Shibumi

Throughout the twenty-two minutes, Darryl Starr had slouched in his white plastic chair, yearning for a cigar, but not daring to light up. He assumed glumly that the details of this gook-lover's life were being inflicted on him as a kind of punishment for screwing up the Rome hit by letting the girl get away. In an effort to save face, he had assumed an attitude of bored resignation, sucking at his teeth and occasionally relieving himself of a fluttering sigh. But something disturbed him more than being punished like a recalcitrant schoolboy. He sensed that Diamond's interest in Nicholai Hel went beyond professionalism. There was something personal in it, and Starr's years of experience in the trenches of CIA operations made him wary of contaminating the job at hand with personal feelings.

As became the nephew of an important man and a CIA trainee-in-terror, the PLO goatherd at first adopted an expression of strictest attention to the information rear-projected on the glass conference table, but soon his concentration strayed to the taut pink skin of Miss Swivven's calves, at which he grinned occasionally in his version of seductive gallantry.

The Deputy had responded to each bit of information with a curt nod of his head meant to create the impression that the CIA was current with all this information, and that he was merely ticking it off mentally. In fact, CIA did not have access to Fat Boy, although the Mother Company's biographic computer system had long ago consumed and digested everything in the tape banks of CIA and NSA.

For his part, Mr. Able had maintained a facade of thin boredom and marginal politeness, although he had been intrigued by certain episodes in Hel's biography, particularly those that revealed mysticism and the rare gift of proximity sense, for this refined man's tastes ran to the occult and exotic, which appetites were manifest in his sexual ambiguities.

A muted bell rang in the adjoining machine room, and Miss Swivven rose to collect the telephotos of Nicholai Hel that Mr. Diamond had requested. There was silence in the conference room for a minute, save for the hum and click of the First Assistant's console, where he was probing Fat Boy's international memory banks and recording certain fragments in his own short-term storage unit. Mr. Diamond lighted a cigarette (he permitted himself four a day) and turned his chair to look out on the spotlighted Washington Monument beyond the window, as he tapped his lips meditatively with his knuckle.

Mr. Able sighed aloud, straightened the crease of one trouser leg elegantly, and glanced at his watch. "I do hope this isn't going to take much longer. I have plans for this evening." Visions of that senator's Ganymede son had been in and out of his mind all evening.

"Ah," Diamond said, "here we are." He held out his hand for the photographs Miss Swivven was bringing from the machine room and leafed through them quickly. "They're in chronological order. This first is a blowup of his identification picture taken when he started working for Sphinx/FE Cryptography."

He passed it on to Mr. Able, who examined the photograph, grainy with excessive enlargement. "Interesting face. Haughty. Fine. Stern."

He pushed the picture across to the Deputy, who glanced at it briefly as though he were already familiar with it, then gave it to Darryl Starr.

"Shee-it," Starr exclaimed. "He looks like a kid! Fifteen-sixteen years old!"

"His appearance is misleading," Diamond said. "At the time this picture was taken he could have been as old as twenty-three. The youthfulness is a family trait. At this moment, Hel is somewhere between fifty and fifty-three, but I have been told that he looks like a man in his midthirties."

The Palestinian goatherd reached for the photograph, but it was passed back to Mr. Able, who looked at it again and said, "What's wrong with the eyes? They look odd. Artificial."

Even in black and white, the eyes had an unnatural transparency, as though they were underexposed.

"Yes," Diamond said, "his eyes are strange. They're a peculiar bright green, like the color of antique bottles. It's his most salient recognition feature."

Mr. Able looked obliquely at Diamond. "Have you met this man personally?"

"I... I have been interested in him for years," Diamond said evasively, as he passed along the second photograph.

Mr. Able winced as he looked at the picture. It would have been impossible to recognize this as the same man. The nose had been broken and was pushed to the left. There was a high ridge of scar tissue along the right cheek, and another diagonally across the forehead, bisecting the eyebrow. The lower lip had been thickened and split, and there was a puffy knob below the left cheekbone. The eyes were closed, and the face at rest.

Mr. Able pushed it over to the Deputy gingerly, as though he did not want to touch it.

The Palestinian held out his hand, but the picture was passed on to Starr. "Shit-o-dear! Looks like he went to Fistcity against a freight train!"

"What you see there," Diamond explained, "is the effect of a vigorous interrogation by Army Intelligence. The picture was taken some three years after the beating, while the subject was anesthetized in preparation for plastic surgery. And here he is a week after the operation." Diamond slid the next picture along the conference table.

The face was still a little puffy in result of recent surgery, but all signs of the disfigurement were erased, and a general tightening-up had even removed the faint lines and marks of age.

"And how old was he at this time?" Mr. Able asked.

"Between twenty-four and twenty-eight."

"Amazing. He looks younger than in the first photograph."

The Palestinian tried to turn his head upside down to see the picture as it passed by him.

"These are blowups of passport photos. The Costa Rican one dates from shortly after his plastic surgery, and the French one the year after that. We also believe he has an Albanian passport, but we have no copy of it."

Mr. Able quickly shuffled through the passport photos which, true to their kind, were overlit and of poor quality. One feature caught his attention, and he turned back to the French picture. "Are you sure this is the same man?"

Diamond took the picture back and glanced at it. "Yes, this is Hel."

"But the eyes—"

"I know what you mean. Because the peculiar color of his eyes would blow any disguise, he has several pairs of noncorrective contact lenses that are clear in the center but colored in the iris."

"So he can have whatever color eyes he wants to have. Interesting."

"Oh yes. Hel runs to the ingenious."

The OPEC man smiled. "That's the second time I have detected a hint of admiration in your voice."

Diamond looked at him coldly. "You're mistaken."

"Am I? I see. Are these the most recent pictures you have of the ingenious—but not admired—Mr. Hel?"

Diamond took up the remaining sheaf of photographs and tossed them onto the conference table. "Sure. We have plenty. And they're typical examples of CIA efficiency."

The Deputy's eyebrows arched in martyred resignation.

Mr. Able leafed through the pictures with a puzzled frown, then pushed them toward Starr.

The Palestinian leapt up and slapped his hand down on the stack, then grinned sheepishly as everyone glared at his surprisingly rude gesture. He pulled the photographs over to him and examined them carefully.

"I don't understand," he admitted. "What is this?"

In each of the pictures, the central figure was blurred. They had been taken in a variety of settings—cafés, city streets, the seashore, the bleachers of a jai-alai match, an airport terminal—and all had the image compression characteristic of a telephoto lens; but in not one of them was it possible to recognize the man being photographed, for he had suddenly moved at the instant of the shutter click.

"This really is something I do not understand," the goatherd confessed, as though that were remarkable. "It is something that my comprehension does not... comprehend."

"It appears," Diamond explained, "that Hel cannot be photographed unless he wants to be, although there's reason to believe he's indifferent about CIA's efforts to keep track of him and record his actions."

"Then why does he spoil each photograph?" Mr. Able asked.

"By accident. It has to do with this proximity sense of his. He can feel concentration being focused on him. Evidently the feeling of being tracked by a camera lens is identical with that of being sighted through the scope of a rifle, and the moment of releasing the shutter feels just like that of squeezing a trigger."

"So he ducks at the instant the picture is being taken," Mr. Able realized. "Amazing. Truly amazing."

"Is that admiration I detect?" Diamond asked archly.

Mr. Able smiled and tipped his head, granting the touch. "One thing I must ask. The Major who figured in the rather brutal interrogation of Hel was named Diamond. I am aware, of course, of the penchant of your people for identifying themselves with precious stones and metals—the mercantile world is richly ornamented with Pearls and Rubys and Golds—but never-the-less the coincidence of names here makes me uncomfortable. Coincidence, after all, is Fate's major weapon."

Diamond tapped the edges of the photographs on his desk to align them and set them aside, saying offhandedly, "The Major Diamond in question was my brother."

"I see," Mr. Able said.

Darryl Starr glanced uneasily toward Diamond, his worries about personal involvement confirmed.

"Sir?" the First Assistant said. "I'm ready with the printout of Hel's counterterrorist activities."

"All right. Bring it up on the table. Just surface stuff. No details. I only want to give these gentlemen a feeling for what we're facing."

Although Diamond had requested a shallow probe of Hel's known counterterrorist activities, the first outline to appear on the conference table was so brief that Diamond felt called upon to fill in. "Hel's first operation was not, strictly speaking, counterterrorist. As you see, it was a hit on the leader of a Soviet Trade Commission to Peking, not long after the Chinese communists had firmed up their control over that country. The operation was so inside and covert that most of the tapes were degaussed by CIA before the Mother Company began requiring them to give dupes of everything to Fat Boy. In bold, it went like this: the American intelligence community was worried about a Soviet/Chinese coalition, despite the fact that there were many grounds for dispute between them—matters of boundaries, ideology, unequal industrial development, racial mistrust. The Think Tank boys came up with a plan to exploit their underlying differences and break up any developing union. They proposed to send an agent into Peking to kill the head of the Soviet commission and plant incriminating directives from Moscow. The Chinese would think the Russians had sacrificed one of their own to create an incident as an excuse for breaking off the negotiations. The Soviets, knowing better, would think the Chinese had made the hit for the same reason. And when the Chinese brought out the incriminating directives as evidence of Russian duplicity, the Soviets would claim that Peking had manufactured the documents to justify their cowardly attack. The Chinese, knowing perfectly well that this was not the case, would be confirmed in their belief that the whole thing was a Russian plot.

"That the plan worked is proved by the fact that Sino-Soviet relations never did take firm root and are today characterized by mistrust and hostility, and Western bloc powers are able to play one of them off against the other and prevent what would be an overwhelming alliance.

"The little stumbling block to the ingenious plot of the Think Tank boys was finding an agent who knew enough Chinese to move through that country under cover, who could pass for a Russian when the necessity arose, and who was willing to take on a job that had slight chance of success, and almost no chance for escape after the hit was made. The operative bad to be brilliant, multilingual, a trained killer, and desperate enough to accept an assignment that offered not one chance in a hundred of survival.

"CIA ran a key-way sort, and they found only one person among those under their control who fit the description..."

Japan

It was early autumn, the fourth autumn Hel had passed in his cell in Sugamo Prison. He knelt on the floor before his desk/bed, lost in an elusive problem of Basque grammar, when he felt a tingling at the roots of the hair on the nape of his neck. He lifted his head and concentrated on the projections he was intercepting. This person's approaching aura was alien to him. There were sounds at the door, and it swung open. A smiling guard with a triangular scar on his forehead entered, one Nicholai had never seen or felt before.

The guard cleared his throat. "Come with me, please."

Hel frowned. The Onasai form? Respect language from a guard to a prisoner? He carefully arranged his notes and closed the book before rising. He instructed himself to be calm and careful. There could be hope in this unprecedented rupture of routine... or danger. He rose and preceded the guard out of the cell.

"Mr. Hel? Delighted to make your acquaintance." The polished young man rose to shake Hel's hand as he entered the visitors' room. The contrast between his close-fitting Ivy League suit and narrow tie and Hel's crumpled gray prison uniform was no greater than that between their physiques and temperaments. The hearty CIA agent was robust and athletic, capable of the first-naming and knee-jerk congeniality that marks the American salesman. Hel, slim and wiry, was reserved and distant. The agent, who was noted for winning immediate confidences, was a creature of words and reason. Hel was a creature of meaning and undertone. It was the battering ram and the rapier.

The agent nodded permission for the guard to leave. Hel sat on the edge of his chair, having had nothing but his steel cot to sit on for three years, and having lost the facility for sitting back and relaxing. After all that time of not hearing himself addressed in social speech, he found the urbane chat of the agent not so much disturbing as irrelevant.

"I've asked them to bring up a little tea," the agent said, smiling with a gruff shagginess of personality that he had always found so effective in public relations. "One thing you've got to hand to these Japanese, they make a good cup of tea—what my limey friends call a 'nice cuppa.'" He laughed at his failure to produce a recognizable cockney accent.

Hel watched him without speaking, taking some pleasure in the fact that the American was caught off balance by the battered appearance of his face, at first glancing away uneasily, and subsequently forcing himself to look at it without any show of disgust.

"You're looking pretty fit, Mr. Hel. I had expected that you would show the effects of physical inactivity. Of course, you have one advantage. You don't overeat. Most people overeat, if you want my opinion. The old human body would do better with a lot less food than we give it. We sort of clog up the tubes with chow, don't you agree? Ah, here we are! Here's the tea."

The guard entered with a tray on which there was a thick pot and two handleless Japanese cups. The agent poured clumsily, like a friendly bear, as though gracelessness were proof of virility. Hel accepted the cup, but he did not drink.

"Cheers," the agent said, taking his first sip. He shook his head and laughed. "I guess you don't say 'cheers' when you're drinking tea. What do you say?"

Hel set his cup on the table beside him. "What do you want with me?"

Trained in courses on one-to-one persuasion and small-group management, the agent believed he could sense a cool tone in Hel's attitude, so he followed the rules of his training and flowed with the ambience of the feedback. "I guess you're right. It would be best to get right to the point. Look, Mr. Hel, I've been reviewing your case, and if you ask me, you got a raw deal. That's my opinion anyway."

Hel let his eyes settle on the young man's open, frank face. Controlling impulses to reach out and break it, he lowered his eyes and said, "That is your opinion, is it?"

The agent folded up his grin and put it away. He wouldn't beat around the bush any longer. He would tell the truth. There was an adage he had memorized during his persuasion courses: Don't overlook the truth; properly handled, it can be an effective weapon. But bear in mind that weapons get blunted with overuse.

He leaned forward and spoke in a frank, concerned tone. "I think I can get you out of here, Mr. Hel."

"At what cost to me?"

"Does that matter?"

Hel considered this for a moment. "Yes."

"Okay. We need a job done. You're capable of doing it. We'll pay you with your freedom."

"I have my freedom. You mean you'll pay me with my liberty."

"Whatever."

"What kind of liberty are you offering?"

"What?"

"Liberty to do what?"

"I don't think I follow you there. Liberty, man. Freedom. You can do what you want, go where you want?"

"Oh, I see. You are offering me citizenship and a considerable amount of money as well."

"Well... no. What I mean is... Look, I'm authorized to offer you your freedom, but no one said anything about money or citizenship."

"Let me be sure I understand you. You are offering me a chance to wander around Japan, vulnerable to arrest at any moment, a citizen of no country, and free to go anywhere and do anything that doesn't cost money. Is that it?"

The agents discomfort pleased Hel. "Ah... I'm only saying that the matter of money and citizenship hadn't been discussed."

"I see." Hel rose. "Why don't you return when you have worked out the details of your proposal."

"Aren't you going to ask about the task we want you to perform?"

"No. I assume it to be maximally difficult. Very dangerous. Probably involving murder. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here."

"Oh, I don't think I'd call it murder, Mr. Hel. I wouldn't use that word. It's more like... like a soldier fighting for his country and killing one of the enemy."

"That's what I said: murder."

"Have it your own way then."

"I shall. Good afternoon."

The agent began to have the impression that he was being handled, while all of his persuasion training had insisted that he do the handling. He fell back upon his natural defense of playing it for the hale good fellow. "Okay, Mr. Hel. I'll have a talk with my superiors and see what I can get for you. I'm on your side in this, you know. Hey, know what? I haven't even introduced myself. Sorry about that."

"Don't bother. I am not interested in who you are."

"All right. But take my advice, Mr. Hel. Don't let this chance get away. Opportunity doesn't knock twice, you know."

"Penetrating observation. Did you make up the epigram?"

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Very well. And ask the guard to knock on my cell door twice. I wouldn't want to confuse him with opportunity."

Back in CIA Far East Headquarters in the basement of the Dai Ichi Building, Hel's demands were discussed. Citizenship was easy enough. Not American citizenship, of course. That high privilege was reserved for defecting Soviet dancers. But they could arrange citizenship of Panama or Nicaragua or Costa Rica—any of the CIA control areas. It would cost a bit in local baksheesh, but it could be done.

About payment they were more reluctant, not because they had any need to economize within their elastic budget, but a Protestant respect for lucre as a sign of God's grace made them regret seeing it wasted. And wasted it would probably be, as the mathematical likelihood of Hel's returning alive was slim. Another fiscal consideration was the expense they would be put to in transporting Hel to the United States for cosmetic surgery, as he had no chance of getting to Peking with a memorable face like that. Still, they decided at last, they really had no choice. Their key-way sort had delivered only one punch card for a man qualified to do the job.

Okay. Make it Costa Rican citizenship and 100 K.

Next problem...

But when they met the next morning in the visitor's room, the American agent discovered that Hel had yet another request to make. He would take the assignment on only if CIA gave him the current addresses of the three men who had interrogated him: the "doctor," the MP sergeant, and Major Diamond.

"Now, wait a minute, Mr. Hel. We can't agree to that sort of thing. CIA takes care of its own. We can't offer them to you on a platter like that. Be reasonable. Let bygones be bygones. What do you say?"

Hel rose and asked that the guard conduct him back to his cell.

The frank-faced young American sighed and shook his head. "All right. Let me call the office for an okay. Okay?"

Washington

"...and I assume Mr. Hel was successful in his enterprise," Mr. Able said. "For, if he were not, we wouldn't be sitting about here concerning ourselves with him."

"That's correct," Diamond said. "We have no details, but about four months after he was introduced into China through Hong Kong, we got word that he had been picked up by a bush patrol of the Foreign Legion in French Indo-China. He was in pretty bad shape... spent a couple of months in a hospital in Saigon... then he disappeared from our observation for a period before emerging as a free-lance counterterrorist. We have him associated with a long list of hits against terrorist groups and individuals, usually in the pay of governments through their intelligence agencies." He spoke to the First Assistant. "Let's run through them at a high scan rate."

Superficial details of one extermination action after another flashed up on the surface of the conference table as Nicholai Hel's career from the early fifties to the mid-seventies was laid out by Fat Boy. Occasionally one or another of the men would ask for a freeze, as he questioned Diamond about some detail.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Darryl Starr said at one point. "This guy really works both sides of the street! In the States he's hit both Weathermen and tri-K's; in Belfast he's moved against both parts of the Irish stew; he seems to have worked for just about everybody except the A-rabs, Junta Greeks, the Spanish, and the Argentines. And did you eyeball the weapons used in the hits? Along with the conventional stuff of handguns and nerve-gas pipes, there were such weirdo weapons as a pocket comb, a drinking straw, a folded sheet of paper, a door key, a light bulb... This guy'd strangle you with your own skivvies, if you wasn't careful!"

"Yes," Diamond said. "That has to do with his Naked/Kill training. It has been estimated that for Nicholai Hel, the average Western room contains just under two hundred lethal weapons."

Starr shook his head and sucked his teeth aloud. "Gettin' rid of a fella like that would be hardern' snapping snot off a fingernail."

Mr. Able paled at the earthy image.

The PLO goatherd shook his head and tished. "I cannot understand these sums so extravagant he receives for his servicing. In my country a man's life can be purchased for what, in dollars, would be two bucks thirty-five cents."

Diamond glanced at him tiredly. "That's a fair price for one of your countrymen. The basic reason governments are willing to pay Hel so much for exterminating terrorists is that terrorism is the most economical means of warfare. Consider the cost of mounting a force capable of protecting every individual in a nation from attack in the street, in his home, in his car. It costs millions of dollars just to search for the victim of a terrorist kidnapping. It's quite a bargain if the government can have the terrorist exterminated for a few hundred thousand, and avoid the antigovernment propaganda of a trial at the same time." Diamond turned to the First Assistant. "What is the average fee Hel gets for a hit?"

The First Assistant posed the simple question to Fat Boy. "Just over quarter of a million, sir. That's in dollars. But it seems he has refused to accept American dollars since 1963."

Mr. Able chuckled. "An astute man. Even if one runs all the way to the bank to change dollars for real money, their plunging value will cost him some fiscal erosion."

"Of course," the First Assistant continued, "that average fee is skewed. You'd get a better idea of his pay if you used the mean."

"Why is that?" the Deputy asked, pleased to have something to say.

"It seems that he occasionally takes on assignments without pay."

"Oh?" Mr. Able said. "That's surprising. Considering his experiences at the hands of the Occupation Forces and his desire to live in a style appropriate to his tastes and breeding, I would have assumed he worked for the highest bidder."

"Not quite," Diamond corrected. "Since 1967 he has taken on assignments for various Jewish militant groups without pay—some kind of twisted admiration for their struggle against larger forces."

Mr. Able smiled thinly.

"Take another case," Diamond continued. "He has done services without pay for ETA-6, the Basque Nationalist organization. In return, they protect him and his château in the mountains. That protection, by the way, is very effective. We have three known incidents of men going into the mountains to effect retribution for some action of Hel's, and in each case the men have simply disappeared. And every once in a while Hel takes on a job for no other reason than his disgust at the actions of some terrorist group. He did one like that not too long ago for the West German government. Flash that one up, Llewellyn."

The men around the conference table scanned the details of Hel's penetration into a notorious group of German urban terrorists that led to the imprisonment of the man after whom the group was named and the death of the woman.

"He was involved in that?", Mr. Able asked with a slight tone of awe.

"That was one heavy number," Starr admitted. "I shit thee not!'"

"Yes, but his highest pay for a single action was in the United States," Diamond said. "And interestingly enough, it was a private individual who footed the bill. Let's have that one, Llewellyn."

"Which one is that, sir?"

"Los Angeles—May of seventy-four."

As the rear-projection came up, Diamond explained. "You'll remember this. Five members of a gang of urban vandals and thieves calling themselves the Symbiotic Maoist Falange were put away in an hour-long firefight in which three hundred fifty police SWAT forces, FBI men, and CIA advisers poured thousands of rounds into the house in which they were holed up."

"What did Hel have to do with that?" Starr asked.

"He had been hired by a certain person to locate the guerrillas and put them away. A plan was worked out in which the police and FBI were to be tipped off, the whole thing timed so they would arrive after the wet work was done, so they could collect the glory... and responsibility. Unfortunately for Hel, they arrived half an hour too early, and he was in the house when they surrounded it and opened fire, along with gas- and firebombing. He had to break through the floor and hide in the crawl space while the place burned down around him. In the confusion of the last minute, he was able to get out and join the mob of officers. Evidently he was dressed as a SWAT man—flack vest, baseball cap, and all."

"But as I recall," Mr. Able said, "there were reports of firing from within the house during the action."

"That was the released story. Fortunately, no one ever stopped to consider that, although two submachine guns and an arsenal of handguns and shotguns was found in the charred wreckage, not one of the three hundred fifty police (and God knows how many onlookers) was so much as scratched after an hour of firing."

"But it seems to me that I remember seeing a photograph of a brick wall with chips out of it from bullets."

"Sure. When you surround a building with over three hundred gunhappy heavies and open fire, a fair number of slugs are going to pass in one window and out another."

Mr. Able laughed. "You're saying the police and FBI and CIA were firing on themselves?"

Diamond shrugged. "You don't buy geniuses for twenty thousand a year."

The Deputy felt he had to come to the defense of his organization. "I should remind you that CIA was there purely in an advisory capacity. We are prohibited by law from doing domestic wet work."

Everyone looked at him in silence, until Mr. Able broke it with a question for Diamond: "Why did this individual go to the expense of having Mr. Hel do the hit, when the police were only too willing?"

"The police might have taken a prisoner. And that prisoner might have testified in a subsequent trial."

"Ah, yes. I see."

Diamond turned to the First Assistant. "Pick up the scan rate and just skim the rest of Hel's known operations."

In rapid chronological order, sketches of action after action flashed up on the tabletop. San Sebastian, sponsor ETA-6; Berlin, sponsor German government; Cairo, sponsor unknown; Belfast, sponsor IRA; Belfast, sponsor UDA; Belfast, sponsor British government—and on and on. Then the record suddenly stopped.

"He retired two years ago," Diamond explained.

"Well, if he is retired..." Mr. Able lifted his palms in a gesture that asked what they were so worried about.

"Unfortunately, Hel has an overdeveloped sense of duty to friends. And Asa Stern was a friend."

"Tell me. Several times this word 'stunt' came up on the printout. I don't understand that."

"It has to do with Hel's system for pricing his services. He calls his actions 'stunts'; and he prices them the same way movie stunt men do, on the basis of two factors: the difficulty of the job, and the danger of failure. For instance, if a hit is hard to accomplish for reasons of narrow access to the mark or difficult penetration into the organization, the price will be higher. But if the consequences of the act are not too heavy because of the incompetence of the organization against which the action is performed, the price is lower (as in the case of the IRA, for instance, or CIA). Or take a reverse case of that: Hel's last stunt before retirement. There was a man in Hong Kong who wanted to get his brother out of Communist China. For someone like Hel, this wasn't too difficult, so you might imagine the fee would be relatively modest. But the price of capture would have been death, so that adjusted the fee upward. See how it goes?"

"How much did he receive for that particular... stunt?"

"Oddly enough, nothing—m money. The man who hired him operates a training academy for the most expensive concubines in the world. He buys baby girls from all over the Orient and educates them in tact and social graces. Only about one in fifty develop into beautiful and skillful enough products to enter his exclusive trade. The rest he simply equips with useful occupations and releases at the age of eighteen. In fact, all the girls are free to leave whenever they want, but because they get fifty percent of their yearly fee—between one and two hundred thousand dollars—they usually continue to work for him for ten or so years, then they retire in the prime of life with five hundred thousand or so in the bank. This man had a particularly stellar pupil, a woman of about thirty who went on the market for quarter-of-a-mil per year. In return for getting the brother out, Hel took two years of her service. She lives with him now at his château. Her name is Hana—part Japanese, part Negro, part Cauc. As an interesting sidelight, this training academy passes for a Christian orphanage. The girls wear dark-blue uniforms, and the women who train them wear nuns' habits. The place is called the Orphanage of the Passion."

Starr produced a low whistle. You're telling me that this squack of Hel's gets a quarter of a million a year? What'd that come to per screw, I wonder?"

"In your case," Diamond said, "about a hundred twenty-five thousand."

The PLO goatherd shook his head. "This Nicholai Hel must be very rich from the point of view of money, eh?"

"Not so rich as you might imagine. In the first place his 'stunts' are expensive to set up. This is particularly true when he has to neutralize the government of the country in which the stunt takes place. He does this through the information brokerage of a man we have never been able to locate—a man known only as the Gnome. The Gnome collects damaging facts about governments and political figures. Hel buys this information and uses it as blackmail against any effort on the part of the government to hamper his actions. And this information is very expensive. He also spends a lot of money mounting caving expeditions in Belgium, the Alps, and his own mountains. It's a hobby of his and an expensive one. Finally, there's the matter of his château. In the fifteen years since he bought it, he has spent a little over two million in restoring it to its original condition, importing the last of the world's master stonemasons, wood carvers, tile makers, and what not. And the furniture in the place is worth a couple of million more."

"So," Mr. Able said, "he lives in great splendor, this Hel of yours."

"Splendor, I guess. But primitive. The château is completely restored. No electricity, no central heating, nothing modern except an underground telephone line that keeps him informed of the arrival and approach of any strangers."

Mr. Able nodded to himself. "So a man of eighteenth-century breeding has created an eighteenth-century world for himself in splendid isolation in the mountains. How interesting. But I am surprised he did not return to Japan and live in the style he was bred to."

"From what I understand, when he got out of prison and discovered to what degree the traditional ways of life and ethical codes of Japan had been 'perverted' by Americanism, he decided to leave. He has never been back."

"How wise. For him, the Japan of his memory will always remain what it was in gentler, more noble times. Pity he's an enemy. I would like your Mr. Hel."

"Why do you call him my Mr. Hel?"

Mr. Able smiled. "Does that irritate you?"

"Any stupidity irritates me. But let's get back to our problem. No, Hel is not as rich as you might imagine. He probably needs money, and that might give us an angle on him. He owns a few thousand acres in Wyoming, apartments in half a dozen world capitals, a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees, but there's less than half a million in his Swiss bank. He still has the expenses of his château and his caving expeditions. Even assuming he sells off the apartments and the Wyoming land, life in his château would be, by his standards, a modest existence."

"A life of... what was the word?" Mr. Able asked, smiling faintly to himself at the knowledge he was annoying Diamond.

"I don't know what you mean."

"That Japanese word for things reserved and understated?"

"Shibumi?"

"Ah, yes. So even without taking any more 'stunts,' your—I mean, our Mr. Hel would be able to live out a life of shibumi."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Starr interposed. "Not with nookie at a hundred K a throw!"

"Will you shut up, Starr," Diamond said.

Not quite able to follow what was going on here, the PLO goatherd had risen from the conference table and strayed to the window, where he looked down and watched an ambulance with a flashing dome light thread its way through the partially congealed traffic—as that ambulance did every night at precisely this time. Starr's colorful language had attracted his attention, and he was thumbing through his pocket English/Arabic dictionary, muttering, "Nookie... nookie..." when suddenly the Washington Monument and the wide avenue of cars vanished, and the window was filled with a blinding light.

The goatherd screamed and threw himself to the floor, covering his head in anticipation of the explosion.

Everyone in the room reacted characteristically. Starr leapt up and whipped out his Magnum. Miss Swivven slumped into a chair. The Deputy covered his face with a sheet of typing paper. Diamond closed his eyes and shook his head at these asses with which he was surrounded. Mr. Able examined his cuticles. And the First Assistant, absorbed in his technological intercourse with Fat Boy, failed to notice that anything had happened.

"Get off the floor, for chrissake," Diamond said. "It's nothing. The street-scene film has broken, that's all."

"Yes, but..." the goatherd babbled.

"You came down in the elevator. You must have known you were in the basement."

"Yes, but..."

"Did you think you were looking down from the Sixteenth Floor?"

"No, but..."

"Miss Swivven, shut the rear projector off and make a note to have it repaired." Diamond turned to Mr. Able. "I had it installed to create a better working environment, to keep the office from feeling shut up in the bowels of the earth."

"And you have been capable of fooling yourself?" Starr snapped his gun back into its holster and glared at the window, as though to say it had been lucky... this time.

With ruminantial ambiguity, the goatherd grinned sheepishly as he got to his feet. "Boy-o-boy, that was a good one! I guess the joke was on me!"

Out in the machine room, Miss Swivven threw a switch, and the glaring light in the window went out, leaving a matte white rectangle that had the effect of sealing the room up and reducing its size.

"All right," Diamond said, "now you have some insight into the man we're dealing with. I want to talk a little strategy, and for that I would as soon have you two out of here." He pointed Starr and the PLO goatherd toward the exercise and sun room. "Wait in there until you're called."

Appearing indifferent to his dismissal. Star ambled toward the sun room, followed by the Arab who insisted on explaining again that he guessed the joke had been on him.

When the door closed behind them, Diamond addressed the two men at the conference table, speaking as though the First Assistant were not present, as indeed in many ways he was not.

"Let me lay out what I think we ought to do. First—"

"Just a moment, Mr. Diamond," Mr. Able interrupted. "I am concerned about one thing. Just what is your relationship to Nicholai Hel?"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, come now! It is evident that you have taken a particular interest in this person. You are familiar with so many details that do not appear in the computer printout."

Diamond shrugged. "After all, he's a mauve-card man; and it's my job to keep current with—"

"Excuse me for interrupting you again, but I am not interested in evasions. You have admitted that the officer in charge of the interrogation of Nicholai Hel was your brother."

Diamond stared at the OPEC troubleshooter for a second. "That's right. Major Diamond was my brother. My older brother."

"You were close to your brother?"

"When our parents died, my brother took care of me. He supported me while he was working his way through college. Even while he was working his way up through the OSS—a notoriously WASP organization—and later with CIA, he continued to—"

"Do spare us the domestic details. I would be correct to say that you were very close to him?"

Diamond's voice was tight. "Very close."

"All right. Now there is something you passed over rather quickly in your biographic sketch of Nicholai Hel. You mentioned that he required, as a part of his pay for doing the Peking assignment that got him out of prison, the current addresses of the three men involved in beating and torturing him during his interrogation. May I presume he did not want the addresses for the purpose of sending Christmas cards... or Hanukkah greetings?"

Diamond's jaw muscles rippled.

"My dear friend, if this affair is as serious as you seem to believe it is, and if you are seeking my assistance in clearing it up, then I must insist upon understanding everything that might bear upon the matter."

Diamond pressed his palms together and hooked the thumbs under his chin. He spoke from behind the fingers, his voice mechanical and atonic. "Approximately one year after Hel showed up in Indo-China, the 'doctor' who had been in charge of administering drugs during the interrogation was found dead in his abortion clinic in Manhattan. The coroner's report described the death as accidental, a freak fall which had resulted in one of the test tubes he was carrying shattering and going through his throat. Two months later, the MP sergeant who had administered the physical aspects of the interrogation and who had been transferred back to the United States died in an automobile accident. He had evidently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven his car off the road and over a cliff. Exactly three months later, Major Diamond—then Lieutenant Colonel Diamond—was on assignment in Bavaria. He had a skiing accident." Diamond paused and tapped his lips with his forefingers.

"Another freak accident, I suppose?" Mr. Able prompted.

"That's right. As best they could tell, he had taken a bad jump. He was found with a ski pole through his chest."

"Hm-m-m," Mr. Able said after a pause. "So this is the way CIA protects its own? It must be quite a satisfaction for you to have under your control the organization that gave away your brother's life as part of a fee."

Diamond looked across at the Deputy. "Yes. It has been a satisfaction."

The Deputy cleared his throat. "Actually, I didn't enter the Company until the spring of—"

"Tell me something," Mr. Able said. "Why haven't you taken retributive action against Hel before now?"

"I did once. And I will again. I have time."

"You did once? When was— Ah! Of course! Those policemen who surrounded that house in Los Angeles and opened fire half an hour before schedule! That was your doing?"

Diamond's nod had the quality of a bow to applause.

"So there is some revenge motive in all of this for you, it would seem."

"I'm acting in the best interest of the Mother Company. I have a message from the Chairman telling me that failure in this would be unacceptable. If Hel has to be terminated to assure the success of the Septembrists skyjacking then, yes, I shall take some personal satisfaction in that. It will be a life for a life, not, as in his case, three murders for one beating!"

"I doubt that he considered them murders. More likely he thought of them as executions. And if my guess is right, it was not the pain of the beatings that he was avenging."

"What, then?"

"The indignity of them. That's something you would have no way to understand."

Diamond puffed out a short laugh. "You really imagine you know Hel better than I do?"

"In some ways, yes—despite your years of studying him and his actions. You see, he and I—accepting our cultural differences—are of the same caste. You will never see this Hel clearly, squinting as you do across the indefinite but impassable barrier of breeding—a great gulf fixed, as the Qoran or one of those books terms it. But let us not descend to personalities. Presumably you sent those two plebes from the room for some other reason than a desire to improve the quality of the company."

Diamond was stiffly silent for a moment, then he drew a short breath and said, "I have decided to pay a visit to Hel's place in the Basque country."

"This will be the first time you have met him face to face?"

"Yes."

"And you have considered the possibility that it may be more difficult to get out of those mountains than to get in?"

"Yes. But I believe I shall be able to convince Mr. Hel of the foolishness of attempting to assist Miss Stern. In the first place, there is no logical reason why he should take on this assignment for a misguided middle-class girl he doesn't even know. Hel has nothing but disgust for amateurs of all kinds, including amateurs in terror. Miss Stern may see herself as a noble soldier in the service of all that is right in the world, but I assure you that Hel will view her as a pain in the ass."

Mr. Able tilted his head in doubt. "Even assuming that Mr. Hel does look upon Miss Stern as a proctological nuisance (whether or not he reflects on the happy pun), there remains the fact that Hel was a friend of the late Asa Stern, and you have yourself said that he has strong impulses toward loyalty to friends."

"True. But there are fiscal pressures we can bring to bear. We know that he retired as soon as he had accumulated enough money to live out his life in comfort. Mounting a 'stunt' against our PLO friends would be a costly matter. It's probable that Hel is relying on the eventual sale of his Wyoming land for financial security. Within two hours, that land will no longer be his. All records of his having bought it will disappear and be replaced by proof that the land is held by the Mother Company." Diamond smiled. "By way of fringe benefit, there happens to be a little coal on that land that can be profitably stripped off. To complete his financial discomfort, two simple cables to Switzerland from the Chairman will cause Hel's money held in a Swiss bank to vanish."

"And I imagine the money will turn up in Mother Company assets?"

"Part of it. The rest will be held by the banks as transactional costs. The Swiss are nothing if not frugal. It's a Calvinist principle that there is an entrance fee to heaven, to keep the riff-raff out. It is my intention to perform these fiscally punitive actions, regardless of Hel's decision to take or reject Miss Stern's job."

"A gesture in memory of your brother?"

"You may think of it that way, if you like. But it will also serve as a financial interdiction to Hel's being a nuisance to the Mother Company and to the nations whose interest you represent."

"What if money pressures alone are not sufficient to persuade him?"

"Naturally, I have a secondary line of action to address that contingency. The Mother Company will bring pressure upon the British government to spare no effort in protecting the Black Septembrists involved in the Munich Olympics debacle. It will be their task to make sure they are unmolested in their skyjacking of the Montreal plane. This will not require as much pressure as you might imagine because, now that the North Sea oil fields are producing, England's economic interests are more closely allied to those of OPEC than to those of the West."

Mr. Able smiled. "Frankly, I cannot imagine the MI-5 and MI-6 lads being an effective deterrent to Mr. Hel. The greater part of their energies are applied to writing imaginative memoirs of their daring exploits during the Second World War."

"True. But they will have a certain nuisance value. Also, we shall have the services of the French internal police to help us contain Hel within that country. And we are moving on another front. It is inconceivable that Hel would try to enter England to put the Septembrists away without first neutralizing the British police. I told you that he does this by buying blackmail material from an information broker known as the Gnome. For years the Gnome has evaded international efforts to locate and render him dysfunctional. Through the good services of Her communications subsidiaries, the Mother Company is beginning to close in on this man. We know that he lives somewhere near the city of Bayonne, and we're actively involved in tightening down on him. If we get to him before Hel does, we can interdict the use of blackmail leverage against the British police."

Mr. Able smiled. "You have a fertile mind, Mr. Diamond—when personal revenge is involved." Mr. Able turned suddenly to the Deputy. "Do you have something to contribute?"

Startled, the Deputy said, "Pardon me? What?"

"Never mind." Mr. Able glanced again at his watch. "Let's do get on with it. I assume you didn't ask me here so you could parade before me your array of tactics and interdictions. Obviously, you need my help in the unlikely event that all the machines you have set into motion fail, and Hel manages to put the Septembrists away."

"Exactly. And it is because this is a bit delicate that I wanted those two buffoons out of the room while we talked about it. I accept the fact that the nations you represent are committed to protecting the PLO, and therefore the Mother Company is, and therefore CIA is. But let's be frank among ourselves. We would all be happier if the Palestinian issue (and the Palestinians with it) would simply disappear. They're a nasty, ill-disciplined, vicious lot whom history happened to put in the position of a symbol of Arab unity. All right so far?"

Mr. Able waved away the obvious with his hand.

"Very well. Let's consider our posture, should everything fail and Hel manage to exterminate the Septembrists. All that would really concern us would be assuring the PLO that we had acted vigorously on its behalf. Considering their barbaric nature, I think they would be mollified if we took vengeance on their behalf by destroying Nicholai Hel and everything he possesses."

"Sowing the land with salt?" Mr. Able mused.

"Just so."

Mr. Able was silent for a time, his eyes lowered as he tickled his upper lip with his forefinger. "Yes, I believe we can rely on the PLO's sophomoric mentality to that degree. They would accept a major act of revenge—provided it was lurid enough—as proof that we are devoted to their interests." He smiled to himself. "And do not imagine that it has escaped my notice that such an eventuality would allow you to slay two birds with one stone. You would solve the tactical problem at hand, and avenge your brother at one stroke. Is it possible that you would rather see all your devices fail and Nicholai Hel somehow break through and hit the Septembrists, freeing you to devise and execute a maximal punishment for him?"

"I shall do everything in my power to prevent the hit in the first instance. That would be best for the Mother Company, and Her interests take priority over my personal feelings." Diamond glanced toward the First Assistant, It was most likely that he reported directly to the Chairman on Diamond's devotion to the Company.

"That's it then," Mr. Able said, rising from the conference table. "If there is not further need for me, I shall return to the social event this business interrupted."

Diamond rang for Miss Swivven to escort Mr. Able out of the building.

The Deputy rose and cleared his throat. "I don't assume you'll be needing me?"

"Have I ever? But I'll expect you to keep yourself available to execute instructions. You may go."

Diamond directed the First Assistant to roll back the information on Nicholai Hel and be prepared to project it at a slow enough rate to accommodate the literacy of Starr and the PLO goatherd, who were returning from the exercise room, the Arab rubbing his inflamed eyes as he put his English/Arabic dictionary back into his pocket. "Goodness my gracious, Mr. Diamond! It is most difficult to read in that room. The lights along the walls are so bright!"

"I want you two to sit here and learn everything you're capable of about Nicholai Hel. I don't care if it takes all night. I've decided to bring you along when I visit this man—not because you'll be of any use, but because you're responsible for this screw-up, and I'm going to make you see it out to the end."

"That's mighty white of you," Starr muttered.

Diamond spoke to Miss Swivven as she reentered from the elevator. "Note the following. One: Hel's Wyoming land, terminate. Two: Swiss money, terminate, Three: The Gnome, intensify search for. Four: MI-5 and MI-6, alert and instruct. All right, Llewellyn, start the roll-down for our blundering friends here. And you two had better pray that Nicholai Hel has not already gone underground."

Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau

At that moment, Nicholai Hel was 393 meters underground, revolving slowly on the end of a cable half a centimeter thick. Seventy-five meters below him, invisible in the velvet black of the cave, was the tip of a vast rubble cone, a collection of thousands of years of debris from the natural shaft. And at the base of the rubble cone his caving partner was waiting for him to finish his eleventh descent down the twisting shaft that wound above him like a mammoth wood screw turned inside out.

The two Basque lads operating the winch at the edge of the gouffre almost four hundred meters above had set double friction clamps to hold the cable fast while they replaced a spent cable drum with a fresh one. This was the most unnerving moment of the descent—and the most uncomfortable. Unnerving, because Hel was now totally dependent on the cable, after ninety minutes of negotiating the narrow, twisting shaft with its bottlenecks, narrow ledges, tricky dihedrons, and tight passages down which he had to ease himself gingerly, never surrendering to gravity because the cable was slack to give him maneuvering freedom. Throughout the descent there was the constant irritation of keeping the cable from fouling or from becoming entangled with the telephone line that dangled beside it. But through all the problems of the shaft, some challenging and some only irritating, there was the constant comfort of the rock walls, close and visible in the beam of his helmet light, theoretically available for clinging to, should something go wrong with the cable or the winch.

But now he was out of the shaft and dangling just below the roof of the first great cave, the walls of which had receded beyond the throw of his helmet light, and he hung there in the infinite void; the combined weight of his body, of four hundred meters of cable, and of the watertight container of food and equipment depending from two friction clamps four hundred meters above. Hel had full faith in the clamp-and-winch system; he had designed it himself and built it in his workshop. It was a simple affair, pedal-driven by the powerful legs of the Basque mountain lads above, and geared so low that descent was very slow. Sliding safety clamps were designed to bite into the cable and arrest it if it exceeded a certain rate of descent. The fulcrum was a tripod of aluminum tubes formed in an open tepee directly over the narrow entrance hole at the bottom of the gouffre. Hel trusted the mechanical system that prevented him from plummeting down through the dark onto the tip of that pile of rubble and boulders that filled about half of the first great cave, but all the same he muttered imprecations at the boys above to get on with it. He had to breathe orally, his mouth wide open, because he was hanging in the middle of a waterfall produced by the outflow of an underground stream into the shaft at meter point 370, making the last ninety-five meters a free descent through an icy spray that seeped up his arms, despite the tight rings of rubber at his wrists, and trickled up to shock his hot armpits. His helmet lamp was useless in the waterfall, so be turned it off and hung limp in the roar and echoing hiss of the water, his harness beginning to chafe his ribs and crotch. There was a certain advantage to his blindness. Inevitably, in the twisting, scrambling descent, the cable always got wound up, and when he gave his weight to the line and began the free descent through the roof of the first cave, he started to spin, slowly at first, then faster, then slowing down and pausing, then beginning to spin in the opposite direction. Had he been able to see the slant of the spray swirling around him, he would have felt the pangs of vertigo, but in the total dark there was only a sensation of "ballooning" as the speed of his spin tended to spread out his arms and legs.

Hel felt himself being drawn upward a short distance to loosen the safety clamps, then there was a stomach-clutching drop of several centimeters as his weight was transferred to the new cable drum, and he began a twisting descent through the waterfall, which soon broke up into thick mist. Eventually, he could make out a smear of light below where his caving partner awaited him, standing well aside from the line of fall of rock and water and, God forbid, possibly Hel.

The scrape of his dangling equipment container told Hel he had reached the tip of the rubble cone, and he pulled up his legs so as to make his first contact with the rock a sitting one, because the lads above would lock up with the first sign of slack, and it could be comically difficult to unharness oneself while standing tiptoe on the rim of a boulder.

Le Cagot scrambled over and helped with the unharnessing and unstrapping of equipment because Hel's legs and arms were numb with loss of circulation in the wet cold, and his fingers felt fat and insensitive as they fumbled with straps and buckles.

"So, Niko!" Le Cagot boomed, his basso voice reverberating in the cave. "You finally decided to drop in for a visit! Where have you been? By the Two Balls of Christ, I thought you had decided to give it over and go home! Come on. I have made some tea."

Le Cagot hoisted the container on his shoulder and started down the unstable rubble cone, picking his way quickly through familiarity, and avoiding loose stones that would precipitate an avalanche. Opening and closing his hands to restore circulation, Hel followed his partner's steps exactly because Le Cagot knew the treacherous and unstable rubble cone better than he. The gruff old Basque poet had been down here for two days, making base camp at the foot of the cone and taking little Theseus sorties into the small caves and galleries that gave out from the principal chamber. Most of these had run out into blocks and blank walls, or pinched out into cracks too narrow for penetration.

Le Cagot pawed around in the equipment container Hel had descended with. "What is this? You promised to bring a bottle of Izzara! Don't tell me you drank it on your way down! If you did this to me, Niko, then by the Epistolary Balls of Paul I shall have to do you hurt, though that would cause me some sadness, for you are a good man, despite your misfortune of birth." It was Le Cagot's conviction that any man so unlucky as not to be born Basque suffered from a tragic genetic flaw.

"It's in there somewhere," Hel said as he lay back on a fiat rock and sighed with painful pleasure as his knotted muscles began to stretch and relax.

During the past forty hours, while Le Cagot had been making base camp and doing light peripheral explorations, Hel had made eleven trips up and down through the gouffre shaft, bringing down food, equipment, nylon rope, and flares. What he needed most of all now was a few hours of sleep, which he could take at any time in the constant blackness of a cave, despite the fact that, by outside time, it was shortly before dawn.

Nicholai Hel and Beñat Le Cagot had been a caving team for sixteen years, during which they had done most of the major systems in Europe, occasionally making news in the limited world of the speleologue with discoveries and new records of depth and distance. Over the years their division of duties had become automatic. Le Cagot, a bull of strength and endurance despite his fifty years, always went down first, sweeping up as he made his slow descent, clearing ledges and dihedrons of loose rock and rubble that could be knocked off by the cable and kill a man in the shaft. He always brought the battery telephone down with him and established some kind of base camp, well out of the line of fall for rock and water. Because Hel was more lithe and tactically more skillful, he made all the equipment trips when, as in the case of this new hole, the access shaft was sinuous and twisting, and gear could not be lowered without the guidance of an accompanying man. Usually this only entailed two or three trips. But this time they had discovered all the signs of a great network of caverns and galleries, the exploration of which would require a great deal of equipment, so Hel had had to make eleven chafing, grueling trips. And now that the job was over and his body was no longer sustained by the nervous energy of danger, fatigue was overtaking him, and his knotted muscles were slackening painfully.

"Do you know what, Niko? I have been giving a great problem the benefit of my penetrating and illuminating mind." Le Cagot poured himself a large portion of Izzara into the metal cap of a flask. After two days alone in the dark cave, Le Cagot's gregarious personality was hungry for conversation which, for him, consisted of monologues delivered to an appreciative audience. "And here's what I have been thinking, Niko. I have decided that all cavers are mad, save of course for Basque cavers, in whom what is madness for others is a manifestation of bravery and thirst for adventure. Do you agree?"

Hel hum-grunted as he descended into a coma/sleep that seemed to soften the slab of stone beneath him.

"But, you protest, is it fair to say the caver is more crazy than the mountain climber? It is! And why? Because the caver faces the more dangerous friction. The climber confronts only the frictions of his body and strength. But the caver faces erosions of nerve and primordial fears. The primitive beast that lingers within man has certain deep dreads, beyond logic, beyond intelligence. He dreads the dark. He fears being underground, which place he has always called the home of evil forces. He fears being alone. He dreads being trapped. He fears the water from which, in ancient times, he emerged to become Man. His most primitive nightmares involve falling through the dark, or wandering lost through mazes of alien chaos. And the caver—crazy being that he is—volitionally chooses to face these nightmare conditions. That is why he is more insane than the climber, because the thing he risks at every moment is his sanity. This is what I have been thinking about, Niko... Niko? Niko? What, do you sleep while I am talking to you? Lazy bastard! I swear by the Perfidious Balls of Judas that not one man in a thousand would sleep while I am talking! You insult the poet in me! It is like closing your eyes to a sunset, or stopping your ears to a Basque melody. You know that, Niko? Niko? Are you dead? Answer yes or no. Very well, for your punishment, I shall drink your portion of the Izzara."

* * *

The shaft to the cave system they were preparing to explore had been discovered by accident the year before, but it had been kept secret because a part of the conical gouffre above it was in Spain, and there was a risk that the Spanish authorities might seal off the entrance as they had at Gouffre Pierre-Saint-Martin after the tragic fall and death of Marcel Loubens in 1952. During the winter, a team of young Basque lads had slowly shifted the boundary stones to put the gouffre well within France, moving twenty markers a little at a time so as to fool the Spanish border guards who checked the area routinely. This adjustment in borders seemed perfectly legitimate to them; after all, it was all Basque land, and they were not particularly interested in an arbitrary boundary established by the two occupying nations.

There was another reason for shifting the border. Since Le Cagot and the two Basque boys operating the winch were known activists in ETA, an arrival of Spanish border police while they were working the cave might end with their passing their lives in a Spanish prison.

Although the Gouffre Port-de-Larrau was rather distant from the vast field of funnel-shaped depressions that characterize the area around Pic d'Anie and earn it the name "the Gruyère of France," it had been visited occasionally by curious teams of cavers, each of which had been disappointed to find it "dry," its shaft clogged with boulders and rubble after a few meters down. In time the word spread amongst the tight community of deep cavers that there was no point in making the long climb up to Gouffre Port-de-Larrau, when there was so much better caving to be had in the vast gouffre field above Ste. Engrace, where the mountainsides and high plateaus were strewn with the conical depressions of gouffres formed by infalls of surface rock and earth into cave systems in the calciate rock below.

But a year ago, two shepherds tending flocks in the high grazing lands were sitting at the edge of Gouffre Port-de-Larrau, taking a lunch of fresh cheese, hard bread, and xoritzo, that strong red sausage, one bite of which will flavor a mouthful of bread. One of the lads thoughtlessly tossed a stone down toward the mouth of the gouffre and was surprised at the startled flight of two crows. It is well-known that crows make nests only over shafts of considerable depth, so it was puzzling that these birds had nested over the little dimple of Gouffre Larrau. In curiosity, they scrambled down the side of the funnel and dropped stones down the shaft. With the echoing and reechoing of the stones and the rubble they knocked off on their way down, it was impossible to tell how deep the shaft was, but one thing was sure: it was no longer a little dimple. Evidently the great earthquake of 1962 that had almost destroyed the village of Arrete had also cleared out some of the choke stones and rubble blocking the shaft.

When, two months later, the second transhumance brought the lads down to the valley, they informed Beñat Le Cagot of their discovery, knowing that the blustery poet of Basque separatism was also an avid caver. He swore them to secrecy and carried the news of the find to Nicholai Hel, with whom he lived in safety, whenever recent actions made remaining in Spain particularly unwise.

Neither Hel nor Le Cagot allowed himself to become too excited over the find. They realized that chances were against finding any great cave system at the bottom of the shaft—assuming they got to the bottom. In all probability, the earthquake had cleared only the upper portions of the shaft. Or, as is often the case, they might find that centuries of infall down the gouffre had built up the rubble cone below until it rose to the roof of the cave and its tip actually entered the shaft, choking it off forever.

Despite all these protective doubts, they decided to make a preliminary light exploration immediately—just clearing their way down and taking a look—nothing major.

With autumn, bad weather came to the mountains, and that was an advantage, for it would diminish any inclinations toward energetic border patrolling on the part of the Spanish (the French being congenitally disinclined to such rigors). The heavy weather would, however, make hard work of bringing into those desolate mountains the winch, the cable drums, the battery phones, the fulcrum tripod, and all the equipment and food they would need for the survey.

Le Cagot sniffed and made light of these tasks, reminding Hel that smuggling contraband over those mountains was the traditional occupation of the Soultain Basque.

"Did you know that we once brought a piano over from Spain?"

"I heard something about that. How did you do it?"

"Ah-ha! Wouldn't the flat hats like to know! Actually, it was fairly simple. Another insurmountable problem that crumbled in the face of Basque ingenuity."

Hel nodded fatalistically. There was no way to avoid the story now, as various manifestations of Basque racial superiority constituted the principal theme of Le Cagot's conversation.

"Because, Niko, you are something of an honorary Basque—despite your ludicrous accent—I shall tell you how we got the piano over. But you must promise to guard the secret to the death. Do you promise?"

"Pardon me?" Hel had been attending to something else.

"I accept your promise. Here's how we did it. We brought the piano over note by note. It took eighty-eight trips. The fellow stumbled while carrying the middle C and dented it, and to this day that piano has two B-flats side by side. That is the truth! I swear it on the Hopeless Balls of Saint Jude! Why would I lie?"

Two and a half days spent bringing the gear up to the gouffre, a day taken to set it up and test it, and the work of exploration began. Hel and Le Cagot took turns down in the shaft, clearing rubble from the narrow ledges, chipping off sharp outcroppings that threatened to abrade the cable, breaking down the triangular wedges of boulders that blocked off the shaft. And any one of those wedges might have proved too firmly lodged to be broken down; any one of them might turn out to be the tip of the clogging rubble cone; and their exploration would come to an inglorious end.

The shaft turned out not to be a dead fall, but rather an inside-out screw which so twisted the cable that each time they came to a short free drop their first task was to put their body weight on the line and accept the dizzying spin and counterspin necessary to unwind the cable. In addition to breaking up clogs and sweeping rubble from ledges, they often had to chip away at the mother rock, particularly in "jugs" and bottlenecks, to make a relatively straight line of fall for the cable, so it would pay out without rubbing against edges of stone, which friction would sooner or later scar and weaken the cable, the thickness of which was already minimal: a hundred percent safety limit when carrying Le Cagot's eighty-two kilos plus a gear container. In designing the pedal winch, Hel had chosen the lightest cable possible for two reasons: flexibility through corkscrew passages and weight. It was not so much the weight of the cable drums that concerned him; his real concern was the weight of the paid-out line. When a man is down three or four hundred meters, the weight of the cable in the shaft triples the work of the men working the winch.

As it was always black in the shaft, they soon lost any sense of diurnal time, and sometimes came up surprised to find it was night. Each man worked as long as his body strength would allow, to reduce the time wasted bringing one man back up and lowering the other. There were exciting times when a clog would break through, revealing ten meters of open shaft; and spirits, both at the end of the cable and above at the telephone headset, would soar. At other times, a jam of choke stone would be loosened only to collapse into the next obstruction a meter or two down, thickening the clog.

The young men working the winch were new to the task, and on one occasion they failed to set the friction safety clamps. Hel was working down below, pecking away at a four-stone pyramid clog with a short-handled pick. Suddenly the clog gave away under his feet. The cable above him was slack. He fell...

About thirty centimeters to the next clog.

For a fraction of a second, be was a dead man. And for a few moments he huddled in silence as the adrenaline spurt made his stomach flutter. Then he put on his headset and in his soft prison voice gave slow, clear instructions on the use of the clamps. And he returned to work.

When both Hel and Le Cagot were too worn of body, too scuffed of knuckle and knee, too stiff of forearm to make a fist around the pick handle, they would sleep, taking shelter in a shepherd's artzain chola shelter used during the summer pasturage on the flank of Pic d'Orhy, this highest of the Basque mountains. Too knotted and tense to find sleep quickly, they would chat while the wind moaned around the south flank of Pic d'Orhy. It was there that Hel first heard the adage that the Basque, wherever they roam in the world, always yearn with a low-grade romantic fever to return to the Eskual-herri.

Orhiko choria Orhin laket: "the birds of Orhy are happy only at Orhy."

The meanest and most desperate time was spent at a thick jam at meter point 365, where they had to work in a constant rain of icy seep water. They could hear the roar and hiss of an underground river that entered the shaft close below. From the sound, it was evident that the river fell a long way after entering the shaft, and the chances were that the water had kept the rest of the hole clear of rock jams.

When Hel came up after three hours of picking away at the heavy clog, he was pale and shivering with bonedeep cold, his lips purple with incipient hypothermia, the skin of his hands and face bleached and wrinkled from hours in the water. Le Cagot bad a great laugh at his expense and told him to stand aside and see how the rock would tremble and retreat before the force of a Basque. But he wasn't long down in the hole before his voice came gasping and spitting over the headphones, damning the clog, the cold rain, the stupid shaft, the mountain, the hobby of caving, and all of creation by the Vaporous Balls of the Holy Ghost! Then suddenly there was silence. His voice came up the line, breathless and hushed. "It's going to slip. Make sure the goddamned clamps are set. If I fall and destroy my magnificent body, I'll come back up and kick many asses!"

"Wait!" Hel shouted over the telephone. The line above was still slack to give Le Cagot work room.

There was a grunt as he delivered the last blow, then the cable tensed. For a time there was silence, then his voice came, strained and metallic: "That is it, my friends and admirers! We are through. And I am hanging in a goddamned waterfall." There was a pause. "By the way, my arm is broken."

Hel took a long breath and pictured the schematic of the shaft in his mind. Then he spoke into the mouthpiece in his calm, soft voice. "Can you make it up through the corkscrew one-handed?"

There was no answer from below.

"Beñat? Can you make it up?"

"Considering the alternative, I think I had better give it a try."

"We'll take it slow and easy."

"That would be nice."

On instructions from Hel, the lad began to pedal. The system was so low-geared that it was easy to maintain a slow pace, and for the first twenty meters there was no difficulty. Then Le Cagot entered the corkscrew that twisted up for almost eighty meters. He couldn't be pulled up through this; the niches and slits they had cut into the rock for the free passage of the pay line were only centimeters wide. Le Cagot would have to climb, sometimes locking himself in a wedging stance while he called for slack in the cable so that he could reach up and flick it out of a narrow slit. All this onehanded.

At first, Le Cagot's voice came over the line regularly, joking and humming, the predictable manifestations of his ebullient braggadocio. It was his habit to talk and sing constantly when underground. He claimed, as poet and egotist, to delight in the sound of his voice enriched with reverberation and echo. Hel had always known that the chatter served the additional purpose of filling the silence and pressing back the dark and loneliness, but he never mentioned this. Before long, the joking, singing, and swearing with which he showed off for those above and numbed his sense of danger began to be replaced by the heavy rasp of labored breathing. Occasionally there were tight dental grunts as a movement shocked waves of pain up his broken arm.

Up and down the cable went. A few meters up, then slack had to be given so Le Cagot could work out some cable jam. If he had both hands free, he could hold the line clear above him and come up fairly steadily.

The first lad at the pedal winch wore out, and they locked the pay line in the double clamps while the second boy took his place. The pedaling was easier now that more than half the weight of the cable was up in the drums, but still Le Cagot's progress was slow and irregular. Two meters up; three meters of slack for clearing a foul; take up the slack; a meter up; two meters down; two and a half meters up.

Hel did not talk to Le Cagot over the phones. They were old friends, and Hel would not insult him by seeming to think he needed the psychological support of being "talked up." Feeling useless and worn with tension and with silly but unavoidable attempts to help Le Cagot up by means of sympathetic kinesodics and "body English," Hel stood beside the take-up drum, listening to Le Cagot's rasping breath over the line. The cable had been painted with red stripes every ten meters, so by watching them come slowly into the pulley blocks Hel could tell where Le Cagot was in the shaft. In his mind, he could see the features around Beñat; that little ledge where he could get a toehold; that snarled dihedron where the cable was sure to foul; that bottleneck in which his broken arm must take some punishment.

Le Cagot's breathing was coming in gulps and gasps. Hel marked the cable with his eye; Le Cagot would now be at the most difficult feature of the ascent, a double dihedron at meter point 44. Just below the double dihedron was a narrow ledge where one could get purchase for the first jackknife squeeze, a maneuver hard enough for a man with two good arms, consisting of chimney climbing so narrow in places that all one could get was a heel-and-knee wedge, so wide in others that the wedge came from the flats of the feet to the back of the neck. And all the time the climber had to keep the slack cable from cross-threading between the overhanging knobs above.

"Stop," said Le Cagot's abraded voice. He would be at me ledge, tilting back his head and looking up at the lower of the two dihedrons in the beam of his helmet lamp. "I think I'll rest here a moment."

Rest? Hel said to himself. On a ledge six centimeters wide?

Obviously that was the end. Le Cagot was spent. Effort and pain had drained him, and the toughest bit was still above him. Once past the double dihedron, his weight could be taken on the cable and be could be dragged up like a sack of millet. But he had to make that reflex dihedron on his own.

The boy working the pedals looked toward Hel, his black Basque eyes round with fear. Papa Cagot was a folk hero to these lads. Had he not brought to the world an appreciation of Basque poetry in his tours of universities throughout England and the United States, where involved young people applauded his revolutionary spirit and listened with hushed attention to verse they could never understand? Was it not Papa Cagot who had gone into Spain with this outlander, Hel, to rescue thirteen who were in prison without trial?

Le Cagot's voice came over the wire. "I think I'll stay here for a while." He was no longer panting and rasping, but there was a calm of resignation alien to his boisterous personality. "This place suits me."

Not sure exactly what he was going to do, Nicholai began to speak in his soft voice, "Neanderthals. Yes, they're probably Neanderthals."

"What are you talking about?" Le Cagot wanted to know.

"The Basque."

"That in itself is good. But what is this about Neanderthals?"

"I've been giving some study to the origin of the Basque race. You know the facts as well as I. Their language is the only pre-Aryan tongue to survive. And there is certain evidence that they are a race apart from the rest of Europe. Type O blood is found in only forty percent of Europeans, while it appears in nearly sixty percent of the Basque. And among the Eskualdun, Type B blood is almost unknown. All this suggests that we have a totally separate race, a race descended from some different primate ancestor."

"Let me warn you right now, Niko. This talk is taking a path I do not like!"

"...then too there is the matter of skull shape. The round skull of the Basque is more closely related to Neanderthal man than the higher Cro-Magnon, from which the superior peoples of the world descend."

"Niko? By the Two Damp Balls of John the Baptist, you will end by making me angry!"

"I'm not saying that it's a matter of intelligence that separates the Basque from the human. After all, they have learned a great deal at the feet of their Spanish masters—"

"Argh!"

"—no, it's more a physical thing. While they have a kind of flashy strength and courage—good for a quick screw or a bandit raid—the Basque are shown up when it comes to sticking power, to endurance—"

"Give me some slack!"

"Not that I blame them. A man is what he is. A trick of nature, a wrinkle in time has preserved this inferior race in their mountainous corner of the world where they have managed to survive because, let's face it, who else would want this barren wasteland of the Eskual-Herri?"

"I'm coming up, Niko! Enjoy the sunlight! It's your last day!"

"Bullshit, Beñat. Even I would have trouble with that double dihedron. And I have two good arms and don't suffer the blemish of being a Neanderthal."

Le Cagot did not answer. His heavy breathing alone came over the wire, and sometimes a tight nasal snort as his broken arm took a shock.

Twenty centimeters now, thirty then, the boy at the winch took up the slack, his attention riveted to the cable markings as they passed through the tripod blocks, swallowing in sympathetic pain with the inhuman gasping that filled his earphones. The second lad held the taut take-up cable in his hand, a useless gesture of assistance.

Hel took off his headphones and sat on the rim of the gouffre. There was nothing more he could do, and he did not want to hear Beñat go, if he went. He lowered his eyes and brought himself into middle-density meditation, narcotizing his emotions. He did not emerge until he heard a shout from the lad at the winch. Mark 40 meters was in the blocks. They could take him on the line!

Hel stood at the narrow crevice of the gouffre mouth. He could hear Le Cagot down there, his limp body scraping against the shaft walls. Notch by notch, the lads brought him out with infinite slowness so as not to hurt him. The sunlight penetrated only a meter or two into the dark hole, so it was only a few seconds between the appearance of Le Cagot's harness straps and the time he was dangling free, unconscious and ashen-faced, from the pulley above.

When he regained consciousness, Le Cagot found himself lying on a board bed in the shepherd's artzain xola, his arm in an improvised sling. While the lads made a brushwood fire, Hel sat on the edge of the bed looking down into his comrade's weatherbeaten face with its sunken eyes and its sun-wrinkled skin still gray with shock under the full rust-and-gray beard.

"Could you use some wine?" Hel asked.

"Is the pope a virgin?" Le Cagot's voice was weak and raspy. "You squeeze it for me, Niko. There are two things a one-armed man cannot do. And one of them is to drink from a xahako."

Because drinking from a goatskin xahako is a matter of automatic coordination between hand and mouth, Nicholai was clumsy and squirted some wine into Beñat's beard.

Le Cagot coughed and gagged on the inexpertly offered wine. "You are the worst nurse in the world, Niko. I swear it by the Swallowed Balls of Jonah!"

Hel smiled. "What's the other thing a one-handed man can't do?" he asked quietly.

"I can't tell you, Niko. It is bawdy, and you are too young."

In fact, Nicholai Hel was older than Le Cagot, although he looked fifteen years younger.

"It's night, Beñat. We'll bring you down into the valley in the morning. I'll find a veterinarian to set that arm. Doctors work only on Homo sapiens."

Then Le Cagot remembered. "I hope I didn't hurt you too much when I got to the surface. But you had it coming. As the saying is: Nola neurtcen baituçu; Hala neurtuco çare çu."

"I'll survive the beating you gave me."

"Good." Le Cagot grinned. "You really are simpleminded, my friend. Do you think I couldn't see through your childish ploy? You thought to enrage me to give me strength to make it up. But it didn't work, did it?"

"No, it didn't work. The Basque mind is too subtle for me."

"It is too subtle for everybody but Saint Peter—who, by the way, was a Basque himself, although not many people know it. So, tell me! What does our cave look like?"

"I haven't been down."

"Haven't been down? Alla Jainkoa! But I didn't get to the bottom! We haven't properly claimed it for ourselves. What if some ass of a Spaniard should stumble into the hole and claim it?"

"All right. I'll go down at dawn."

"Good. Now give me some more wine. And hold it steady this time! Not like some boy trying to piss his name into a snowbank!"

The next morning Hel went down on the line. It was clear all the way. He passed through the waterfall and down to the place where the shaft opened into the great cave. As he hung, spinning on the cable while the lads above held him in clamps as they replaced drums, he knew they had made a real find. The cavern was so vast that his helmet light could not penetrate to the walls.

Soon he was on the tip of the rubble heap, where he tied off his harness to a boulder so he could find it again. After carefully negotiating the rubble heap, where stones were held in delicate balance and counterbalance, he found himself on the cave floor, some two hundred meters below the tip of the cone. He struck on a magnesium flare and held it away behind him so he would not be blinded by its light. The cave was vast—larger than the interior of a cathedral—and myriad arms and branches led off in every direction. But the flow of the underground river was toward France, so that would be the route of major exploration when they returned. Filled though he was with the natural curiosity of a veteran caver, Hel could not allow himself to investigate further without Le Cagot. That would be unfair. He picked his way up the rubble cone and found the tied-off cable.

Forty minutes later he emerged into the misty morning sunlight of the gouffre. After a rest, he helped the lads dismount the aluminum-tube triangle and the anchoring cables for the winch. They rolled several heavy boulders over the opening, partly to hide it from anyone who might wander that way, but also to block the entrance to protect next spring's sheep from falling in.

They scattered stone and pebbles to efface the marks of the winch frame and cable tie-offs, but they knew that most of the work of concealment would be done by the onset of winter.

Back in the artzain xola, Hel made his report to Le Cagot, who was enthusiastic despite his swollen arm throbbing with pain.

"Good, Niko. We shall come back next summer. Listen. I've been pondering something while you were down in the hole. We must give our cave a name, no? And I want to be fair about naming it. After all, you were the first man in, although we must not forget that my courage and skill opened the last of the chokes. So, taking all this into consideration, I have come up with the perfect name for the cave."

"And that is?"

"Le Cagot's Cave! How does that sound?"

Hel smiled. "God knows it's fair."

* * *

All that was a year ago. When the snow cleared from the mountain, they came up and began descents of exploration and mapping. And now they were ready to make their major penetration along the course of the underground river.

For more than an hour, Hel had slept on the rock slab, fully clothed and booted, while Le Cagot had passed the time talking to himself and the unconscious Hel, all the while sipping at the bottle of Izzara, taking turns. One drink for himself. The next on Niko's behalf.

When at last Hel began to stir, the hardness of the rock penetrating even the comatose sleep of his fatigue, Le Cagot interrupted his monologue to nudge his companion with his boot. "Hey! Niko? Going to sleep your life away? Wake up and see what you have done! You've drunk up half a bottle of Izzara, greedy bastard!"

Hel sat up and stretched his cramped muscles. His inactivity had permitted the cave's damp cold to soak in to the bone. He reached out for the Izzara bottle, and found it empty.

"I drank the other half," Le Cagot admitted. "But I'll make you some tea." While Beñat fiddled with the portable solid-fuel cooker, Hel got out of his harness and paratrooper jumpsuit specially modified with bands of elastic at the neck and wrists to keep water out. He peeled off his four thin sweaters that kept his body warmth in and replaced the innermost with a dry jersey made of loosely knitted fabric, then he put three of the damp sweaters on again. They were made of good Basque wool and were warm even when wet. All this was done by the light of a device of his own design, a simple connection of a ten-watt bulb to a wax-sealed automobile battery which, for all its primitive nature, had the effect of keeping at bay the nerve-eroding dark that pressed in from all sides. A fresh battery could drive the little bulb day and night for four days and, if necessary, could be sent up, now that they had widened the bottleneck and double dihedron, to be recharged from the pedal-driven magneto that kept their telephone battery fresh.

Hel tugged off his gaiters and boots. "What time is it?"

Le Cagot was carrying over a tin cup of tea. "I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because if I turn over my wrist, I will pour out your tea, ass! Here. Take the cup!" Le Cagot snapped his fingers to shake off the burn. "Now I will look at my watch. The time at the bottom of Le Cagot's Cave—and perhaps elsewhere in the world—is exactly six thirty-seven, give or take a little."

"Good." Hel shuddered at the taste of the thin tisane Le Cagot always brewed as tea. "That gives us five or six hours to eat and rest before we follow the stream into that big sloping tunnel. Is everything laid out?"

"Does the devil hate the water?"

"Have you tested the Brunton compass?"

"Do babies shit yellow?"

"And you're sure there's no iron in the rock?"

"Did Moses start forest fires?"

"And the fluorescein is packed up?"

"Is Franco an asshole?"

"Fine then. I'm going to get into a bag and get some sleep."

"How can you sleep! This is the big day! Four times we have been down in this hole, measuring, map-making, marking. And each time we have resisted our desire to follow the river course, saving the greatest adventure for last. And now the time has come! Surely you cannot sleep! Niko? Niko? I'll be damned." Le Cagot shrugged and sighed. "There is no understanding these Orientals."

Between them, they would be carrying twenty pounds of fluorescein dye to dump into the underground river when at last they could follow it no longer, either because their way was blocked by infall, or the river disappeared down a siphon. They had estimated that the outfall of the river had to be into the Torrent of Holçarté, and during the winter, while Le Cagot was up to patriotic mischief in Spain, Hel had investigated the length of that magnificent gorge where the torrent had cut a channel two hundred meters deep into the rock. He found several outfalls of underground streams, but only one seemed to have the flow velocity and position to make it a likely candidate. In a couple of hours, two young Basque caving enthusiasts would make camp by the outfall, taking turns watching the stream. With the first trace of dye color in the water, they would mark the time with their watch, synchronized with Le Cagot's. From this timing, and from their dead-reckoning navigation through the cave system, Hel and Le Cagot would estimate if it was feasible to follow the stream underwater in scuba gear and accomplish that finale of any thorough exploration of a cave, a trip from the vertical shaft to the light and air of the outfall.

After five hours of deep sleep, Hel awoke as he always did, instantly and thoroughly, without moving a muscle or opening his eyes. His highly developed proximity sense reported to him immediately. There was only one person within aura range, and that person's vibrations were defuse, defocused, vulnerable. The person was daydreaming or meditating or asleep. Then he heard Le Cagot's baritone snoring.

Le Cagot was in his sleeping bag, fully dressed, only his long, tousled hair and rust-gray beard visible in the dim light of the ten-watt battery lamp. Hel got up and set the solid-fuel stove going with a popping blue flame. While the water was coming to a boil, he searched about in the food containers for his tea, a strong tannic cha which he brewed so long it had twice the caffeine of coffee.

A man who committed himself totally to all physical activities, Le Cagot was a deep sleeper. He did not even stir when Hel tugged his arm out of the bag to check the time. They should be moving out. Hel kicked the side of Beñat's sleeping bag, but he got no more response than a groan and a muttered curse. He kicked again and Le Cagot turned over on his side and coiled up, hoping this tormentor would evaporate. When the water was starting to form pinpoint bubbles along the sides of the pan, Hel gave his comrade a third and more vigorous kick. The aura changed wavelengths. He was awake.

Without turning over, Le Cagot growled thickly, "There is an ancient Basque proverb saying that those who kick sleeping men inevitably die."

"Everybody dies."

"You see? Another proof of the truth of our folk wisdom."

"Come on, get up!"

"Wait a minute! Give me a moment to arrange the world in my head, for the love of Christ!"

"I'm going to finish this tea, then I'm setting off. I'll tell you about the cave when I get back."

"All right!" Le Cagot kicked his way angrily out of the sleeping bag and sat on the stone slab beside Hel, hunching moodily over his tea. "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Donkey! What kind of tea is this?"

"Mountain cha."

"Tastes like horse piss."

"I'll have to take your word for that. I lack your culinary experience."

Hel drank off the rest of his tea, then he hefted the two packs and selected the lighter one. He took up his coil of Edelrid rope and a fat carabiner on which were threaded a ring of smaller carabiners. Then he made a quick check of the side pocket of his pack to make sure he had the standard assortment of pitons for various kinds of fissures. The last thing he did before setting off was to replace the batteries for his helmet lamp with fresh ones. This device was another of his own design, based on the use of the experimental Gerard/Simon battery, a small and powerful cylinder, eight of which could be fitted into the helmet between the crown and webbing. It was one of Hel's hobbies to design and make caving equipment in his workshop. Although he would never consider patenting or manufacturing these devices, he often gave prototypes to old caving friends as presents.

Hel looked down at Le Cagot, still hunched petulantly over his tea. "You'll find me at the end of the cave system. I'll be easy to recognize; I'll be the one with the victorious look on his face." And he started down the long corridor that was the river's channel.

"By the Rocky Balls of St. Peter, you have the soul of a slave-driver! You know that?" Le Cagot shouted after Hel, as he rapidly donned his gear, grumbling to himself, "I swear there's a trace of Falange blood in his veins!"

Shortly after entering the gallery, Hel paused and waited for Le Cagot to catch up. The entire performance of exhortation and grousing was part of the established heraldry of their relationship. Hel was the leader by virtue of personality, of route-finding skills granted him by his proximity sense, and of the physical dexterity of his lithe body. Le Cagot's bullish strength and endurance made him the best backup man in caving. From the first, they had fallen into patterns that allowed Le Cagot to save face and maintain his self-respect. It was Le Cagot who told the stories when they emerged from the caves. It was Le Cagot who constantly swore, bullied, and complained, like an ill-mannered child. The poet in Le Cagot had confected for himself the role of the miles gloriosus, the Falstaffian clown—but with a unique difference: his braggadocio was founded on a record of reckless, laughing courage in numberless guerrilla actions against the fascist who oppressed his people in Spain.

When Le Cagot caught up with Hel, they moved together down the slanting, rapidly narrowing cut, its floor and walls scrubbed clean by the action of the underground stream, revealing the formational structure of the cave system. The rock above was limestone, but the floor along which the stream ran was ancient foliate schist. For eons, soak water had penetrated the porous limestone to the depth of the impermeable schist, along which bed it flowed, seeking depth and ultimate outfall. Slowly the slightly acid seep water had dissolved the limestone immediately above the schist, making a water pipe for itself. And slowly it had eaten at the edges of the water pipe until it had undermined its structure and caused infalls, which nibble it patiently eroded by absorptions and scrubbing; and the rubble itself acted as an abrasive carried along in the current, aiding in the work of undermining, causing greater infalls and multiplying the effect: and so, by geometric progression in which effects were also causes, through hundreds of thousands of years the great cave system was developed. The bulk of the work was accomplished by the silent, minute, relentless work of scrubbing and dissolution, and only occasionally was this patient action punctuated by the high geological drama of major collapses, most of them triggered by the earthquakes common to this underground system of faults and fissures which found surface expression in a landscape of karst, the abrupt outcroppings and frequent runnel pits and gouffres that earned this region its caving reputation.

For more than an hour they inched along the corridor, descending gently, while the sides and roof of their tunnel slowly closed in on them until they were easing along a narrow ledge beside the rushing current, the bed of which was a deep vertical cut not more than two meters wide, but some ten meters deep. The roof continued to close down on them, and soon they were moving with difficulty, bent over double, their packs scraping the rock overhead. Le Cagot swore at the pain in his trembling knees as they pushed along the narrow ledge walking in a half-squat that tormented the muscles of their legs.

As the shaft continued to narrow, the same unspoken thought harried them both. Wouldn't it be a stupid irony if, after their work of preparation and building up supplies, this was all there was? If this sloping shaft came to an end at a swallow down which the river disappeared?

The tunnel began to curve slowly to the left. Then suddenly their narrow ledge was blocked by a knob of rock that protruded out over the gushing stream. It was not possible for Hel to see around the knob, and he could not wade through the riverbed; it was too deep in this narrow cut, and even if it had not been, the possibility of a vertical swallow ahead in the dark was enough to deter him. There were stories of cavers who had stepped into swallows while wading through underground rivers. It was said that they were sucked straight down one hundred, two hundred meters through a roaring column of water at the bottom of which their bodies were churned in some great "giant's caldron" of boiling foam and rock until they were broken up enough to be washed away. And months afterward bits of equipment and clothing were found in streams and torrents along the narrow valleys of the outfall rivers. These, of course, were campfire tales and mostly lies and exaggerations. But like all folk narratives, they reflected real dreads, and for most cavers in these mountains the nightmare of the sudden swallow is more eroding to the nerves than thoughts of falling while scaling walls, or avalanches, or even being underground during an earthquake. And it is not the thought of drowning that makes the swallow awful, it is the image of being churned to fragments in that boiling giant's caldron.

"Well?" Le Cagot asked from behind, his voice reverberating in the narrow tunnel. "What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"That's reassuring. Are you just going to stand there? I can't squat here forever like a Béarnais shepherd with the runs!"

"Help me get my pack off."

In their tight, stooped postures, getting Hel's pack off was not easy, but once he was free of it he could straighten up a bit. The cut was narrow enough that he could face the stream, set his feet, and let himself fall forward to the wall on the other side. This done, he turned carefully onto his back, his shoulders against one side of the cut, his Vibram boot cleats giving him purchase against the ledge. Wriggling sideward in this pressure stance, using shoulders and palms and the flats of his feet in a traverse chimney climb, he inched along under the projecting knob of rock, the stream roaring only a foot below his buttocks. It was a demanding and chafing move, and he lost some skin from his palms, but he made slow progress.

Le Cagot's laughter echoed, filling the cave. "Ola! What if it suddenly gets wider, Niko? Maybe you had better lock up there and let me use you like a bridge. That way at least one of us would make it!" And he laughed again.

Mercifully, it didn't get wider. Once past the knob, the cut narrowed, and the roof rose overhead to a height beyond the beam of Hel's lamp. He was able to push himself back to the interrupted ledge. He continued to inch along it, still curving to the left. His heart sank when his lamp revealed ahead that the diaclase through which they had been moving came to an abrupt end at an infall of boulders, under which the river gurgled and disappeared.

When he got to the base of the infall raillère and looked around, he could see that he was at the bottom of a great wedge only a couple of meters wide where he stood, but extending up beyond the throw of his light. He rested for a moment, then began a corner climb at the angle of the diaclase and the blocking wall of rubble. Foot- and handholds were many and easy, but the rock was rotten and friable, and each stance had to be tested carefully, each hold tugged to make sure it would not come away in his hand. When he climbed a slow, patient thirty meters, he wriggled into a gap between two giant boulders wedged against one another. Then he was on a flat ledge from which he could see nothing in front or to the sides. He clapped his hands once and listened. The echo was late, hollow, and repeated. He was at the mouth of a big cave.

His return to the knob was rapid; he rappelled down the infall clog on a doubled line which he left in place for their ascent. From his side of the knob he called to Le Cagot, who had retreated a distance back down the tunnel to a narrow place where he could lock himself into a butt-and-heels stance and find some relief from the quivering fatigue of his half-squatting posture.

Le Cagot came back to the knob. "So? Is it a go?"

"There's a big hole."

"Fantastic!"

The packs were negotiated on a line around the knob, then Le Cagot repeated Hel's chimney traverse around that tight bit, complaining bitterly all the while and cursing the knob by the Trumpeting Balls of Joshua and the Two Inhospitable Balls of the Innkeeper.

Because Hel had left a line in place and had cleared out much of the rotten rock, the climb back up the scree clog was not difficult. When they were together on the flat slab just after the crawl between two counterbalanced boulders that was later to be known as the Keyhole, Le Cagot struck off a magnesium flare, and the stygian chaos of that great cavern was seen for the first time in the numberless millennia of its existence.

"By the Burning Balls of the Bush," Le Cagot said in an awed hush. "A climbing cave!"

It was an ugly sight, but sublime. The raw crucible of creation that was this "climbing" cave muted the egos of these two humanoid insects not quite two meters tall standing on their little flake of stone suspended between the floor of the cave a hundred meters below and the cracked and rotten dome more than a hundred meters above. Most caves feel serene and eternal, but climbing caves are terrible in their organic chaos. Everything here was jagged and fresh; the floor was lost far below in layers of house-size boulders and rubble; and the roof was scarred with fresh infalls. This was a cavern in the throes of creation, an adolescent cave, awkward and unreliable, still in the process of "climbing," its floor rising from infall and rubble as its roof regularly collapsed. It might soon (twenty thousand years, fifty thousand years) stabilize and become an ordinary cave. Or it might continue to climb up the path of its fractures and faults until it reached the surface, forming in its final infall the funnel-shaped indentation of the classic "dry" gouffre. Of course, the youth and instability of the cave was relative and had to be considered in geological time. The "fresh" scars on the roof could be as young as three years old, or as old as a hundred.

The flare fizzled out, and it was some time before they got their cave eyes back sufficiently to see by the dim light of their helmet lamps. In the spot-dancing black, Hel heard Le Cagot say, "I baptize this cave and christen it. It shall be called Le Cagot Cave!"

From the splattering sound, Hel knew Le Cagot was not wasting water on the baptism. "Won't that be confusing?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"The first cave has the same name."

"Hm-m-m. That's true. Well, then, I christen this place Le Cagot's Chaos! How's that?"

"Fine."

"But I haven't forgotten your contribution to this find, Niko. I have decided to name that nasty outcropping back there—the one we had to traverse—Hel's Knob. How's that?"

"I couldn't ask for more."

"True. Shall we go on?"

"As soon as I catch up." Hel knelt over his notebook and compass, and in the light of his helmet lamp scratched down estimates of distance and direction, as he had every hundred or so meters since they left base camp at the rubble heap. After replacing everything in its waterproof packet, he said, "All right. Let's go."

Moving cautiously from boulder to boulder, squeezing between cracks and joints, picking their way around the shoulders of massive, toppling rocks the size of barns, they began to cross the Chaos. The Ariadne's String of the underground river was lost to them beneath layers upon layers of boulders, seeping, winding, bifurcating and rejoining, weaving its thousand threads along the schist floor far below. The recentness of the infalls and the absence of weather erosion that so quickly tames features on the surface combined to produce an insane jumble of precariously balanced slabs and boulders, the crazy canting of which seemed to refute gravity and create a carnival fun house effect in which water appears to run up hill, and what looks level is dangerously slanted. Balance had to be maintained by feel, not by eye, and they had to move by compass because their sense of direction bad been mutilated by their twisting path through the vertigo madness of the Chaos. The problems of pathfinding were quite the opposite of those posed by wandering over a featureless moonscape. It was the confusing abundance of salient features that overloaded and cloyed the memory. And the vast black void overhead pressed down on their subconsciouses, oppressed by that scarred, unseen dome pregnant with infall, one-ten-thousandth part of which could crush them like ants.

Some two hours and five hundred meters later they had crossed enough of the Chaos to be able to see the far end of the cave where the roof sloped down to join the tangle of jagged young fall stone. During the past half-hour, a sound had grown around them, emerging so slowly out of the background ambience of gurgle and hiss far below that they didn't notice it until they stopped to rest and chart their progress. The thousand strands of the stream below were weaving tighter and tighter together, and the noise that filled the cavern was compounded of a full range of notes from thin cymbal hiss to basso tympany. It was a waterfall, a big waterfall somewhere behind that meeting of roof and rubble that seemed to block off the cave.

For more than an hour, they picked back and forth along the rubble wall, squeezing into crevices and triangular tents formed of slabs weighing tons, but they could find no way through the tangle. There were no boulders at this newer end of the Chaos, only raw young slab, many of which were the size of village frontons, some standing on end, some flat, some tilted at unlikely angles, some jetting out over voids for three-fourths of their length, held up by the cantilevering weight of another slab. And all the while, the rich roar of the waterfall beyond this infall lured them to find a way through.

"Let's rest and collect ourselves!" Le Cagot shouted over the noise, as he sat on a small fragment of slab, tugged off his pack, and pawed around inside for a meal of hardtack, cheese, and xoritzo. "Aren't you hungry?"

Hel shook his head. He was scratching away at his notebook, making bold estimates of direction and even vaguer guesses of slope, as the clinometer of his Brunton compass had been useless in the wilderness of the Chaos.

"Could that be the outfall behind the wall?" Le Cagot asked.

"I don't think so. We're not much more than halfway to the Torrent of Holçarté, and we must still be a couple of hundred meters too high."

"And we can't even get down to the water to dump the dye in. What a nuisance this wall is! What's worse, we just ran out of cheese. Where are you going?"

Hel had dropped off his pack and was beginning a free climb of the wall. "I'm going to take a look at the tip of the heap."

"Try a little to your left!"

"Why? Do you see something there?"

"No. But I'm sitting right in the line of your fall, and I'm too comfortable to move."

They had not given much thought to trying the top of the slab heap because, even if there was a way to squeeze through, it would bring them out directly above the waterfall, and it would probably be impossible to pass through that roaring cascade. But the base and flanks of the clog had produced no way through, so the tip was all that was left.

Half an hour later, Le Cagot heard a sound above him. He tilted back his head to direct the beam of his lamp toward it. Hel was climbing back down in the dark. When he reached the slab, he slumped down to a sitting position, then lay back on his pack, one arm over his face. He was worn out and panting with effort, and the lens of his helmet lamp was cracked from a fall.

"You're sure you won't have anything to eat?" Le Cagot asked.

His eyes closed, his chest heaving with great gulps of air, sweat running down his face and chest despite the damp cold of the cave, Hel responded to his companion's grim sense of humor by making the Basque version of the universal hand language of animosity: he tucked his thumb into his fist and offered it to Le Cagot. Then he let the fist fall and lay there panting. His attempts to swallow were painful, the dryness in his throat was sharp-edged. Le Cagot passed his xahako over, and Hel drank greedily, beginning with the tip touching his teeth, because he had no light, then pulling it farther away and directing the thin jet of wine to the back of his throat by feel. He kept pressure on the sac, swallowing each time the back of his throat filled, drinking for so long that Le Cagot began to worry about his wine.

"Well?" Le Cagot asked grudgingly. "Did you find a way through?"

Hel grinned and nodded.

"Where did you come out?"

"Dead center above the waterfall."

"Shit!"

"No, I think there's a way around to the right, down through the spray."

"Did you try it?"

Hel shrugged and pointed to the broken helmet lens. "But I couldn't make it alone. I'll need you to protect me from above. There's a good belaying stance."

"You shouldn't have risked trying. Niko. One of these days you'll kill yourself, then you'll be sorry."

When he had wriggled through the mad network of cracks that brought him out beside Hel on a narrow ledge directly above the roaring waterfall, Le Cagot was exuberant with wonder. It was a long drop, and the mist rose through the windless air, back up the column of water, boiling all about them like a steam bath with a temperature of 40°. All they could see through the mist was the head of the falls below and a few meters of slimy rock to the sides of they ledge. Hel led the way to the right, where the ledge narrowed to a few centimeters, but continued around the shoulder of the cave opening. It was a worn, rounded ledge, obviously a former lip of the waterfall. The cacophonous crash of the falls made sign language their only means of communication as Hel indicated to Le Cagot the "good" belaying stance he had found, an outcrop of rock into which Le Cagot had to squeeze himself with difficulty and pay out the defending line around Hel's waist as he worked his way down the edge of the falls. The natural line of descent would bring him through the mist, through the column of water, and—it was to be hoped—behind it. Le Cagot grumbled about this "good" stance as he fixed his body into the wedge and drove a covering piton into the limestone above him, complaining that a piton in limestone is largely a psychological decoration.

Hel began his descent, stopping each time he found the coincidence of a foothold for himself and a crack in the rock to drive in a piton and thread his line through the carabiner. Fortunately, the rock was still well-toothed and offered finger- and toeholds; the change in the falls course had been fairly recent, and it had not had time to wear all the ledge smooth. The greatest problem was with the line overhead. By the time he had descended twenty meters and had laced the line through eight carabiners, it took dangerous effort to tug slack against the heavy friction of the soaked rope through so many snap links; the effort of pulling on the line lifted his body partially out of his footholds. And this weakening of his stance occurred, of course, just when Le Cagot was paying out line from above and was, therefore, least able to hold him, should he slip.

He inched down through the sheath of mist until the oily black-and-silver sheet of the waterfall was only a foot from his helmet lamp, and there he paused and collected himself for the diciest moment of the descent.

First he would have to establish a cluster of pitons, so that he could work independently of Le Cagot, who might blindly resist on the line and arrest Hel while he was under the falls, blinded by the shaft of water, feeling for holds he could not see. And he would be taking the weight of the falling water on his back and shoulders. He had to give himself enough line to move all the way through the cascade, because he would not be able to breathe until he was behind it. On the other hand, the more line he gave himself, the greater his drop would be if the water knocked him off. He decided to give himself about three meters of slack. He would have liked more to avoid the possibility of coming to the end of his slack while still under the column of water, but his judgment told him that three meters was the maximum length that would swing him back out of the line of the falls, should he fall and knock himself out for long enough to drown, if he was hanging in the falls.

Hel edged to the face of the metallic, glittering sheet of water until it was only inches away from his face, and soon he began to have the vertigo sensation that the water was standing still, and his body rising through the roar and the mist. He reached into the face of the falls, which split in a heavy, throbbing bracelet around his wrist, and felt around for the deepest handhold he could find. His fingers wriggled their way into a sharp little crack, unseen behind the water. The hold was lower than he would have wished, because he knew the weight of the water on his back would force him down, and the best handhold would have been high, so the weight would have jammed his fingers in even tighter. But it was the only crack he could find, and his shoulder was beginning to tire from the pounding of the water on his outstretched arm. He took several deep breaths, fully exhaling each one because he knew that it is more the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs than the lack of oxygen that forces a man to gasp for air. The last breath he took deeply, stretching his diaphragm to its full. Then he let a third of it out, and he swung into the falls.

It was almost comic, and surely anticlimactic.

The sheet of falling water was less than twenty centimeters thick, and the same movement that swung him into it sent him through and behind the cascade, where he found himself on a good ledge below which was a book corner piled with rubble so easy that a healthy child could make the climb down.

It was so obvious a go that, there was no point in testing it, so Hel broke back through the sheet of water and scrambled up to Le Cagot's perch where, shouting over the din of the falls into Beñat's ear, their helmets clicking together occasionally, he explained the happy situation. They decided to leave the line in place to facilitate the return, and down they went one after the other, until they were at the base of the rubble-packed book corner.

It was a peculiar phenomenon that, once they were behind the silver-black sheet of the falls, they could speak in almost normal volume, as the curtain of water seemed to block out sound, and it was quieter behind the falls than without. As they descended, the fails slowly broke up as a great quantity of its water spun off in the mist, and the weight of the cascade at the bottom was considerably less than it was above. Its mass was diffused, and passing through it was more like going through a torrential rainfall than a waterfall. They advanced cautiously through the blinding, frigid steam, over a slick rock floor scrubbed clean of rubble. As they pressed on, the mists thinned until they found themselves in the clear dark air, the noise of the falls receding behind them. They paused and looked around. It was beautiful, a diamond cave of more human dimensions than the awful Le Cagot's Chaos; a tourist cave, far beyond the access capacities of any tourist.

Although it was wasteful, their curiosity impelled them to scratch off another magnesium flare.

Breathtakingly beautiful. Behind them, billowing clouds of mist churning lazily in the suction of the falling water. All around and above them, wet and dripping, the walls were encrusted with aragonite crystals that glittered as Le Cagot moved the flare back and forth. Along the north wall, a frozen waterfall of flowstone oozed down the side and puddled like ossified taffy. To the east, receding and overlapping curtains of calcite drapery, delicate and razor-sharp, seemed to ripple in an unfelt spelean wind. Close to the walls, thickets of slender crystal stalactites pointed down toward stumpy stalagmites, and here and there the forest was dominated by a thick column formed by the union of these patient speleotherns.

They did not speak until the glare sputtered orange and went out, and the glitter of the walls was replaced by dancing dots of light in their eyes as they dilated to accommodate the relatively feeble helmet lamps. Le Cagot's voice was uncharacteristically hushed when he said, "We shall call this Zazpiak Bat Cave."

Hel nodded. Zazpiak bat: "Out of seven, let there be one," the motto of those who sought to unite the seven Basque provinces into a Trans-Pyrenean republic. An impractical dream, neither likely nor desirable, but a useful focus for the activities of men who choose romantic danger over safe boredom, men who are capable of being cruel and stupid, but never small or cowardly. And it was right that the cuckoo-land dream of a Basque nation be represented by a fairyland cave that was all but inaccessible.

He squatted down and made a rough measurement back to the top of the waterfall with his clinometer, then he did a bit of mental arithmetic. "We're down almost to the level of the Torrent of Holçarté. The outfall can't be far ahead."

"Yes," Le Cagot said, "but where is the river? What have you done with it?"

It was true that the river had disappeared. Broken up by the falls, it had evidently sounded through cracks and fissures and must be running below them somewhere. There were two possibilities. Either it would emerge again within the cave somewhere before them, or the cracks around the base of the waterfall constituted its final swallow before its outfall into the gorge. This latter would be unfortunate, because it would deny them any hope of final conquest by swimming through to the open air and sky. It would also make the long vigil of the Basque lads camped at the outfall pointless.

Le Cagot took the lead as they advanced through Zazpiak Bat Cavern, as he always did when the going was reasonably easy. They both knew that Nicholai was the better rock tactician; it was not necessary for Le Cagot to admit it, or for Hel to accent it. The lead simply changed automatically with the nature of a cave's features. Hel led through shafts, down faces, around cornices; while Le Cagot led as they entered caves and dramatic features, which he therefore "discovered" and named.

As he led, Le Cagot was testing his voice in the cave, singing one of those whining, atonic Basque songs that demonstrate the race's ability to withstand aesthetic pain. The song contained that uniquely Basque onomatopoeia that goes beyond imitations of sounds, to imitations of emotional states. In the refrain of Le Cagot's song, work was being done sloppily (kirrimarra) by a man in confused haste (tarrapatakan).

He stopped singing when he approached the end of the diamond cave and stood before a broad, low-roofed gallery that opened out like a black, toothless grin. Indeed, it held a joke.

Le Cagot directed his lamp down the passage. The slope increased slightly, but it was no more than 15°, and there was enough overhead space for a man to stand erect. It was an avenue, a veritable boulevard! And yet more interesting, it was probably the last feature of the cave system. He stepped forward... and fell with a clatter of gear.

The floor of the passage was thickly coated with clay marl, as slick and filthy as axle grease and flat on his back, Le Cagot was slipping down the incline, not moving very fast at first, but absolutely helpless to arrest his slide. He cursed and pawed around for a hold, but everything was coated with the slimy mess, and there were no boulders or outcroppings to cling to. His struggling did no more than turn him around so that he was going down backward, half-sitting, helpless, furious, and risible. His slide began to pick up speed. From back on the edge of the marl shaft, Hel watched the helmet light grow smaller as it receded, turning slowly like the beam of a lighthouse. There was nothing he could do. The situation was basically comic, but if there was a cliff at the end of the passage...

There was no cliff at the end of the passage. Hel had never known a marl chute at this depth. At a good distance away, perhaps sixty meters, the light stopped moving. There was no sound, no call for help. Hel feared that Le Cagot had been bashed against the side of the passage and was lying there broken up.

Then came a sound up through the passage, Le Cagot's voice roaring with fury and outrage, the words indistinct because of the covering reverberations, but carrying the tonalities of wounded dignity. One phrase in the echoing outpour was decipherable: "...by the Perforated Balls of Saint Sebastian!"

So Le Cagot was unhurt. The situation might even be funny, were it not that their only coil of rope had gone down with him, and not even that ox of Urt could throw a coil of line sixty meters uphill.

Hel blew out a deep sigh. He would have to go back through Zazpiak Bat Cavern, through the base of the waterfall, up the rubble corner, back out through the falls, and up that dicy climb through icy mists to retrieve the line they had left in place to ease their retreat. The thought of it made him weary.

But... He tugged off his pack. No point carrying it with him. He called down the marl passage, spacing his words out so they would be understood through the muffling reverberations.

"I'm... going... after... line!"

The dot of light below moved. Le Cagot was standing up. "Why... don't... you... do... that!" came the call back. Suddenly the light disappeared, and there was the echoing sound of a splash, followed by a medley of angry roaring, scrambling, sputtering, and swearing. Then the light reappeared.

Hel's laughter filled both the passage and the cave. Le Cagot had evidently fallen into the river which must have come back to the surface down there. What a beginner's stunt!

Le Cagot's voice echoed back up the marl chute: "I... may... kill... you... when... you... get... down... here!"

Hel laughed again and set off back to the lip of the falls.

Three-quarters of an hour later, he was back at the head of the marl chute, fixing the line into a healthy crack by means of a choke nut.

Hel tried at first to take a rope-controlled glissade on his feet, but that was not on. The marl was too slimy. Almost at once he found himself on his butt, slipping down feet first, a gooey prow bone of black marl building up at his crotch and oozing back over his hip. It was nasty stuff, an ignoble obstacle, formidable enough but lacking the clean dignity of a cave's good challenges: cliffs and rotten rock, vertical shafts and dicy siphons. It was a mosquito of a problem, stupid and irritating, the overcoming of which brought no glory. Marl chutes are despised by all cavers who have mucked about in them.

When Hel glissed silently to his side, Le Cagot was sitting on a smooth slab, finishing off a hardtack biscuit and a cut of xoritzo. He ignored Hel's approach, still sulky over his own undignified descent, and dripping wet from his dunking.

Hel looked around. No doubt of it, this was the end of the cave system. The chamber was the size of a small house, or of one of the reception rooms of his château at Etchebar. Evidently, it was sometimes filled with water—the walls were smooth, and the floor was free of rubble. The slab on which Le Cagot was taking his lunch covered two-thirds of the floor, and in the distant corner there was a neat cubic depression about five meters on each edge—a regular "wine cellar" of a sump constituting the lowest point of the entire cave system. Hel went to the edge of the Wine Cellar and directed his beam down. The sides were smooth, but it looked to be a fairly easy corner climb, and he wondered why Le Cagot hadn't climbed down to be the first man to the end of the cave.

"I was saving it for you," Le Cagot explained.

"An impulse toward fair play?"

"Exactly."

There was something very wrong here. Basque to the bone though he was, Le Cagot had been educated in France, and the concept of fair play is totally alien to the mentality of the French, a people who have produced generations of aristocrats, but not a single gentleman; a culture in which the legal substitutes for the fair; a language in which the only word for fair play is the borrowed English.

Still, there was no point in standing there and letting the floor of that final Wine Cellar go virgin. Hel looked down, scanning for the best holds.

...Wait a minute! That splash. Le Cagot had fallen into water. Where was it?

Hel carefully lowered his boot into the Wine Cellar. A few centimeters down, it broke the surface of a pool so clear it appeared to be air. The features of the rock below were so sharp that no one would suspect they were under water.

"You bastard," Hel whispered. Then he laughed. "And you climbed right down into it, didn't you?"

The instant he pulled up his boot, the ripples disappeared from the surface, sucked flat by a strong siphon action below. Hel knelt at the side of the sump and examined it with fascination. The surface was not still at all; it was drawn tight and smooth by the powerful current below. Indeed, it bowed slightly, and when he put in his finger, there was a strong tug and a wake of eddy patterns behind it. He could make out a triangular opening down at the bottom of the sump which must be the outflow of the river. He had met trick pools like these before in caves, pools into which the water entered without bubbles to mark its current, the water so purified of those minerals and microorganisms that give it its tint of color.

Hel examined the walls of their small chamber for signs of water line. Obviously, the outflow through that triangular pipe down there had to be fairly constant, while the volume of the underground river varied with rainfall and seep water. This whole chamber, and that marl chute behind them acted as a kind of cistern that accepted the difference between inflow and outflow. That would account for marl appearing this far underground. There were doubtless times when this chamber in which they sat was full of water which backed up through the long chute. Indeed, upon rare occasions of heavy rain, the waterfall back there probably dropped into a shallow lake that filled the floor of Zazpiak Cavern. That would explain the stubbiness of the stalagmites in that diamond cave. If they had arrived at some other time, say a week after heavy rains had seeped down, they might have found their journey ending in Zazpiak Cavern. They had planned all along to consider a scuba exploration to the outfall in some future run, should the timing on the dye test prove practicable. But if they had been stopped by a shallow lake in the cavern above, it would have been unlikely that Hel would ever find that marl chute under water, swim all the way down it, locate this Wine Cellar sump, pass out through the triangular opening, and make it through that powerful current to the outfall. They were lucky to have made their descent after a long dry spell.

"Well?" Le Cagot said, looking at his watch. "Shall we drop the dye in?"

"What time is it?"

"A little before eleven."

"Let's wait for straight up. It'll make calculation easier." Hel looked down through the invisible pane of water. It was difficult to believe that there at the bottom, among those clear features of the floor, a current of great force was rushing, sucking. "I wish I knew two things," he said.

"Only two?"

"I wish I knew how fast that water was moving. And I wish I knew if that triangular pipe was clear."

"Let's say we get a good timing—say ten minutes—are you going to try swimming it next time we come down?"

"Of course. Even with fifteen minutes."

Le Cagot shook his head. "That's a lot of line, Niko. Fifteen minutes through a pipe like that is a lot of line for me to haul you back against the current if you run into trouble. No, I don't think so. Ten minutes is maximum. If it's longer than that, we should let it go. It's not so bad to leave a few of Nature's mysteries virgin."

Le Cagot was right, of course.

"You have any bread in your pack?" Hel asked.

"What are you going to do?"

"Cast it upon the waters."

Le Cagot tossed over a cut of his flute baguette; Hel set it gently on the surface of the sump water and watched its motion. It sank slowly, seeming to fall in slow motion through clear air, as it pulsed and vibrated with unseen eddies. It was an unreal and eerie sight, and the two men watched it fascinated. Then suddenly, like magic, it was gone. It had touched the current down there and had been snatched into the pipe faster than the eye could follow.

Le Cagot whistled under his breath. "I don't know, Niko. That looks like a bad thing."

But already Hel was making preliminary decisions. He would have to enter the pipe feet first with no fins because it would be suicidal to rush head first through that triangular pipe, in case be met a choking boulder inside there. That could be a nasty knock. Then too, he would want to be head first coming out if it was not a go, so he could help Le Cagot's weight on the safety line by pushing with his feet.

"I don't like it, Niko. That little hole there could kill your ass and, what is worse, reduce the number of my admirers by one. And remember, dying is a serious business. If a man dies with a sin on his soul, he goes to Spain."

"We have a couple of weeks to think it over. After we get out, we'll talk about it and see if it's worth dragging scuba gear down here. For all we know, the dye test will tell us the pipe's too long for a try. What time is it?"

"Coming up to the hour."

"Let's drop off the dye then."

The fluorescein dye they had carried down was in two-kilo bags. Hel tugged them out of their packs, and Le Cagot cut off the corners and lined them along the edge of the Wine Cellar sump. When the second hand swept to twelve, they pushed them all in. Bright green smoke seeped from the cuts as the bags dropped through the crystal water. Two of them disappeared instantly through the triangular pipe, but the other two lay on the bottom, their smoking streams of color rushing horizontally toward the pipe until the nearly empty bags were snatched away by the current. Three seconds later, the water was clear and still again.

"Niko? I have decided to christen this little pool Le Cagot's Soul."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Because it is clear and pure and lucid."

"And treacherous and dangerous?"

"You know, Niko, I begin to suspect that you are a man of prose. It is a blemish in you."

"No one's perfect."

"Speak for yourself."

The return to the base of the rubble cone was relatively quick. Their newly discovered cave system was, after all, a clean and easy one with no long crawls through tight passages and around breakdowns, and no pits to contend with, because the underground river ran along the surface of a hard schist bed.

The Basque boys dozing up at the winch were surprised to hear their voices over the headsets of the field telephones hours before they had expected them.

"We have a surprise for you," one lad said over the line.

"What's that?" Le Cagot asked.

"Wait till you get up and see for yourself."

The long haul up from the tip of the rubble cone to the first corkscrew shaft was draining for each of the men. The strain on the diaphragm and chest from banging in a parachute harness is very great, and men have been known to suffocate from it. It was such a constriction of the diaphragm that caused Christ's death on the cross—a fact the aptness of which did not escape Le Cagot's notice and comment.

To, shorten the torture of hanging in the straps and struggling to breathe, the lads at the low-geared winch pedaled heroically until the man below could take a purchase within the corkscrew and rest for a while, getting some oxygen back into his blood.

Hel came up last, leaving the bulk of their gear below for future explorations. After he negotiated the double dihedron with a slack cable, it was a short straight haul up to the cone point of the gouffre, and he emerged from blinding blackness... into blinding white.

While they had been below, an uncommon atmospheric inversion had seeped into the mountains, creating that most dangerous of weather phenomena: a whiteout.

For several days, Hel and his mountaineer companions had known that conditions were developing toward a whiteout because, like all Basques from Haute Soule, they were constantly if subliminally attuned to the weather patterns that could be read in the eloquent Basque sky as the dominant winds circled in their ancient and regular boxing of the compass. First Ipharra, the north wind, sweeps the sky clear of clouds and brings a cold, greenish-blue light to the Basque sky, tinting and hazing the distant mountains. Ipharra weather is brief, for soon the wind swings to the east and becomes the cool Iduzki-haizea, "the sunny wind," which rises each morning and falls at sunset, producing the paradox of cool afternoons with warm evenings. The atmosphere is both moist and clear, making the contours of the countryside sharp, particularly when the sun is low and its oblique light picks out the textures of bush and tree; but the moisture blues and blurs details on the distant mountains, softening their outlines, smudging the border between mountain and sky. Then one morning one looks out to find that the atmosphere has become crystalline, and distant mountains have lost their blue haze, have closed in around the valley, their razor outlines acid-etched into the ardent blue of the sky. This is the time of Hego-churia, "the white southeast wind." In autumn, Hego-churia often dominates the weather for weeks on end, bringing the Pays Basque's grandest season. With a kind of karma justice, the glory of Hego-churia is followed by the fury of Haize-hegoa, the bone-dry south wind that roars around the flanks of the mountains, crashing shutters in the villages, ripping roof tiles off, cracking weak trees, scudding blinding swirls of dust along the ground. In true Basque fashion, paradox being the normal way of things, this dangerous south wind is warm velvet to the touch. Even while it roars down valleys and clutches at houses all through the night, the stars remain sharp and close overhead. It is a capricious wind, suddenly relenting into silences that ring like the silence after a gunshot, then returning with full fury, destroying the things that man makes, testing and shaping the things that God makes, shortening tempers and fraying nerve ends with its constant screaming around corners and reedy moaning down chimneys. Because the Haize-hegoa is capricious and dangerous, beautiful and pitiless, nerve-racking and sensual, it is often used in Basque sayings as a symbol of Woman. Finally spent, the south wind veers around to the west, bringing rain and heavy clouds that billow gray in their bellies but glisten silver around the edges. There is—as there always is in Basqueland—an old saying to cover the phenomenon: Hegoak hegala urean du, "The south wind flies with one wing in the water." The rain of the southwest wind falls plump and vertically and is good for the land. But it veers again and brings the Haize-belza, "the black wind," with its streaming squalls that drive rain horizontally, making umbrellas useless, indeed, comically treacherous. Then one evening, unexpectedly, the sky lightens and the surface wind falls off, although high altitude streams continue to rush cloud layers overhead, tugging them apart into wisps. As the sun sets, chimerical archipelagos of fleece are scudded southward where they pile up in gold and russet against the flanks of the high mountains.

This beauty lasts only one evening. The next morning brings the greenish light of Ipharra. The north wind has returned. The cycle begins again.

Although the winds regularly cycle around the compass, each with its distinctive personality, it is not possible to say that Basque weather is predictable; for in some years there are three or four such cycles, and in other years only one. Also, within the context of each prevailing wind there are vagaries of force and longevity. Indeed, sometimes the wind turns through a complete personality during a night, and the next morning it seems that one of the dominant phases has been skipped. Too, there are the balance times between the dominance of two winds, when neither is strong enough to dictate. At such times, the mountain Basque say, "There is no weather today."

And when there is no weather, no motion of wind in the mountains, then sometimes comes the beautiful killer: the whiteout. Thick blankets of mist develop, dazzling white because they are lighted by the brilliant sun above the layer. Eye-stinging, impenetrable, so dense and bright that the extended hand is a faint ghost and the feet are lost in milky glare, a major whiteout produces conditions more dangerous than simple blindness; it produces vertigo and sensory inversion. A man experienced in the ways of the Basque mountains can move through the darkest night. His blindness triggers off a compensating heightening of other senses; the movement of wind on his cheek tells him that he is approaching an obstacle; small sounds of rolling pebbles give him the slant of the ground and the distance below. And the black is never complete; there is always some skyglow picked up by widely dilated eyes.

But in a whiteout, none of these compensating sensory reactions obtains. The dumb nerves of the eyes, flooded and stung with light, persist in telling the central nervous system that they can see, and the hearing and tactile systems relax, slumber. There is no wind to offer subtle indications of distance, for wind and whiteout cannot coexist. And all sound is perfidious, for it carries far and crisp through the moisture-laden air, but seems to come from all directions at once, like sound under water.

And it was into a blinding whiteout that Hel emerged from the black of the cave shaft. As be unbuckled his parachute harness, Le Cagot's voice came from somewhere up on the rim of the gouffre.

"This is the surprise they told us about."

"How nice." When Hel scrambled up the gouffre side, he could dimly make out five forms hovering around the winch. He had to approach within a meter before he recognized the other two as the lads who had been camping down in Holçarté Gorge, waiting for the outfall of dye from the underground stream. "You climbed up through this?" Nicholai asked.

"It was forming as we came. We just made it."

"What is it like lower down?"

They were all mountain men here; they knew what he meant.

"It's grayer."

"Much?"

"Much."

If the sheet of mist was grayer below, passing down through it would be folly in this Swiss-cheese mountainside dotted with treacherous cracks and steep gouffres. They would have to climb upward and hope to break out of the mist before they ran out of mountain. It is always wisest to do so in a whiteout: it is difficult to fall up a mountain.

Alone, Hel could have made it down the mountain, despite the blinding mist with its sensory trickery. He could have relied on a combination of his proximity sense and intimate knowledge of the features of the mountain to move cautiously down over terrain hidden in the blinding haze. But he could not be responsible for Le Cagot and the four Basque lads.

Because it was impossible to see clearly farther than a meter and to see at all farther than three, they roped up, and Hel led a slow and careful ascent, picking the long and easy way around outcroppings of rock, across slides of scree, past the rims of deep gouffres. The blanket of mist did not thicken, but it grew ever more blindingly bright as they rose toward the sun. After three-quarters of an hour, Hel suddenly broke through into sunlight and taut blue skies, and the scene that greeted him was beautiful, and awful. In the absolute stillness of the mist layer, the motion of his body up through it created languorous swirls and billows that churned lazily behind him and down into which his rope passed to the next man only ten meters below, but hidden behind the milky wall. He was almost at eye level with a platform of dense white mist that stretched flat and stable for hundreds of kilometers, filling all the valleys below as though with a great snow. Through this blanket of mist, the tops of the Basque Pyrenees stuck up, clear and sharp-edged in the ardent sunlight, like bits of mosaic tesserae set in a fleecy plaster. And above was the taut dark-blue sky peculiar to the Basque country. The stillness was so absolute that he could hear the squeak and surge of blood through his temples.

Then he heard another sound, Le Cagot's voice from below demanding, "Are we to stand here forever? By the Complaining Balls of Jeremiah, you should have relieved yourself before we started!" And when he broke through the layer of mist, he said, "Oh, I see. You were admiring the Basque spectacle all by yourself, while we dangled down there like bait on a line! You're a selfish man, Niko."

The sun was beginning to sink, so they moved around the flank of the mountain with some haste, to arrive at the highest of the artzain xola shelters before dark. When they got there, they found it already occupied by two old shepherds driven up from the other side of the mountain by the whiteout. Their heavy packs revealed them to be smugglers in a minor way. The Basque temperament is more comfortable with smuggling than with commerce; with poaching than with hunting. Socially condoned activities lack spice.

There was an exchange of greetings and wine, and the eight of the "fist" to the intruder, declaring that, if his will had power, that plane would fall from the sky like a wounded bird, littering Spain with the bodies of two hundred stupid vacationers on their way to Lisbon, and relieving the world of the burden of surplus population, for anyone who would fly through so perfect a moment was, by definition, an expendable being.

Le Cagot's gall up, he went on to extend his malediction to all those outlanders who defiled the mountains: the tourists, the back-packers, the hunters, and especially the skiers who bring vile machines into the mountains because they are too soft to walk up the hill, and who build ugly lodges and noisy après-ski amusements. The filthy shits! It was for dealing with loud-mouthed skiers and their giggling bunnies that God said, on the eighth day, let there also be handguns!

One of the old shepherds nodded sagely and agreed that outlanders were universally evil. "Atzerri; otzerri."

Following the ritual of conversation among strangers, Hel matched this ancient dicton with "But I suppose chori bakhoitzari eder bere ohantzea."

"True," Le Cagot said. "Zahar hitzak, zuhur hitzak."

Hel smiled. These were the first words of Basque he had learned, years ago in his cell in Sugamo Prison. "With the possible exception," he said, "of that one."

The old smugglers considered this response for a moment, then both laughed aloud and slapped their knees. "Hori phensatu zuenak, ongi afaldu zuen!" (An Englishman with a clever story "dines out on, it." Within the Basque culture, it is the listener who enjoys the feast.)

They sat in silence, drinking and eating slowly as the sun fell, drawing after it the gold and russet of the cloud layer. One of the young cavers stretched his legs out with a satisfied grunt and declared that this was the life. Hel smiled to himself, knowing that this would probably not be the life for this young man, touched as he was by television and radio. Like most of the Basque young, he would probably end up lured to the factories of the big cities, where his wife could have a refrigerator, and he could drink Coca-Cola in a café with plastic tables—the good life that was a product of the French Economic Miracle.

"It is the good life," Le Cagot said lazily. "I have traveled, and I have turned the world over in my hand, like a stone with attractive veining, and this I have discovered: a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupid. It would involve doing unnatural things—bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the free things of life: the mountains, laughter, poetry, wine offered by a friend, older and fatter women. Now, me? I am perfectly capable of being happy with what I have. The problem is getting enough of it in the first place!"

"Le Cagot?" one of the old smugglers asked, as he made himself comfortable in a corner of the artzain xola. "Give us a story to sleep on."

"Yes," said his companion. "Let it be of old things."

A true folk poet, who would rather tell a story than write one, Le Cagot began to weave fables in his rich basso voice, while the others listened or dozed. Everyone knew the tales, but the pleasure lay in the art of telling them. And Basque is a language more suited to storytelling than to exchanging information. No one can learn to speak Basque beautifully; like eye color or blood type, it is something one has to be born to. The language is subtle and loosely regulated, with its circumlocutory word orders, its vague declensions, its doubled conjugations, both synthetic and periphrastic, with its old "story" forms mixed with formal verb patterns. Basque is a song, and while outlanders may learn the words, they can never master the music.

Le Cagot told of the Basa-andere, the Wildlady who kills men in the most wonderful way. It is widely known that the Basa-andere is beautiful and perfectly formed for love, and that the soft golden hair that covers all her body is strangely appealing. Should a man have the misfortune to come upon her in the forest (she is always to be found kneeling beside a stream, combing the hair of her stomach with a golden comb), she will turn to him and fix him with a smile, then lie back and lift her knees, offering her body. Now, everyone knows that the pleasure from her is so intense that a man dies of it during climax, but still many and many have willingly died, their backs arched in the agony of unimaginable pleasure.

One of the old smugglers declared that he once found a man in the mountains who had died so, and in his dim staring eyes there was an awful mixture of fright and pleasure.

And the quietest of the young lads prayed that God would give him the strength to resist, should he ever come upon the Basa-andere with her golden comb. "You say she is all covered with golden hair, Le Cagot? I cannot imagine breasts covered with hair. Are the nipples visible then?"

Le Cagot sniffed and stretched out on the ground. "In truth, I cannot say from personal experience, child. These eyes have never seen the Basa-andere. And I am glad of that, for had we met, that poor lady would at this moment be dead from pleasure."

The old man laughed and ripped up a turf of grass, which he threw at the poet. "Truly, Le Cagot, you are as full of shit as God is of mercy!"

"True," Le Cagot admitted. "So true. Have you ever heard me tell the story of..."

* * *

When dawn came the whiteout was gone, churned away by the night winds. Before they broke up, Hel paid the lads for their assistance and asked them to take apart the winch and tripod and bring them down to a barn in Larrau for storage, as they were already beginning to plan the next exploration into the cave, this time with wet suits and scuba gear, for the boys camping down by the fallout in the Gorge of Holçarté had marked the appearance of dye in the water at eight minutes after the hour. Although eight minutes is not a long time, it could indicate considerable distance, considering the speed of the water through that triangular pipe at the bottom of the Wine Cellar. But if the water pipe was not filled with obstructions or too narrow for a man, they might have the pleasure of exploring their cave from entrance shaft to outfall before they shared the secret of its existence with the caving fraternity.

Hel and Le Cagot trotted and glissaded down the side of the mountain to the narrow track on which they had parked Hel's Volvo. He delivered the door a mighty kick with his boot, as was his habit, and after examining the satisfying dent, they got in and drove down to the village of Larrau, where they stopped off to have a breakfast of bread, cheese, and coffee, after having splashed and scrubbed away most of the dried mud with which they were caked.

Their hostess was a vigorous widow with a strong ample body and a bawdy laugh who used two rooms of her house as a café/restaurant/tobacco shop. She and Le Cagot had a relationship of many years, for when things got too hot for him in Spain, be often crossed into France through the Forest of Irraty that abutted this village. Since time beyond memory, the Forest of Irraty had been both a sanctuary and an avenue for smugglers and bandits crossing from the Basque provinces under Spanish occupation to those under French. By ancient tradition, it is considered impolite—and dangerous—to seem to recognize anyone met in this forest.

When they entered the café, still wet from the pump in back, they were questioned by the half-dozen old men taking their morning wine. How had it gone up at the gouffre? Was there a cave under the hole?

Le Cagot was ordering breakfast, his hand resting proprietarily on the hip of the hostess. He did not have to think twice about guarding the secret of the new cave, for he automatically fell into the Basque trait of responding to direct questions with misleading vagueness that is not quite lying.

"Not all holes lead to caves, my friends."

The hostess's eyes glittered at what she took to be double entendre. She pushed his hand away with pleased coquetry.

"And did you meet Spanish border patrols?" an old man asked.

"No, I was not required to burden hell with more Fascist souls. Does that please you, Father?" Le Cagot addressed this last to the gaunt revolutionary priest sitting in the darkest corner of the café, who had turned his face away upon the entrance of Le Cagot and Hel. Father Xavier nurtured a smoldering hate for Le Cagot and a flaming one for Hel. Though he never faced danger personally, he wandered from village to village along the border, preaching the revolution and attempting to bind the goals of Basque independence to those of the Church—the Basque manifestation of that general effort on the part of God-merchants to diversify into social and political issues, now that the world was no longer a good market for hell-scare and soul-saving.

The priest's hatred (which be termed "righteous wrath") for Le Cagot was based on the fact that praise and hero worship that properly belonged to the ordained leaders of the revolution was being siphoned away by this blaspheming and scandalous man who had spent a part of his life in the Land of the Wolves, out of the Pays Basque. But at least Le Cagot was a native son. This Hel was a different matter. He was an outlander who never went to Mass and who lived with an Oriental woman. And it was galling to the priest that young Basque cavers, boys who should have chosen their idols from the ranks of the priesthood, told stories of his spelunking exploits and of the time he had crossed with Le Cagot into Spain and broken into a military prison in Bilbao to release ETA prisoners. This was the kind of man who could contaminate the revolution and divert its energies from the establishment of a Basque Theocracy, a last fortress of fundamentalist Catholicism in a land where Christian practices were primitive and deep, and where the key to the gates of heaven was a profound weapon of control.

Shortly after he bought his home in Etchebar, Hel began to receive unsigned threats and hate notes. Upon two occasions there were "spontaneous" midnight charivaris outside the château, and live cats bound in burning straw were thrown at the walls of the house, where they screamed in their death throes. Although Hel's experience had taught him to despise these fanatical Third World priests who incite children to their deaths for the purpose of linking the cause of social reform to the Church to save that institution from natural atrophy in the face of knowledge and enlightenment, he would nevertheless have ignored this kind of harassment. But he intended to make the Basque country his permanent home, now that the Japanese culture was infected with Western values, and he had to put an end to these insults because the Basque mentality ridicules those who are ridiculed. Anonymous letters and the mob frenzy of the charivari are manifestations of cowardice, and Hel had an intelligent fear of cowards, who are always more dangerous than brave men, when they outnumber you or get a chance to strike from behind, because they are forced to do maximal damage, dreading as they do the consequences of retaliation, should you survive.

Through Le Cagot's contacts, Hel discovered the author of these craven acts, and a couple of months later he came across the priest in the back room of a café in Ste. Engrace, where he was eating a free meal in silence, occasionally glaring at Nicholai, who was taking a glass of red with several men of the village—men who had previously been sitting at the priest's table, listening to his wisdom and cant.

When the men went off to work, Hel joined the priest at his table. Father Xavier started to rise, but Hel gripped his forearm and returned him to his chair. "You are a good man, Father," he said in his prison whisper. "A saintly man. In fact, at this moment you are closer to heaven than you know. Finish your food and listen well. There will be no more anonymous letters, no more charivaris. Do you understand?"

"I'm afraid I don't—"

"Eat."

"What?"

"Eat!"

Father Xavier pushed another forkful of piperade into his mouth and chewed sullenly.

"Eat faster, Father. Fill your mouth with food you have not earned."

The priest's eyes were damp with fury and fear, but he shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed as rapidly as he could.

"If you choose to stay in this corner of the world, Father, and if you do not feel prepared to join your God, then this is what you will do. Each time we meet in a village, you will leave that village immediately. Each time we meet on the trails, you will step off the track and turn your back as I pass. You can eat faster than that!"

The priest choked on his food, and Hel left him gasping and gagging. That evening, he told the story to Le Cagot with instructions to make sure it got around. Hel considered public humiliation of this coward to be necessary.

* * *

"Hey, why don't you answer me, Father Esteka?" Le Cagot asked.*

* Esteka is Basque for "sexual deficiency."

The priest rose and left the café, as Le Cagot called after him, "Holà! Aren't you going to finish your piperade?"

Because they were Catholic, the old men in the café could not laugh; but they grinned, because they were Basque.

Le Cagot patted the hostess's bottom and sent her after their food. "I don't think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared." Le Cagot laughed. "After all, his father was French and very active in the Resistance."

Hel smiled. "Have you ever met one who was not?"

"True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn't draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazi's feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning bonjours were heroes of liberty!"

Hel laughed. "You're being a little hard on the French."

"It is history that is hard on them. I mean real history, not the verité à la cinquième République that they teach in their schools. The truth be known, I admire the French more than any other foreigners. In the centuries they have lived beside the Basque, they have absorbed certain virtues—understanding, philosophic insight, a sense of humor—and these have made them the best of the 'others.' But even I am forced to admit that they are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the Americans neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese. Take the particular manifestation of French ridiculousness that makes them attempt to combine their myopic devotion to money with the pursuit of phantom gloire. The same people who dilute their burgundy for modest profit willingly spend millions of francs on the atomic contamination of the Pacific Ocean in the hope that they will be thought to be the technological equals of the Americans. They see themselves as the feisty David against the grasping Goliath. Sadly for their image abroad, the rest of the world views their actions as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing a cow's leg and assuring her that he will be gentle."

Le Cagot looked down at the tabletop thoughtfully. "I cannot think of anything further to say about the French just now."

The widow had joined them at table, sitting close to Le Cagot and pressing her knee against his. "Hey, you have a visitor down at Etchehelia," she told Hel, using the Basque name for his château. "It is a girl. An outsider. Arrived yesterday evening."

Hel was not surprised that this news was already in Larrau, three mountains and fifteen kilometers from his home. It had doubtless been common knowledge in all the local villages within four hours of the visitor's arrival.

"What do you know about her?" Hel asked.

The widow shrugged and tucked down the corners of her mouth, indicating that she knew only the barest facts. "She took coffee chez Jaureguiberry and did not have money to pay. She walked all the way from Tardets to Etchebar and was seen from the hills several times. She is young, but not too young to bear. She wore short pants that showed her legs, and it is said that she has a plump chest. She was received by your woman, who paid her bill with Jaureguiberry. She has an English accent. And the old gossips in your village say that she is a whore from Bayonne who was turned out from her farm for sleeping with the husband of her sister. As you see, very little is known of her."

"You say she is young with a plump chest?" Le Cagot asked. "No doubt she is seeking me, the final experience."

The widow pinched his thigh.

Hel rose from the table. "I think I'll go home and take a bath and a little sleep. You coming?"

Le Cagot looked at the widow sideways. "What do you think? Should I go?"

"I don't care what you do, old man."

But as he started to rise, she tugged him back by his belt.

"Maybe I'll stay a while, Niko. I'll come back this evening and take a look at your girl with the naked legs and the big boobs. If she pleases me, I may bless you with an extension of my visit. Ouch!"

Hel paid and went out to his Volvo, which he kicked in the rear fender, then drove away toward his home.

Château d'Etchebar

After parking in the square of Etchebar (he did not permit automobiles on his property) and giving the roof a parting bash with his fist, Hel walked down the private road to his château feeling, as he always did upon returning home, a paternal affection for this perfect seventeenth-century house into which he had put years of devotion and millions of Swiss francs. It was the thing he loved most in the world, a physical and emotional fortress against the twentieth century. He paused along the path up from the heavy gates to pat the earth in around a newly planted shrub, and as he was doing this he felt the approach of that vague and scattered aura that could only be Pierre, his gardener.

"Bonjour, M'sieur," Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.

Hel nodded. "I hear we have a guest, Pierre."

"It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—"

"I know. Is Madame awake?"

"To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago." Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. "Ah, ah, ah," he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre's own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M'sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander's gardener and his official defender from village gossip.

"Ah, M'sieur, there will be rain before this day is out," Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. "So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today."

"Is that so, Pierre?" How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?

"Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign."

"Oh? But doesn't the saying go the other way? Isn't it arrats gorriak eguraldi?"

"That is how the saying goes, M'sieur. However..." Pierre's eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. "...everything depends on the phase of the moon."

"Oh?"

Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M'sieur Hel. "When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way."

"I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?"

Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. "That varies, M'sieur."

"I'm sure it does."

"And... there is an additional complication."

"You're going to tell me about it."

Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. "Vous voyez, M'sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!"

Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. "Good morning, Pierre."

"Good morning, M'sieur." Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.

* * *

His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.

Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.

"Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?"

Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. "Later," he muttered.

After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. "One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure."

Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. "Was it a good cave?"

He nodded. "An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle."

He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night's sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.

Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his "gun room," where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.

Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.

The meal done, Hana rose from the table. "Shall I close the panels?"

"Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden."

Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden... like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of shibumi, and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.

She let her kimono fall away. "Shall we have a wager?"

He laughed. "All right. The winner receives... let's see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?"

"Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much."

"That sure of yourself?"

"My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager."

"We shall see."

With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner's sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.

The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.

Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.

It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel's sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.

With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another's bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.

During his brief sojourn in Stage II—the use of sex as psychological aspirin, as social narcosis, a kind of bloodletting to reduce fevers and pressures—Hel began to have glimpses of the fourth level of sexual experience. Because he realized that sexual activity would be a significant part of his life, and because he detested amateurism in all its forms, he undertook to prepare himself. He received professional tactical training in Ceylon and in the exclusive bordellos of Madagascar, where he lived for four months, learning from women of every race and culture.

Stage III, sexual gourmandizing, is the highest stage ever reached by Westerners and, indeed, by most Orientals. Hel moved through this stage leisurely and with high appetite because he was young, his body strong and taut, and his imagination fertile. He was in no danger of getting bogged down in the sexual black masses of artificial stimulation with which the nastier-than-thou jetsetters and the soft intellectuals of the literary and filmmaking worlds seek to compensate for callused nerve ends and imaginations by roiling among one another's tepid flesh and lubricating fluids.

Even while in the sexual smorgasbord of Stage III, Hel began to experiment with such refined tactics as climax hovering and mental intercourse. He found it amusing to associate sexual techniques with Gô nomenclature. Such terms as aji keshi, ko, furikawari and hane lent themselves easily as illuminating images; while others, such as kaketsugi, nozoki, and yosu-miru, could be applied to lovemaking only with a liberal and procrustean view of metaphor.

By the age of thirty, Hel's sexual interests and capacities led him naturally to Stage IV, the final "game phase," in which excitation and climax are relatively trivial terminal gestures in an activity that demands all the mental vigor and reserve of championship Gô, the training of a Ceylonese whore, and the endurance and agility of a gifted grade VI rock climber. The game of his preference was an invention of his own which he called "kikashi sex." This could only be played with another Stage IV lovemaker, and only when both were feeling particularly strong. The game was played in a small room, about six tatami. Both players dressed in formal kimonos and knelt facing one another, their backs against opposite walls. Each, through concentration alone, was required to come to the verge of climax and to hover there. No contact was permitted, only concentration and such gestures as could be made with one hand.

The object of the game was to cause climax before climaxing yourself, and it was best played while it was raining.

In time, he abandoned kikashi sex as being somewhat too demanding, and also because it was a lonely and selfish experience, lacking the affection and caressing of afterplay that decorates the best of lovemaking.

* * *

Hana's eyes were squeezed shut with effort, and her lips were stretched over her teeth. She tried to escape from the involute position in which he held her, but he would not release her.

"I thought we agreed that you weren't permitted to do that!" she pled.

"I didn't agree to anything."

"Oh, Nikko... I can't!... I can't hold on! Damn you!"

She arched her back and emitted a squeak of final effort to avoid climaxing.

Her delight infected Hel, who relinquished his control to allow himself to climax just after she did. Then suddenly his proximity sense sounded the alarm. She was faking! Her aura was not dancing, as it would at climax. He tried to void his mind and arrest his climax, but it was too late. He had broken over the rim of control.

"You devil!" he shouted as he came.

She was laughing as she climaxed a few seconds later.

* * *

She lay on her stomach, humming sleepily in appreciation as he slowly inched the razor over her buttock, a perfect object blending the fineness of her Japanese blood with the useful shape of her Black. He kissed it gently and continued the Delight.

"In two months your tenure with me is over, Hana."

"Hmm-hmm." She did not want to break her languor by speaking.

"Have you considered my suggestion that you stay on with me?"

"Hmm-hmm."

"And?"

"Unh-nh-nh-nh-nh." The prolonged sound through slack lips meant, "Don't make me talk."

He chuckled and turned her over onto her back, continuing the thrill massage with close attention to technique and detail. Hana was in a perfect state. She was in her midthirties, the youngest a woman can be and still possess the training and experience of a grand lover. Because of the excellent care she took of her body and because of the time-annihilating effects of her ideal blend of Oriental, Black, and Caucasian strains, she would be in her prime for another fifteen years. She was a delight to look at, and to work on. Her greatest quality lay in her ability to receive pleasure completely and graciously.

When the Delight of the Razor had closed to her centers and had rendered her moist and passive, he concluded the event with its classic quick finish. And for a time they lay together in that comfortable lover's twine that knows how to deal with the extra arm.

"I have thought about staying on, Nikko," she said, her voice buzzing against his chest. "There are many reasons that might prompt me to do so. This is the most beautiful spot in the world. I shall always be grateful to you for showing me this corner of the Basque country. And certainly you have constructed a life of shibumi luxury here that is attractive. And there is you, so quiet and stern when you deal with the outside world, so boyish in lovemaking. You are not without a certain charm."

"Thank you."

"And I must also confess that it is much rarer to find a well-trained man than an accomplished woman. But... it is lonely here. I know that I am free to go to Bayonne or Paris whenever I wish—and I have a good time when I do go—but day to day, despite your attention and the delights of your conversation, and despite the bawdy energy of our friend Le Cagot, it is lonely for a woman whose interests and appetites have been so closely honed as mine have been."

"I understand that."

"It is different for you, Nikko. You are a recluse by nature. You despise the outside world, and you don't need it. I too find that most of the people out there either bore or annoy me. But I am not a recluse by nature, and I have a vivid curiosity. Then too... there is another problem."

"Yes?"

"Well, how shall I put this? Personalities such as yours and mine are meant to dominate. Each of us should function in a large society, giving flavor and texture to the mass. The two of us together in one place is like a wasteful concentration of spice in the course of an otherwise bland meal. Do you see what I mean?"

"Does that mean that you have decided to leave when your tenure is up?"

She blew a jet of breath over the hairs of his chest. "It means that I have not yet made up my mind." She was silent for a time, then she said, "I suppose I would really prefer to have the best of both worlds, spending half of every year here, resting and learning with you, and half of each year out there, stunning my audience."

"I see nothing wrong with that."

She laughed, "It would mean that you would have to make do for six months each year with the bronzed, long-legged, mindless nymphs of the Côte Basque. Actresses and models and that sort. Could you do that?"

"As easily as you could make do with round-armed lads possessing excellent muscle tone and honest, empty eyes. For both of us, it would be like subsisting on hors d'oeuvres. But why not? There is some amusement in hors d'oeuvres, though they cloy without nourishing."

"Let me think about it, Nikko. It is an attractive idea." She raised herself onto one elbow and looked down into his half-closed, amused eyes. "Then too, freedom is also attractive. Maybe I won't make any decision at all."

"That's a kind of decision."

They dressed and went to shower beneath the perforated copper cask designed for the purpose by the first enlightened owner of the château nearly three hundred years before.

It was not until they were taking tea in the cream-and-gold east salon that Hel asked about the visitor.

"She is still asleep. When she arrived yesterday evening, she was desperate. She had walked from the village after flying in to Pau from Rome and hitchhiking to Tardets. Although she tried to chat and follow the forms of politeness, I could tell from the first that she was very distraught. She began weeping while she was taking tea. Weeping without knowing she was doing it. I gave her something to calm her and put her to bed. But she awoke during the night with nightmares, and I sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and humming to her, until she was calm and dropped off again."

"What is her problem?"

"She talked about it while I stroked her hair. There was a nasty business at the airport in Rome. Two of her friends were shot and killed."

"Shot by whom?"

"She didn't say. Perhaps she didn't know."

"Why were they shot?"

"I have no idea."

"Did she tell you why she came to our home?"

"Evidently all three of them were on their way here. She had no money, only her plane ticket."

"Did she give you her name?"

"Yes. Hannah Stern. She said her uncle was a friend of yours."

Hel set his cup down, closed his eyes, and pushed out a long nasal sigh. "Asa Stern was a friend. He's dead. I am indebted to him. There was a moment when, without his help, I would have died."

"And this indebtedness, does it extend to the girl as well?"

"We'll see. Did you say the blow-away in Rome International happened yesterday afternoon?"

"Or morning. I am not sure which."

"Then it should be on the news at noon. When the girl wakes up, please have her come and see me. I'll be in the garden. Oh, and I think Le Cagot will take dinner with us—if he finishes his business in Larrau in time."

Hel worked in the garden for an hour and a half, trimming, controlling, striving for modest and subtle effects. He was not an artist, but he was sensitive; so while his garden, the major statement of his impulse to create, lacked sabi, it had the shibui features that separate Japanese art from the mechanical dynamics of Western art and the florid hyperbole of Chinese. There was that sweet melancholy, that forgiving sadness that characterizes the beautiful in the Japanese mind. There was intentional imperfection and organic simplicity that created, then satisfied, aesthetic tensions, functioning rather as balance and imbalance function in Western art.

Just before noon, a servant brought out a battery radio, and Hel listened in his gun room for the twelve o'clock broadcast of BBC World Service. The news reader was a woman whose distinctive voice has been a source of amusement for the international Anglophone community for years. To that peculiar pronunciation that is BBC's own, she adds a clipped, half-strangled sound which the world audience has long taken to be the effect of an uncomfortable suppository, although there is lively dispute and extensive wagering between those who maintain that the suppository is made of sandpaper and those who promote the ice-cube theory.

Buried among the trivia of collapsing governments, the falling dollar, and Belfast bombings was a description of the atrocity at Rome International. Two Japanese men, subsequently identified from papers on their persons as Red Army members working in behalf of the Black Septembrists, opened fire with automatic weapons, killing two young Israeli men, whose identities are being withheld. The Red Army assassins were themselves killed in an exchange of gunfire with Italian police and special agents, as were several civilian bystanders. And now for news of a lighter note...

"Mr. Hel?"

He switched off the radio and beckoned to the young woman standing in the doorway of the gun room. She was wearing fresh khaki walking shorts and a shortsleeved shirt with three top buttons open. As hors d'oeuvres go, she was a promising morsel: long strong legs, slim waist, aggressive bosom, reddish hair fluffy from recent washing. More soubrette than heroine, she was in that brief desirable moment between coltishness and zaftig. But her face was soft and without lines of experience, giving the strain she was under the look of petulance.

"Mr. Hel?" she said again, her tone uncertain.

"Come in and sit down, Miss Stern."

She look a chair beneath a rack of metal devices she did not recognize to be weapons and smiled faintly. "I don't know why, but I thought of you as an older man. Uncle Asa spoke of you as a friend, a man of his own age."

"We were of an age; we shared an era. Not that that's pertinent to anything." He looked at her flatly, evaluating her. And finding her wanting.

Uncomfortable under the expressionless gaze of his bottle-green eyes, she sought the haven of small talk. "Your wife—Hana, that is—has been very kind to me. She sat up with me last night and—"

He cut her off with a gesture. "Begin by telling me about your uncle. Why he sent you here. After that, give me the details of the events at Rome International. Then tell me what your plans are and what they have to do with me."

Surprised by his businesslike tone, she took a deep breath, gathered her thoughts, and began her story, characteristically enough, with herself. She told him that she had been raised in Skokie, had attended Northwestern University, had taken an active interest in political and social issues, and had decided upon graduation to visit her uncle in Israel—to find her roots, discover her Jewishness.

Hel's eyelids drooped at this last, and he breathed a short sigh. With a rolling motion of his hand he gestured her to get on with it.

"You knew, of course, that Uncle Asa was committed to punishing those who committed the Munich murders."

"That was on the grapevine. We never spoke of such things in our letters. When I first heard of it, I thought your uncle was foolish to come out of retirement and attempt something like that with his old friends and contacts either gone or decayed into politics. I could only assume it was the desperate act of a man who knew he was in his final illness."

"But he first organized our cell a year and a half ago, and he didn't become sick until a few months ago."

"That is not true. Your uncle has been ill for several years. There were two brief remissions. At the time you say he organized your cell, he was combating pain with drugs. That might account for his crepuscular thinking."

Hannah Stern frowned and looked away. "You don't sound as though you held my uncle in much esteem."

"On the contrary, I liked him very much. He was a brilliant thinker and a man of generous spirit—a man of shibumi."

"A man of... what?"

"Never mind. Your uncle never belonged in the business of terror. He was emotionally unequipped for it—which of course says a good deal in his favor as a human being. In happier times, he would have lived the gentle life of a teacher and scholar. But he was passionate in his sense of justice, and not only for his own people. The way things were twenty-five years ago, in what is now Israel, passionate and generous men who were not cowards had few options open to them."

Hannah was not used to Hel's soft, almost whispered prison voice, and she found herself leaning close to hear his words.

"You are wrong to imagine that I did not esteem your uncle. There was a moment in Cairo sixteen years ago when he risked his safety, possibly his life, to help me. What is more significant, he also risked the success of a project he was devoted to. I had been shot in the side. The situation was such that I could not seek medical assistance. When I met him, I had gone two days with a wad of blood-soaked cloth under my shirt, wandering in the back streets because I didn't dare try a hotel. I was dazed with fever. No, I esteem him a great deal. And I am in his debt." Hel had said this in a soft monotone, without the histrionics she would have associated with sincerity. He told her these things because he thought that, in fairness to the uncle, she had a right to know the extent of his debt of honor. "Your uncle and I never met again after that business in Cairo. Our friendship grew through years of exchanging letters that both of us used as outlets for testing ideas, for sharing our attitudes toward books we were reading, for complaining about fate and life. We enjoyed that freedom from embarrassment one only finds in talking to a stranger. We were very close strangers." Hel wondered if this young woman could understand such a relationship. Deciding she could not, he focused in on the business at hand. "All right, after his son was killed in Munich, your uncle formed a cell to aid him in his mission of punishment. How many people, and where are they now?"

"I am the only one left."

"You were within the cell?"

"Yes. Why? Does that seem—"

"Never mind." Hel was convinced now that Asa Stern had been acting in dazed desperation, to introduce this soft college liberal into an action cell. "How large was the cell?"

"We were five. We called ourselves the Munich Five."

His eyelids drooped again. "How theatrical. Nothing like telegraphing the stunt."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Five in the cell? Your uncle, you, the two hit in Rome—who was the fifth member? David O. Selznik?"

"I don't understand what you mean. The fifth man was killed in a café bombing in Jerusalem. He and I were... we were..." Her eyes began to shine with tears.

"I'm sure you were. It's a variation of the summer vacation romance: one of the fringe benefits of being a committed young revolutionary with all humanity as your personal flock. All right, tell me how far you had got before Asa died."

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

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

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

"How large a group?"

"Five or six. We were never sure."

"Had you identified which of them were involved in Munich?"

"No."

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

She nodded.

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

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

"Oh, God."

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