Shibumi

"Please," he interrupted. "Now, what were these IRA's going to do for you?"

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

"'Us' being you and the two who got hit in Rome?"

"Yes."

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

"I don't know."

"Weren't you there?"

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

"Don't touch that!"

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't doubt that. Now tell me about the Rome hit. Facts and impressions, not emotions."

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

"All right. That's fine. Now tell me this. Were you a target?"

"What?"

"Was anyone shooting specifically at you?"

"I don't know! How could I know?"

"Were the Japanese using automatic weapons?"

"What?"

"Did they go rat-a-tat, or bang! bang! bang!"

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

"Rat-a-tat or bang bang?"

"They were machine guns."

"And did anyone standing close to you go down?"

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

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

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

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

"No. I never saw the people firing from the mezzanine."

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

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

He lifted his hand to silence her without looking up.

Four minutes later he raised his head. "What?"

"Pardon me?"

"Something about flowers."

"Oh, nothing important. I just wondered why you didn't have any flowers in your garden."

"There are three flowers."

"Three varieties?"

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

"What is the Mother Company? I've never heard of them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Does the sixth of August mean anything to you?"

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

"Never mind." Hel rose. "I have to think this out a bit. We'll talk again this afternoon."

"Do you intend to help me?"

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

"What would that be?"

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

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

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

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

"What do you mean?" Hannah asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Hana disapproved of Hel's ingracious tone, so she took control of the dinner talk as she brought Hannah's plate to the sideboard to replenish it. "My English is imperfect. There is more than one asparagus here, but the word 'asparaguses' sounds awkward. Is it one of those odd Latin plurals, Nicholai? Does one say asperagae, or something like that?"

"One would say that only if he were that overinformed/undereducated type who attends concerti for celli and afterward orders cups of capuccini. Or, if he is American, dishes of raspberry Jell-I."

"Arrêtes un peu et sois sage," Hana said with a slight shake of her head. She smiled at Hannah. "Isn't he a bore on the subject of Americans? It's a flaw in his personality. His sole flaw, he assures me. I've been wanting to ask you, Hannah, what did you read at university?"

"What did I read?"

"What did you major in," Hel clarified.

"Oh. Sociology."

He might have guessed it. Sociology, that descriptive pseudo-science that disguises its uncertainties in statistical mists as it battens on the narrow gap of information between psychology and anthropology. The kind of non-major that so many Americans use to justify their four-year intellectual vacations designed to prolong adolescence.

"What did you study in school?" Hannah asked her hostess thoughtlessly.

Hana smiled to herself. "Oh... informal psychology, anatomy, aesthetics—that sort of thing."

Hannah applied herself to the asparagus, asking casually, "You two aren't married, are you? I mean... you joked the other night about being Mr. Hel's concubine."

Hana's eyes widened in rare astonishment. She was not accustomed to that inquisitive social gaucherie that Anglo-Saxon cultures mistake for admirable frankness. Hel opened his palm toward Hana, gesturing her to answer, his eyes wide with mischievous innocence.

"Well..." Hana said, "...in fact, Mr. Hel and I are not married. And in fact I am his concubine. Will you take dessert now? We have just received our first shipment of the magnificent cherries of Itxassou, of which the Basque are justly proud."

Hel knew Hana was not going to get off that easily, and he grinned at her as Miss Stern pursued, "I don't think you mean concubine. In English, concubine means someone who is hired for... well, for her sexual services. I think you mean 'mistress.' And even mistress is sort of old-fashioned. Nowadays people just say they are living together."

Hana looked at Hel for help. He laughed and interceded for her. "Hana's English is really quite good. She was only joking about the asparagus. She knows the difference among a mistress, a concubine, and a wife. A mistress is unsure of her wage, a wife has none; and they are both amateurs. Now, do try the cherries."

* * *

Hel sat on a stone bench in the middle of the cutting gardens, his eyes closed and his face lifted to the sky. Although the mountain breeze was cool, the thin sunlight penetrated his yukata and made him warm and drowsy. He hovered on the delicious verge of napping until he intercepted the approaching aura of someone who was troubled and tense.

"Sit down, Miss Stern," he said, without opening his eyes. "I must compliment you on the way you conducted yourself at lunch. Not once did you refer to your problems, seeming to sense that in this house we don't bring the world to our table. To be truthful, I hadn't expected such good form from you. Most people of your age and class are so wrapped up in themselves—so concerned with what they're 'into'—that they fail to realize that style and form are everything, and substance a passing myth." He opened his eyes and smiled as he made a pallid effort to imitate the American accent: "It ain't what you do, it's how you do it."

Hannah perched on the marble balustrade before him, her thighs flattened by her weight. She was barefoot, and she had not heeded his advice about changing into less revealing clothes. "You said we should talk some more?"

"Hm-m-m. Yes. But first let me apologize for my uncivil tone, both during our little chat and at lunch. I was angry and annoyed. I have been retired for almost two years now, Miss Stern. I am no longer in the profession of exterminating terrorists; I now devote myself to gardening, to caving, to listening to the grass grow, and to seeking a kind of deep peace I lost many years ago—lost because circumstances filled me with hate and fury. And then you come along with a legitimate claim to my assistance because of my debt to your uncle, and you threaten me with being pressed back into my profession of violence and fear. And fear is a good part of why I was annoyed with you. There is a certain amount of antichance in my work. No matter how well-trained one is, how careful, how coolheaded, the odds regularly build up over the years; and there comes a time when luck and antichance weigh heavily against you. It's not that I've been lucky in my work—I mistrust luck—but I have never been greatly hampered by bad luck. So there's a lot of bad luck out there waiting for its turn. I've tossed up the coin many times, and it has come down heads. There are more than twenty years' worth of tails waiting their turn. So! What I wanted to explain was the reason I have been impolite to you. It's fear mostly. And some annoyance. I've had time to consider now. I think I know what I should do. Fortunately, the proper action is also the safest."

"Does that mean you don't intend to help me?"

"On the contrary. I am going to help you by sending you home. My debt to your uncle extends to you, since he sent you to me; but it does not extend to any abstract notion of revenge or to any organization with which you are allied."

She frowned and looked away, out toward the mountains. "Your view of the debt to my uncle is a convenient one for you."

"So it turns out, yes."

"But... my uncle gave the last years of his life to hunting down those killers, and it would make that all pretty pointless if I didn't try to do something."

"There's nothing you can do. You lack the training, the skill, the organization. You didn't even have a plan worthy of the name."

"Yes, we did."

He smiled, "All right. Let's take a look at your plan. You said that the Black Septembrists were intending to hijack a plane from Heathrow. Presumably your group was going to hit them at that time. Were you going to take them on the plane, or before they boarded?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Avrim was the leader after Uncle Asa died. He told us no more than he thought we had to know, in case one of us was captured or something like that. But I don't believe we were going to meet them on the plane. I think we were going to execute them in the terminal."

"And when was this to take place?"

"The morning of the seventeenth."

"That's six days away. Why were you going to London so soon? Why expose yourself for six days?"

"We weren't going to London. We were coming here. Uncle Asa knew we didn't have much chance of success without him. He had hoped he would be strong enough to accompany us and lead us. The end came too fast for him."

"So he sent you here? I don't believe that."

"He didn't exactly send us here. He had mentioned you several times. He said that if we got into trouble we could come to you and you would help."

"I'm sure he meant that I would help you get away after the event."

She shrugged.

He sighed. "So you three youngsters were going to pick up your arms from your IRA contacts in London, loiter around town for six days, take a taxi out to Heathrow, stroll into the terminal, locate the targets in the waiting area, and blow them away. Was that your plan?"

Her jaw tightened, and she looked away. It did sound silly, put like that.

"So, Miss Stern, notwithstanding your disgust and horror over the incident at Rome International, it turns out that you were planning to be responsible for the same kind of messy business—a stand-up blow-away in a crowded waiting room. Children, old women, and bits thereof flying hither and yon as the dedicated young revolutionaries, eyes flashing and hair floating, shoot their way into history. Is that what you had in mind?"

"If you're trying to say we are no different from those killers who murdered young athletes in Munich or who shot my comrades in Rome—!"

"The differences are obvious! They were well organized and professional!" He cut himself off short. "I'm sorry. Tell me this: what are your resources?"

"Resources?"

"Yes. Forgetting your IRA contacts—and I think we can safely forget them—what kind of resources were you relying on? Were the boys killed in Rome well trained?"

"Avrim was. I don't think Chaim had ever been involved in this sort of thing before."

"And money?"

"Money? Well, we were hoping to get some from you. We didn't need all that much. We had hoped to stay here for a few days—talk to you and get advice and instructions. Then fly directly to London, arriving the day before the operation. All we needed was air fare and a little more."

Hel closed his eyes. "My dear, dumb, lethal girl. If I were to undertake something like you people had in mind, it would cost between a hundred and a hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. And I am not speaking of my fee. That would be only the setup money. It costs a lot to get in, and often even more to get out. Your uncle knew that." He looked out over the horizon line of mountain and sky. "I'm coming to realize that what he had put together was a suicide raid."

"I don't believe that! He would never lead us into suicide without telling us!"

"He probably didn't intend to have you up front. Chances are he was going to use you three children as backups, hoping he could do the number himself, and you three would be able to walk away in the confusion. Then too..."

"Then too, what?"

"Well, we have to realize that he had been on drugs for a long time to manage his pain. Who knows what he was thinking; who knows how much he had left to think with toward the end?"

She drew up one knee and hugged it to her chest, revealing again her erubescence. She pressed her lips against her knee and stared over the top of it across the garden, "I don't know what to do."

Hel looked at her through half-closed eyes. Poor befuddled twit, seeking purpose and excitement in life, when her culture and background condemned her to mating with merchants and giving birth to advertising executives. She was frightened and confused, and not quite ready to give up her affair with danger and significance and return to a life of plans and possessions. "You really don't have much choice. You'll have to go home. I shall be delighted to pay your way."

"I can't do that."

"You can't do anything else."

For a moment, she sucked lightly on her knee. "Mr. Hel—may I call you Nicholai?"

"Certainly not."

"Mr. Hel. You're telling me that you don't intend to help me, is that it?"

"I am helping you when I tell you to go home."

"And if I refuse to? What if I go ahead with this on my own?"

"You would fail—almost surely die."

"I know that. The question is, could you let me try to do it alone? Would your sense of debt to my uncle allow you to do that?"

"You're bluffing."

"And if I'm not?"

Hel glanced away. It was just possible that this bourgeois muffin was dumb enough to drag him into it, or at least to make him decide how far loyalty and honor went. He was preparing to test her, and himself, when he felt an approaching presence he recognized as Pierre's, and he turned to see the gardener shuffling toward them from the château.

"Good afternoon, 'sieur, m'selle. It must be pleasant to have the leisure to sun oneself." He drew a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his blue worker's smock and handed it to Hel with great solemnity, then he explained that he could not stay for there were a thousand things to be done, and he went on toward the garden and his gatehouse, for it was time to soften his day with another glass.

Hel read the note.

He folded it and tapped it against his lips. "It appears, Miss Stern, that we may not have all the freedom of option we thought. Three strangers have arrived in Tardets and are asking questions about me and, more significantly, about you. They are described as Englishmen or Amérlos—the village people wouldn't be able to distinguish those accents. They were accompanied by French Special Police, who are being most cooperative."

"But how could they know I am here?"

"A thousand ways. Your friends, the ones who were killed in Rome, did they have plane tickets on them?"

"I suppose so. In fact, yes. We each carried our own tickets. But they were not to here; they were to Pau."

"That's close enough. I am not completely unknown." Hel shook his head at this additional evidence of amateurism. Professionals always buy tickets to points well past their real destinations, because reservations go into computers and are therefore available to government organizations and to the Mother Company.

"Who do you think the men are?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"What are you going to do?"

He shrugged. "Invite them to dinner."

* * *

After leaving Hannah, Hel sat for half an hour in his garden, watching the accumulation of heavy-bellied storm clouds around the shoulders of the mountains and considering the lie of the stones on the board. He came to two conclusions at about the same time. It would rain that night, and his wisest course would be to rush the enemy.

From the gun room he telephoned the Hôtel Dabadie where the Americans were staying. A certain amount of negotiation was required. The Dabadies would send the three Amérlos up to the château for dinner that evening, but there was the problem of the dinners they had prepared for their guests. After all, a hotel makes its money on its meals, not its rooms. Hel assured them that the only fair and proper course would be to include the uneaten dinners in their bill. It was, God knows, not the fault of the Dabadies that the strangers decided at the last moment to dine with M. Hel. Business is business. And considering that waste of food is abhorrent to God, perhaps it would be best if the Dabadies ate the dinners themselves, inviting the abbé to join them.

He found Hana reading in the library, wearing the quaint little rectangular glasses she needed for close work. She looked over the top of them as he entered. "Guests for dinner?" she asked.

He caressed her cheek with his palm. "Yes, three. Americans."

"How nice. With Hannah and Le Cagot, that will make quite a dinner party."

"It will that."

She slipped in a bookmark and closed the volume.

"Is this trouble, Nikko?"

"Yes."

"It has something to do with Hannah and her problems?"

He nodded.

She laughed lightly. "And just this morning you invited me to stay on with you for half of each year, trying to entice me with the great peace and solitude of your home."

"It will be peaceful soon. I have retired, after all."

"Can one? Can one completely retire from such a trade as yours? Ah well, if we are to have guests, I must send down to the village. Hannah will need some clothes. She cannot take dinner in those shorts of hers, particularly considering her somewhat cavalier attitude toward modest posture."

"Oh? I hadn't noticed."

* * *

A greeting bellow from the allée, a slamming of the salon porte fenêtre that rattled the glass, a noisy search to find Hana in the library, a vigorous hug with a loud smacking kiss on her cheek, a cry for a little hospitality in the form of a glass of wine, and all the household knew that Le Cagot had returned from his duties in Larrau. "Now, where is this young girl with the plump breasts that all the valley is talking about? Bring her on. Let her meet her destiny!"

Hana told him that the young woman was napping, but that Nicholai was working in the Japanese garden.

"I don't want to see him. I've had enough of his company for the last three days. Did he tell you about my cave? I practically had to drag your man through it. Sad to confess, he's getting old, Hana. It's time for you to consider your future and to look around for an ageless man—perhaps a robust Basque poet?"

Hana laughed and told him that his bath would be ready in half an hour. "And after that you might choose to dress up a bit; we're having guests for dinner."

"Ah, an audience. Good. Very well, I'll go get some wine in the kitchen. Do you still have that young Portuguese girl working for you?"

"There are several."

"I'll go sample around a bit. And wait until you see me dressed up! I bought some fancy clothes a couple of months ago, and I haven't had a chance to show them off yet. One look at me in my new clothes, and you'll melt, by the Balls..."

Hana cast a sidelong glance at him, and he instantly refined his language.

"...by the Ecstasy of Ste. Therese. All right, I'm off to the kitchen." And he marched through the house, slamming doors and shouting for wine.

Hana smiled after Le Cagot. From the first he had taken to her, and his gruff way of showing his approval was to maintain a steady barrage of hyperbolic gallantry. For her part, she liked his honest, rough ways, and she was pleased that Nicholai had a friend so loyal and entertaining as this mythical Basque. She thought of him as a mythic figure, a poet who had constructed an outlandish romantic character, and who spent the rest of his life playing the role he had created. She once asked Hel what had happened to make the poet protect himself within this opéra-bouffe, picaresque facade of his. Hel could not gave her the details; to do so would betray a confidence, one Le Cagot was unaware he had invested, because the conversation had taken place one night when the poet was crushed by sadness and nostalgia, and very drunk. Many years ago, the sensitive young poet who ultimately assumed the persona of Le Cagot had been a scholar of Basque literature, and had taken a university post in Bilbao. He married a beautiful and gentle Spanish Basque girl, and they had a baby. One night, for vague motives, he joined a student demonstration against the repression of Basque culture. His wife was with him, although she had no personal interest in politics. The federal police broke up the demonstration with gunfire. The wife was killed. Le Cagot was arrested and spent the next three years in prison. When he escaped, he learned that the baby had died while he was in jail. The young poet drank a great deal and participated in pointless and terribly violent anti-government actions. He was arrested again; and when he again escaped, the young poet no longer existed. In his place was Le Cagot, the invulnerable caricature who became a folk legend for his patriotic verse, his participation in Basque Separatist causes, and his bigger-than-life personality, which brought him invitations to lecture and read his poetry in universities throughout the Western world. The name he gave to his persona was borrowed from the Cagots, an ancient pariah race of untouchables who had practiced a variant of Christianity which brought down upon them the rancor and hatred of their Basque neighbors. The Cagots sought relief from persecution through a request to Pope Leo X in 1514, which was granted in principle, but the restrictions and indignities continued to the end of the nineteenth century, when they ceased to exist as a distinct race. Their persecution took many forms. They were required to wear on their clothing the distinctive sign of the Cagot in the shape of a goose footprint. They could not walk barefooted. They could not carry arms. They could not frequent public places, and even in entering church they had to use a low side door constructed especially for the purpose, which door is still to be seen in many village churches. They could not sit near others at Mass, or kiss the cross. They could rent land and grow food, but they could not sell their produce. Under pain of death, they could not marry or have sexual relations outside their race.

All that remained for the Cagots were the artisan trades. For many centuries, both by restriction and privilege, they were the land's only woodcutters, carpenters, and joiners. Later, they also became the Basque masons and weavers. Because their misshapen bodies were considered funny, they became the strolling musicians and entertainers of their time, and most of what is now called Basque folk art and folklore was created by the despised Cagots.

Although it was long assumed that the Cagots were a race apart, propagated in Eastern Europe and driven along before the advancing Visigoths until they were deposited, like moraine rubble before a glacier, in the undesirable land of the Pyrenees, modern evidence suggests they were isolated-pockets of Basque lepers, ostracized at first for prophylactic reasons, physically diminished in result of their disease, eventually taking on distinguishable characteristics because of enforced intermarriage. This theory goes a long way toward explaining the various limitations placed upon their freedom of action.

Popular tradition has it that the Cagots and their descendants had no earlobes. To this day, in the more traditional Basque villages, girls of five and six years of age have their ears pierced and wear earrings. Without knowing the source of the tradition, the mothers respond to the ancient practice of demonstrating that their girls have lobes in which to wear earrings.

Today the Cagots have disappeared, having either withered and grown extinct, or slowly merged with the Basque population (although this last suggestion is a risky one to advance in a Basque bar), and their name has all but fallen from use, save as a pejorative term for bent old women.

The young poet whose sensitivity had been cauterized by events chose Le Cagot as his pen name to bring attention to the precarious situation of contemporary Basque culture, which is in danger of disappearing, like the suppressed bards and minstrels of former times.

* * *

A little before six, Pierre tottered down to the square of Etchebar, the cumulative effect of his day's regularly spaced glasses of wine having freed him from the tyranny of gravity to such a degree that he navigated toward the Volvo by means of tacking. He had been sent to pick up two ensembles which Hana bad ordered by telephone after asking Hannah for her sizes and translating them into European standards. After the dresses, Pierre was to collect three dinner guests from the Hôtel Dabadie. Having twice missed the door handle, Pierre pulled down the brim of his beret and focused all of his attention on the not-inconsiderable task of getting into the car, which he eventually accomplished, only to slap his forehead as he remembered an omission. He struggled out again and delivered a glancing kick to the rear fender in imitation of M'sieur Hel's ritual, then he found his way to the driver's seat again. With his native Basque mistrust for things mechanical, Pierre limited his gear options to reverse and low, in which he drove with the throttle wide open, using all the road and both verges. Such sheep, cows, men, and wobbly Solex mopeds as suddenly appeared before his bumper he managed to avoid by twisting the wheel sharply, then seeking the road again by feel. He abjured the effete practice of using the foot brake, and even the emergency brake he viewed as a device only for parking. As he always stopped without depressing the clutch, he avoided the nuisance of having to turn off the engine, which always bucked and died as he reached his destination and hauled back on the brake lever. Fortunately for the peasants and villagers between the château and Tardets, the sound of the Volvo's loosened body clattering and clanking and the roar of its engine at full speed in low gear preceded Pierre by half a kilometer, and there was usually time to scurry behind trees or jump over stone walls. Pierre felt a justified pride in his driving skills, for he had never been involved in an accident. And this was all the more notable considering the wild and careless drivers all around him, whom he frequently observed swerving into ditches and up on sidewalks, or crashing into one another as he roared through stop signs or up one-way streets. It was not so much the maladroit recklessness of these other drivers that disturbed Pierre as their blatant rudeness, for often they had shouted vulgar things at him, and he could not count the number of times he had seen through his rearview mirror a finger, a fist, or even a whole forearm, throwing an angry figue at him.

Pierre brought the Volvo to a bucking and coughing stop in the center of the Place of Tardets and clawed his way out. After bruising his toe against the battered door, he set about his commissions, the first of which was to share a hospitable glass with old friends.

No one thought it odd that Pierre always delivered a kick to the car upon entering or leaving, as Volvo-bashing was a general practice in southwestern France, and could even be encountered as far away as Paris. Indeed, carried to cosmopolitan centers around the world by tourists, Volvo-bashing was slowly becoming a cult activity throughout the world, and this pleased Nicholai Hel, since he had begun it all.

Some years before, seeking a car-of-all-work for the château, Hel had followed the advice of a friend and purchased a Volvo on the assumption that a car so expensive, lacking in beauty, comfort, speed, and fuel economy must have something else to recommend it. And he was assured that this something else was durability and service. His battle with rust began on the third day; and little errors of construction and design and set-up (misaligned wheels that wore out his tires within five thousand kilometers, a windshield wiper that daintily avoided contact with the glass, a rear hatch catch so designed as to require two hands to close it, so that loading and unloading was a burlesque of inefficient motion) required that he return the automobile frequently to the dealer some 150 kilometers away. It was the dealer's view that these problems were the manufacturer's and the manufacturer's view that the responsibility lay with the dealer; and after months of receiving polite but vague letters of disinterested condolence from the company, Hel decided to bite the bullet and set the car to the brutish tasks of transporting sheep and bringing equipment up rough mountain roads, hoping that it would soon fall apart and justify his purchase of a vehicle with a more reliable service infrastructure. Sadly, while he had found no truth in the company's reputation for service, there was some basis for the car's claim to durability and, while it always ran poorly, it always ran. Under other circumstances, Hel would have viewed durability as a virtue in a machine, but he could find little consolation in the threat that his problems would go on for years.

Having observed Pierre's skills as a chauffeur, Hel thought to shorten his torment by allowing Pierre to drive the car whenever he chose. But this plot was foiled because ironic fate shielded Pierre from accidents. So Hel came to accept his Volvo as one of the comic burdens of life, but he allowed himself to vent his frustration by kicking or bashing the car each time he got in or out.

It was not long before his caving associates fell into the practice of bashing his Volvo whenever they passed it, at first as a joke and later by habit. Soon they and the young men they traveled with began to bash any Volvo they passed. And in the illogical way of fads, Volvo-bashing began to spread, here taking on an anti-Establishment tone, there a quality of youthful exuberance; here as an expression of antimaterialism, there as a manifestation of in-cult with-itness.

Even owners of Volvos began to accept the bashing craze, for it proved that they traveled in circles of the internationally aware. And there were cases of owners secretly bashing their own Volvos, to gain unearned reputations as cosmopolites. There were persistent, though probably apocryphal, rumors that Volvo was planning to introduce a prebashed model in its efforts to attract the smart set to an automobile that had sacrificed everything to passenger safety (despite their use of Firestone 500 tires on many models) and primarily appealed to affluent egotists who assumed that the continuance of their lives was important to the destiny of Man.

* * *

After his shower, Hel found laid out in the dressing room his black broadcloth Edwardian suit, which had been designed to protect either guests in simple business suits or those in evening wear from feeling under- or overdressed. When he met Hana at the top of the principal staircase, she was in a long dress of Cantonese style that had the same social ambiguity as his suit.

"Where's Le Cagot?" he asked as they went down to a small salon to await their guests. "I've felt his presence several times today, but I haven't heard or seen him."

"I assume he is dressing in his room." Hana laughed lightly. "He told me that I would be so taken by his new clothes that I would swoon amorously into his arms."

"Oh, God." Le Cagot's taste in clothes, as in most things, ran to operatic overstatement. "And Miss Stern?"

"She has been in her room most of the afternoon. You evidently gave her rather a bad time during your chat."

"Hm-m-m."

"She'll be down shortly after Pierre returns with clothes for her. Do you want to hear the menu?"

"No, I'm sure it's perfect."

"Not that, but adequate. These guests give us a chance to be rid of the roebuck old M. Ibar gave us. It's been hanging just over a week, so it should be ready. Is there something special I should know about our guests?"

"They are strangers to me. Enemies, I believe."

"How should I treat them?"

"Like any guest in our house. With that particular charm of yours that makes all men feel interesting and important. I want these people to be off balance and unsure of themselves. They are Americans. Just as you or I would be uncomfortable at a barbecue, they suffer from social vertigo at a proper dinner. Even their gratin, the jetset, are culturally as bogus as airlines cuisine."

"What on earth is a 'barbecue'?"

"A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer."

"I daren't ask what a 'hush puppy' is."

"Don't."

They sat together in the darkening salon, their fingers touching. The sun was down behind the mountains, and through the open porte fenêtres they could see a silver gloaming that seemed to rise from the ground of the park, its dim light filling the space beneath the black-green pines, the effect rendered mutable and dear by the threat of an incoming storm.

"How long did you live in America, Nikko?"

"About three years, just after I left Japan. In fact, I still have an apartment in New York."

"I've always wanted to visit New York."

"You'd be disappointed. It's a frightened city in which everyone is in hot and narrow pursuit of money: the bankers, the muggers, the businessmen, the whores. If you walk the streets and watch their eyes, you see two things: fear and fury. They are diminished people hovering behind triple-locked doors. They fight with men they don't hate, and make love to women they don't like. Asea in a mongrel society, they borrow orts and leavings from the world's cultures. Kir is a popular drink among those desperate to be 'with it,' and they affect Perrier, although they have one of the world's great waters in the local village of Saratoga. Their best French restaurants offer what we would think of as thirty-franc meals for ten times that much, and the service is characterized by insufferable snottiness on the part of the waiter, usually an incompetent peasant who happens to be able to read the menu. But then, Americans enjoy being abused by waiters. It's their only way of judging the quality of the food. On the other hand, if one must live in urban America—a cruel and unusual punishment at best—one might as well live in the real New York, rather than in the artificial ones farther inland. And there are some good things. Harlem has real tone. The municipal library is adequate. There is a man named Jimmy Fox who is the best barman in North America. And twice I even found myself in conversation about the nature of shibui—not shibumi, of course. It's more within the range of the mercantile mind to talk of the characteristics of the beautiful than to discuss the nature of Beauty."

She struck a long match and lighted a lamp on the table before them. "But I remember you mentioning once that you enjoyed your home in America."

"Oh, that was not New York. I own a couple of thousand hectares in the state of Wyoming, in the mountains."

"Wy-om-ing. Romantic-sounding name. Is it beautiful?"

"More sublime, I would say. It's too ragged and harsh to be beautiful. It is to this Pyrenees country what an ink sketch is to a finished painting. Much of the open land of America is attractive. Sadly, it is populated by Americans. But then, one could say a similar thing of Greece or Ireland."

"Yes, I know what you mean. I've been to Greece. I worked mere for a year, employed by a shipping magnate."

"Oh? You never mentioned that."

"There was nothing really to mention. He was very rich and very vulgar, and he sought to purchase class and status, usually in the form of spectacular wives. While in his employ, I surrounded him with quiet comfort. He made no other demands of me. By that time, there were no other demands he could make."

"I see. Ah—here comes Le Cagot."

Hana had heard nothing, because Le Cagot was sneaking down the stairs to surprise them with his sartorial splendor. Hel smiled to himself because Le Cagot's preceding aura carried qualities of boyish mischief and ultra-sly delight.

He appeared at the door, his bulk half-filling the frame, his arms in cruciform to display his fine new clothes. "Regard! Regard, Niko, and burn with envy!"

Obviously, the evening clothes had come from a theatrical costumer. They were an eclectic congregation, although the fin-de-siècle impulse dominated, with a throat wrapping of white silk in place of a cravat, and a richly brocaded waistcoat with double rows of rhinestone buttons. The black swallowtail coat was long, and its lapels were turned in gray silk. With his still-wet hair parted in the middle and his bushy beard covering most of the cravat, he had something the appearance of a middle-aged Tolstoi dressed up as a Mississippi riverboat gambler. The large yellow rose he bad pinned to his lapel was oddly correct, consonant with this amalgam of robust bad taste. He strode back and forth, brandishing his long makila like a walking stick. The makila had been in his family for generations, and there were nicks and dents on the polished ash shaft and a small bit missing from the marble knob, evidences of use as a defensive weapon by grandfathers and greatgrandfathers. The handle of a makila unscrews, revealing a twenty-centimeter blade, designed for foining, while the butt in the left hand is used for crossed parries, and its heavy marble knob is an effective clubbing weapon. Although now largely decorative and ceremonial, the makila once figured importantly in the personal safety of the Basque man alone on the road at night or roving in the high mountains.

"That is a wonderful suit," Hana said with excessive sincerity.

"Is it not? Is it not?"

"How did you come by this... suit?" Hel asked.

"It was given to me."

"In result of your losing a bet?"

"Not at all. It was given to me by a woman in appreciation for... ah, but to mention the details would be ungallant. So, when do we eat? Where are these guests of yours?"

"They are approaching up the allée right now," Hel said, rising and crossing toward the central hall.

Le Cagot peered out through the porte fenêtre, but he could see nothing because evening and the storm had pressed the last of the gloaming into the earth. Still, he had become used to Hel's proximity sensitivity, so he assumed there was someone out there.

Just as Pierre was reaching for the handle of the pull bell, Hel opened the door. The chandeliers of the hall were behind him, so he could read the faces of his three guests, while his own was in shadow. One of them was obviously the leader; the second was a gunny CIA type, Class of '53; and the third was an Arab of vague personality. All three showed signs of recent emotional drain resulting from their ride up the mountain road without headlights, and with Pierre showing off his remarkable driving skills.

"Do come in," Hel said, stepping from the doorway and allowing them to pass before him into the reception hall, where they were met by Hana who smiled as she approached.

"It was good of you to accept our invitation on such short notice. I am Hana. This is Nicholai Hel. And here is our friend, M. Le Cagot." She offered her hand.

The leader found his aplomb. "Good evening. This is Mr. Starr. Mr. ... Haman. And I am Mr. Diamond." The first crack of thunder punctuated his last word.

Hel laughed aloud. "That must have been embarrassing. Nature seems to be in a melodramatic mood."

PART THREE

Seki

Château d'Etchebar

From the moment they had the heart-squeezing experience of driving with Pierre in the battered Volvo, the three guests never quite got their feet on firm social ground. Diamond had expected to get down to cases immediately with Hel, but that clearly was not on. While Hana was conducting the party to the blue-and-gold salon for a glass of Lillet before dinner, Diamond held back and said to Hel, "I suppose you're wondering why—"

"After dinner."

Diamond stiffened just perceptibly, then smiled and half-bowed in a gesture he instantly regretted as theatrical. That damned clap of thunder!

Hana refilled glasses and handed around canapés as she guided the conversation in such a way that Darryl Starr was soon addressing her as "Ma'am" and feeling that her interest in Texas and things Texan was a veiled fascination with him; and the PLO trainee called Haman grinned and nodded with each display of concern for his comfort and well-being. Even Diamond soon found himself recounting impressions of the Basque country and feeling both lucid and insightful. All five men rose when Hana excused herself, saying that she had to attend to the young lady who would be dining with them.

There was a palpable silence after she left, and Hel allowed the slight discomfort to lie there, as he watched his guests with distant amusement.

It was Darryl Starr who found a relevant remark to fill the void. "Nice place you got here."

"Would you like to see the house?" Hel asked.

"Well... no, don't trouble yourself on my account."

Hel said a few words aside to Le Cagot, who then crossed to Starr and with gruff bonhomie pulled him from his chair by his arm and offered to show him the garden and the gun room. Starr explained that he was comfortable where he was, thank you, but Le Cagot's grin was accompanied by painful pressure around the American's upper arm.

"Indulge my whim in this, my good friend," he said.

Starr shrugged—as best he could—and went along.

Diamond was disturbed, torn between a desire to control the situation and an impulse, which he recognized to be childish, to demonstrate that his social graces were as sophisticated as Hel's. He realized that both he and this event were being managed, and he resented it. For something to say, he mentioned, "I see you're not having anything to drink before dinner, Mr. Hel."

"That's true."

Hel did not intend to give Diamond the comfort of rebounding conversational overtures; he would simply absorb each gesture and leave the chore of initiation constantly with Diamond, who chuckled and said, "I feel I should tell you that your driver is a strange one."

"Oh?"

"Yes. He parked the car out in the village square and we had to walk the rest of the way. I was sure the storm would catch us."

"I don't permit automobiles on my grounds."

"Yes, but after he parked the car, he gave the front door a kick that I'm sure must have dented it."

Hel frowned and said, "How odd. I'll have to talk to him about that."

At this point, Hana and Miss Stern joined the men, the young woman looking refined and desirable in a summer tea dress she had chosen from those Hana had bought for her. Hel watched Hannah closely as she was introduced to the two men, grudgingly admiring her control and ease while confronting the people who had engineered the killing of her comrades in Rome. Hana beckoned her to sit beside her and managed immediately to focus the social attention on her youth and beauty, guiding her in such a way that only Hel could sense traces of the reality vertigo the girl was feeling. At one moment, he caught her eyes and nodded slightly in approval of aplomb. There was some bottom to this girl after all. Perhaps if she were in the company of a woman like Hana for four or five years... who knows?

There was a gruff laugh from the hall and Le Cagot reentered, his arm around Starr's shoulders. The Texan looked a bit shaken and his hair was tousled, but Le Cagot's mission was accomplished; the shoulder holster under Starr's left armpit was now empty.

"I don't know about you, my friends," Le Cagot said in his accented English with the overgrowled r of the Francophone who has finally conquered that difficult consonant, "but I am ravenous! Bouffons! I could eat for four!"

The dinner, served by the light of two candelabra on the table and lamps in wall sconces, was not sumptuous, but it was good: trout from the local gave, roebuck with cherry sauce, garden vegetables cooked in the Japanese style, the courses separated by conversation and appropriate ices, finally a salad of greens before dessert of fruit and cheeses. Compatible wines accompanied each entrée and relevé, and the particular problem of game in a fruit sauce was solved by a fine pink wine which, while it could not support the flavors, did not contradict them either. Diamond noted with slight discomfort that Hel and Hana were served only rice and vegetables during the early part of the meal, though they joined the others in salad. Further, although their hostess drank wine with the rest of them, Hel's glass was little more than moistened with each bottle, so that in total he drank less than a full glass.

"You don't drink, Mr. Hel?" he asked.

"But I do, as you see. It is only that I don't find two sips of wine more delicious than one."

Padding with wines and waxing pseudopoetic in their failure to describe tastes lucidly is an affectation of socially mobile Americans, and Diamond fancied himself something of an authority. He sipped, swilled and examined the pink that accompanied the roebuck, then said, "Ah, there are Tavels, and there are Tavels."

Hel frowned slightly. "Ah... that's true, I suppose."

"But this is a Tavel, isn't it?"

When Hel shrugged and changed the subject diplomatically, the nape of Diamond's neck horripilated with embarrassment. He had been so sure it was Tavel.

Throughout dinner, Hel maintained a distant silence, his eyes seldom leaving Diamond, though they appeared to focus slightly behind him. Effortlessly, Hana evoked jokes and stories from each of the guests in turn, and her delight and amusement was such that each felt he had outdone himself in cleverness and charm. Even Starr, who had been withdrawn and petulant after his rough treatment at Le Cagot's hands, was soon telling Hana of his boyhood in Flatrock, Texas, and of his adventures fighting against the gooks in Korea.

At first Le Cagot attended to the task of filling himself with food. Soon the ends of his wrapped cravat were dangling, and the long swallowtailed coat was cast aside, so by the time he was ready to dominate the party and hold forth at his usual length with vigorous and sometimes bawdy tales, he was down to his spectacular waistcoat with its rhinestone buttons. He was seated next to Hannah, and out of the blue he reached over, placed his big warm hand on her thigh, and gave it a friendly squeeze. "Tell me something in all frankness, beautiful girl. Are you struggling against your desire for me? Or have you given up the struggle? I ask you this only that I may know how best to proceed. In the meantime, eat, eat! You will need your strength. So! You men are from America, eh? Me, I was in America three times. That's why my English is so good. I could probably pass for an American, eh? From the point of view of accent, I mean."

"Oh, no doubt of it," Diamond said. He was beginning to realize how important to such men as Hel and Le Cagot was the heraldry of sheer style, even when faced by enemies, and he wanted to show that be could play any game they could.

"But of course once people saw the clear truth shining in my eyes, and hear the music of my thoughts, the game would be up! They would know I was not an American."

Hel concealed a slight smile behind a finger.

"You're hard on Americans," Diamond said.

"Maybe so," Le Cagot admitted. "And maybe I am being unjust. We get to see only the dregs of them here: merchants on vacation with their brassy wives, military men with their papier-mâché, gum-chewing women, young people seeking to 'find themselves,' and worst of all, academic drudges who manage to convince granting agencies that the world would be improved if they were beshat upon Europe. I sometimes think that America's major export product is bewildered professors on sabbaticals. Is it true that everyone in the United States over twenty-five years of age has a Ph.D?" Le Cagot had the bit well between his teeth, and he began one of his tales of adventure, based as usual on a real event, but decorated with such improvements upon dull truth as occurred to him as he went along. Secure in the knowledge that Le Cagot would dominate things for many minutes, Hel let his face freeze in a politely amused expression while his mind sorted out and organized the moves that would begin after dinner.

Le Cagot had turned to Diamond. "I am going to shed some light upon history for you, American guest of my friend. Everyone knows that the Basque and the Fascists have been enemies since before the birth of history. But few know the real source of this ancient antipathy. It was our fault, really. I confess it at last. Many years ago, the Basque people gave up the practice of shitting by the roadside, and in doing this we deprived the Falange of its principal source of nourishment. And that is the truth, I swear it by Methuselah's Wrinkled B—"

"Beñat?" Hana interrupted, indicating the young girl with a nod of her head.

"—by Methuselah's Wrinkled Brow. What's wrong with you?" he asked Hana, his eyes moist with hurt "Do you think I have forgotten my manners?"

Hel pushed back his chair and rose. "Mr. Diamond and I have a bit of business to attend to, I suggest you take your cognac on the terrace. You might just have time before the rain comes."

As they stepped down from the principal hall to the Japanese garden, Hel took Diamond by the arm. "Allow me to guide you; I didn't think to bring a lantern."

"Oh? I know about your mystic proximity sense, but I didn't know you could see in the dark as well."

"I can't. But we are on my ground. Perhaps you would be well advised to remember that."

Hel lighted two spirit lamps in the gun room and gestured Diamond toward a low table on which there was a bottle and glasses. "Serve yourself. I'll be with you in a moment." He carried one of the lamps to a bookcase filled with pull drawers of file cards, some two hundred thousand cards in all. "May I assume that Diamond is your real name?"

"It is."

Hel searched for the proper key card containing all cross references to Diamond. "And your initials are?"

"Jack O." Diamond smiled to himself as he compared Hel's crude card file with his own sophisticated information system, Fat Boy. "I didn't see any reason to use an alias, assuming that you would see a family resemblance between me and my brother."

"Your brother?"

"Don't you remember my brother?"

"Not offhand." Hel muttered to himself as he fingered through a drawer of cards. As the information on Hel's cards was in six languages, the headings were arranged phonetically. "D. D-A, D-AI diphthong, DAI-M... ah, here we are. Diamond, Jack O. Do have a drink, Mr. Diamond. My filing system is a bit cumbersome, and I haven't been called on to use it since my retirement."

Diamond was surprised that Hel did not even remember his brother. To cover his temporary confusion, he picked up the bottle and examined the label. "Armagnac?"

"Hm-m-m." Hel made a mental note of the cross-reference indices and sought those cards. "We're close to the Armagnac country here. You'll find that very old and very good. So you are a servant of the Mother Company, are you? I can therefore assume that you already have a good deal of information about me from your computer. You'll have to give me a moment to catch up with you."

Diamond carried his glass with him and wandered about the gun room, looking at the uncommon weapons in cases and racks along the walls. Some of these he recognized: the nerve-gas tube, air-driven glass sliver projectors, dry-ice guns, and the like. But others were foreign to him: simple metal disks, a device that seemed to be two short rods of hickory connected by a metal link, a thimblelike cone that slipped over the finger and came to a sharp point. On the table beside the Armagnac bottle he found a small, French-made automatic. "A pretty common sort of weapon among all this exotica," he said.

Hel glanced up from the card he was reading. "Oh yes, I noticed that when we came in. It's not mine, actually. It belongs to your man, the bucolic tough from Texas. I thought he might feel more relaxed without it."

"The thoughtful host."

"Thank you." Hel set aside the card he was reading and pulled open another drawer in search of the next "That gun tells us rather a lot. Obviously, you decided not to travel armed because of the nuisance of boarding inspections. So your lad was given the gun after he got here. Its make tells us he received the gun from French police authorities. That means you have them in your pocket."

Diamond shrugged. "France needs oil too, just like every other industrial country."

"Yes. Ici on n'a pas d'huile, mais on a des idées."

"Meaning?"

"Nothing really. Just a slogan from French internal propaganda. So I see here that the Major Diamond from Tokyo was your brother. That's interesting—mildly interesting, anyway." Now that he considered it, Hel found a certain resemblance between the two, the narrow face, the intense black eyes set rather close together, the falciform nose, the thin upper lip and heavy, bloodless lower, a certain intensity of manner.

"I thought you would have guessed that when you first heard my name."

"Actually, I had pretty much forgotten him. After all, our account was settled. So you began working for the Mother Company in the Early Retirement Program, did you? That is certainly consonant with your brother's career."

Some years before, the Mother Company had discovered that its executives after the age of fifty began to be notably less productive, just at the time the Company was paying them the most. The problem was presented to Fat Boy, who offered the solution of organizing an Early Retirement Division that would arrange for the accidental demise of a small percentage of such men, usually while on vacation, and usually of apparent stroke or heart attack. The savings to the Company were considerable. Diamond had risen to the head of this division before being promoted to conducting Mother Company's control over CIA and NSA.

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

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

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

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

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

Diamond laughed thinly. "You really hate me, don't you?"

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

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

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

"I assume your information came from the Gnome?"

"Much of it came from the person you call the Gnome."

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

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

"But you do know the identity and location of the Gnome."

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

"He's nothing more or less than a blackmailer."

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

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

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

"So you will soon be without protection?"

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

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

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

"Yes."

"And you're punishing them by making them clean up after themselves?"

"That's about it."

"You're taking the risks, Mr. Diamond, A foolish associate is more dangerous than a clever opponent."

"That's my concern."

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

"That roughly is it."

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

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

"What are these?"

"Shotguns, in a way of speaking."

"Shotguns?"

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

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

Hel nodded.

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

"She made that assumption."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"I intend to listen to your proposal."

"My proposal?"

"Isn't that what merchants do? Make proposals?"

"I wouldn't exactly call it a proposal."

"What would you call it?"

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

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

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

"How will I be prevented?"

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

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

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

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

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

"May I assume you suggested this punishment?"

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

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

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

He was enjoying himself.

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

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

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

"That's right."

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

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

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

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

"And presumably that money serves also as your personal protection."

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

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

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

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

"That should be obvious."

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

Diamond stared at Hel for a moment "I'll be honest with you..."

"Don't break any habits on my account."

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

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

Hel turned his face away and shook his head slightly. "This must be embarrassing to be you."

During the silence, Diamond's fingernails had dug into his palms. He cleared his throat. "Whatever you think of me, I cannot believe that you will sacrifice the years remaining to you for one gesture that would be appreciated by no one but that middle-class dumpling I met at dinner. I think I know what you are going to do, Mr. Hel. You are going to consider this matter at length and realize at last that a handful of sadistic Arabs is not worth this home and life you have made for yourself here; you will realize that you are not honor-bound to the desperate hopes of a sick and drug-befuddled man; and finally you will decide to back off. One of the reasons you will do this is because you would consider it demeaning to make an empty gesture of courage to impress me, a man you despise. Now, I don't expect you to tell me that you're backing off right now. That would be too humiliating, too damaging to your precious sense of dignity. But that is what you will do at last. To be truthful, I almost wish you would persist in this matter. It would be a pity to see the punishments I have devised for you go unused. But, fortunately for you, the Chairman of the Mother Company is adamant that the Septembrists go unmolested. We are arranging what will be called the Camp David Peace Talks in the course of which Israel will be pressured into leaving her southern and eastern borders naked. As a by-product of these talks, the PLO will be dealt out of the Middle Eastern game. They have served their irritant purpose. But the Chairman wants to keep the Palestinians mollified until this coup comes off. You see, Mr. Hel, you're swimming in deep currents, involved with forces just a little beyond shotgun pistols and cute gardens."

Hel regarded Diamond in silence for a moment. Then he turned toward his garden. "This conversation is over," he said quietly.

"I see." Diamond took a card from his pocket'. "I can be contacted at this number. I shall be back at my office within ten hours. When you tell me that you have decided not to interfere in this business, I shall initiate the release of your Swiss funds."

As Hel no longer seemed to be aware of his presence, Diamond put the card on the table, "There's nothing more for us to discuss at this time, so I'll be on my way."

"What? Oh, yes. I am sure you can find your way out, Diamond. Hana will serve you coffee before sending you and your lackeys back to the village. No doubt Pierre has been fortifying himself with wine for the past few hours and will be in good form to give you a memorable ride."

"Very well. But first... there was that question I had for you."

"Well?"

"That rosé I had with dinner. What was it?"

"Tavel, of course."

"I knew it!"

"No, you didn't. You almost knew it."

The arm of the garden extending toward the Japanese building had been designed for listening to rain. Hel worked for weeks each rainy season, barefoot and wearing only sodden shorts, as he tuned the garden. The gutters and downspouts had been drilled and shaped, plants moved and removed, gravel distributed, sounding stones arranged in the stream, until the blend of soprano hissing of rain through gravel, the basso drip onto broad-leaved plants, the reedy resonances of quivering bamboo leaves, the counterpoint of the gurgling stream, all were balanced in volume in such a way that, if one sat precisely in the middle of the tatami'd room, no single sound dominated. The concentrating listener could draw one timbre out of the background, or let it merge again, as he shifted the focus of his attention, much as the insomniac can tune in or out the ticking of a clock. The effort required to control the instrument of a well-tuned garden is sufficient to repress quotidian worries and anxieties, but this anodyne property is not the principal goal of the gardener, who must be more devoted to creating a garden than to using it.

Hel sat in the gun room, hearing the rain, but lacking the peace of spirit to listen to it. There was bad aji in this affair. It wasn't of a piece, and it was treacherously... personal. It was Hel's way to play against the patterns on the board, not against fleshy, inconsistent living opponents. In this business, moves would be made for illogical reasons; there would be human filters between cause and effect. The whole thing stank of passion and sweat.

He released a long sigh in a thin jet of breath. "Well?" he asked. "And what do you make of all this?"

There was no answer. Hel felt her aura take on a leporine palpitation between the urge to flee and fear of movement. He slid back the door panel to the tea room and beckoned with his finger.

Hannah Stern stood in the doorway, her hair wet with rain, and her sodden dress clinging to her body and legs. She was embarrassed at being caught eavesdropping, but defiantly unwilling to apologize. In her view, the importance of the matters at hand out-weighed any consideration of good form and rules of polite behavior. Hel might have told her that, in the long run, the "minor" virtues are the only ones that matter. Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity, and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and it stands immutable in the storm of circumstance.

Hel might have told her this, but he was not interested in her spiritual education, and he had no wish to decorate the unperfectible. At all events, she would probably have understood only the words, and if she were to penetrate to meanings, what use would be the barriers and foundations of good form to a woman whose life would be lived out in some Scarsdale or other?

"Well?" he asked again. "What did you make of all that?"

She shook her head. "I had no idea they were so... organized; so... cold-blooded. I've caused you a lot of trouble, haven't I?"

"I don't hold you responsible for anything that has happened so far. I have long known that I have a karma debt. Considering the fact that my work has cut across the grain of social organization, a certain amount of bad luck would be expected. I've not had that bad luck, and so I've built up a karma debt; a weight of antichance against me. You were the vehicle for karma balance, but I don't consider you the cause. Do you understand any of that?"

She shrugged. "What are you going to do?"

The storm was passing, and the winds behind it blew in from the garden and made Hannah shudder in her wet dress.

"There are padded kimonos in that chest Get out of those clothes."

"I'm all right"

"Do as I tell you. The tragic heroine with the sniffles is too ludicrous an image."

It was consonant with the too-brief shorts, the unbuttoned shirt front and the surprise Hannah affected (believed she genuinely felt) when men responded to her as an object that she unzipped and stepped out of the wet dress before she sought out the dry kimono. She had never confessed to herself that she took social advantage of having a desirable body that appeared to be available. If she had thought of it, she would have labeled her automatic exhibitionism a healthy acceptance of her body—an absence of "hangups."

"What are you going to do?" she asked again, as she wrapped the warm kimono about her.

"The real question is what are you going to do. Do you still intend to press on with this business? To throw yourself off the pier in the hopes that I will have to jump in after you?"

"Would you? Jump in after me?"

"I don't know."

Hannah stared out into the dark of the garden and hugged the comforting kimono to herself. "I don't know... I don't know. It all seemed so clear just yesterday. I knew what I had to do, what was the only just and right thing to do."

"And now...?"

She shrugged and shook her head. "You'd rather I went home and forgot all about it, wouldn't you?"

"Yes. And that might not be as easy as you think, either. Diamond knows about you. Getting you safely home will take a little doing."

"And what happens to the Septembrists who murdered our athletes in Munich?"

"Oh, they'll die. Everyone does, eventually."

"But... if I just go home, then Avrim's death and Chaim's would be pointless!"

"That's true. They were pointless deaths, and nothing you might do would change that."

Hannah stepped close to Hel and looked up at him, her face full of confusion and doubt. She wanted to be held, comforted, told that everything would be just fine.

"You'll have to decide what you intend to do fairly quickly. Let's go back to the house. You can think things out tonight."

* * *

They found Hana and Le Cagot sitting in the cool of the wet terrace. The gusting wind had followed the storm, and the air was fresh and washed. Hana rose as they approached and took Hannah's hand in an unconscious gesture of kindness.

Le Cagot was sprawled on a stone bench, his eyes closed, his brandy glass loose in his fingers, and his heavy breathing occasionally rippling in a light snore.

"He dropped off right in the middle of a story," Hana explained.

"Hana," Hel said. "Miss Stern won't be staying with us after tonight. Would you see to having her things packed by morning? I'm going to take her up to the lodge." He turned to Hannah. "I have a mountain place. You can stay there, out of harm's way, while I consider how to get you back to your parents safely."

"I haven't decided that I want to go home."

Instead of responding, Hel kicked the sole of Le Cagot's boot. The burly Basque started and smacked his lips several times. "Where was I? Ah... I was telling you of those three nuns in Bayonne. Well, I met them—"

"No, you decided not to tell that one, considering the presence of ladies."

"Oh? Well, good! You see, little girl, a story like that would inflame your passions. And when you come to me, I want you to do so of your own will, and not driven by blinding lust. What happened to our guests?"

"They've gone. Probably back to the United States."

"I am going to tell you something in all frankness, Niko. I do not like those men. There is cowardice in their eyes; and that makes them dangerous. You must either invite a better class of guests, or risk losing my patronage. Hana, wonderful and desirable woman, do you want to go to bed with me?"

She smiled. "No, thank you, Beñat."

"I admire your self control. What about you, little girl?"

"She's tired," Hana said.

"Ah well, perhaps it's just as good. It would be a little crowded in my bed, what with the plump Portuguese kitchen maid. So! I hate to leave you without the color and charm of my presence, but the magnificent machine that is my body needs draining, then sleep. Good night, my friends." He grunted to his feet and started to leave, then he noticed Hannah's kimono. "What's this? What happened to your clothes? Oh, Niko, Niko. Greed is a vice. Ah well... good night."

* * *

Hana had gently stroked the tension from his back and shoulders as he lay on his stomach, and now she tugged his hair until he was half asleep. She placed her body over his, fitting her lap to his buttocks, her legs and arms over his, her warm weight protecting him, comforting, forcing him to relax. "This is trouble, isn't it?" she whispered.

He hummed in affirmation.

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," he breathed. "Get the girl away from here first. They may think that her death would cancel my debt to the uncle."

"You are sure they won't find her? There's no such thing as a secret in these valleys."

"Only the mountain men will know where she is. They're my people; and they don't talk to police, by habit and tradition."

"And what then?"

"I don't know. I'll think about it."

"Shall I bring you pleasure?"

"No. I'm too tense. Let me be selfish. Let me bring you pleasure."

Larun

Hel was awake at dawn and put in two hours of work on the garden before he took breakfast with Hana in the tatami'd room overlooking the newly raked sea gravel that flowed down to the edge of the stream; "In time, Hana, this will be an acceptable garden. I hope you are here to enjoy it with me."

"I have been giving that matter consideration, Nikko. The idea is not without its attractions. You were very thorough last night."

"I was working out some stresses. That's an advantage."

"If I were selfish, I would hope for such stresses always."

He chuckled. "Oh, will you telephone down to the village and arrange for the next flight back to the United States for Miss Stern? It will be Pau to Paris, Paris to New York, New York to Chicago."

"She is leaving us then?"

"Not just yet. I don't want her in the open. But the reservations will be stored in the airline's computer bank, and will be immediately available to Fat Boy. It will throw them off the track."

"And who is 'Fat Boy'?"

"A computer. The final enemy. It arms stupid men with information."

"You sound bitter this morning."

"I am. Even self-pitying."

"I had avoided that phrase, but it is the right one. And it's not becoming in a man like you."

"I know." He smiled. "No one in the world would dare correct me like that, Hana. You're a treasure."

"It's my role to be a treasure."

"True. By the way, where is Le Cagot? I haven't heard him thundering about."

"He went off an hour ago with Miss Stern. He's going to show her some of the deserted villages. I must say she seemed to be in good spirits."

"The shallow recover quickly. You can't bruise a pillow. When will they be back?"

"By lunch surely. I promised Beñat a roast of gigot. You said you were taking Hannah to the lodge. When will you be leaving?"

"After twilight. I'm being watched."

"You intend to spend the night there with her?"

"Hm-m. I suppose so. I wouldn't want to come back down those roads in the dark."

"I know you don't like Hannah, but—"

"I don't like her type, thrill-seeking middle-class muffins tickling themselves with the thrill of terror and revolution. Her existence has already cost me a great deal."

"Do you intend to punish her while you're up there?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

"Don't be harsh. She's a good child."

"She is twenty-four years old. She has no right to be a child at that age. And she is not good. At best, she is 'cute.'"

Hel knew what Hana meant by "punishing" the girl. He had occasionally avenged himself on young women who had annoyed him by making love to them, using his tactical skills and exotic training to create an experience the woman could never approach again and would seek in vain through affairs and marriages for the rest of her life.

Hana felt no jealousy concerning Hannah; that would have been ridiculous. During the two years they had lived together, both she and Hel had been free to go off on little trips and seek sexual diversion, exercises of physical curiosity that kept their appetites in tone and made more precious, by comparison, what they had. Hana once chided him lightheartedly, complaining that he had the better of the arrangement, for a trained man can accomplish decent levels of exercise with a willing amateur; while even the most gifted and experienced woman has difficulty, with the gauche instrument of a bumbling man, achieving much beyond lust-scratching. Still, she enjoyed the occasional well-muscled young man of Paris or the Côte d'Azure, primarily as objects of physical beauty: toys to cuddle.

* * *

They drove along the twisting valley road, already dark with descending evening. The mountains rising sharply to their left were featureless geometric shapes, while those to their right were pink and amber in the horizontal rays of the setting sun. When they started from Etchebar, Hannah had been full of chatter about the robust good time she had had that afternoon with Le Cagot, wandering through deserted villages in the uplands, where she had noticed that each church clock had had its hands removed by the departing peasants. Le Cagot had explained that removing the hands of the clocks was considered necessary, because there would be no one in the churches to keep the clock weights screwed up, and one could not allow God's clock to be inaccurate. The dour tone of primitive Basque Catholicism was expressed in a memento mori inscription on the tower of one deserted church; "Each hour wounds, the last kills."

She was silent now, awed by the desolate beauty of the mountains rising so abruptly from the narrow valley that they seemed to overhang. Twice, Hel frowned and glanced over at her to find her eyes soft and a calm smile on her lips. He had been attracted and surprised by the alpha saturation in her aura, uncommon and unexpected in a person he had dismissed as a peppy twit. It was the timbre of calm and inner peace. He was going to question her about her decision concerning the Septembrists, when his attention was arrested by the approach of a car from behind driving with only wing lights. It flashed through his mind that Diamond or his French police lackeys might have learned that he was moving her to a safer place, and his hands gripped the wheel as he recalled the features of the road, deciding where he would force the car to pass him, then knock it into the ravine that raced along to their left. He had taken an exhaustive course in offensive driving, in result of which he always drove heavy cars, like his damned Volvo, for just such emergencies as this.

The road was never straight, constantly curving and twisting as it followed the course of the river ravine.

There was no place a safe pass could be made, but that, of course, would not deter a French driver, whose adolescent impulse to pass is legendary. The car behind continued to close the distance until it was only a meter from his back bumper. It flashed its headlights and sounded its horn, then whipped around while they were in a tight blind curve.

Hel relaxed and slowed to let the car pass. The horn and the lights told him that this was not an assassination attempt. No professional would telegraph his move like that. It was just another childish French driver.

He shook his head paternally as the underpowered Peugeot strained its motor in its laboring effort to pass, the young driver's knuckles white on the steering wheel, his eyes bulging from their sockets in his effort to hold the road.

In his experience, Hel had found that only older North American drivers, with the long distances they habitually travel on good roads with competent machines, have become inured to the automobile as toy and as manhood metaphor. The French driver's infantile recklessness often annoyed him, but not so much as did the typical Italian driver's use of the automobile as an extension of his penis, or the British, driver's use of it as a substitute.

For half an hour after leaving the valley road, they pulled up toward the mountains of Larun, over an unimproved road that writhed like a snake in its final agony. Some of the cutbacks were inside the turning radius of the Volvo, and negotiating them required two cuts and a bit of skidding close to the edge of loose gravel verges. They were never out of low gear, and they rose so steeply that they climbed out of the night that had pooled in the valley and into the zebra twilight of the high mountains: a blinding glare on the windshield when they turned toward the west, then blackness when outcroppings of rock blocked the setting sun.

Even this primitive road petered out, and they continued to ascend along faint ruts pressed into stubbly alpine meadows. The setting sun was now red and huge, its base flattened as it melted into the shimmering horizon. There were snow fields on the peaks above them glowing pink, then soon mauve, then purple against a black sky. The first stars glittered in the darkening east while the sky to the west was still hazy blue around the blood-red rim of the sinking sun.

Hel stopped the car by an outcropping of granite and set the hand brake. "We have to pack in from here. It's another two and a half kilometers."

"Up?" Hannah asked.

"Mostly up."

"God, this lodge of yours is certainly out of the way."

"That's its role." They got out and unloaded her pack from the car, experiencing the characteristic frustration of the Volvo's diabolic rear latch. They had walked twenty meters before it occurred to him to perform his satisfying ritual. Rather than go back, he picked up a jagged rock and hurled it, a lucky shot that hit a rear window and made a large cobweb of crackled safety glass.

"What was that all about?" Hannah asked.

"Just a gesture. Man against the system. Let's go. Stay close. I know the trail by feel."

"How long will I be up here all alone?"

"Until I decide what to do with you."

"Will you be staying tonight?"

"Yes."

They walked on for a minute before she said, "I'm glad."

* * *

He maintained a brisk pace because the light was draining fast. She was strong and young, and could stay with him, walking in silence, captured by the rapid but subtle color shifts of a mountain twilight. Again, as before down in the valley, he intercepted a surprising alpha tone in her aura—that rapid, midvolume signal that he associated with meditation and soul peace, and not at all with the characteristic signature timbres of young Westerners.

She stopped suddenly as they were crossing the last alpine meadow before the narrow ravine leading to the lodge.

"What is it?"

"Look. These flowers. I've never seen anything like them before." She bent close to the wiry-stalked bells of dusty gold, just visible in the groundglow.

He nodded. "They're unique to this meadow and to one other over there." He gestured westward, toward the Table of the Three Kings, no longer visible in the gloom. "We're just above twelve hundred here. Both here and over there, they grow only at twelve hundred, Locally they are called the Eye of Autumn, and most people have never seen them, because they bloom for only three or four days."

"Beautiful. But it's almost dark, and they're still open."

"They never close. Tradition has it that they live so short a time they dare not close."

"That's sad."

He shrugged.

* * *

They sat opposite one another at a small table, finishing supper as they looked out through the plate-glass wall that gave onto the steep, narrow gully that was the only access to the lodge. Normally, Hel would be uneasy sitting in front of a glass wall, his form lighted by an oil lamp, while all was dark beyond. But he knew that the double plate glass was bulletproof.

The lodge was built of local stone and was simple of design: one large room with a cantilevered sleeping balcony. When first they arrived, he had acquainted Hannah with its features. The stream that flowed from a permanent snowfield above passed directly under the lodge, so one could get water through a trap door without going outside. The four-hundred-liter oil tank that fueled the stove and space heater was encased in the same stone as the lodge, so that incoming gunfire could not rupture it. There was a boiler-plate shutter that closed over the only door. The larder was cut into the face of granite that constituted one wall of the lodge, and contained thirty days' supply of food. Set into the bulletproof plate-glass wall was one small pane that could be broken out to permit firing down into the tight ravine up which anyone approaching the lodge would have to pass. The walls of the ravine were smooth, and all covering boulders had been dislodged and rolled to the bottom.

"Lord, you could hold an army off forever!" she exclaimed.

"Not an army, and not forever; but it would be a costly position to take." He took a semiautomatic rifle with telescopic sights from its rack and gave it to her. "Can you use this weapon?"

"Well... I suppose so."

"I see. Well, the important thing is that you shoot if you see anyone approaching up the gully who is not carrying a xahako. It doesn't matter if you hit him or not. The sound of your fire will carry in these mountains, and within half an hour help will be here."

"What's a... ah...?"

"A xahako is a wine skin like this one. The shepherds and smugglers in these hills all know you are here. They're my friends. And they all carry xahakos. An outlander wouldn't."

"Am I really in all that much danger?"

"I don't know."

"But why would they want to kill me?"

"I'm not sure they do. But it's a possibility. They might reason that my involvement would be over if you were dead, and there was nothing more I could do to repay my debt to your uncle. That would be stupid thinking, because if they killed you while you were in my protection, I would be forced to make a countergesture. But we are dealing here with merchant and military mentalities, and stupidity is their intellectual idiom. Now let's see if you can manage everything."

He rehearsed her in lighting the stove and space heater, in drawing water from the trap door over the stream, and in loading clips into the rifle. "By the way, remember to take one of these mineral tablets each day. The water running under the floor is snowmelt. It has no minerals, and in time it will leech the minerals out of your system."

"God, how long will I be here?"

"I'm not sure. A week. Maybe two. Once those Septembrists have accomplished their hijack, the pressure will be off you."

While he made supper from tinned foods in the larder, she had wandered about the lodge, touching things, thinking her own thoughts.

And now they sat across the round table by the glass wall, the candlelight reversing the shadows on her soft young face on which lines of character and experience had not yet developed. She had been silent throughout the meal, and she had drunk more wine than was her habit, and now her eyes were moist and vague. "I should tell you that you don't have to worry about me anymore. I know what I'm going to do now. Early this morning, I decided to go home and try my best to forget all this anger and... ugliness. It's not my kind of thing. More than that, I realize now that it's all—I don't know—all sort of unimportant." She played absently with the candle flame, passing her finger through it just quickly enough to avoid being burned. "A strange thing happened to me last night. Weird. But wonderful. I've been feeling the effects of it all day long."

Hel thought of the alpha timbres he had been intercepting.

"I couldn't sleep. I got up and wandered around your house in the dark. Then I went to the garden. The air was cool and there was no breeze at all. I sat by the stream, and I could see the dark flicker of the water. I was staring at it, not thinking of anything in particular, then all at once I... it was a feeling I almost remember having when I was a child. All at once, all the pressures and confusions and fears were gone. They dissolved away, and I felt light. I felt like I was transported somewhere else, someplace I've never been to, but I know very well. It was sunny and still, and there was grass all around me; and I seemed to understand everything. Almost as though I was... I don't know. Almost as though I was—ouch!" She snapped her hand back and sucked the singed finger.

He laughed and shook his head, and she laughed too.

"That was a stupid thing to do," she said.

"True. I think you were going to say that it was almost as though you and the grass and the sun were all one being, parts of the same thing."

She stared at him, her finger still to her lips. "How did you know that?"

"It's an experience others have had. You said you remembered similar feelings when you were a child?"

"Well, not exactly remember. No, not remember at all. It's just that when I was there, I had the feeling that this wasn't new and strange. It was something I had done before—but I don't actually remember doing it before. You know what I mean?"

"I think I do. You might have been participating in the atavistic—"

"I'll tell you what! I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. But I'll tell you what it's like. It's like the very best high on pot or something, when you're in a perfect mood and everything's going just right. It's not exactly like that, because you never get there with hooch, but it's where you think you're going. You know what I mean?"

"No."

"You never use pot or anything?"

"No. I've never had to. My inner resources are intact."

"Well. It was something like that."

"I see. How's your finger?"

"Oh, it's fine. The point is that, after the feeling had passed last night, I found myself sitting there in your garden, rested and clear-minded. And I wasn't confused any more. I knew there was no point in trying to punish the Septembrists. Violence doesn't get you anywhere. It's irrelevant. Now I think I just want to go home. Spend a little time getting in touch with myself. Then maybe—I don't know. See what's happening around me, maybe. Deal with that." She poured herself out another glass of wine and drank it down, then she put her hand on Hel's arm. "I guess I've been a lot of trouble to you."

"I believe the American idiom is 'a pain in the ass.'"

"I wish there were some way I could make it up to you."

He smiled at her obliquity.

She poured another glass of wine and said, "Do you think Hana minds your being here?"

"Why should she?"

"Well, I mean... do you think she minds our spending the night together?"

"What does that phrase signify to you?"

"What? Well... we'll be sleeping together."

"Sleeping together?"

"In the same place, I mean. You know what I mean."

He regarded her without speaking. Her experience of mystic transport, even if it was a unique event prompted by an overload of tension and desperation, rather than the function of a spirit in balance and peace, gave her a worthiness in his eyes. But this new acceptance was not free from a certain envy, that this vague-minded muffin should be able to achieve the state that he had lost years ago, probably forever. He recognized the envy to be adolescent and small on his part, but this recognition was not sufficient to banish the feeling.

She had been frowning into the candle flame, trying to sort out her emotions. "I should tell you something."

"Should you?"

"I want to be honest with you."

"Don't bother."

"No, I want to be. Even before I met you, I used to think about you... daydream, sort of. All the stories my uncle used to tell about you. I was really surprised at how young you are—how young you appear, that is. And I suppose if I analyzed my feelings, there's a sort of father projection. Here you are, the great myth in the flesh. I was scared and confused, and you protected me. I can see all the psychological impulses that would draw me toward you, can't you?"

"Have you considered the possibility that you're a randy young woman with a healthy and uncomplicated desire to climax? Or do you find that psychologically unsubtle?"

She looked at him and nodded. "You certainly know how to put a person down, don't you? You don't leave a person much to cover herself with."

"That's true. And perhaps it's uncivil of me. I'm sorry. Here is what I think is going on with you. You're alone, lonely, confused. You want to be cuddled and comforted. You don't know how to ask for that, because you're a product of the Western culture; so you negotiate for it, bartering sex for cuddling. It's not an uncommon negotiation for the Western woman to engage in. After all, she's limited to negotiating with the Western male, whose concept of social exchange is brittle and limited, and who demands earnest money in the form of sex, because that's the only part of the bargain he is comfortable with. Miss Stern, you may sleep with me tonight if you wish. I'll hold you and comfort you, if that's what you want."

Both gratitude and too much wine moistened her eyes. "I would like that, yes."

* * *

But the animal lurking within is seldom tethered by good intentions. When he awoke to her attentions and felt emanating from her the alpha/theta syncopation that attends sexual excitation, his response was not solely dictated by a desire to shield her from rejection.

She was exceptionally ripe and easy, all of her nerves close to the surface and desperately sensitive. Because she was young, there was a bit of difficulty keeping her lubricated, but beyond that mechanical nuisance he could hold her in climax without much effort.

Her eyes rolled back again and she pleaded, "No... please... I can't again! I'll die if I do again!" But her involuntary contractions rushed closer and closer together, and she was gasping in her fourth orgasm, which he prolonged until her fingernails were clawing frantically at the nap of the rug.

He recalled Hana's injunction against dimming Hannah's future experience by comparison, and he had no particular impulse to climax himself, so he brought her back down slowly, stroking and cooling her as the muscles of her buttocks, stomach, and thighs quivered with the fatigue of repeated orgasm, and she lay still on the pile of pillows, half-unconscious and feeling that her flesh was melting.

He washed in frigid meltwater, then went up to the overhanging balcony to sleep.

Some time later, he felt her approach silently. He made space for her and a nest in his arms and lap. As she dipped toward sleep, she said dreamily, "Nicholai?"

"Please don't call me by my first name," he murmured.

She was silent for a time. "Mr. Hel? Don't be scared by this, because it's just a passing thing. But at this moment, I am in love with you."

"Don't be foolish."

"Do you know what I wish?"

He did not answer.

"I wish it were morning and I could go out and pick you a bunch of flowers... those Eyes of Autumn we saw."

He chuckled and folded her in. "Good night, Miss Stern."

Etchebar

It was midmorning before Hana heard the splash of a slab of rock into the stream and came from the château to find Hel rearranging the sounding stones, his trouser legs rolled up, and his forearms dripping with water.

"Will I ever get this right, Hana?"

She shook her head. "Only you will ever know, Nikko. Is Hannah safely set up at the lodge?"

"Yes. I think the girls have heated the water by now. Do you feel like taking a bath with me?"

"Certainly."

They sat opposite one another, their feet in their habitual caress, their eyes closed and their bodies weightless.

"I hope you were kind to her," Hana murmured sleepily.

"I was."

"And you? How was it for you?"

"For me?" He opened his eyes. "Madame, do you have anything pressing on your schedule just now?"

"I'll have to consult my carnet de bal, but it is possible that I can accommodate you."

* * *

Shortly after noon, when he had reason to hope the local PTT would be functioning at least marginally, Hel placed a transatlantic call to the number Diamond had left with him. He had decided to tell the Mother Company that Hannah Stern had decided to return home, leaving the Septembrists unmolested. He assumed Diamond would take personal satisfaction in the thought that he had frightened Nicholai Hel off, but just as praise from such a source would not have pleased him, so scorn could not embarrass him.

It would be more than an hour before the viscous and senile French telephone system could place his call, and he chose to pass the interval inspecting the grounds. He felt lighthearted, well-disposed toward everything, enjoying that generalized euphoria that follows a close call with danger. For a whole constellation of impalpable reasons, he had dreaded getting involved in a business that was trammeled with personalities and passions.

He was wandering through the privet maze on the east lawns when he came across Pierre, who was in his usual vinous fog of contentment. The gardener looked up into the sky and pontificated. "Ah, M'sieur. Soon there will be a storm. The signs all insist on it."

"Oh?"

"Oh yes, there is no doubt. The little clouds of the morning have been herded against the flank of ahuñe-mendi. The first of the ursoa flew up the valley this afternoon. The sagarra turned its leaves over in the wind. These are sure signs. A storm is inevitable."

"That's too bad. We could have used a little rain."

"True, M'sieur. But look! Here comes M'sieur Le Cagot. How finely he dresses!"

Le Cagot was approaching across the lawn, still wearing the rumpled theatrical evening dress of two nights ago. As he neared, Pierre tottered away, explaining that there were many thousands of things that demanded his immediate attention.

Hel greeted Le Cagot. "I haven't seen you in a while, Beñat. Where have you been?"

"Bof. I've been up in Larrau with the widow, helping her put out the fire in her belly." Le Cagot was uneasy, his badinage mechanical and flat.

"One day, Beñat, that widow will have you in the trap, and you'll be... What is it? What's wrong?"

Le Cagot put his hands on Hel's shoulders. "I have hard news for you, friend. A terrible thing has happened. That girl with the plump breasts? Your guest?..."

Hel closed his eyes and turned his head to the side. After a silence he said quietly, "Dead?"

"I'm afraid so. A contrabandier heard the shots. By the time he got to your lodge, she was dead. They had shot her... many, many times."

Hel took a long, slow breath and held it for a moment; then he let it out completely, as he absorbed the first shock and avoided the flash of mind-fogging fury. Keeping his mind empty, he walked back toward the château, while Le Cagot followed, respecting his friend's armor of silence.

Hel had sat for ten minutes at the threshold of the tatami'd room, staring out over the garden, while Le Cagot slumped beside him. He refocused his eyes and said in a monotone, "All right. How did they get into the lodge?"

"They didn't have to. She was found in the meadow below the ravine. Evidently she was picking wildflowers. There was a large bunch found in her hand."

"Silly twit," Hel said in a tone that might have been affectionate. "Do we know who shot her?"

"Yes. Early this morning, down in the village of Lescun, two outlanders were seen. Their descriptions are those of the Amérlo from Texas I met here and that little Arab snot."

"But how did they know where she was? Only our people knew that."

"There is only one way. Someone must have informed."

"One of our people?"

"I know. I know!" Le Cagot spoke between his teeth. "I have asked around. Sooner or later, I shall find out who it was. And when I do, by the Prophetic Balls of Joseph in Egypt, I swear that the blade of my makila will puncture his black heart!" Le Cagot was ashamed and furious that one of his own, a mountain Basque, had disgraced the race in this way. "What do you say, Niko? Shall we go get them, the Amérlo and the Arab?"

Hel shook his head. "By now they are on a plane bound for the United States. Their time will come."

Le Cagot smashed his fists together, breaking the skin over a knuckle. "But why, Niko! Why kill such a morsel? What harm could she do, the poor muffin?"

"They wanted to prevent me from doing something. They thought they could erase my debt to the uncle by killing the niece."

"They are mistaken, of course."

"Of course." Hel sat up straight as his mind began to function in a different timbre. "Will you help me, Beñat?"

"Will I help you? Does asparagus make your piss stink?"

"They have French Internal Security forces all over this part of the country with orders to put me away if I attempt to leave the area."

"Bof! The only charm of the Security Force is its epic incompetence."

"Still, they will be a nuisance. And they might get lucky. We'll have to neutralize them. Do you remember Maurice de Lhandes?"

"The man they call the Gnome? Yes, of course."

"I have to get in touch with him, I'll need his help to get safely into Britain. We'll go through the mountains tonight, into Spain to San Sebastian. I need a fishing boat to take me along the coast to St. Jean de Luz. Would you arrange that?"

"Would a cow lick Lot's wife?"

"Day after tomorrow, I'll be flying out from Biarritz to London. They'll be watching the airports. But they're spread thin, and that's to our advantage. Starting about noon that day, I want reports leaked to the authorities that I have appeared in Oloron, Pau, Bayonne, Bilbao, Mauléon, St. Jean Pied de Port, Bordeaux, Ste. Engrace, and Dax—all at the same time. I want their crosscommunications confused, so that the report from Biarritz will be just one drop in a torrent of information. Can that be arranged?"

"Can it be arranged? Do... I can't think of an old saying for it just now. Yes, it can be arranged. This is like the old days, eh?"

"I'm afraid so."

"You're taking me with you, of course."

"No. It's not your kind of thing."

"Holà! Don't let the gray in my beard fool you. A boy lives inside this body! A very mean boy!"

"It's not that. If this were breaking into a prison or blowing away a guardpost, there is no one I'd rather have with me. But this won't be a matter of courage. It must be done by craft."

As was his custom when in the open air, Le Cagot had turned aside and unbuttoned his trousers to relieve himself as he talked. "You don't think I am capable of craft? I am subtlety itself! Like the chameleon, I blend with all backgrounds!"

Hel could not help smiling. This self-created folk myth standing before him, resplendent in rumpled fin-de-siècle evening clothes, the rhinestone buttons of his brocade waistcoat sparkling in the sun, his beret tugged low over his sunglasses, his rust-and-steel beard covering a silk cravat, the battered old makila under his arm as he held his penis in one hand and sprayed urine back and forth like a schoolboy—this man was laying claim to being subtle and inconspicuous.

"No, I don't want you to come with me, Beñat. You can help most by making the arrangements I asked for."

"And after that? What do I do while you are off amusing yourself? Pray and twiddle my thumbs?"

"I'll tell you what. While I'm gone, you can press on with preparations for the exploration of your cave. Get the rest of the gear we need down into the hole. Wet suits. Air tanks. When I get back, we'll take a shot at exploring it from light to light. How's that?"

"It's better than nothing. But not much."

A serving girl came from the house to tell Hel that he was wanted in the château.

He found Hana standing with the telephone in the butler's pantry, blocking the mouthpiece with her palm. "It is Mr. Diamond returning your call to the United States."

Hel looked at the phone, then glanced down to the floor. "Tell him I'll get back to him soon."

* * *

They had finished supper in the tatami'd room, and now they were watching the evening permutations of shifting shadow through the garden. He had told her that he would be away for about a week.

"Does this have to do with Hannah?"

"Yes." He saw no reason to tell her the girl was dead.

After a silence, she said, "When you get back, it will be close to the end of my stay with you."

"I know. By then you'll have to decide if you're interested in continuing our life together."

"I know." She lowered her eyes and, for the first time he could remember, her cheeks colored with the hint of a blush. "Nikko? Would it be too silly for us to consider becoming married?"

"Married?"

"Never mind. Just a silly thought that wandered through my mind. I don't believe I would want it anyway." She had touched on the idea gingerly and had fled instantly from his first reaction.

For several minutes, he was deep in thought. "No, it's not all that silly. If you decide to give me years of your life, then of course we should do something to assure your economic future. Let's talk about it when I return."

"I could never mention it again."

"I realize that, Hana. But I could."

PART FOUR

Uttegae

St. Jean de Luz/Biarritz

The open fishing boat plowed the ripple path of the setting moon, quicksilver on the sea, like an effect from the brush of a kitsch watercolorist. The diesel motor chugged bronchially and gasped as it was turned off. The bow skewed when the boat crunched up on the pebble beach. Hel slipped over the side and stood kneedeep in the surging tide, his duffel bag on his shoulder. A wave of his hand was answered by a blurred motion from the boat, and he waded toward the deserted shore, his canvas pants heavy with water, his rope-soled espadrilles digging into the sand. The motor coughed and began its rhythmic thunking, as the boat made its way out to sea, along the matte-black shore toward Spain.

From the brow of a dune, he could see the lights of cafés and bars around the small harbor of St. Jean de Luz, where fishing boats heaved sleepily on the oily water of the docking slips. He shifted the weight of the duffel and made for the Café of the Whale, to confirm a telegraph order he had made for dinner. The owner of the café had been a master chef in Paris, before retiring back to his home village. He enjoyed displaying his prowess occasionally, particularly when M. Hel granted him carte blanche as regards menu and expense. The dinner was to be prepared and served in the home of Monsieur de Lhandes, the "fine little gentleman" who lived in an old mansion down the shore, and who was never to be seen in the streets of St. Jean de Luz because his physiognomy would cause comment, and perhaps ridicule, from ill-brought-up children. M. de Lhandes was a midget, little more than a meter tall, though he was over sixty years old.

* * *

Hel's tap at the back door brought Mademoiselle Pinard to peer cautiously through the curtain, then a broad smile cracked her face, and she opened the door wide. "Ah, Monsieur Hel! Welcome. It has been too long since last we saw you! Come in, come in! Ah, you are wet! Monsieur de Lhandes is so looking forward to your dinner."

"I don't want to drip on your floor, Mademoiselle Pinard. May I take off my pants?"

Mademoiselle Pinard blushed and slapped at his shoulder with delight. "Oh, Monsieur Hel! Is this any way to speak? Oh, men!" In obedience to their established routine of chaste flirtation, she was both flustered and delighted. Mademoiselle Pinard was somewhat older than fifty—she had always been somewhat older than fifty. Tall and sere, with dry nervous hands and an unlubricated walk, she had a face too long for her tiny eyes and thin mouth, so rather a lot of it was devoted to forehead and chin. If there had been more character in her face, she would have been ugly; as it was, she was only plain. Mademoiselle Pinard was the mold from which virgins are made, and her redoubtable virtue was in no way lessened by the fact that she had been Bernard de Lhandes's companion, nurse, and mistress for thirty years. She was the kind of woman who said "Zut!" or "Ma foi!" when exasperated beyond the control of good taste.

As she showed him to the room that was always his when he visited, she said in a low voice, "Monsieur de Lhandes is not well, you know. I am delighted that he will have your company this evening, but you must be very careful. He is close to God. Weeks, months only, the doctor tells me."

"I'll be careful, darling. Here we are. Do you want to come in while I change my clothes?"

"Oh, Monsieur!"

Hel shrugged. "Ah well. But one day, your barriers will fall, Mademoiselle Pinard. And then... Ah, then..."

"Monster! And Monsieur de Lhandes your good friend! Men!"

"We are victims of our appetites, Mademoiselle. Helpless victims. Tell me, is dinner ready?"

"The chef and his assistants have been cluttering up the kitchen all day. Everything is in readiness."

"Then I'll see you at dinner, and we'll satisfy our appetites together."

"Oh, Monsieur!"

* * *

They took dinner in the largest room of the house, one lined with shelves on which books were stacked and piled in a disarray that was evidence of de Lhandes's passion for learning. Since he considered it outrageous to read and eat at the same time—diluting one of his passions with the other—de Lhandes had struck on the idea of combining library and dining room, the long refectory table serving both functions. They sat at one end of this table, Bernard de Lhandes at the head, Hel to his right. Mademoiselle Pinard to his left. Like most of the furniture, the table and chairs had been cut down and were somewhat too big for de Lhandes and somewhat too small for his rare guests. Such, de Lhandes had once told Hel, was the nature of compromise: a condition that satisfied no one, but left each with the comforting feeling that others had been done in too.

Dinner was nearly over, and they were resting and chatting between courses. There had been Neva caviar with blinis, still hot on their napkins, St. Germain Royal (de Lhandes found a hint too much mint), suprême de sole au Château Yquem, quail under the ashes (de Lhandes mentioned that walnut would have been a better wood for the log fire, but he could accept the flavor imparted by oak cinders), rack of baby lamb Edward VII (de Lhandes regretted that it was not cold enough, but he realized that Hel's arrangements were spur of the moment), riz à la grècque (the bit too much red pepper de Lhandes attributed to the chef's place of birth), morels (the bit too little lemon juice de Lhandes attributed to the chef's personality), Florentine artichoke bottoms (the gross unbalance between gruyère and parmesan in the mornay sauce de Lhandes attributed to the chef's perversity, for the error had been mentioned before), and Danicheff salad (which de Lhandes found perfect, to his slight annoyance).

From each of these dishes, de Lhandes took the smallest morsel that would still allow him to have all the flavors in his mouth at once. His heart, liver, and digestive system were such a ruin that his doctor restricted him to the blandest of foods. Hel, from dietary habit, ate very little. Mademoiselle Pinard's appetite was good, though her concept of exquisite table manners involved taking minute bites and chewing them protractedly with circular, leporine motions confined to the very front of her mouth, where her napkin often and daintily went to brush thin lips. One of the reasons the chef of the Café of the Whale enjoyed doing these occasional suppers for Hel was the great feast his family and friends always enjoyed later that same night.

"It's appalling how little we eat, Nicholai," de Lhandes said in his surprisingly deep voice. "You with your monk's attitude toward food, and I with my ravished constitution! Picking about like this. I feel like a rich ten-year-old in a luxurious bordello!"

Mademoiselle Pinard went behind her napkin for a moment.

"And these thimblesful of wine!" de Lhandes complained. "Ah, that I have descended to this! A man who, through knowledge and money, converted gluttony into a major art! Fate is either ironic or just, I don't know which. But look at me! Eating as though I were a bloodless nun doing penance for her daydreams about the young curé!"

The napkin concealed Mademoiselle Pinard's blush.

"How sick are you, old friend?" Hel asked. Honesty was common currency between them.

"I am finally sick. This heart of mine is more a sponge than a pump. I have been in retirement for—what? Five years now? And for four of them I have been of no use to dear Mademoiselle Pinard—save as an observer, of course."

The napkin.

The meal ended with a bombe, fruit, glacés variées—no brandies or digestifs—and Mademoiselle Pinard retired to allow the men to chat.

De Lhandes slid down from his chair and made his way to the fireside, stopping for breath twice, where he occupied a low chair that nevertheless left his feet straight out before him.

"All chairs are chaises longues for me, my friend." He laughed. "All right, what can I do for you?"

"I need help."

"Of course. Good comrades though we are, you would not come by boat in the dead of night for the sole purpose of disgracing a supper by picking at it. You know that I have been out of the information business for several years, but I have orts and bits left from the old days, and I shall help you if I can."

"I should tell you that they have got my money. I won't be able to pay you immediately."

De Lhandes waved a dismissing hand. "I'll send you a bill from hell. You'll recognize it by the singed edges. Is it a person, or a government?"

"Government. I have to get into England. They'll be waiting for me. The affair is very heavy, so my leverage will have to be strong."

De Lhandes sighed. "Ah, my. If only it were America. I have something on America that would make the Statue of Liberty lie back and spread her knees. But England? No one thing. Fragments and scraps. Some nasty enough, to be sure, but no one big thing."

"What sort of things have you?"

"Oh, the usual. Homosexuality in the foreign office..."

"That's not news."

"At this level, it's interesting. And I have photographs. There are few things so ludicrous as the postures a man assumes while making love. Particularly if he is no longer young. And what else have I? Ah... a bit of rambunctiousness in the royal family? The usual political peccadillos and payoffs? A blocked inquiry into that flying accident that cost the life of... you remember." De Lhandes looked to the ceiling to recall what was in his files. "Oh, there's evidence that the embrace between the Arab oil interests and the City is more intimate than is generally known. And there's a lot of individual stuff on government people—fiscal and sexual irregularities mostly. You're absolutely sure you don't want something on the United States? I have a real bell ringer there. It's an unsalable item. Too big for almost any use. It would be like opening an egg with a sledge hammer."

"No, it has to be English. I haven't time to set up indirect pressure from Washington to London."

"Hm-m-m. Tell you what. Why don't you take the whole lot? Arrange to have it published, one shot right after the other. Scandal after scandal eroding the edifice of confidence—you know the sort of thing. No single arrow strong enough alone, but in fascine... who knows? It's the best I can offer."

"Then it will have to do. Set it up the usual way? I bring photocopies with me? We arrange a 'button-down' trigger system with the German magazines as primary receivers?"

"It's not failed yet. You're sure you don't want the Statue of Liberty's brazen hymen?"

"Can't think of what I'd do with it."

"Ah well, painful image at best. Well... can you spend the night with us?"

"If I may. I fly out of Biarritz tomorrow at noon, and I have to lie low. The locals have a bounty on me."

"Pity. They ought to protect you as the last surviving member of your species. You know, I've been thinking about you lately, Nicholai Alexandrovitch. Not often, to be sure, but with some intensity. Not often, because when you get to the bang or whimper moment of life, you don't spend much time contemplating the minor characters of your personal farce. And one of the difficult things for egocentric Man to face is that he is a minor character in every biography but his own. I am a bit player in your life; you in mine. We have known one another for more than twenty years but, discounting business (and one must always discount business), we have shared perhaps a total of twelve hours of intimate conversation, of honest inquiry into one another's minds and emotions. I have known you, Nicholai, for half a day. Actually, that's not bad. Most good friends and married couples (those are seldom the same thing) could not boast twelve hours of honest interest after a lifetime of shared space and irritations, of territorial assertions and squabbles. So... I've known you for half a day, my friend, and I have come to love you. I think very highly of myself for having accomplished that, as you are not an easy man to love. Admire? Yes, of course. Respect? If fear is a part of respect, then of course. But love? Ah, that's a different business. Because there is in love an urge to forgive, and you're a hard man to forgive. Half saintly ascetic, half Vandal marauder, you don't make yourself available for forgiveness. In one persona, you are above forgiveness; in another, beneath it. And always resentful of it. One has the feeling that you would never forgive a man for forgiving you. (That probably doesn't mean much, but it rolls well off the tongue, and a song must have music as well as words.) And after my twelve hours of knowing you, I would capsulize you—reduce you to a definition—by calling you a medieval antihero."

Hel smiled. "Medieval antihero? What on earth does that mean?"

"Who has the floor now, you or I? Let's have a little silent respect for the dying. It's part of your being Japanese—culturally Japanese, that is. Only in Japan was the classical moment simultaneous with the medieval. In the West, philosophy, art, political and social ideal, all are identified with periods before or after the medieval moment, the single exception being that glorious stone bridge to God, the cathedral. Only in Japan was the feudal moment also the philosophic moment. We of the West are comfortable with the image of the warrior priest, or the warrior scientist, even the warrior industrialist. But the warrior philosopher? No, that concept irritates our sense of propriety. We speak of 'death and violence' as though they were two manifestations of the same impulse. In fact, death is the very opposite of violence, which is always concerned with the struggle for life. Our philosophy is focused on managing life; yours on managing death. We seek comprehension; you seek dignity. We learn how to grasp; you learn how to let go. Even the label 'philosopher' is misleading, as our philosophers have always been animated by the urge to share (indeed, inflict) their insights; while your lot are content (perhaps selfishly) to make your separate and private peace. To the Westerner, there is something disturbingly feminine (in the sense of yang-ish, if that coinage doesn't offend your ear) in your view of manhood. Fresh from the battlefield, you don soft robes and stroll through your gardens with admiring compassion for the falling cherry petal; and you view both the gentleness and the courage as manifestations of manhood. To us, that seems capricious at least, if not two-faced. By the way, how does your garden grow?"

"It's becoming."

"Meaning?"

"Each year it is simpler."

"There! You see? That goddamned Japanese penchant for paradoxes that turn out to be syllogisms! Look at yourself. A warrior gardener! You are indeed a medieval Japanese, as I said. And you are also an antihero—not in the sense in which critics and scholars lusting for letters to dangle after their names use (misuse) the term. What they call antiheroes are really unlikely heroes, or attractive villains—the fat cop or Richard III. The true antihero is a version of the hero—not a clown with a principal role, not an audience member permitted to work out his violent fantasies. Like the classic hero, the antihero leads the mass toward salvation. There was a time in the comedy of human development when salvation seemed to lie in the direction of order and organization, and all the great Western heroes organized and directed their followers against the enemy: chaos. Now we are learning that the final enemy is not chaos, but organization; not divergence, but similarity; not primativism, but progress. And the new hero—the antihero—is one who makes a virtue of attacking the organization, of destroying the systems. We realize now that salvation of the race lies in that nihilist direction, but we still don't know how far." De Lhandes paused to catch his breath, then seemed to be ready to continue. But his glance suddenly crossed Hel's, and he laughed. "Oh, well. Let that be enough. I wasn't really speaking to you anyway."

"I've been aware of that for some time."

"It is a convention in Western tragedy that a man is permitted one long speech before he dies. Once he has stepped on the inevitable machinery of fate that will carry him to his bathetic denouement, nothing he can say or do will alter his lot. But he is permitted to make his case, to bitch at length against the gods—even in iambic pentameter."

"Even if doing so interrupts the flow of the narrative?"

"To hell with it! For two hours of narcosis against reality, of safe, vicarious participation in the world of action and death, one should be willing to pay the price of a couple minutes worth of insight. Structurally sound or not. But have it your way. All right. Tell me, do the governments still remember 'the Gnome'? And do they still scratch the earth trying to find his lair, and gnash their teeth in frustrated fury?"

"They do indeed, Maurice. Just the other day there was an Amérlo scab at home asking about you. He would have given his genitals to know how you came by your information."

"Would he indeed? Being an Amérlo, he probably wasn't risking much. And what did you tell him?"

"I told him everything I knew."

"Meaning nothing at all. Good. Candor is a virtue. You know, I really don't have any very subtle or complicated sources of information. In fact, the Mother Company and I are nourished by the same data. I have access to Fat Boy through the purchased services of one of their senior computer slaves, a man named Llewellyn. My skill lies in being able to put two and two together better than they can. Or, to be more precise, I am able to add one and a half plus one and two thirds in such a way as to make ten. I am not better informed than they; I am simply smarter."

Hel laughed. "They would give almost anything to locate and silence you. You've been bamboo under their fingernails for a long time."

"Ha, that knowledge brightens my last days, Nicholai. Being a nuisance to the government lackeys has made my life worth living. And a precarious living it has been. When you trade in information, you carry stock that has very short shelf life. Unlike brandy, information cheapens with age. Nothing is duller than yesterday's sins. And sometimes I used to acquire expensive pieces, only to have them ruined by leakage. I remember buying a very hot item from the United States: what in time became known as the Watergate Cover-up. And while I was holding the merchandise on my shelf, waiting for you or some other international to purchase it as leverage against the American government, a pair of ambitious reporters sniffed the story out and saw in it a chance to make their fortunes—and voilà! The material was overnight useless to me. In time, each of the criminals wrote a book or did a television program describing his part in the rape of American civil rights, and each was paid lavishly by the stupid American public, which seems to have a peculiar impulse toward having their noses rubbed in their own shit. Doesn't it seem unjust to you that I should end up losing several hundred thousand worth of spoiled stock on my shelves, while even the master villain himself makes a fortune doing television shows with that British leech who has shown that he would sniff up to anybody for money, even Idi Amin? It's a peculiar one, this trade I'm in."

"Have you been an information broker all your life, Maurice?"

"Except for a short stint as a professional basketball player."

"Old fool!"

"Listen, let us be serious for a moment. You described this thing you're doing as hard. I wouldn't presume to advise you, but have you considered the fact that you've been in retirement for a time? Is your mental conditioning still taut?"

"Reasonably. I do a lot of caving, so fear doesn't clog my mind too much. And, fortunately, I'll be up against the British."

"That's an advantage, to be sure. The MI-5 and -6 boys have a tradition of being so subtle that their fakes go unnoticed. And yet... There is something wrong with this affair, Nicholai Alexandrovitch. There's something in your tone that disturbs me. Not quite doubt, but a certain dangerous fatalism. Have you decided that you are going to fail?"

Hel was silent for a time. "You're very perceptive, Maurice."

"C'est mon métier."

"I know. There is something wrong—something untidy—about all this. I recognize that to come back out of retirement I am challenging karma. I think that, ultimately, this business will put me away. Not the task at hand. I imagine that I can relieve these Septembrists of the burden of their lives easily enough. The complications and the dangers will be ones I have dealt with before. But after that, the business gets tacky. There will be an effort to punish me. I may accept the punishment, or I may not. If I do not, then I shall have to go into the field again. I sense a certain—" He shrugged, "—a certain emotional fatigue. Not exactly fatalistic resignation, but a kind of dangerous indifference. It is possible, if the indignities pile up, that I shall see no particular reason to cling to life."

De Lhandes nodded. It was this kind of attitude that he had sensed. "I see. Permit me to suggest something, old friend. You say that the governments do me the honor of still being hungry for my death. They would give a lot to know who and where I am. If you get into a tight spot, you have my permission to bargain with that information."

"Maurice!—"

"No, no! I am not suffering from a bout of quixotic courage. I'm too old to contract such a childhood disease. It would be our final joke on them. You see, you would be giving them an empty bag. By the time they get here, I shall have departed."

"Thank you, but I couldn't do it. Not on your account, but on mine." Hel rose. "Well, I have to get some sleep. The next twenty-four hours will be trying. Mostly mind play, without the refreshment of physical danger. I'll be leaving before first light."

"Very well. For myself, I think I shall sit up for a few more hours and review the delights of an evil life."

"All right. Au revoir, old friend."

"Not au revoir, Nicholai."

"It is that close?"

De Lhandes nodded.

Hel leaned over and kissed his comrade on both cheeks. "Adieu, Maurice."

"Adieu, Nicholai."

Hel was caught at the door by, "Oh, Nicholai, would you do something for me?"

"Anything."

"Estelle has been wonderful to me these last years. Did you know her name was Estelle?"

"No, I didn't."

"Well, I want to do something special for her—a kind of going-away present. Would you drop by her room? Second at the head of the stairs. And afterward, tell her it was a gift from me."

Hel nodded. "It will be my pleasure, Maurice."

De Lhandes was looking into the fading fire. "Hers too, let us hope," he muttered.

* * *

Hel timed his arrival at the Biarritz airport to minimize the period he would have to stand out in the open. He had always disliked Biarritz, which is Basque only in geography; the Germans, the English, and the international smart set having perverted it into a kind of Brighton on Biscay.

He was not five minutes in the terminal before his proximity sense intercepted the direct and intense observation he had expected, knowing they would be looking for him at all points of departure. He lounged against the counter of the bar where he was taking a jus d'ananas and lightly scanned the crowd. Immediately, he picked up the young French Special Services officer in civilian clothes and sunglasses. Pushing himself off me bar, he walked directly toward the man, feeling as he approached the lad's tension and confusion.

"Edxuse me, sir," Hel said in a French larded with German accent. "I have just arrived, and I cannot discover how to make my connection to Lourdes. Could you assist me?"

The young policeman scanned Hel's face uncertainly. This man filled the general description, save for the eyes, which were dark-brown. (Hel was wearing noncorrective brown contact lenses.) But there was nothing in the description about his being German. And he was supposed to be leaving the country, not entering it. In a few brusque words, the police agent directed Hel to the information office.

As he walked away, Hel felt the agent's gaze fixed on him, but the quality of the concentration was muffled by confusion. He would, of course, report the spotting, but without much certainty. And the central offices would at this moment be receiving reports of Hel's appearance in half a dozen cities at the same time. Le Cagot was seeing to that.

As Hel crossed the waiting room a towheaded boy ran into his legs. He caught up the child to keep him from falling.

"Rodney! Oh, I am sorry, sir." The good-looking woman in her late twenties was on the scene in an instant, apologizing to Hel and admonishing the child all at the same time. She was British and dressed in a light summer frock designed to reveal not only her suntan, but the places she had not suntanned. In a babble of that brutally mispronounced French resulting from the Britisher's assumption that if foreigners had anything worth saying they would say it in a real language, the young woman managed to mention that the boy was her nephew, that she was returning with him from a short vacation, and that she was taking the next flight for England, that she herself was unmarried, and that her name was Alison Browne, with an e.

"My name is Nicholai Helm."

"Delighted to meet you, Mr. Hel."

That was it. She had not heard the m because she was prepared not to. She would be a British agent, covering the action of the French.

Hel said he hoped they would be sitting together on the plane, and she smiled seductively and said that she would be willing to speak to the ticket agent about that. He offered to purchase a fruit juice for her and little Rodney, and she accepted, not failing to mention that she did not usually accept such offers from strange men, but this was an exception. They had, after all, quite literally run into one another. (Giggle.)

While she was busy dabbing her handkerchief at Rodney's juice-stained collar, leaning forward and squeezing in her shoulders to advertise her lack of a bra, Hel excused himself for a moment.

At the sundries shop he purchased a cheap memento of Biarritz, a box to contain it, a pair of scissors, and some wrapping paper—a sheet of white tissue and one of an expensive metal foil. He carried these items to the men's room, and worked rapidly wrapping the present, which he brought back to the bar and gave to Rodney, who was by now whining as he dangled and twisted from Miss Browne's hand.

"Just a little nothing to remind him of Biarritz. I hope you don't mind?"

"Well, I shouldn't. But as it's for the boy. They've called twice for our flight. Shouldn't we be boarding?"

Hel explained that these French, with their anal compulsion for order, always called early for the planes; there was no rush. He turned the talk to the possibility of their getting together in London. Dinner, or something?

At the last moment they went to the boarding counter, Hel taking his place in the queue in front of Miss Browne and little Rodney. His small duffel bag passed the X-ray scanner without trouble. As he walked rapidly toward the plane, which was revving up for departure, he could hear the protests of Miss Browne and the angry demands of the security guards behind him. When the plane took off, Hel did not have the pleasure of the seductive Miss Browne and little Rodney.

Heathrow

Passengers passing through customs were directed to enter queues in relation to their status: "British Subjects," "Commonwealth Subjects," "Common Market Citizens," and "Others." Having traveled on his Costa Rican passport, Hel was clearly an "Other," but he never had the opportunity to enter the designated line, for he was immediately approached by two smiling young men, their husky bodies distorting rather extreme Carnaby Street suits, their meaty faces expressionless behind their moustaches and sunglasses. As he always did when he met modern young men, Hel mentally shaved and crewcut them to see whom he was really dealing with.

"You will accompany us, Mr. Hel," one said, as the other took the duffel from his hand. They pressed close to him on either side and escorted him toward a door without a doorknob at the end of the debarkation area.

Two knocks, and the door was opened from the other side by a uniformed officer, who stood aside as they passed through. They walked without a word to the end of a long windowless corridor of institutional green, where they knocked. The door was opened by a young man struck from the same mold as the guards, and from within came a familiar voice.

"Do come in, Nicholai. We've just time for a glass of something and a little chat before you catch your plane back to France. Leave the luggage, there's a good fellow. And you three may wait outside."

Hel took a chair beside the low coffee table and waved away the brandy bottle lifted in offer. "I thought you had finally been cashiered out, Fred."

Sir Wilfred Pyles squirted a splash of soda into his brandy. "I had more or less the same idea about you. But here we are, two of yesterday's bravos, sitting on opposite sides, just like the old days. You're sure you won't have one? No? Well, I imagine the sun's over the yardarm somewhere around the world, so—cheers."

"How's your wife?"

"More pleasant than ever."

"Give her my love when next you see her."

"Let's hope that's not too soon. She died last year."

"Sorry to hear that."

"Don't be. Is that enough of the small talk?"

"I should think so."

"Good. Well, they dragged me out of the mothballs to deal with you, when they got word from our petroleum masters that you might be on your way. I assume they thought I might be better able to handle you, seeing that we've played this game many times, you and I. I was directed to intercept you here, find out what I could about your business in our misty isle, then see you safely back on a plane to the place from whence you came."

"They thought it would be as easy as that, did they?"

Sir Wilfred waved his glass. "Well, you know how these new lads are. All by the book and no complexities."

"And what do you assume, Fred?"

"Oh, I assume it won't be quite that easy. I assume you came with some sort of nasty leverage gained from your friend, the Gnome. Photocopies of it in your luggage, I shouldn't wonder."

"Right on top. You'd better take a look."

"I shall, if you don't mind," Sir Wilfred said, unzipping the bag and taking out a manila folder. "Nothing else in here I should know about, I trust? Drugs? Subversive or pornographic literature?"

Hel smiled.

"No? I feared as much." He opened the folder and began to scan the information, sheet by sheet, his matted white eyebrows working up and down with each uncomfortable bit of information. "By the way," he asked between pages, "what on earth did you do to Miss Browne?"

"Miss Browne? I don't believe I know a—"

"Oh, come now. No coyness between old enemies. We got word that she is this moment sitting in a French detention center while those gentlemen of Froggish inclination comb and recomb her luggage. The report we received was quite thorough, including the amusing detail that the little boy who was her cover promptly soiled himself, and the consulate is out the cost of fresh garments."

Hel couldn't help laughing.

"Come. Between us. What on earth did you do?"

"Well, she came on with all the subtlety of a fart in a bathosphere, so I neutralized her. You don't train them as you did in the old days. The stupid twit accepted a gift."

"What sort of a gift?"

"Oh, just a cheap memento of Biarritz. It was wrapped up in tissue paper. But I had cut out a gun shape from metal foil paper and slipped it between the sheets of tissue."

Sir Wilfred sputtered with laughter. "So, the X-ray scanner picked up a gun each time the package passed through, and the poor officials could find nothing! How delicious: I think I must drink to that." He measured out the other half, then returned to the task of familiarizing himself with the leverage information, occasionally allowing himself such interjections as: "Is that so? Wouldn't have thought it of him." "Ah, we've known this for some time. Still, wouldn't do to broadcast it around." "Oh, my. That is a nasty bit. How on earth did he find that out?"

When he finished reading the material. Sir Wilfred carefully tapped the pages together to make the ends even, then replaced them in the folder. "No single thing here sufficient to force us very far."

"I'm aware of that, Fred. But the mass? One piece released to the German press each day?"

"Hm-m. Quite. It would have a disastrous effect on confidence in the government just now, with elections on the horizon. I suppose the information is in 'button-down' mode?"

"Of course."

"Feared as much."

Holding the information in "button-down" mode involved arrangements to have it released to the press immediately, if a certain message was not received by noon of each day. Hel carried with him a list of thirteen addresses to which he was to send cables each morning. Twelve of these were dummies; one was an associate of Maurice de Lhandes who would, upon receipt of the message, telephone to another intermediary, who would telephone de Lhandes. The code between Hel and de Lhandes was a simple one based upon an obscure poem by Barro, but it would take much longer than twenty-four hours for the intelligence boys to locate the one letter in the one word of the message that was the active signal. The term "button-down" came from a kind of human bomb, rigged so that the device would not go off, so long as the man held a button down. But any attempt to struggle with him or to shoot him would result in his releasing the button.

Sir Wilfred considered his position for a moment. "It is true that this information of yours can be quite damaging. But we are under tight orders from the Mother Company to protect these Black September vermin, and we are no more eager to bring down upon our heads the ire of the Company than is any other industrial country. It appears that we shall have to choose between misfortunes."

"So it appears."

Sir Wilfred pushed out his lower lip and squinted at Hel in evaluation. "This is a very wide-open and dangerous thing you're doing, Nicholai—walking right into our arms like this. It must have taken a great deal of money to draw you out of retirement."

"Point of fact, I am not being paid for this."

"Hm-m-m. That, of course, would have been my second guess." He drew a long sigh. "Sentiment is a killer, Nicholai. But of course you know that. All right, tell you what. I shall carry your message to my masters. We'll see what they have to say. Meanwhile, I suppose I shall have to hide you away somewhere. How would you like to spend a day or two in the country? I'll make a telephone call or two to get the government lads thinking, then I'll run you out in my banger."

Middle Bumley

Sir Wilfred's immaculate 1931 Rolls crunched over the gravel of a long private drive and came to a stop under the porte cochère of a rambling house, most of the charm of which derived from the aesthetic disorder of its having grown without plan through many architectural impulses.

Crossing the lawn to greet them were a sinewy woman of uncertain years and two girls in their mid-twenties.

"I think you'll find it amusing here, Nicholai," Sir Wilfred said. "Our host is an ass, but he won't be about. The wife is a bit dotty, but the daughters are uniquely obliging. Indeed, they have gained something of a reputation for that quality. What do you think of the house?"

"Considering your British penchant for braggadocio through meiosis—the kind of thing that makes you call your Rolls a banger—I'm surprised you didn't describe the house as thirty-seven up, sixteen down."

"Ah, Lady Jessica!" Sir Wilfred said to the older woman as she approached wearing a frilly summer frock of a vague color she would have called "ashes of roses." "Here's the guest I telephoned about. Nicholai Hel."

She pressed a damp hand into his. "So pleased to have you. To meet you, that is. This is my daughter, Broderick."

Hel shook hands with an overly slim girl whose eyes were huge in her emaciated face.

"I know it's an uncommon name for a girl," Lady Jessica continued, "but my husband had quite settled on having a boy—I mean he wanted to have a boy in the sense of fathering a son—not in the other sense—my goodness, what must you think of him? But he had Broderick instead—or rather, we did."

"In the sense that you were her parents?" Hel sought to release the skinny girl's hand.

"Broderick is a model," the mother explained.

Hel had guessed as much. There was a vacuousness of expression, a certain limpness of posture and curvature of spine that marked the fashionable model of that moment.

"Nothing much really," Broderick said, trying to blush under her troweled-on makeup. "Just the odd job for the occasional international magazine."

The mother tapped the daughter's arm. "Don't say you do 'odd jobs'! What will Mr. Hel think?"

A clearing of the throat by the second daughter impelled Lady Jessica to say, "Oh, yes. And here is Melpomene. It is conceivable she might act one day."

Melpomene was a substantial girl, thick of bosom, ankle, and forearm, rosy of cheek, and clear of eye. She seemed somehow incomplete without her hockey stick. Her handshake was firm and brisk. "Just call me Pom. Everyone does."

"Ah... if we could just freshen up?" Sir Wilfred suggested.

"Oh, of course! I'll have the girls show you everything—I mean, of course, where your rooms are and all. What must you think?"

As Hel was laying out his things from the duffel bag, Sir Wilfred tapped on the door and came in. "Well, what do you think of the place? We should be cozy here for a couple of days, while the masters ponder the inevitable, eh? I've been on the line to them, and they say they'll come up with a decision by morning."

"Tell me, Fred. Have your lads been keeping a watch on the Septembrists?"

"On your targets? Of course."

"Assuming that your government goes along with my proposal, I'll want all the background material you have."

"I expected no less. By the bye, I assured the masters that you could pull this off—should their decision go that way—with no hint of collusion or responsibility on our part. It is that way, isn't it?"

"Not quite. But I can work it so that, whatever their suspicions, the Mother Company will not be able to prove collusion."

"The next best thing, I suppose."

"Fortunately, you picked me up before I went through passport check, so my arrival won't be in your computers and therefore not in theirs."

"Wouldn't rely on that overly much. Mother Company has a million eyes and ears."

"True. You're absolutely sure this is a safe house?"

"Oh, yes! The ladies are not what you would call subtle, but they have another quality quite as good—they're totally ignorant. They haven't the slightest idea of what we're doing here. Don't even know what I do for a living. And the man of the house, if you can call him that, is no trouble at all. We seldom let him into the country, you see."

Sir Wilfred went on to explain that Lord Biffen lived in the Dordogne, the social leader of a gaggle of geriatric tax avoiders who infested that section of France, to the disgust and discomfort of the local peasants. The Biffens were typical of their sort: Irish peerage that every other generation stiffened its sagging finances by introducing a shot of American hog-butcher blood. The gentleman had overstepped himself in his lust to avoid taxes and had got into a shady thing or two in free ports in the Bahamas. That had given the government a hold on him and on his British funds, so he was most cooperative, remaining in France when he was ordered to, where he exercised his version of the shrewd businessman by cheating local women out of antique furniture or automobiles, always being careful to intercept his wife's mail to avoid her discovering his petty villainies. "Silly old fart, really. You know the type. Outlandish ties; walking shorts with street shoes and ankle stockings? But the wife and daughters, together with the establishment here, are of some occasional use to us. What do you think of the old girl?"

"A little obsessed."

"Hm-m. Know what you mean. But if you'd gone twenty-five years getting only what the old fellow had to offer, I fancy you'd be a little sperm mad yourself. Well, shall we join them?"

* * *

After breakfast the next morning. Sir Wilfred sent the ladies away and sat back with his last cup of coffee. "I was on the line with the masters this morning. They've decided to go along with you—with a couple of provisos, of course."

"They had better be minor."

"First, they want assurance that this information will never be used against them again."

"You should have been able to give them that assurance. You know that the man you call the Gnome always destroys the originals as soon as the deal is made. His reputation rests on that."

"Yes, quite so. And I shall undertake to assure them on that account. Their second proviso is that I report to them, telling them that I have considered your plan carefully and believe it to be airtight and absolutely sure not to involve the government directly."

"Nothing in this business is airtight."

"All right. Airtight-ish, then. So I'm afraid that you will have to take me into your confidence—familiarize me with details of dastardly machinations, and all that."

"Certain details I cannot give you until I have gone over your observation reports on the Septembrists. But I can sketch the bold outlines for you."

Within an hour, they had agreed on Hel's proposal, although Sir Wilfred had some reservations about the loss of the plane, as it was a Concorde, "...and we've had trouble enough trying to ram the damned thing down the world's throat as it is."

"It's not my fault that the plane in question is that uneconomical, polluting monster."

"Quite so. Quite so."

"So there it is, Fred. If your people do your part well, the stunt should go off without the Mother Company's having any proof of your complicity. It's the best plan I could work up, considering that I've had only a couple of days to think about it. What do you say?"

"I don't dare give my masters the details. They're political men—the least reliable of all. But I shall report that I consider the plan worth cooperating with."

"Good. When do I get the observation reports on the Septembrists?"

"They'll be here by courier this afternoon. You know, something occurs to me, Nicholai. Considering the character of your plan, you really don't have to involve yourself at all. We could dispose of the Arabs ourselves, and you could return to France immediately."

Hel looked at Sir Wilfred flatly for fully ten seconds. Then they both laughed at once.

"Ah well," Sir Wilfred said, waving a hand, "you can't blame me for trying. Let's take a little lunch. And perhaps there's time for a nap before the reports come in."

"I hardly dare go to my room."

"Oh? Did they also visit you last night?"

"Oh, yes, and I chucked them out."

"Waste not, want not, I always say."

* * *

Sir Wilfred dozed in his chair, warmed by the setting sun beyond the terrace. On the other side of the white metal table, Hel was scanning the observation reports on the PLO actives.

"There it is," he said finally.

"What? Hm-m? There what is?"

"I was looking for something in the list of contacts and acquaintances the Septembrists have made since their arrival."

"And?"

"On two occasions, they spent time with this man you have identified as 'Pilgrim Y'. He works in a food-preparation service for the airlines."

"Is that so? I really don't know the file. I was only dragged into this—unwillingly, I might mention—when you got involved. What's all this about food preparation?"

"Well, obviously the Septembrists are not going to try to smuggle their guns through your detection devices. They don't know that they have the passive cooperation of your government. So I had to know how they were going to get their weapons aboard. They've gone to a well-worn method. The weapons will come aboard with the prepared dinners. The food trucks are never searched more than desultorily. You can run anything through them."

"So now you know where their weapons will be. So what?"

"I know where they will have to come to collect them. And that's where I'll be."

"And what about you? How are you going to get arms aboard for yourself, without leaving trace of our complicity in this?"

"I'll carry my weapons right through the checkpoint."

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten about that for a moment. Naked/Kill and all that. Stab a man with a drinking straw. What a nuisance that's been to us over the years."

Hel closed the report. "We have two days until the plane departs. How shall we fill our time?"

"Loll about here, I suppose. Keep you out of sight."

"Are you going up to dress for dinner?"

"No, I think I'll not take dinner tonight. I should have followed your example and forsaken my midday lie by. Had to contend with both of them. Probably walk with a limp the rest of my life."

Heathrow

The plane was almost full of passengers, all adults, most of them the sort who could afford the surcharge for flying Concorde. Couples chatted; stewards and stewardesses leaned over seats making the cooing noises of experienced nannies; businessmen asked one another what they sold; unacquainted pairs said those inane things calculated to lead to assignations in Montreal; the conspicuously busy kept their noses in documents and reports or fiddled ostentatiously with pocket recorders; the frightened babbled about how much they loved flying, and tried to appear casual as they scanned the information card designating procedures and exits in case of emergency.

A muscular young Arab and a well-dressed Arab woman sat together near the back, a curtain separating them from the service area, where food and drinks were stored. Beside the curtain stood a flight attendant who smiled down at the Arab couple, his bottle-green eyes vacant.

Two young Arabs, looking like rich students, entered the plane and sat together about halfway down. Just before the doors were closed, a fifth Arab, dressed as a businessman, rushed down the mobile access truck and aboard the plane, babbling to the receiving steward something about just making it and being delayed by business until the last moment. He came to the back of the plane and took a seat opposite the Arab couple, to whom he nodded in a friendly way.

With an incredible roar, the engines tugged the plane from the loading ramp, and soon the bent-nosed pterodactyl was airborne.

When the seat-belt sign flashed off, the pretty Arab woman undid her belt and rose. "It is this way to the ladies' room?" she asked the green-eyed attendant, smiling shyly.

He had one hand behind the curtain. As he smiled back at her, he pressed the button on which his finger rested, and two soft gongs echoed through the passenger area. At this sound, each of the 136 passengers, except the PLO Arabs, lowered his head and stared at the back of the seat before him.

"Any one of these, Madam," Hel said, holding the curtain aside for her to pass through.

At that instant, the Arab businessman addressed a muffled question to Hel, meaning to attract his attention while the girl got the weapons from the food container.

"Certainly, sir," Hel said, seeming not to understand the question. "I'll get you one."

He slipped a comb from his pocket as he turned and followed the girl, snapping shut the curtain behind him.

"But wait!" the Arab businessman said—but Hel was gone.

Three seconds later he returned, a magazine in his hand. "I'm sorry, sir, we don't seem to have a copy of Paris Match. Will this do?"

"Stupid fool!" muttered the businessman, staring at the drawn curtain in confusion. Had this grinning idiot not seen the girl? Had she stepped into the rest room upon his approach? Where was she?

Fully a minute passed. The four Arabs aboard were so concerned with the girl's failure to emerge through the curtain, an automatic weapon in her hands, they failed to notice that everyone else on the plane was sitting with his head down, staring at the seat back before him.

Unable to control themselves longer, the two Arab students who had sat together in the waist of the plane rose and started back down the aisle. As they approached the smiling, daydreaming steward with the green eyes, they exchanged worried glances with the older businessman and the muscular lad who was the woman's companion. The older man gestured with his head for the two to pass on behind the curtain.

"May I help you?" Hel asked, rolling up the magazine into a tight cylinder.

"Bathroom," one of them muttered, as the other said, "Drink of water."

"I'll bring it to you, sir," Hel said. "Not the bathroom, of course," he joked with the taller one.

They passed him, and he followed them behind the curtain.

Four seconds later, he emerged, a harried expression on his face. "Sir," he said confidentially to the older businessman, "you're not a doctor by any chance?"

"Doctor? No. Why?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Not to worry. The gentleman's had a little accident."

"Accident?"

"Don't worry. I'll get help from a member of the cabin crew. Nothing serious, I'm sure." Hel had in his hand a plastic drinking cup, which he had crushed and creased down the center.

The businessman rose and stepped into the aisle.

"If you would just stay with him, sir, while I fetch someone," Hel said, following the businessman into the service area.

Two seconds later, he was standing again at his station, looking over the passengers with that expression of vague compassion airline stewards affect. When his gaze fell on the worried muscular young man beside him, he winked and said, "It was nothing at all. Dizzy spell, I guess. First time in a supersonic plane, perhaps. The other gentleman is assisting him. I don't speak Arabic, unfortunately."

A minute passed. Another. The muscular young man's tension grew, while this mindless steward standing before him hummed a popular tune and gazed vacantly around, fiddling with the small plastic name tag pinned to his lapel.

Another minute passed.

The muscular lad could not contain himself. He leaped up and snatched the curtain aside. On the floor, in the puppet-limbed sprawl of the dead, were his four companions. He never felt the edge of the card; he was nerve dead before his body reached the floor.

Other than the hissing roar of the plane's motors, there was silence in the plane. All the passengers stared rigidly ahead. The flight crew stood facing the front of the plane, their eyes riveted on the decorated plastic panel before them.

Hel lifted the intercom phone from its cradle. His soft voice sounded metallic through the address system. "Relax. Don't look back. We will land within fifteen minutes." He replaced the phone and dialed the pilot's cabin. "Send the message exactly as you have been instructed to. That done, open the envelope in your pocket and follow the landing instructions given."

Its pterodactyl nose bent down again, the Concorde roared in for a landing at a temporarily evacuated military airfield in northern Scotland. When it stopped and its engines had whined down to silence, the secondary entrance portal opened, and Hel descended on mobile stairs that had been rolled up to the door. He stepped into the vintage 1931 Rolls that had chased the plane across the runway, and they drove away.

Just before turning off to a control building, Hel looked back and saw the passengers descending and lining themselves up in four-deep ranks beside the plane under the direction of a man who had posed as senior steward. Five military buses were already crossing the airstrip to pick them up.

* * *

Sir Wilfred sat at the scarred wooden desk of the control office, sipping a whiskey, while Hel was changing from the flight attendant's uniform to his own clothes.

"Did the message sound all right?" Hel asked.

"Most dramatic. Most effective. The pilot radioed back that the plane was being skyjacked, and right in the middle of the message, he broke off, leaving nothing but dead air and the hiss of static."

"And he was on clear channel, so there will be independent corroborations of your report?"

"He must have been heard by half a dozen radio operators all across the North Atlantic."

"Good. Now, tomorrow your search planes will come back with reports of having found floating wreckage, right?"

"As rain."

"The wreckage will be reported to have been picked up, and the news will be released over BBC World Service that there was evidence of an explosion, and that the current theory is that an explosive device in the possession of Arab skyjackers was detonated accidentally, destroying the plane."

"Just so."

"What are your plans for the plane, Fred? Surely the insurance companies will be curious."

"Leave that to us. If nothing else remains of the Empire, we retain at least that penchant for duplicity that earned us the title Perfidious Albion."

Hel laughed. "All right. It must have been quite a job to gather that many operatives from all over Europe and have them pose as passengers."

"It was indeed. And the pilots and crew were RAF fellows who had really very little check-out time on a Concorde."

"Now you tell me."

"Wouldn't have done to make you edgy, old man."

"I regret your problem of having a hundred-fifty people in on the secret. It was the only way I could do it and still keep your government to the lee of the Mother Company's revenge. And, after all, they are all your own people."

"True enough. But that is no assurance of long-term reliability. But I've arranged to manage the problem."

"Oh? How so?"

"Where do you imagine those buses are going?"

Hel adjusted his tie and zipped up his duffle. "All hundred-fifty of them?"

"No other airtight way, old boy. And within two days, we'll have to attend to the extermination crew as well. But there's a bright side to everything, if you look hard enough. We're having a bit of an unemployment problem in the country just now, and this will produce scads of openings for bright young men and women in the secret service."

Hel shook his head. "You're really a tough old fossil, aren't you, Fred."

"In time, even the soul gets callused. Sure you won't have a little farewell drink?"

PART FIVE

Shicho

Château d'Etchebar

His muscles melting in the scalding water, his body weightless, Hel dozed as his feet enclosed Hana's in slack embrace. It was a cool day for the season, and dense steam billowed, filling the small bathing house.

"You were very tired when you came home last night," Hana said after a sleepy silence.

"Is that a criticism?" he muttered without moving his lips.

She laughed lightly. "On the contrary. Fatigue is an advantage in our games."

"True."

"Was your trip... successful?"

He nodded.

She was never inquisitive about his affairs; her training prohibited it, but her training also taught her to create opportunities for him to speak about his work if he wanted to. "Your business? It was the same sort of thing you did in China when we met?"

"Same genre, different phylum."

"And those unpleasant men who visited us, were they involved?"

"They weren't on the ground, but they were the enemy." His tone changed. "Listen, Hana. I want you to take a little vacation. Go to Paris or the Mediterranean for a few weeks."

"Back only ten hours and you are already trying to be rid of me?"

"There may be some trouble from those 'unpleasant men.' And I want you safely out of the way. Anyway"—he smiled,—"you could probably use the spice of a strong young lad or two."

"And what of you?"

"Oh, I'll be out of the enemy's range. I'm going into the mountains and work that cave Beñat and I discovered. They're not likely to find me there."

"When do you want me to leave, Nikko?"

"Today. As soon as you can."

"You don't think I would be safe here with our friends in the mountains protecting me?"

"That chain's broken. Something happened to Miss Stern. Somebody informed."

"I see." She squeezed his foot between hers. "Be careful, Nikko."

The water had cooled enough to make slow movements possible, and Hel flicked his fingers, sending currents of hotter water toward his stomach. "Hana? You told me that you could not bring up the subject of marriage again, but I said that I could and would. I'm doing that now."

She smiled and shook her head. "I've been thinking about that for the past few days, Nikko. No, not marriage. That would be too silly for such as you and I."

"Do you want to go away from here?"

"No."

"What then?"

"Let's not make plans. Let's remain together for a month at a time. Perhaps forever—but only a month at a time. Is that all right with you?"

He smiled and nestled his feet into hers. "I have great affection for you, Hana."

"I have great affection for you, Nicholai."

"By the Skeptical Balls of Thomas! What's going on in here?" Le Cagot had snatched open the door of the bathing room and entered, bringing unwelcomed cool air with him. "Are you two making your own private whiteout? Good to see you back, Niko! You must have been lonely without me." He leaned against the wooden tub, his chin hooked over the rim. "Arid good to see you too, Hana! You know, this is the first time I've seen all of you. I shall tell you the truth—you are a desirable woman. And that is praise from the world's most desirable man, so wear it in health."

"Get out of here!" Hel growled, not because he was uncomfortable with nudity, but because Le Cagot's tease would go flat if he didn't seem to rise to the bait.

"He shouts to hide his delight at seeing me again, Hana. It's an old trick. Mother in Heaven, you have fine nipples! Are you sure there isn't a bit of Basque in that genetic stew of yours? Hey, Niko, when do we see if there is light and air at the other end of Le Cagot's Cave? Everything is in readiness. The air tank is down, the wet suit. Everything."

"I'm ready to go up today."

"When today?"

"In a couple of hours. Get out."

"Good. That gives me time to visit your Portuguese maid. All right, I'm off. You two will have to resign yourselves to getting on without my company." He slammed the door behind him, swirling the scant steam that remained in the room.

After they had made love and taken breakfast, Hana began her packing. She had derided to go to Paris because in late August that city would be relatively empty of vacationing bourgeois Parisians.

Hel puttered for a time in his garden, which had roughened somewhat in his absence. It was there Pierre found him.

"Oh, M'sieur, the weather signs are all confused."

"Is that so?"

"It is so. It has rained for two days, and now neither the Eastwind nor the Northwind have dominance, and you know what that means."

"I'm confident you will tell me."

"It will be dangerous in the mountains, M'sieur. This is the season of the whiteout."

"You're sure of that?"

Pierre tapped the tip of his rubicund drunkard's nose with his forefinger, signifying that there were things only the Basque knew for certain, and weather was but one of them.

Hel took some consolation in Pierre's assurance. At least they would not have to contend with a whiteout.

* * *

The Volvo rolled into the village square of Larrau, where they would pick up the Basque lads who operated the pedal winch. They parked near the widow's bar, and one of the children playing pala against the church wall ran over and did Hel the service of bashing the hood of the car with a stick, as he had seen the man do so often. Hel thanked him, and followed Le Cagot to the bar.

"Why are you bringing your makila along, Beñat?" He hadn't noticed before that Le Cagot was carrying his ancient Basque sword/cane under his arm.

"I promised myself that I would carry it until I discover which of my people informed on that poor little girl. Then, by the Baby-Killing Balls of Herod, I shall ventilate his chest with it. Come, let's take a little glass with the widow. I shall give her the pleasure of laying my palm upon her ass."

The Basque lads who had been awaiting them since morning now joined them over a glass, talking eagerly about the chances of M'sieur Hel being able to swim the underground river to the daylight. Once that air-to-air exploration had been made, the cave system would be officially discovered, and they would be free to go down into the hole themselves and, what is more, to talk about it later.

The widow twice pushed Le Cagot's hand away; then, her virtue clearly demonstrated, she allowed it to remain on her ample bottom as she stood beside the table, keeping his glass full.

The door to the W.C. in back opened, and Father Xavier entered the low-ceilinged bar, his eyes bright with fortifying wine and the ecstasy of fanaticism. "So?" he said to the young Basque lads. "Now you sit with this outlander and his lecherous friend? Drinking their wine and listening to their lies?"

"You must have drunk deep of His blood this morning, Father Esteka!" Le Cagot said. "You've swallowed a bit of courage."

Father Xavier snarled something under his breath and slumped down in a chair at the most distant table.

"Holà," Le Cagot pursued. "If your courage is so great, why don't you come up the mountain with us, eh? We are going to descend into a bottomless pit from which there is no exit. It will be a foretaste of hell for you—get you used to it!"

"Let him be," Hel muttered. "Let's go and leave the silly bastard to pickle in his own hate."

"God's eyes are everywhere!" the priest snarled, glaring at Hel. "His wrath is inescapable!"

"Shut your mouth, convent girl," Le Cagot said, "or I shall put this makila where it will inconvenience the Bishop!

Hel put a restraining hand on Le Cagot's arm; they finished off their wine and left.

Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau

Hel squatted on the flat slab that edged their base camp beside the rubble cone, his helmet light turned off to save the batteries, listening over the field telephone to Le Cagot's stream of babble, invective, and song as he descended on the cable, constantly bullying and amusing the Basque lads operating the pedal winch above. Le Cagot was taking a breather, braced up in the bottom of the corkscrew before allowing himself to be lowered into the void of Le Cagot's Cave, down into the waterfall, where he would have to hang, twisting on the line, while the lads locked up and replaced the cable drum.

After ordering them to be quick about the job and not leave him hanging there, dangling like Christ on the tree, or he would come back up and do them exquisite bodily damage, he said, "All right, Niko, I'm coming down!"

"That's the only way gravity works," Hel commented, as he looked up for the first glimpse of Le Cagot's helmet light emerging through the mist of the waterfall.

A few meters below the opening into the principal cave, the descent stopped, and the Basque boy on the phones announced that they were changing drums.

"Get on with it!" Le Cagot ordered. "This cold shower is abusing my manhood!"

Hel was considering the task of carrying the heavy air tank all the way to the Wine Cellar at the end of the system, glad that he could rely on Le Cagot's bull strength, when a muffled shout came over the earphones. Then a sharp report. His first reaction was that something had snapped. A cable? The tripod? His body instinctively tightened in kinesthetic sympathy for Le Cagot. There were two more crisp reports. Gunfire!

Then silence.

Hel could see Le Cagot's helmet lamp, blurred through the mist of the waterfall, winking on and off as he turned slowly on the end of the cable.

"What in hell is going on?" Le Cagot asked over the phones.

"I don't know."

A voice came over the telephone, thin and distant "I warned you to stay out of this, Mr. Hel."

"Diamond?" Hel asked, unnecessarily.

"That is correct. The merchant. The one who would not dare meet you face to face."

"You call this face to face?"

"It's close enough."

Le Cagot's voice was tight with the strain on his chest and diaphragm from hanging in the harness. "What is going on?"

"Diamond?" Hel was forcing himself to remain calm. "What happened to the boys at the winch?"

"They're dead."

"I see. Listen. It's me you want, and I'm at the bottom of the shaft. I'm not the one hanging from the cable. It is my friend. I can instruct you how to lower him."

"Why on earth should I do that?"

From the background, Hel heard Darryl Starr's voice. "That's the son of a bitch that took my piece. Let him hang there, turning slowly in the wind, the mammy-jammer!"

There was the sound of a childish giggle—the PLO scab they called Haman.

"What makes you think I involved myself in your business?" Hel asked, his voice conversational, although he was frantically playing for time to think.

"The Mother Company keeps sources close to our friends in England—just to confirm their allegiance. I believe you met our Miss Biffen, the young model?"

"If I get out of here, Diamond..."

"Save your breath, Hel. I happen to know that is a 'bottomless pit from which there is no exit.'"

Hel took a slow breath. Those were Le Cagot's words in the widow's bar that afternoon.

"I warned you," Diamond continued, "that we would have to take counteraction of a kind that would satisfy the vicious tastes of our Arab friends. You will be a while dying, and that will please them. And I have arranged a more visible monument to your punishment. That château of yours? It ceased to exist an hour and a half ago."

"Diamond..." Hel had nothing to say, but he wanted to keep Diamond on the other end of the line. "Le Cagot is nothing to you. Why let him hang there?"

"It's a detail sure to amuse our Arab friends."