The First Assistant was right; a critical decision; there are literally thousands of ways in which a list can be ordered.

Diamond thought back over the sketch on Asa Stern. His intuition was tickled by one line: Profession and/or cover... Farmer, Journalist, Poet, Historian. Not, then, a typical terrorist. Something worse—a romantic patriot.

"Order the list emotionally. Go for indices indicating love, friendship, trust—this sort of thing. Go from closest to most distant."

The First Assistant's eyes shone as he took a deep breath and lightly rubbed his fingers together. This was a fine challenge demanding console virtuosity. Love, friendship, trust—these imprecisions and shadows could not be located through approaches resembling the Schliemann Back-bit and Non-bit Theory. No computer, not even Fat Boy, can respond to such rubrics directly. Questions have to be phrased in terms of nonfrequency counts and non sequitur exchange relationships. In its simplest form, actions performed for no measurable reason, or contrary to linear logic, might indicate such underlying motives as love or friendship or trust. But great care had to be exercised, because identical actions could derive from hate, insanity, or blackmail. Moreover, in the case of love, the nature of the action seldom helps to identify its motivational impulse. Particularly difficult is separating love from blackmail.

It was a delicious assignment, infinitely complicated. As he began to insert the first probes into Fat Boy, the First Assistant's shoulders twisted back and forth, as though he were guiding a pinball with body-english.

Miss Swivven returned to the work room. "They're waiting for you in the theater, sir."

"Good. Bring those telephotos along. What on earth is wrong with you, Miss Swivven?"

"Nothing, sir. My back itches, that's all."

"For Christ's sake."

Darryl Starr sensed trouble in the air when he and the Arab received curt orders to report to the viewing room at once. His fears were confirmed when he found his direct superior sitting gloomily in the auditorium. The Deputy International Liaison Duty Officer nodded a curt greeting to Starr and grunted once toward the Arab. He blamed the oil-rich Arabian sheikhdoms for many of his current problems, not the least of which was the interfering presence of Mr. Diamond in the bowels of the CIA, with his snide attitude toward every little operational peccadillo.

When first the oil-producing Arabs had run a petroleum boycott against the industrialized West to blackmail them into withdrawing their moral and legal commitments to Israel, the Deputy and other leaders of CIA proposed putting on line Contingency Plan NE385/8 (Operation Six Second War). In terms of this plan, CIA-sponsored troops of the Orthodox Islamic Maoist Falange would rescue the Arab states from the temptations of greed by occupying more than 80 percent of its oil facilities in an action calculated to require less than one minute of actual combat, although it was universally admitted that an additional three months would be required to round up such Arab and Egyptian troops as had fled in panic as far as Rhodesia and Scandinavia.

It was agreed that Operation Six Second War would be undertaken without burdening the President or Congress with those decision-making responsibilities so onerous in an election year. Phase One was instituted, and political leaders in both Black and Muslim Africa experienced an epidemic of assassinations, one or two at the hands of members of the victim's own family. Phase Two was in countdown, when suddenly everything froze up. Evidence concerning CIA operations was leaked to congressional investigating committees; lists of CIA agents were released to Leftist newspapers in France, Italy, and the Near East; internal CIA communications began to be jammed; massive tape erasures occurred in CIA memory banks, denying them the "biographic leverage" with which they normally controlled American elected officials.

Then one afternoon, Mr. Diamond and his modest staff walked into the Center carrying orders and directives that gave the Mother Company total control over all operations touching, either directly or tangentially, the oil-producing nations. Neither the Deputy nor his colleagues had ever heard of this "Mother Company," so a quick briefing was in order. They learned that the Mother Company was a consortium of major international petroleum, communications, and transportation corporations that effectively controlled the Western World's energy and information. After some consideration, the Mother Company had decided that she could not permit CIA to continue meddling in affairs that might harm or irritate those oil-producing friends in consort with whom she had been able to triple profits in two years.

No one at CIA seriously considered opposing Mr. Diamond and the Mother Company, which controlled the careers of most major governmental figures, not only through direct support, but also by the technique of using their public media subsidiaries to blacken and demoralize potential candidates, and to shape what the American masses took to be the Truth.

What chance had the scandal-ridden CIA to resist a force with enough power to build pipelines through tundra that had been demonstrated to be ecologically fragile? Who could stand against the organization that had reduced government research spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to a placating trickle, so as to avoid competition with their own atomic and fossil-fuel consorda? How could CIA effectively oppose a group with such overwhelming dominance that She was able, in conjunction with its Pentagon flunkies, to make the American public accept the storage of atomic wastes with lethal half-lives so long that failure and disaster were absolutely assured by the laws of antichance?

In Her takeover of CIA, the Mother Company had no interference from the executive branch of the government, as it was nearing election time, and all public business is arrested during this year of flesh-bartering. Nor did She really worry about the post-election pause of three years before the next democratic convulsion, for the American version of representative government assures that such qualities of intellect and ethics as might equip a man to lead a powerful nation responsibly are precisely the qualities that would prevent him from subjecting himself to the debasing performances of vote begging and delegate swapping. It is a truism of American politics that no man who can win an election deserves to.

There was one awkward moment for the Mother Company when a group of naïve young Senators decided to inquire into Arab millions in short-term paper that allowed them to manipulate American banks and hold the nation's economy hostage against the possibility—however remote—that the United States might attempt to fulfill its moral commitments to Israel. But these probes were cut short by Kuwait's threat to withdraw its money and crumble the banks, should the Senate pursue. With exceptional rhetorical adroitness, the committee reported that they could not say with certainty that the nation was vulnerable to blackmail, because they had not been permitted to continue their investigations.

This was the background to the Deputy's feelings of petulance over loss of control of his organization as he heard the doors of the auditorium bang open. He rose to his feet as Diamond entered at a brisk pace, followed by Miss Swivven who carried several rip-sheets from the Fat Boy printout and the stack of photographs of members of the Munich Five.

In minimal recognition of Diamond's arrival, Starr lifted most of the weight off his butt, then settled back with a grunt. The Arab's response to Miss Swivven's arrival was to jump to his feet, grin, and bow in jerky imitation of European suavity. Very nice looking woman, he told himself. Very lush. Skin like snow. And most gifted in what, in English, is referred to as the knockers.

"Is the projectionist in the booth?" Diamond asked, sitting apart from the others.

"Yes, sir," Starr drawled. "You fixin' to see the film again?"

"I want you fools to see it again."

The Deputy was not pleased to be grouped with a mere agent, and even less with an Arab, but he had learned to suffer in silence. It was his senior administrative skill.

"You never told us you wanted to see the film," Starr said. "I don't think the projectionist has rewound it yet."

"Have him run it backward. It doesn't matter."

Starr gave instructions through the intercom, and the wall lights dimmed.

"Starr?"

"Sir?"

"Put out the cigar."

...the elevator door opens and closes on the dead Japanese gunman's head. The man returns to life and slides up the wall. The hole in his palm disappears, and he tugs the bullet out of his back. He runs backward through a gaggle of schoolchildren, one of whom floats up from the floor as a red stain on her dress is sucked back into her stomach. When he reaches the lightblurred main entrance, the Japanese ducks as fragments of broken glass rush together to form a window pane. The second gunman jumps up from the floor and catches a flying automatic weapon, and the two of them run backward, until a swish pan leaves them and discovers an Israeli boy on the tiled floor. A vacuum snaps the top of his skull back into place; the stream of gore recoils back into his hip. He leaps up and runs backward, snatching up his rucksack as he passes it. The camera waves around, then finds the second Israeli just in time to see his cheek pop on. He rises from his knees, and blood implodes into his chest as the khaki shirt instantly mends itself. The two boys walk backward. One turns and smiles. They saunter back through a group of Italians pushing and standing tiptoe to greet some arriving relative. They back down the lane to the immigration counter, and the Italian official uses his rubber stamp to suck the entrance permissions off their passports. A red-headed girl shakes her head, then smiles thanks...

"Stop!" called Mr. Diamond, startling Miss Swivven, who had never heard him raise his voice before.

The girl on the screen froze, a blow-back douser dimming the image to prevent the frame from burning.

"See that girl. Starr?"

"Sure."

"Can you tell me anything about her?"

Starr was confused by this seemingly arbitrary demand. He knew he was in trouble of some sort, and he fell back on his habit of taking cover behind his dumb, good-ol'-boy facade.

"Well... let's see. She's got a fair set of boobs, that's for sure. Taut little ass. A little skinny in the arms and waist for my taste but, like my ol' daddy used to say: the closer the bone, the sweeter the meat!" He forced a husky laugh in which he was joined by the Arab, who was anxious to prove he understood.

"Starr?" Diamond's voice was monotonic and dense. "I want you to do something for me. For the next few hours, I want you to try very hard to stop being an ass. I don't want you to entertain me, and I don't want you to supplement your answers with folksy asides. There is nothing funny about what is going on here. True to the traditions of the CIA, you have screwed up, Starr. Do you understand that?"

There was silence as the Deputy considered objecting to this defamation, but thought better of it.

"Starr? Do you understand that?"

A sigh, then quietly, "Yes, sir."

The Deputy cleared his throat and spoke in his most authoritative voice. "If there's anything the Agency can—"

"Starr? Do you recognize this girl?" Diamond asked.

Miss Swivven took the photograph from its folder and sidled down the aisle to Starr and the Arab.

Starr tilted the print to see it better in the dim light. "Yes, sir."

"Who is it?"

"It's the girl up there on the screen."

"That's right. Her name is Hannah Stern. Her uncle was Asa Stern, organizer of the Munich Five. She was the third member of the commando team."

"Third?" Starr asked. "But... we were told there were only two of them on the plane."

"Who told you that?"

"It was in the intelligence report we got from this fella here."

"That is correct, Mr. Diamond," the Arab put in. "Our intelligence men..."

But Diamond had closed his eyes and was shaking his head slowly. "Starr? Are you telling me that you based an operation on information provided by Arab sources?"

"Well, we... Yes, sir." Starr's voice was deflated. Put that way, it did seem a stupid thing to do. It was like having Italians do your political organization, or the British handle your industrial relations.

"It seems to me," the Deputy injected, "that if we have made an error based on faulty input from your Arab friends, they have to accept a goodly part of the responsibility."

"You're wrong," Diamond said. "But I suppose you're used to that. They don't have to accept anything. They own the oil."

The Arab representative smiled and nodded. "You reflect exactly the thinking of my president and uncle, who has often said that—"

"All right." Diamond rose. "The three of you remain on tap. In less than an hour, I'll call for you. I have background data coming in now. It's still possible that I may be able to make up for your bungling." He walked up the aisle, followed closely by Miss Swivven.

The Deputy cleared his throat to say something, then decided that the greater show of strength lay in silence. He fixed a long stare on Starr, glanced away from the Arab in dismissal, then left the theater.

"Well, buddy," Starr said as he pushed himself out of the theater seat, "we better get a bite to eat while the gettin's good. Looks like the shit has hit the fan."

The Arab chuckled and nodded, as he tried to envision an ardent supporter of sports fouled with camel dung.

For a time, the empty theater was dominated by the frozen image of Hannah Stern, smiling down from the screen. When the projectionist started to run the film out, it jammed. An amoeba of brown, bubbly scab spread rapidly over the young lady and consumed her.

Etchebar

Hannah Stern sat at a café table under the arcade surrounding the central place of Tardets. She stared numbly into the lees of her coffee, thick and granular. Sunlight was dazzling on the white buildings of the square; the shadows under the arcade were black and chill. From within the café behind her came the voices of four old Basque men playing mousse, to the accompaniment of a litany of bai... passo... passo... alla Jainkoa!... passo... alla Jainkoa... this last phrase passing through all conceivable permutations of stress and accent as the players bluffed, signaled, lied, and called upon God to witness this shit they had been dealt, or to punish this fool of a partner with whom God had punished them.

For the last seven hours, Hannah Stern had alternated between clawing through nightmare reality and floating upon escapist fantasy, between confusion and vertigo. She was stunned by emotional shock, spiritually evacuated. And now, teetering on the verge of nervous disintegration, she felt infinitely calm... even a little sleepy.

The real, the unreal; the important, the insignificant; the Now, the Then; the cool of her arcade, the rippling heat of the empty public square; these voices chanting in Europe's most ancient language... it was all indifferently tangled. It was all happening to someone else, someone for whom she felt great pity and sympathy, but whom she could not help. Someone past help.

After the massacre in Rome International, she had somehow got all the way from Italy to this café in a Basque market town. Dazed and mentally staggering, she had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers in nine hours. But now, with only another four or five kilometers to go, she had used up the last of her nervous energy. Her adrenaline well was empty, and it appeared that she was going to be defeated at the last moment by the caprice of a bumbling café owner.

First there had been terror and confusion at seeing her comrades shot down, neurasthenic incredulity during which she stood frozen as people rushed past her, knocking against her. More gunshots. Loud wailing from the family of Italians who had been awaiting a relative. Then panic clutched her; she walked blindly ahead, toward the main entrance of the terminal, toward the sunlight. She was breathing orally, shallow pants. Policemen rushed past her. She told herself to keep walking. Then she realized that the muscles in the small of her back were knotted painfully in anticipation of the bullet that never came. She passed an old man with a white goatee, sitting on the floor with his legs straight out before him, like a child at play. She could see no wound, but the pool of dark blood in which he sat was growing slowly wider. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked up at her interrogatively. She couldn't make herself stop. Their eyes locked together as she walked by. She muttered stupidly, "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

A fat woman in the group of waiting relatives was hysterical, wailing and choking. More attention was being paid to her than to the fallen members of the family. She was, after all, Mama.

Over the confusion, the running and shouting, a calm, singsong voice announced the first call for passengers on Air France flight 470 for Toulouse, Tarbes, and Pau. The recorded voice was ignorant of the chaos beneath its loudspeakers. When the announcement was repeated in French, the last fragment stuck to Hannah's consciousness. Gate Eleven. Gate Eleven.

The stewardess reminded Hannah to put up her seat back. "Yes. Yes. I'm sorry." A minute later, on her return down the aisle, the hostess reminded her to buckle her seat belt. "What? Oh, yes. I'm sorry."

The plane rose into thin cloud, then into crisp infinite blue. The drone of engines; the vibration of the fuselage. Hannah shivered with vulnerability and aloneness. There was a middle-aged man seated beside her, reading a magazine. From time to time his eyes slipped over the top of the page and glanced quickly at her suntanned legs below the khaki shorts. She could feel his eyes on her, and she buttoned one of the top two buttons of her shirt. The man smiled and cleared his throat. He was going to speak to her! The stupid son of a bitch was going to try to pick her up! My God!

And suddenly she was sick.

She made it to the toilet, where she knelt in the cramped space and vomited into the bowl. When she emerged, pale and fragile, the imprint of floor tile on her knees, the stewardess was solicitous but slightly superior, imagining that a short flight like this had made her airsick.

The plane banked on its approach to Pau, and Hannah looked out the window at the panorama of the Pyrenees, snow-tipped and sharp in the crystalline air, like a sea of whitecaps frozen in midstorm. Beautiful and awful.

Somewhere there, at the Basque end of the range, Nicholai Hel lived. If she could only get to Mr. Hel...

It was not until she was out of the terminal and standing in the chill sunlight of the Pyrenees that it occurred to her that she had no money. Avrim had carried all their money. She would have to hitchhike, and she didn't know the route. Well, she could ask the drivers. She knew that she would have no trouble getting rides. When you're pretty and young... and big-busted...

Her first ride took her into Pau, and the driver offered to find her a place to stay for the night. Instead, she talked him into taking her to the outskirts and directing her to Tardets. It must have been a hard car to shift, because his hand twice slipped off the lever and brushed her leg.

She got her next ride almost immediately. No, he wasn't going to Tardets. Only as far as Oléron. But he could find her a place to stay for the night...

One more car, one more suggestive driver, and Hannah reached the little village of Tardets, where she sought further directions at the café. The first barrier she met was the local accent, langue d'oc with heavy overlays of Soultine Basque in which une petite cuillè has eight syllables.

"What are you looking for?" the café owner asked, his eyes leaving her breasts only to stray to her legs.

"I'm trying to find the Château of Etchebar. The house of M. Nicholai Hel."

The proprietor frowned, squinted at the arches overhead, and scratched with one finger under the beret that Basque men take off only in bed, in coffin, or when adjudicating the game of rebot. No, he did not believe he had ever heard the name. Hel, you say? (He could pronounce the h because it is a Basque sound.) Perhaps his wife knew. He would ask. Would the Mademoiselle take something while she waited? She ordered coffee which came, thick, bitter, and often reheated, in a tin pot half the weight of which was tinker's solder, but which leaked nevertheless. The proprietor seemed to regret the leak, but to accept it with heavy fatalism. He hoped the coffee that dripped on her leg had not burned her. It was not hot enough to burn? Good. Good. He disappeared into the back of the café, ostensibly to inquire after M. Hel.

And that had been fifteen minutes ago.

Hannah's eyes dilated painfully as she looked out toward the bright square, deserted save for a litter of cars, mostly Deu'ches bearing '64 plates, parked at random angles, wherever their peasant drivers had managed to stop them.

With deafening roar of motor, grinding of gears, and outspewing of filthy exhaust, a German juggernaut lorry painfully navigated the corner with not ten centimeters to spare between vehicle and the crepi facades of the buildings. Sweating, cranking the wheel, and hiss-popping his air brakes, the German driver managed to introduce the monster into the ancient square, only to be met by the most formidable of barriers. Waddling side by side down the middle of the street, two Basque women with blank, coarse faces exchanged gossip out of the corners of their mouths. Middle-aged, dour, and vast, they plodded along on great barrel legs, indifferent to the frustration and fury of the truck driver, who crawled behind them muttering earnest imprecations and beating his fist against the steering wheel.

Hannah Stern had no way to appreciate this scene's iconographic representation of Franco-German relations in the Common Market, and at this moment the café owner reappeared, his triangular Basque face abeam with sudden comprehension.

"You are seeking M. Hel!" he told her.

"That's what I said."

"Ah, if I had known it was M. Hel you were seeking..." He shrugged from the waist, lifting his palms in a gesture implying that a little more clarity on her part would have saved them both a lot of trouble.

He then gave her directions to the Château d'Etchebar: first cross the gave from Tardets (the r rolled, both the t and the s pronounced), then pass through the village of Abense-de-Haut (five syllables, the h and t both pronounced) and on up through Lichans (no nasal, s pronounced), then take the right forking up into the hills of Etchebar; but not the left forking, which would carry you to Licq.

"Is it far?"

"No, not all that far. But you don't want to go to Licq, anyway."

"I mean to Etchebar! Is it far to Etchebar!" In her fatigue and nervous tension, the formidable task of getting simple information out of a Basque was becoming too much for Hannah.

"No, not far. Maybe two kilometers after Lichans."

"And how far is it to Lichans?"

He shrugged. "Oh, it could be two kilometers after Abense-de-Haut. You can't miss it. Unless you turn left at the forking. Then you'll miss it all right! You'll miss it because you'll be in Licq, don't you see."

The old mousse players had forsaken their game and were gathered behind the café owner, intrigued by all the confusion this foreign tourist was causing. They held a brief discussion in Basque, agreeing at last that if the girl took the left forking she would indeed end up in Licq. But then, Licq was not such a bad village. Was there not the famous story of the bridge at Licq built with the help of the Little People from the mountains who then...

"Listen!" Hannah pled. "Is there someone who could drive me to the Château of Etchebar?"

A quick conference was held between the café owner and the mousse players. There was some argument and a considerable amount of clarification and restatement of positions. Then the proprietor delivered the consensus opinion.

"No."

It had been decided that this foreign girl wearing walking shorts and who had a rucksack was one of the young athletic tourists who were notorious for being friendly, but for tipping very little. Therefore, there was no one who would drive her to Etchebar, except for the oldest of the mousse players, who was willing to gamble on her generosity, but sadly he had no car. And anyway, he did not know how to drive.

With a sigh, Hannah took up her rucksack. But when the café owner reminded her of the cup of coffee, she remembered she had no French money. She explained this with expressions of lighthearted contrition, trying to laugh off the ludicrousness of the situation. But he steadfastly stared at the cup of unpaid-for coffee, and remained dolefully silent. The mousse players discussed this new turn of events with animation. What? The tourist took coffee without the money to pay for it? It was not impossible that this was a matter for the law.

Finally, the proprietor sighed a rippling sigh and looked up at her, tragedy in his moist eyes. Was she really telling him that she didn't have two francs for the coffee—forget the tip—just two francs for the coffee? There was a matter of principle involved here. After all, he paid for his coffee; he paid for the gas to heat the water; and every couple of years he paid the tinker to mend the pot. He was a man who paid his debts. Unlike some others he could mention.

Hannah was between anger and laughter. She could not believe that all these heavy theatrics were being produced for two francs. (She did not know that the price of a cup of coffee was, in fact, one franc.) She had never before met that especially French version of avarice in which money—the coin itself—is the center of all consideration, more important than goods, comfort, dignity. Indeed, more important than real wealth. She had no way to know that, although they bore Basque names, these village people had become thoroughly French under the corrosive cultural pressures of radio, television, and state-controlled education, in which modern history is creatively interpreted to confect that national analgesic, la vérité à la Cinquième République.

Dominated by the mentality of the petit commercant, these village Basques shared the Gallic view of gain in which the pleasure of earning a hundred francs is nothing beside the intense suffering caused by the loss of a centime.

Finally realizing that his dumb show of pain and disappointment was not going to extract the two francs from this young girl, the proprietor excused himself with sardonic politeness, telling her be would be right back.

When he returned twenty minutes later, after a tense conference with his wife in the back room, he asked, "You are a friend of M. Hel?"

"Yes," Hannah lied, not wanting to go into all that.

"I see. Well then, I shall assume that Mr. Hel will pay, should you fail to." He tore a sheet from the note pad provided by the Byrrh distributors and wrote something on it before folding it two times, sharpening the creases with his thumbnail. "Please give this to M. Hell," he said coldly.

His eyes no longer flicked to her breast and legs. Some things are more important than romance.

* * *

Hannah had been walking for more than an hour, over the Pont d'Abense and the glittering Gave de Saison, then slowly up into the Basque hills along a narrow tar road softened by the sun and confined by ancient stone walls over which lizards scurried at her approach. In the fields sheep grazed, lambs teetering beside the ewes, and russet vaches de pyrénées loitered in the shade of unkempt apple trees, watching her pass, their eyes infinitely gentle, infinitely stupid. Round hills lush with fern contained and comforted the narrow valley, and beyond the saddles of the hills rose the snow-tipped mountains, their jagged arêtes sharply traced on the taut blue sky. High above, a hawk balanced on the rim of an updraft, its wing feathers splayed like fingers constantly feeling the wind as it scanned the ground for prey.

The heat stewed a heady medley of aroma: the soprano of wild-flower, the mezzotones of cut grass and fresh sheep droppings, the insistent basso profundo of softened tar.

Insulated by fatigue from the sights and smells around her, Hannah plodded along, her head down and her concentration absorbed in watching the toes of her hiking boots. Her mind, recoiling from the sensory overload of the last ten hours, was finding haven in a tunnel-vision of the consciousness. She did not dare to think, to imagine, to remember; because looming out there, just beyond the edges of here-and-now, were visions that would damage her, if she let them in. Don't think. Just walk, and watch the toes of your boots. It is all about getting to the Château d'Etchebar. It is all about contacting Nicholai Hel. There is nothing before or beyond that.

She came to a forking in the road and stopped. To the right, the way rose steeply toward the hilltop village of Etchebar, and beyond the huddle of stone and crepi houses she could see the wide mansard facade of what must be the château peeking between tall pine trees and surrounded by a high stone wall.

She sighed deeply and trudged on, her fatigue blending with protective emotional neurasthenia. If she could just make the château... just get to Nicholai Hel...

Two peasant women in black dresses paused in their gossip over a low stone wall and watched the outlander girl with open curiosity and mistrust. Where was she going, this hussy showing her legs? Toward the château? Ah well, that explained it. All sorts of strange people go to the château ever since that foreigner bought it! Not that M. Hel was a bad man. Indeed, their husbands had told them he was much admired by the Basque freedom movement. But still... he was a newcomer. No use denying it. He had lived in the château only fourteen years, while everyone else in the village (ninety-three souls) could find his name on dozens of gravestones around the church, sometimes newly cut into pyrenean granite, sometimes barely legible on ancient stone scrubbed smooth by five centuries of rain and wind. Look! The hussy has not even bound her breasts! She wants men to look at her, that's what it is! She will have a nameless child if she is not careful! Who would marry her then? She will end up cutting vegetables and scrubbing floors in the household of her sister. And her sister's husband will pester her when he is drunk! And one day, when the sister is too far along with child to be able to do it, this one will succumb to the husband! Probably in the barn. It always happens so. And the sister will find out, and she will drive this one from the house! Where will she go then? She will become a whore in Bayonne, that's what!

A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn't go that far. Just a poor putain who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.

True, true.

As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women. "Bonjour, mesdames," she said.

"Bonjour, mademoiselle," they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. "You are giving yourself a walk?" one asked.

"Yes, Madame."

"That's nice. You are lucky to have the leisure."

An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.

"You are looking for the château, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes, I am."

"Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you're looking for."

A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.

Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The château was set back a hundred meters, up a long curving allée of trees. Uncertain, she decided to try one of the smaller gates down the road, when a voice behind her asked in a singsong, "Mademoiselle?"

She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. "I am looking for M. Hel," she explained.

"Yes," the gardener said, with that inhaled "oui" that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.

Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.

Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the allée between tall blue-green cedars, the drooping branches of which wept and undulated, brushing the shadows with long kelplike sweeps. A susurrant wind hissed high in the trees like tide over sand, and the dense shade was chill. She shivered. She was dizzy after the long hot walk, having taken nothing but coffee all day long. Her emotions had been frozen by fear, then melted by despair. Frozen, then melted. Her hold on reality was slipping.

When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.

"May I help you?" a woman's voice asked from above.

Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. "Hello. I am Hannah Stern."

"Well, come up, Hannah Stern." With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. "We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese, hana means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea."

They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four porte-fenêtres flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. "I must put these in water," she said. "Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?"

"No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his."

"And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you." She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Château d'Etchebar, all Hannah would ever see or hear of staff and servants would be doors that closed as she entered, or soft tiptoeing at the end of the hall, or the appearance of coffee or flowers on a bedside table. Meals were prepared in such a way that the mistress of the house could do the serving herself. It was an opportunity for her to show kindness and concern.

"Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah," the woman said. "And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?"

With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.

For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school... it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, "Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?"

And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.

That's odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a café-owner in Tardets, the long walk up the shimmering road to Etchebar... of all of it, the most profound image was her walk up the cedar-lined allée in subaqueous shadow... shivering in the dense shadow as the wind made sea sounds in the trees. It was another world. And odd.

Was it possible that she was sitting here, pouring tea into Limoges, probably looking quite the buffoon with her tight hiking shorts and clumsy, Vibram-cleated boots?

Was it just a few hours ago she had walked dazedly past the old man sitting on the floor of Rome International? "I'm sorry," she had muttered to him stupidly.

"I'm sorry," she said now, aloud. The beautiful woman had said something which had not penetrated the layers of thought and retreat.

The woman smiled as she sat beside her. "I was just saying it is a pity that Nicholai is not here. He's been up in the mountains for several days, crawling about in those caves of his. Appalling hobby. But I expect him back this evening or tomorrow morning. And that will give you a chance to bathe and perhaps sleep a little. That would be nice, wouldn't it."

The thought of a hot bath and cool sheets was almost swooningly seductive to Hannah.

The woman smiled and drew her chair closer to the marble tea table. "How do you take your tea?" Her eyes were calm and frank. In shape, they were Oriental, but their color was hazel, semé of gold flecks. Hannah could not have guessed her race. Surely her movements were Eastern, fine and controlled; but her skin tone was café au lait, and the body within its high-collared Chinese dress of green silk had a distinctly African development of breast and buttocks. Her mouth and nose, however, were Caucasian. And her voice was cultured, low and modulated, as was her laugh when she said, "Yes, I know. It is confusing."

"Pardon me?" Hannah said, embarrassed at having her thoughts read so transparently.

"I am what the kindly disposed call a 'cosmopolitan,' and others might term a mongrel. My mother was Japanese, and it would appear that my father was a mulatto American soldier. I never had the good fortune to meet him. Do you take milk?"

"What?"

"In your tea." Hana smiled. "Are you more comfortable in English?" she asked in that language.

"Yes, in fact I am," Hannah admitted also in English, but with an American tonality.

"I assumed as much from your accent. Good then. We shall speak in English. Nicholai seldom speaks English in the house, and I fear I am getting rusty." She had, in fact, a just-perceptible accent; not a mispronunciation, but a slightly mechanical overenunciation of her British English. It was possible that her French also bore traces of accent, but Hannah, with her alien ear, could not know that.

But something else did occur to her. "There are two cups set out. Were you expecting me, Mrs. Hel?"

"Do call me Hana. Oh, yes, I was expecting you. The man from the café in Tardets telephoned for permission to give you directions. And I received another call when you passed through Abense-de-Haut, and another when you reached Lichans." Hana laughed lightly. "Nicholai is very well protected here. You see, he has no great affection for surprises."

"Oh, that reminds me. I have a note for you." Hannah took from her pocket the folded note the café proprietor had given her.

Hana opened and glanced at it, then she laughed in her low, minor-key voice. "It is a bill. And very neatly itemized, too. Ah, these French. One franc for the telephone call. One franc for your coffee. And an additional one franc fifty—an estimate of the tip you would have left. My goodness, we have made a good bargain! We have the pleasure of your company for only three francs fifty." She laughed and set the bill aside. Then she reached across and placed her warm, dry hand upon Hannah's arm. "Young lady? I don't think you realize that you are crying."

"What?" Hannah put her hand to her cheek. It was wet with tears. My God, how long had she been crying? "I'm sorry. It's just... This morning my friends were... I must see Mr. Hel!"

"I know, dear. I know. Now finish your tea. There is something in it to make you rest. Then I will show you up to your room, where you can bathe and sleep. And you will be fresh and beautiful when you meet Nicholai. Just leave your rucksack here. One of the girls will see to it."

"I should explain—"

But Hana raised her hand. "You explain things to Nicholai when he comes. And he will tell me what he wants me to know."

Hannah was still sniffling and feeling like a child as she followed Hana up the wide marble staircase that dominated the entrance hall. But she could feel a delicious peace spreading within her. Whatever was in the tea was softening the crust of her memories and floating them off to a distance. "You're being very kind to me, Mrs. Hel," she said sincerely.

Hana laughed softly. "Do call me Hana. After all, I am not Nicholai's wife. I am his concubine."

Washington

The elevator door opened silently, and Diamond preceded Miss Swivven into the white workspace of the Sixteenth Floor.

"...and I'll want them available within ten minutes after call: Starr, the Deputy, and that Arab. Do you have that?"

"Yes, sir." Miss Swivven went immediately to her cubicle to make the necessary arrangements, while the First Assistant rose from his console.

"I have the scan of Asa Stern's first-generation contacts, sir. It's coming in now." He felt a justifiable pride. There were not ten men alive who had the skill to pull a list based upon amorphous emotional relationships out of Fat Boy.

"Give me a desk RP on it," Diamond ordered as he sat in his swivel chair at the head of the conference table.

"Coming up. Oops! Just a second, sir. The list is one-hundred-eighty percent inverted. It will only take a moment to flip it."

It was typical of the computer's systemic inability to distinguish between love and hate, affection and blackmail, friendship and parasitism, that any list organized in terms of such emotional rubrics stood a 50/50 chance of coming in inverted. The First Assistant had foreseen this danger and had seeded the raw list with the names of Maurice Herzog and Heinrich Himmler (both H's). When the printout showed Himmler to be greatly admired by Asa Stern, and Herzog to be detested, the First Assistant dared the assumption that Fat Boy had done a 180.

"It's not just a naked list, is it?" Diamond asked.

"No, sir. I've requested pinhole data. Just the most salient facts attached to each name, so we can make useful identification."

"You're a goddamned genius, Llewellyn."

The First Assistant nodded in absentminded agreement as he watched the list crawl up his screen in sans-serif IBM lettering.

STERN, DAVID

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS SON... WHITE CARD...

STUDENT, AMATEUR ATHLETE... KILLED, 1972 sub MUNICH OLYMPICS...

* * *

STERN, JUDITH

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS WIFE... PINK CARD...

SCHOLAR. RESEARCHER...

DEAD, 1956 sub NATURAL CAUSES...

* * *

ROTHMANN, MOISHE

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND... WHITE CARD...

PHILOSOPHER, POET... DEAD, 1958 sub NATURAL CAUSES...

* * *

KAUFMANN, S. I.

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND... RED CARD...

POLITICAL ACTIVIST... RETIRED...

* * *

HEL, NICHOLAI ALEXANDROVITCH

RELATIONSHIP EQUALS FRIEND...

"Stop!" Diamond ordered. "Freeze that!" The First Assistant scanned the next fragments of information. "Oh, my goodness!"

Diamond leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. When CIA screws up, they certainly do it in style! "Nicholai Hel," Diamond pronounced, his voice a monotone.

"Sir?" the First Assistant said softly, recalling the ancient practice of executing the messenger who brings bad news. "This Nicholai Hel is identified with a mauve card."

"I know... I know."

"Ah... I suppose you'll want a complete pull and printout on Hel, Nicholai Alexandrovitch?" the First Assistant asked, almost apologetically.

"Yes." Diamond rose and walked to the big window beyond which the illuminated Washington Monument stood out against the night sky, while double rows of automobile headlights crawled down the long avenue toward the Center—the same automobiles that were always at the same place at this time every evening.

"You'll find the pull surprisingly thin."

"Thin, sir? On a mauve card?"

"On this mauve card, yes."

Within the color-coding system, mauve punch cards indicated the most elusive and dangerous of men, from the Mother Company's point of view: Those who operated without reference to nationalistic or ideological prejudices, free-lance agents and assassins who could not be controlled through pressure upon governments; those who killed for either side.

Originally, color-coding of punch cards was introduced into Fat Boy for the purpose of making immediately evident certain bold characteristics of a subject's life and work. But from the very first. Fat Boy's systemic inability to deal with abstractions and shadings reduced the value of the system. The problem lay in the fact that Fat Boy was permitted to color-code himself, in terms of certain input principles.

The first of these principles was that only such people as constituted real or potential threats to the Mother Company and the governments She controlled would be represented by color-coded cards, all others being identified by standard white cards. Another principle was that there be a symbolic relationship between the color of the card and the nature of the subject's affiliations. This worked well enough in its simplest forms: Leftist agitators and terrorists were represented by red cards; Rightist politicians and activists received blue cards; sympathizers of the Left had pink cards; abettors of ultra-conservatives had powder blue. (For a brief time, devoted Liberals were assigned yellow cards, in concurrence with British political symbolism, but when the potential for effective action by Liberals was assessed by Fat Boy, they were reassigned white cards indicating political impotence.)

The value of color-coding came under criticism when the system was applied to more intricate problems. For instance, active supporters of the Provisional IRA and of the various Ulster defense organizations were randomly assigned green or orange cards, because Fat Boy's review of the tactics, philosophy, and effectiveness of the two groups made them indistinguishable from one another.

Another major problem arose from Fat Boy's mindless pursuit of logic in assigning colors. To differentiate between Chinese and European communist agents, the Chinese were assigned yellow cards; and the Europeans under their domination received a mixture of red and yellow, which produced for them orange cards, identical with those of the North Irish. Such random practices led to some troublesome errors, not the least of which was Fat Boy's longstanding assumption that Tan Paisley was an Albanian.

The most dramatic error concerned African nationalists and American Black Power actives. With a certain racial logic, these subjects were assigned black cards. For several months these men were able to operate without observation or interference from the Mother Company and her governmental subsidiaries, for the simple reason that black print on black cards is rather difficult to read.

With considerable regret, it was decided to end the color-code method, despite the millions of dollars of American taxpayers' money that had been devoted to the project.

But it is easier to introduce a system into Fat Boy than to cleanse it out, since His memory is eternal and His insistence on linear logic implacable. Therefore, color-coding remained in its vestigial form. Agents of the left were still identified with red and pink; while crypto-fascists, such as KKK members, were identified with blue, and American Legionnaires with powder blue. Logically enough, subjects who worked indifferently for both sides were identified with purple, but Fat Boy remembered His problem with Black Power actives, and so he grayed the purple down to mauve.

Further, Fat Boy reserved the mauve card for men who dealt specifically in assassination.

The First Assistant looked up quizzically from his console. "Ah... I don't know what's wrong, sir. Fat Boy is running statement/correction/statement/correction patterns. On even the most basic information, his various input sources disagree. We have ages for this Nicholai Hel ranging from forty-seven to fifty-two. And look at this! Under nationality we have a choice among Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Costa Rican. Costa Rican, sir?"

"Those last two have to do with his passports; he holds passports from France and Costa Rica. Right now he lives in France—or he did recently. The other nationalities have to do with his genetic background, his place of birth, and his major cultural inputs."

"So what is his real nationality?"

Mr. Diamond continued to look out the window, staring at nothing. "None."

"You seem to know something about this person, sir." The First Assistant's tone was interrogative but tentative. He was curious, but he knew better than to be inquisitive.

For several moments, Diamond did not answer. Then: "Yes. I know something about him." He fumed away from the window and sat heavily at his desk. "Get on with the search. Turn up everything you can. Most of it will be contradictory, vague, or inaccurate, but we need to know everything we can discover."

"Then you feel that this Nicholai Hel is involved in this business?"

"With our luck? Probably."

"In what way, sir?"

"I don't know! Just get on with the search!"

"Yes, sir." The First Assistant scanned the next fragments of data. "Ah... sir? We have three possible birthplaces for him."

"Shanghai."

"You're sure of that, sir?"

"Yes!" Then, after a moment's pause, "Reasonably sure, that is."

Shanghai: 193?

As always at this season, cool evening breezes are drawn over the city from the sea, toward the warm land mass of China; and the draperies billow out from the glass doors to the veranda of the large house on Avenue Joffre in the French Concession.

General Kishikawa Takashi withdraws a stone from his lacquered Gô ke and holds it lightly between the tip of his middle finger and the nail of his index. Some minutes pass in silence, but his concentration is not on the game, which is in its 176th gesture and has begun to concrete toward the inevitable. The General's eyes rest on his opponent who, for his part, is completely absorbed in the patterns of black and white stones on the pale yellow board. Kishikawa-san has decided that the young boy must be sent away to Japan, and tonight he would have to be told. But not just now. It would spoil the flavor of the game; and that would be unkind because, for the first time, the young man is winning.

The sun has set behind the French Concession, over mainland China. Lanterns have been lighted in the old walled dry, and the smell of thousands of cooking suppers fills the narrow, tangled streets. Along the Whangpoo and up Soochow Creek, the sampan homes of the floating city are alive with dim lights, as old women with trousers tied at the ankle arrange stones to level cooking fires on the canted decks, for the river is at low tide and the sampans have heeled over, their wooden bellies stuck in the yellow mud. People late for their suppers trot over Stealing Hen Bridge. A professional letter writer flourishes his brush carelessly, eager to finish his day's work, and knowing that his calligraphic insouciance will not be discovered by the illiterate young girl for whom he is composing a love letter on the model of one of his Sixteen Never-Fail Formulas. The Bund, that street of imposing commercial houses and hotels, gaudy statement of imperial might and confidence, is silent and dark; for the British taipans have fled; the North China Daily News no longer prints its gossip, its pious reprimands, its complaisant affirmations of the world situation. Even Sasson House, the most elegant facade on the Bund, built on profits from the opium trade, has been demoted to the mundane task of housing the Headquarters of the Occupation Forces. The greedy French, the swaggering British, the pompous Germans, the opportunistic Americans are all gone. Shanghai is under the control of the Japanese.

General Kishikawa reflects on the uncanny resemblance between this young man across the Gô board and his mother: almost as though Alexandra Ivanovna had produced her son parthenogenetically—a feat those who had experienced her overwhelming social presence would consider well within her capacity. The young man has the same angular line of jaw, the same broad forehead and high cheekbones, the fine nose that is spared the Slavic curse of causing interlocutors to feel they are staring into the barrels of a shotgun. But most intriguing to Kishikawa-san are comparisons between the boy's eyes and the mother's. Comparisons and contrasts. Physically, their eyes are identical: large, deepset, and of that startling bottle-green color unique to the Countess's family. But the polar differences in personality between mother and son are manifest in the articulation and intensity of gaze, in the dimming and crystallizing of those sinople eyes. While the mothers glance was bewitching, the son's is cool. Where the mother used her eyes to fascinate, the boy uses his to dismiss. What in her look was coquetry, in his is arrogance. The light that shone from her eyes is still and internal in his. Her eyes expressed humor; his express wit. She charmed; he disturbs.

Alexandra Ivanovna was an egotist; Nicholai is an egoist.

Although the General's Oriental frame of reference does not remark it, by Western criteria Nicholai looks very young for his fifteen years. Only the frigidity of his too-green eyes and a certain firm set of mouth keeps his face from being too delicate, too finely formed for a male. A vague discomfort over his physical beauty prompted Nicholai from an early age to engage in the most vigorous and combative of sports. He trained in classic, rather old-fashioned jiujitsu, and he played rugby with the international side against the sons of the British taipans with an effectiveness that bordered on brutality. Although Nicholai understood the stiff charade of fair play and sportsmanship with which the British protect themselves from real defeat, he preferred the responsibilities of victory to the comforts of losing with grace. But he did not really like team sports, preferring to win or lose by virtue of his own skill and toughness. And his emotional toughness was such that he almost always won, as a matter of will.

Alexandra Ivanovna almost always won too, not as a matter of will, but as a matter of right. When she appeared in Shanghai in the autumn of 1922 with an astonishing amount of baggage and no visible means of support, she relied upon her previous social position in St. Petersburg to grant her leadership in the growing community of displaced White Russians—so called by the ruling British, not because they came from Belorosskiya, but because they were obviously not "red." She immediately created about her an admiring court that included the most interesting men of the colony. To be interesting to Alexandra Ivanovna, one had to be rich, handsome, or witty; and it was the major annoyance of her life that she seldom found two of these qualities in one man, and never all three.

There were no other women near the core of her society; the Countess found women dull and, in her opinion, superfluous, as she could fully occupy the minds and attentions of a dozen men at one time, keeping a soirée atmosphere witty, brisk, and just naughty enough.

In retaliation, the unwanted ladies of the International Settlement declared that nothing in this world could tempt them to be seen in public with the Countess, and they fervently wished their husbands and fiancées shared their fine sense of propriety. By shrugs and hums and pursings of lips, these peripheral ladies made it known that they suspected a causal relationship between two social paradoxes: the first being that the Countess maintained a lavish household although she had arrived penniless; and the second being that she was constantly surrounded by the most desirable men of the international community, despite the fact that she lacked all those sterner virtues the ladies had been assured by their mothers were more important and durable than mere charm and beauty. These women would have been glad to include the Countess within that body of White Russian women who trickled into China from Manchuria, sold what pitiful goods and Jewelry they had managed to escape with, and finally were driven to sustain themselves by vending the comfort of their laps. But these arid, righteous women were denied that facile dismissal by the knowledge that the Countess was one of those not uncommon anomalies of the Tzarist court, a Russian noblewoman without a drop of Slavic blood in her all-too-visible (and possibly available) body. Alexandra Ivanovna (whose father's given name had been Johann) was a Hapsburg with connections to a minor German royal family that had immigrated to England with nothing but their Protestantism to recommend them, and which had recently changed its name to one of less Hunnish sound as a gesture of patriotism. Still, the proper ladies of the settlement averred that even such deep quarterings were not proof of moral rectitude in those Flapper days; nor, despite the Countess's apparent assumption, an adequate substitute for it.

During the third season of her reign, Alexandra Ivanovna appeared to settle her attentions upon a vain young Prussian who possessed that pellucid, superficial intelligence untrammelled by sensitivity that is common to his race. Count Helmut von Keitel zum Hel became her companion of record—her pet and toy. Ten years younger than she, the Count possessed great physical beauty and athletic prowess. He was an expert horseman and a fencer of note. She thought of him as a decorative setting for her, and the only public statement she ever made concerning their relationship was to speak of him as "adequate breeding stock."

It was her practice to pass the heavy, humid months of summer in a villa in the uplands. One autumn she returned later than usual to Shanghai, and thenceforward there was a baby boy in the household. As a matter of form, young von Keitel zum Hel proposed marriage. She laughed lightly and told him that, while it had been her intention all along to create a child as a living argument against mongrel egalitarianism, she did not feel the slightest impulse to have two children about the house. He bowed with the rigid petulance that serves Prussians as a substitute for dignity, and made arrangements to return to Germany within the month.

Far from concealing the boy or the circumstances of his birth, she made him the ornament of her salon. When official requirements made it necessary that she name him, she called him Nicholai Hel, taking the last name from a little river bordering the Keitel estate. Alexandra Ivanovna's view of her own role in the production of the lad was manifest in the fact that his full name was Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel.

A series of English nannies followed one another through the household, so English joined French, Russian, and German as the languages of the crib, with no particular preference shown, save for Alexandra Ivanovna's conviction that certain languages were best for expressing certain classes of thought. One spoke of love and other trivia in French; one discussed tragedy and disaster in Russian; one did business in German; and one addressed servants in English.

Because the children of the servants were his only companions, Chinese was also a cradle language for Nicholai, and he developed the habit of thinking in that language because his greatest childhood dread was that his mother could read his thoughts—and she had no Chinese.

Alexandra Ivanovna considered schools appropriate only for merchants' children, so Nicholai's education was confided to a succession of tutors, all decorative young men, all devoted to the mother. When it developed that Nicholai displayed an interest in, and a considerable capacity for, pure mathematics, his mother was not at all pleased. But when she was assured by the tutor of the moment that pure mathematics was a study without practical or commercial application, she decided it was appropriate to his breeding.

The more practical aspects of Nicholai's social education—and all of his fun—came from his practice of sneaking away from the house and wandering with street urchins through the narrow alleys and hidden courtyards of the seething, noisome, noisy city. Dressed in the universal loose-fitting blue, his close-cropped hair under a round cap, he would roam alone or with friends of the hour and return home to admonitions or punishments, both of which he accepted with great calm and an infuriating elsewhere gaze in his bottle-green eyes.

In the streets, Nicholai learned the melody of this city the Westerners had confected for themselves. He saw supercilious young British "griffins" being pulled about by cadaverous rickshaw "boys" cachectic with tuberculosis, sweating with effort and malnutrition, wearing gauze masks to avoid offending the European masters. He saw the compradores, fat and buttery middlemen who profited from the Europeans' exploitation of their own people, and who aped Western ways and ethics. After making profit and gorging on exotic foods, the greatest pleasure of these compradores was to arrange to deflower twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls who had been bought in Hangchow or Soochow and who were ready to enter the brothels licensed by the French. Their tactics of defloration were... irregular. The only revenge the girl might have was, if she had a gift for theatrics, the profitable ploy of being deflowered rather often. Nicholai learned that all of the beggars who threatened passers-by with contact with their rotting limbs, or stuck pins into babies to make them cry pitifully, or mobbed and frightened tourists with their demands for kumshah—all of them, from the old men who prayed for you or cursed you, to the half-starved children who offered to perform unnatural acts with one another for your entertainment, were under the control of His Heinous Majesty, the King of Beggars, who ran a peculiar combination of guild and protection racket. Anything lost in the city, anyone hiding in the city, any service wanted in the city, could be found through a modest contribution to His Majesty's treasury.

Down at the docks, Nicholai watched sweating stevedores dog-trot up and down the gangplanks of metal ships and wooden junks with strabismic eyes painted on their prows. In the evening, after they had already worked eleven hours, chanting their constant, narcotizing hai-yo, hai-yo the stevedores would begin to weaken, and sometimes one would stumble under his load. Then the Gurkhas would wade in with their blackjacks and iron bars, and the lazy would find new strength... or lasting rest.

Nicholai watched the police openly accept "squeeze money" from withered amahs who pimped for teenaged prostitutes. He learned to recognize the secret signs of the "Greens" and the "Reds," who constituted the world's largest secret societies, and whose protection and assassination rackets extended from beggars to politicians. Chiang Kai-shek himself was a "Green," sworn to obedience to the gang. And it was the "Greens" who murdered and mutilated young university students who attempted to organize the Chinese proletariat. Nicholai could tell a "Red" from a "Green" by the way he held his cigarette, by the way he spat.

During the days, Nicholai learned from tutors: Mathematics, Classical Literature, and Philosophy. In the evenings, he learned from the streets: Commerce, Politics, Enlightened Imperialism, and the Humanities.

And at night he would sit beside his mother as she entertained the cleverest of the men who controlled Shanghai and wrung it dry from their clubs and commercial houses of the Bund. What the majority of these men thought was shyness in Nicholai, and what the brightest of them thought was aloofness, was in fact cold hatred for merchants and the merchant mentality.

Time passed; Alexandra Ivanovna's carefully placed and expertly guided investments flourished, while the rhythms of her social life slowed. She became more comfortable of body, more languid, more lush; but her vivacity and beauty ripened, rather than waned, for she had inherited that family trait that had kept her mother and aunts looking vaguely thirtyish long after they passed the half-century mark. Former lovers became old friends, and life on Avenue Joffre mellowed.

Alexandra Ivanovna began to have little fainting spells, but she did not concern herself over them, beyond accepting the well-timed swoon as essential to the amorous arsenal of any lady of blood. When a doctor of her circle who had for years been eager to examine her ascribed the spells to a weak heart, she made a nominal accommodation to what she conceived to be a physical nuisance by reducing her at-homes to one a week, but beyond that she gave her body no quarter.

"...and they tell me, young man, that I have a weak heart. It's an essentially romantic failing, and you must promise not to take advantage of it too frequently. You must also promise to seek out a responsible tailor. That suit, my boy!"

On the seventh of July, 1937, the North China Daily News reported that shots had been exchanged between Japanese and Chinese at the Marco Polo bridge near Peking. Down at number Three, the Bund, British taipans lounging about in the Shanghai Club agreed that this latest development in the pointless struggle between Orientals might get out of hand, if not dealt with briskly. They made it known to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that they would prefer him to rush north and engage the Japanese along a front that would shield their commercial houses from the damned nuisance of war.

The Generalissimo decided, however, to await the Japanese at Shanghai in the nope that putting the International Settlement in jeopardy would attract foreign intervention on his behalf.

When that did not work, he began a systematic harassment of Japanese companies and civilians in the international community that culminated when, at six-thirty in the evening of August 9, Sub-Lieutenant Isao Oyama and his driver, first-class seaman Yozo Saito, who were driving to inspect Japanese cotton mills outside the city, were stopped by Chinese soldiers.

They were found beside Monument Road, riddled with bullets and sexually mutilated.

In response, Japanese warships moved up the Whangpoo. A thousand Japanese sailors were landed to protect their commercial colony at Chapei, across Soochow creek. They were faced by 10,000 elite Chinese soldiers dug in behind barricades.

The outcry of the comfortable British taipans was reinforced by messages sent by European and American ambassadors to Nanking and Tokyo demanding that Shanghai be excluded from the zone of hostilities. The Japanese agreed to this request, provided that Chinese forces also withdraw from the demilitarized zone.

But on August 12, the Chinese cut all telephone lines to the Japanese Consulate and to Japanese commercial firms. The next day, Friday 13, the Chinese 88th Division arrived at North Station and blocked all roads leading out of the settlement. It was their intention to bottle up as large a buffer of civilians as possible between themselves and the vastly outnumbered Japanese.

On August 14, Chinese pilots in American-built Northrops flew over Shanghai. One high explosive bomb crashed through the roof of the Palace Hotel; another exploded in the street outside the Café Hotel. Seven hundred twenty-nine people dead; eight hundred sixty-one wounded. Thirty-one minutes later another Chinese plane bombed The Great World Amusement Park which had been converted into a refugee camp for women and children. One thousand twelve dead; one thousand seven wounded.

For the trapped Chinese there was no escape from Shanghai; the Generalissimo's troops had closed all the roads. For the foreign taipans, however, there was always escape. Sweating coolies grunted and chanted hai-yo, hai-yo as they struggled up gangplanks, carrying the loot of China under the supervision of white-suited young griffins with their checklists, and Gurkhas with their blackjacks. The British on the Raj Putana, Germans on the Oldenburg, Americans on the President McKinley, Dutchmen on the Tasman said good-bye to one another, the women daubing at eyes with tiny handkerchiefs, the men exchanging diatribes against the unreliable and ungrateful Orientals, as in the background ships' bands played a gallimaufry of national anthems.

That night, from behind its barricades of sandbags and trapped Chinese civilians, Chiang Kai-shek's artillery opened up on the Japanese ships at anchor in the river. The Japanese returned fire, destroying barricades of both kinds.

Through all of this, Alexandra Ivanovna refused to leave her home on Avenue Joffre, now a deserted street, its shattered windows open to evening breezes and looters. As she was of no nationality, neither Soviet nor Chinese nor British, she was outside formal systems of protection. At any event, she had no intention at her age of leaving her home and carefully collected furnishings to reestablish herself God knows where. After all, she reasoned, the Japanese whom she knew were no duller than the rest, and they could hardly be less efficient administrators than the English had been.

The Chinese made their firmest stand of the war at Shanghai; it was three months before the outnumbered Japanese could drive them out. In their attempts to attract foreign intervention, the Chinese permitted a number of bombing "mistakes" to add to the toll in human lives and physical destruction caused by Japanese shelling.

And they maintained their barricades across the roads, keeping in place the protective buffer of tens of thousands of civilians... their own countrymen.

Throughout those terrible months, the resilient Chinese of Shanghai continued to go about their daily lives as best they could, despite the shelling from the Japanese and the bombings from American-made Chinese planes. Medicine, then food, then shelter, and finally water became scarce; but life went on in the teeming, frightened city; and the bands of boys clad in blue cotton with whom Nicholai roamed the streets found new, if grim, games involving the toppling ruins of buildings, desperate scrambles for make-shift air raid shelters, and playing in geysers from broken water mains.

Only once did Nicholai have a brush with death. He was with other street urchins in the district of the great department stores, the Wing On and The Sincere, when one of the common "mistakes" brought Chinese dive-bombers over densely packed Nanking Road. It was the lunch hour, and the crowds were thick when The Sincere received a direct hit, and one side of the Wing On was sheared away. Ornate ceilings caved in upon the faces of people staring up in horror. The occupants of a crowded elevator screamed in one voice as the cable was cut, and it plunged to the basement.

An old woman who had been facing an exploding window was stripped of flesh in front, while from behind she seemed untouched. The old, the lame, and children were crushed under foot by those who stampeded in panic. The boy who had been standing next to Nicholai grunted and sat down heavily in the middle of the street. He was dead; a chip of stone had gone through his chest. As the thunder of bombs and the war of collapsing masonry ebbed, there emerged through it the high-pitched scream from thousands of voices. A stunned shopper whimpered as she searched through shards of glass that had been a display counter. She was an exquisite young woman clothed in the Western "Shanghai" mode, an ankle-length dress of green silk slit to above the knee, and a stiff little collar standing around her curved, porcelain neck. Her extreme pallor might have come from the pale rice powders fashionable with the daughters of rich Chinese merchants, but it did not. She was searching for the ivory figurine she had been examining at the moment of the bombing, and for the hand in which she had been holding it.

Nicholai ran away.

A quarter of an hour later, he was sitting on a rubble heap in a quiet district where weeks of bombing had left blocks of empty and toppling shells. Dry sobs racked his body and seared his lungs, but he did not cry; no tears streaked the plaster dust that coated his face. In his mind, he repeated again and again: "Northrop bombers. American bombers."

* * *

When at last the Chinese soldiers were driven out, and their barricades broken, thousands of civilians fled the nightmare city of bombed-out buildings on the interior walls of which could be seen the checkerboard patterns of gutted apartments. In the rubble: a torn calendar with a date encircled, a charred photograph of a young woman, a suicide note and a lottery ticket in the same envelope.

By a cruel perversity of fate, the Bund, monument to foreign imperialism, was relatively unscathed. Its empty windows stared out over the desolation of the city the taipans had created, drained, then deserted.

Nicholai was among the small gaggle of blue-clad Chinese children who lined the streets to watch the first parade of Japanese occupation troops. Army news photographers had passed out pieces of sticky candy and small hinomaru rising-sun flags, which the children were ordered to wave as the motion picture cameras recorded their bewildered enthusiasm. An officious young officer conducted the event, adding greatly to the confusion with his barked instructions in heavily accented Chinese. Uncertain of what to make of an urchin with blond hair and green eyes, he ordered Nicholai to the back of the crowd.

Nicholai had never seen soldiers like these, rough and efficient, but certainly no parade-ground models. They did not march with the robot synchronization of the German or the British; they passed in clean but rumpled ranks, marching jerkily behind serious young officers with moustaches and comically long swords.

Despite the fact that rather few dwellings were intact in the residential areas when the Japanese entered the city, Alexandra Ivanovna was surprised and annoyed when a staff car, little flags fluttering from its fenders, arrived in her driveway and a junior officer announced in a metallic French that General Kishikawa Takashi, governor of Shanghai, was to be billeted upon her. But her vivid instinct for self-preservation persuaded her that there might be some advantage to cultivating friendly relations with the General, particularly as so many of the good things of life were in short supply. Not for an instant did she doubt that this General would automatically enlist himself among her admirers.

She was mistaken. The General took time from a busy schedule to explain to her in a curiously accented but grammatically flawless French that he regretted any inconvenience the necessities of war might bring to her household. But he made it clear that she was a guest in his house, not he in hers. Always correct in his attitude toward her, the General was too occupied with his work to waste time on flirtations. At first Alexandra Ivanovna was puzzled, later annoyed, and finally intrigued by this man's polite indifference, a response she had never inspired from a heterosexual man. For his part, he found her interesting, but unnecessary. And he was not particularly impressed by the heritage that had made even the haughty women of Shanghai stand in reluctant awe. From the point of view of his thousand years of samurai breeding, her lineage appeared to be only a couple of centuries of Hunnish chieftainship.

Nevertheless, as a matter of politeness, he arranged weekly suppers, taken in the Western style, during the light conversation of which he learned a great deal about the Countess and her withdrawn, self-contained son; while they learned very little about the General. He was in his late fifties—young for a Japanese general—and a widower with one daughter living in Tokyo. Although an intensely patriotic man in the sense that he loved the physical things of his country—the lakes, mountains, misted valleys—he had never viewed his army career as the natural fulfillment of his personality. As a young man, he had dreamed of being a writer, although in his heart he had always known that the traditions of his family would ultimately conduct him into a military career. Pride in self and devotion to duty made him a hard-working and conscientious administrative officer but, although he had passed more than half his life in the army, his habits of mind caused him to think of the military as an avocation. His mind, not his heart; his time, not his passions, were given to his work.

In result of unstinting effort that often kept the General in his office on the Bund from early morning until midnight, the city began to recover. Public services were restored, the factories were repaired, and Chinese peasants began to trickle back into the city. Life and noise slowly returned to the streets, and occasionally one heard laughter. While not good by any civilized standards, living conditions for the Chinese worker were certainly superior to those he had experienced under the Europeans. There was work, clean water, basic sanitary services, rudimentary health facilities. The profession of begging was banned, but prostitution of course throve, and there were many acts of petty brutality, for Shanghai was an occupied city, and soldiers are men at their most beastly.

When General Kishikawa's health began to suffer from his self-imposed work load, he began a more salubrious routine that brought him to his home on Avenue Joffre in time for dinner each evening.

One evening after dinner, the General mentioned in passing that he was devoted to the game of Gô. Nicholai, who seldom spoke save in brief answer to direct questions, admitted that he also played the game. The General was amused and impressed by the fact that the boy said this in flawless Japanese. He laughed when Nicholai explained that he had been learning Japanese from textbooks and with the assistance of the General's own batman.

"You speak it well, for only six months' study," the General said.

"It is my fifth language, sir. All languages are mathematically similar. Each new one is easier to learn than the last. Then too"—the lad shrugged—"I have a gift for languages."

Kishikawa-san was pleased with the way Nicholai said this last, without braggadocio and without British coyness, as he might have said he was left-handed, or green-eyed. At the same time, the General had to smile to himself when he realized that the boy had obviously rehearsed his first sentence, for while that had been quite correct, his subsequent statements had revealed errors of idiom and pronunciation. The General kept his amusement to himself, recognizing that Nicholai was of an age to take himself very seriously and to be deeply stung by embarrassment.

"I shall help you with your Japanese, if you wish," Kishikawa-san said. "But first, let us see if you are an interesting opponent at Gô."

Nicholai was given a four-stone handicap, and they played a quick, time-limit game, as the General had a full day of work tomorrow. Soon they were absorbed, and Alexandra Ivanovna, who could never see much point in social events of which she was not the center, complained of feeling a bit faint and retired.

The General won, but not as easily as he should have. As he was a gifted amateur capable of giving professionals close combat with minimum handicaps, he was greatly impressed by Nicholai's peculiar style of play.

"How long have you been playing Gô?" he asked, speaking in French to relieve Nicholai of the task of alien expression.

"Oh, four or five years, I suppose, sir."

The General frowned. "Five years? But... how old are you?"

"Thirteen, sir. I know I look younger than I am. It's a family trait."

Kishikawa-san nodded and smiled to himself as he thought of Alexandra Ivanovna who, when she had filled out her identity papers for the Occupation Authority, had taken advantage of this "family trait" by blatantly setting down a birth date that suggested she had been the mistress of a White Army general at the age of eleven and had given birth to Nicholai while still in her teens. The General's intelligence service had long ago apprised him of the facts concerning the Countess, but he allowed her this trivial gesture of coquetry, particularly considering what he knew of her unfortunate medical history.

"Still, even for a man of thirteen, you play a remarkable game, Nikko." During the course of the game, the General had manufactured this nickname that allowed him to avoid the troublesome "l." It remained forever his name for Nicholai. "I suppose you have not had any formal training?"

"No, sir. I have never had any instruction at all. I learned from reading books."

"Really? That is unheard of."

"Perhaps so, sir. But I am very intelligent."

For a moment, the General examined the lad's impassive face, its absinthe eyes frankly returning the officer's gaze. "Tell me, Nikko. Why did you choose to study Gô? It is almost exclusively a Japanese game. Certainly none of your friends played the game. They probably never even heard of it."

"That is precisely why I chose Gô, sir."

"I see." What a strange boy. At once both vulnerably honest and arrogant. "And has your reading given you to understand what qualities are necessary to be a fine player?"

Nicholai considered for a moment before answering. "Well, of course one must have concentration. Courage. Self-control. That goes without saying. But more important than these, one must have... I don't know how to say it. One must be both a mathematician and a poet. As though poetry were a science; or mathematics an art. One must have an affection for proportion to play Gô at all well. I am not expressing myself well, sir. I'm sorry."

"On the contrary. You are doing very well in your attempt to express the inexpressible. Of these qualities you have named, Nikko, where do you believe your own strengths lie?"

"In the mathematics, sir. In concentration and self-control."

"And your weaknesses?"

"In what I called poetry."

The General frowned and glanced away from the boy. It was strange that he should recognize this. At his age, he should not be able to stand outside himself and report with such detachment. One might expect Nikko to realize the need for certain Western qualities to play Gô well, qualities like concentration, self-control, courage. But to recognize the need for the receptive, sensitive qualities he called poetry was outside that linear logic that is the Western mind's strength... and limitation. But then—considering that Nicholai was born of the best blood of Europe but raised in the crucible of China—was he really Western? Certainly he was not Oriental either. He was of no racial culture. Or was it better to think of him as the sole member of a racial culture of his own?

"You and I share that weakness, sir." Nicholai's green eyes crinkled with humor. "We both have weaknesses in the area I called poetry."

The General looked up in surprise. "Ah?"

"Yes, sir. My play lacks much of this quality. Yours has too much of it. Three times during the game you relented in your attack. You chose to make the graceful play, rather than the conclusive one."

Kishikawa-san laughed softly. "How do you know I was not considering your age and relative inexperience?"

"That would have been condescending and unkind, and I don't believe you are those things." Nicholai's eyes smiled again. "I am sorry, sir, that there are no honorifics in French. It must make my speech sound abrupt and insubordinate."

"Yes, it does a little. I was just thinking that, in fact."

"I am sorry, sir."

The General nodded. "I assume you have played Western chess?"

Nicholai shrugged. "A little. It doesn't interest me."

"How would you compare it with Gô?"

Nicholai thought for a second. "Ah... what Gô is to philosophers and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants."

"Ah! The bigotry of youth. It would be more kind, Nikko, to say that Gô appeals to the philosopher in any man, and chess to the merchant in him."

But Nicholai did not recant. "Yes, sir, that would be more kind. But less true."

The General rose from his cushion, leaving Nicholai to replace the stones. "It is late, and I need my sleep. We'll play again soon, if you wish."

"Sir?" said Nicholai, as the General reached the door.

"Yes?"

Nicholai kept his eyes down, shielding himself from the hurt of possible rejection. "Are we to be friends, sir?"

The General gave the question the consideration its serious tone requested. "That could be, Nikko. Let us wait and see."

It was that very night that Alexandra Ivanovna, deciding at last that General Kishikawa was not of the fabric of the men she had known in the past, came to tap at his bedroom door.

* * *

For the next year and half, they lived as a family. Alexandra Ivanovna became more subdued, more contented, perhaps a little plumper. What she lost in effervescence she gained in an attractive calm that caused Nicholai, for the first time in his life, to like her. Without haste, Nicholai and the General constructed a relationship that was as profound as it was undemonstrative. The one had never had a father; the other, a son. Kishikawa-san was of a temperament to enjoy guiding and shaping a clever, quick-minded young man, even one who was occasionally too bold in his opinions, too confident of his attributes.

Alexandra Ivanovna found emotional shelter in the lee of the General's strong, gentle personality. He found spice and amusement in her flashes of temperament and wit. Between the General and the woman—politeness, generosity, gentleness, physical pleasure. Between the General and the boy—confidence, honesty, ease, affection, respect.

Then one evening after dinner, Alexandra Ivanovna joked as usual about the nuisance of her swooning fits and retired early to bed... where she died.

* * *

Now the sky is black to the east, purple over China. Out in the floating city the orange and yellow lanterns are winking out, as people make up beds on the canted decks of sampans heeled over in the mud. The air has cooled on the dark plains of inland China, and breezes are no longer drawn in from the sea. The curtains no longer billow inward as the General balances his stone on the nail of his index finger, his mind ranging far from the game before him.

It is two months since Alexandra Ivanovna died, and the General has received orders transferring him. He cannot take Nicholai with him, and he does not want to leave him in Shanghai where he has no friends and where his lack of formal citizenship denies him even the most rudimentary diplomatic protection. He has decided to send the boy to Japan.

The General examines the mother's refined face, expressed more economically, more angularly in the boy. Where will he find friends, this young man? Where will he find soil appropriate to his roots, this boy who speaks six languages and thinks in five, but who lacks the smallest fragment of useful training? Can there be a place in the world for him?

"Sir?"

"Yes? Oh... ah... Have you played, Nikko?"

"Some time ago, sir."

"Ah, yes, Excuse me. And do you mind telling me where you played?"

Nicholai pointed out his stone, and Kishikawa-san frowned because the unlikely placement had the taste of a tenuki. He marshaled his fragmented attention and examined the board carefully, mentally reviewing the outcome of each placement available to him. When he looked up, Nicholai's bottle-green eyes were on him, smiling with relish. The game could be played on for several hours, and the outcome would be close. But it was inevitable that Nicholai would win. This was the first time.

The General regarded Nicholai appraisingly for some seconds, then he laughed. "You are a demon, Nicholai."

"That is true, sir," Nicholai admitted, enormously pleased with himself. "Your attention was wandering."

"And you took advantage of that?"

"Of course."

The General began to collect his stones and return them to the Gô ke. "Yes," he said to himself. "Of course." Then he laughed again. "What do you say to a cup of tea, Nikko?" Kishikawa-san's major vice was his habit of drinking strong, bitter tea at all hours of day and night. In the heraldry of their affectionate but reserved relationship, the offer of a cup of tea was the signal for a chat. While the General's batman prepared the tea, they walked out into the cool night air of the veranda, both wearing yukatas.

After a silence during which the General's eye wandered over the city, where the occasional light in the ancient walled town indicated that someone was celebrating, or studying, or dying, or selling herself, he asked Nicholai, seemingly apropos of nothing, "Do you ever think about the war?"

"No, sir. It has nothing to do with me."

The egoism of youth. The confident egoism of a young man brought up in the knowledge that he was the last and most rarefied of a line of selective breeding that had its sources long before tinkers became Henry Fords, before coinchangers became Rothschilds, before merchants became Medici.

"I am afraid, Nikko, that our little war is going to touch you after all." And with this entrée, the General told the young man of the orders transferring him to combat, and of his plans to send Nicholai to Japan where he would live in the home of a famous player and teacher of Gô.

"...my oldest and closest friend, Otake-san—whom you know by reputation as Otake of the Seventh Dan."

Nicholai did indeed recognize the name. He had read Otake-san's lucid commentaries on the middle game.

"I have arranged for you to live with Otake-san and his family, among the other disciples of his school. It is a very great honor, Nikko."

"I realize that, sir. And I am excited about learning from Otake-san. But won't he scorn wasting his instruction on an amateur?"

The General chuckled. "Scorn is not a style of mind that my old friend would employ. Ah! Our tea is ready."

The batman had taken away the Gô ban of kaya, and in its place was a low table set for tea. The General and Nicholai returned to their cushions. After the first cup, the General sat back slightly and spoke in a businesslike tone. "Your mother had very little money as it turns out. Her investments were scattered in small local companies, most of which collapsed upon the eve of our occupation. The men who owned the companies simply returned to Britain with the capital in their pockets. It appears that, for the Westerner, the great moral crisis of war obscures minor ethical considerations. There is this house... and very little more. I have arranged to sell the house for you. The proceeds will go for your maintenance and instruction in Japan."

"As you think best, sir."

"Good. Tell me, Nikko. Will you miss Shanghai?"

Nicholai considered for a second. "No."

"Will you feel lonely in Japan?"

Nicholai considered for a second. "Yes."

"I shall write to you."

"Often?"

"No, not often. Once a month. But you must write to me as often as you feel the need to. Perhaps you will be less lonely than you fear. There are other young people studying with Otake-san. And when you have doubts, ideas, questions, you will find Otake-san a valuable person to discuss them with. He will listen with interest, but will not burden you with advice." The General smiled. "Although I think you may find one of my friend's habits of speech a little disconcerting at times. He speaks of everything in terms of Gô. All of life, for him, is a simplified paradigm of Gô."

"He sounds as though I shall like him, sir."

"I am sure you will. He is a man who has all my respect. He possesses a quality of... how to express it?... of shibumi."

"Shibumi, sir?" Nicholai knew the word, but only as it applied to gardens or architecture, where it connoted an understated beauty. "How are you using the term, sir?"

"Oh, vaguely. And incorrectly, I suspect. A blundering attempt to describe an ineffable quality. As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is... how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that."

Nicholai's imagination was galvanized by the concept of shibumi. No other ideal had ever touched him so. "How does one achieve this shibumi, sir?"

"One does not achieve it, one... discovers it. And only a few men of infinite refinement ever do that. Men like my friend Otake-san."

"Meaning that one must learn a great deal to arrive at shibumi?"

"Meaning, rather, that one must pass through knowledge and arrive at simplicity."

From that moment, Nicholai's primary goal in life was to become a man of shibumi; a personality of overwhelming calm. It was a vocation open to him while, for reasons of breeding, education, and temperament, most vocations were closed. In pursuit of shibumi he could excel invisibly, without attracting the attention and vengeance of the tyrannical masses.

Kishikawa-san took from beneath the tea table a small sandalwood box wrapped in plain cloth and put it into Nicholai's hands. "It is a farewell gift, Nikko. A trifle."

Nicholai bowed his head in acceptance and held the package with great tenderness; he did not express his gratitude in inadequate words. This was his first conscious act of shibumi.

Although they spoke late into their last night together about what shibumi meant and might mean, in the deepest essential they did not understand one another. To the General, shibumi was a kind of submission; to Nicholai, it was a kind of power.

Both were captives of their generations.

Nicholai sailed for Japan on a ship carrying wounded soldiers back for family leave, awards, hospitalization, a life under the burden of mutilation. The yellow mud of the Yangtze followed the ship for miles out to sea, and it was not until the water began to blend from khaki to slate blue that Nicholai unfolded the simple cloth that wrapped Kishikawa-san's farewell gift. Within a fragile sandalwood box, swathed in rich paper to prevent damage, were two Gô ke of black lacquer worked with silver in the Heidatsu process. On the lids of the bowls, lakeside tea houses wreathed in mist were implied, nestling against the shores of unstated lakes. Within one bowl were black Nichi stones from Kishiu. Within the other, white stones of Miyazaki clam shell... lustrous, curiously cool to the touch in any weather.

No one observing the delicate young man standing at the rail of the rusty freighter, his hooded green eyes watching the wallow and plunge of the sea as he contemplated the two gifts the General had given him—these Gô ke, and the lifelong goal of shibumi—would have surmised that he was destined to become the world's most highly paid assassin.

Washington

The First Assistant sat back from his control console and puffed out a long sigh as he pushed his glasses up and lightly rubbed the tender red spots on the bridge of his nose. "It's going to be difficult getting reliable information out of Fat Boy, sir. Each input source offers conflicting and contradictory data. You're sure he was born in Shanghai?"

"Reasonably, yes."

"Well, there's nothing on that. In a chronological sort, the first I come up with has him living in Japan."

"Very well. Start there, then!"

The First Assistant felt he had to defend himself from the irritation in Mr. Diamond's voice. "It's not as easy as you might think, sir. Here's an example of the kind of garble I'm getting. Under the rubric of 'languages spoken,' I get Russian, French, Chinese, German, English, Japanese, and Basque. Basque? That can't be right, can it?"

"It is right."

"Basque? Why would anyone learn to speak Basque?"

"I don't know. He studied it while he was in prison."

"Prison, sir?"

"You'll come to it later. He did three years in solitary confinement."

"You... you seem to be uniquely familiar with the data, sir."

"I've kept an eye on him for years."

The First Assistant considered asking why this Nicholai Hel had received such special attention, but he thought better of it, "All right, sir. Basque it is. Now how about this? Our first firm data come from immediately after the war, when it seems he worked for the Occupation Forces as a cryptographer and translator. Now, assuming he left Shanghai when we believe he did, we have six years unaccounted for. The only window Fat Boy gives me on that doesn't seem to make any sense. It suggests that he spent those six years studying some kind of game. A game called Gô—whatever that is."

"I believe that's correct."

"Can that be? Throughout the entire Second World War, he spent his time studying a board game?" The First Assistant shook his head. Neither he nor Fat Boy was comfortable with conclusions that did not proceed from solid linear logic. And it was not logical that a mauve-card international assassin would have passed five or six years (Christ! They didn't even know exactly how many!) learning to play some silly game!

Japan

For nearly five years Nicholai lived within the household of Otake-san; a student, and a member of the family. Otake of the Seventh Dan was a man of two contradictory personalities; in competition he was cunning, cold-minded, noted for his relentless exploitation of flaws in the opponent's play or mental toughness. But at home in his sprawling, rather disorganized household amid his sprawling extended family that included, besides his wife, father, and three children, never fewer than six apprenticed pupils, Otake-san was paternal, generous, even willing to play the clown for the amusement of his children and pupils. Money was never plentiful, but they lived in a small mountain village with few expensive distractions, so it was never a problem. When they had less, they lived on less; when they had more, they spent it freely.

None of Otake-san's children had more than average gifts in the art of Gô. And of his pupils, only Nicholai possessed that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.

In time, Otake-san discovered an additional quality in Nicholai that made his play formidable: In the midst of play, Nicholai was able to rest in profound tranquility for a brief period, then return to his game freshminded.

It was Otake-san who first happened upon the fact that Nicholai was a mystic.

Like most mystics, Nicholai was unaware of his gift, and at first he could not believe that others did not have similar experiences. He could not imagine life without mystic transport, and he did not so much pity those who lived without such moments as he regarded them as creatures of an entirely different order.

Nicholai's mysticism came to light later one afternoon when he was playing an exercise game with Otake-san, a very tight and classic game in which only vaguest nuances of development separated their play from textbook models. Partway through the third hour, Nicholai felt the gateway open to him for rest and oneness, and he allowed himself to expand into it. After a time, the feeling dissolved, and Nicholai sat, motionless and rested, wondering vaguely why the teacher was delaying in making an obvious placement. When he looked up, he was surprised to find Otake-san's eyes on his face and not on the Gô ban.

"What is wrong, Teacher? Have I made an error?"

Otake-san examined Nicholai's face closely. "No, Nikko. There was no particular brilliance in your last two plays, but also no fault. But... how can you play while you daydream?"

"Daydream? I was not daydreaming, Teacher."

"Were you not? Your eyes were defocused and your expression empty. In fact, you did not even look at the board while making your plays. You placed the stones while gazing out into the garden."

Nicholai smiled and nodded. Now he understood. "Oh, I see. In fact, I just returned from resting. So, of course, I didn't have to look at the board."

"Explain to me, please, why you did not have to look at the board, Nikko."

"I... ah... well, I was resting." Nicholai could see that Otake-san did not understand, and this confused him, assuming as he did that mystic experience was common.

Otake-san sat back and took another of the mint drops that he habitually sucked to relieve pains in his stomach resulting from years of tight control under the pressures of professional play. "Now tell me what you mean when you say that you were resting."

"I suppose 'resting' isn't the correct word for it, Teacher. I don't know what the word is. I have never heard anyone give a name to it. But you must know the sensation I mean. The departing without leaving. The... you know... the flowing into all things, and... ah... understanding all things." Nicholai was embarrassed. The experience was too simple and basic to explain. It was as though the Teacher had asked him to explain breathing, or the scent of flowers. Nicholai was sure that Otake-san knew exactly what he meant; after all, he had only to recall his own rest times. Why did he ask these questions?

Otake-san reached out and touched Nicholai's arm. "I know, Nikko, that this is difficult for you to explain. And I believe I understand a little of what you experience—not because I also have experienced it, but because I have read of it, for it has always attracted my curiosity. It is called mysticism."

Nicholai laughed. "Mysticism! But surely, Teacher—"

"Have you ever talked to anyone about this... how did you phrase it?... 'departing without leaving'?"

"Well... no. Why would anyone talk about it?"

"Not even our good friend Kishikawa-san?"

"No, Teacher. It never came up. I don't understand why you are asking me these questions. I am confused. And I am beginning to feel shame."

Otake-san pressed his arm. "No, no. Don't feel shame. Don't be frightened. You see, Nikko, what you experience... what you call 'resting'... is not very common. Few people experience these things, except in a light and partial way when they are very young. This experience is what saintly men strive to achieve through discipline and meditation, and foolish men seek through drugs. Throughout all ages and in all cultures, a certain fortunate few have been able to gain this state of calm and oneness with nature (I use these words to describe it because they are the words I have read) without years of rigid discipline. Evidently, it comes to them quite naturally, quite simply. Such people are called mystics. It is an unfortunate label because it carries connotations of religion and magic about it. In fact, all the words used to describe this experience are rather theatrical. What you call 'a rest,' others call ecstasy."

Nicholai grinned uncomfortably at this word. How could the most real thing in the world be called mysticism? How could the quietest emotion imaginable be called ecstasy?

"You smile at the word, Nikko. But surely the experience is pleasurable, is it not?"

"Pleasurable? I never thought of it that way. It is... necessary."

"Necessary?"

"Well, how would one live day in and day out without times of rest?"

Otake-san smiled. "Some of us are required to struggle along without such rest."

"Excuse me, Teacher. But I can't imagine a life like that. What would be the point of living a life like that?"

Otake-san nodded. He had found in his reading that mystics regularly reported an inability to understand people who lack the mystic gift. He felt a bit uneasy when he recalled that when mystics lose their gift—and most of them do at some time or other—they experience panic and deep depression. Some retreat into religion to rediscover the experience through the mechanics of meditation. Some even commit suicide, so pointless does life without mystic transport seem.

"Nikko? I have always been intensely curious about mysticism, so please permit me to ask you questions about this 'rest' of yours. In my readings, mystics who report their transports always use such gossamer terms, so many seeming contradictions, so many poetic paradoxes. It is as though they were attempting to describe something too complicated to be expressed in words."

"Or too simple, sir."

"Yes. Perhaps that is it. Too simple." Otake-san pressed his fist against his chest to relieve the pressure and took another mint drop. "Tell me. How long have you had these experiences?"

"Always."

"Since you were a baby?"

"Always."

"I see. And how long do these experiences last?"

"It doesn't matter, Teacher. There is not time there."

"It is timeless?"

"No. There is neither time nor timelessness."

Otake-san smiled and shook his head. "Am I to have the gossamer terms and the poetic paradoxes from you as well?"

Nicholai realized that these bracketing oxymorons made that which was infinitely simple seem chaotic, but he didn't know how to express himself with the clumsy tools of words.

Otake-san came to his aid. "So you are saying that you have no sense of time during these experiences. You do not know how long they last?"

"I know exactly how long they last, sir. When I depart, I don't leave. I am where my body is, as well as everywhere else. I am not daydreaming. Sometimes the rest lasts a minute or two. Sometimes it lasts hours. It lasts for as long as it is needed."

"And do they come often, these... rests?"

"This varies. Twice or three times a day at most. But sometimes I go a month without a rest. When this happens, I miss them very much. I become frightened that they may never come back."

"Can you bring one of these rest periods on at will?"

"No. But I can block them. And I must be careful not to block them away, if I need one."

"How can you block them away?"

"By being angry. Or by hating."

"You can't have this experience if you hate?"

"How could I? The rest is the very opposite of hate."

"Is it love, then?"

"Love is what it might be, if it concerned people. But it doesn't concern people."

"What does it concern?"

"Everything. Me. Those two are the same. When I am resting, everything and I are... I don't know how to explain."

"You become one with everything?"

"Yes. No, not exactly. I don't become one with everything. I return to being one with everything. Do you know what I mean?"

"I am trying to. Please take this 'rest' you experienced a short time ago, while we were playing. Describe to me what happened."

Nicholai lifted his palms helplessly. "How can I do that?"

"Try. Begin with: we were playing, and you had just placed stone fifty-six... and... Go on."

"It was stone fifty-eight, Teacher."

"Well, fifty-eight then. And what happened?"

"Well... the flow of the play was just right, and it began to bring me to the meadow. It always begins with some kind of flowing motion... a stream or river, maybe the wind making waves in a field of ripe rice, the glitter of leaves moving in a breeze, clouds flowing by. And for me, if the structure of the Gô stones is flowing classically, that too can bring me to the meadow."

"The meadow?"

"Yes. That's the place I expand into. It's how I recognize that I am resting."

"Is it a real meadow?"

"Yes, of course."

"A meadow you visited at one time? A place in your memory?"

"It's not in my memory. I've never been there when I was diminished."

"Diminished?"

"You know... when I'm in my body and not resting."

"You consider normal life to be a diminished state, then?"

"I consider time spent at rest to be normal. Time like this... temporary, and... yes, diminished."

"Tell me about the meadow, Nikko."

"It is triangular. And it slopes uphill, away from me. The grass is tall. There are no animals. Nothing has ever walked on the grass or eaten it. There are flowers, a breeze... warm. Pale sky. I'm always glad to be the grass again."

"You are the grass?"

"We are one another. Like the breeze, and the yellow sunlight. We're all... mixed in together."

"I see. I see. Your description of the mystic experience resembles others I have read. And this meadow is what the writers call your 'gateway' or 'path.' Do you ever think of it in those terms?"

"No."

"So. What happens then?"

"Nothing. I am at rest. I am everywhere at once. And everything is unimportant and delightful. And then... I begin to diminish. I separate from the sunlight and the meadow, and I contract again back into my bodyself. And the rest is over." Nicholai smiled uncertainly. "I suppose I am not describing it very well, Teacher. It's not... the kind of thing one describes."

"No, you describe it very well, Nikko. You have evoked a memory in me that I had almost lost. Once or twice when I was a child... in summer, I think... I experienced brief transports such as you describe. I read once that most people have occasional mystic experiences when they are children, but soon outgrow them. And forget them. Will you tell me something else? How is it you are able to play Gô while you are transported... while you are in your meadow?"

"Well, I am here as well as there. I depart, but I don't leave. I am part of this room and that garden."

"And me, Nikko? Are you part of me too?"

Nicholai shook his head. "There are no animals in my rest place. I am the only thing that sees. I see for us all, for the sunlight, for the grass."

"I see. And how can you play your stones without looking at the board? How do you know where the lines cross? How do you know where I placed my last stone?"

Nicholai shrugged. It was too obvious to explain. "I am part of everything, Teacher. I share... no... I flow with everything. The Gô ban, the stones. The board and I are amongst one another. How could I not know the patterns of play?"

"You see from within the board then?"

"Within and without are the same thing. But 'see' isn't exactly right either. If one is everyplace, he doesn't have to 'see.'" Nicholai shook his head. "I can't explain."

Otake-san pressed Nikko's arm lightly, then withdrew his hand. "I won't question you further. I confess that I envy the mystic peace you find. I envy most of all your gift for finding it so naturally—without the concentration and exercise that even holy men must apply in search of it. But while I envy it, I also feel some fear on your behalf. If the mystic ecstasy has become—as I suspect it has—a natural and necessary part of your inner life, then what will become of you, should this gift fade, should these experiences be denied you?"

"I cannot imagine that happening, Teacher."

"I know. But my reading has revealed to me that these gifts can fade; the paths to inner peace can be lost. Something can happen that fills you with constant and unrelenting hate or fear, and then it would be gone."

The thought of losing the most natural and most important psychic activity of his life disturbed Nicholai. With a brief rush of panic, he realized that fear of losing it might be fear enough to cause him to lose it. He wanted to be away from this conversation, from these new and incredible doubts. His eyes lowered to the Gô ban, he considered his reaction to such a loss.

"What would you do, Nikko?" Otake-san repeated after a moment of silence.

Nicholai looked up from the board, his green eyes calm and expressionless. "If someone took my rest times from me, I would kill him."

This was said with a fatalistic calm that made Otake-san know it was not anger, only a simple truth. It was the quiet assurance of the statement that disturbed Otake-san most.

"But, Nikko. Let us say it was not a man who took this gift from you. Let us say it was a situation, an event, a condition of life. What would you do then?"

"I would seek to destroy it, whatever it was. I would punish it."

"Would that bring the path to rest back?"

"I don't know, Teacher. But it would be the least vengeance I could exact for so great a loss."

Otake-san sighed, part in regret for Nikko's particular vulnerability, part in sympathy for whoever might happen to be the agent of the loss of his gift. He had no doubt at all that the young man would do what he said. Nowhere is a man's personality so clearly revealed as in his Gô game, if his play be read by one with the experience and intelligence to interpret it. And Nicholai's play, brilliant and audacious as it was, bore the aesthetic blemishes of frigidity and almost inhuman concentration of purpose. From his reading of Nicholai's game, Otake-san knew that his star pupil might achieve greatness, might become the first non-Japanese to rise to the higher dans; but he knew also that the boy would never know peace or happiness in the smaller game of life. It was a blessed compensation that Nikko possessed the gift of retirement into mystic transport. But a gift with a poisoned core.

Otake-san sighed again and considered the pattern of stones. The game was about a third played out. "Do you mind, Nikko, if we do not finish? My nagging old stomach is bothering me. And the development is sufficiently classic that the seeds of the outcome have already taken root. I don't anticipate either of us making a serious error, do you?"

"No, sir." Nicholai was glad to leave the board, and to leave this small room where he had learned for the first time that his mystic retreats were vulnerable... that something could happen to deny him an essential part of his life. "At all events, Teacher, I think you would have won by seven or eight stones."

Otake-san glanced at the board again. "So many? I would have thought only five or six." He smiled at Nikko. It was their kind of joke.

In fact, Otake-san would have won by at least a dozen stones, and they both knew it.

* * *

The years passed, and the seasons turned easily in the Otake household where traditional roles, fealties, hard work, and study were balanced against play, devilment, and affection, this last no less sincere for being largely tacit.

Even in their small mountain village, where the dominant chords of life vibrated in sympathy with the cycle of the crops, the war was a constant tone in the background. Young men whom everybody knew left to join the army, some never to return. Austerity and harder work became their lot. There was great excitement when news came of the attack at Pearl Harbor on the eighth of December 1941; knowledgeable men agreed that the war would not last more than a year. Victory after victory was announced by enthusiastic voices over the radio as the army swept European imperialism from the Pacific.

But still, some farmers grumbled privately as almost impossible production quotas were placed on them, and they felt the pressures of decreasing consumer goods. Otake-san turned more to writing commentaries, as the number of Gô tournaments was restricted as a patriotic gesture in the general austerity. Occasionally the war touched the Otake household more directly. One winter evening, the middle son of the Otake family came home from school crushed and ashamed because he had been ridiculed by his classmates as a yowamushi, a weak worm, because he wore mittens on his sensitive bands during the bruising afternoon calisthenics when all the boys exercised on the snow-covered courtyard, stripped to the waist to demonstrate physical toughness and "samurai spirit."

And from time to time Nicholai overheard himself described as a foreigner, a gaijin, a "redhead," in tones of mistrust that reflected the xenophobia preached by jingoistic schoolteachers. But he did not really suffer from his status as an outsider. General Kishikawa had been careful that his identity papers designated his mother as a Russian (a neutral) and his father as a German (an ally). Too, Nicholai was protected by the great respect in which the village held Otake-san, the famed player of Gô who brought honor to their village by choosing to live there.

When Nicholai's game had improved sufficiently that he was allowed to play preliminary matches and accompany Otake-san as a disciple to the great championship games held in out-of-the-way resorts where the players could be "sealed in" away from the distractions of the world, he had opportunities to see at first hand the spirit with which Japan went to war. At railroad stations there were noisy send-offs for recruits, and large banners reading:

FELICITATIONS ON YOUR CALL TO COLORS and WE PRAY FOR YOUR LASTING MILITARY FORTUNE.

He heard of a boy from the neighboring village who, failing his physical examination, begged to be accepted in any role, rather than face the unspeakable haji of being unworthy to serve. His pleas were ignored, and he was sent home by train. He stood staring out the window, muttering again and again to himself, "Haji desu, haji desu." Two days later, his body was found along the tracks. He had chosen not to face the disgrace of returning to the relatives and friends who had sent him off with such joy and celebration.

For the people of Japan, as for the people of its enemies, this was a just war into which they had been forced. There was a certain desperate pride in the knowledge that tiny Japan, with almost no natural resources other than the spirit of the people, stood alone against the hordes of the Chinese, and the vast industrial might of America, Britain, Australia, and all the European nations but four. And every thinking person knew that, once Japan was weakened by the overwhelming odds against it, the crushing mass of the Soviet Union would descend upon them.

But at first there were only victories. When the village learned that Tokyo had been bombed by Doolittle, the news was received with bewilderment and outrage. Bewilderment, because they had been assured that Japan was invulnerable. Outrage, because although the effect of the bombing was slight, the American bombers had scattered their incendiaries randomly, destroying homes and schools and not touching—by ironic accident—a single factory or military establishment. When he heard of the American bombers, Nicholai remembered the Northrop planes that had bombed The Sincere department store in Shanghai. He could still see the doll-like Chinese girl in her green silk dress, a stiff little collar standing around her porcelain neck, her face pale beneath its rice powder as she searched for her hand.

Although the war tinted every aspect of life, it was not the dominant theme of Nicholai's formative years. Three things were more important to him: the regular improvement of his game; his rich and resuscitative returns to states of mystic calm whenever his psychic vigor flagged; and, during his seventeenth year, his first love.

Mariko was one of Otake-san's disciples, a shy and delicate girl only a year older than Nikko, who lacked the mental toughness to become a great player, but whose game was intricate and refined. She and Nicholai played many practice bouts together, drilling opening and middle games particularly. Her shyness and his aloofness suited one another comfortably, and frequently they would sit together in the little garden at evening, talking a little, sharing longish silences.

Occasionally they walked together into the village on some errand or other, and arms accidentally brushed, thrilling the conversation into an awkward silence. Eventually, with a boldness that belied the half hour of self-struggle that had preceded the gesture, Nicholai reached across the practice board and took her hand. Swallowing, and concentrating on the board with desperate attention, Mariko returned the pressure of his fingers without looking up at him, and for the rest of the morning they played a very ragged and disorganized game while they held hands, her palm moist with fear of discovery, his trembling with fatigue at the awkward position of his arm, but he could not lighten the strength of his grip, much less relinquish her hand, for fear that this might signal rejection.

They were both relieved to be freed by the call to the noon meal, but the tingle of sin and love was effervescent in their blood all that day. And the next day they exchanged a brushing kiss.

One spring night when Nicholai was almost eighteen, he dared to visit Mariko in her small sleeping room. In a household containing so many people and so little space, meeting at night was an adventure of stealthy movements, soft whispers, and breaths caught in the throat while hearts pounded against one another's chest at the slightest real or imagined sound.

Their lovemaking was bungling, tentative, infinitely gentle.

* * *

Although Nicholai exchanged letters with General Kishikawa monthly, only twice during the five years of his apprenticeship could the General free himself from administrative duties for brief leaves of absence in Japan.

The first of these lasted only one day, for the General spent most of his leave in Tokyo with his daughter, recently widowed when her naval officer husband went down with his ship during the victory of the Coral Sea, leaving her pregnant with her first child. After sharing in her bereavement and arranging for her welfare, the General stopped over in the village to visit the Otakes and to bring Nicholai a present of two boxes of books selected from confiscated libraries, and given with the injunction that the boy must not allow his gift of languages to atrophy. The books were in Russian, English, German, French and Chinese. These last were useless to Nicholai because, although he had picked up a fluid knowledge of rough-and-ready Chinese from the streets of Shanghai, he never learned to read the language. The General's own limitation to French was demonstrated by the fact that the boxes included four copies of Les Miserables in four different languages—and perhaps a fifth in Chinese, for all Nicholai knew.

That evening the General took dinner with Otake, both avoiding any talk about the war. When Otake-san praised the work and progress of Nicholai, the General assumed the role of Japanese father, making light of his ward's gifts and asserting that it was a great kindness on Otake's part to burden himself with so lazy and inept a pupil. But he could not mask the pride that shone in his eyes.

The General's visit coincided with jusanya, the Autumn Moon-Viewing Festival, and offerings of flowers and autumn grasses were placed on an altar in the garden where the moon's rays would fall on them. In normal times, there would have been fruit and food among the offerings, but with war shortages Otake-san tempered his traditionalism with common sense. He might, like his neighbors, have offered the food, then returned it to the family table the next day, but such a thing was unthinkable to him.

After dinner, Nicholai and the General sat in the garden, watching the rising moon disentangle itself from the branches of a tree.

"So, Nikko? Tell me. Have you attained the goal of shibumi as you once told me you would?" There was a teasing tone to his voice.

Nicholai glanced down. "I was rash, sir. I was young."

"Younger, yes. I assume you are finding flesh and youth considerable obstacles in your quest. Perhaps you will be able, in time, to acquire the laudable refinement of behavior and facade that might be called shibusa. Whether you will ever achieve the profound simplicity of spirit that is shibumi is moot. Seek it, to be sure. But be prepared to accept less with grace. Most of us have to."

"Thank you for your guidance, sir. But I would rather fail at becoming a man of shibumi than succeed at any other goal."

The General nodded and smiled to himself. "Yes, of course you would. I had forgotten certain facets of your personality. We have been apart too long." They shared the garden in silence for a time. "Tell me, Nikko, are you keeping your languages fresh?"

Nicholai had to confess that, when he had glanced at a few of the books the General had brought, he discovered that his German and English were rusting.

"You must not let that happen. Particularly your English. I shall not be in a position to help you much when this war is over, and you have nothing to rely upon but your gift for language."

"You speak as though the war will be lost, sir."

Kishikawa-san was silent for a long time, and Nicholai could read sadness and fatigue in his face, dim and pale in the moonlight. "All wars are lost ultimately. By both sides, Nikko. The day of battles between professional warriors is gone. Now we have wars between opposing industrial capacities, opposing populations. The Russians, with their sea of faceless people, will defeat the Germans. The Americans, with their anonymous factories, will defeat us. Ultimately."

"What will you do when this happens, sir?"

The General shook his head slowly. "That doesn't matter. Until the end, I shall do my duty. I shall continue to work sixteen hours a day on petty administrative problems. I shall continue to perform as a patriot."

Nicholai looked at him quizzically. He had never heard Kishikawa-san speak of patriotism.

The General smiled family. "Oh, yes, Nikko. I am a patriot after all. Not a patriot of politics, or ideology, or military bands, or the hinomaru. But a patriot all the same. A patriot of gardens like this, of moon festivals, of the subtleties of Gô, of the chants of women planting rice, of cherry blossoms in brief bloom—of things Japanese. The fact that I know we cannot win this war has nothing to do with the fact that I must continue to do my duty. Do you understand that, Nikko?"

"Only the words, sir."

The General chuckled softly. "Perhaps that is all there is. Go to your bed now, Nikko. Let me sit alone for a while. I shall leave before you arise in the morning, but it pleased me to have this little time with you."

Nicholai bowed his head and rose. Long after he had gone, the General was still sitting, regarding the moonlit garden calmly.

Much later, Nicholai learned that General Kishikawa had attempted to provide money for his ward's maintenance and training, but Otake-san had refused it, saying that if Nicholai were so unworthy a pupil as the General claimed, it would be unethical of him to accept payment for his training. The General smiled at his old friend and shook his head. He was trapped into accepting a kindness.

* * *

The tide of war turned against the Japanese, who had staked all their limited production capabilities on a short all-out struggle resulting in a favorable peace. Evidence of incipient defeat was everywhere: in the hysterical fanaticism of government morale broadcasts, in reports by refugees of devastating "carpet bombing" by American planes concentrating on residential areas, in ever-increasing shortages of the most basic consumer goods.

Even in their agricultural village, food was in short supply after farmers met their production quotas; and many times the Otake family subsisted on zosui, a gruel of chopped carrots and turnip tops boiled with rice, rendered palatable only by Otake-san's burlesque sense of humor. He would eat with many gestures and sounds of delight, rolling his eyes and patting his stomach in such a way as to make his children and students laugh and forget the bland, loamy taste of the food in their mouths. At first, refugees from the cities were cared for with compassion; but as time passed, these additional mouths to feed became a burden; the refugees were referred to by the mildly pejorative term sokaijin; and there was grumbling amongst the peasants about these urban drones who were rich or important enough to be able to escape the horrors of the city, but not capable of working to maintain themselves.

Otake-san had permitted himself one luxury, his small formal garden. Late in the war he dug it up and converted it to the planting of food. But, typical of him, he arranged the turnips and radishes and carrots in mixed beds so their growing tops were attractive to the eye. "They are more difficult to weed and care for, I confess. But if we forsake beauty in our desperate struggle to live, then the barbarian has already won."

Eventually, the official broadcasts were forced to admit the occasional loss of a battle or an island, because to fail to do so in the face of the contradictions of returning wounded soldiers would have cost them the last semblance of credibility. Each time such a defeat was announced (always with an explanation of tactical withdrawal, or reorganization of defense lines, or intentional shortening of supply lines) the broadcast was ended by the playing of the old, beloved song, "Umi Yukaba," the sweet autumnal strains of which became identified with this era of darkness and loss.

Otake-san now traveled to play in Gô tournaments very seldom, because transportation was given over to military and industrial needs. But the playing of the national game and reports of important contests in the newspapers were never given up entirely, because it was realized that this was one of the traditional refinements of culture for which they were fighting.

In the course of accompanying his teacher to these infrequent tournaments, Nicholai witnessed the effects of the war. Cities flattened; people homeless. But the bombers had not broken the spirit of the people. It is an ironic fiction that strategic (i.e., anti-civilian) bombing can break a nation's will to fight. In Germany, Britain, and Japan, the effect of strategic bombing was to give the people a common cause, to harden their will to resist in the crucible of shared difficulties.

Once, when their train was stopped for hours at a station because of damage to the railroad lines, Nicholai walked slowly back and forth on the platform. All along the facade of the station were rows of litters on which lay wounded soldiers on their way to hospitals.

Some were ashen with pain and rigid with the effort to contain it, but none cried out; there was not a single moan. Old people and children passed from stretcher to stretcher, tears of compassion in their eyes, bowing low to each wounded soldier and muttering, "Thank you. Thank you. Gokuro sama. Gokuro sama."

One bent old woman approached Nicholai and stared into his Western face with its uncommon glass-green eyes. There was no hate in her expression, only a mixture of bewilderment and disappointment. She shook her head sadly and turned away.

Nicholai found a quiet end of the platform where he sat looking at a billowing cloud. He relaxed and concentrated on the slow churning within it, and in a few minutes he found escape into a brief mystic transport, in which state he was invulnerable to the scene about him, and to his racial guilt.

* * *

The General's second visit was late in the war. He arrived unannounced one spring afternoon and, after a private conversation with Otake-san, invited Nicholai to take a trip with him to view the cherry blossoms along the Kajikawa river near Niigata. Before turning inland over the mountains, their train brought them north through the industrialized strip between Yokohama and Tokyo, where it crawled haltingly over a roadbed weakened by bombing and overuse, past mile after mile of rubble and destruction caused by indiscriminate carpet bombing that had leveled homes and factories, schools and temples, shops, theaters, hospitals. Nothing stood higher than the chest of a man, save for the occasional jagged stump of a truncated smokestack.

The train was shunted around Tokyo, through sprawling suburbs. All around them was evidence of the great air raid of March 9 during which more than three hundred B-29's spread a blanket of incendiaries over residential Tokyo. Sixteen square miles of the city became an inferno, with temperatures in excess of 1800 degrees Fahrenheit melting roof tiles and buckling pavements. Walls of flame leapt from house to house, over canals and rivers, encircling throngs of panicked civilians who ran back and forth across ever-shrinking islands of safety, hopelessly seeking a break in the tightening ring of fire. Trees in the parks hissed and steamed as they approached their kindling points, then with a loud crack burst into flame from trunk to tip in one instant. Hordes waded out into the canals to avoid the terrible heat; but they were pushed farther out, over their heads, by screaming throngs pressing in from the shores. Drowning women lost their grip on babies held high until the last moment.

The vortex of flames sucked air in at its base, creating a firestorm of hurricane force that roared inward to feed the conflagration. So great were the blast-furnace winds that American planes circling overhead to take publicity photographs were buffeted thousands of feet upward.

Many of those who died that night were suffocated. The voracious fires literally snatched the breath from their lungs.

With no effective fighter cover left, the Japanese had no defense against the wave after wave of bombers that spread their jellied fire over the city. Firemen wept with frustration and shame as they dragged useless hoses toward the walls of flame. The burst and steaming water mains provided only limp trickles of water.

When dawn came, the city still smoldered, and in every pile of rubble little tongues of flame licked about in search of combustible morsels. The dead were everywhere. One hundred thirty thousand of them. The cooked bodies of children were stacked like cordwood in schoolyards. Elderly couples died in one another's arms, their bodies welded together in final embrace. The canals were littered with the dead, bobbing in the still-tepid water.

Silent groups of survivors moved from pile to pile of charred bodies in search of relatives. At the bottom of each pile were found a number of coins that had been heated to a white heat and had burned their way down through the dead. One fleshless young woman was discovered wearing a kimono that appeared unharmed by the flames, but when the fabric was touched, it crumbled into ashy dust.

In later years, Western conscience was to be shamed by what happened at Hamburg and Dresden, where the victims were Caucasians. But after the March 9 bombing of Tokyo, Time magazine described the event as "a dream come true," an experiment that proved that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves."

And Hiroshima was still to come.

Throughout the journey. General Kishikawa sat stiff and silent, his breathing so shallow that one could see no movement beneath the rumpled civilian suit he wore. Even after the horror of residential Tokyo was behind them, and the train was rising into the incomparable beauty of mountains and high plateaus, Kishikawa-san did not speak. To relieve the silence, Nicholai asked politely about the General's daughter and baby grandson in Tokyo. Even as he spoke the last word, he realized what must have happened. Why else would the General have received leave during these last months of the war?

When he spoke, Kishikawa-san's eyes were kind, but wounded and void. "I looked for them, Nikko. But the district where they lived was... it no longer exists. I have decided to say good-bye to them among the blossoms of Kajikawa, where once I brought my daughter when she was a little girl, and where I always planned to bring my... grandson. Will you help me say good-bye to them, Nikko?"

Nicholai cleared his throat. "How can I do that, sir?"

"By walking among the cherry trees with me. By allowing me to speak to you when I can no longer support the silence. You are almost my son, and you..." The General swallowed several times in succession and lowered his eyes.

Half an hour later, the General pressed his eye sockets with his fingers and sniffed. Then he looked across at Nicholai. "Well! Tell me about your life, Nikko. Is your game developing well? Is shibumi still a goal? How are the Otakes managing to get along?"

Nicholai attacked the silence with a torrent of trivia that shielded the General from the cold stillness in his heart.

* * *

For three days they stayed in an old-fashioned hotel in Niigata, and each morning they went to the banks of the Kajikawa and walked slowly between rows of cherry trees in full bloom. Viewed from a distance, the trees were clouds of vapor tinted pink. The path and road were covered with a layer of blossoms that were everywhere fluttering down, dying at their moment of greatest beauty. Kishikawa-san found solace in the insulating symbolism.

They talked seldom and in quiet tones as they walked. Their communication consisted of fragments of running thought concreted in single words or broken phrases, but perfectly understood. Sometimes they sat on the high embankments of the river and watched the water flow by until it seemed that the water was still, and they were flowing upstream. The General wore kimonos of browns and rusts, and Nicholai dressed in the dark-blue uniform of the student with its stiff collar and peaked cap covering his light hair. So much did they look like the typical father and son that passersby were surprised to notice the striking color of the young man's eyes.

On their last day, they remained among the cherry trees later than usual, walking slowly along the broad avenue until evening. As light drained from the sky, an eerie gloaming seemed to rise from the ground, illuminating the trees from beneath and accenting the pink snowfall of petals. The General spoke quietly, as much to himself as to Nicholai. "We have been fortunate. We have enjoyed the three best days of the cherry blossoms. The day of promise, when they are not yet perfect. The perfect day of enchantment. And today they are already past their prime. So this is the day of memory. The saddest day of the three... but the richest. There is a kind of—solace?... no... perhaps comfort—in all that. And once again I am struck by what a tawdry magician's trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old, Nikko. Viewed from your coign of vantage—facing toward the future—sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage—facing toward the past—this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in... for lack of time. Time. Only yesterday—but more than fifty years ago—I walked along this river with my father. There were no embankments then; no cherry trees. It was only yesterday... but another century. Our victory over the Russian navy was still ten years in the future. Our fighting on the side of the allies in the Great War was still twenty and more years away. I can see my father's face. (And in my memory, I am always looking up at it.) I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. I can still feel in my chest... as though nerves themselves have independent memories... the melancholy tug I felt then over my inability to tell my father that I loved him. We did not have the habit of communicating in such bold and earthy terms. I can see each line in my father's stern but delicate profile. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things—the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. I used to think I felt sorry for my father because I could never tell him I loved him. It was for myself that I felt sorry. I needed the saying more than he needed the hearing."